"Despite early progress reducing Chesapeake Bay pollution, levels of a key pollutant, phosphorus, have not come down in many rivers in the past decade — and are actually rising in several, officials say."

"Canada’s embrace of the ‘miracle mineral’ has seeded an epidemic of cancers. Yet many Canadians are still exposed to asbestos every day"

"NEW CASTLE, Colo. — Four in 10 new oil and gas wells near national forests and fragile watersheds or otherwise identified as higher pollution risks escape federal inspection, unchecked by an agency struggling to keep pace with America's drilling boom, according to an Associated Press review that shows wide state-by-state disparities in safety checks."

"An environmental campaigner is killed every week in Brazil."

"Trains carrying a potentially more flammable crude oil have begun rolling with little notice through Sacramento and California in the last year, prompting concerns about safety and calls for more transparency, but state officials said Friday they have decided for now not to release information to the public on where those trains run or how many there are."

"'What gets everybody really suspicious is that you don't have access to watch it, which raises all kinds of issues about transparency.'"

"SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia – 'The fate of billions of poor people and the state of the planet depend on the success of our efforts,' UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told leaders of the Group of 77 and China at their summit meeting Sunday in Santa Cruz."

"As a sociologist in the 1970s, Robert Bullard made a dismaying discovery: Houston landfills and incinerators were far more likely to be located in communities of color than in white neighborhoods, even though blacks made up just one-fourth of the city’s population. That realization launched a lifetime of environmental justice work, including leadership in convening the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit and framing the landmark 17 Principles of Environmental Justice in 1991, bringing environmental justice to the fore at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and catalyzing creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice."

"When the coal-fired power plant at the Bingham Canyon copper mine in Utah started up, Franklin D. Roosevelt was running for his fourth term as president. The top music hits were sung by Bing Crosby, Jimmy Dorsey and Dinah Shore. D-Day was still a couple of months away."