"The House voted late on Wednesday to advance a 211-mile industrial road that would cut through pristine Alaskan wilderness to reach a proposed copper and zinc mine, handing a victory to the company behind the contentious mining venture."
"When a deadly landslide tore through part of Wrangell, Alaska, in 2023, there was only one place people there could go for information. "We're on an island, and there's one road, and everybody that lived south of that road lost everything — they lost their electricity, internet, television, phones," says Cindy Sweat, the general manager of KSTK, the community's public broadcaster. What was left, Sweat says, was the radio."
The Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” is anything but, especially in its unraveling of efforts to weave environmental and climate justice into American society, argues the new Voices of Environmental Justice. In her latest column, writer Yessenia Funes calls on journalists to report its ramifications not just for the planet but for the most vulnerable people living on it. Here are key stories to start with.
"Officials in Alaska’s capital city are asking residents to voluntarily evacuate from parts of the Mendenhall Valley ahead of an expected glacial flood this week."
The United States has nearly 100,000 miles of coastline and much of it is at risk of flooding. But what that inundation looks like varies widely from place to place. From storm surges to land subsidence, the latest Backgrounder details the different types of flooding and the threats they pose to coastal communities, especially sea level cities.
"Tsunami waves reached Hawaii and the West Coast after one of the strongest earthquakes in recorded history, a magnitude 8.8 temblor, struck off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula on July 29 and triggered alerts across the Pacific, Alaska and the entire U.S. West Coast."
"Closing Mauna Loa and three other U.S. sites that track greenhouse gases would disrupt a decades-long record of the planet’s changing atmosphere."
"Eric Huntington built his dream cabin nestled in the wilderness of central Alaska, eventually raising two daughters there. But over the years, he learned that living in this quiet, remote village came with a hefty cost."
"The Trump administration announced Monday it is moving ahead with plans to reopen millions of acres of undisturbed public land to oil and gas drilling, amid a visit by top officials to Alaska this week." "The plan would open up 11 million acres to drilling and remove conditions, including protections for sensitive ecological areas, on oil and gas leases in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska."
"Environmentalists are challenging in court President Trump’s executive order that they say strips core protections from the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument and opens the area to harmful commercial fishing."
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