"A federal appeals court ruled that a federal land swap giving a Native American tribal holy site in Arizona to a private mining company so it could be the site of a copper mine would not violate the tribe’s religious freedoms."
In 2006, a local government council in Pennsylvania concerned about sewage sludge dumping enacted the Western legal system’s first formal “rights of nature” instrument. Today, numerous countries have laws recognizing specific rights or even legal personhood for nature. As legal expert Alice Bleby explains, this new perspective arises from a wide range of contexts and plays out in many different ways.
Heat waves, heat domes … heat deaths. The reality of climate change means a grim uptick in fatalities, more so from excess heat than any other kind of extreme weather event. Reporter’s Toolbox points to useful data sources for covering the crisis, with insights on how to go behind the numbers to find the stories of those most vulnerable to heat’s effects.
"Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first elected leftist president, will take office in August with ambitious proposals to halt the record-high rates of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. Petro has promised to limit agribusiness expansion into the forest, and create reserves where Indigenous communities and others are allowed to harvest rubber, acai and other non-timber forest products."
"Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Wednesday outlined the next steps her department has planned to address the legacy of abuses at government-run schools for Indigenous children and legislation to examine the matter."
"The Biden administration has reached a historic agreement to give five Native American tribes more say over the day-to-day management of a national monument in Utah, marking a new chapter in the federal government’s often-fraught relationship with tribes."
"When Black land rights activists were offered a 150-acre (60-hectare) plot in the U.S. South, they saw it as an opportunity towards righting a historical wrong."
"Phoenix is the US’s deadliest city for heat fatalities while its urban sprawl makes it a concrete heat island".
The historic discovery of the Clotilda — America’s “Last Slave Ship” — is only part of the story told in a new book by Alabama-based journalist Ben Raines, which tells the far larger tale about the ship’s survivors, the remarkable Jim Crow-era community they created and its ultimate erosion when faced by decades of environmental racism. A review by BookShelf Editor Tom Henry.
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