These trees hold fog in their bark and release it slowly into the soil below. Watersheds that feed entire valleys depend on this exchange. When the forest disappears, the water follows it out.

Acción Andina now counts over 1.1 million native trees under restoration across eleven projects in Peru and Ecuador, working alongside the Priceless Planet Coalition and a long list of corporate and conservation partners.

Just this planting season, 155,000 native Polylepis trees went into the ground at the Aquia landscape in Peru, with 124,000 of them expected to survive five years of monitoring and reconnect high-altitude habitat critical for endemic wildlife.

A tree planted is not a tree restored. Restoration means monitoring, replanting failures, and waiting years to know if the work held.

The wildlife started answering back.

Researchers have identified twenty-one individual Andean bears within the restored corridors at Q’ero, Peru, including three mothers with cubs, confirming active nursery habitat.

Two critically endangered endemic bird species, the Royal Cinclodes and the White-browed Tit-Spinetail, have been documented breeding within the same corridors.

A bear does not return to a landscape that cannot feed her. A bird does not nest where the canopy cannot hold. These are biological verdicts, delivered by animals that have no reason to lie.

Further south, in Challabamba, a smaller but equally deliberate project has been running since 2022.

Conservación Amazónica-ACCA reported over 350,000 native plants in the ground by May 2024, with 115,000 native trees added by January 2025. The communities doing this work farm the same land they are restoring. Their stake in the outcome runs deeper than any grant cycle.

They have told researchers that Andean forests and reforestation efforts have improved water quality and quantity in their communities, largely through aquifer recharge and better water retention. Polylepis and mosses acting as living sponges, catching fog and drip-feeding it into the ground ahead of the dry season.

This is the part that gets buried under the celebration: the region planting all these trees is also losing them at scale.

Peru lost an additional 147,000 hectares of tropical forest in 2024 alone, driven by subsistence agriculture, cattle ranching, logging, mining, and drug trafficking operations that carve through protected land as easily as unprotected land.

Reforestation and deforestation are running in the same country, on the same mountains, at the same time.

The women leading this season’s restoration work deserve their own paragraph, not a footnote. Women took on central roles this season, leading patrols, seedling maintenance, and biodiversity surveys across the Cajamarca and Pichincha landscapes, drawing on their position as primary managers of local water resources and keepers of traditional botanical knowledge. I give it to them here.

Ancestral knowledge and modern ecological science are doing the same job here, side by side, neither one waiting for permission from the other.

None of this happens by accident or by good intentions alone.

A hectare restored today needs someone checking on it in year three, year four, year five. A seedling survives because a community organized itself to make sure it would. Land ownership, environmental education, and community structure decide which restoration projects take root and which ones quietly fail after the cameras leave.

Peru’s mountains are proving, tree by tree, that the second outcome is not inevitable.

The bears are back. The birds are nesting. The water is returning to the lagoons. None of it required a miracle. It required people who stayed and believed their individual efforts can make a difference.

I am taking a Substack Hiatus so that I can learn financial skills to bankroll environmental startups and become Peter Thiel’s antithesis.

Confused? Start Here: I want to be Peter Thiel’s Antichrist

The accelerating pace of the world has me stumbling to keep up and I’ve been struggling the maintenance of keeping these articles alive. I started to cut corners and use AI which feels hypocritical being a Climate & Environmental writer.

I hope to come back when I have the space to actually articulate my ideas, not have Claude take my thoughts, ideas, connections and vision and make my words for me.

I’m sorry…

In the meantime, I’ll be getting back to my roots and writing The Good News According to Enoch, the first section you can get free until the series is finished.

I’ll Be Back to Substack! (like the Bear to Peru)

Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

Sources

1. Amazon Conservation Association, “Recent Study Highlights Effective Reforestation Efforts in the Andes”

2. Global Forest Generation, “Over 1.1 Million Native Trees Under Restoration in the High-Andes: Wildlife Already Returning”

3. Wikipedia, “Deforestation in Peru”

The couch group consumed six or more hours of bombing coverage a day. That group scored nine times higher on acute stress than people with minimal exposure.

The study ran in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. Lead researcher Alison Holman called the finding a surprise even to her own team. Her theory holds a hard truth.

Repeated exposure to violent footage keeps trauma alive in the body long after the actual event has ended.

This pattern repeats. Roxane Cohen Silver and her colleagues tracked the same effect after 9/11 and the Iraq War. Heavy media consumers carried physical and psychological symptoms for up to three years past the initial event.

The body cannot always tell the difference between a threat happening now and a threat replayed for the tenth time this week. It responds to both as danger.

Sit with that. An entire industry runs on footage that hurts its viewers more than the disaster hurt its survivors.

Every autoplay, every push alert, every “breaking” banner exists to keep a nervous system locked in a stress response, because a nervous system locked in a stress response keeps scrolling. This is how it’s reflecting in the business world:

Read more

The UK just signed the High Seas Treaty.

That single signature builds a legal framework where none existed, a mechanism to designate marine protected areas in international waters and prosecute illegal fishing fleets that have operated for decades with total impunity.

A country with one of the largest maritime histories on earth just agreed that the ocean answers to something bigger than commerce. Boundaries and the good of all life.

Boundaries protect things, that’s their whole function.

A reef without protection gets stripped bare, coral bleached to bone-white silence, fish gone, the whole ecosystem collapsed into a graveyard with good lighting.

Marine biologists found something strange when they studied these dead reefs: fish don’t return because the coral regrows. Coral regrows because the fish return first.

So researchers lowered underwater speakers into a damaged reef and played the sound of a healthy one. Snapping shrimp. Fish chatter. The low hum of a living reef going about its business.

Fish heard the noise and swam toward it, mistaking sound for safety, and their return kickstarted the exact recovery scientists had been chasing for years. The reef needed to sound alive before it could become alive again.

Life follows the signal of life. The UK intends to defend the need to do this, but at least we have a road of repair for the places plundered.

Whales picked up a signal too, and they’ve been transmitting it back to us with the hulls of yachts.

Orcas off the coast of Spain and Portugal have sunk and disabled a growing number of luxury vessels. Younger whales appear to be learning the behavior from older ones, passing down the technique like a trade secret.

Marine researchers call it an emergent cultural behavior. I call it class consciousness in a seascape sick of humans taking without regard.

Whatever triggered the first incident, the orcas have built a tradition around it, a pod-taught curriculum in yacht dismantling that spreads exactly the way any successful strategy spreads through an intelligent, social species. They found the softest target in the ocean and made a habit out of hitting it.

Just like orcas, people are getting the signal that the top depend on our compliance in order to function.

Flock surveillance cameras have blanketed American streets under the promise of safety, license plate readers scanning every car that passes, data flowing into databases most residents never agreed to build.

Guerilla activists all over the country have been ripping these cameras down at scale.

The backlash grew loud enough that the Los Angeles Police Department dissolved its Flock contract outright, one of the biggest departments in the country walking away from a surveillance system it once championed.

Communities pushed. A government body listened. The cameras came down because people refused to accept quiet observation as the price of admission to their own neighborhoods.

New York communities have been running the same play against a different machine.

Data centers keep arriving in New York with the same pitch: massive investment, promised jobs, a future built on artificial intelligence infrastructure. Residents keep asking the questions that pitch conveniently skips.

How much water disappears to cool these buildings? How much strain lands on a power grid already stretched thin? What happens to a small town’s water table once a hyperscale facility moves in next door?

Community after community has blocked or delayed these projects, forcing developers back to the table and forcing the state to notice.

New York has now paused approval of new hyperscale data centers, an entire state government acknowledging that a resident’s objection carries more weight than a developer’s timeline.

The UK bound itself to international law instead of letting the ocean stay a free-for-all. New York bound its own agencies to the will of the people living next to the infrastructure instead of the will of the company building it. Los Angeles cut a contract loose the moment its cost to public trust outweighed its value to public safety.

Every one of these moves required a government to choose the many over the few with money.

That choice is the whole job. A government exists to protect the life within its reach, human and otherwise, from whoever has the resources to take what isn’t theirs.

The ocean cannot lobby. A reef cannot hire an attorney. An orca cannot testify before a city council, though its actions carry a kind of testimony all their own. Someone has to answer for the interests that cannot speak, and for a while it looked like almost nobody would.

