"Just 45 miles from the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation where Daranda Hinkey and her family corral horses and cows, a centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s clean energy plan is taking shape: construction of one of the largest lithium mines in the world."
"The US’s first-ever trial in a constitutional climate lawsuit kicked off Monday morning in a packed courtroom in Helena, Montana. The case, Held v Montana, was brought in 2020 by 16 plaintiffs between the ages of five and 22 from around the state who allege state officials violated their constitutional right to a healthy environment by enacting pro-fossil fuel policies."
Attacks of all kinds on U.S. journalists clearly hamper a free press. And environmental journalists are not spared such aggressions, especially when covering contested places like pipeline construction sites. WatchDog Opinion outlines the problem and explores how journalists might be spared from such violations, including with a prospective law explicitly protecting journalists from assault.
"A landmark climate trial that will reverberate in states and litigation across the US is set to begin Monday, when more than a dozen young people face off with the state of Montana at Lewis and Clark County District Court."
"A federal judge has yanked approval for a phosphate mining project in southeastern Idaho, saying federal land managers in the Trump administration didn’t in part properly consider the mine’s impact on sage grouse, a bird species that has seen an 80% decline in population since 1965."
"In Colorado's famed San Luis Valley, residents who rely on well water are grappling not only with a shortage amid drought, but questionable quality of the water coming out of the ground."
"In the middle of the longest-running drought in more than a thousand years, Colorado energy companies diverted rising volumes of the state’s freshwater resources for fracking, a new analysis shows."
"Festival organizers are trying to block plans to build a clean energy plant in the Nevada desert, highlighting the struggle to combat climate change and the cost of clean power."
"One of the darkest towns in America lies roughly 100 miles north of Reno, where the lights are few and rarely lit until one week each summer when pyrotechnics and LEDs set the sky and mountains aglow.
Inspired by a discussion at a Society of Environmental Journalists conference, freelancer Rico Moore (pictured, left) applied for a Fund for Environmental Journalism grant to report on Bears Ears National Monument. Then, armed with advice for better covering Indigenous communities and Native American tribes, Moore found a new way to write about the cultural and environmental richness of those lands. His experience, in the new FEJ StoryLog.
"For decades, conservationists have fought against gold mining at the edge of Yellowstone National Park, fearing hard-rock extraction could fragment its wildlife habitat and pollute its waterways. Now park lovers say they say have a permanent way to preserve this crown jewel of the national park system: buying gold rights at Yellowstone’s doorstep."
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