Yahoo News The Upside's best things that happened in 2019
How’s it been for you? Annus horribilis or golden year? We’d love to hear from Upside fans about their 2019: what was the best thing that happened? The funniest thing you witnessed? The very best joke? The most promising dab of progress that you came across? Anything that made it good to feel alive?
Email us at the usual address (theupside@theguardian.com). We’ll showcase a sample in next week’s festive edition, the last newsletter of the year. The best email wins a hole punch.
For us, the most positive things of 2019 included:
• The school strikes and mounting awareness of the climate emergency.
• The fact that more people voted in elections than ever before.
• The sudden awareness of the power of the tree.
• The great progress in the battle against Aids and malaria.
• The growing consumer backlash against environmental waste.
• The cautious optimism about ketamine as a treatment for psychological disorders.
• The numbers of companies successfully experimenting with four-day working weeks.
• Upsider responses to our requests for unsung heroes – we will publish this as an alternative honours list between Christmas and new year.
As for this week, an eclectic flurry of uplifting journalism, including:
• Why Dutch prisons are so empty. Three-minute read.
• A room with a view (to a career in journalism). One-minute read.
• Young women take over Finnish government. Even shorter.
• A new country for the Pacific? Ninety-second read.
• The town giving families $500 a month. Two-minute read.
Lucky numbers
The world will be 1C cooler by mid-century than it would have been had ozone-damaging CFCs not been banned under the 1987 Montreal protocol. So it IS possible …
Oh, and as pointed out by Beautiful News, everything that kills children is in decline.
What we liked
In a week, a year, a decade of division, kudos to the BBC’s Crossing Divides series, which found 10 reasons why Brits are actually not that divided.
We also liked this New York Times piece about people hosting recently released prisoners to give them a stable re-entry into civilian life.
What we heard
Our recent piece on biochar generated a prodigious response from you lot.
New Yorker Miguel Hoffman wrote in from El Salvador:
Biochar can be a wonderful component to a climate change mitigation program. However, it does not make sense, as some would suggest, to grow, kill and then char trees. So, we ask, what other sources could be pyrolysed and charred? The answer just might be at our fingertips and within reach all over the impoverished world.
Throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, stagnant or semi-stagnant lakes, lagoons, canals and reservoirs have become home to massive and persistent infestations of the beautiful violet flowering plant the floating water hyacinth. Why does it reproduce at such great velocity? Because nature assigned it a double role: to suction every type of contaminant in its midst and to absorb all the carbon dioxide it possibly can. Essentially, its purpose in this world is to decontaminate waterways and decarbonise the atmosphere. Not bad for such a maligned “pest”!
There is an added bonus to the water hyacinth. The plant has high levels of cellulose, oils and lipids and low level of lignin. The cellulose, oils and lipids are the components for biofuels. The low level of lignin makes the other components accessible for production of a perfect substitute for fossil fuels.
Cyrus Forouhar wrote in on a recently revived laptop:
I have an idea for what should be covered: The short lifespan of smartphones and laptops that invariably end up in a tip because manufacturers make it hard, or very expensive, to change batteries and carry out repairs, in the expectation that consumers will throw them away and upgrade to the latest offering.
Case in point: I have a five-year-old MacBook that was reborn when Apple fitted a new (and expensive) battery. I am pretty sure that in a few years when I have to change the battery again, I will not be able to find a replacement anywhere and a perfectly good machine will end up in a council dump, a huge and unnecessary waste of materials and resources.
We need to dramatically slow down strip mining the planet to produce new shiny gadgets.
And Bev Colgan from the western US got in touch early with her Christmas wish:
Hello Upside Santa,
What I would like from you this year is to free up a few elves to start a project that gives low- or no-cost loans and knowhow to people in working-class neighbourhoods like mine for little solar projects. We have so much sun out here in the western US! And here in my neighbourhood are plenty of people who have the skills to build a solar car port to charge an electric car, or install a few solar panels to heat a garage/workshop in the winter, or put in an a solar-powered attic exhaust fan.
But they, and I, don’t have the extra couple thousand bucks to pay for materials, or any clue, really, about how to successfully set about it. And most of my neighbours believe that solar is very expensive and only for the rich people.
I’d love for your elves to do a successful pilot project and then watch the ripple effect. Saving the planet – and money – is always good news.
Finally, Dieter Lehmkuhl wrote in from Berlin:
I just read your article Good company: the capitalists putting purpose ahead of profit. Maybe you also might want to cover, if you haven’t done yet, the economy of the common good (Gemeinwohl-Ökonomie), which is a concept worthwhile to consider as an ethical and sustainable business.
Where was the Upside?
At the Bridge Builder Awards, which doled out $1m in seed funding for ideas to help refugees and displaced people. Read about one of the winners here:
Also at the British Journalism Awards, which rewarded the brilliance of my colleagues Marina Hyde, Simon Hattenstone, Daniel Lavelle and Rob Davies with prizes.
