Some members of Congress consistently vote against clean water, and many others are reliable champions. The senators profiled below were the biggest surprises in their vote to block protections for our nation's waterways.

The Nature Conservancy works with unlikely allies to create economically and environmentally sustainable solutions. Brian Stranko, our north and central coast regional director, explains how we develop creative approaches to complex problems to get the job done.

(This article was published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the Dec. 3, 2012 issue.) The feds and the state want to see Bayou Bienvenue in the Crescent ...

At the eight-acre, Bayou Corne sinkhole in Assumption Parish, owners of slab houses are waiting for methane-gas monitors to be installed in December.

With less than seven percent of this initial commitment to the Gulf Coast met, it's fair to say BP must do a better job of working fairly with the state and federal trustee to move projects forward.

BP oil and tar that washed ashore or was uncovered in Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. Bernard and other Louisiana parishes during Hurricane Isaac is settling into wetlands and shutting some public beaches.

We still have a lot of work to do, but there is no doubt that our water is safer to fish from and cleaner to swim in than it was when Congress passed this law. Yet even as we continue to make progress, it is time for another transformative change.

Residents of the Jefferson Parish town of Jean Lafitte, 25 miles south of New Orleans, hope a levee can be built soon after they were inundated by Isaac in August and a string of earlier storms.

Armstrong Energy in Missouri hopes to open a company-backed RAM coal terminal in Alliance, La. on the west bank of the lower Mississippi River in 2014. But residents of Ironton, located just south of RAM's site, say they don't want their air quality to get any worse than it is now.

As rising temperatures and soaring demands for food and energy put more pressure on our planet's resources, we can invest wisely in food and environmental security by helping America's farmers, ranchers and foresters act as good stewards of our lands and waters.

Healthy wetlands act like a giant sponge, relieving pressure on levee systems downstream, lessening flood risk and filtering harmful agricultural runoff.

In the highly partisan atmosphere of a presidential election year, it's encouraging to see examples of one thing that Americans can agree on: the importance of preserving our nation's natural heritage.

Before the Clean Water Act, pollution was so bad that water bodies like the Cuyahoga River in Ohio and the Charles River in Massachusetts caught on fire faster than a batch of birthday candles.

Given difficult challenges for the Federal budget and the economy, you might expect support of conservation and the environment to weaken in the U.S. But, when we Americans are at our best, hard times can actually result in creativity and innovation.

A New Orleans open house held by Louisiana's coastal restoration authority last week on a draft of the state's 2012 Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast drew mixed, earnest and sometimes vehement comments.

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This Thanksgiving I'm thinking about all the amazing ways in which water makes life better -- ways that are perhaps so fundamental to our everyday existence.

It seems a week doesn't go by where an extremist in Congress isn't threatening to undo our basic environmental laws. This week is no exception.

The United Houma Nation, with its family tree firmly planted in Louisiana's coastal parishes for the last 300 years, doesn't want to see its centers drown as the wetlands shrink.

Whether or not we are ready to conclude that today's extreme weather events are linked to global climate change, it would be utterly irresponsible for us to ignore the possibility.

In this time of debate over the use of federal funding, the project is a good example of the kind of return we can expect from well planned investments in the conservation of our land and water.

This article was published in the Louisiana Weekly in the May 2, 2011 edition. Before the BP spill, a number of Louisiana towns were underwater, loc...