"Globally, numerous infectious diseases are being transmitted between wildlife, livestock and humans at escalating rates, including outbreaks of COVID-19, Ebola, dengue, HIV and others, as the threat of new emergent zoonotic diseases grows ever greater. The cost is huge in lives lost and ruined economies. The driver: human activities, particularly intrusion into wild landscapes and eating and trading wild animals."

"Human-driven planetary warming threatens to collapse a system of currents in the Atlantic Ocean that regulate and impact weather across the globe, a new scientific study has found."

"Once the headquarters of Jean Lafitte and later the site of a U.S. military fort, West Grand Terre island now hosts a fleet of modern excavators and sand-pumping pipelines rather than smuggled treasure or cannon. The $102 million restoration of West Grand Terre, adjacent to Grand Isle, marks a milestone in Louisiana’s effort to fortify its first line of defense against hurricanes."

"The Biden administration laid out plans today [Friday] for scrapping and replacing a contentious Trump-era Clean Water Act rule that pulled back federal protections for millions of streams and wetlands."

"Douglas James stood Thursday on the Mall in front of the 25-foot totem pole he and a team had spent three months hand-carving and painting from a 400-year-old red cedar tree. James, a member of the Lummi Nation in Washington state, and a group of supporters and volunteers from his tribe hauled the pole on a flatbed truck more than 20,000 miles along the West Coast and across the Midwest before arriving in the other Washington, where the pole will stay as part of a campaign to protect sacred tribal lands."

"Gulf Coast researchers are raising alarms about a $1.4 billion coastal restoration project’s potential to kill and injure bottlenose dolphins. Now, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries employee whose job it was to count dolphin deaths in the state says she was fired in 2019 because her work reaffirmed the potential of the project to devastate a dolphin population."

"Nauru, which sponsors a company to mine the seabed for minerals in ungoverned waters, has triggered a rule with the International Seabed Authority that requires it to allow seabed mining in two years, regardless of whether regulations have been written."

"With the era of building big dams over in the U.S., a growing number of existing dams are being modified to produce hydropower. These projects, advocates say, avoid the damaging impacts of new dams and could generate enough renewable electricity for several million homes."