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This week's investigative reporting, analysis and environmental news.
The Revelator

No. 26, May 3, 2018

Hello Revelator readers,

Last year the USDA program known as "Wildlife Services" killed hundreds of thousands of animals at the request of farmers and livestock owners. Among the dead were a startling 23,000 beavers. Were those deaths really necessary? As journalist Ben Goldfarb wrote this week, there's a better way to manage our ecosystem engineers that doesn't involve killing them.

In other news, Bears Ears National Monument remains under threat from the Trump administration and the energy-extraction industry. That puts the monument's incredible fossil heritage at risk, along with an historic record that could give us clues about how the climate changed in millennia past and what that means for our future.

Where do we go for solutions to environmental problems? Increasingly, people are turning to specialized environmental courts, which now operate on six continents and focus on human rights ignored by other legal systems. Is this the wave of the future?

Finally this week, we take a look at May's best environmental reads — 15 amazing books covering climate change, entangled whales, rare bears, the threats of nuclear energy, the history of the Bundy militia and a whole lot more. Check out the entire list and pick the best books for your spring reading list.

In case you missed it:

The population of critically endangered Amur leopards in Russia has tripled over the past 20 years — to all of 103 big cats. Read our story, or listen to this podcast interview about the good news.

Send us your tips:

What other stories should we be covering? We welcome your ideas and inside scoops. Drop us a line anytime.

Coming up:

We have a ton of other stuff in the works in the days and weeks ahead, including news of a species that has gone extinct, our latest "5 Questions" interview, and a whole lot more. Look for all of our links in next week's newsletter, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook for the latest headlines as they go live. And while you're on social media, we hope you'll share our stories with your friends.

Feel free to forward this newsletter, too — every new reader makes a difference.

That's it for this week. As always, thanks for reading.

John Platt

John R. Platt
Editor, The Revelator

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