Water & Oceans

"On an overcast day in early August, a flotilla of five canoes pushed away from a jetty in Astoria, Ore., near where the Pacific breaks on Desolation Point, at the mouth of the Columbia River."

"The federal government is about to release its final, $500 million cleanup plan for the Gowanus Canal, one of New York City’s two Superfund sites, a long-awaited moment in the effort to cleanse more than a century of environmental abuse."

"Shenandoah Riverkeeper Jeff Kelble filed an appeal in Richmond Circuit Court on Wednesday to overturn Virginia's sewage sludge regulations."

"A federal judge in California has sided with environmental groups in their lawsuit against the U.S. government over Navy training exercises off the West Coast involving sonar that they say harms endangered whales, dolphins and other protected marine mammals."

"Critics of hydraulic fracturing, known widely as 'fracking,' have been pushing hard for natural gas companies to disclose all of the chemicals in the fluids that are used in the process. But what if the companies themselves don't even know what those chemicals are?"

"WHITING -- The Indiana Department of Environmental Management issued its final ruling on a permit application for BP's Whiting Refinery, requiring the company to cut its mercury releases into Lake Michigan by more than half."

"Cancer-causing industrial chemicals have been found in the sewers at a Columbia-area restaurant as a state investigation of illegal dumping expands from the Upstate to the Midlands, where utility officials scrambled this week to learn more about the threat to central South Carolina."

"At its heart, a major new U.S. EPA report that synthesizes more than 1,000 studies about connections among streams, wetlands, rivers and lakes comes down to what elementary school students are taught about the water cycle. Streams flow into creeks that flow into rivers."