Inspirational News Articles

Excerpts of key news articles on

Below are highly engaging excerpts of key inspirational news articles reported in the mainstream media. Links are provided to the full, original news articles. If any link fails to function, read this webpage. These inspirational articles are listed by order of importance. You can also explore the news articles listed by order of the date of the article or by the date posted. Enjoy the rich inspiration!

Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

In December 2016, William Akley sat down in his sprawling headquarters for the biggest gas utility in Massachusetts, Eversource. Across the table were three women from a group that had become increasingly troublesome to his company. The group was Mothers Out Front, and it had been doing things like dressing up in orange costumes depicting gas flames and putting big signs where the company's natural gas lines leaked into the air. As the meeting started, Zeyneb Magavi and each of the other mothers calmly explained their passion to Mr. Akley: "I have three kids," Ms. Magavi said. "I'm worried about climate change. And I'm worried about their future." It was the start of an unlikely partnership that eventually became an audacious idea: to use heat from underground – instead of natural gas – to both cool and heat homes and buildings. The test of that idea is now blinking on in Framingham, Massachusetts. Eversource workers have buried a mile-long loop of plastic pipe underground ... to collect geothermal energy. They are now connecting the loop to heat and cool 36 buildings – homes, a fire station, and businesses. It is the first U.S. trial of this innovative technology being provided to an entire neighborhood by a major utility. It's the kind of scaled-up model that could bring a wholesale change to the nation's infrastructure, replacing natural gas just as natural gas supplanted coal and oil in much of the United States.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on technology for good.

Tangles of grapes and blackberries grow in clusters along a trellis. Leafy rows of basil, sweet potatoes and mesclun spring from raised garden troughs. Most striking are corridors of elevated planters stacked four high, like multilevel bunk beds, filled with kale, cabbage, arugula, various lettuces, eggplants, tatsoi and collard greens. Run by a gardening wizard named Jamiah Hargins, this wee farm in the front yard of his bungalow provides fresh produce for 45 nearby families, all while using a tiny fraction of the water required by a lawn. At just 2,500 square feet, this farm forms the heart of Mr. Hargins's nonprofit, Crop Swap LA, which transforms yards and unused spaces into microfarms. It runs three front yard farms that provide organic fruits and vegetables each week to 80 families, all living in a one-mile radius, and often with food insecurity. Rooted in the empowering idea that people can grow their own food, Crop Swap LA has caught on, with a wait list of 300 residents wanting to convert their yards into microfarms. The mini farms bring environmental benefits, thanks to irrigation and containment systems that capture and recycle rain. That allows the farms to produce thousands of pounds of food without using much water. "Some people pay $100 a month on their water because they're watering grass, but they don't get to eat anything, no one gets any benefit from it," Mr. Hargins said. "I can't think of a more generous gift to give to the community than to grow delicious, naturally organic food for the direct community," [says Crop Swap LA subscriber] Katherine Wong. "This is one of the noblest things anyone is doing today."

Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing our bodies and healing the Earth.

Clinicians know that their patients' health is determined not just by the care they receive but also factors outside the confines of medicine – employment, financial stability, safe housing and access to nutritious food, to name a few. Boston Medical Center ... is well ahead of the curve; 23 years ago, it began its first "food as medicine" program. Patients identified as having food insecurity receive a food "prescription," meaning they could visit a food pantry run by the hospital once every two weeks and receive boxes customized for their medical conditions. Latchman Hiralall, manager of BMC's Preventive Food Pantry, explained that clinicians give a referral to the program, so workers know whether the patient requires a diet for diabetes, kidney disease, autoimmune conditions and so forth. Eligible patients can walk in right away, chat with pantry staff and leave with a wide array of food. Crucially, it's patients who decide what food they take. Eligibility is simply a matter of answering yes to two questions about whether they are worried about getting enough food. They don't need to show proof of financial stress. The program serves about 6,800 patients, distributing 50,000 pounds of food a month. The source of much of the fresh produce: The hospital itself. That's right – BMC operates its own rooftop farm. Seventy percent of the vegetables grown there go to Preventive Food Pantry participants. A portion of the rest is served in the hospital cafeteria.

