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.
There are more Emperor penguins than we previously thought
For all you penguin lovers, we have good news: recent satellite images have identified a raft of new Emperor penguin breeding sites. The discovery lifts the estimated global Emperor population by 5-10 percent, to perhaps as many as 278,500 breeding pairs. It's a welcome development given that Read More...
Rhino poaching drops by 50 percent in South Africa thanks to lockdown
Other than sea turtles with threatened conservation status, other endangered species around the world have also benefitted from diminished human activity during the pandemic. The number of South African rhinos killed by poachers fell by half in the first half of the year as the coronavirus outbreak Read More...
Discarded face masks could be turned into biofuel to produce energy
While the pandemic has benefitted the environment in some ways, it has also brought about an unprecedented problem: the overwhelming number of single-use, non-recyclable personal protective equipment (PPE) leaking into the environment. Concerned about how these single-use masks and gloves can be Read More...
Wildlife forensics: Inside the quest to save pangolins from poachers
Pangolins are thought to be the most trafficked animal in the world, and yet, we know relatively little about them. We know the pangolin, which is the only scaly mammal in the world, has a body covered with razor-sharp, overlapping keratin plates. When attacked, it rolls into an armored ball with Read More...
Pittsburgh launches ‘guaranteed income’ program with Jack Dorsey donation
Last week, we wrote about “guaranteed income” and the support it's getting from mayors across America, who formed a network called Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. That group was launched by Stockton, Calif. Mayor Michael Tubbs, who launched his own guaranteed income program in 2018. But Read More...
America now has a stretch of highway paved with recycled plastic
A newly repaved stretch of highway in Oroville, California, looks like an ordinary road. But it’s the first highway in the country to be paved in part with recycled plastic—the equivalent of roughly 150,000 plastic bottles per mile of the three-lane road. The change in materials makes the Read More...
The bold plan to save Appalachia’s endangered mussels
You probably haven’t heard of the golden rifleshell mussel, but for Kentucky’s Center for Mollusk Conservation in Frankfort, saving these yellowy, fan-shaped river-dwellers from extinction is a daily battle. More than two-thirds of all identified North American freshwater mussel species are Read More...
Key population of loggerhead turtles in Greece thrives during pandemic
This year’s pandemic-induced quietness and lack of tourists on many of the world’s beaches has been a true blessing for endangered turtles. Record numbers of turtle nests and high hatching success rates have been recorded in a number of places with important nesting sites, from Thailand and the Read More...
How scientists revived 100-million-year-old microbes
Deep within the cold abyss, beneath the primordial muck of the seafloor and the sediment of millions of years, ancient microbes sit between life and death…and have now been awakened! Scientists haven't quite unleashed Neptune's revenge, but they have revived ancient microbes — possibly over Read More...
Trinity College to transform campus lawn into native wildflower garden
We recently shared a very popular article about replacing tradition lawns with a clover alternative. Trinity College Dublin is taking a page out of the alternative grass handbook and opting to turn their college green into a native flower garden to promote pollinator health and boost Read More...