Last-minute changes in the House budget reconciliation bill included scrapping one of the more controversial amendments that would have sold off public lands in the southwest to private developers. But the overall bill isn’t a complete win for the environment, with even deeper cuts to clean energy tax credits added at the last minute. Wyatt Myskow is the Mountain West Correspondent for Inside Climate News and joins Host Aynsley O’Neill to explain.

This week’s “Listening on Earth” sounds come from listener Flynn Wendling, who shared the call of a mockingbird (or Cenzontle in Spanish) in Mexico that became his morning wake-up call; and from Living on Earth Producer Paloma Beltran, who visited Mexico City’s Zocalo and captured the sounds of a celebration of 700 years since the founding of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City.

A new White House memo instructs federal agencies to disregard the economic impacts of climate change in their regulations and permitting decisions. This metric is known as the “social cost of carbon” and it has been used for decades to guide policy so that it considers the economic realities of our changing climate. David Cash served under President Biden as the New England Administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency and he joins Host Jenni Doering to discuss.

Last year, a nonprofit group in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was awarded a large federal grant as part of a $2 billion climate justice program through the Inflation Reduction Act. But now that climate and environmental justice work are non grata at the federal government, their grant has evaporated. The Allegheny Front’s Julie Grant reports.

One of the recipients of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize is helping to protect an especially biodiverse part of the oceans around the Canary Islands. Carlos Mallo Molina was previously a civil engineer who also loved scuba diving. When he found out about plans to build a massive port on the island of Tenerife that could have devastated the local marine life, he decided to leave construction and dedicate his career to protecting the oceans. He joined Living on Earth Executive Producer Steve Curwood.

Seagrass is a foundation of marine ecosystems and stores as much as 35 times more carbon than a tropical rainforest, but warming ocean temperatures and other threats are wiping seagrass out. There is hope, though, as a project to “garden” or cultivate more resilient varieties is making waves along the U.S. East Coast. Hosts Aynsley O’Neill and Jenni Doering chat about the benefits and promising results of this seagrass “gardening.”