Natural Resources

"President Obama today announced three new national monuments honoring key events in the civil rights movement and expanded both the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Oregon and the California Coastal National Monument.

The White House said the president was using his authority to mark the upcoming Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday by creating two new sites in Alabama — the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and the Freedom Riders National Monument — and one in South Carolina — the Reconstruction Era National Monument.

"Less than a month after the Obama administration announced that it was banning offshore oil and gas production in most of the Arctic, there are signs that a place many conservationists regard as the crown jewel of the Arctic could one day be open for drilling."

The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management issued four plans for management of 6.5 million publicly owned acres of Alaska’s eastern interior.

"President-elect Donald Trump once rejected the idea of selling public lands to states because he wanted 'to keep the lands great.'"

"Louisiana is losing its coast at a rapid rate because of rising sea levels, development and sinking marshland. Officials are trying to rebuild those marshes and the wetlands, but much of the coast can't be saved."

"House Republicans are endorsing a procedural change to make it easier for Congress to transfer federal land to state or local government agencies."

"Underground pockets of boiling water and steam in a northern New Mexico national preserve that represent the heart of an ancient collapsed volcano could get extra federal protection under a proposal by the National Park Service to limit or prevent any negative effects from tapping geothermal energy on neighboring land."

"A little-known federal program that avoids publicizing its accomplishments to protect from looters the thousands of Native American sites it's tasked with managing has been caught up in a big net."

"The Louisiana coast loses a football field’s worth of land every 38 minutes. This staggering rate of land loss has been brought on by climate change and coastal erosion accelerated by human activities, including water diversion projects and damage done by the oil and gas industry."