On Wednesday the E.P.A. will announce that it will step up monitoring and enforcement of federal rules regarding air and water quality, particularly in communities of color, which are disproportionately burdened by pollution. “Seeing the situation for myself, talking directly to community members, it is startling where we get to this point — the point where children miss school days because the water isn’t safe,” Mr. Regan said.

Our tax system operates on the same “you figure it out” model, one that costs citizens 9 billion hours a year. Many other wealthy economies let their citizens know if they owe anything in taxes or send them prefilled forms to review once a year. The IRS could do that, but tax-prep companies’ lobbying and Congress’s disregard have maintained the miserable status quo... Even if we do not have a measure of the time tax itself, we have ample evidence of its effects. We know that millions of Americans do not receive the credits or benefits they qualify for. Taken as a whole, the time tax is regressive. Programs for the wealthy tend to be easy, automatic, and guaranteed. You do not need to prostrate yourself before a caseworker to get the benefits of a 529 college-savings plan. You do not need to urinate in a cup to get a tax write-off for your home, boat, or plane. You do not need to find a former partner to get a child-support determination as a prerequisite for profiting from a 401(k). The difference is so significant that, as shown by the Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler, many high-income people, unlike poor folks, never even realize they are benefiting from government programs.

The sense of emergency has intensified in recent weeks after deadly clashes between miners and Yanomami and a gun battle between federal police agents and heavily armed gunmen apparently linked to the mines.

Biodiversity in the ecosystem is critical for the planet to survive. You want to see different plants and flowers in the fields, not rows and rows of corn or soya. We’re also losing diversity of seeds and plants because of climate change. We need to go back to our indigenous roots where diversity of mother nature has always been critical.

Over the years, a mountain of evidence has brought to light a stark injustice: Compared with white Americans, people of color in the United States suffer disproportionately from exposure to pollution.