Tatiana Schlossberg

President Theodore Roosevelt, who signed the Antiquities Act into law, created 18 monuments, including the Grand Canyon and Olympic National Park in Washington, totaling more than a million acres.

The features that have made plastic so important in the global market are the same ones that make it such a pervasive pollutant: durability and resistance to degradation.

New data suggests contamination in rivers and streams, as well as on land, is increasingly common, with most of the pollution in the form of microscopic pieces of synthetic fibers, largely from clothing.

And since plastic does not naturally degrade, the billions of tons sitting in landfills, floating in the oceans or piling up on city streets will provide a marker if later civilizations ever want to classify our era.

If human civilization were to be destroyed and its cities wiped off the map, there would be an easy way for future intelligent life-forms to know when the mid-20th century began: plastic.

Consumers can choose organic cotton grown without pesticides, but it uses more water and requires more land than conventional crops. Organic cotton can also be much more expensive and difficult to find.

Polyester, one of the most common fibers, is a plastic derived from crude oil. The long fibers that make up polyester thread are woven together to make fabric. Extracting the oil and melting the plastic require energy.

In the Garden of Eden, figuring out what to wear was easy and the fig leaves were environmentally friendly. Today, it's much harder to find clothes that don't have some kind of negative impact on the planet.

Some of the opposition to the national monuments may be ideological. Western ranchers and sportsmen have long complained about what they see as federal land grabs that limit their access to millions of acres of public territory.

Most Americans support protection of public lands.

Most legal scholars and historians agree that the Antiquities Act does not give the president the authority to revoke previous national monument designations, but a president can change the boundaries of a national monument.

Over the vast plains of the open ocean, where wave lines may be the only markers, seabirds, including albatrosses, manage to find food.

When policymakers, financiers and scientists describe the world decades from now, in the throes of climatic changes that we now only model, they emphasize what might be lost.

Reducing the damage from waste might require expanding the traditional definition of waste - not just as old-fashioned garbage, but as a result of wild inefficiency in all kinds of systems, which often results in emissions of greenhouse gases, among other problems.

If there's one vital, but underappreciated, subject in the conversation about climate change, it's waste: how to define it, how to create less of it, how to deal with it without adding more pollution to the planet or the atmosphere.

Farmers and agricultural authorities must take account of climate change and the prospect of increased rainfall in designing strategies to mitigate the effects of nutrient pollution.

In the stable emissions model, in which a rise in global surface temperatures by two degrees Celsius from preindustrial times is more than likely, the Northeast would still see a robust increase in nitrogen loading.

Excess nitrogen from the fertilizers can cause eutrophication in the ocean, which can lead to harmful algae blooms or hypoxia - reduced levels of oxygen that create conditions in which organisms can't survive.

Nitrogen-based fertilizers, which came into wide use after World War II, helped prompt the agricultural revolution that has allowed the Earth to feed its seven billion people.

When you buy carbon offsets, you pay to take planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in exchange for the greenhouse gases you put in. For example, you can put money toward replanting trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The most effective way to reduce your carbon footprint is to fly less often. If everyone took fewer flights, airline companies wouldn't burn as much jet fuel.

Ice cores, which are long cylinders scientists extract from glaciers, ice sheets or ice caps, contain gas bubbles, pollen, dust particles, or chemical isotopes that give scientists clues about what Earth's temperature and atmosphere were like when the ice caps first formed.

If you live in Minneapolis, there's a 95 percent chance you live within a 10-minute walk to a park.

Whales and dolphins have extraordinary hearing and the ability to communicate in widely varying voices.

Sea mammals, in particular, have evolved to take advantage of how well and far sound can travel under water, and to compensate for poor visibility in the dark deep.

Climate change, habitat destruction, extinctions - the Earth has seen it all before, thousands of years ago. And humans may have been partly to blame for many of those changes in nature, too.

