From simple searches to chatGPT, the big digital buildup threatens the grid and water supplies.
Pollution
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Meet LA’s detective for dead marine mammals
A day in the life of a scientist studying the aftermath of the city’s deadly algal blooms.
Posted inJuly 2025: Seeds as Sustenance
First came the record-setting fire. Then came the record-setting floods.
‘I don’t trust the water:’ How post-fire flooding has destabilized a rural community’s drinking water.
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Can fracking wastewater be reused?
New Mexico’s legislators are eager to repurpose “produced water,” but environmental organizations say that there is no safe way to do that.
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Supreme Court puts Utah’s oil train back on the rails
The 8-0 decision overturned the U.S. Court of Appeals decision that the project’s environmental impact statement was insufficient.
Posted inJune 2025: The Promised Land
Where the garbage goes
Amid massive rollbacks of federal environmental protections, a community battling the expansion of a local landfill seeks to safeguard its own backyard – and everyone else’s.
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A proposed Utah uranium mine gets the Trump treatment
Feds approve contested facility in just 11 days.
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Working in the Permian Basin comes at a high cost
Oil workers in New Mexico are subjected to harrowing conditions that lead to death, injury, disease and terrible tolls on mental health and family life.
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Massive pipeline spill seeps toward Colorado’s Animas River
23,000 gallons of gasoline leaked on the Southern Ute reservation in December.
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Can Trump bring back ‘clean, beautiful coal’?
The fossil fuel-fetish once again trumps economics and common-sense.
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A return to the fight against Alaska’s Ambler Road
Alaska Native tribes and activists will use previous momentum to try and keep a road from being built through caribou migratory paths, subsistence harvest areas and remote Indigenous land.
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Trump halts historic orphaned well-plugging program
Western states were using funds from the Infrastructure Act to clean up pollution left behind by industry.
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Contamination threatens the last source of clean groundwater in west New Mexico
The toxic legacy of Cold War uranium mining and milling has shattered lives, destroyed homes and created a pollution problem for an entire region.
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Turkey vultures in California are testing positive for rat poison
Despite statewide restrictions on the deadly poisons, new research shows they’re still infiltrating the food web.
Posted inMarch 2025: The Berry Pickers
As the Great Salt Lake recedes, industry rises
Utah’s Inland Port Authority works with local officials to boost development, but residents feel ignored.
Posted inFebruary 2025: Immigrant Stories
How do we raise our children in a time of wildfire?
The poet Rachel Richardson learns, through writing and motherhood, to defy fear.
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Uranium trucks on Arizona’s ‘Killer 89’ spark alarm in tribal communities
White Mesa residents say they’d be last to know about accidents despite being closest to danger.
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‘They’ll have to drag me out before I go.’ EPA workers stand firm despite Trump chaos
Staff outside D.C. headquarters respond to funding freeze and other orders from the new administration.
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The beautiful and awful Butte, Montana
The indelible history of mining poisons a town yet extracts something new.