California

"Just beyond the southeast corner of Joshua Tree National Park, rows of boarded-up houses, gouged mountainsides and concrete ruins are an ugly reminder of the never-ending battle over the West’s public lands."

"One warm spring day a year ago, Griselda Barrera, a Mexican-born mother of three, went to a middle school auditorium in Thermal, California, an unincorporated community in the desert east of Los Angeles, to square off against a panel of regulators. Barrera, who is just 5 feet tall, wore a black pencil skirt and platform pumps, the kind of shoes she favors now that she no longer works in the fields. She was flanked by mothers like herself, there to give public comment to the South Coast Air Quality Management District."

"Pollution from illegal marijuana farms deep in California's national forests is far worse than previously thought, and has turned thousands of acres into waste dumps so toxic that simply touching plants has landed law enforcement officers in the hospital."

"The biggest gas storage facility in the West resumed operations Monday, nearly two years after a blowout led to the nation’s largest-known methane release and drove thousands of families from their Los Angeles homes."

"There is a man among us who talks to the bees. They spoke recently on a warm Sunday morning in my driveway. Nick Wigle was standing with his hands on his hips, squinting down at a small gas-meter vault packed with 3,000 stinging residents. “All right, guys,” he said. “We’re going to take this nice and easy.” The hive buzzed back, its low tone telegraphing the gentleness unique to Santa Barbara's bees."

"The same communities that fought for decades to protect California’s coast from offshore oil drilling have renewed their battle calls as the Trump administration considers opening 3,500 square miles of state waters to energy development."

"State utility and gas regulators ignored a top gas manager's warnings about the risk of earthquakes to aging wells at the Aliso Canyon gas storage field when they okayed it to resume operations, Los Angeles County said Friday in court papers."

"A surging wildfire raced through California mountains and foothills west of Yosemite National Park on Wednesday, forcing thousands to flee tiny, Gold Rush-era towns, destroying 29 structures and wafting a smoky haze over the park's landmark Half Dome rock face."

"California's legislature passed a package of bills that extends the state's signature plan to address climate change by a decade, sending Governor Jerry Brown a cap-and-trade plan that uses market forces to cuts greenhouse gas emissions."