Just like the orcas and the activists, this signals a shift in how societies are run.

The High Seas Treaty proves a country can still choose planetary stewardship over unrestricted extraction. New York proves a state can still choose its residents over a billion-dollar contract. Los Angeles proves a city can still walk away from a surveillance deal once its people say enough.

None of these wins arrived because a corporation had a change of heart. They arrived because governments remembered who they were built to serve, and the people applied enough pressure to make that memory permanent.

The whales never needed a treaty. They just started sinking the yachts.

Read more about the owner of Flock and the small acts you can do to rebel in last week’s paid article: I want to be Peter Thiel’s Antichrist

If you want to get deeper into how to accomplish something to this magnitude, become a part of the community I’m building Good News Makers, paid subscribers get an extra article every Wednesday with actual steps to help the world. We also just started a community chat to celebrate and support one another through this process:

If 7 dollars a month is too much, think about leaving a one-time tip and support Independent Journalism in the face of politics taking over the media narrative:

Buy Me A Coffee

Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

Sources

1. Reuters — UK ratifies High Seas Treaty

2. Science Daily — Underwater speakers used to restore coral reef fish populations

3. The Guardian — Orca attacks on boats off Spain and Portugal

4. Los Angeles Times — LAPD ends Flock Safety camera contract

5. The New York Times — New York communities blocking data center development

6. Politico New York — New York State pauses approval of hyperscale data centers

Over several weeks from mid-September through early October, he used the biblical concept of the Antichrist as a metaphor for modern forces that use fear of catastrophe to justify centralized control over technology, government, and society.

Drawing on Christian theology and political critique, he warned that movements focused on existential risks from climate activism to AI regulation feed a mindset that sacrifices liberty for safety, framing such fear-driven narratives as symbolic of the Antichrist he sees emerging in the 21st century.

As Professor Elke Schwarz writes in Opinio Juris, this attempt to demonize opponents of AI attempts to build a “spiritual narrative” that bolsters the wealth of investors. “To create belief in a technology is to sacralize the capacity of a startup to deliver this quasi-divine technology and this, in turn serves to elevate the valuation of such a company,” she writes.

Thiel suggested people like Greta Thunberg (climate activism) and Eliezer Yudkowsky (AI safety critic) could symbolically represent the kind of fear-based Antichrist archetype he warned about, not necessarily as literal villains but as embodiments of what he sees as risk-driven control narratives.

But this only serves his own aims… so what is the Antichrist really?

Read more

From Trump administration officials, a NATO commander, senators, PayPal alumni, private equity billionaires.

The agenda for their August retreat at Ireland’s Powerscourt Hotel included sessions on preparing for a third world war and building cults. Four days, five stars, off the record. The retreat was scheduled to last four days from August 12-16 at Powerscourt Hotel. Then the hotel cancelled.

Why is this GOOD NEWS? The chain of events matters more than the outcome.

Powerscourt Estate initially claimed its hands were tied. The estate said it was taking legal advice on whether it could move to cancel the event itself and stated that if it was within their remit they would cancel the event planned, but that a legally binding lease with MHL Hotels made this impossible.

That’s the sound of institutional power protecting itself, the standard posture of an entity that has calculated the cost of saying no and found it too high. Nothing moves an estate like that except pressure it cannot absorb.

So people applied it.

Activists occupied the hotel grounds, and organic regional groups put major pressure on the owner and management of Powerscourt Hotel. Protests were planned outside the estate for weeks running. Local TDs raised the alarm publicly. A campaign called Drop Dialogue issued a plain warning to the hotel’s parent company and to every other venue in Ireland that might consider hosting the group.

Within weeks, the equation flipped. A spokesperson for the estate announced they were relieved and pleased to say the Dialog event planned for August had been cancelled.

An estate that once hid behind a lease found the will to thank its “staff, neighbors, friends, supporters and legal team” for standing with them through what they called a difficult and challenging time.

Public pressure changed the story the estate said about itself, from a business bound by contract to a community that had been under siege and had come through it. That transformation is the real event here, more than the cancelled dinners and locked conference rooms.

People without armies or fortunes tend to assume the world’s most powerful men move through life on frictionless rails. Palantir’s founder, a man who has bankrolled presidents and shaped surveillance states, needed a room with good lighting and discreet staff… but didn’t get one.

A regional hotel group with a portfolio of major properties across Dublin, Galway, and Limerick calculated that hosting Thiel’s circle cost more than losing the booking. That calculation was considered because people made it happen.

Reputational cost is manufactured by collective attention, and collective attention is the one resource ordinary people still hold in abundance.

This is the leverage elites spend fortunes trying to make you forget you have. Power at that altitude runs on infrastructure you can see and touch: hotels, banks, caterers, security firms, venues, staff. Think Fight Club:

“Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances, we guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us.” - Tyler Durden

Every layer of that infrastructure is staffed by people who read the news, weigh their own reputations, and answer to boards and neighbors and consciences.

Thiel doesn’t need your vote, but he does need a room. He needs a caterer willing to serve his guests, a security team willing to work the perimeter, a town willing to look the other way while two hundred of the most influential people alive discuss the next war.

Every one of those needs is a pressure point, and every pressure point is reachable by people with nothing but attention and organization. This is Public Pressure. The one real power we have to fight people like Thiel.

The instinct to treat this as a footnote is small think. Small victories get filed away as symbolic, as if symbolism were separate from consequence rather than the engine of it.

Powerscourt’s cancellation forced Dialog’s organizers to scramble for another venue in the middle of summer, weeks before a retreat meant to bring together a NATO commander and half a cabinet’s worth of Trump officials.

Anything that disrupts that scheming is a win worth having, and this one came from a coalition of local activists, opposition politicians, and ordinary people who read a leaked document and decided to act on it rather than scroll past it.

Nobody organizing outside those gates had a fraction of Thiel’s net worth. What they had was coordination, persistence, and the willingness to stand in front of an estate and refuse to leave quietly.

That combination beat a five-star hotel’s contractual obligations and a venture capitalist’s Rolodex and did it in a matter of weeks.

The next gathering will look for a new home. The organizers behind Dialog are already searching, and the campaigners who won this round have promised to keep watching.

That’s the actual lesson buried in this story: power like Thiel’s is not a fortress. It is a network of dependencies, and dependencies can be interrupted by people who understand exactly where the seams are. Every hotel is a seam, every caterer, every landlord, every town council weighing a permit is a seam.

This is an answer from last week’s paid article: Where Do We Go From Here, in a World Taken Over by Tech Giants

If you want to get deeper into how to accomplish something to this magnitude, become a part of the community I’m building Good News Makers, paid subscribers get an extra article every Wednesday with actual steps to help the world. We also just started a community chat to celebrate and support one another through this process:

If 7 dollars a month is too much, think about leaving a one-time tip and support Independent Journalism in the face of politics taking over the media narrative:

Buy Me A Coffee

Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

Sources

1. The Irish Times, “Wicklow hotel cancels ‘secretive’ Peter Thiel group conference,” July 3, 2026

2. The Journal, “Wicklow hotel cancels Peter Thiel-linked ‘Dialog’ conference,” July 2026

3. Novara Media, “Irish Hotel Cancels Conference for Peter Thiel’s Secretive Group,” July 6, 2026

4. The Canary, “Peter Thiel’s Ireland retreat cancelled after campaign,” July 4, 2026

5. RTÉ, “Dialog group event at Powerscourt in Wicklow cancelled,” July 3, 2026

6. Irish Examiner, “Powerscourt Estate ‘relieved’ to announce cancellation of Peter Thiel’s private retreat,” July 2026

7. Business Post, “Powerscourt Hotel cancels Peter Thiel’s secretive Irish retreat,” July 2026

8. Echo Live, “Private Peter Thiel retreat at five-star Wicklow hotel cancelled,” July 2026

The moment to participate is not when it becomes undeniable. That moment is always too late.

Participate now. Post. Share accurate information. Apply pressure through the tools available. A keyboard activist who shows up consistently and refuses to be silent is not nothing.

Dispersed, sustained public attention is exactly the kind of friction that makes certain moves politically costly. Need an example?

Read more

Shoppers had no way to know, and businesses had no legal obligation to tell them. That arrangement is ending.

