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A mariner says there is a "raft" of plastic debris spanning 965,000 square miles in part of the South Pacific.

Around Yellowstone national park, mining companies anticipate the end of the Obama-era moratorium, but local businesses are fighting back

• Help support the Guardian’s coverage of the government’s public land sell-off

Bruce Gordon’s Cessna Centurion floats off the runway south of Livingston, Montana, quickly escaping the confines of Paradise Valley, walled on both sides by the Absaroka and Gallatin mountain ranges. Snaking through the alfalfa fields, cottonwood thickets and ranches below, the Yellowstone river is still surging with late spring snowmelt.

As soon as we crest the ridges, the whole of Yellowstone national park is visible to the south, with Grand Teton towering on the far horizon. Places that would take hours to drive between – because of impassable mountains and roadless wilderness – are revealed to be only a handful of miles apart. The nearly 1 million acres of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness is spread out to the east, teeming with unseen elk herds, mountain lions, and grizzly bears. Gordon, who runs the nonprofit EcoFlight, based in Aspen, Colorado, pilots flights like this one to help people understand conservation issues with a view from above. “We’re coming up on Emigrant Gulch now,” Joe Josephson, sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, says over the intercom as we fly over the green-roofed buildings of Chico Hot Springs resort, skirting the conical 10,915ft Emigrant Peak. Josephson, an avid mountaineer who recently summited Emigrant Peak to celebrate his 50th birthday, is the Montana Conservation Associate for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a nonprofit devoted to defending the 20 million-acre Yellowstone ecosystem from degradation.

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The Founder and chair of the Virgin Group speaks during a panel discussion in New York on Friday and says the threat of climate change actually offers ‘one of the great opportunities for this world’. Branson urges the business sector to step forward and ‘fill certain gaps that some governments are leaving behind’ in tackling the problem

• Trump regrets ‘bizarre mistake’ of Paris climate pullout, Branson claims

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Britain is an international leader in animal welfare and now, fortunately, the message is beginning to spread – importantly to China

Animal welfare is one of the UK’s most successful exports. When the late Peter Roberts, a Hampshire dairy farmer, founded the charity Compassion in World Farming (ciwf.org.uk) 50 years ago, he rightly feared that industrialised farming would wreak havoc on animals and the planet. Even he couldn’t have envisaged today’s numbers: 70 billion animals are reared globally for meat, milk and eggs each year and two thirds of farm animals are reared intensively. We call it factory farming. The mission of CIWF is to bring it to a halt.

The concept of animal welfare didn’t have an equivalent in Mandarin or Cantonese.

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Scientists have dated the trees to a previous ice age 60,000 years ago, when sea levels were far lower.

A "raft" of plastic debris spanning more than 965,000 square miles is floating in the South Pacific.

Simultaneous harvest failures in key regions would bring global famine, says the Met Office

Governments may be seriously underestimating the risks of crop disasters occurring in major farming regions around the world, a study by British researchers has found.

The newly published research, by Met Office scientists, used advanced climate modelling to show that extreme weather events could devastate food production if they occurred in several key areas at the same time. Such an outcome could trigger widespread famine.

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• Virgin chief tells audience in Brooklyn Trump’s decision is ‘very, very strange’
• ‘I get the feeling the president is regretting what he did’

Donald Trump regrets the “bizarre mistake” of withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement, Sir Richard Branson has said. The British billionaire also urged the president to help phase out the ailing US coal industry.

Related: Donald Trump offers hand of friendship to Emmanuel Macron on Paris visit

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Acclaimed Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani dies of breast cancer aged 40.

Readers document the rising environmental crisis of plastic waste, as the planet struggles to cope with a million plastic bottles being sold every minute

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Bratley View, New Forest The distinct click had been a seed pod twisting and firing its tiny black seeds into the distance

Click. The sound is distinct. A black speck flashes across my vision. I straighten up and think about the two. There can be no doubt what they were, but I am sensorially confused. Which had I actually experienced first? The click, or the speck?

At that moment, I had been adjusting the settings on my camera to try to catch the pink of the clump of common centaury that was looking radiant at the edge of an parched path. I give up on that for the time being, and linger by the gorse bushes in the hope that there will be a repeat performance, and I will solve the puzzle. Though I wait, and later walk some distance through an extensive gorse brake following a route marked out by the ponies, the plants refuse an encore.

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Six of the world's large carnivores have lost more than 90% of their historic range, new analysis says.

They hunt for prey, look like modernist sculptures and have their very own kingdom on the tree of life: slime moulds are bizarre and beautiful. This episode is selected from the Off Track archive.

New reporting rules seem to represent a big win for the campaign by the mining sector and conservative politicians to stifle environmental advocacy

The environment department has recently begun sending letters to conservation groups registered as eligible for tax deductible donations, as they do every year. But this year the correspondence is different, in a disturbing way.

In the past the groups, which include all the big names such as the Australian Conservation Society, The Wilderness Society, Lock the Gate, Greenpeace etc, as well as small local conservation organisations, were simply asked to reveal the total expenditure from their public fund. This year they have also been asked to break down their expenditure into the amounts spent on “on ground environmental remediation”, “campaign and advocacy”, “research” and other administration.

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A small farmers market in the Tamar Valley in Tasmania is leading the war on waste, one plastic bag at a time.

This week we toast an urban wine project; Carol Cosentino opens her home and heart to injured wildlife; we go behind the scenes at a commercial worm farm; and try our luck in a stockman's challenge.

Letter writers share their stories of picking up litter and offer suggestions how others might be encouraged to follow their lead

In our village, we have seen both the potential and the limitations of people-led efforts to tackle litter (Letters, 13 July). The parish council and the local transition village group have worked together to both inform people about the wider environmental problems of litter, especially plastic, and to develop a network of individuals who have undertaken to keep specific roads or areas free of litter. Volunteers were provided with good-quality litter pickers (available from the Keep Britain Tidy campaign) and gloves, and a map was put up in the parish office showing the areas covered.

The results have been fantastic: lots of volunteers mean that most of the village is litter-free most of the time. I am sure that Wendy Harvey’s hope that the sight of people picking up litter raises awareness and discourages (but doesn’t stop) others from dropping litter. A campaign at the local secondary school, has undoubtedly contributed as well.

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Chinese scientists have "teleported" a photon particle to a satellite - could humans be next?

The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

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If you’ve spotted a butterfly in the UK, and have been lucky enough to take a photograph of it, we’d like you to share your experience with us

More than three quarters of the UK’s butterflies have declined in the last 40 years, but some reports say this is an unusually good year for butterflies.

Related: World’s largest butterfly survey aims to assess apparent spike in British numbers

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