Note: Read about how German hospitals are offering patients the "planetary health diet," a plant-based, whole food approach that's also in service to the Earth. Explore more positive stories like this about healing our bodies.

Western Sikkim in India ... officially went 100 percent organic in 2016, and won what many regard as the Oscar for best public policies – the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's Future Policy Gold Award – in 2018. This change is necessary: An estimated 52 percent of agricultural land across the globe is moderately to severely degraded due to monoculture, chemical pesticide and fertilizer use, and groundwater extraction – and this will accelerate unless these practices change. Sikkim is India's most sparsely populated state. Its mainly subsistence farms were, and continue to be, spread thinly across mountainous terrain, which makes supplying inorganic fertilizers expensive. Consequently, using homegrown organic manure and vermicompost (compost created from worm waste) was very much the norm. It also helped that the local populace already understood the value of organic food. "As children, we were taught that basti (local) vegetables grown without any chemical inputs by small farmers, were the best vegetables to eat," says Renzino Lepcha, CEO of Mevedir, an organic agri-business and certification agency in Sikkim. [Former] chief minister Pawan Chamling wrote, "[W]e have not inherited this earth from our forefather but have borrowed it from our future generations, it is our duty to protect it by living in complete harmony with nature and environment." Rain-fed agriculture has helped reduce the need for irrigation and conserve water. Some reports suggest that since 2014, bee populations have been rebounding, with yields of pollinator-dependent cardamom increasing by more than 23 percent.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing our bodies and healing the Earth.

Someday soon, in addition to prescribing medication or therapy, doctors may begin directing patients to visit a museum or join a choir. The growing practice of "social prescribing" is a way for healthcare providers to address patients' health and wellbeing by connecting them to a range of nonclinical services, often taking the form of community arts and cultural activities. Attention on the healing power of the arts grew during the COVID-19 pandemic. A UK study found that during lockdown in 2020, individuals who spent 30 minutes per day on arts activities had lower rates of depression and anxiety, as well as greater life satisfaction. The first social prescribing pilots in the United States are kicking off on the heels of research demonstrating the long-term health benefits of arts engagement. Adolescents who regularly engage in arts activities have lower odds of behavioral problems, criminalized behaviors, and substance use and higher odds of maintaining strong social support networks. Creatively engaged older adults have 20% lower odds of depression and are more likely to have better memory, life satisfaction, and overall aging experiences. One particularly striking study found that older adults with frequent cultural engagement are less likely to use inpatient healthcare or nursing home stays. In a study of people experiencing chronic pain, doing monthly arts activities is associated with better physical wellbeing, specifically less difficulty with everyday activities.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing our bodies and healing social division.

Edgard Gouveia Jr., 58, says the key to solving the world's problems is games. "I use games and narrative to mobilize crowds," says the Brazilian game inventor and co-founder of Livelab. He's worked with schools, companies, government offices and slums. "Games that can make a whole town, a whole city or even a whole country play together." And now he's developing a global game called "Jornada X" whose goal is to get kids and teenagers to save nothing less than all life on the planet. Through games and playful activities, we create a field of trust. When you create abundance of connection, abundance of possibility, people sense it right away. It doesn't matter if for 30 or 40 years they were living in scarcity. By belonging to a group that we love and that's doing good in the world – these are ways of energizing our collective power, our collective meaning. When you do some good, you feel like you have an identity. [Jornada X] starts with young people. They receive a call that's like a Matrix video that says, "Humanity isn't doing well. Society is violent and nature is dying. But you are one of a group of special kids with superpowers – things like love, helping others, strength, and friendship. As soon as they sign up, the team starts to receive missions. We might say, "Look at your neighborhood. What's wrong?" By the end of seven weeks, they have to find a solution ... Kids play war games all the time. They collaborate to kill people. It's not that they like death, but they want to have this kind of adrenaline. What could be more exciting? My answer is saving the planet in a way that adults haven't been able to."

