Mountain West (CO ID MT NV UT WY)

"A new partnership between NASA and researchers is measuring the impact of beavers reintroduced to landscapes in Idaho."

"The state of Utah is not doing enough to save its imperiled Great Salt Lake and stop an impending ecological collapse, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by national and western environmental groups."

"Lawsuits, protests and fierce disputes over who controls water in the parched American West have held up a crucial pipeline."

"Climate activists caused a miles-long traffic jam when they blocked the only road leading into the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.

Videos posted online show activists using a trailer to block the road that leads into Black Rock City. One video posted to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, shows a white pickup truck appearing to be from the Pyramid Lake Ranger Station crashing through the barricade set up by protesters.

"A federal board erred when it gave approval to a railway project in eastern Utah that could ship billions of gallons of crude oil along the Colorado River, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled on Friday.

The Uinta Basin Railway project would have connected oil drilling in Utah with major rail networks with 88 miles of new tracks. The project drew widespread criticism from environmental groups, local officials in Colorado and U.S Senator Michael Bennet, which raised alarms about safety and environmental risks from increased oil traffic.

"They're tearing up rangeland and riparian areas—and also our ideas about wildness".

"Young environmental activists scored what may be a groundbreaking legal victory Monday when a Montana judge said state agencies were violating their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment by allowing fossil fuel development."

"The Cloud Foundation (TCF), a nonprofit dedicated to protecting America’s wild horses and burros on public lands, has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon against the U.S. Department of Interior seeking to address the lack of transparency in roundups that are conducted by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)."

"A legal battle over the U.S. government’s ongoing capture of thousands of wild horses in Nevada where 31 mustangs have died in a weekslong roundup goes before a judge Wednesday as opponents try to prove it’s illegal and should be stopped."

"The Bureau of Land Management proposed Thursday removing more than a million acres of public lands in Colorado from future oil and gas leasing, while also designating tens of thousands of acres of new protected areas in the western part of the state as part of an effort to resolve a series of legal challenges from environmental groups."