Author: Grace Liu ‘23
It’s that time of the semester again: midterms week. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by exams, essays, and/or p-sets, we hope that a bit of happy environmental news will help lift your spirits.
- Jane Goodall has hope for the future: Primatologist Jane Goodall, best known as the world expert on chimpanzees, recently released a book with Douglas Abrams titled “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times.” In it, she argues why hope is a “crucial survival trait,” and offers inspiring stories of human intellect and environmental resilience. Since it’s so easy to become jaded or apathetic around environmental issues, Goodall shares an important message to reignite hope and foster an ethos of sustainability.
2. Protected Peruvian crops potentially facilitate climate adaptation: The Marcapata Ccollana preserve in the Andes is the home of a Quechua-speaking Indigenous community that has preserved ancient ways of farming over 100 varieties of root vegetables. The government of Peru has recently declared this region a protected agrobiodiversity zone. This status protects food security because agricultural biodiversity is necessary for climate change adaptation.
3. Startup makes edible protein flour using bacteria: A Finnish Startup named Solar Foods has developed a process for growing protein in a bioreactor using only water, carbon dioxide, nutrients, and bacteria for fermentation. The resulting product is a white, tasteless flour that can be flavored or added to many different foods to increase the nutritional value. If production scales up to economically practical quantities, we could experience a reinvention of protein for mass consumption.
Thanks for reading and best of luck during midterms, everyone! Please tune in next week for more positive environmental news and in the meantime, feel free to take a look at previous posts or share some good news with us!