Note: The latest US Air Force recruitment tool is a video game that allows players to receive in-game medals and achievements for drone bombing Iraqis and Afghans. What world do we want our youth to live in? Explore more positive stories like this in our inspiring news articles archive, which aims to inspire each of us to make a difference.

In 1983, I was out playing at the Silver Dollar Lounge. I had just finished playing the first song when someone put an arm around my shoulder. It was a white guy. He said it was his first time sitting with a Black guy, and I asked why. The man looked at me and said, "I'm a member of the Ku Klux Klan." I thought he was joking. But he pulled out his wallet and handed me his KKK membership card. It only dawned on me a couple years later that I blew my chance to ask them the question that had been plaguing me since I was 10 years old: How can you hate me when you don't know me? Who better to ask that of than someone who went out of their way to join an organization that has, for over 100 years, practiced hating people who don't look like them? I spent the next several years traveling across the country, interviewing the man from that night, Klan leaders, and Klan members, and eventually writing a book about it. I did not convert anybody. Over 200 Klan members have converted themselves. The more we conversed, the more people would change. One time, someone said we should put Black people down. But I sat there calmly, and they'd be curious about why I didn't fight back. Now their ears are open. Now we can nourish those seeds, water them, and, in most cases, they bloom. Of course, some people go to their graves with hatred in their hearts. But what gives me hope, despite the current state of this country, is the fact that I've seen it work. I've seen people change.

Note: Daryl Davis has successfully persuaded more than 200 KKK members and other white supremacists to disavow their allegiances. Read more about the power of calling people in with love, rather than criticism and judgment. Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.

Time banks offer an alternative, powered by 21st-century technology, to the U.S. dollar. About 70 exist across the country – some with a few members, others with hundreds – to give value to work that members say often goes uncompensated in a traditional market economy. The Silver Spring Time Bank formed in 2015 and has about 300 members, said co-founder Mary Murphy. Last year, she said, 1,000 hours were exchanged for basic home repairs, dog walking, cooking and tailoring, among other services, without the exchange of money. "You get to save that money that you would have spent," she said. "You get to meet somebody else in your community and get to know that person. That's a bonus." Edgar S. Cahn, an 84-year-old law professor who had worked on civil rights and anti-poverty legislation in president Lyndon B. Johnson's Justice Department, suffered a heart attack in 1980. He said doctors gave him two years to live, with "maybe two good hours a day. I thought: What do I do with two good hours a day?" he said, having beaten doctors' expectations by nearly four decades. "I have to teach people to value themselves ... We're all trained as human service professionals: 'How can I help you?'' " he said. "None of us is trained to say: ‘How can you make a difference?' I need you as much as you need me." Cahn became a proselytizer for what he called the "time dollar" – a currency in which an hour of work is worth an hour of work, whether it's performed by a maid, a mechanic or a mechanical engineer. In 1995, he founded the D.C. nonprofit TimeBanks USA, which developed the software used by many time banks around the world. Time banks can serve as small-business incubators and a way for seniors to remain active after retirement.

Note: Read more about the potential of time banking. Explore more positive stories like this in on reimagining the economy.

It happened 25 years ago - up to 800,000 people in Rwanda killed - mostly from the minority Tutsi community, all of that over the course of just a hundred days. Today the hundreds of thousands of people who carried out those killings live among their victims. Journalist and author Philip Gourevitch has witnessed the unique way Rwandans have defined and navigated forgiveness after the massacre. There was a lot of agency in the local level. And the experience of the genocide was extremely localized. People were killed by neighbors. It was intimate. They knew each other. And to simply ignore that wouldn't work. In order to navigate the aftermath of the genocide, the Rwandan government set up this nationwide reconciliation process. So they set up a system of community courts - without lawyers - to sort of repurpose a system that really had only been used for small claims mitigation in traditional Rwanda, called gacaca, and have open, communal - what we might call a town hall - format for trials. And then the idea was to hold people accountable and have a system of punishment. And this system banked very heavily on encouraging confession and rewarding it. But the confessions were supposed to be also verified by the community. The motto of the gacaca courts was, truth heals. Forgiveness doesn't require trust. Forgiveness simply means letting go of the idea of getting even, forgoing the idea of revenge. Right? Now, even that's a big ask. But it means accepting coexistence. There's never been as comprehensive a reckoning with such communal violence or mass atrocity. It was an ongoing, multi-year confrontation with the past in the communities.

