Site like Things Are Good which cover good news about the environment, people, and politics aren’t that rare. When we started this site nearly 10 years ago there were few options to find places that cover good news. That has since changed. Recently the folks over at AHAALiving did a
Continue readingAuthor: Adam Clare
Things Are Good: China and US Agree to Cut Emissions
The world’s largest polluters have agreed that they have a problem and they need to stop it. The USA and China have come to terms with the fact that they are the worst polluters and have both decided to take action using various policy tools and joint cooperation. This is
Continue readingThings Are Good: Surfing Oceanic Data
The ocean is massive and it’s experiencing massive change thanks to climate change and humans depleting its resources. We know this, but we don’t know the extent of the harm done to the oceans nor many other aspects of life in the seas. A surfer and engineer, Benjamin Thompson, decided
Continue readingThings Are Good: Visualizing Energy Generated from Wind
Renewable energy debates can suffer obfuscation through abstraction and disingenuous allegations like renewable is limited in it’s generation times. For example, wind power is often argued to be useless because we cannot control the wind. We can’t control it, but we can predict it. To demonstrate the effectiveness of wind
Continue readingThings Are Good: Only Keep Things That Bring You Joy
Are you sick of tidying your place all the time? If you are, just stop. There’s no need to tidy if you go through all your items and only keep things which bring you joy and improve your life. Marie Kondo has published a book on the Japanese art of
Continue readingThings Are Good: Talking About Mental Health
Smashing Magazine is best known for geek and design issues, recently they published an article out of the norm. It was part of {Geek} Mental Health Week. Christopher Murphy wrote about his struggle with his mental issues and encourages others to speak up, and for people without mental health issues
Continue readingThings Are Good: Renewable Energy Use Grows Fastest in Poor Countries
Renewable resources are good for the environment, good for remote areas, and don’t need expensive infrastructure. All of these benefits of renewable power generation have led poorer countries to embrace distributed renewable energy! The boom in renewables is often made for economic reasons, Ethan Zindler, a Washington-based Bloomberg New Energy
Continue readingThings Are Good: Abandoned Walmart Becomes a Library
Walmart is best known for predatory corporate behaviour that damages communities and for the “interesting” people who shop there. One thing that Walmart does is pit one small town against the other to get cheap land and better tax rates, this sometimes means that an existing Walmart gets abandoned. A
Continue readingThings Are Good: Using Turntablism to Address Climate Change
Climate change id the biggest issue facing humanity today and it’s no surprise to see artists express this through art. In Calgary this month there’s an exhibit by John Folsom which was inspired through a walk in the rocky mountains looking at sound and climate change. The way he does
Continue readingThings Are Good: Condesned Forests for an Urban Canopy
Shubhendu Sharma has found a way to get a small area of land to become a thick forest nearly impossible to walk trough. The idea is to take useless spaces in cities (like car parking) and turn them into miniature forests. These mini-forests can cool the local temperature, clean the
Continue readingThings Are Good: Bringing Burmese Cats Back From the Brink of Extinction
Cats are adorable, but not all cats get the same respect. There are wild breeds that are threatened due to anthropogenic environmental changes while others, like the Burmese cat, have been negatively impacted due to conflict. Thanks to the effort of focused individuals the Burmese cat is back from the
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Green Office is a Productive Office
Workplaces aren’t associated with fun, but there are certain designs of places that can make places more enjoyable. It turns out that buildings designed with sustainability in mind tend to be a better, more productive place to work. You should convince your boss that you should move to a green
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Rise of Urban Agriculture
Industrial agriculture is not kind to the environment and has been attributed to deforestation of the rainforest to the massive bee die-off. Yet, we find ourselves attached to this 20th century model of centralized production. Lucky for civilization, this is changing! Small scale urban agriculture is getting large enough as
Continue readingThings Are Good: Louder is a New Website Designed to Increase Your Media Impact
Louder is a new site that aims to bring important news that is usually ignored to the forefront. The site does this in two ways which revolves around Twitter: organic stories can get attention or organizations can sponsor some of the content they want to spread. This could get more
Continue readingThings Are Good: Floating Wind Turbine in Alaska
In Alaska they are trying something rather cool – a wind turbine that floats in the air. The turbine will be tethered to the ground and will be a test run of this new technology. if successful, the turbine can be used to power remote communities and be used in
Continue readingThings Are Good: Blog Action Day 2014: Examine Inequality
This year for Blog Action Day they are tackling inequality, which is great to see! Inequality manifests in various ways that aren’t alway obvious. By having so many global participants today it shows a diversity of thinking and approaches to providing solutions to this global problem. Be a part of
Continue readingThings Are Good: Get to Know the World, and Stay Informed
How much do you know about the world? Hans Rosling, with his famous charts of global population, health and income data (and an extra-extra-long pointer), demonstrates that you have a high statistical chance of being quite wrong about what you think you know. Play along with his audience quiz —
Continue readingThings Are Good: London Lowered Speed Limits to Save Lives
Cars kill. Or is it like the gun debate – cars don’t kill people drivers kill people? Regardless of fault the results of car use as a primary means of transportation causes health problems and needless death. Cities around the world are taking steps to try and hold back cars
Continue readingThings Are Good: Look at This Landscaping Called Xeriscaping
California is suffering a huge drought due to horrible water use policies and climate change. For some reason people love to have lawns where they naturally shouldn’t exist, this itself leads to massive water wastage and arguably microclimate issues. Thankfully, perhaps people are beginning to understand that their landscaping is
Continue readingThings Are Good: Renewable Energy Capacity Comparable to Nuclear
The future is looking better and better for renewable energy production and recently the capacity for renewable energy is comparable to nuclear. Nuclear energy saw great progress and governmental support to get it where it is today; without such extensive help renewable energy production is now catching up. Seeing the
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