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🇺🇸 Today is Indigenous Peoples Day! Since the 1990s, a growing number of states have begun to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day — a holiday meant to honor the culture and history of the people living in the Americas both before and after Columbus’s arrival.

📰 Hamas has now released all 20 remaining living Israeli hostages held in Gaza, while Israel began releasing the more than 1,900 Palestinian prisoners and detainees as part of the ceasefire deal.

Businesses doing good

The world’s first ‘upcycled skyscraper’ is a finalist for the coveted Earthshot Prize

When the owners of Sydney, Australia’s AMP Centre wanted to replace the original 1970s structure with a bigger, better, and more energy-efficient building — they also wanted to do it without demolishing the old building.

The “new” building now stands 676 feet tall and retains 95% of the original building’s core as well as 65% of the original building’s structure, including beams and columns. The process saved more than 12,000 tonnes of embodied carbon, the equivalent of 35,000 flights between Sydney and Melbourne.

It was completed in 2022, but was just named one of 15 finalists for Prince William’s fifth annual Earthshot Prize, a coveted competition that celebrates big ideas aimed at tackling climate change.

Why is this good news? While companies may resort to demolition as a “cheaper” option when constructing new buildings, they’re not considering its steep environmental costs. This project “proves that retrofitting buildings that have stood for decades offers a commercially viable and scalable solution to decarbonizing the built environment.”

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More Good News

Great Britain has run on 100% clean power for a record 87 hours in 2025 so far. This is up from just 2.5 hours in 2021 and 64.5 hours in all of 2024, ahead of the government’s clean-power target for 2030, which aims for 95% of the electricity generated in the country in 2030 to come from low-carbon sources.

Backed by Bill Gates, a food startup has raised $33 million to reinvent butter without cows. Savor’s lab-created butter is closer to cow butter than any vegan option on the market, and the company wants to create another option for farmers, chefs, food manufacturers, and customers to help alleviate the agriculture industry’s strain on the environment.

Nabarun Dasgupta was awarded the MacArthur “genius” award for his groundbreaking research on overdose. The fellowship comes with a monetary award of $800,000, and the MacArthur Foundation also noted his work outside the lab, helping develop "harm reduction" programs aimed at reducing drug deaths.

A group of women in Mexico is buying ancient Aztec farms to save a vanishing ecosystem. The women are sustainably cultivating the farms, called chinampas, to preserve the critical ecosystem they hold, which is increasingly threatened by urban development, mass tourism, and water pollution.

politics

Jane Fonda and 500 other Hollywood stars are reviving the Committee for the First Amendment. What does that mean?

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Indigenous Peoples Day

Good news to celebrate on Indigenous Peoples Day

The first to call these lands home, Indigenous people in America continue to make the country a better, thriving place. Here are just some of their stories to celebrate today:

Through “DeTours,” Hawaii’s Indigenous communities are working to educate settlers and tourists alike on Hawaii and its colonial past and present, and creatively raising awareness about decolonization.

An Indigenous-designed mural is the largest in the world and doubles as a giant solar power generator, reducing 150 tons of CO2 emissions annually.

A South Dakota Y.M.C.A. branch worked with an Indigenous tribe to develop a tiny home project to help address the reservation’s housing shortage. (Gifted link)

An Indigenous, mother-daughter-led nonprofit organization in Los Angeles is addressing challenges that Indigenous communities confront daily with translation services, connecting migrants to translators for border documentation, and more.

Indigenous farmers are reclaiming time-honored agricultural techniques to achieve food sovereignty, or the right to healthy and culturally appropriate meals produced locally using sustainable methods and agricultural practices.

After a decade of work, an Indigenous tribe revived its local beaver population to fight wildfires in California’s southern Sierra Nevada mountains.

Indigenous tribes collaborated with the Montana Department of Transportation to design and build one of the largest networks of wildlife highway crossings in the U.S., reducing animal collisions by 71%.

Last year, the Smithsonian and NOAA rolled out a first-of-its-kind ocean conservation plan in the country, which will prioritize Indigenous knowledge.

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→ More good news stories about Indigenous communities

More Good bits

🎋 A frog so tiny, it grows up in bamboo water droplets.

🤯 People invented some pretty cool stuff this year.

🏈 NFL stadiums see field goals … and sustainability goals.

🧠 What happens when you use your phone just two hours per day?

📱 You have to watch the Nobel Peace Prize winner get the call. (Reels)

What’s good?

I was absolutely fascinated reading the story about that upcycled skyscraper!

How would you feel about a building being upcycled rather than demolished?

Reply and tell me!

— Megan