The UK government announced during London Climate Action Week that it will introduce mandatory rules forcing British businesses to prove their supply chains are free of illegal deforestation.

Companies trading in soy, palm oil, cocoa, coffee, rubber, and timber will face required due diligence checks, verifying that what they import has not come from illegally cleared land.

These commodities sit inside thousands of everyday products like chocolate, cooking oil, shampoo, cosmetics. The staples of a normal shopping trip, quietly bound to the fate of the world’s most biodiverse places.

Nature Minister Mary Creagh framed the stakes bluntly.

Tackling deforestation ranks among the most effective tools available for fighting climate change and protecting the planet’s rarest wildlife.

Government scrutiny of its own supply chains sets the standard it now expects from industry. The language of leadership matters less than the mechanism behind it.

The retail industry did not resist. Major supermarkets had already been pushing for stronger regulation, and industry representatives welcomed the announcement as a long-called-for step toward driving forest conservation across retail supply chains. Retailers know what their customers increasingly demand.

A generation raised on nature documentaries and climate anxiety does not want its snack aisle funding rainforest collapse. (Thank you David Attenburough)

Regulation gives supermarkets legal cover to demand the same standards from every supplier, rather than competing on sustainability claims that customers can’t verify.

The policy carries weight beyond Great Britain.

The EU’s own Regulation on Deforestation-Free Products takes effect in Northern Ireland starting December 30, 2026, under the terms that keep the region tied to both UK and EU markets.

London intends to mirror that regime closely. The government plans for its Great Britain rules to cover the same core commodities and information requirements as the Northern Ireland regulation, preventing duplicate compliance burdens and helping British exporters meet consistent standards across both markets.

Conservation groups want the timeline tightened. WWF’s Director of Advocacy, Gavin Crowden, connected the policy to something larger than trade compliance.

He described the potential collapse of tropical forests in the Amazon and Indonesia as a national security risk as much as an environmental one, pointing to the world’s dependence on these forests for food security and climate stability, alongside the extraordinary wildlife they shelter.

His argument for urgency draws directly from the Northern Ireland deadline. With EU rules already locked in for the end of the year, he sees no justification for leaving the rest of the UK exposed, still unknowingly driving rainforest destruction through ordinary purchases.

The consultation will establish mandatory due diligence requirements built on powers in the Environment Act, alongside a strengthening of the UK’s existing Timber Regulations.

This is an old legal skeleton getting new muscle, aimed squarely at the point where illegal land clearing enters the consumer economy.

Government ambition extends past illegality alone. The eventual goal is a full transition to a deforestation-free standard, one requiring that products be produced with no deforestation at all, not merely deforestation that broke existing law in the country of origin.

That distinction is critical. A great deal of forest clearing happens entirely legally, sanctioned by governments eager for the revenue that palm oil, soy, and cattle ranching bring. A ban on illegal deforestation closes one door. A deforestation-free standard closes the building.

This effort sits inside a commitment made five years ago. The measures trace back to the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use, signed at COP26, which pledged to halt and reverse global forest loss and land degradation by 2030.

Declarations like that one often collects dust. This is the rare case of a government converting a signature into statute.

Skeptics will point out, correctly, that a consultation is not a law.

Formal proposals still need to survive contact with industry lobbying, parliamentary scheduling, and the churn of a news cycle that moves on within a week. Businesses will negotiate for longer transition windows and narrower definitions.

Some of that negotiation is reasonable or, at least, made to sound like it. Supply chains built over decades don’t restructure overnight, and a policy that collapses under its own complexity helps no one, least of all the forests it claims to protect.

But the direction is set, and the direction matters more than the pace.

A government has decided that the shampoo on a shelf in Manchester carries responsibility for a hillside in Sumatra. That link, invisible for as long as global trade has existed, is becoming visible and enforceable.

Consumers will soon be able to trust, rather than hope, that their basket isn’t quietly financing the destruction of the planet’s lungs.

The rainforest has never had legal standing in a British courtroom, unlike a river. Read more about that here: If a Corporation Can Be a Person, So Can a River.

It’s about to get the next best thing: a supply chain that has to answer for what it takes from the ground.

If you want to get deeper into how to accomplish something to this magnitude, become a part of the community I’m building Good News Makers, paid subscribers get an extra article every Wednesday with actual steps to help the world. We also just started a community chat to celebrate and support one another through this process:

Subscribe now

If 7 dollars a month is too much, think about leaving a one-time tip and support Independent Journalism in the face of politics taking over the media narrative:

Buy Me A Coffee

Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

Sources:

1. UK Government — “Government steps up action to tackle illegal deforestation,” gov.uk

2. Surrey Live — “Some everyday items may disappear from supermarkets in ingredients ban”

3. Wood & Panel Europe — “UK government moves to ban illegal deforestation from British supply chains”

4. Teesside Live — “Some everyday items may disappear from supermarkets in ingredients ban”

5. North Wales Live — “Some everyday items may disappear from supermarkets in ingredients ban”

The Birth of Perception Engineering

After World War II, advertisers realized propaganda techniques could be used in peacetime. Ed Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew) called it “engineering consent.” He taught companies to bypass logic and speak directly to emotion and identity.

Selling cigarettes to women as a “Torches of Freedom” movement, linking cars, cologne, or soap to status, desire, or belonging. Make people feel, not think. If emotion anchors attention, the RAS locks on. (RAS? We will go over that a little later).

Read more

Last month, Governor Tim Walz signed a bonding bill that set it right. All 3,400 acres are being returned to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, with the University of Minnesota retaining access for research and education during a transition period.

Fond du Lac Tribal Chairman Bruce M. Savage called the transfer far more than a land transaction: “This is not only the return of land. It is the return of even more responsibility. It is the return of a relative.”

When Indigenous peoples talk about land, they are rarely talking about property. They are talking about kinship, a web of responsibilities that run in both directions between people and place.

The dominant culture spent a century running research programs on land it called its own, producing knowledge about northern forest ecosystems while the people with the deepest knowledge of those ecosystems were shut out.

Now those people are coming home.

The Minnesota agreement is a data point in a larger pattern that conservation science keeps confirming and policy keeps ignoring. Research published in January 2023 found that forests managed by Indigenous peoples between 2001 and 2021 were carbon sinks, while forests not managed by Indigenous peoples were on average net carbon sources.

The forests do not behave this way by accident but by design and stewardship.

They behave this way because the people tending them carry multi-generational knowledge of how those ecosystems function, and because they have a stake in the outcome that extends beyond quarterly reporting cycles.

The evidence comes in everywhere.

In British Columbia, the Syilx Okanagan, Secwépemc, and Ktunaxa nations launched the Bringing the Salmon Home project to reintroduce sockeye salmon to the Columbia River, which had been blocked from migrating for decades by downstream dams.

In October 2025, the initiative celebrated the return of two adult sockeye that had been released as juvenile fry two years earlier, detected nearly 800 river kilometers upstream from the mouth of the Columbia.

Two fish out of 10,000 sounds modest until you remember that those fish had to navigate a 2,000-kilometer river system and two major dams to get home. Mark Thomas, a Shuswap Band councilor, described the return as having monumental significance.

In the Amazon, the numbers are starker. About 385 Indigenous groups reside on approximately 2.4 million square kilometers of Amazonia, and a growing body of research confirms they are its most effective defenders.

Data spanning 36 years shows that 86% of deforestation in the Amazon has occurred in areas without territorial management regimes aimed at conservation.

Indigenous-held land is the difference.

A 2021 analysis found that after 36 Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon used satellite-based deforestation alerts, deforestation rates declined by 52 percent in a single year.

Armed with technology and ancestral knowledge in equal measure, Indigenous guards across Ecuador and Colombia are organizing to permanently protect more than twenty million acres of the most biodiverse rainforest in the world.

The pattern holds. Where Indigenous peoples hold land tenure, forests survive. Where they don’t, the chainsaw arrives.

New research from the Environmental Defense Fund found that designating 63.4 million additional hectares of unprotected Brazilian Amazon forests as either Indigenous lands or protected areas would reduce deforestation across the entire Brazilian Amazon by up to 20 percent by 2030.

The science is not ambiguous about this anymore. The political will is the variable.

