Standing amid rows of juicy, lime green lettuce and chunky florets of broccoli, Jose Paiz appears as if he could be the owner of a modern, high-tech farm. But the crops thriving here, in the suburbs of Mexico City, are part of a 1,000-year-old tradition. “My ancestors were doing this before even the [Spanish] Conquistadors arrived in Mexico [in 1519],” says Paiz, while crouching down to pick up a handful of powdery soil from the chinampa, or “floating garden,” on which we are both standing. These highly productive man-made island-farms, which can be found floating on lakes across the south of ..read more

Four years ago, Melody Murray started noticing these cute signs in her Portland, Oregon neighborhood of Sullivan’s Gulch. Posted in residents’ front yards, the signs read: “Certified Backyard Habitat” with a drawing of a black, red and white spotted towhee sitting on a leafy branch.  “I didn’t know what they were for,” says the Ohio native who moved to Oregon in 1994. Her curiosity piqued, she went online and quickly found out: The Backyard Habitat Certification began as a joint project of Columbia Land Trust and Portland Audubon (now called the Bird Alliance of Oregon) to encourage urban ..read more

Welcome back to our weekly behind-the-scenes glimpse at what’s getting our team talking. Let us know what you think at info@reasonstobecheerful.world. Good signs Good news for kids (and parents) who are deaf or hard of hearing: Starting this month, episodes of several PBS children’s programs, including Arthur and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, will include American Sign Language interpretations. As a Fast Company story shared by Editorial Director Rebecca Worby explains, while the brand has long offered closed-captioning, this latest accessibility measure is aimed at preschoolers who can’t yet ..read more

Somporn Kaikaew is the owner of Prapapan Farm in Nakhon Pathom, a city 40 miles west of Bangkok. He farms tilapia fish and white shrimp across 160,000 square meters of land. We hitch a ride on the back of Somporn’s pickup truck, driving along the dusty roads that separate the fish farm’s large ponds of water. His farm is tightly operated, with the ponds segregated neatly, along with bird traps and scarecrows to deter predators and sophisticated recirculation systems to keep the water clean. There are thousands of monoculture fish farms in Thailand, but Somporn, 60, has been practicing polycult ..read more

I showed up to my first Dare to Repair Cafe with a notepad and a shopping tote full of holey sweaters. The pad I needed to take notes on the event — a roving ministry, of sorts, for broken household items. The sweaters, on the other hand, I took as mea culpas: I had said I’d bring a faulty Bluetooth speaker in the hopes a volunteer could make it play again. But my husband had already tossed the speaker in the trash. We were, in other words, part of the problem.   “You won’t do that again,” said Don Winkelman, 71, a long-time volunteer for Dare to Repair. “We have people come in one t ..read more

This story was originally published in the Daily Yonder. Adaline Sneak lives at the end of a long, unmarked dirt road in a rural area of the Navajo Nation in Utah. Getting there requires a high clearance vehicle and at least moderate navigation skills. Residents here don’t have typical addresses with street names and house numbers. Until recently, Sneak’s official address was even vaguer than the directions a gas station clerk might give a lost driver — seven miles south of Montezuma Creek, Utah, County Road 410. She can’t get mail with an address like that, nor could someone search direc ..read more

Welcome back to our weekly behind-the-scenes glimpse at what’s getting our team talking. Let us know what you think at info@reasonstobecheerful.world. Greener pastures We all know that spending time in nature is good for us. But when it comes to green spaces, not all neighborhoods are created equal. A story from the Washington Post that Contributing Editor Michaela Haas shared this week digs into local “NatureScores” and what they reveal. Michaela says:   How green is your city? We’ve written about how access to nature improves health. This new app lets you enter your address and you c ..read more

This story is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here. You might have heard that the Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest collection of coral reefs, a natural wonder stretching over 1,400 miles off Australia’s Queensland coast, hosting 400 types of coral and thousands of fish species. Since 1981, it has been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and most of its ecosystem is protected. But you might not know that it is also the stage for daily underwater concerts. Take a dive or listen to marine biologist Steven Simpson’s recordings and you hear grunt fish grunt, shrimps sn ..read more

This is part one of a two-part series. Part two will be published on Monday, April 15. Sperm whales don’t sing melodious, moaning whale songs like their humpback cousins. The biggest predator on the planet communicates in clicks, called codas. Some compare the sounds to popping popcorn or frying bacon in a pan. For CUNY biologist David Gruber, it resembles “morse code or techno music.”  Gruber, the founding president of Project CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, often listens for hours in his New York office to the sperm whale chats his team has recorded in the Eastern Caribbean ..read more

Entrepreneurs Alisha Fredriksson and Roujia Wen spent months in 2022 scouring London for the right space to develop a prototype. Their big idea — to capture carbon emissions from cargo ships by trapping the gas amongst calcium oxide pebbles, through a system fitted on board — required a big, well-equipped space.  The options their search yielded were less than appealing. Large warehouses that had the high ceilings Fredriksson and Wen needed to build their venture, Seabound, were typically empty, with tenants needing to fully equip it themselves with the right machinery, plus the electrici ..read more