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.

Brooklyn is known the world over for things small-batch and local, like designer clogs. In a promising experiment in an affluent swath of the borough, dozens of solar-panel arrays spread across rowhouse rooftops are wired into a growing network. Called the Brooklyn Microgrid, the project is signing up residents and businesses to a virtual trading platform that will allow solar-energy producers to sell excess-electricity credits from their systems to buyers in the group, who may live as close as next door. The project is still in its early stages – it has just 50 participants thus far – but its implications could be far reaching. The idea is to create a kind of virtual, peer-to-peer energy trading system built on blockchain, the database technology that underlies cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The ability to complete secure transactions and create a business based on energy sharing would allow participants to bypass the electric company energy supply and ultimately build a microgrid with energy generation and storage components that could function on their own, even during broad power failures. "The long-term goal is to be at least partially independent of the grid in emergencies, which was a reasonable argument to join," said Patrick Schnell, whose Gowanus basement flooded during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. "Hopefully it will expand and more people will join and it will be more worthwhile."

Note: Our latest video explores the potential for blockchain to transform society for the better. Explore more positive stories like this in on technology for good.

The story of two enemies cuts through the darkness. It begins on a battlefield in the Iran-Iraq war, and ends 20 years later in a waiting room in Vancouver. The Iran-Iraq war began in 1980, and ended eight years later. It was the longest conventional war of the 20th century, claiming at least a million casualties. Najah Aboud was nearly one of them. Najah was severely wounded. He crawled off to a bunker, where he saw corpses from both sides and prepared himself to die. Zahed Haftlang ... was assigned as a medic. After the Iranians recaptured Khorramshahr in May 1982, Zahed was ordered to go into the bunkers and treat wounded countrymen. It was then that he ... spotted Najah near the back. Both men were suspicious of each other. Zahed thought Najah's body might be booby-trapped. Najah thought Zahed might kill him. Then Zahed reached into Najah's breast pocket and pulled out a photograph. It showed Najah, with a beautiful woman, and infant son. It was at that very moment that Zahed decided to save Najah's life, even though it meant risking his own. Najah was taken to a prisoner of war camp, where he'd remain in unspeakable conditions for the next 17 years. While reading magazines in [a Vancouver] waiting room, Zahed noticed the door open as another man entered the room. The two men erupted into shouts, hugs, kisses and tears. Their spectacular reunion happened two decades years after the battle of Khorramshahr and on the other side of the world. "Najah is like my family … he really is my angel, because he gave me life. After he got a new chance at life, he gave me a new chance at life. He is the dearest and most precious thing in the entire world to me."

Note: Don't miss the powerful 16-min documentary about Zahed and Najah. Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.

America's biggest "food forest" is just a short drive from the world's busiest airport, Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson. When the Guardian visits the Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill there are around a dozen volunteers working. Food forests are part of the broader food justice and urban agriculture movement and are distinct from community gardens in various ways. They are typically backed by grants rather than renting plots, usually rely on volunteers and incorporate a land management approach that has a focus on growing perennials. The schemes vary in how they operate in allocating food ... but they are all aimed at boosting food access. Organizers in Atlanta stress that they properly distribute the food to the neighborhoods that the food forest is intended to support and it's not open to the public beyond volunteer workers. Other schemes have areas where the public is free to take what they want. Celeste Lomax, who manages community engagement at the Brown Mills forest and lives in the neighborhood, believes education is key to the forest's success and beams like sunlight when sharing her vision for the fertile soil she tends. "We're using this space for more than just growing food. We have composting, beehives, bat boxes, and this beautiful herb garden where we're teaching people how to heal themselves with the foods we eat. We'll be doing walkthrough retreats and outside yoga. This is a health and wellness place. It's so much more than just free food."