Minnesota moved that variable. The Fond du Lac Band will now steward the Cloquet forest under an agreement that keeps the University’s research partnership intact while returning management authority to the people the land belongs to.

The Band described the future partnership as encompassing culturally grounded research, fire stewardship and Ishkode teachings, youth engagement, and long-term forest health and climate resilience. That is a full program, held by people who have been ready to lead it for generations.

The land kept its memory through all of it. It was always going to be returned. It just took 117 years to find people in positions of power willing to do the obvious thing.

If you want to get deeper into how to accomplish something to this magnitude, become a part of the community I’m building Good News Makers, paid subscribers get an extra article every Wednesday with actual steps to help the world. We also just started a community chat to celebrate and support one another through this process:

If 7 dollars a month is too much, think about leaving a one-time tip and support Independent Journalism in the face of politics taking over the media narrative:

Buy Me A Coffee

Until Next Time.

Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

Sources:

Minnesota land return:

1. Minnesota Star Tribune — Minnesota is returning thousands of acres of forest to the Fond du Lac Band

2. Tribal Business News — Fond du Lac Band set to reclaim 3,400 acres after Minnesota lawmakers approve land transfer

BC salmon restoration:

3. CBC News — Salmon released as fry in B.C. return up Columbia River (October 2025)

4. Pacific Salmon Foundation — A year in review: taking action for salmon in 2024

Amazon / Indigenous guardians:

5. One Earth — New report reaffirms the critical role of Indigenous-led efforts in protecting the Amazon rainforest

6. Amazon Frontlines — The First Line of Defense: Indigenous Guards of the Amazon

The brain releases it when something novel, urgent, or emotionally charged appears on the horizon. A person with ADHD can hyperfocus for six hours on something interesting and forget to eat, then stare at a one-page form for three days.

The form has no horizon, nothing is coming, work with that. Here’s how:

Read more

The project will scale up in the coming weeks until it reaches full operational capacity, providing electricity to Rhode Island and Connecticut enough to power more than 350,000 homes and businesses.

The road there was ugly.

Days before Christmas, the Trump administration suspended leases for five large-scale offshore wind projects under construction along the East Coast, citing national security risks identified by the Pentagon.

The Interior Department issued no specifics about what those risks were. Developers and states sued, and federal judges allowed all five projects to resume construction, essentially concluding that the government had not demonstrated the national security risk was so imminent that construction must halt.

The White House declared it looked forward to “ultimate victory on this issue.” Revolution Wind is online.

The five East Coast projects that won those court victories now make up a small fraction of Atlantic states’ ambitious offshore wind plans. Dozens of projects that have yet to break ground face long odds while the current administration remains in office.

Warren Leon, executive director of the Clean Energy States Alliance, put the prognosis plainly: the most realistic forecast is that no other projects beyond these five will move forward over the next few years.

Revolution Wind punched through and the turbines are spinning.

Across the country in New Mexico, a different kind of energy story is being written at a slower pace and with longer roots.

The New Mexico Community Solar Act, passed in 2021, created unique provisions for what it defines as “native community solar projects”: facilities sited on the land of an Indigenous nation, tribe, or pueblo, owned or operated by a tribal entity, or developed in partnership with a third-party.

Projects on tribal land remain exempt from state program limitations a carve-out that makes New Mexico the only state in the country with tribal exemptions of this kind.

State regulators are now making a fresh push to accelerate a program that has moved fitfully since its passage, weighing rule changes and 300 megawatts in new projects as advocates race to deliver bill savings before key federal tax credits expire.

The stakes for rural and tribal households are not abstract. More than 54,000 Native Americans currently have no home access to electricity, according to a 2023 Department of Energy report. A quarter of low-income households in the United States spend more than 15% of their income on energy bills.

New Mexico received a $156 million Solar for All grant to fund photovoltaic systems for households that otherwise cannot access clean energy including homes on tribal lands. The program targets households earning at or below 80% of the area median income, or those enrolled in federal assistance programs.

The first community solar project on state trust lands broke ground in Los Lunas in April 2025, one of eight projects slated for installation on parcels leased from the State Land Office.

The developments are incremental.

Incremental is how grids actually get built one interconnection, one tribe, one county at a time. The question community solar answers are a simple one: who gets to benefit from the energy produced near where they live? In New Mexico, the answer is beginning to include people it has historically excluded.

And, perhaps, because of that…

In May 2026, for the first time in American history, solar generated more electricity than coal.

Data from the energy think tank Ember shows U.S. solar generation climbed to 45.5 terawatt-hours in May, the highest monthly total ever recorded and a 17% increase from May of last year.

That output gave solar 12.8% of all U.S. electricity for the month, just enough to edge ahead of coal at 12.2%.

The more useful number is the one five years back.

In May 2021, coal supplied 19.7% of U.S. electricity while solar accounted for just 5.4%. Every year, gigawatts of new clean energy come online because it is cheap and comparatively easy to build.

For several years running, over 90% of new electricity capacity built in the U.S. has been solar, wind, or batteries. The last new coal plant in the U.S. was completed in 2013.

The administration responded last week by proposing nearly $700 million for coal plants and exports.

Lena Moffitt of the environmental group Evergreen Action called it “throwing a lifeline to a ship that has already sunk.”

Ember analysts noted the record set in May could be broken again in the coming summer months, as solar output typically peaks in June and July.

In March, renewables as a group generated more electricity than gas in the U.S. for the first time. These milestones have a compounding logic. Each one makes the next one easier to reach.

The future doesn’t care about the permissions of policy but it’s being built by economics, by sunlight, and by the accumulated weight of decisions made by those who have the vision to see where humanity must go if we are to survive.

If you want to get deeper into how to accomplish something to this magnitude, become a part of the community I’m building Good News Makers, paid subscribers get an extra article every Wednesday with actual steps to help the world. We also just started a community chat to celebrate and support one another through this process:

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Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

Sources:

Revolution Wind

- Fortune/AP, “Despite Trump’s best efforts, an offshore wind farm just lit up New England” — dc.fortune.com, March 16, 2026

- NPR, “The Trump administration pauses wind projects off New England, New York and Virginia” — npr.org, Dec. 22, 2025

Community Solar / New Mexico

- Sovereign Energy, “Community Solar” — sovereignenergy.org

- Albuquerque Journal, “Can community solar finally take off in New Mexico?” — abqjournal.com, March 21, 2026

Solar vs. Coal

- Canary Media, '“Solar beat coal on the US grid in May — a new milestone” — canarymedia.com

- TechSpot, “Solar generation beats coal in the US for the first time ever” — techspot.com

Creators like Heather Cox Richardson and the Politics Chick have seen huge dips in numbers and reach on Meta platforms. Which means their voices and influence is spreading. Knowing this it would be important to be intentional what you consume instead of just being fed by your “feed.”

“We have seen the deterioration of the support for Israel in the United States almost — I would say, it correlates almost 100% with the geometric rise of social media.”

— Benjamin Netanyahu, on CBS’ 60 Minutes, aired May 10, 2026

The last greatest invention was the Printing Press, for the first time, ideas could travel faster than the institutions trying to contain them.

Social media is that moment again, and most people are sleepwalking through it:

Read more

Dolphinariums across the country were ordered shut down. The capture and confinement of whales, dolphins, and porpoises for entertainment became illegal in one of the largest countries on earth.

Halfway across the world, African penguins are fighting for their lives in a South African courtroom. Their population has collapsed by 97 percent.

Conservation groups took the government to the High Court overfishing restrictions near the penguins’ last breeding islands, arguing that watered-down no-fishing zones amounted to a death sentence for the species.

The case forced a reckoning that older laws never anticipated: what happens when the survival of an animal population becomes a matter litigated with the seriousness of a property dispute or a labor contract.

These stories sit at the edge of something larger.

Human law has always organized the world into two categories. Persons hold rights. Things get used. For most of history, that line was simple and convenient. Land, water, animals, mountains all of it sat on the “thing” side of the ledger, available to be owned, divided, drained, and sold.

The line is starting to move.

New Zealand has spent the last decade rewriting what the natural world is allowed to be under law. In 2014, the country granted legal personhood to Te Urewera, an 820-square-mile forest sacred to the Tūhoe people.

The forest stopped being government property. It became its own legal entity, holding title to itself, with guardianship transferred to the tribe that had always understood it as a living ancestor.

