Lake Superior

Bad River Band was in the middle of a legal fight with Canada-based Enbridge over its contentious Line 5 pipeline, which carries oil and gas from Alberta to Ontario while crossing the American border.

Scientists say global heating is driving ice loss and warmer water, as ice cover falls short of the 50-year average of 18 per cent.

The world’s groundwater aquifers are taking a beating. Decades of unrestrained pumping by thirsty farms and fast-growing cities have drained these underground rock beds, which hold more than 95 per cent of the planet’s drinkable water.

The roughly 2,100-hectare island is home to several significant animal and tree species and has been owned by American investor Joe Acheson for the last 20 years.

The federal government has committed $420 million over 10 years to protect the Great Lakes, which hold 84 per cent of North America’s surface freshwater and face a litany of threats.

For the second time in a year, the federal government is invoking a little-known 1977 energy treaty between Canada and the United States in an effort to prevent a federal court from shutting down the Line 5 pipeline.

Canada has a goal to protect 25 per cent of its land and freshwater by 2025, and Nature Canada says the Great Lakes need to be included in this.

"Canadian lakes are warming twice as fast as the rest of the lakes globally," said York University biologist Sapna Sharma, a co-author of a paper published in the journal Bioscience.

From Minnesota to the Northwest Territories, researchers are studying dramatic changes in the vast northern forests: thawing permafrost, drowned trees, methane releases, increased wildfires, and the slow transformation of these forests from carbon sinks to carbon emitters.

More than two dozen Democrats in Congress are demanding the White House pause construction on the oil project and carry out new environmental studies.

The Straits of Mackinac, a “sacred wellspring of Anishinaabe life and culture,” is part of an area ceded to the U.S. in 1836 only upon assurances that the right to hunt, fish and gather would be protected, tribal governments say.

Six wolves at risk of dying of starvation have successfully been moved off a northern Ontario island to one on the U.S. side of Lake Superior.

A once-thriving herd of endangered caribou on a northern Ontario island is weeks away from being killed off by a pack of wolves, says a First Nation that is working with the provincial government to get the animals moved to a safe location.