SALINA, Kan. – In 1976, Wes and Dana Jackson launched The Land Institute as a nonprofit school to teach a small group of students ways to grow food that respected nature, conserved energy and water, and managed wastes. As one of the nation’s first regional nonprofit environmental and farm research organizations devoted to land stewardship, the Institute set sail in the powerful current of alternative ideas and new organizations in that era that were determined to change how America operated.

Learn about Legionnaires' disease CDC data showing rising cases and what it means for public health in 2025.

By Shilpashree Jagannathan, The Narwhal A small town on northwestern Ontario’s border with the U.S. is quietly preparing for a worst-case scenario. It’s one that could mean a dramatic change for the community’s water supply. Fort Frances, home to about 7,500 people, sits where Rainy Lake empties into the Rainy River and flows north into Lake of the Woods. Fort Frances’ drinking water comes from Rainy Lake, which is bisected by the Canada-U.S.

Legionnaires’ disease, a deadly respiratory illness spread by inhaling contaminated water droplets, is rising again. Following a pandemic lull, the case rate in 2025 climbed to its second-highest level on record, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. registered 2.9 cases for every 100,000 people, second only to 2018, when the rate was 3.04.

This article first appeared on The New Lede and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License. US officials said this week they are expanding a scientific review of the widely used weed killer glyphosate, a chemical popular in agriculture but also linked for years to cancer and other health problems. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) …

In the shadow of wooded hills near the confluence of the Kentucky and Ohio rivers is Lanes Landing, the 125-acre farm where Wendell Berry tended the land and published the most trenchant appeals in American letters to tame the damage from industrial agriculture. “No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it can, for long, disguise its failure to conserve the wealth and health of nature, eroded, wasted, or degraded soils, damaged or destroyed ecosystems, extinction of biodiversity species,” he wrote.

New Internal Revenue Service (IRS) guidance released last week confirms that gas extracted from livestock manure qualifies for a federal clean fuel tax credit, paving the way for increased investment in biogas projects. The move comes as farms increasingly turn to anaerobic digestion to deal with massive amounts of manure. Proponents say the tax credits will bolster an industry that provides a solution to excess waste and turns otherwise emitted methane into a usable fuel.

In the struggling Colorado River basin, where water is scarce, the White House has signaled its priorities for how to use the remaining gallons. Even as scientifically-determined thresholds have been met for releasing water from Glen Canyon Dam for ecological and recreational benefits in Grand Canyon, the Trump administration has decided against those actions in this record-hot year – deciding not to release cold water from deep in Lake Powell to aid the humpback chub, a threatened fish species, and not to authorize a high-volume release of water to rebuild Grand Canyon’s eroded beaches, which are in terrible condition, according to federal monitoring.

Great Lakes researchers warn that changing Lake Ontario’s name is a costly waste of time that complicates longstanding collaboration to manage and protect an iconic water body named by indigenous people before either the United States or Canada were founded. The August 27 executive order signed by President Trump directs the federal government to change Lake Ontario’s name to Lake America across its maps, documents, and communications.

In 2006, in the first chapter of Omnivore’s Dilemma, his best-selling takedown of the American food production system, author Michael Pollan offered a stunning exposé of the havoc that corn caused on water, soil, taxpayers, rural economies, and public health. Really? Corn is a serious problem? Indigenous, peaceable, abundant corn? Twenty years after Pollan’s exposé the wreckage from cultivating and harvesting corn has gotten worse.

This story was originally published by Michigan Public | By Anna Barnes The Illinois Department of Natural Resources has detected invasive carp in the Illinois River only 80 miles from Lake Michigan. That's the closest the fish are known to have gotten to the Great Lakes and hundreds were detected. Officials from the department also suspect there could be spawning grounds closer to the Great Lake and are monitoring the area further.

Circle of Blue and True Elements Launch Situation: Colorado River from Stockholm World Water Week Colorado River faces a “collective nightmare.” New platform delivers a shared view to help inform decisions and collaboration. Situation: Colorado River is part of Designing Water’s Future, the initiative to create “a new operating system for the world’s fresh water” — aligning across finance, policy, media, and innovation.

Learn about nitrate contamination in water and how Chippewa Falls manages this challenge to protect its residents' health.

