One morning in February 2015, I felt a rumble. Was it an earthquake? No. It was an explosion at the ExxonMobil oil refinery a few miles away. The refinery is located in the middle of a residential area of Torrance, Calif.

In an announcement that could prove to be extremely good news for elephants in the wild, the Chinese government has promised to end its domestic ivory market by the end of this year.Every year, thousands of elephants are killed for their tusks by poachers. Between 2011 and 2014, more than 100,000 elephants were slaughtered. The African elephant population dropped 30 percent from 2007 to 2014. More elephants are being killed than are being born.

Energy conservation is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about freeways jammed with idling vehicles.But in California, which has some of the most congested freeways in the country, that’s about to change. The California Energy Commission (CEC) has approved a pilot program in which piezoelectric crystals will be installed on several freeways.

Imagine trying to relax in your home while being bombarded with the explosive sounds of shotgun blasts as well as freight trains rumbling by. For many whales, dolphins and other marine life that depend on their hearing to survive, there is no way to escape the loud, human-made noises in their ocean home. The main culprits are vessels like cargo ships, along with sonar guns used by the U.S. Navy and air guns used in seismic oil and gas exploration. Their blasts are so loud that they are known to change the behavior of blue whales. But now, in what Michael Jasny, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Marine Mammal Protection Project, Land & Wildlife Program, referred to as “a sea change in the way we manage ocean noise off our shores,” NOAA has announced it plans to take action to reduce the noise in entire marine ecosystems.

For the past six years, an iceberg the size of Rome has blocked the access of Adélie penguins to the sea in Antarctica. To find food, they must walk a detour of nearly 40 miles to the coast.The impact on the colony has been devastating: More than 150,000 penguins have died.The approximately 1,800-square-mile iceberg (referred to as B09B) struck a glacier and became stuck in Commonwealth Bay back in 2010, essentially land-locking 160,000 penguins. Before then, the colony was thriving, thanks to strong winds that blew ice from the shore, making it easy to hunt for fish.“The Cape Denison population could be extirpated within 20 years unless B09B relocates or the now perennial fast ice within the bay breaks out,” wrote scientists from the Climate Change Research Centre at Australia’s University of New South Wales (UNSW) in a study published this month in Antarctic Science.