When I need to hear that people are good, progress is occurring, and the world is not going to hell in a hand basket, I turn to Future Crunch. It's a newsletter and blog featuring all the global good news that might otherwise go unnoticed. As the Future Crunch team says, "If we want to change the story of the human race in the 21st century we have to change the stories we tell ourselves." Subscription to the Future Crunch newsletter is free, but I pay for a more detailed version in order to support the bloggers. who in turn donate a third of all subscription fees to small charities who do a lot with a little. Everyone wins.
Every year, Future Crunch puts together a list of the most impressive good news you probably didn't hear about. I want to entice you to read all 99 stories with this small smattering:
Global Health: Nine billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine were administered across 184 countries, and almost 60% of the planet has received at least one dose (in four months it’ll be 75%). This is by far the most successful global health initiative ever undertaken. In less than two years not only did we come up with a way to overcome a brand new disease, but rolled it out to more than half of humanity.
Conservation & Regeneration: Two newly created marine protection areas, the North-Atlantic Current and Evlanov Sea Basin (off the coast of Ireland) and the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor (Ecuador, Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica), cover more than a million km² of ocean.
Peace, Tolerance, and Human Rights: After 30 years of denuclearization, Kazakhstan announced that it is officially nuclear-free.
Human Development: In India, about 11.2 million, or 38% of all households in disease-vulnerable regions now have access to clean water, up from 2.9% in 2019, and another 11.8 million now have running tap water, up from less than two million in 2019.
Clean Energy: In the six years since the Paris Agreement, more than three quarters of planned coal projects have been shelved, 44 governments have committed to ending coal, and a further 33 have cancelled their pipelines.
Electric Vehicles: More than a third of new German cars sold are now electric, while in China EV sales have reached nearly 20%. In October, the Tesla Model 3 was the best selling car in Europe (not the best selling electric vehicle — the best selling car, overall), and Hertz bought 100,000 of them for its new fleet, the largest electric car order of all time.
Animals: The EU voted to phase out the use of animals in laboratory experiments, Virginia became the fourth state in America to ban cosmetic animal testing and Mexico became the 41st country to do the same, after Save Ralph, an animated film about a rabbit cosmetic tester, spurred 1.3 million people to petition for new legislation.
The bald eagle has quadrupled its population in the past decade with more than 300,000 birds soaring across American skies.
China doubled the number of wild animals protected under its conservation rules, imposing hefty fines on the trading and consumption of 500 species, and officials announced that giant pandas are no longer endangered.
I hope you'll share this post and these stories. Remember, "If we want to change the story of the human race in the 21st century we have to change the stories we tell ourselves."