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The Poor People’s Campaign, which revived King’s anti-poverty efforts, is taking a modern focus on the environment after the Flint crisis

The Poor People’s Campaign’s attempt to stage a “moral revival” across dozens of US states echoes much of its 1968 antecedent – a guttural cry to shake America from a miasma of racism, poverty and militarism. But the modern version has also opened up a new battleground – the environment.

Last week, as several hundred protesters tried and failed to gain entry to the Kentucky statehouse, concerns over healthcare roiled the crowd. But the campaigners also decried the pollution of air and water by the state’s mining industry, which has sickened residents and contributed to a sprawling, existential crisis – climate change – that was barely on the horizon when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.

Related: 'America's dirty little secret': the Texas town that has been without running water for decades

Related: A civil rights 'emergency': justice, clean air and water in the age of Trump

Related: Donald Trump is costing us one precious thing: time | Bill McKibben

Liverpool plains farmer Megan Kuhn says cows are being slaughtered because there is no way of feeding them after years of extreme weather

In the south-west corner of NSW’s Liverpool plains, in an area called Bundella, farmer Megan Kuhn runs beef cattle and merino sheep with her husband, Martin.

They have 400 breeding cows that will calve in six weeks. Shortly, 89 of those cows will leave the property, sold to an abattoir because the cost of feeding the animals during drought has become too great.

Related: Water shortages to be key environmental challenge of the century, Nasa warns

Everywhere is worse than I've ever seen it

In the next three weeks we’re going to lose our winter crop-sowing window

Related: Farmers challenge Nationals' claim drought unrelated to climate change

June, generally considered a ‘moderate’ month, surprised us last year with searing heat and teeming rain

June is usually thought of as a rather moderate month, weather-wise. Heatwaves tend to happen in July and August, and although there were famous falls of snow in parts of England on 2 June 1975, such events are mercifully very rare.

Occasionally June will surprise us. Last year, the month started with unsettled conditions and heavy rain. But from the middle of the month temperatures began to rise, with very warm air from continental Europe bringing temperatures above 30C every day from the 17th to 21st, reaching a peak of 34.5C (94.1F) at Heathrow Airport on the 21st, the highest June temperature since the long hot summer of 1976. That helped push the average temperature up for the month, so that, despite a return to cooler, fresher weather, this was the equal fifth warmest June in the UK since records began in 1910.

Pumping £5bn into a new plant in north Wales as a way to fight climate change is a solution at odds with the rest of the world

For once, ministers have put their money where their mouth is – into taking another stab at nuclear power. This week the business secretary, Greg Clark, announced plans to pump £5bn into a new nuclear power station at Wylfa in north Wales. It was a reversal of a longstanding Conservative policy not to underwrite nuclear construction. So why the sudden enthusiasm? And what does Clark know that the rest of the world does not?

For almost everywhere else, governments and corporations are pulling the plug on nuclear. Even in a world fearful of climate change, in which nations have promised to wean themselves off fossil fuels by the mid-century, almost no one wants to touch nuclear.

Related: UK takes £5bn stake in Welsh nuclear power station in policy U-turn

Related: Hinkley Point: the ‘dreadful deal’ behind the world’s most expensive power plant