Animals warn each other whenever a predator approaches, and in some cases they help each other. In the case of sperm whales they share defensive measures to avoid being killed by whalers. When whalers first started hunting sperm whales they were very successful; however, their effective harpooning rate soon started
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Things Are Good: How to Free Yourself from Gas at Home
When it comes to emissions we often think of cars and factories, but we can’t ignore the impact we can make at home. In much of the northern hemisphere houses are built with infrastructure supporting the burning of non-renewable fuels which destroy the planet. The decisions made by people who
Continue readingThings Are Good: People Live Longer in Non-Profits
The COVID pandemic has revealed problems in our society which we will need to fix. Thankfully researchers are identifying what problems are fixable by looking for the cause. Long term care homes (LTCs) are one such area of our society that we can improve, and do so very easily too.
Continue readingThings Are Good: We can Save 200,000 Lives a Year Replacing Car Commutes with Bicycles
A simple modification to our cities can save a lot of lives: add more and better bicycling infrastructure. Researchers looked into quantifying how many lives we can save by replacing car journeys with bicycle use and the results aren’t surprising, but will hopefully influence people. The harms vehicular traffic does
Continue readingThings Are Good: New York City Bans New Gas Connections
New buildings constructed in New York City are not permitted to connect to natural gas for any reason. This makes NYC the largest city in the USA to do so and likely marks a shift in the country for even more cities to adopt a ban on new uses of
Continue readingThings Are Good: It’s Time to Talk About Wage Theft
Over at Popular Information they juxtapose two crimes that happened last year: the stealing of retail goods by one person valued between $200-$950 and the other crime by one corporation was the stealing of people’s money valued at $4,500,000. One got a lot of news coverage while the other did
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Insurrection Index Exists to Defend American Democracy
The Insurrection Index launches today to defend democracy in the United States from internal attacks on democratic institutions. The focus of the initiative is clearly in response to, and all about, the failed coup and insurrection attempt that happened on this day last year. Multiple organizations joined together to create
Continue readingThings Are Good: This is Why Nature Helps Your Cognitive Health
It’s clear that being around nature is good for one’s health, but why? Researchers have been looking into the physiological reasons for the benefits of nature and multiple reasons have been found. Being in nature is good for you in many tiny ways that culminate into a big benefit to
Continue readingThings Are Good: One Way Maritimers can Drastically Reduce their Energy Consumption
Canada’s Maritime provinces are blustery, cold, and powered by coal. The weather is fine for most people (and lovely in the summer), but they know they need to transition to renewable energy quickly or risk losing more land to the seas and worsening storms due to climate change. The work
Continue readingThings Are Good: Buying Time Provides More Than Buying Objects
Start 2022 with a new mindset of buying time instead of material objects. Researchers continue to find more evidence that for a fulfilling life one should eschew material gains for temporal gains. In practice this means that, when given the choice between spending your money on a consumer good or
Continue readingThings Are Good: Paris, the City of Bike Lights
When I visited Paris long ago it was a traffic clogged mess, with lovely architecture. Parisians have had enough of bad traffic and decided to solve their mobility challenges by adding more ways to get around the city. Thy’ve already returned urban space to pedestrians and started to build more
Continue readingThings Are Good: Affordable Ethical Shopping
It’s that time of year when people buy consumer goods to express their appreciation that other people exist. Yet, the world around us in suffering from consumerism-led climate change, what is a person to do? The simple solution is to not buy physical gifts, but that’s not always practical. Tanja
Continue readingThings Are Good: Growing Coffee Sustainably in Finland
Climate change changes everything and coffee is no exception. Traditional growing locales are suffering from unpredictable weather and more incidences of extreme weather making it difficult for the coffee plants to survive. A Finnish company has been researching how to grow coffee in a a lab so that coffee plants
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Mangroves Manage Climate Change
Dense mangrove forests provide an ecological boost wherever they are found because they protect both land and sea species. They are really ecosystems unto themselves with nuance and each with their own history. That history can help us understand how the delicate forests will survive climate change, we know they
Continue readingThings Are Good: Carbon Capture Solutions from Students get Funding
The best thing to do to prevent climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels, until that happens we need to find ways to extract carbon from the air to reduce the speed of climate change. Of course, carbon removal needs to be powered by renewable systems themselves. The XPrize
Continue readingThings Are Good: See Through Solar Panels
The future is powered by renewables, and the more sources of electricity we have the more resilient our power grid will be. Researches at Michigan State University have created a solar film that can be applied to existing windows to generate electricity from the sun. The system is not as
Continue readingThings Are Good: Vertical Farming and the Future of Farms
Quality farmland ensures a good harvest which benefits many, from the producers of produce to the consumers. Our cities have grown around good for sources from the sea and land, this puts pressure on the local politicians to give up arable land to developers. In Ontario, the conservative party values
Continue readingThings Are Good: Time to Break Up with Gas
One thing is certain: we need to get off of fossil fuels as fast as possible. The gas companies want to keep polluting and are paying people to promote the burning of carbon-intensive resources.Gas companies are using influencers to promote gas stoves, when everyone knows that induction stovetops are better
Continue readingThings Are Good: Electric Public Transportation is the Future, Not Cars
Politicians and car makers will often tout that the future of sustainable transportation lies in electric vehicles. Let’s be clear: cars won’t save us. In fact, cars are responsible for a lot of death on our streets and for supply chains that cause great harm to the environment. Instead, electric
Continue readingThings Are Good: Green Your Garage
If you have a garage filled with tools and other oddities, you can easily make it a little nicer for you and the environment. The next time you do some cleaning you can think about what is clean for the rest of the environment. Of course, you’re going to want
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