About 6,000 years ago, St. Paul Island, a tiny spot of land in the middle of the Bering Sea, must have been a strange place. Hundreds of miles away from the mainland, it was uninhabited except for a few species of small mammals, like arctic foxes, and one big one: woolly mammoths.

Air quality is already a problem outside of cars: More than 80 percent of people living in cities where pollution is tracked are exposed to air quality levels below World Health Organization limits.

As a nation, we spent eight billion hours sitting in our cars, waiting for lights to change, for the driver ahead to sneak into that parking spot, for an accident to be cleared.

The world's oceans are littered with trillions of pieces of plastic - bottles, bags, toys, fishing nets and more, mostly in tiny particles - and now this seaborne junk is making its way into the Arctic.

Coal ash gets far less attention than toxic and greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, but it has created environmental and health problems - every major river in the Southeast has at least one coal ash pond - and continuing legal troubles and large cleanup costs for the authority and other utilities.

Coal ash, the hazardous byproduct of burning coal to produce power, is a particularly insidious legacy of the nation's dependence on coal.

If you are like many people, flying may be a large portion of your carbon footprint. Over all, the aviation industry accounts for 11 percent of all transportation-related emissions in the United States.

Environmental advocates say that changing how much power computers and monitors use in idle mode can cut greenhouse gas emissions without requiring consumers to change their behavior.

Climate refers to the long-term averages and trends in atmospheric conditions over large areas, while weather deals with short-term variations, which is what happens when the polar vortex visits your hometown.

When there is this dip in the jet stream that brings cold to the East, there's usually a countervailing loop that takes warm air into Alaska or the Arctic.

In the past, offshore wind farms have faced significant opposition in the United States for a few reasons: high costs, complicated rules about who gets to build on the seafloor and what they build, and complaints from people who do not want their ocean view obstructed.

Environmentalists, members of the Obama administration and government officials in several states see significant potential for offshore wind energy, given that winds over the ocean usually blow stronger and more steadily than those on land.

Renewable energy, including from offshore wind, is crucial to the effort to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, according to environmentalists and some elected officials.

Extreme precipitation is likely to increase with rising temperatures because of growing atmospheric humidity, leading to a higher risk of flash flooding nationwide.

An inherent tension between the seeming ineffectiveness of immediate and individual action and the long view the government is trying to take here may be common to every society trying to reduce emissions and to encourage participation.

Because Japan has to import most of its energy, and because of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, the country has an almost obsessive interest in tackling energy issues.

Ocean plastic in particular has captured the public imagination, and seems to be a jumping-off point for several companies developing plastic alternatives, both in source material and in the pollution they are trying to prevent.

Almost everyone I spoke with in Maine who's involved with the Arctic told me that Mainers have more in common with people from Iceland and Norway than they do with people from New York or California - they all live in relatively small communities with fairly extreme weather, and mainly depend on the ocean and other natural resources.

Melting permafrost in Greenland and the Arctic tundra is releasing vast amounts of methane, a potent climate-altering gas.

A less icy Arctic is coming, and generally speaking, that's not a good thing. Climate change is warming this region twice as fast as the global average, threatening wildlife and indigenous communities.

Cargo shipping, cruising, mining, oil drilling, fishing - all these industrial activities could expand to the Arctic, one of the last remaining wild places, and with potentially devastating consequences.

The Google Quad Campus looks way too nice to sit on top of an active Superfund site: There are matching bikes, a pool with primary-colored umbrellas, and a contained universe that looks more like a college or a park than a satellite campus of one of the biggest companies in the world.

Computers and cellphones - which require semiconductors and microchips to work - have become so essential to life all over the world that it's easy to ignore the problems with building them.

Santa Clara County has 23 active Superfund sites, more than any other county in the United States. All of them were designated as such in the mid to late 1980s, and most were contaminated by toxic chemicals involved in making computer parts. Completely cleaning up these chemicals may be impossible.