Three years later, the Whanganui River received the same status. Lawmakers described it as “an indivisible and living whole from the mountains to the sea,” a being with its own name, Te Awa Tupua, and its own legal standing to sue and be sued.

This year, Mount Taranaki joined them. Parliament voted unanimously to recognize the mountain as Te Kāhui Tupua, a living and indivisible whole that includes the peak, its surrounding land, and everything tied to it.

The government gave up ownership. A council made up of Māori representatives and government officials now manages what was once treated as scenery.

Each case emerged from a settlement over land the Crown took by force generations ago. Granting personhood became the legal mechanism for returning something that money alone couldn’t repair.

A relationship between people and place, broken by colonization, got rebuilt using the only tools modern law has for restoring what was lost: the language of rights.

And from the OG Colonizers: The River Wye just became the first river in the United Kingdom to be formally recognized as a living ecosystem with rights of its own.

The charter covers the river’s entire 130-mile catchment, from its source in the Cambrian Mountains in Wales down through England to the Bristol Channel. Herefordshire and Powys County councils have already adopted it, and Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire are expected to follow.

The rights laid out in the charter are specific; The Wye has the right to flow, the right to biodiversity, the right to be free from pollution, the right to regenerate, the right to be represented in the decisions that shape its future.

A working ecologist, Dr. Louise Bodnar, now holds a voting seat on the river’s nutrient management board as its appointed voice (a person whose job is to speak for water.)

The Wye is at the center of the largest environmental pollution lawsuit ever brought before the UK’s High Court, with thousands of residents accusing a major poultry producer and a major water utility of poisoning the river through decades of agricultural runoff and sewage discharge.

The charter gives campaigners a new foundation to stand on while the fight continues. A river that has rights is a river whose degradation can be named as a violation, not just an inconvenience.

Nature is finally being treated as alive under the law, not as a backdrop for human activity but as a party with standing of its own.

A new bipartisan bill introduced in Congress would direct $1.9 billion a year toward repairing America’s public lands. The Great American Outdoors Act 250 builds on a 2020 law that funded over 560 restoration projects before its dedicated funding expired.

It was introduced by representatives from both parties: Ryan Zinke, Bruce Westerman, and Jared Huffman at a moment when bipartisan anything has become rare enough to notice.

The money would go toward the kind of work that doesn’t make headlines but defines whether a visit to a national park feels like stepping into something cared for or something crumbling.

Trails. Campgrounds. Water systems. Roads. Yosemite has needed work on aging campground infrastructure for years. Zion’s facilities show the wear of millions of annual visitors. Death Valley’s water and wastewater systems are decades past their intended lifespan.

The original Great American Outdoors Act already funded fixes at places like the Grand Canyon and Mount Rainier, proving the model works when the money actually shows up.

What’s notable here isn’t the figure but the agreement. Public lands are one of the last things both parties still claim to love, and this bill tests whether that affection survives contact with a vote.

Look at the pattern across these stories and a shape starts to emerge.

Dolphins recognized as persons rather than property. Penguins defended in court as a population worth saving at any cost. A forest, a river, and a mountain in New Zealand granted the legal standing to exist on their own terms. A river in Wales given the right to flow and to be heard. American lawmakers, on both sides of an increasingly hostile aisle, agreeing that the land deserves upkeep.

None of these movements started with a grand philosophical declaration. They started with damage; from polluted water, collapsing penguin colonies, stolen land, crumbling trails.

Rights of nature, wherever they’ve taken hold, have grown out of necessity rather than idealism, a recognition that the old world wasn’t protecting what needed protecting.

If a river can hold the right to flow, and a mountain can hold the right to exist as an ancestor, and a forest can hold title to itself, the next step is obvious.

Entire ecosystems like watersheds, coastlines, old-growth forests, the great migratory corridors that animals have used for ten thousand years could be recognized as non-human persons in their own right, withstanding to be defended in court the same way a person or a corporation is defended today.

Under the right leadership, that future stops being theoretical but becomes policy.

A world where the Amazon has lawyers. Where the Great Barrier Reef can sue. Where the line between person and property finally bends toward the only thing that ever made sense: life recognizing life.

If you want to get deeper into how to accomplish something to this magnitude, become a part of the community I’m building Good News Makers, paid subscribers get an extra article every Wednesday with actual steps to help the world. We also just started a community chat to celebrate and support one another through this process:

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If 7 dollars a month is too much, think about leaving a one-time tip and support Independent Journalism in the face of politics taking over the media narrative:

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Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

Sources:

Dolphins — India

- “What India’s Decision to Ban Dolphin Captivity Means,” Earth Island Journal — https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/what_indias_decision_to_ban_dolphin_captivity_means/

- “Dolphins gain unprecedented protection in India,” Deutsche Welle — https://fore.yale.edu/node/5557

African Penguins — South Africa

- “South Africa: Major Showdown in Court Over African Penguin’s Future,” AllAfrica — https://allafrica.com/stories/202502170189.html

- “Settlement reached in African Penguin case,” GroundUp — https://groundup.org.za/article/settlement-reached-in-legal-battle-over-critically-endangered-african-penguins/

New Zealand — Te Urewera, Whanganui River, Mount Taranaki

- “New Zealand mountain granted legal personhood, with human-like rights,” Anadolu Agency — https://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/new-zealand-mountain-granted-legal-personhood-with-human-like-rights/3468287

- “New Zealand Recognizes a Mountain as a Legal Person,” VOA Learning English — https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/new-zealand-recognizes-a-mountain-as-a-legal-person/7962441.html

- “Legal personality for maunga, awa and other natural features of the land,” Community Law NZ — https://communitylaw.org.nz/community-law-manual/test/legal-personality-for-maunga-awa-and-other-natural-features-of-the-land/

River Wye

- “River Wye formally recognised as living ecosystem with intrinsic rights in UK-first charter,” Britbrief — https://britbrief.co.uk/environment/climate/river-wye-gets-legal-rights-in-uk-first-charter.html

- “Charter Launch of the Rights of the River Wye,” Save the Wye — https://savethewye.org/charter-launch-of-the-rights-of-the-river-wye/

- “UK river granted legal rights in landmark move,” Oceanographic — https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/uk-river-granted-legal-rights-in-landmark-move/

Public Lands Bill

- “STATEMENT: Members of Congress introduce bipartisan bill on national parks,” Environment America — https://environmentamerica.org/texas/media-center/statement-members-of-congress-introduce-bipartisan-bill-on-national-parks/

- “New Bill Would Give Billions to Public Lands,” GearJunkie — https://gearjunkie.com/parks-and-public-lands/great-america-outdoors-act-250

Since COVID, the American downtown scene spent too long looking like a film set between shoots. The furniture still there, the lights still humming on timers, the coffee cups gone… sitting in the back of the cabinet in the kitchen.

Remote work emptied the offices. It left cities holding buildings they had no obvious use for, in neighborhoods that had organized themselves entirely around the assumption that millions of people would show up every weekday morning and spend money.

That assumption is now being renegotiated.

The numbers compound quickly when you look back: in 2022, the conversion pipeline totaled 23,100 units. By 2023 it had nearly doubled to 45,200. By 2024 it reached 55,300, and now it has climbed to an all-time high.

New York is driving the charge: Conversion starts in the city totaled 1.6 million square feet in 2023, more than doubled to 3.3 million in 2024, and already by August 2025 had surpassed 4.1 million square feet, the entire previous year’s total in eight months.

Manhattan’s largest conversion project tells you something about the scale these developers are thinking at. At 25 Water Street in the financial district, developers are transforming a 1.1-million-square-foot office tower into 1,300 apartment units a building the size of a small town, repurposed floor by floor.

In New York, policy has followed ambition: the city’s Office Conversion Accelerator Program, a new tax incentive passed in 2024, zoning reforms under the City of Yes framework, and the 2025 lifting of a density cap have collectively expanded what’s eligible and reduced what’s bureaucratically impossible.

Calgary moved on this earlier and more aggressively than most. Its Downtown Development Incentive Program offers $75 per square foot of converted space, up to $15 million per property, as an upfront subsidy and demand overwhelmed the original funding so quickly that the program had to be temporarily paused before reopening with additional federal backing.

