Environment

With Sabbath candles burning and 14 guests seated around her dinner table, Joanna Arch held up a cup of kosher red wine and chanted the kiddish prayer in Hebrew: "God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he rested from all his creative work."

The Georgetown apartment complex was one of this city's most coveted properties back in 2005. Now Greg Chelius and Alex Size were touring it as if examining an exotic ruin. They walked past the unmanned guardhouse and its broken windows. Size snapped photos with a digital camera. Chelius lifted the green fabric on a fence tacked with No Trespassing signs. Building after building loomed in the near distance, all of them quiet and vacant.

With the election of President Obama, environmentalists had expected to see the end of the "Appalachian apocalypse," their name for exposing coal deposits by blowing the tops off whole mountains. But in recent weeks, the administration has quietly made a decision to open the way for at least two dozen more mountaintop removals. In a letter this month to a coal ally, Rep. Nick J. Rahall II (D-W.Va.), the Environmental Protection Agency said it would not block dozens of "surface mining" projects.

A federal judge has rejected key provisions of a plan for managing millions of acres in the California desert, saying the U.S. Bureau of Land Management designated roughly 5,000 miles of off-road vehicle routes without properly taking into account their impact on public lands, archaeological sites and wildlife. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston on Monday ruled that the West Mojave plan, which the bureau approved in 2006 after a decade of development, is "flawed because it does not contain a reasonable range of alternatives" to limit the number of miles of off-road routes.

Docked in Long Beach on Wednesday with a fresh load of oil from Valdez, the Alaskan Navigator didn't look like much of a trailblazer. The massive tanker sat silently, with a few thin cables draping down to some gray metal boxes. Missing was the incessant rumble of diesel engines, which on an average cargo ship would be running constantly to keep electrical systems going -- burning quite a bit of diesel fuel and generating a significant amount of pollution.

The road to recovery for U.S. automakers could be jammed with hundreds of thousands of gas-guzzling used cars, which President Obama hopes will be traded in for more fuel-efficient vehicles -- with the lure of government money. So-called cash-for-clunkers programs in Germany and France have worked well this year to spur new car sales. But similar initiatives aimed at reducing smog in Southern California have not fared so well in recent years.

Under a large shade umbrella in a Santa Monica courtyard, Lucie and Estella nibbled on cherry tomatoes and greeted moviegoers at a film festival screening Sunday morning. As film festival guests go, they were unusual -- they're chickens. Even for chickens, they are exotic -- Belgian bearded d'Uccles. Lucie is a deep orange hue speckled with black and white. Estella is black and white. And as befits a turn in the spotlight at a film festival, their feathered feet gave the appearance that they were shod in elaborate pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes.

Sitting like a turquoise gem in a bowl of hemlock, Sitka spruce and ice, Berners Bay has long been a jewel of Alaska's Tongass National Forest. In the spring, swarms of tiny eulachon rush in to spawn, and the bay floods with hundreds of killer whales, humpback whales and sea lions in hot pursuit, along with eagles and seabirds by the thousands. Fishermen flock to its herring, salmon and Dungeness crab. Its chilly, tranquil waters are a favorite destination for kayakers.

When Energy Secretary Steven Chu talks about how Americans can break their addiction to oil and coal, he starts with his hi-fi amplifier. It's so old that the on-off light burned out long ago. But inside lies a technology that -- in its day -- was as revolutionary as the changes needed to solve the nation's energy problems. Radios, telephones and other electronics once depended on fragile vacuum tubes the size of small light bulbs.

Yang Xuemei grew up tending yak with her family in this outpost on the edge of the Tibetan plateau. These days, she herds tourists through the alpine pastures and other scenic climes of Pudacuo National Park -- 1,243 square miles of soaring mountains and glacial lakes inhabited by red pandas and nearly 100 other endangered species. Her job as a tour guide broadens her horizons beyond the toothy mountains that define her life. "It's hard to go out into the world from here," said Yang, 23.