"The U.S.'s ocean regulator plans to make industry-friendly changes to a longstanding rule designed to protect vanishing whales, prompting criticism from environmental groups who cite the recent death of an endangered whale."
"President Donald Trump has nominated a hotel and food management executive to be director of the National Park Service."
"Josh Courville has harvested crawfish his whole life, but these days, he’s finding a less welcome catch in some of the fields he manages in southern Louisiana. Snails. Big ones."
"President Donald Trump revoked a ban Friday on commercial fishing inside a 3.1-million-acre marine national monument, opening up a previously protected swath of the Atlantic Ocean to industry."
"The Florida Reef, heralded in tourist come-ons as a “world-class natural wonderland waiting to be discovered,” is a vast and vibrant underwater world, extending from Atlantic Ocean waters north of Biscayne National Park, arcing south around the bottom of Florida, and swinging into the Gulf of Mexico where Dry Tortugas National Park is mostly submerged."
"A staffing exodus at Olympic National Park has put salmon recovery efforts in jeopardy."
"A sweeping proposal by the Trump administration to expand offshore oil and gas drilling could result in more than 4,000 oil spills in U.S. waters, according to a new analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity."
"Bally Philp hauls up his baited traps from the waters off Scotland’s Isle of Skye, checking each one methodically. Unlike most of Scotland’s coastline, these waters are protected from industrial fishing methods that have devastated seabeds elsewhere. But Philp, who’s fished for more than three decades, has watched conditions deteriorate nearly everywhere else along the coast."
"The House of Representatives voted 214 to 208 Wednesday to open up hundreds of thousands of federal acres to mining near the border of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness."
"An international agreement to safeguard marine life is now in effect. Known as the High Seas Treaty, it represents the first time that international waters, which lie outside of any country’s jurisdiction and cover nearly half the globe, can be protected."
