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.
Give a damn
We're so thrilled about this one. Introducing MiracleFeet, an amazing charity we recently discovered that's on a mission to create universal access for treatment of clubfoot, one of leading causes of physical disability in the world. Founded in 2010 by parents of children born with clubfoot, they use a simple, low cost treatment to give kids the extraordinary gift of lifelong mobility, independence, and opportunity.
We are sending them US$5,000 to cover the cost of 250 braces, made of shoes that clip into a plastic bar. They're currently used at clinics in 19 of the countries where this charity works. These ones are going specifically to children in the Philippines. Thank you to all of you, our paying subscribers, for making this possible. That's 250 lives changed. Check out this video and then go look at the site, we promise it will give you all the feels.
Good news you probably didn't hear about
The world has gained a new weapon in the war on malaria, among the oldest known and deadliest of infectious diseases. In a momentous and long-awaited decision, the World Health Organization has approved the rollout of a malaria vaccine (the first ever for a parasitic disease) to protect children in Africa. NYT
India has the largest public health insurance scheme in the world, providing 500 million people with free healthcare. Since its launch in 2018, over 20 million treatments worth approximately $3.5 billion have been provided for the country's poorest citizens. In a new update announced this week, transgender operations and treatments will now be covered too.
More than 110,000 landmines covering 135 km2 were destroyed globally last year, a new annual record. Four of the world’s most heavily mined countries - Lao PDR, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq - accounted for 95% of the clearances, an exceptional achievement, especially against the backdrop of the pandemic. Over a million landmines have been cleared in the last decade. ReliefWeb
Police in Tehran will no longer arrest women for failing to observe the Islamic dress code in place since the 1979 revolution. The announcement signals an easing of punishments, as called for by young and reform-minded Iranians who helped re-elect President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate, earlier this year. AP
Bad news travels, good news doesn’t. When Afghanistan’s government collapsed, the whole world watched. But when Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority country, produces the planet's most effective democratically elected leader – President Joko Widodo – almost no one outside the archipelago knows the story. Project Syndicate
Brazil’s highest court has upheld a ban on missionaries entering reserves that are home to isolated and recently contacted Indigenous people. The decision comes in response to a lawsuit filed by Indigenous organizations against a law passed in July 2020 that allowed missionaries to remain inside reserves despite the pandemic, in violation of Brazil’s official policy in place since 1987. Mongabay
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
A huge domino just went down. Guangdong, China's most populous province and one of its most industrialized, has banned the construction of coal plants in the Pearl River Delta, the first ever crackdown on coal by a major Chinese province. Crude oil processing will also be forbidden, along with other industries like cement, plate glass, chemical pulping, raw leather tanning and steel. SP Global
Another North American pipeline down too. The proposed PennEast Pipeline from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, one of the last remaining projects set to pull gas from the biggest gas shale basin in the United States, has been cancelled due to legal and regulatory challenges. Reuters
California just passed a law requiring the carbon emissions per ton of cement produced to be cut by 40% percent below 2019 levels by 2035. It's the first time ever a US state has required specific reductions from an economic sector, and puts it right out at the front of the global effort to decarbonize the cement industry. Canary
The global steel industry is moving far quicker than expected in tackling the challenge of decarbonization. "The steel industry is now at a tipping point. For years, we've watched small pilot projects demonstrate cleaner steelmaking processes, but they weren't really moving the needle. Now it’s different." Canary
The International Council on Mining and Metals, one third of the global mining and metals industry, has committed to net zero direct and indirect carbon emissions by 2050 or sooner. Made up of 28 of the world's biggest mining companies, with 650 sites in over 5o countries, it sends a clear signal on where things are heading for the rest of the industry. Reuters
Seems like everyone's scrambling to get their commitments in before COP26. The International Air Transport Association, which groups 290 airlines, including dozens of state carriers, has also committed to net zero by 2050, in a move that ties the sector's climate action to the 2015 Paris accord for the first time ever. Reuters
The European Banking Authority says it's seeing clear signs that banks are dropping clients that pose a climate risk, and redirecting capital away from polluting industries. Loans account for two-thirds of the $22 trillion in exposure that the world's biggest financial institutions have to carbon intensive industries. Once they start drying up, things get very ugly for fossil fuels. Bloomberg
The only home we've ever known
The US government is reinstating environmental protections for three major national monuments ripped away by the Trump administration. The Bears Ears National Monument and the Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, and the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts off the coast of New England, America's first marine monument, will all have their boundaries restored. NYT
A federal judge has overturned the US Bureau of Land Management’s decision to lease 58,000 acres of public land in western Colorado for oil and gas extraction, agreeing with conservation groups that fracking and drilling will worsen air quality and threaten public health. “This is a huge win for public health and the wild places of Colorado that deserve protection." CBL
Three years ago, Pakistan launched the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami, a plan to reforest vast swathes of one of the most deforested countries in the world. Critics scoffed, but they're being forced to eat their words: the country is on track to plant 1.5 billion trees by the end of 2021, and is also conducting one of the biggest mangrove restoration projects in the world. Dunya
Pakistan's efforts haven't gone unnoticed. Mongolia, another country suffering from severe desertification, just announced it's going to spend around 1% of its GDP to plant a billion trees by 2030. Montsame
An ambitious project to create a 50 million tree corridor between Liverpool and Hull in northern England has taken a step forward after the government pledged £15m to the cause. That's enough for a million trees in the next year, on top of the three million already planted as part of the Northern Forest initiative. BBC
