177: The Art of Maintenance
This is the members only edition of Future Crunch, a weekly roundup of good news, mindblowing science, and the best bits of the internet (not necessarily in that order). One third of your subscription fee goes to charity.
Good news you probably didn't hear about
Humanity is making steady progress towards the elimination of mother-to-child transmission of hepatitis B. By 2020, 190 of the 194 WHO member states had introduced a universal infant HepB vaccination, compared with 186 in 2016, and 110 states now provide a birth dose to all newborns, a 10% increase from 100 in 2016. WHO
South Nigeria has successfully eliminated maternal and neonatal tetanus (MNT) thanks to increased vaccination rates and skilled birth attendees. MNT is often caused by unclean abortion or delivery, and infections during the first 28 days of life. South-East and South-West Nigeria achieved elimination in 2017 and 2019, respectively. WHO
A landmark ruling in India has expanded the scope of the country's abortion laws to allow single women to end a 24 week pregnancy if they are a minor, or survivors of sexual violence. India currently allows abortion for all women until 20 weeks of pregnancy. Independent
Secondary school dropout rates among 11-14 year old girls in India have declined to their lowest level ever, from 18.4% in 2017 to 13.7% in 2021. That equates to almost two million more girls staying in school each year, thanks to a government scheme offering free uniforms and textbooks, sanitary pads and self-defence training. The Print
A joint study by the World Bank and a number of government bodies in China has shown that in the past 40 years, the world's most populous country lifted 800 million people out of poverty, contributing to three-quarters of global poverty reduction during that time.
Indonesia has boosted protections for fishing workers, regulating the placement, payment, and treatment of crews aboard foreign commercial and fishing vessels. The regulations have been welcomed by marine activists who have campaigned for years against the twin practices of forced labour and illegal fishing. Mongabay
British Columbia has become the first Canadian province to end immigration detention in jails. Over the past five years, hundreds of immigrants have been incarcerated in BC with no legal limit on duration. The victory is thanks to the human rights campaign #WelcomeToCanada that launched last October. HRW
Today’s decision is a momentous step. This is a true human rights victory, one which upholds the dignity and rights of people who come to Canada in search of safety or a better life.
Ketty Nivyabandi, Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada
Two wins for LGBTQ+ rights. Andorra has approved a new family code that eliminates legal differences between married heterosexual couples and gay and lesbian couples in civil partnerships, and the Caribbean nations of Antigua and Barbuda have decriminalized gay sex, removing a colonial era law.
The difference between crime rates in New York and its residents' perception of them has never been wider. Widespread anxiety obscures the fact that crime is actually at decades-long lows. The reason for the mismatch? Views on crime are influenced more by what people see in the news than by hard numbers. Bloomberg
The only home we've ever known
A milestone five decades in the making, the UN General Assembly has declared access to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment to be a universal human right. This is a profound shift in the way we see ourselves, and a crucial part of the moral framework we need if our species is going to succesfully make it out of our industrial phase.
From a foothold in the 1972 Stockholm Declaration, the right has been integrated into constitutions, national laws and regional agreements. Today’s decision elevates the right to where it belongs: universal recognition.
Inger Andersen, United Nations Environment Chief
A new electricity law in Bosnia has banned the construction of small hydroelectric power plants, saving the country’s 244 rivers from over 350 planned projects. The victory comes after a decade of court battles and protests by Balkan activists to protect Europe’s last wild rivers. ABC
Meat consumption has fallen by 12% in Germany in the last decade, from 63 kg per person in 2011, to 55 kg today. Understanding the causes behind Germany's newfound love for plant-based food could be critical in figuring out how to slow climate change - meat and dairy account for around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Vox
Colombia has launched a $245-million initiative to support the creation, expansion, and improvement of 32 million hectares of protected areas in the next decade. The country contains around 10% of the world’s biodiversity and the project aims to create over 3 million hectares of new protected areas and biological corridors, and 15 million hectares of marine protected areas. Mongabay
Non-profit organisation The Ocean Cleanup has officially removed more than 100,000 kg of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The milestone is thanks to Jenny, a device that has swept over 3000 km2 of ocean, capturing plastic and funnelling it into a net. A 1,000 Jennys, and the Garbage Patch is gone.