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.

It came to be known as the Sunflower movement, a sudden three-week stand-off in 2014 between the government and Taiwanese protesters. Months later, government officials arrived at a ... university campus to ask for the help of a group that few knew even existed: the civic hackers. Taiwan's civic hackers were organized around a leaderless collective called g0v (pronounced "gov zero.") Many believed in radical transparency ... and in the idea that everyone who is affected by a decision should have a say in it. They preferred establishing consensus to running lots of majority-rule votes. These were all principles, incidentally, that parallel thinking about how software should be designed – a philosophy that g0v had begun to apply to the arena of domestic politics. As g0v saw it, the problem of politics was essentially one of information. They needed a way not to measure division, but construct consensus. The hackers' answer was called vTaiwan. The platform invites citizens into an online space for debate that politicians listen to and take into account when casting their votes. As people expressed their views, rather than serving up the comments that were the most divisive, it gave the most visibility to those finding consensus. Soon, vTaiwan was being rolled out on issue after issue, especially those related to technology, and each time a hidden consensus was revealed. "Invariably, within three weeks or four, we always find a shape where most people agree on most of the statements." Most valuable of all, by clearing away the noise and divisiveness, vTaiwan created outcomes that the government could actually act on. It has formed the core of around a dozen pieces of laws and regulations now implemented in Taiwan, on everything from revenge porn to fintech regulation. More are waiting to be passed. The system's potential to heal divisions, to reconnect people to politics, is a solution made for the problems of our age.

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.

In 1986, [Dr. Jane Goodall] attended a conference in Chicago with researchers studying chimps in six areas of Africa, and the reports of environmental devastation shocked Goodall. Her activism evolved quickly, from chimps, to their habitat to human welfare, and how animal rights and the future of the planet are inherently interconnected. Some of her decisions have been deemed controversial: her friendship with for US Secretary of State James Baker, her work with Conoco ... oil company to build a chimpanzee sanctuary, hard conversations with the National Institutes of Health regarding their medical research and testing practices on chimpanzees and visiting their labs. "I lost a lot of friends because of going into the labs, sitting down and talking to the people, organizing a conference to bring in the lab people, the scientists and also the animal welfare people ..."There were a lot of animal rights people who refused to speak to me – they said, 'Wow can you sit down with these evil people and have a cup of tea with them?' I was totally and completely flabbergasted. If you don't talk to people, how can expect them to change?" When speaking to the NIH, "I didn't stand there and accuse them of being cruel monsters. I showed slides and some film of the Gombe chimpanzees and talked about their lives, and then showed some slides of the chimps in the small cages and said, ‘You know, it's like putting a person in a prison like that,'" said Goodall. "Many of the scientists said, ‘We really have never thought about this in this way' a lot of them were actually crying." She stands by all of it because it produces results. It took decades, but the NIH phased out medical testing and research on chimpanzees. Conoco built the chimpanzee sanctuary, the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center, saving all of the starving chimpanzees in the Brazzaville Zoo in the Republic of Congo. In this age of cancel culture and unprecedented political polarity, Goodall's pragmatism, and insistence that arguing does not change minds but appealing to people's hearts and to their better nature is what produces progress distinguishes her from contemporary activists.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.