California has passed the strictest recycling law in the US, requiring manufacturers to ensure items with the 'chasing arrows' recycling symbol are actually recyclable. The bill also strengthens rules for what can be used in compost to prevent soil contamination, and requires labels to inform consumers what can be composted too. AP
After a decade long battle by environmentalists, the EU has officially opened its courts to environmental challenges, allowing NGOs and individuals to contest many more decisions that break European environmental law, and hold the continent's institutions to account on climate change and biodiversity loss. Euro Reporter
A vast area of the Atlantic Ocean off the south west coast of Ireland is to be designated as a marine protected area in an international effort to protect 5 million seabirds across 22 different species. The MPA, known as the North-Atlantic Current and Evlanov Sea Basin, will protect an area of 641 612 km2. Irish Times
Indistinguishable from magic
A French company is using an enzyme derived from bacteria to recycle PET, one of the most common single-use plastics, used to make most plastic bottles. Their reactor holds about 100,000 bottles at a time, breaking them down into PET's original components, ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid, in about 16 hours. MIT
A team of music historians, composers and computer scientists have completed Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony, after training a machine on the composer's entire body of work, and then letting it loose on his unfinished sketches. A full recording is set to be released on October 9th, the same day as the world premiere performance in Bonn, Germany. Smithsonian
First games, then protein folding, now weather. Deepmind might have just ruined the UK's national pastime, after devising a new machine learning model that can predict whether it’s going to rain 5 to 90 minutes in advance. When compared against the best current techniques, meteorologists ranked it first 88% of the time. Venture Beat
Four years ago, international group of 250 scientists from 45 institutions across 3 continents set out to catalog the diverse cells types in human, monkey and mouse brains. The first installment of this ambitious endeavor is now complete, with a comprehensive mapping of the wiring and cell types of the mammalian primary motor cortex, down to the molecular level. Nature
The Russians have beaten Tom Cruise to space. Earlier this week a Soyuz rocket carried director Klim Shipenko and actress Yulia Peresild to the ISS to spend 12 days filming The Challenge, the first feature-length film shot with professional actors in space. Inevitably, there's also a reality show. NYT
The last spot in Shenzhen's business district will be occupied by a 'farmscraper' after a group of Italian architects won with a design straight out of Elysium. The 51-storey Jian Mu Tower will supposedly produce 270 tons of food a year, enough for 40,000 people, creating "a self-sustained food supply chain that manages cultivation, harvest, sale and consumption all within one building." Dezeen
The information superhighway is still awesome
Last week we gave you the bull case on clean meat. This week, an excellent reality check from food journalist Joe Fassler. Cultivated meat will never be economically viable for the same reason that single-celled organisms evolved after 500 million years on earth but it took another three billion for animals to appear, and that King Kong and Godzilla don't exist IRL. Counter
Laura Olin is a veteran digital campaigner who ran social media strategy for the Obama campaign in 2012. She has a great weekly newsletter, comprising "lovely and/or meaningful things in the form of links, notes, and updates" and we cannot recommend it enough. Short, sweet and always surprising.
The academic publishing industry does the exact opposite of what the name suggests. Its impossibly high paywalls keep scientific information out of the population’s hands, preventing the dissemination of scholarly work. It's an inexcusable problem in the age of the internet, and this article really nails it, with bonus points for mentions of Sci Hub and Aaron Swartz. Palladium
Love this idea. Clive Thompson, one of tech's most thoughtful and experienced journalists, says it's time to 'rewild your attention.' Hunt down the idiosyncratic posts and videos that people are publishing, often to tiny and niche audiences. It’s decidedly unviral culture — but more likely to plant in your mind the seed of a rare, new idea. UX Collective
After months of searching for the right set and setting, Joseph Dana took a heroic dose of psilocybin and has written up his experience. It's a really beautiful journey through hyperspace, consciousness and healing, and highly recommended for anyone curious about psychedelic therapies, which we think are as big a revolution in healthcare as genetics or immunology.
In case you missed it, a new single and music video from the greatest band of the early 21st century. Pitchfork
Humankind
Meet Marthe Wandou, a 58 year old lawyer and activist in Cameroon who has spent decades fighting to protect women and girls against sexual violence, and helping survivors heal trauma and rebuild their lives.
Born and raised in Kaélé, a village in the far north of Cameroon, Marthe witnessed first-hand the brutal reality for women in her region. “There was not a single girl who had not experienced, at least once, gender violence.” Against all odds, Marthe became the first girl in her village to attend university, thanks to a supportive family who valued her education.
Graduating with a law degree, Marthe started her career in the development sector and realised that to improve conditions for women, she needed to tackle deep-rooted cultural practices and stereotypes around girls. In 1998 she founded a model of community-based child protection, in which families, teachers and community leaders are trained to prevent and report violence, and girls are provided education, life skills support and trauma counselling.
In 2013, when Boko Haram began abducting school-aged girls in the region, forcing them into marriage and using them as suicide bombers, Marthe’s mission became critically important. Survivors had been raped, beaten and often left alone to care for children because their husbands had been killed. Through Marthe’s organisation, they received counselling, community support and were taught technical skills like tailoring, carpentry and computer science to help them gain financial independence.
More than 50,000 girls and women have benefited from Marthe’s work and her organisation has helped gradually eradicate the practice of early marriage in Cameroon. With increased awareness, more women are reporting violence and families and traditional community leaders are now engaged to help survivors of sexual violence seek justice and a chance to rebuild their lives.
“We work so that they can heal these traumas and reach autonomy, and resilience. Before, when you were a victim of violence, you didn’t explain it, not even at home. That's the story of my life, I am also part of them.”
We're all done here, thanks for reading, we love you all for making the donations possible. Look after yourselves out there, we'll see you next week.
Much love,
Gus, Amy and the rest of the FC team
What did you think of this edition?
