"A tablespoon of soil contains billions of microscopic organisms. Life on Earth, especially the growing of food, depends on these microbes, but scientists don't even have names for most of them, much less a description."

"As a Friday deadline for a government shutdown approached, the Trump administration began setting plans in motion to halt scores of federal functions — even as it scrambled to keep hundreds of national parks and monuments open to the public to minimize anger over the disruption of services."

"The U.S. Interior Department on Wednesday said it welcomed the mass resignation of members of the National Parks Service advisory board, saying they had ignored sexual harassment cases and lied about how they were treated by the Trump administration."

"The U.S. Department of State is spearheading a plan to tackle the decade-long problem brewing in the transboundary Kootenai River watershed, where toxic contaminants leaching from upstream Canadian coal mines into Montana’s watersheds continue to poison the prized aquatic ecosystem."

"Three-quarters of the members of a federally chartered board advising the National Park Service abruptly quit Monday night out of frustration that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had refused to meet with them or convene a single meeting last year."

"Garry Holiday grew up among the abandoned mines that dot the Navajo Nation’s red landscape, remnants of a time when uranium helped cement America’s status as a nuclear superpower and fueled its nuclear energy program."

"The plight of Chile's indigenous Mapuche people and their struggle for land rights will come under the spotlight as Pope Francis travels to the country on Monday amid growing tension between the Mapuche and loggers and farmers."

"At 5:20 on Tuesday evening, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke tweeted a photo of himself at the Tallahassee airport with Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, announcing that he had decided, after meeting with Governor Scott, to exempt the state from a new Trump administration plan to open up most of the nation’s coastline to offshore oil drilling."

"The Interior Department has approved a land swap deal that will allow a remote Alaskan village to construct a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, according to local officials. The action effectively overrules wilderness protections that have kept the area off limits to vehicles for decades."