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.
South Korea is on a mission to transform from carbon villain to model
A year ago, Soyoung Lee was one of a crowd of climate activists demonstrating on the streets of Seoul in a campaign inspired by the global school strike founder Greta Thunberg. Today, the 35-year-old lawyer is the youngest member of the South Korean parliament and a driving force in the Read More...
How AI can save the American West this fire season
The American West is heading into the dry season, but AI could help firefighters predict where fires are likely to break out for a less devastating fire season. A new deep-learning model maps out landscape dryness and the amount of burnable material across 12 states to get ahead of destructive Read More...
To save the Amazon rainforest, scientists turn to reverse-engineering
With software, taking something apart and putting it back together again can help engineers improve their understanding of the underlying source code of their software. In structural engineering, the same methods can determine the cause of potentially fatal design flaws. This is known as Read More...
How to turn all those scraps of food into a delicious vegetable broth
Food waste is a major dilemma in today’s world and throwing out even vegetable scraps contributes to the problem. As the people over at Inhabitat reminded us over the weekend, there's a great way to make use of all your food scraps: create a delicious broth. It’s surprisingly easy to make Read More...
Albanian beekeepers expect a record year as bees thrive during the pandemic
Dressed in a protective bee suit on the base of Morava mountain in southeast Albania, 68-year-old Gezim Skermo had a wonderful declaration to make: “It’s been a golden year for bees.” At least, in Albania that is the case. With factories and farms silenced by the coronavirus shutdown, Read More...
Once hunted into near extinction, wild donkeys return to the Danube Delta
Hundreds of years ago, the kulan, or more commonly known as the wild donkey, were established inhabitants of the Eurasian Steppe, from the Mediterranean to the east of Mongolia. Sadly for the kulan though, two hundred years of hunting and habitat loss has led to a decline of 95 percent of the Read More...
An extremely rare white grizzly bear has been filmed in the Rocky Mountains
Cara Clarkson and her family were driving down a remote highway in Canada’s Rocky Mountains when a figure glimpsed against the dark evergreen forest left them in disbelief. Nuzzling through the snow for food was a white grizzly bear (no it wasn’t a polar bear), which Clarkson managed to capture Read More...
Global coalition of faith groups commits to divest from fossil fuels
To achieve a meaningful impact in the fight against climate change, groups from all echelons of society must act without delay. Seeking to do their part, faith institutions from around the globe have recently come together to take a stand for the climate. A global coalition of faith groups has Read More...
Some sneaky sea turtles lay decoy nests to trick predators
If there’s one positive to come out of this pandemic, it’s definitely a resurgence of sea turtles thriving on empty beaches. We’ve been covering stories around the world of successful hatchings. Now, it appears these hardworking sea turtles are even smarter than we thought. From observing Read More...
UK wildlife sees wild white stork hatchlings for the first time in centuries
In European folklore, the stork often symbolizes the birth of a new baby, but for centuries the wild white stork in the UK has failed to have babies itself. That is, until now. In what comes as great news for wildlife in the UK, wild white stork chicks have recently hatched in the UK for the Read More...