Welcome to the week.
And Godspeed to everyone struggling through Daylight Savings today.
Quick note before we get to the news: This week we launched a new project called Unfinished, where we will be platforming the stories of public servants, scientists and humanitarian workers who’s work has been cut short by the current US administration.
If this is you (or someone you know!), and you’d like to share a 500-800 word essay about your unfinished work, please submit a ready to publish version here. We can’t publish every submission, but we’ll share as many as we can.
Ok, let’s go.
This week:
🌍 Climate action without US dollars
😷 Outbreak updates
🐮 Cow’s milk makes a comeback
🔮 DeepSeek fortune tellers
And more
Have a great week,
— Willow
{{active_subscriber_count}}+ people who give a shit got this post in their email, for free.
🙋♀️ Vote!
Have you ever been involved in a campaign for a political candidate at any level?
Last week, we asked: Based on your interest in climate change, we'd like to understand which related areas you're most interested in learning about. Which of these topics would you most like to hear more about?
You said:
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Public health (32%)
“This topic to my mind holds all the others on the list that concern me most under one umbrella: food, water, biotech, medicine -- even tech and AI can be related to public health. What is our social contract with each other? I believe in and strive for a humane, ecologically sound, wholistic sense of social care which yields public health when married with climate justice.”
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Food (18%)
“If we can't grow crops - If the environment shifts to a hotter and dryer climate - If Storms continue to increase in intensity and become more destructive - And we haven't got any food - Well... It's a Hell of a deal!! ”
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Water (18%)
“The stuff of life.”
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Biotech (10%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Tech (5%)
“I'd love to know more about new technologies, things that are working well, where the next ideas, innovations, and solutions are gaining traction”
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Medicine (7%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ AI (6%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Other (send us your ideas!) (4%)
“This may or may not fall under other categories, but air quality is a huge climate issue, especially with increased ozone on the ground in the summer and wildfire smoke. As someone with asthma, this is what scares me the most!”
New Shit Giver Kim is here because “I’m looking to make a career change – I work in communications and I really want to make a move somewhere (agency, in-house, non-profit, whatever it might be) where my role is ESG focused, my ultimate dream being doing comms work for maybe a tech company make waves in climate change advancements.“
Love to see it! Check out the What Can I Do app for resources on transitioning your career into meaningful, climate-focused work.
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⚡️ Climate change:
Trump has directed federal agencies to bypass environmental regulations to increase timber production is 280 million acres of national forests and public lands (The New York Times)
🌏 Japan is battling its biggest wildfire in decades, with thousands evacuated, after record dry weather and strong winds (Bloomberg)
🌎 Women in Africa are leading land restoration efforts, despite facing systemic barriers, that inclusive financing models are looking to address to strengthen women’s land rights (World Resources Institute)
A French university is inviting American scientists who’s research on subjects like climate may face censorship under the new administration to continue their research in France (404 Media)
🌏 Other countries must prepare to combat climate change without US financial support, including greater private investment and multilateral development bank reforms (Bloomberg)
🦠 Health & Bio:
There’s so many outbreaks and infections popping up out there, from measles to bird flu, so take a look at the current state of public health/more evidence to get vaccinated (Your Local Epidemiologist)
The federal funding freeze has disrupted critical cancer and Alzheimer’s research at NIH, with scientists unable to purchase essential supplies (Popular Information)
Researchers are (finally) starting to study women’s aging brains, looking into why women’s brains age more slowly than men’s, the relationship hormone therapy and Alzheimer’s in women, and impacts of early menopause (The New York Times)
🌏 In another blow to global health, the US government has stopped sharing air quality data collected from its embassies, which will create critical gaps in global air pollution monitoring (Bloomberg)
The housing crisis in LA traps domestic violence survivors in a cycle where they must choose between returning to abuse or living on the streets (The 19th)
💦 Food & Water:
The Indigenous practice of food reciprocity offers an alternative to the current food system, that addresses climate change and food sovereignty (Civil Eats)
Tariffs will likely hurt American farmers by threatening export markets and increasingly fertilizer costs (Civil Eats)
RFK Jr’s aim to make food safer may be difficult to balance with Trump’s focus on keeping food prices low (LA Times)
Cow’s milk is making a comeback, with the biggest increase since 2009, while plant-based alternatives declined about 5 percent (Vox)
Ultra-processed food labels can increase consumer awareness and encourage manufacturers to reformate products with less sugar/sodium/fat, they haven’t yet translated to significant improvements in health outcomes (Vox)
👩💻 Beep Boop:
An AI tool, SCORPIO has outperformed FDA-approved tests in predicting which cancer patients will respond to immunotherapy (National Cancer Institute)
The explosive growth of data centers could force consumers to pay for new infrastructure that primarily benefits Big Tech (Floodlight News)
🌍 DeepSeek’s LLM’s are being rapidly adopted by Chinese home appliance manufacturers to enhance smart device functionality (Reuters)
🌎 A UK watchdog is investigating TikTok, Reddit, and Imgur to examine how these platforms handle children’s data and whether they serve up inappropriate or harmful content to young users (The Guardian)
🌎Young adults in China are using DeepSeek as a fortune teller, to seek guidance during economic uncertainty, despite potential harms from inaccurate readings and commercial biases (MIT Technology Review)
🌎 = Global news
Cold hard facts about heat
Last week’s most popular Action Step was bombarding your Senators with phone calls and emails to oppose Medicare and Medicaid Cuts.
Donate to the Clean Water Fund — their founder helped pass the Clean Water Act in 1972, and they’re still fighting to defend it in 2025.
Volunteer with the Food Research and Action Center to help put food on the table for every person and family in the US.
🌎 Get educated about how to make your sustainability work more sustainable using resources at the Reconsidered Change Hub.
Be heard about affordable health care and keep calling your Senators to get them to oppose Medicare and Medicaid Cuts.
Invest in mutual funds and ETFs that aren’t financing climate catastrophe using Fossil Free Funds.
🌎 = Global Action Step
NEW: Find the action steps that mean the most to you at WhatCanIDo.Earth
Together With Bookshop
Want to read what the people working on the frontlines of the future are reading?
Every week, I ask our podcast guest, "What’s a book you’ve read this year that’s opened your mind to a topic you haven’t considered before, or that’s changed your thinking in some way?"
And every week, we add their picks to a list on Bookshop, where every purchase on the site financially supports independent bookstores.
Want an ad-free experience? Become a Member!
In honor of International Women’s Day, we’re highlighting this episode with Cat Bohannon from 2023.
How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? And why the hell are we just finding out about it now?
That's today's big question, and my guest is Cat Bohannon.
Cat is the author of the incredible new book, “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution”. Cat is also a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative in cognition. Cat's essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American, Non Required Reading, The Georgia Review, Story Collider, and Poets Against the War.
Look, for a very long time, scientists ignored everything about the female body, except for how to have sex with it. And even that, they barely understood (and still don't).
They didn't think or care to ask helpful questions like: How did we get here? What else about the female biological body is different from the traditional male body? Why might those differences matter?
And how might they have gotten us to where we are today, atop the animal kingdom, for better or worse, and a huge outlier in about 500 different ways from even our closest primate cousins?
📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.
▶ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.
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