National (U.S.)

"President Joe Biden nominated former tribal chairman Bryan Newland for assistant secretary for Indian Affairs of the Interior Thursday."

"In the decades before the Civil War, one of the South’s largest slave enterprises held sway on the northern outskirts of Durham, North Carolina. At its peak, about 900 enslaved people were compelled to grow tobacco, corn, and other crops on the Stagville Plantation, 30,000 acres of rolling piedmont that had been taken from the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. Today, the area has a transitional feel: Old farmhouses, open fields, and pine forests cede ground to subdivisions, as one of America’s hottest real estate markets sprawls outward."

"At a hearing on Thursday, 17-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg offered [Biden] some advice on a way to do so: ending all subsidies to the dirty energy sector."

"Seventy miles off the coast of Louisiana, among a maze of drilling platforms and seafloor pipelines, thousands of 55-gallon drums containing hazardous industrial chemicals litter a vast, dark swath of the ocean floor. They’ve been sitting there for nearly 50 years."

"The Transportation Department announced Thursday it was withdrawing part of a Trump-era rule that blocked states from setting their own tough car pollution standards, setting the stage for a return of broader power to California to fight climate change."

"The White House on Thursday nominated Tracy Stone-Manning as the Bureau of Land Management director, potentially putting an environmentalist in charge of America’s largest land-owning agency."

"President Biden on Thursday moved to put four years of official climate denial behind the United States, declaring that America would cut its global warming emissions at least in half by the end of the decade."

"More evidence that harmful PFAS chemicals are sneaking into some "green" and "compostable" products."

"New research from the American Lung Association finds that more than four in 10 people – a whopping 135 million in the US – live in counties with unhealthy levels of particle or ozone pollution."

"If anything, the worst public health crisis in a century has brought our understanding of our planet, and our place in the fragile yet resilient web of life throughout it, into stark relief."