"When a huge floating gyre of plastic waste was discovered in the Pacific in the late 1980s, people were shocked. When whales died and washed ashore with stomachs full of plastic, people were horrified. ... Though some of it came from ships, most, presumably, was from land. But how much was coming from where?"

"Hoover Dam helped transform the American West, harnessing the force of the Colorado River — along with millions of cubic feet of concrete and tens of millions of pounds of steel ... . Now it is the focus of a distinctly 21st-century challenge: turning the dam into a vast reservoir of excess electricity, fed by the solar farms and wind turbines that represent the power sources of the future."

"In a resounding win for EPA, a federal court today upheld a contentious Obama-era rule aimed at protecting fish and other aquatic life endangered by water intakes of power plants and other industrial facilities."

"In a quest to shrink national monuments last year, senior Interior Department officials dismissed evidence that these public sites boosted tourism and spurred archaeological discoveries, according to documents the department released this month and retracted a day later."