"Every day is a test of endurance on the [Standing Rock Sioux] reservation, which encompasses 3,600 square miles of windswept prairie in North and South Dakota. Freezing in winter, baking in summer, the reservation's residents brave the elements in clusters of trailer parks and prefabricated homes. Some 40 percent of its 8,200 people live below the poverty line. Like other Native American communities, Standing Rock suffers from high rates of unemployment, alcoholism and suicide. The health care system is a shambles, and housing is so scarce that multiple families often cram into a single dwelling."

"CROW AGENCY, Mont. — The pale yellow halls of the Crow government building here are nearly empty these days, with 1,000 of this tribe’s 1,300 employees recently laid off."

"The number of Chinook salmon predicted to return to the Klamath River on the California-Oregon border this fall fishing season is around 11,000 fish. That is the lowest number in recorded history. Coho salmon is already listed under the Endangered Species Act in California and Oregon."

"Powerful Republican congressmen and governors are pressing President Donald Trump to take an unprecedented step: Reverse his predecessor’s creation of several national monuments under a law that dates back to Theodore Roosevelt. No president has ever attempted such a reversal, and legal experts doubt it could succeed."

"The cookies showed up Monday morning, hundreds of them packed tightly in cardboard boxes, and made their way to offices throughout the Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters in downtown Washington."

"Agriculture leaders including lawmakers from President Donald Trump's Republican Party on Thursday criticized his planned 21 percent cut to discretionary spending at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), saying it could take a toll on the rural communities that helped elect him last November."

"A Native American tribe has a legal right to groundwater in Southern California's arid Coachella Valley, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled yesterday."

"The head of the environmental justice program at the Environmental Protection Agency has stepped down, departing the government with a lengthy letter to Scott Pruitt, the EPA's new administrator, urging him not to kill the agency's programs."

"An Oklahoma-based Native American tribe filed a lawsuit in its own tribal court system Friday accusing several oil companies of triggering the state’s largest earthquake that caused extensive damage to some near-century-old tribal buildings."

"The Trump administ"ration is seeking to slash the budget of one of the government’s premier climate science agencies by 17 percent, delivering steep cuts to research funding and satellite programs, according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington Post."