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.
If your carbon footprint makes you feel guilty, there’s an easy way out
“We think a lot about our carbon footprint,” says Deborah Markowitz. She diligently recycles, avoids eating meat most days, burns wood pellets for heat, and drives an electric car if public transport isn’t available. That’s all pretty standard fare for the environmentally conscious. But Read More...
Ode to Guilin and Lijiang River National Park, Guangxi, China
Protecting China’s natural heritage From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2915 “The river winds like a green silk ribbon, while the hills are like jade hairpins.” So wrote the Chinese poet Han Yu (768–824), in praise of the area surrounding the Chinese city of Guilin, at the banks of the Read More...
Ode to Abeer Seikaly, Amman, Jordan
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 A new kind of mobile home People move. It’s what they have always done and what they will keep doing. Architect, artist and cultural producer Abeer Seikaly, from Amman, Jordan, designed an elegant and practical home for people who are forced to move on to a Read More...
Possibility: Let nature run wild
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 Commentary by Fred Pearce, a London-based environmental writer, is author of numerous books, most recently The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature’s Salvation, from which this is excerpted. Rogue rats, predatory jellyfish, suffocating Read More...
Salesforce offsets all its emissions 33 years ahead of schedule
In February 2015, a group of business leaders, including the CEO’s of Unilever and Salesforce and led by Richard Branson committed themselves to completely offset the harmful emissions of companies processed by 2050. A great goal that also seemed far away. Now Salesforce has shown that Read More...
These cities are changing parking lots into parks and urban farms
The self-driving cars are coming and that means that, soon, cities can do with a lot less parking spaces. Some cities are already anticipating the trend and turning parking lots into parks or even urban farms. This is one more change the self-driving car will bring: Downtown is going to be a much Read More...
A new recycling company with links to Tesla raises funding
The SEC has processed a new filing that suggests Tesla may be at work on yet another new initiative. Specifically, the filing shows a $2 million investment in a months-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company called Redwood Materials that describes itself at its site as focused on “advanced Read More...
Stylish shoes from recycled plastic that can be washed over and over again
The shoes from this San Francisco design company are made from woven, recycled plastic that can be washed over and over again. The plastic comes from recycled bottles. When dirty, the shoes can be washed and Read More...
This factory sucks up carbon dioxide and feeds it to vegetables
At the end of this month the Swiss company Climeworks will open the first commercial plant that sucks carbon dioxide out of the air and feeds it to vegetables in a neighboring greenhouse. It will be the first business to sell carbon dioxide drawn right out of its surroundings, using a technology Read More...
Why the return of the mammoth may be crucial to reverse global warming
Russian scientists Sergey Zimov and Nikita Zimov believe they can slow the thawing of the Siberian permafrost, that contains vast amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, by bringing back grazing animals to a swath of land called Pleistocene Park. “When animals trample down the snow, they Read More...