Wisdom, at 71 the world’s oldest known bird, returns once again to Midway Atoll.

In what Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm calls “one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century,” scientists at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieve the first fusion reaction that results in more energy than it took to produce.

US Fish and Wildlife lists the whitebark pine as a threatened species in seven Western states. Threats to the keystone species include a fungal disease, habitat loss, and a changing climate. The agency also declares Tiehm’s buckwheat to be endangered. The perennial herb grows in Nevada’s Silver Peak mountains, notably in the vicinity of a proposed lithium mine. 

Invasive black carp establish themselves in wild portions of the Mississippi River Basin.

Colorado plans to reintroduce wolves to the state. Federal agencies consider reintroducing grizzly bears to Washington State’s North Cascades. Montana’s Fort Belknap Indian Reservation is bringing back black-footed ferrets and swift foxes.

A wolf in Germany that killed a pony belonging to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, is executed.

In Los Angeles, wildlife officers euthanize famed mountain lion P22, which was captured after being struck by a car and killing a Chihuahua.

Australia’s mountain mist frog is extinct. “For tens of thousands of years, there were these little frogs that were calling their hearts out in these rainforests, and now it’s silent.”

Sperm from an extinct 30-million-year-old species of cockroach is found preserved in amber.

The International Olympic Committee struggles to find a city cold enough to host the 2030 Winter Olympics. 

Amazon’s plastic packaging usage in 2021 jumped to 709 million pounds—enough plastic pillows to encircle the earth 800 times. 

Three reporters from West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette Mail are fired for complaining on Twitter about a softball interview by the paper’s president with former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship. In it, he calls climate change “an absolute hoax” and blames the disastrous 2010 explosion at his Upper Big Branch coal mine, which killed 29 miners, on former President Barack Obama. 

The Keystone Pipeline spills at least 600,000 gallons of tar sands oil into Mill Creek in Kansas. It is the largest of the pipeline’s 22 spills over the past 12 years.

California’s oil and gas industry says it has collected enough signatures to put a measure on the state’s 2024 ballot to overturn a new law requiring a minimum distance between new oil and gas wells and homes, schools, and hospitals. Some who signed the petitions say that canvassers falsely told them the measure would ban oil drilling near homes when in fact it does the opposite.

California’s Public Utility Commission rewrites regulations for rooftop solar installations, cutting by 75 percent the amount utilities must pay homeowners for their excess power. 

More than 140 people in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, are killed in heavy flooding and landslides. 

Attacks on electrical substations are proliferating, having now been reported in Oregon and Washington State in addition to North Carolina and South Carolina. 

House Republicans want to investigate a conspiracy theory that US environmental groups—including the Sierra Club—are secretly colluding with Russia and China on energy policy. (We’re not.)

Under pressure from Republican attorneys general, money manager Vanguard quits the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, a voluntary attempt by the financial industry to regulate its holdings’ carbon emissions.

Due to the declining value of stock in EV manufacturer Tesla, Elon Musk is no longer the wealthiest person in the world. 

The songs of blue whales are getting deeper. In the past 40 years, the frequencies of their songs have declined by 30 percent.