"It was just before sunrise in July when the botanists Naomi Fraga and Maria Jesus threw on backpacks and crunched their way across a brittle alkaline flat in the hottest corner of the Mojave Desert. Their mission: to rescue a tiny plant teetering on the brink of extinction."

"The snail darter, a tiny fish that notoriously blocked a federal dam project in Tennessee decades ago, should no longer be on the endangered species list, federal officials announced on Tuesday."

"The record-setting crowds of people surging into public lands this summer has set off new challenges for park managers."

"America’s lobster fishing industry will face a host of new harvesting restrictions amid a new push from the federal government to try to save a vanishing species of whale."

"Climate change abruptly gripped North America’s Pacific Coast at the start of summer, setting new heat records by staggering margins across the region’s cities and towns. ... The sudden and extreme heat disaster — matched by other recent heat waves in the Southeastern U.S., Northern Africa, Western Asia, Japan, and Europe — means many temperate cities are in for significantly warmer conditions."

"A federal judge rejected a challenge from 12 states with Republican attorneys general that attempted to block the Biden administration from using certain figures to calculate the climate benefits of rules it puts forward, known as the "social costs" of greenhouse gases."