Ever since Jacob Leinenkugel discovered spring waters here that were pure enough to brew his famous beer, this small Wisconsin city’s devotion to clean water has been paramount. That’s why in 1997, when Chippewa Falls utility managers detected potentially dangerous concentrations of nitrates in a well supplying city water, officials acted. They installed new filtration equipment in their treatment system and drilled deeper wells into cleaner aquifers to ensure the water delivered to the city’s 16,000 customers contained nitrates at concentrations less than 10 parts per million, the level deemed safe by federal law.

by Brian Bienkowski, The New Lede August 6, 2026 Michigan is giving a green light to a large new concentrated dairy farm that would add millions of gallons of animal waste to a region where water quality is already suffering from manure saturation.  The decision from Michigan’s Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) department is the latest to highlight the uphill battle that communities around the US face in trying to slow or stop the expansion of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

by Brian Bienkowski, The New Lede August 4, 2026 The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has backed off its re-assessment of cancer-causing nitrates despite decades of research suggesting the contaminant is more harmful than previously thought and that nitrate pollution is at crisis levels in US drinking water.  The agency would not confirm the assessment was cancelled, but the work has been stagnant for more than two years and the department responsible for it was eliminated.

A look at the global water-food-energy nexus after one of the hottest Julys on record

The Michigan Supreme Court on Friday ruled that the Michigan Public Service Commission erred when it granted a key permit for the Line 5 petroleum pipeline tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac. Among other findings in its 58-page ruling, the majority found the commission’s permit review was overly narrow, failed to consider whether the tunnel project would harm public rights to the Great Lakes, and failed to study whether Line 5 would shut down if the tunnel isn’t built.

Top executives of Bayer, the German chemical maker, were understandably elated on June 25, the day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in their favor in a product injury case involving the company’s Roundup herbicide. The high court reversed a state court decision and dismissed the legal theory that prompted a jury to award $1.25 million to a Missouri man who accused Roundup of causing his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

By Carl Meyer; This article was originally published by The Narwhal Wildfires are raging in every province and territory across Canada, leaving entire First Nations communities burnt, upending the lives of thousands of evacuees and creating plumes of toxic smoke dirtying the air in major cities like Toronto and New York. While some politicians claim the out-of-control wildfires are being primarily caused by improper forest management, scientists agree that climate change, driven by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, is the main culprit.

Real change occurs in America when civic pressures from outside the centers of influence force insiders to retreat. Arguably the most compelling example of systemic change in how a state could operate is now unfolding in Iowa. Severe water contamination from crop and livestock production linked to the nation’s second highest and fastest rising incidence of cancer developed into the election year issues of their time in Iowa,

NORTHWEST INDIANA — The defining scenes of the era of artificial intelligence look nothing like science fiction. They are bright yellow, neon orange, dusty, sweaty, greasy, and loud. They are excavators parked in a tallgrass field in rural Indiana. They are backhoes trundling down an Ohio farming town’s lone road. They are the neon vests worn by sunburnt utility workers raising power lines in a Wisconsin county where cows outnumber humans tenfold.

COLUMBUS, Oh. — After months of deliberation, Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) has decided not to move forward with a proposed general permit that would have allowed all data centers across the state — regardless of their size, location, or type — to discharge untreated waste- and stormwater directly into waterways.  The decision follows a recent slew of state-level orders — including those from New York, Michigan, Illinois, and Nebraska — meant to curb the data center industry’s growth, which so far has proceeded largely unchecked. 

When members of the Pennsylvania American Legion gathered in Philadelphia on July 21, 1976, they were unaware that their organization’s annual conference would enter the epidemiological history books. America was in a celebratory mood that month. The country had just marked the bicentennial of the nation’s founding, and Philadelphia, as a leading player in the revolutionary drama, was a center of revelry.

By Phred Dvorak July 12, 2026 This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. BANTANG KILLING, Gambia—In this little village in West Africa, Ebrima Nyan is watching his farmland slowly wither away. When Nyan, 47, was a teenager, the village grew all the rice it consumed, in a field alongside the Gambia River.

Learn how AI is influencing fossil fuels and water resources in Indiana, shedding light on local environmental issues.

JASPER COUNTY, IND. — Growing up in the shadow of a coal plant in rural Indiana gives a child a unique relationship with the passage of time. As a little girl in the small town of Wheatfield, population 900, Barb Deardorff recognized the months by the height of the cornstalks and beansprouts which grew on her family’s farmland. The years were marked by what loomed beyond these fields — the R.M.

By Leah Borts-Kuperman; June 26, 2026 This article was originally published by The Narwhal Gathered in an arena in North Bay, Ont., in summer 2024, federal officials told hundreds of concerned citizens how they planned to remediate longstanding contamination of the city’s waterways left behind by the Department of National Defence. A few months later, officials gave a similar presentation to a packed hotel conference room.

Explore the Colorado River water sharing agreements and their impact on agriculture, industry, and climate challenges.

