"After a 10-month wait, preliminary work began Thursday on the delicate task of removing barrels sitting in Wallowa Lake marked as containing defoliants used in Agent Orange."
"Two key research agencies in the Department of Agriculture will move to the Kansas City area, Secretary Sonny Perdue announced today. The plan will move hundreds of jobs at USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) out of Washington, despite objections from employees and some members of Congress."
"Last week, we learned that the Food and Drug Administration had detected PFAS compounds in pineapple, sweet potato, meat, and chocolate cake. ... [I]t has become clear that 3M, the company that originally developed PFOS and PFOA, had known for a very long time that these toxic and persistent chemicals were in our food."
"Prosecutors dropped all criminal charges Thursday against eight people in the Flint water crisis and pledged to start from scratch the investigation into one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in U.S. history."
"Pot prohibition is gradually lifting, but state and federal growing guidance is lacking. EHN visited West Coast growers committed to nudging the fledgling industry in a chemical-free, Earth-friendly direction."
"A week after the West Virginia Supreme Court unanimously upheld the property rights of landowners battling one natural gas giant, the same court tossed out a challenge filed by another group of landowners against a different natural gas company."
"An investigation into an explosion at an Oklahoma natural gas drilling rig that killed five workers last year faulted inadequate training and equipment and called for new regulations, the U.S. safety regulator said on Wednesday."
"A collection of activist groups delivered a petition with more than 200,000 signatures to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters Wednesday calling for a presidential debate focused on climate change."
"Take a walk through the grocery story; the packages are talking to you, proclaiming their moral virtue, appealing to your ideals: organic, cage-free, fair trade. When I dug into the world of eco-labels recently, I was surprised to find that some of the people who know these labels best are ambivalent about them."
""Houston, Texas, has flooded every year for the past five years. At the same time, Texas is also known for dire water shortages. What if people were to capture the floodwater and store it for later in aquifers — underground layers of permeable rock, gravel and sand that allow water to pass through?"