Chicago’s LaSalle Street Reimagined program takes a different angle, using tax increment financing and requiring that at least 30 percent of converted units serve residents earning around 60 percent of area median income. The subsidy comes with strings, and the strings point toward affordability.

The physical reality of these projects resists the enthusiasm that surrounds them.

Deep floor plates, the legacy of mid-century office design, which used fluorescent lighting and air conditioning to push rentable space far from any exterior wall make natural light difficult to deliver to interior rooms.

Immovable load-bearing walls dictate where apartments can and cannot go. Ventilation systems built for open-plan offices have to be rebuilt from scratch for residential use.

The buildings that convert most cleanly are older, smaller-footprint structures built before those design conventions took hold. The glass towers from the 1970s and 1980s, the ones that define the skylines of most American downtowns, are often the hardest to work with and the most likely to sit vacant.

Cost is the number that sobers the conversation fastest. Converting an office building into housing runs an average of $685 per square foot… more than buying a finished multifamily property at $600 per square foot, and more than building a new one from the ground up at $588.

Office conversion, in other words, is frequently the most expensive way to add housing to a city, not the cheapest. Conversions still represent only 1.7 percent of total U.S. office inventory and the gap between buildings that are structurally viable and buildings that are merely vacant is wide enough to swallow most of the optimism.

The pandemic didn’t immediately trigger a rush of conversions. Completions actually fell in 2020 and 2021 as construction froze and developers waited. What the pandemic triggered was planning.

That planning is now coming due, in building permits, in demolition crews, in architects solving the light-well problem one floor plate at a time.

The housing shortage that emptied waiting lists and drove rents past reason didn’t emerge from a single failure, and it won’t be solved by a single mechanism. But the office tower that once sorted workers by floor and title has begun, slowly and expensively, to become the kind of place where people actually live.

That’s worth something. The question is whether cities will decide it’s worth enough.

Become a monthly contributor to this publication by upgrading (at the bottom of this page) or leave a one-time tip below. The more space and time I have to write the further we can go to make lasting changes across social media and the world:

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Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

Sources

1. RentCafe / Planetizen — *Over 71K Office-to-Apartment Units in the Pipeline for 2025* (Feb. 2025)

2. Cushman & Wakefield — *Office to Residential Conversions Surge to Record Levels in New York City* (Sept. 2025)

3. The Mortgage Point — *2025 Office-to-Apartment Conversions Break Record After Record* (Feb. 2025)

4. Econsult Solutions — *Office-to-Residential Conversions: A Comparative Analysis of Incentive Programs in Four North American Cities* (July 2025)

5. Callan — *2025 Office Conversions: Issues for Institutional Investors* (June 2025)

6. Ballard Spahr — *Office to Residential Conversion: A Tale of the City and the Suburbs* (2025)

7. Strong Towns — *Why Cities Need More Than Office Conversions to Fix Their Housing Shortage* (March 2025)

8. CBRE — *Conversions and Demolitions Reducing U.S. Office Supply* (June 2025)

9. Propmodo — *The Great Office Conversion Is Just Getting Started* (April 2026)

Synthetic fertilizers supplied the nutrients that microbial life used to provide. Repeated tillage broke apart the fungal networks threading through root systems. Monocultures left fields barren between harvests.

Soil formation is so slow that scientists classify it as a limited resource and the industrial model treated it like a checking account with no minimum balance.

The bill is due.

Long-term conventional fertilization results in nutrient depletion, loss of microbial diversity, reduced organic matter, and deterioration of soil’s physical structure.

A healthy handful of topsoil contains more living organisms than there are people on earth. Synthetic chemistry simplified that complexity down to NPK ratios; nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and called it good enough.

The fungal networks that help plants communicate and share resources across root systems don’t show up on a fertilizer label. Long-term chemical fertilization dramatically decreases soil pH, which drives down bacterial diversity and destabilizes the microbial community structures that keep land productive.

What was treated as a substrate became a liability.

Regenerative agriculture works from a different premise: the soil is alive, and living things respond to how they are treated.

The core practices; no-till or minimal tillage, cover cropping, diverse crop rotation, integrating livestock, composting are not new inventions, they’re recovered disciplines.

When crop residues and cover crops are rolled flat and left on the surface, they function as mulch, feeding soil microorganisms and accelerating the storage of carbon in the ground.

Crops planted into that mulch face fewer weeds.

The soil beneath retains moisture and resists drought. Rainfall infiltrates instead of running off. These outcomes don’t require chemical inputs to maintain; they compound on their own when the disturbance stops.

The data on carbon is significant.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that enhancing soil carbon through regenerative agriculture could sequester up to 23 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050. A measurable portion of the reduction scientists say is required to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Carbon pulled into the soil is carbon out of the atmosphere, and healthier soils pull harder. Vineyard soils managed with regenerative practices showed carbon sequestration potential up to four times higher than conventional cropland.

That gap is not an anomaly; it reflects the difference between soil treated as a medium for chemical delivery and soil managed as a living system.

Short-term yield reductions often occur during the changeover period, though long-term productivity typically improves as soil function recovers. Farms that have completed the transition frequently report higher profitability, driven by lower input costs and better resource efficiency.

Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are expensive (especially with the Iranian War). A functioning soil microbiome provides much of the same service for free.

Studies comparing regenerative and conventional plots have found that regenerative practices produce richer, more heterogeneous bacterial communities including higher levels of organisms associated with carbon retention and nutrient cycling.

The soil under regenerative management behaves differently because it contains more life and more variety of life. Diversity confers resilience. A monoculture of microbes crashes under stress the same way a monoculture of corn crashes under drought.

What’s emerging from farms making this shift is less a new agricultural philosophy than a retrieval of something older and more durable.

Recent developments in regenerative agriculture have tended to be farmer-led rather than driven by research. These are practical, on-farm solutions aimed at restoring natural processes, cutting costs, and reducing dependence on agrochemical inputs.

Farmers are ahead of the institutions here, working with what they can observe across their own land across years. That kind of knowledge accumulates differently than laboratory data. Both matter.

The soil has been here longer than agriculture. It will outlast our worst mistakes, given enough time.

The question is whether the people working it are willing to stop treating four inches of living earth like a problem to be chemically managed and start treating it like the inheritance it is.

Become a monthly contributor to this publication by upgrading (at the bottom of this page) or leave a one-time tip below. The more space and time I have to write the further we can go to make lasting changes across social media and the world:

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Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

Sources:

- Frontiers in Environmental Science, 2025 — Comprehensive review of soil health and regenerative agriculture practices

- Frontiers in Agronomy / NCBI, 2023 — Regenerative agriculture and bacterial community structure

- Science Societies (CSA News), 2025 — Rooted in Resilience: regenerative agriculture and food systems

- Green America — Regenerative agriculture, no-till, and carbon storage

- World Economic Forum, 2024 — Regenerative agriculture and climate resilience

- FoodPrint — Industrial agriculture’s effects on soil health

- Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2023 — Soil carbon sequestration in regenerative and vineyard systems

- Frontiers in Microbiology, 2020 — Soil microbiome and impacts of chemical fertilization

- IPCC, cited via WEF — Carbon sequestration potential through 2050

Meanwhile, the global paper industry cuts down an estimated six million trees every year to meet demand for packaging, printing, and the unremarkable paper products that pass through our hands daily without much thought.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the pulp and paper sector consumes between 13 and 15 percent of all wood traded globally and that wood has to come from somewhere.

Valentyn Frechka, a young inventor from Sokyrnytsia in western Ukraine, noticed both problems at once.

During a hike in the Carpathians, he began turning over a straightforward question: leaves contain cellulose, the same core ingredient found in wood… so why couldn’t they be used to make paper?

He took the question back to his high school chemistry lab.

By 2017, after months of trial and error, he had produced the first prototypes of leaf-based paper. Simple sheets, but durable enough to write on, print on, and fold.

That was the proof he needed.

The startup he eventually co-founded, Releaf Paper, now produces around three million paper bags per month. The manufacturing process begins with urban collection. Releaf sources its leaves exclusively from city streets, parks, and sidewalks… never from forests.

The company works directly with municipal governments, offering to take the collected leaf litter off their hands rather than have it trucked to a landfill or incineration facility.

