It's time for more green happies! Almost essential for me to write this when there are so many things going on out in the world that bring anxiety, sadness, and more, you know?
So here are a few things to CELEBRATE this month...
Fresh from buying our 2022 Chevy Bolt this past week, gotta cheer the fact that Ethiopia has banned gas-powered car imports which has caused sakes of EVs to skyrocket. Reminiscent of how Australia raised the tax on cigarettes to such an extraordinary level that smoking numbers are some of the lowest in the WORLD, the fact that Ethiopia jacked up the taxes/tariffs on gas-powered cars has had an immediate impact. Now if the politicians would use tariffs in THAT manner? That'd be a beautiful thing for the planet.
Black farmers are finally getting paid by the USDA to begin compensating them for the generations of racist policies that they faced, not surprising predominantly in Southern states. "For years, Black farmers have faced discrimination from the USDA and been denied loans and credit at rates exponentially higher than any other demographic...Throughout the 20th century, Black farmers lost an estimated $326 billion worth of land due to discriminatory lending practices from the USDA and the forced sale of Black-owned land." And it's not much better now - NPR's report quoted in the article describes how even now, Black farmers still are approved at the lowest rate of any demographic, which is literally HALF of the 72% of white farmers who are approved. The Biden/Harris administration taking steps in the right direction is to be celebrated.
Kids in Oakland took climate change into their own hands, wading through a ton of red tape to get their school to approve use of existing funds to finance a heat pump to save energy, address the climate crisis, and keep kids safely educated as our seasons brutally affect their physical learning environment.
Two words: Robot Fish. For studying our marine environments in the least intrusive way possible, this is incredibly awesome. Collecting eDNA samples is a very rudimentary task to study our oceans, and these Swiss engineering students are not only helping make the process more effective, but less disruptive to the millions of aquatic life that humans have been ignoring the well being of for centuries. "More advanced tools that can study environments in more detail could be vital for better protecting Earth’s oceans, at a time when ocean habitats are facing unprecedented threats from climate change, overfishing and other human activity."
And finally, salmon are given a fighting chance once again in Southern Oregon, after a tremendous fight over the past century led by the local indigenous communities. Klamath River dams have started coming down, finally throwing a life preserver to our salmon populations that greed helped drive in the first half of the 20th century. "The Klamath was once known as the third-largest salmon-producing river on the West Coast. But after power company PacifiCorp built the dams to generate electricity between 1918 and 1962, the structures halted the natural flow of the river and disrupted the lifecycle of the region’s salmon, which spend most of their life in the Pacific Ocean but return up their natal rivers to spawn." I'll leave the video below to describe the efforts - efforts generations have fought for, and who deserve so much of the credit. Remember too, that the Biden/Harris administration's agencies are the ones who finally listened, and approved the plan to remove these wildly destructive dams. We MUST continue to increase the environmental advocacy at all levels of our community, state and federal government if we want more to happen...VOTE BLUE.
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