Environment
Need some good news about the environment? The Optimist Daily is your go-to herald of positive environmental news, highlighting eco-friendly solutions and scientific progress around climate action, circularity, conservation, and more. Learn about everything eco in our Environment section.
Smart city tech is getting it’s time to shine in Brooklyn
In Downtown Brooklyn, Fulton Street–the neighborhood’s commercial thoroughfare–is closed to cars. Technically, at least. Fulton is designated as a bus-only street, but around 3,000 cars each month use the corridor illegally. This creates issues for the buses and their 20,000 daily riders, Read More...
An iconic music festival just banned plastic water bottles for good
Britain’s Glastonbury Festival is one of the most iconic music festivals in the world, hosting over 200,000 visitors each year. If you’re old enough to remember, acts like The Kinks, Van Morrison and Felt Kuti all the stage of Glastonbury back in the 1970s. And while it’s always been a Read More...
If you can’t avoid flying, choose the airlines trying to cut down on emissions
By avoiding air travel altogether, you’re doing the environment a huge favor. The problem is avoiding airplanes and using alternative forms of transportation isn’t always possible, especially if you have to make it overseas. Still, you can make a difference by traveling with the airlines that Read More...
General Mills is on a mission to regenerate America’s farmland
Farming a single crop on the same path of land—something known as a monoculture—depletes the soil of its nutrients and ruins its ability to trap carbon. The longer a monoculture remains a place, the harder it becomes for healthy land to regenerate. The problem is that for farmers, rotating Read More...
Why you should stop buying birthday balloons
As our name implies, we don’t like to be the bearer of bad news. But sometimes we feel it’s important to bring about some more unfortunate news in order to motivate better decisions regarding our planet. In this case, new research has found that balloons are the number one marine debris risk of Read More...
White paint: the surprisingly simple way to keep cities cool
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel and invent highly-complex gadgets to keep our cities cool in the face of climate change. In fact, a bucket of white paint can already go a long way in helping cities shrug off rising temperatures. White paint limits the amount of light and therefore heat a Read More...
An Indonesian community built a natural defense to save its shoreline
When the Demak District of Indonesia’s most populous island started to notice that its precious shoreline was degrading and disappearing, the district came up with a five-year plan to restore it. The plan included the installation of permeable dam structures made of bamboo and brushwood that trap Read More...
The UN just declared 2021 to 2030 the ‘Decade on Ecosystem Restoration’
Massive political and financial backing will be needed if we want to turn the tide against climate change. That’s why it’s more than welcoming to know that the period between 2021 and 2030 has officially been declared as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Just this week, the General Read More...
Can you bring a forest back to life? Absolutely
The Iberian peninsula was once home to vast stretches of forests that spanned across the northern coast of Spain. Now the region is an arid one with depleted soil baking under the hot sun. Typically such a baron landscape would present a major obstacle for any old reforestation program, but for Read More...
The race is on to build batteries big enough for planes to fly on clean energy
The need for electrifying the aviation industry is clear. Not only is air travel responsible for 2 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, but it also has a particular warming effect as planes flying at high altitudes spew nitrogen oxides and other particulates that heat up the Read More...