Once the leaves arrive, they’re cleaned to remove debris, then run through high-pressure, high-temperature reactors that break down the leaf structure and isolate cellulose fibers without the chlorine bleaching and sulfate pulping chemicals that conventional paper mills depend on. The fibers get washed, ground into pulp, blended with natural bio-fillers, and rolled into sheets.

The resource comparison is stark. Conventional wood-based paper production consumes approximately 230 cubic meters of water per tonne. Releaf’s process uses 10 to 15, roughly fifteen times less.

It also uses three times less energy overall.

The finished paper biodegrades in 30 to 40 days in soil. Standard paper can take closer to nine months. Each tonne of Releaf paper produced spares approximately 17 trees and repurposes 2.3 tonnes of leaf material that would otherwise have been waste.

The lignin extracted during production, the structural compound that holds plant cells together, goes back to cities as a semi-fertilizer for parks and street trees. The same leaves that came off those trees return to feed them.

Nothing in the cycle is discarded.

Releaf has secured a €2.5 million grant through the European Commission’s EIC Accelerator program and currently has production capacity of up to 5,000 tonnes annually.

Clients include L’Oréal, Samsung, and Google. In 2024, the European Patent Office selected Frechka as a finalist for its Young Inventors Prize, chosen from over 550 applicants.

The paper industry has operated on the same basic logic for centuries: cut trees, pulp them, sell the sheets.

Releaf didn’t invent a new kind of paper so much as it located a feedstock the industry had been walking past every fall. Urban leaf litter is abundant, seasonal, and delivered straight to collection points by the wind. The raw material costs cities money to remove. Turning it into a product worth selling requires only the willingness to treat waste as a starting point rather than an endpoint.

That reorientation, practical, grounded, and without sentiment, is where future innovations are born.

Become a monthly contributor to this publication by upgrading (at the bottom of this page) or leave a one-time tip below. The more space and time I have to write the further we can go to make lasting changes across social media and the world:

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Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

Sources:

- Releaf Paper, official company site: releaf-paper.com

- European Patent Office, Young Inventors Prize 2024 announcement

- World Wildlife Fund, pulp and paper industry data

- Birdsadvice.com, Releaf Paper profile (May 2025)

- ChemEurope.com, EPO finalist coverage (June 2024)

A tent costs hundreds of dollars. A quality fishing rod isn’t cheap. The families who would benefit most from time outside are often the ones who can’t afford to experiment with it.

The Nature Library answers that problem with the same logic public libraries have used for centuries, shared access to things most people can’t or won’t own outright.

The campus will offer borrowable outdoor equipment: tents, fishing gear, and the other physical threshold items that price people out before they ever make it to a trailhead.

This sits alongside 140 acres of actual open land, walking trails, gardens, and hands-on programming designed to teach practical outdoor skills rather than just celebrate nature aesthetically.

Public libraries have always been a bet on the intelligence and capability of ordinary people. You hand them a book, you trust them to engage with it seriously. The Nature Library extends that to the outdoors.

It assumes that if you put quality gear in someone’s hands and land beneath their feet, they’ll know what to do (or they’ll learn). The programming exists for that second group, but the model doesn’t require people to be beginners to use it.

Adams County runs one of the more economically diverse library systems in Colorado, serving communities that don’t always see themselves in outdoor recreation culture.

When the equipment is expensive and the marketing is aspirational, the implicit message is that this lifestyle belongs to people who already have the money to try it.

A borrowable tent sitting on a library shelf says something different.

One hundred and forty acres is enough space to get genuinely lost in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. Trails and gardens are a start, but the acreage is the real asset, the kind of roaming room that teaches something.

You can read about plant identification. You can watch a video on how to set up a tent. Neither of those replaces the hour you spend stumbling through actual terrain trying to figure out where the water runs.

The hands-on programming is designed to close that gap.

Whether it’s edible plant walks, fishing clinics, or basic navigation the format is skill transfer, not spectacle. People leave knowing how to do something they didn’t know before.

I believe social media is the most important innovation since the printing press. It gives us knowledge otherwise overlooked in normal distribution channels. It’s how you're reading about this incredible idea from Adams County, Colorado.

While its importance grows now that many news outlets are being bought out by current administration, social media is not a life. Learn what I mean in my new book:

Dopamine 4u

The counterculture quietly building across communities in the Southeast United States and Colorado understands something that the online conversation has not fully absorbed, that genuine resilience is physical, local, and practical.

People are teaching each other earth skills, grassroots style. Growing food, sourcing clean water, repairing shelter, learning the things that modern convenience made easy to forget.

This is the oldest form of sovereignty a person can hold; the ability to meet your own basic needs regardless of what the political atmosphere decides to do.

Public institutions are most useful when they take something people already know how to want and remove the reasons they can’t have it. Colorado’s Nature Library does that. The outdoors has always been there, now the gear is too.

Become a monthly contributor to this publication by upgrading (at the bottom of this page) or leave a one-time tip below. The more space and time I have to write the further we can go to make lasting changes across social media and the world:

Buy Me A Coffee

Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

SOURCES:

1. Anythink Libraries — Official Nature Library Page

anythinklibraries.org/anythink-nature-library

The primary source. The campus sits on 15 acres within the 140-acre Aylor Open Lands in Thornton, costs $43.4 million to construct, and is projected to open August 2026.

2. Colorado Public Radio — “New public library opening this August will focus on nature education” (March 31, 2026)

cpr.org/2026/03/31/anythink-nature-public-library-opening-thornton

3. Denver Gazette — “Nature Library with outdoor education, nature kits to open in Thornton” (April 3, 2026)

denvergazette.com/2026/04/03/nature-library-with-outdoor-education-nature-kits-to-open-in-thornton

A 2024 study found microplastics in 83% of drinking water tested worldwide. Researchers have located these particles in human brains, reproductive organs, and cardiovascular systems.

Animal studies have already linked them to hormone disruption and reproductive failure. The full picture in humans is still being assembled, but the particles are accumulating faster than the science.

The water treatment industry’s standard response to this problem is aluminum sulfate (alum) a chemical coagulant that causes suspended particles to clump and drop out of solution.

It works.

It also requires mining, industrial processing, and careful dosing, because aluminum at high concentrations carries its own toxicity concerns, including links to neurodegenerative disease. The global south, where water infrastructure is thinnest and the resource gap is widest, is least equipped to deploy it at scale.

The moringa tree has been doing a version of this work for thousands of years.

Moringa oleifera, native to India, grows across the tropics and subtropics with minimal inputs. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans used its seeds to clarify turbid water, a practice likely predating the written records that document it.

The mechanism behind this is a group of proteins in the seeds that act as natural coagulants, drawing fine particles together into aggregates large enough to settle or filter out. Researchers at São Paulo State University (UNESP) have spent the last decade examining how this property holds up against the specific challenge of microplastic contamination.

Their findings, published in ACS Omega in early 2026, are precise.

Saline extract from moringa seeds removed 98.5% of PVC microplastics from low-turbidity drinking water. PVC was selected for a reason, it’s among the most hazardous and most prevalent microplastic type found in drinking water.

The particles tested had a mean size of 18.8 micrometers, roughly a quarter the thickness of an average human hair. At that scale, removal is demanding.

The moringa extract matched aluminum sulfate across standard filtration conditions and outperformed it in alkaline water.

The seeds are renewable, they produce less sludge than alum, they biodegrade. They require no mining and no industrial synthesis. A single seed can treat approximately ten liters of water.

That last figure is the constraint the research team states plainly. Ten liters per seed is workable at the household or village scale. A large urban treatment plant handling millions of liters daily would require a seed supply that strains any reasonable agricultural projection.

The researchers are candid: this technology is best suited, at present, for small communities and regions where access to chemical coagulants is unreliable or unaffordable. For those places (and there are many) moringa offers something the chemical industry does not.

Matthew Campen, professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, reviewed the findings without involvement in the study.

He noted that replacing aluminum-based filtration with a natural coagulant could offer a cheaper and more sustainable pathway for PVC microplastic removal, while also eliminating the environmental costs of aluminum extraction.

He identified open questions: how the extract degrades in treated water, what becomes of the captured PVC, whether the method scales economically, and whether it proves effective against nanoplastics particles roughly 1,000 times smaller than the average human hair, considered the most likely to penetrate human tissue.