Consider the Norwegians, who experienced extreme polarization at the same time as the Germans did. The Norwegian economic elite organized against striking laborers and produced a polarized country that included both Nazi Brown Shirts goose-stepping in the streets and Norwegian Communists agitating to overthrow capitalism. The politician Vidkun Quisling, an admirer of Hitler, organized in 1933 a Nazi party, and its uniformed paramilitary wing sought to provoke violent clashes with leftist students. Quisling reportedly held discussions with military officers about a possible coup d'etat.The stage was set for a fascist "solution." Instead, Norway broke through to a social democracy. Progressive movements of farmers and workers, joined by middle-class allies, launched nonviolent direct action campaigns that made the country increasingly ungovernable by the economic elite. The majority forced the economic elite to take a back seat and invented a new economy with arguably the most equality, individual freedom, and shared abundance the developed world has known. The key to avoiding fascism? An organized left with a strong vision and broad support. Grassroots movements built a large infrastructure of co-ops that showed their competency and positivity when the government and political conservatives lacked both. Additionally, activists reached beyond the choir, inviting participation from people who initially feared making large changes. Norwegians also ... chose nonviolent direct action campaigns consisting of strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and occupations. Norway therefore lacked the dangerous chaos that in Germany led the middle classes to accept the elite's choice of Hitler to bring "law and order."

Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing social division and reimagining the economy.

Wadded-up tissues littered Rishel Middle School's gym floor as tough teenagers sobbed, hugged their peers and told gut-wrenching stories about their lives during an all-day session intended to break down barriers. One 13-year-old said he was abandoned by his parents and that he lies awake at night scared by sounds of gunshots outside his window. A 15-year-old girl talked about attempting suicide and urged anyone with similar thoughts to reach out for help. And a teacher tearfully warned students about their actions by revealing he was a bully when he was younger – until the person he tormented tried to kill himself. The confessions were shared ... as part of "Challenge Day," a nationally recognized anti-bullying program that travels to schools around the country. Challenge Day promotes self respect and acceptance, and inspires students to become positive leaders. [The] 20-year-old program [was] designed by Yvonne and Rich St. John-Dutra. "We want to create a world where every child feels safe," said Rich St. John-Dutra. The program, which was featured on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." The events combined ice-breaking routines to get students to drop their guards with soul-searching exercises designed to reveal their true selves. Students wept as their troubles tumbled out - from worries about their parents, medical problems within the family, troubles with gangs, and battles with alcohol and drugs. Students later apologized to others who they had put down or teased over the years. "This is going to change people," said Eddie Castillo, 13. "I never knew people had problems with their families and their brothers and drugs. I never saw that sensitive side until now."

Note: For one of the most inspiring video clips ever, watch an incredibly moving 15-minute clip from an Emmy-award winning documentary on Challenge day. Learn more about this amazing program on the Challenge Day website.

In Oklahoma in 2009, 5-year-old Ryan Hammons would lie awake at night and plead: "Can I go home? Can I see my mom?" or "What happened to my children?" He was lying beside [his mother] one night, Cyndi Hammons remembers, when he said that he needed to tell her something. "I think I used to be somebody else," he whispered. Ryan was waking up sobbing at night and describing things his mother couldn't fathom: that he remembered living in Hollywood in a big white house with a swimming pool. That he once had three sons and a younger sister. That he drove a green car, and his wife drove a black one. Not long after, Ryan saw a man he recognized in one of his library books, a peripheral figure in a photograph of six men: "That's me!" he told his mother. With the help of a production crew from the A&E series "The Unexplained," they were able to identify the man as Marty Martyn, a movie extra and talent agent who died in 1964. Cyndi and Ryan traveled to California to meet Martyn's daughter, Marisa Martyn Rosenblatt, who was 8 when her father died. She ultimately confirmed many of Ryan's statements about Marty Martyn. She didn't know that her father had driven a green car, or that he had a younger sister, but it turned out both claims were accurate. Marty Martyn's death certificate cited his age as 59, but Ryan insisted he had died at 61; census records and marriage listings ... confirmed this, as did Martyn's daughter. Since the 1960s, more than 2,200 children from across the world have described apparent recollections from a previous life. Sometimes a child presents enough identifying information for relatives or researchers to pinpoint a deceased person, but ... about a third of the cases in the database do not include such a match. The most pronounced and convincing cases ... tend to occur in children between the ages of 2 and 6. They might suddenly describe places they have never been, people they have never met, sometimes using words or phrases that seem beyond their vocabulary. Their descriptions of past-life recollections often fade away entirely by the time the child turns 7 or 8.

