"There’s a stretch of Kim Shade’s ranch in the North Dakota Badlands where he used to look for a peculiar long-billed bird from the seat of his saddle. Now, all he sees there is a road leading to an oil rig."
"A coalition of environmental groups is calling on the federal government to enact emergency rules to protect a vanishing species of whale from lethal collisions with large ships. The groups filed their petition with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Sept. 28 in an effort to protect the North Atlantic right whale."
"Friday’s deluge was yet another reminder that little has been done to make basement dwellings safer, and that the risk for residents is only increasing."
"The Biden administration has finalized national efficiency rules for residential gas furnaces affecting about a third of all US homes, updating a 36-year-old standard that effectively phases out older furnace models."
"Hours before devastating fires scorched the historic town of Lahaina on Maui, Kyle Ellison labored to save his rental house in Kula, a rural mountain town 24 miles away, from a different blaze."
"The Onondaga Nation has protested for centuries that illegal land grabs shrank its territory from what was once thousands of square miles in upstate New York to a relatively paltry patch of land south of Syracuse. ... So now the nation is presenting its case to an international panel."
"Five people were killed in a multi-vehicle crash that included a tanker truck carrying a toxic chemical that spilled Friday night, triggering a large temporary evacuation near downstate Effingham. The truck was holding 7,500 gallons of anhydrous ammonia, of which about 4,000 gallons spilled, according to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency."
In the Coachella Valley east of Los Angeles, the massive Salton Sea is rapidly drying up, threatening vulnerable immigrant communities in a growing toxic environment. The Living Downstream podcast reported extensively on these hazards, winning third place in the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Awards for Reporting on the Environment’s explanatory reporting, small, category, in 2022. Inside Story spoke with one of the prizewinners.
For reporters seeking stories that connect environmental and health issues, there may be no better — or more wide-ranging — place to start than with high-quality data from the Centers for Disease Control’s wide range of datasets. The latest Reporter’s Toolbox looks into where the CDC’s data originates from and how that affects its usefulness, and offers up a helpful overview of CDC data surveys.
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