Forests

"As wildfires engulf nearly 170,000 acres of Northern California wine country, questions are swirling about the role of climate change in causing damage of historic proportions."

"The Interior Department is preparing to set aside a decades-old ban on development in federally protected wilderness areas by pursuing a controversial proposal to build a nearly 12-mile road through a wildlife refuge in ­Alaska.

"Firefighters worked tirelessly to battle fast-spreading flames in Northern California's wine country as the return of dangerous winds threatened to worsen the blazes that have killed 23 people. At least 285 people remain missing as the wildfires wiped out communities and scorched 170,000 acres. About 3,500 structures have been destroyed."

"Firefighters battling wildfires in California’s wine country face the prospect of new outbreaks when dry, windy conditions return on Wednesday to an area where at least 17 people have been killed and 2,000 homes and businesses destroyed in blazes."

"As soybean and cotton farmers across the Midwest and South continue to see their crops ravaged from the weed killer dicamba, new complaints have pointed to the herbicide as a factor in widespread damage to oak trees."

"Dry conditions and gusting winds fueled a deadly outbreak of wildfires in California that quickly exploded through thousands of acres of forest and residential neighborhoods, killing at least 11, injuring over 100 and destroying some 1,500 structures while scorching nearly 100,000 acres of land."

"The world’s tropical forests are so degraded they have become a source rather than a sink of carbon emissions, according to a new study that highlights the urgent need to protect and restore the Amazon and similar regions."

"Heat, drought, wildfire and insects threaten an iconic pine — and potentially an entire ecosystem — as climate change looms large in the American Southwest".

"Environmentalists won a major battle this week in a long legal war over the Clinton administration rule that limited road construction and logging in national forests."

"For much of this week and last, devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey in Houston and Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean has grabbed front-page headlines. But wildfires in the West have been wreaking destruction of their own, though it has attracted less attention. Vast swaths of land have burned, choking the air with ash and smoke."