This week’s Upside comes to you from the past. I’ve been buried in the Guardian archive all week, looking for treasures from yesteryear. My rather facile thought was that if there is not much encouragement in the news at the moment, perhaps we can find some in the “olds”.
The victory over fascism, the civil rights movement, the stunning rise in prosperity, longevity, health, the long struggle for women’s rights … Perhaps it’s only when you take the long view that you can see progress in all its varied forms.
Despite everything, we must be grateful to be alive today, rather than, say in 1921, when disease, postwar trauma and nasty food made things pretty glum (life expectancy was about 50), or 1951, when prejudice and bigotry was still the rule, not the exception. Our current era is so maligned, and yet a child born today still has a better chance of leading a long, fulfilling, agreeable life than at any point in history.
And for those anxious that Covid could yet upend this progressive view of history, there is yet more comfort from the archives. An edition from October 1979 reported on a precedent that we can all take encouragement from.
The world has made great strides forward in the past 50 years against a range of pathogens and illnesses. But the vaccination programme to vanquish smallpox was probably the biggest of them all, as our then reporter Iain Guest wrote.
“The 10-year programme was a model of international cooperation,” he wrote. “It brought wholehearted support from donors (led by the US and USSR), urgency and commitment from governments, who committed tens of thousands of health workers, and strong leadership from WHO, which fielded 687 international staff from 60 countries.”
So we’ve done it before. We can do it again.
Otherwise, this week we were greatly cheered by:
• A plan to save the great white rhino using stem cells – five-minute read
• A plan to protect 30% of Earth’s land and oceans – two-minute read
• A plan to create 750,000 jobs in Nigeria – 90-second read
• A plan to turn the Champs-Élysées into an “extraordinary garden” – 90-second makeover
• The homelessness plan that worked – three-minute read
Basically, a lot of plans out there …
Lucky numbers
US greenhouse gas emissions fell by more than 10% in 2020 as a result of the pandemic.
More than $14bn has been pledged to accelerate the building of a “great green wall” across the arid north African Sahel to restore 100m hectares of trees and grassland, capturing 250m tonnes of carbon and creating 10m jobs, according to the French president, Emmanual Macron.
What we liked
Buildings made of wood might sound quite medieval, but “plyscrapers” are the latest word in construction, according to this piece in the Good News Network.
Rivers full of fish might also sound like something from the dim and distant past, but it can be done, as one remote village discovered.
Oh, and this from Wired is cool, though I’m not sure I fully understand it: generating electricity from the thermal energy in the oceans.
Finally, we are greater admirers of Adam Vaughan’s Fix the Planet newsletter over at New Scientist – a weekly dose of well-reported solutions to confront the climate crisis. Give it a go – it’s utterly free and equally great.
What we heard
Nina Meilof got in touch from Amsterdam on the subject of Christmas trees:
The biggest tree in Amsterdam is now a toy for the elephants in the zoo. Other trees are collected separately from the trash and will be composted. In other places they even have fields to replant trees with roots to pick up every year.
And Judith Neal wrote in from Wisconsin with the kind of feedback we are always happy to receive:
Thank you so much for The Upside! It has been enormously helpful in staying sane during these insane times (I live in the States – what can I say?). I periodically send out an email to family and friends, and often find uplifting pieces from The Upside – funny and heartwarming stories that help me keep my life balanced. I hope that you can continue The Upside for a long time!
Feel free to write in any time praising us to the skies.
Where was The Upside?
With Vitamin D, which I’d like to propose as molecule of the week. The question is, could it help us in the struggle with Covid-19?
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