"A U.S. Geological Survey researcher says she's worried about the Navajo because drought, combined with increasing temperatures, are making it harder for them to live in the harsh conditions. The Navajo Nation is being buried in sand."

"Lester Brown has spent his career making shrewd projections about the food, water, and energy people need to survive, and pushing governments to respond. None of this math brings tears to his eyes except the time in 1965 he made some calculations and risked his career advising the president of the United States to save India from starving."

"A small aboriginal community in British Columbia has rejected a $1 billion payment for a natural gas project, the latest setback for the Canadian energy industry’s effort to bolster exports."

"Fracking wells in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale region are disproportionately located in poor rural communities, which bear the brunt of associated pollution, according to a new study."

"TEXAS CITY, Texas — Renetta Trylas had not heard about plans to build one of the world’s largest methanol plants less than 3 miles from her neighborhood, even though it has been more than six months since the land was leased by Chinese entrepreneurs behind the project."

"HONOLULU — Police on the Big Island arrested 12 people Thursday who were trying to block workers from getting to a telescope construction site on a mountain considered sacred to Native Hawaiians."

"In the frozen far north, in Arctic Quebec, the Inuit have relied on the same nutritious foods culled from the oceans for centuries: beluga whale, fish, seal, and walrus. But some of these traditional foods have become so contaminated with brain-damaging mercury that the IQs of schoolchildren in remote Arctic villages are abnormally low."

"Chuck Fluharty parachutes into busted rural economies and tries to figure out how to get them out of the ditch. His latest challenge: Appalachia."

"Turn on the faucet. Fill a glass with water. Drink it. Acts so commonplace you perform them without thinking twice. Flora Barraza cannot. Neither can José Garcia, nor the cooks at Los Pasteles Bakery No. 2, nor the elderly at the Epoca de Oro Adult Day Care. Along the Texas-Mexico border, nearly 90,000 people are believed to still live without running water. An untold number more — likely tens of thousands, but no one is sure — often have running water of such poor quality that they cannot know what poisons or diseases it might carry."