Nairobi, Kenya - A new road is needed in the Kenyan Osupuku Conservancy. And strong stone is needed for the road. A Chinese corporation, Sinohydro, owns a rock quarry, which offers the best stones to build a strong road; a road which wouldn’t need repairs for a long time. However, the rock quarry poses a threat to the aboriginal wildlife of the region.

The Osupuku Conservancy was created in 2008 as a means of protecting elephants. The conservancy is a corridor that links Amboseli to Kenya’s Chyullu Hills and Tsavo National Parks and is a thoroughfare for elephant migration. However, elephants may discontinue using the conservancy if the rock quarry is permitted to continue.

“We are not against the building of the road, but [we are against] the area from which the material for the road construction is to be gotten from,” said African Wildlife Foundation (AWF)’s Fiesta Warinwa. The quarry is controversial for multiple reasons, but first and foremost may be the use of explosives in creating the quarry.

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While other endangered species in Australia have been hit hard by the recent fires, a new study reveals that the broad-headed snake may actually benefit from them — and could actually need more of them to survive.

“Broad-headed snakes are only found living in small pockets within 200 km of Sydney, and those small communities are fast becoming extinct or increasingly more rare,” said Professor Rick Shine of the University of Sydney, who co-wrote the study.

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While solar energy is often touted as a way to avoid fossil fuels, California Senator Dianne Feinstein believes some public lands solar projects in the Mojave Desert need to be reexamined for their potential environmental impact.

Feinstein wrote to the Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar to request that 12 proposed solar plans for the desert lands be scrapped, citing potential habitat destruction. The complaint applies to a small fraction of the 165 pending wind and solar energy leases on 600,000 acres of former railroad land.

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The Animal Legal Defense Fund is celebrating their annual Justice For Animals Week by asking people to partake in a new, specific action for animals every day this week.

For the first day, they’re asking people to help spread the word by telling friends on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere to visit their site to partake in the next six actions. But most importantly, the organization says they hope to add 10,000 signatures to the Animal Bill of Rights during this week alone.

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The government defends the decision by pointing to the hundreds of jobs the 2,000-acre facility will create amid a damaged economy. The facility is expected to generate $100 million annually for the Aberdeenshire community.

The government has essentially given Trump free reign to do what he’d like with the land with little-to-no environmental supervision. Wildlife groups had hoped to form a compromise, but instead, Trump’s development will not be required take the wildlife habitat into account whatsoever.

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