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Food
Chile's small-scale fishers are squeezed, but a renewed interest in native foods offers hope. Claudio Almarza / Oceana

Can a Locavore Seafood Movement Save Chile’s Traditional Fishers?

By Allison Guy

When Carlos Castro was young, he didn't plan on following his dad and granddad into fishing. Like a lot of teenagers in the 1970s, Castro dreamt of kung fu. Bruce Lee was more his style than the family business.

Castro swam laps to shape up back then, dodging boats in the bracingly cold bay of Valparaiso, a port city in central Chile. Forty years later, he still plies those waters, driving one of the boats he used to swim past. Castro, a youthful 56 in white trainers and Nike gear, became a fisherman after all.

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Oceans
Russian and U.S. students carry bug spray for the mosquitoes, bear spray for the grizzlies and notebooks for the salmon science, while studying in Alaska's backcountry. John Simeone on behalf of WWF

Sharing Knowledge and Salmon Across the Bering Sea

By Amy McDermott

At the height of the Alaskan summer, a troupe of students hiked up the middle of a shallow creek. Undergraduates and grads from the University of Washington, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Kamchatka State Technical University in eastern Russia carried handheld clickers to count the multitudes of salmon thrashing upstream to spawn. Some of the students spoke English, others Russian, but they all came to see salmon: fish that their two countries share.

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Animals

Orca Whale J50 'Missing and Now Presumed Dead'

The ailing orca whale J50 was declared "missing and now presumed dead" by the Center for Whale Research Thursday, after a three-day search by the organization in the waters between Washington state and Canada failed to locate her.

She would be the third Southern Resident killer whale to die since June, bringing their numbers down to 74.

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Climate
Lance Koudele / Columbia Riverkeeper

Why Does Climate Change Matter to the Columbia River?

By Miles Johnson

Why does a river organization like Columbia Riverkeeper dedicate so much energy to fighting fossil fuel projects?

First, fossil fuels threaten clean water. Think oil spills, pipelines that degrade salmon streams, coal dust in the river, and aerial deposition of mercury from coal-burning power plants. But we have additional motivation to fight fossil fuel infrastructure: climate change is harming the Columbia River and our communities right now. And giant fossil fuel corporations want to build more infrastructure—pipelines, fracked gas refineries, shipping terminals—to lock our region into continued reliance on dirty energy. Together, we are taking a stand to protect clean water and our climate.

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Politics
A Buddha statue is seen at a burned home in Spring Valley, near Clearlake Oaks, northern California, on Aug. 7. Tens of thousands of firefighters battled relentless flames ripping across California on Aug. 7, as the death toll from a series of infernos that erupted last month hit 11. The raging Mendocino Complex fire comprising twin blazes in the western state's north has now ravaged more than 290,000 acres — approximately the size of sprawling Los Angeles — in less than two weeks, becoming California's largest wildfire since record-keeping began a century ago. JOSH EDELSON / AFP / Getty Images

Trump Admin. Takes Advantage of California Fires to Funnel More Water From Endangered Fish to Agriculture, Critics Say

The Commerce Department seemed to take its direction from President Donald Trump's Twitter account on Wednesday when it issued a directive to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to prioritize fighting wildfires over protecting endangered species when allocating California's water resources, The Huffington Post reported.

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Animals
Christina Felsing / Getty Images

Thousands of Farmed Salmon Escape Into the Wild

By Dan Nosowitz

The CBC reports that between 2,000 and 3,000 farmed salmon escaped the confines of Cooke Aquaculture's Newfoundland location, and are now somewhere in the wild.

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Animals
The bald eagle was officially listed as an endangered species in 1967. By 2007, it had recovered. Carl Chapman / CC BY 2.0

House Republicans Launch Extinction Bills to Cripple Endangered Species Act

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives announced on Thursday a series of bills aimed at profoundly gutting the Endangered Species Act, including provisions making it almost impossible for imperiled species to gain protection and giving states that often oppose endangered species protection veto power over those decisions.

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Animals
Their sensitivity to changing environmental conditions make salmon susceptible to climate change, but it's also why scientists use salmon as an indicator species to gauge the health of the ecosystem. Illustration by Delphine Lee

5 Reasons Salmon Are an Environmental Justice Solution

By Shannan Lenke Stoll

Last year, for the first time, scientists surveying Pacific Northwest salmon came up with empty nets. They weren't all empty, but some were—and that's "really different than anything we have ever seen," David Huff of the NOAA survey team told The Seattle Times. It's a bit too early to identify a particular cause of these unusual salmon surveys, but it's not too early to be concerned.

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Animals

Orca Whale 'Crewser' Presumed Dead as Population Reaches Its Lowest Point Since 1984

Following the suspected death of an orca whale nicknamed Crewser, the population of southern resident orca whales is the lowest it has been in 34 years, The Seattle Times reported Saturday.

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