"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."

"A federal judge has dismissed Des Moines Water Works' lawsuit against drainage districts in three northern Iowa counties the utility claimed are funneling high levels of nitrates into the Raccoon River, a source of drinking water for 500,000 central Iowa residents."

"The company whose pipeline dumped more than 46,000 gallons of diesel on northern Iowa farmland in January has had more spills than any other pipeline operator in the state over the past 16 years, according to a Des Moines Register analysis."

"For years, when spring rolled around in St. Louis, Mich., songbirds dropped to the ground, dead."

"Hundreds of construction workers will be put to work in Fremont over the next couple summers building a massive $275 million facility for producing broiler chickens, and the utility lines and roads to serve it, as well as upgrading the city’s water treatment plant."

"The people of Hendricks, Minn., thought they had won the feedlot war two years ago when they sued to stop a mega-dairy slated for a hilltop just across the border in South Dakota."