Natural Resources

"House Republicans are endorsing a procedural change to make it easier for Congress to transfer federal land to state or local government agencies."

"Underground pockets of boiling water and steam in a northern New Mexico national preserve that represent the heart of an ancient collapsed volcano could get extra federal protection under a proposal by the National Park Service to limit or prevent any negative effects from tapping geothermal energy on neighboring land."

"A little-known federal program that avoids publicizing its accomplishments to protect from looters the thousands of Native American sites it's tasked with managing has been caught up in a big net."

"The Louisiana coast loses a football field’s worth of land every 38 minutes. This staggering rate of land loss has been brought on by climate change and coastal erosion accelerated by human activities, including water diversion projects and damage done by the oil and gas industry."

"The view from the observation deck over a meadow of brown marsh grasses would make a nice postcard. Eagles roost on tall pines, muskrats burrow in mounds of mud and straw, and black ducks splash in a pond."

"The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality this week approved a general mining permit and an air use permit for the Back Forty mine in the western Upper Peninsula despite tribal opposition over its location on sacred ground."

"President Barack Obama designated two national monuments Wednesday at sites in Utah and Nevada that have become key flashpoints over use of public land in the U.S. West, marking the administration's latest move to protect environmentally sensitive areas in its final days."

"The livelihood of the Nenets people who live along the northern stretches of the Yenisei, Russia’s longest river, depends on two pursuits: fishing and reindeer herding. But locals have said both of those activities are under threat from an oil terminal due to be built on the Tanalau cape, near where the river empties into the Arctic Ocean."

"In a tradition dating to Biblical times, men rise at dawn in the rugged Cal Madow mountains of Somaliland in the Horn of Africa to scale rocky outcrops in search of the prized sap of wild frankincense trees."

"A Montana lawmaker tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to be secretary of the interior committed travel fraud when he was a member of the elite Navy SEAL Team 6, according to three former unit leaders and a military consultant."