Tigers are having a good year. Officials in Nepal just announced that numbers have more than doubled in a bit more than a decade, and last week, a wildlife group reported there are as many as 5,500 tigers prowling jungles and swamps across Asia, a 40% jump from its 2015 assessment. WaPo
Jaguars have been born in an Argentine wetland 70 years after they went extinct from the area, and in Brazil, the Spix's macaw has made its return to the wild, two decades after it was last seen in nature. These kind of reintroduction efforts aren't just symbolic - the other animals and plants that live in the associated conservation areas also benefit.
What began as a defensive measure to protect Toronto from extreme flooding has evolved into one of the world's most ambitious urban resilience projects. 600 acres of Canada's largest city are being reshaped into 64 acres of parks, 75 acres of wildlife habitat, a new 1.5 km river course and eventually, housing to accommodate 20,000 residents. Bloomberg
We’re really using it as a catalyst for city building. We’re building something that’s very natural and environmental, but its location and its plan are integrated completely with the urban renewal plans for the area.
Christopher Glaisek, Waterfront Toronto
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
The big news in energy circles this week is Joe Manchin's U-turn on climate and energy. There's an inside account over here. We're holding off on the celebrations (it still has to pass Congress) but if it does, we'll probably have to issue a mea culpa on last week's edition.
In the meantime, did you hear lawmakers in Germany just approved their own version of a Green New Deal? $180 billion to be spent between 2023 and 2026 to accelerate the shift to an economy that’s cleaner and less dependent on Russia for energy supplies. Bloomberg
Spain's energy minister says Europe is close to a game-changing overhaul of its power market that separates the pricing of dirty energy and clean energy, Ireland has reached a deal with its farmers to cut agricultural emissions by 25% by 2030, and in Greece, solar energy is transforming the country's coal-laden 'Valley of Tears.'
In case you missed it, green hydrogen now costs less than fossil gas in eight European countries. You have to hand it to Putin - his determination to speed up humanity's decarbonization efforts knows no bounds. WSJ
German steel producer Salzgitter has committed $723 million to the first stage of decarbonizing its business — representing 1% of Germany’s carbon emissions — by 2033. It's the largest investment in green steel to date (larger investments have been announced by rival steelmakers LKAB, SSAB and ArcelorMittal, but that funding has yet to be approved). Recharge
India's state-run energy transition company is planning a $10 billion tender for 50,000 electric buses to help the world's third largest emitter decarbonize public transport. Its managing director, Mahua Acharya, says the country could electrify all its two-wheelers and public buses within the next seven years. Bloomberg
Porsche says that its electric cars will be as profitable as its conventional cars within two years. Automakers have long lamented the thin profit margins on EVs, which have always been more expensive to make and held less appeal to customers. Now though, with manufacturing facilities scaling up and consumer interest on the rise, things are starting to change. Yale360
In Norway, new car registrations are now 89.9% fully electric and 11.2% hybrid (and plugin vehicles are covering more ground than ICE counterparts). In the Netherlands, plugins now account for 34% of all new car sales, and Volvo says plugins accounted for 31% of sales in 2Q 2022, up from 24% last year.
China sold 565,000 new plugin vehicles in June this year - 28% of market share. Fully electric vehicles alone accounted for 22% of new auto sales. If electrification continues at this pace, sales of new cars in the largest automotive market in the world will be majority electric within the next three years. Clean Technica
Take a moment to let that one sink in.
Indistinguishable from magic
Two weeks in, and the most complicated machine ever built is already reshaping astronomy. A few choice quotes from this fantastic piece in Quanta.
It’s better than I imagined and it’s only the beginning.
We’ve never seen it like this before on a global scale. That’s an extraordinary thing to see.
The issue now is keeping pace with the constant barrage of science coming down from a machine so complex yet faultless it almost defies belief that it was built by human brains.
It’s working, and it’s insane.
Speaking of human brains, until recently we had only figured out the shape of about 0.01%, or 190,000, of all known proteins. This week, in one of the greatest scientific leaps in our lifetimes, Deepmind unveiled a public database of 200 million protein structures, nearly all the proteins known to science. One of the 'grand challenges' of biology has essentially been solved in just a few years.