Lead researcher Adriano Gonçalves dos Reis said his team expects moringa to perform across multiple plastic types, and that confirming this is the next phase of their research.

There’s urgency.

Human exposure to microplastics and nanoplastics is rising and, as Campen put it, is unlikely to reverse for many decades.

The plastics already dispersed into soils, waterways, and ocean systems represent a contamination legacy that will outlast any single generation’s effort to address it. The policy apparatus built around water safety has not yet caught up to the scale of what has been introduced.

A seed that grows in tropical heat, requires minimal resources to process, and removes nearly all of a target contaminant from drinking water at the quality threshold of industrial chemistry deserves more than a footnote in the literature.

The moringa tree spent millennia serving communities that lacked access to anything better. The research now confirms it can hold its own against the tools that were supposed to replace it.

What was dismissed as folk practice has peer-reviewed numbers behind it. The question for water engineers, public health officials, and rural development organizations is whether they are willing to plant the answer.

Our greatest concern is the lack of concern. As we know from a few weeks ago there were two teens that used a device using acoustics to extract microplastics from water:

In case you missed it… Read Here

Now that we know there’s a problem, we need to find the care and funds to fix it.

These articles have been short and to the point these past few weeks. I’ve been writing and editing a book about dopamine regulation and the importance of social media and the power it gives back to the people.

I feel this work is urgent, so I’ve been putting all my spare time into it.

Should be available May/June.

Stay tuned! Become a monthly contributor to this publication by upgrading (at the bottom of this page) or leave a one-time tip below. The more space and time I have to write the further we can go to make lasting changes across social media and the world:

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Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

SOURCES:

1. The Primary Study — ACS Omega, January 2026

Researchers at UNESP and the University of Birmingham tested moringa seed extract against aluminum sulfate across direct and in-line filtration systems, targeting aged PVC microplastics in low-turbidity drinking water.

2. Microplastics in Human Organs — Journal of Global Health, 2024

A scoping review found microplastics across eight of twelve human organ systems, including the cardiovascular and reproductive systems, and in biological samples ranging from breastmilk to semen.

3. Aluminum Sulfate and Neurotoxicity — PMC Environmental Research, 2020

Epidemiological research has found correlations between aluminum accumulation in the brain and Alzheimer’s disease, and the use of aluminum salts in water treatment has long drawn criticism on health grounds.

They held on. A remnant population survived near Big Sur, and from that narrow thread the species began its slow return.

Today, researchers track populations that have grown over 20% in certain stretches of coastline a number that would have seemed impossible a generation ago.

Part of that recovery runs through the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sea Otter Program. Orphaned pups, animals that would die without intervention, are pulled from the water, raised, trained, and released.

The program teaches them to forage, to dive, to read a kelp forest. Surrogates, actual wild female otters, do much of that teaching. The aquarium understood something simple: a sea otter raised by humans becomes dependent on humans.

So they built a system to make themselves unnecessary.

The ecological stakes are real. Sea otters eat sea urchins. Sea urchins, left unchecked, strip kelp forests to bare rock. Kelp forests absorb carbon, shelter fish, buffer coastlines.

The otter sits at the top of a chain that holds the whole nearshore system together. Fewer otters means more urchins means less kelp means a poorer, quieter ocean. The math runs the other direction too.

California’s coast is not healed. The southern sea otter remains listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and the population still hovers around 3,000 animals which is a fraction of its historic range.

Recovery is not the same as restoration. But the otters are hunting again in waters where they were absent for a century, and the kelp is responding.

That counts for something.

I had to keep this week’s article short. I’ll be going to a wedding this weekend and that’s when I usually have the time to write. Since so many of us are on budgets, I’ll be helping my friends set up and tear down.

We got to have each other’s backs in these trying times.

Become a monthly contributor to this publication by upgrading (at the bottom of this page) or leave a one-time tip below. The more space and time I have to write the further we can go to make lasting changes across social media and the world:

Buy Me A Coffee

Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

SOURCES:

1. Mayer et al. (2019), Oryx — The International Journal of Conservation

“Surrogate rearing a keystone species to enhance population and ecosystem restoration”

(https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/576223)

2. Monterey Bay Aquarium press release

“New Study Confirms Monterey Bay Aquarium Surrogate-Reared Sea Otters Helped Restore Threatened Population in Coastal Estuary” — September 23, 2019

https://newsroom.montereybayaquarium.org/press/new-study-confirms-monterey-bay-aquarium-surrogate-reared-sea-otters-helped-restore-threatened-population-in-coastal-estuary

The problem they set out to solve has been building for decades. Microplastics particles smaller than five millimeters, often invisible to the naked eye have made their way into oceans, drinking water, food supplies, and human blood.

Current filtration methods use physical filters, chemicals, and biological solutions, and they come with real drawbacks: inefficiency, expense, and potential harm to the surrounding environment. Ou and Huang went in a different direction entirely.

Their device fits in your hand, roughly the size of a pen. Inside, a tube and two ultrasound transducer stations generate an acoustic pressure field that holds microplastic particles in place while water flows past them and out the other side.

The physics behind it (known as acoustic force) pushes particles toward pressure nodes within the tube based on their density and compressibility.

Plastic behaves differently under sound than water does, and that difference is exactly what the system exploits. No chemicals enter the water. The process adds nothing and removes only what shouldn’t be there.

In a single-stage setup, the device filtered between 84% and 94% of polyethylene microplastics across flow rates of 10, 20, and 40 milliliters per minute. A two-stage configuration pushed that figure to 94–96%. Comparable results came with polyurethane and polystyrene, both exceeding 95% filtration efficiency.

Those numbers came from a homemade lab, not a university research facility.

Victoria and Justin have been in school together since elementary school. The same sixth-grade science teacher, Ms. Caldwell, put the environment on both of their radars. Victoria’s first science fair project, back then, was on plastic pollution, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch specifically.

The thread from that childhood project to a $50,000 prize at an international competition runs in a straight line.

The win itself was significant. The Gordon E. Moore Award for Positive Outcomes for Future Generations recognizes work that makes an enduring difference for future generations through rigorous scientific inquiry.

Nearly 2,000 students from 9th through 12th grade competed, with more than $9 million awarded across the fair. Ou and Huang also took home a separate $5,000 Earth and Environmental Sciences prize.

Their next target is the laundry machine. Synthetic textiles account for roughly 35% of primary microplastic pollution every wash cycle sheds fibers that flow back into the water supply.

A device integrated into a washing machine’s outflow would address the contamination at the source rather than chasing it downstream.

Huang has said the current prototype filters too little volume to be deployed at scale, and the next phase of work involves understanding the phenomenon well enough to build something larger something suited to water treatment plants, industrial textile facilities, and municipal systems.

Justin has said that skills he picked up as far back as fifth grade, building LED lights with his grandfather, directly translated to constructing the system.

Huang has said that with more professional equipment and access to a proper laboratory, the device could be refined toward large-scale manufacturing. Two teenagers working from their houses achieved 94% filtration efficiency. The ceiling on what this becomes with serious resources behind it remains to be tested.

Just waiting for the U.S. to get their priorities in order.

These articles have been short and to the point past few weeks. I’ve been writing and editing a book about dopamine regulation and the importance of social media and the power it gives back to the people.

I feel this work is urgent, so I’ve been putting all my spare time into it.

Should be available May/June.

Stay tuned! Become a monthly contributor to this publication by upgrading (at the bottom of this page) or leave a one-time tip below. The more space and time I have to write the further we can go to make lasting changes across social media and the world:

Buy Me A Coffee

Your Neighbor,

Benji Faun

SOURCES:

1. FOX 26 Houston — The Woodlands students win $50,000 for microplastics filtration system (May 29, 2024)

2. Grist — A different kind of youth activist: Meet the high schoolers who invented a microplastics solution (June 7, 2024)

3. AsAmNews — 17 year olds win $50K for invention to filter plastics from ocean (July 29, 2024)

4. Free the Ocean / GreaterGood — Texas Teens Turn Sound Waves Into a Weapon Against Microplastics (September 2, 2025)

5. SunnySkyz — Texas Teenagers Win Prestigious Award For Inventing Device That Filters Microplastics From Water

6. Society for Science (referenced across multiple sources as the primary governing body for ISEF and the Gordon E. Moore Award) — societyforscience.org