Welcome to the week.
Big things happening over here! Quinn launched our new initiative *Actually* Pro Life yesterday — if you missed it, go read about it here. Very excited about what’s to come there.
And for all you Life Finds A Way fans: we now have video versions of the essays you can watch on YouTube, if that’s your thing. The first video is up: Where The Wild Things Are Walled Out by Syris Valentine. You can watch it here.
Okay, that’s enough housekeeping for today. Let’s get to the news.
This Week
And more.
Have a great week,
— Willow
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⚡️ Climate change:
Climate change is boosting antibiotic resistance, as warmer soils breed bacteria that can shrug off our drugs. (Nature)
🌍 Deep in the Amazon, remote Indigenous communities are ditching their polluting diesel generators for solar panels and batteries. (Bloomberg)
Climate change is turning practice fields into danger zones and student athletes (especially those in less affluent areas) are literally dying from the heat. (Undark)
Cities trying to ban gas hookups keep winning in court, despite the fossil fuel industry’s legal crusade to kill building electrification laws. (Canary Media)
🦠 Health & Bio:
Pedestrian deaths in the US are technically down, but only because we’re recovering from a pandemic-era spike, as American pedestrians continue to be killed at some of the highest rates of any wealthy nation. (Vox)
MAHA moms and progressive Democrats are teaming up to kick a pesticide industry shield out of the farm bill (turns out “don’t poison our kids” is bipartisan). (The 19th)
🌎 An estimated 400 million people worldwide are living with Long COVID, but most will never receive a formal diagnosis due to stigma, underfunded healthcare systems, and a disease that looks different in every body. (The Sick Times)
🌍 Two decades of painstaking progress against AIDS in Zambia is visibly unraveling, because the US cut funding and then offered to restore it only in exchange for mineral rights. (The New York Times)
💦 Food & Water:
Arizona is betting its AI future on water-guzzling data centers in a desert fed by a dwindling river. (Bloomberg)
Black farmers across rural America are responding to a lack of federal support by building community and passing the torch to the next generation on their own terms. (Capital B)
While climate change devastates lobster populations and wild blueberries across New England, Vermont’s maple syrup industry is thriving through innovation and climate adaptation. (Boston Globe)
🌎 The world’s 30×30 conservation pledge is crawling along, but Colombia (home to more bird species than any other country) is excelling, with one couple’s 45-acre cloud forest restoration becoming Latin America’s first internationally recognized conservation milestone of its kind. (Mongabay)
👩💻 Beep Boop:
Data centers don’t have to be terrible! We’re just building them that way for some reason! Instead we could use technology (that we already have!) to make them smaller, smarter, grass-covered grid assets that heat your local greenhouse and share revenue with the town. (Molly Wood Media)
The century-old electric grid is being held together with duct tape while we’re trying to plug in an entire AI-powered civilization. (The New York Times)
A Google Deepmind scientist just published a paper arguing AI will never be conscious, which is kind of awkward to put out while the CEO is hyping AGI as the next Industrial Revolution. (404 Media)
Minnesota is the first state to ban nudification apps, with a unanimous vote driven largely by one woman who spent two years fighting for a law. (The 19th)
🌎 = Global news
Last week’s most popular Action Step was finding a green financial institution to put your money using bank.green.
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Be heard about making schoolyards greener, so kids have a healthy place to play by urging your legislators to support the Revitalize America’s Schoolyards Act.
Invest in energy efficient upgrades for your home or small business with financing from Atmos Financial.
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Last Christmas we teamed up with about 40 other big podcasts to support our dear friends at Give Directly with a very special campaign called Pods Fight Poverty.
The goal was to raise $1 million to send to families in extreme poverty in Bwakira, Rwanda. Today, I want to share some of those results with you, and some of those stories from the folks you helped.
But first, a reminder, some context in Bwakira, most people are farmers, but they don't own large enough plots to grow enough food, and many struggle to eat more than one meal a day.
Water supply is inconsistent. People often rely on nearby natural streams to collect water when their wells are dry, and there are very few jobs for young people. Families don't have the capital to start small businesses to create their own jobs.
Here's the good news. 500-plus rigorous academic studies show how effective cash can be for local economies, for infant mortality, food security, and more. And that's at least in part because when you give cash directly to people in poverty, it means they can choose how best to improve their own lives. You're also giving them dignity and flexibility.
So how did our big campaign go? Well, you and me and the 40 other pods we worked with raised $386,000, reaching 250 families in need. Pretty incredible stuff. I'm extremely grateful to all of you.
Families told us they spent the cash on urgently needed livestock, household items, food, housing, land, education, healthcare, and more.
Listen for some of their firsthand stories about how much your generosity affected their lives directly. You did this, and you can keep doing this.
Consider setting up a new monthly donation at givedirectly.org.
Let's go hear from those families.
📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.
T'Pol explains the multiverse in 'Fissure Quest'. Credit: Paramount
The real science behind Star Trek: Lower Decks 'quantum reality drive'
The reality-bending two-part series finale of Star Trek: Lower Decks was a joyous, exhilarating, and surprisingly science-heavy romp through the multiverse. Building off an idea from Star Trek: The Next Generation—that the Federation fans know and love is but one of an endless number of possible permutations—"Fissure Quest" and "The New Next Generation" reveal a rich tapestry of alternate realities where characters live and die differently, rank up or remain ensigns, and in some cases, exist only as holograms.
In addition to firmly canonizing the idea that Star Trek is set in a quantum multiverse, we learn there is at least one alternate reality where Starfleet's mission is to explore alternate dimensions, using a warp drive cousin called the quantum reality drive. And just as there's a real scientific foundation for warp drive, the quantum reality drive was inspired by actual concepts from the realms of particle physics, quantum mechanics, and cosmology.
Every Community Needs Its Wolves
Today we’re tagging along with journalist and writer of The Gumbo Pot, Karen Fischer, on a trip to Yellowstone, where her personal quest to spot wolves in the Lamar Valley turned into a deeper understanding of how ecosystems actually work, and why that matters for the rest of us trying to build resilient communities.
The story of Yellowstone wolves, and their return to the ecosystem in 1995 reveals a truth about healthy systems: when you remove essential diversity, the whole thing starts falling apart. Diversity is how healthy systems work, whether we’re talking about ecosystems or democracy.
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