A Dutch biotech company has unveiled its inaugural lab-grown pork sausage - the first synthetic meat product that doesn't rely on using fetal bovine serum harvested from cattle fetuses. Instead, the company is touting the use of what it calls opti-ox technology, based on a single cell from the umbilical cord of an animal. A big step closer to true 'cruelty-free' meat. Tech Crunch
Japanese scientists have successfully cloned 75 healthy mice from freeze-dried skin cells collected from both male and female donors. Many of the offspring went on to have pups of their own. With a maximum success rate of 5%, the technique is far from efficient, but does carve a path towards the bigger picture: our ability to store and potentially revive genetic variations of near-extinct species. Singularity Hub
MIT engineers have invented a new, stamp-sized adhesive patch that sticks to skin and can provide continuous ultrasound imaging of internal organs for 48 hours. In demonstrations, the devices produced live, high-resolution images of major blood vessels and deeper organs such as the heart, lungs, and stomach, even as volunteers moved. Guardian
Information superhighway
Stewart Brand has written a gripping account of the first ever around-the-world solo sailboat race of 1968, centred around the theme of 'maintenance', and we can't recommend it enough. Extra points here for the format, which allows readers to suggest edits. Seems obvious when you see it done like this, but it's a great way of using the internet. Works in Progress
This list in Slate of the 50 best deaths in fiction is immensely satisfying - there's something here for everyone. Where else are you going to find Macbeth, Final Fantasy VII, Scream, Little Women, Pac-Man, Rashomon, Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Watership Down, the Left Hand of Darkness and The Little Prince in one place?
Arthur C Brooks just reached a century of columns as the 'happiness' correspondent for the Atlantic. We've featured his work a few times here. To mark the occasion, he's created what he calls the three maxims of happiness, the most important, big truths he's learned that transcend circumstance and time, guiding us across all of life’s events, from the trivial to the momentous.
Great newsletter on psychedelics. We hunted around for a while for something like this - everything else was either too scientific, too commercial, or too woo-woo. This one, which comes from the newly established U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, and is written by award-winning science journalist Jane C. Hu, strikes the perfect balance. The Microdose
Two good perspective shifts here. The first is from Zeynep Tufekci, who points out that even though today's mass protests are bigger than in the past, they're less effective because they rely on the internet, rather than long-term organizing. The second is from Grace Rubenstein, who makes the simple yet profound point that the real promise of longevity science is not a longer life—it’s a better one.
And finally, is this the best photo ever taken of Amelia Earheart?
Humankind
Guardians of nature
Meet 32 year old Alexandra Narváez and 29 year old Alex Lucitante, two young members of the Cofán community in Ecuador who led their forest dwelling tribe to a historic legal victory to protect their ancestral way of life from the impact of mining.
Alexandra and Alex grew up with the Amazon as their backyard. Their families, both part of the wider Cofán tribe, have lived in Ecuador’s northern Amazon forest for centuries, maintaining the delicate balance of the land that has served as home, supermarket, and pharmacy. However, since the discovery of oil and gold a century ago, their territory has been threatened by mining without any protection from the government.
In 2017 the community formed a land patrol, La Guardia, to monitor mining activity within their territory. Alexandra was the first woman to join the patrol and the young mother of two quickly emerged as a leader, driven by the realisation that her future grandchildren might never experience a healthy forest. When the patrol discovered heavy machinery along the banks of the Aguarico River, Alexandra raised the alarm and uncovered 20 large scale mining concessions, with more pending, that the Ecuadoran government had issued without consultation.
This is where Alex came in. Descended from a long line of spiritual leaders, he was practicing to be a shaman but also had one foot in the modern world as a law student. When there was no response from government offices, Alex and Alexandra united their communities and took the government to court. The young leaders combined their ancestral knowledge with modern tools; using mapping technology, camera traps and drones to document the impact of mining and rally international support through social media. Their strategy played a crucial role in the community's success.
In 2018 the Cofán won the landmark case - 52 mining concessions were cancelled, ensuring the protection of 79,000 acres of rainforest. But Alexandra and Alex didn’t stop there. In February 2022, they secured a larger win when Ecuador’s Constitutional Court guaranteed, for the first time in the country, Indigenous peoples the right the right to decide what happens on their lands.
Since the victories, Alexandra has inspired five more women to join the patrol and both she and Alex have expanded their mission to help Indigenous communities around the world preserve their ancestral lands and cultures.
We want to invite other Indigenous communities in Ecuador and the world to join these collective fights happening in Amazonia. We're dreaming of a world where our communities — with their knowledge and culture — can keep living.
Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed this edition. We'll see you next week :)
Much love,
Gus, Amy and the rest of the FC team