Good News Headline 2/19/2024

Photo courtesy of Edgar Castrejo, Unsplash

The Rockefeller Foundation And HHS Look To Accelerate The Adoption Of Food Is Medicine

by Elena Seeley, FoodTank

The Rockefeller Foundation recently announced that it will put an additional US$80 million toward Food is Medicine (FIM) programs in the United States over the next five years. The new commitment will bring the Foundation’s total funding of FIM interventions to over US$100 million. “There is no time to waste for unlocking Food is Medicine’s great potential to advance health equity by improving nutrition security,” says Devon Klatell, Vice President for Food, The Rockefeller Foundation. More than half of the new funding will go toward the Health Care by Food Initiative, a multi-year collaboration with the American Heart Association.

Dinosaur Evergreens Thought Extinct For 2Mil Years Discovered By Park Ranger–The Grove Is The ‘Find Of The Century’

by Andy Corbley, Good News Network

From Australia comes a story too cool to believe. Like a vegetable version of Jurassic Park or King Kong, a copse of pine trees from a species that evolved in the Cretaceous Era were found high in the mountains. These living fossils, to use the classic phrase, survived both the comet impact and subsequent global firestorm that killed the dinosaurs, as well as two intervening ice ages to make it to our time, and Australian botanists are treating the specimens as a top-secret national treasure. The Wollemi pine evolved 91 million years ago and went extinct according to the fossil record 2 million years ago, but in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, a stand of 90 specimens were found.

Under Pressure From Angry Students, GOP Gov Reverses On Federal Summer Meals Funding

by Julia Conley, Common Dreams

As the deadline rapidly approached for state governments to accept federal funds for summer food assistance for children, Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen announced Monday that conversations with students from around the state had convinced him to take the funding—leaving just 14 Republican-led states still refusing the aid. At a news conference, the GOP governor—who previously said he didn’t “believe in welfare” and would be forgoing $18 million for the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer (Summer EBT) program—said he had changed his mind after “an evolution of information” about how young people across Nebraska would be affected by his decision.

Cambodia Sea Turtle Nests Spark Hope Amid Coastal Development & Species Decline

by Gerald Flynn, Mongabay

In late December 2023, on a remote island in Preah Sihanouk province, off the southwest coast of Cambodia, a team of conservationists uncovered nine nests belonging to sea turtles after more than a decade of searching for them. Cambodia’s marine turtle population has long been declining, but this discovery has sparked hope among conservationists that the critically endangered hawksbill turtles and endangered green turtles have not vanished from Cambodia’s waters. Nine nests were discovered by volunteers from the Royal Cambodian Navy who are stationed on the island and have been trained by Fauna & Flora to monitor for the presence of sea turtles.

A Rural Montana County Has Found a Unique And Forward-Thinking Way To Share Its Groundwater With Future Generations

by Keely Larson, Reasons to be Cheerful

On a cold January morning, Jeff Wivholm drives the dirt roads between farms in Sheridan County, where he’s lived for all his 63 years, with practiced ease, pointing out different plots of land by who owns them. And if he doesn’t know the family name, Amy Yoder with the Sheridan County Conservation District or Brooke Johns with the Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge — both sitting in the backseat of his truck — can supply it. If you look to the right there, Wivholm says, you can see the valley created by the aquifer. Maybe he can, his eyes accustomed to seeing dips and crevasses in, to an unfamiliar eye, a starkly flat landscape.