"There's a certain smell that reminds Dianna Cormier-Jackson of her childhood on Leila Street in Houston's Fifth Ward. When she was young in the early 1960s, she recalls the air there feeling "heavy," as if it was thick with oil and gasoline. Some days, the heavy smell would be so strong that her parents would make her and her siblings stay in the house. But on school days, they marched out into the rank air."

"The D.C. government is preparing to build a sprawling school-bus terminal in the historically Black enclave of Brentwood, where residents have long lived amid industrial sites that discharge pollution into their community."

"U.S. cities that have been forced to rely on nonprofit groups and corporations to drive tree-planting efforts and boosting their urban “canopy” could soon get a new ally—the federal government."

"Under orders from President Biden, EPA has taken its first overt step to revisit one of the Trump administration’s most bitterly contested air quality rollbacks."

"President Joe Biden has repeatedly bragged that the bipartisan infrastructure bill germinating in the U.S. Senate will spur the removal of America’s toxic drinking water pipes made of lead. ... But the bill does not require water utilities to replace lead pipes. Rather, it provides $15 billion to a revolving fund that utilities can use to replace lead pipes if they want ― something that’s only happened in a handful of cities to date."

"Two liquefied natural gas terminals under development at the tip of Texas’ Gulf Coast could either lift low-income residents out of poverty or destroy local fishing and tourism economies, depending on whom you ask."

"LOWNDES COUNTY, Ala. -- For almost 30 years Perman Hardy obeyed a simple rule: When it rains, turn off the water."

"China and India have missed a U.N. deadline to submit fresh plans for cutting their greenhouse gas emissions in time for the global body to include their pledges in a report for governments at this year’s global climate summit, officials said Saturday."

"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."