The Colorado River, from one viewpoint, is a mess. The iconic waterway, fundamental to the region’s modern existence – its desert metropolises, its high-tech industries, its agriculture, and its recreation economy – is on the verge of crashing. A two-decade drying trend, aided by carbon pollution in the atmosphere and water use that exceeds supply have nearly drained the basin’s liquid savings accounts.

By Alex Hager/KJZZ and Mark Olalde/ProPublica; Photography by Sharon Chischilly for ProPublica; June 29, 2026 This story was originally published by ProPublica and KJZZ Reporting highlights ▪ Certainty on the River: Tribes have negotiated a settlement to resolve the largest outstanding claim to the Colorado River, while providing billions of dollars for water infrastructure. ▪ Upper Hand: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — the Upper Basin states — are resisting the deal because it allows the Navajo and Hopi to lease water outside their reservations.

Gamblers now have a chance to put their money where the water isn’t. Kalshi, an online prediction market, is offering wagers on Lake Mead’s water level at the end of June. Prediction markets like Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket allow users to bet on the outcome of events – things like elections, interest rate decisions, the winning couple on Love Island, and even whether the U.S.

By Annie MacKeigan, The Water Desk Western wildfires start and spread because of a whole host of factors—wind, temperature, drought, forest health. But scientists are finding that the most important indicator of where the next big fire might ignite isn’t held in the trees themselves, but in the soil their roots are buried in. Recent studies demonstrate how soil moisture data can help wildfire experts predict a potential fire’s location and severity.

Dawn is most memorable, the awakening hour in Bear Swamp, a 3,915-acre expanse of the Huron-Manistee National Forest in northern Michigan. Even after the somnolence of night, morning light is not nudged by the sound of anything connected to industrial America. Such tracts of backcountry forest, unreachable on any road, are features of America’s grand necessity to honor and safeguard its wilderness expanses.

Decades ago, before it was much of a concern, water moved through the average U.S. home in enormous quantities. Toilets pulled 3.5 gallons per flush or more. Washing machines filled like tiny swimming pools. Water flowed and flowed. Things have tightened considerably since then. New data shows that U.S. homes are becoming ever more efficient in their water use. Between 1999, when the first residential end-use study was released, to the…

Explore how prescribed burns for wildfire prevention can protect ecosystems and reduce risks in the Upper Midwest’s pristine lakes.

Wildfire risk is predicted to stay elevated through June in the Upper Midwest from drought and high winds. That’s risky for the region’s pristine inland lakes, but land managers are working to reduce wildfire risk in the Northwoods with controlled burns. Some experts are advocating for increasing the use of this centuries-old method of prescribed fire to create more resilient ecosystems.

Explore the connection between Wild Rice and Menominee Lakes in northern Wisconsin through ancient wisdom and modern technology.

Wildfire risk is high in the upper Great Lakes, and research shows that large, scorching wildfires spell trouble for lakes in the region’s remote watersheds.  The reason: Vegetation burns in the fire. Scorching, high temperatures make the soil hydrophobic, which causes erosion and more runoff into lakes. Plants are no longer there to filter the sediment seeping into waterways. One region of concern is northern Minnesota where fires are blazing in dry and windy conditions.

Just like his presidential predecessors – George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden – Donald Trump has a thing for ethanol. But why? Inordinately expensive to taxpayers, monstrously polluting, and now linked to mounting cancer incidence in Midwest Corn Belt states, fermenting ethanol from a third of America’s corn crop would appear to sane people as an insane pursuit. Not to corn growers, ethanol refiners and their allies in farm industries, the White House, Congress, and farm state legislatures.

The country’s most severe drinking water problems, from high levels of contaminants and foul-smelling water to pipe breaks, low water pressure, and expensive rates, are generally found in the…

Find out why the Illinois POWER Act fails to pass, leaving crucial data center water usage and energy use regulations unaddressed.

MENOMINEE, Wisc. — On a cool bluebird morning, DJ Micik guides his canoe through the narrow channel connecting Little Rice Lake with Rice Lake, two of the largest bodies of water on the Menominee reservation in northern Wisconsin. Sitting behind Micik is his 6-year-old son, Liam, whose curiosity pulls him again and again into the tall trio of buckets he sits amongst.

The country’s most severe drinking water problems, from high levels of contaminants and foul-smelling water to pipe breaks, low water pressure, and expensive rates, are generally found in the thousands of small systems that serve dozens of people up to a few thousand. These systems are public health crises waiting to emerge, said Denise Schmidt, director of water at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, a group that works with water utilities on infrastructure funding.