Friday, Mar 13

Welcome to Your Daily Dot where Dot will share tips, advice, and stories on how we can make our world better.

Dear Reader,

Today’s Feel-Good news starts in a Costa Rican rainforest where noise is a welcome improvement. 

When an acoustic biologist wants evidence of a rainforest’s health, he listens for it. And what one such biologist discovered in Costa Rica was that “Natural forests were raucous — loud and marked by lots of variation in sounds, particularly around dawn and dusk,” reads a story in Anthropocene. “Birds and insects were particularly noisy during twilight. Pastures, by contrast, had far more human sounds, no big burst at sunrise and sunset, and more noise at night.”

This biologist’s raucous forest is healthy thanks to cash incentives — the Costa Rican government is literally paying people to restore their pastures to forest, with money collected via a tax on fossil fuels. But though the country now grows more forest than it loses, there was no proof the nationwide initiative was successfully restoring ecosystems until the burgeoning field of bioacoustics was applied and researchers collected just under a million minutes of recordings between May and July of 2022. 

While the replanted forests weren’t as healthy as intact forests, they were nonetheless 1.4 times more similar to a natural forest than a pasture. “The results offer hope for ecological restoration and for simultaneously bringing economic benefits to the people, many of them poor, who live on and protect the land,” the story tells us. Given that the health of our planet relies on these forests to be our lungs, that’s good news for all of us. 

And there’s more Feel-Good news for anyone interested in replacing their internal combustion engine car with an electric one. EVs can feel a bit scary at first. Like many, Dot suffered from “range anxiety” — fear that I wouldn’t be able to get to a charger before my battery died — but that resolved itself quickly. A growing infrastructure, as well as online apps, ensure that a charging station can be easily located when necessary.

But another hurdle is cost, something the folks at Energy Sage are eager to help with. With the current U.S. adminstration’s elimination of many of the EV incentives under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, the EV-curious might wonder if cost is prohibitive. But Energy Sage has created a handy guide to leasing vs buying, various loans, and how to charge your car without paying a fortune. Check it out.

Positively,

Dot

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