Biden’s | Environment.org

When President Joe Biden nominated Deanne Criswell to serve as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2021, she received a unanimous confirmation, a rare gesture of bipartisan support from the bitterly divided U.S. Senate. A longtime firefighter who served overseas in the Colorado Air National Guard, Criswell also had decades of emergency management experience not just with FEMA, but in local emergency response leadership roles in Colorado and New York City.

Criswell knew how the system worked at FEMA, but her mandate was to change the status quo at an agency that is often accused of acting too slowly after disasters — and of being far too slow to adapt to climate change. In her three years leading the agency, she has attempted to overhaul FEMA’s disaster aid programs, overseen billions of dollars in new spending on …

Why Biden’s new protections don’t eliminate threats to the Tongass National Forest

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| Pollution

Last week, the Biden administration restored protections for the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, reversing a Trump-era initiative that opened up millions of acres to road-building and logging. The Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska covers 16.7 million acres — an area larger than West Virginia — and is home to old-growth Sitka spruce and cedars. Bald eagles swoop low over the forest’s dense canopy. Deer, moose, and black bears roam wild, and salmon swim in the forest’s streams.

Because the Tongass is a massive carbon sink, storing 8 percent of the total carbon in U.S. forests, it’s often called the “lungs of the country.” Locally, Alaskan Native tribes depend on the forest to hunt deer and moose, forage for medicines, and fish salmon. “It’s just very important that we keep [the forest] intact,” said Joel Jackson, president of the …