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...
Possibility: One Last Thing: “We find the void in our minds”
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 At sea, Henk de Velde has discovered something on his many solo voyages around the world: the void. Now the Dutch sea-farer tries to find it on the land as well. And he recommends everyone do the same. What do you mean by void? “Void is space. I Read More...
Possibility: How to become like Steve Jobs
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 This article previously appeared in What Doctors Don’t Tell You Fruit may well have contributed to the mental sharpness and creativity of Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple. And it’s not just Jobs who benefited: anyone who regularly eats fruits that are Read More...
Possibility: Milk without the moo
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 Our parents knew milk comes from cows. Our children may think, as the joke goes, milk comes from the supermarket. Their grandchildren, however, may think it comes from breweries. A pair of young, vegan bio-engineers in the U.S. are producing milk in a radical Read More...
Possibility: Rebels with a job
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 “A new day begins. I am sure of who I am, although there are people who still don’t understand. To find solutions, war is not the way.” These are the first lines of the song “Pido Perdón” (“I Apologize”), made by a group called La Iguana and two Read More...
Possibility: The justice of the crowd
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 In recent years, crowdfunding has become a popular tool to fund projects and interests shared by groups of people. It is particularly common in arts and culture, leaving it up to the audience to determine what gets done and what they want to see. A British Read More...
Possibility: Keeping refugees afloat
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 A quarter of a million. That’s the number of immigrants and asylum seekers who have already tried to get to Europe in 2015 by crossing the Mediterranean Sea. It’s the highest number on record, according to the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees. Thousands Read More...
Possibility: Kale is dead. Long live watercress.
From The Optimist Magazine Fall 2015 Marketing is an art, and more often than not it doesn’t produce the best results for the consumer. Take the case of kale. In recent years, this vegetable has become the darling of the health-conscious movement. There’s hardly any healthy-cuisine restaurant Read More...