A climate trial and tribulations

When Montana’s constitution was ratified by voters in 1972 it enshrined a citizen’s right to a clean and healthful environment into the future. The youth-led climate change lawsuit Held v. Montana is predicated on this right and its interpretation through Montana’s courts.

Early exposure to scientific rigor and climate change’s impact on ranches led Rikki Held to confer her name to the nation’s first constitutional climate change lawsuit to reach trial.

Two Kalispell brothers cite changes to skiing and hunting seasons as reasons for joining the coalition of Montana youth in Held v. Montana suing several state agencies over failure to secure their “right to a clean and healthful environment.”

Mica Kantor, 14, says he has felt the impacts of the changing climate on the roads, tracks and trails he runs on, prompting his inclusion as a plaintiff in Held v. Montana.

How the recent legislative session passed a slew of laws that highlight lawmakers' energy priorities, and took direct aim at the pivotal case, Held v. Montana.

A coalition of Montana groups have filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing that newly passed laws that lawmakers say will speed up permitting of surface coal mines would have made the Copper Kings of Montana proud by gutting protections for the citizens and clean water.

Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality will move forward with a court-ordered environmental review of the controversial gas-fired power plant in Laurel, now that a new state law banning regulation of carbon dioxide is on the books.

Montana has a long history of making money by extracting and exporting its natural resources, namely coal. State politicians and Montana’s largest electricity utility company seem set on keeping it that way.

A federal judge ruled on Thursday that a lawsuit brought by young Oregon-based climate activists can proceed to trial years after they first filed the lawsuit in an attempt to hold the nation’s leadership accountable for its role in climate change.

Carbon dioxide levels in the air are now the highest they’ve been in more than 4 million years because of the burning of oil coal and gas. The last time the air had similar amounts was during a less hospitable hothouse Earth before human civilization took root, scientists said.

Over the last half century, summers have gotten progressively hotter in the U.S., especially in the West, according to new analysis. Reno, Nev., has seen average summer temperatures soar by more than 11 degrees, the biggest increase in the country. Boise, Idaho's 5.8-degree spike ranks No. 2, followed by Las Vegas (5.8 degrees) and Salt Lake City (5.5 degrees).

As conditions that best support life shift toward the poles, more than 600 million people are already living outside of a crucial “climate niche,” facing more extreme heat, rising food scarcity and higher death rates.

The U.S. District Court in Arizona granted mining giant Resolution Copper permission on Monday to join the U.S. government as a defendant in a lawsuit brought by grassroots group Apache Stronghold.

“Protection of Chaco Canyon is a great first step, but protections for the Greater Chaco Region, where there are living communities of Diné relatives, wildlife, and plant life, including countless sacred sites throughout the region are just as critical,” said Robyn Jackson, executive director of Diné CARE, an Indigenous environmental group in the Southwest. “The Biden administration must phase out fossil fuels.”

“For our people to survive, we need salmon. Without salmon, there can be no Salmon People. We have a sacred relationship with – and obligation to – the salmon populations that call Nch’í Wána (Columbia River) home.”

To preserve their food supply, Native Alaskans are teaming up with federal officials and state scientists.

The remains of five Native American children who died at a notorious Indian boarding school more than a century ago will be returned to their living relatives.

Thirty years after a federal law mandated the return of Native human remains and funerary items, Arizona still has one-third of them in storage.

For more than six decades, the rare white bison’s remains have been on display at the Montana Historical Society in Helena.

Colorado Rep. Brandi Bradley wonders if she should revive corner-crossing legislation after Wyoming judge dismisses civil trespass complaint against hunters.

Hunters also agree not to seek attorneys’ fees after judge rules they did not trespass when corner crossing.

A freshman state lawmaker says the federal government must obtain the consent of the Wyoming Legislature to acquire more property — even private property from a willing seller — in the state. Legal experts say the argument smacks of debunked legal posturing in a long-simmering fight against federal land ownership and management in the West.

