Like the title says, what are some of your favorite specific examples of environmental storytelling in games?

I'm confused, do you mean the environment contributing to the telling of the story?

information/narrative conveyed through the game environment.

I don't know if this counts, but there's a frozen field in Northrend (In WoW), where two armies were battling and all the participants were frozen in place. It was really fun to walk among those frozen "statues" and trying to figure out what happened.

Sorry if I misunderstood the question.

No, that's basically the sort of thing I'm looking for :)

The earliest game I can think of that had something like that : Golden Axe. Specifically inside Deathadder's castle. At one point there is a row of 3/4 green statues including a rhino warrior and some barbarian. I got a massive fright the first time I saw them in the game, thinking that they were going to come alive and attack me. Luckily they didn't, and every time I passed that point in the game I used to wonder what their story was. I figured that perhaps the barbarian was an old foe of Deathadder, or perhaps a hero from the days before Deathadder rose to power. So I guess I derived my own narrative from the environment in that case.

Another similar example are the ruins of old underground fortresses in the Warcraft 1 cave missions. They used to fascinate me to no end, and I always wondered what they were, who used the, and for long they had stood abandoned by the time my party descended into them.

It's a little on the basic side but I'm going to throw out the TR games.

Every one of them has a hand full of levels that bases the goals and achievement of them around the history of the setting, be it Sir Francis' Folly, The Great Wall, The Pyramids, The Coliseum, or even the London Underground.

Except for the bit where you zip line over a T-rex pit!

I said a hand full of levels in each game! :P

Mr Smarty Pants! XD

I can think of a couple ones I liked, but my all-time favorite has to be Ocarina of Time. Running (out of necessity) through the deserted castle town once you become adult Link tells you all you need to know about the state of the world, especially when contrasted with the cheery atmosphere the same place has when you visit as a child.

Shadow of Chernobyl.

Those that have played, will understand.
Those that have not, must play!

In Freedom Fall the whole story is told through graffiti on the walls. I'm not exactly sure if it counts though, because in the end it's some kind of text again.

The Ultima Underworld games and the successor series (Thief, System Shock, etc - ESPECIALLY System Shock) were very good at this and used the technique all throughout.

Do you have any specific examples?

In MegaMan 1 on IceMan's level the background is frozen trees and bushes, which makes perfect sense for IceMan. However the frozen trees are palm trees, meaning the winter wonderland you find yourself in was one a tropical zone before IceMan came to town. I always wondered what that battle looked like and how ill prepared a tropic based defense force would be against ice and snow.

In the Metro 2033 games there are background characters who having conversations that don't affect the gameplay or main story at all, in fact the player cannot even interact with them. Listening to these conversations brings a lot of interesting story flavor to the world. One conversation that really struck me was a father and young daughter fishing, but the daughter was worried about catching a fish with cancer in it, because if they eat it they will get cancer just like mama. In another section of the game I found an adult skeleton holding a small child-sized skeleton with an old teddy bear. There are similar "skeleton stories" to be found in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and to a lesser extent Fallout.