Note: A 2006 University of Virginia study found that memories of past lives are not uncommon in kids. These fascinating recollections are all documented in a database maintained by the Division of Perceptual Studies ... at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Explore more positive stories like this about the mysterious nature of reality.

Leah Garcés considered Craig Watts her enemy. As CEO and president of the nonprofit Mercy for Animals, Garcés has devoted her life to protecting animals. When she met Watts in the spring of 2014 at his poultry farm in North Carolina, he was one those factory farmers she deeply despised. Watts had raised over 720,000 chickens in 22 years for Perdue, the fourth-largest chicken company in the US. He took out a $200,000 bank loan to build four giant chicken houses. Squeezed by Perdue's profit margins, Watts struggled to pay the bills. Garcés realized that Watts was not her enemy, but an ally: Chicken farmers like him wanted to end chicken farming as much as she did. Yet because of his hefty loans, Watts saw no way out. Together, they released footage from the horrors of chicken farming in the New York Times. Watts has now become one of the poster farmers for the Transfarmation Project, which Garcés founded as an offshoot of the nonprofit Mercy for Animals in 2019. Ultimately, Garcés's vision is not just "helping a few dozen farmers transition to a healthier and more sustainable model, it is about how we transition away entirely from factory farming." The Transfarmation Project connects farmers with consultants and is producing resources and pilots to model successful transitions. In the same warehouse where Watts once had to kill chickens and where he and Garcés filmed the whistleblower video, he is now harvesting mushrooms.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing our Earth.

Former NASA astronaut Ron Garan ... described the striking beauty and stark reality he witnessed from space. "When I looked out the window of the International Space Station, I saw ... dancing curtains of auroras that seemed so close it was as if we could reach out and touch them," he exclaimed. He also noticed something concerning. "I saw the unbelievable thinness of our planet's atmosphere," the astronaut remarked. That "paper-thin" atmosphere is all that stands between humanity and disaster. Garan was troubled by how easily this fact is overshadowed by economic priorities. "I saw an iridescent biosphere teeming with life. I didn't see the economy. But since our human-made systems treat everything, including the very life-support systems of our planet, as the wholly owned subsidiary of the global economy, it's obvious from the vantage point of space that we're living a lie," he said. He shared the concept of the "overview effect," something many astronauts feel after they visit space. "It describes the shift that astronauts have when they see the planet hanging in the blackness of space. There's this light bulb that pops up where they realize how interconnected and interdependent we all are," the astronaut explained. "When we can evolve beyond a two-dimensional us versus them mindset, and embrace the true multi-dimensional reality of the universe that we live in, that's when we're going to no longer be floating in darkness. That's our true calling."

Note: Watch a powerful video where Ron Garan shares the profound revelations he experienced in space. Read about astronaut Edgar Mitchell's mystical experience in space as the sixth person to walk on the moon. Explore more positive stories like this about healing social division.

Patrick Burrichter did not think about saving lives or protecting the planet when he trained as a chef. But 25 years later he has focused his culinary skills on doing exactly that. On the outskirts of Berlin, Burrichter and his team cook for a dozen hospitals that offer patients a "planetary health" diet – one that is rich in plants and light in animals. Compared with the typical diet in Germany, known for its bratwurst sausage and doner kebab, the 13,000 meals they rustle up each day are better for the health of people and the planet. In Burrichter's kitchen, the steaming vats of coconut milk dal and semolina dumpling stew need to be more than just cheap and healthy – they must taste so good that people ditch dietary habits built up over decades. The biggest challenge, says Burrichter, is replacing the meat in a traditional dish. Moderate amounts of meat can form part of a healthy diet, providing protein and key nutrients, but the average German eats twice as much as doctors advise. Patients on the wards of Waldfriede praise the choice of meals on offer. Martina Hermann, 75, says she has been inspired to cook more vegetables when she gets home. Followers of the planetary health diet need not abandon animal products altogether. The guidelines, which were proposed by 37 experts from the EAT-Lancet Commission in 2019, translate to eating meat once a week and fish twice a week, along with more wholegrains, nuts and legumes.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.

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