Damaging a couple of wetlands won’t have a drastic effect, but the cumulative sum of losses adds up to something significant—and quickly, too.

As the BLM invests $160 million nationwide in what it calls "restoration landscapes," Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner speaks with BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning about two wetlands in Colorado that will benefit.

deeply controversial proposal to increase dissolved oxygen for Arctic grayling in a shallow lake within the Red Rocks National Wildlife Refuge is moving forward.

The time has come to put conservation on equal footing with the private enterprises that have benefitted enormously from using and sometimes abusing our lands.

Desert farming, wasteful irrigation and the profoundly thirsty crop is bringing the critical river to the brink.

Climate change tightens existing water supplies and can worsen conditions in communities where hauling water is a necessity.

Arizona's water agency will stop approving new development that relies solely on groundwater after a new model shows a projected shortfall.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled an angler has no standing to sue for river access by arguing the state's rivers were navigable at statehood.

The decision strips federal protections from the ephemeral streams that are crucial for life in the arid West.

With water use growing, arid Western states are asking for new regulations.

The Iron Creek site in east-central Idaho could produce at least 6,000 metric tons of cobalt, but possibly much more.

This old, abundant, relatively clean energy source has barely been tapped.

Boise-based Clēnera said the company’s 600-acre solar array, located along U.S. Interstate 15 near Dillon, is in its final phase before launching within weeks.

Emery County's San Rafael Research Center, where the county hopes to invent its post-coal future, is caught in a political fight.

Reporter Alicia Inez Guzmán describes her personal and family history with the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the U.S. moves to modernize its stockpile of nuclear weapons, which presages enormous, inevitable changes for New Mexico.

The new construction standards are meant to ensure homes and buildings are built for efficiency, electric cars and solar panels.

A study of the economies and cultures of Durango, Cortez and Farmington, three Western towns with roots in resource extraction and processing that have taken different career paths.

Two separate decisions limit fossil fuel extraction on public lands, protecting schools and Indigenous sites.

The release of cancer-causing benzene and other toxic gases from sites in Pennsylvania raises concerns about millions of other abandoned wells across the U.S.

Grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem have been able to gain the body fat they need for hibernation even as population densities have increased and as climate change and human impacts have changed the availability of some foods, according to a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey and its partners.

Deputy Director Dustin Temple will assume Hank Worsech’s position.

Fishing guides and outfitters alarmed about declining trout populations in the Big Hole River receive no reply from Gov. Gianforte after urgent appeal.

The reintroduction and management of gray wolves has sparked many conversations across Colorado. Now it has also inspired a new opera.

Ammunition, gas, aviation fuel price hikes drive costs higher as hard winter boosts interest in coyote culls.

A federal judge has yanked approval for a phosphate mining project in southeastern Idaho, saying federal land managers in the Trump administration didn’t in part properly consider the mine’s impact on sage grouse, a bird species that has seen an 80% decline in population since 1965.

Roughly 500 horses inhabit an area along the Black River in eastern Arizona. Some say the herd descends from Spanish colonial horses. Others say the herd is more recent and doesn’t belong on the land it now grazes.

Wildlife cameras may be key to understanding the threatened species’ response to climate change.

A local team is getting hard data on insect population declines in the Missoula area.

Eagle County, Colo., property owners are incentivized to rent their houses to local workers instead of renting them out as short-term vacation homes. If an Eagle County homeowner chooses to rent to a local worker, they will get a stipend ranging from $2,000 to $12,000, depending on how long the lease is.

Pollution protections are stripped while Canada boasts progress. This is the history of promises made and betrayed.

How a highly politicized social media ban in Big Sky Country sparked a nationwide debate over freedom of speech.

Ryan Busse once worked for a major gun-maker. He now warns about the danger of growing radicalization in the industry.

Journalists at 24 Gannett newspapers decimated by financial cuts are protesting the failure of contract negotiations to resolve what they say is low pay and increasingly stressful working conditions.