"For over a century, a smelter and other plants polluted Omaha with 400 million pounds of lead. The city now has the largest residential lead cleanup site in the U.S."
Explore our 10th annual Journalists’ Guide to Environment + Energy, as we scour the beat to identify 15 top stories to put on your radar for 2026. Our updated format for the special report provides a quick read and a broad scope — with insights on climate change and environmental justice, bird and insect declines, data centers and deep sea mining, deregulation and PFAS and much more. Get started here.
For more than a century, oil and gas companies have been drilling — and abandoning — wells across the country, leaving hundreds of thousands to potentially leak pollutants into the air, water and soil. Climate and environment reporter Martha Pskowski looks at how funding and regulatory issues are impacting efforts to identify and plug these wells, and offers resources for drilling into their story.
'For the past few weeks, Oitancan “Oi” Zephier has labored among piles of vinyl records nearly 2 feet high. KILI-FM, the Porcupine, South Dakota-based tribal public broadcasting station Zephier manages, has gone digital and no longer needs the records. The station is selling the records, because what it needs is cash."
"A North Dakota judge has ordered Greenpeace to pay damages of $345 million, reducing an earlier jury award after it found the environmental group and related entities liable for defamation and other claims in connection with protests of an oil pipeline nearly a decade ago."
"Bison once moved across North America in herds that blackened the landscape in all directions, in numbers estimated not in the hundreds but in the tens of thousands."
"With billions of dollars at stake, Bayer has gone on the offensive. Billboards along major highways. A social media offensive. Tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations in Missouri alone. And a major push in at least 11 states to change pesticide labeling laws."
"The counties with the highest use of pesticides per square mile are all located in Missouri’s Bootheel. Many of these counties have some of the state’s highest cancer rates and their health care options are dwindling."
"A gold rush brought settlers to South Dakota’s Black Hills roughly 150 years ago, chasing the dream of wealth and displacing Native Americans in the process. Now, a new crop of miners driven by gold prices at more than $3,000 an ounce are seeking to return to the treasured landscape, promising an economic boost while raising fears of how modern gold extraction could forever change the region."
"A Texas-based federal judge assented to a Trump administration request Tuesday and ended Endangered Species Act protections for the lesser prairie chicken."
Advertisement 
