Breaking: Mother Nature caught giving praise
Hey Reader,
Old Faithful says I've been a little salty lately. And he's not referring to my oceans.
So for Week 6, the spotlight’s on you—finding clever hacks I hadn’t even thought of. Look at you showing off.
My inbox has been overflowing with support, which is wild because I didn't even know I had a Gmail account. Turns out, when you invent lightning, Google assumes you want to stay connected. But, truly, I love it when you share these brilliant ideas with me.
Deadly Gas and Burping
Banana peels seem harmless enough. Toss one outside, bugs eat it, gone in a week. You’d think the same thing happens in landfills.
Nope. Landfills bury scraps under plastic, cardboard, and whatever else you toss out. Trapped without air, they don’t compost. They rot, releasing methane gas…twenty-five times worse than carbon dioxide. Everyone blames cows. Nobody mentions the kale rotting in your trash.
Billions of pounds of food get buried, I get bloated, and suddenly “Mother Nature has gas.” Nice.
But here’s where it gets good. You learned to trap it. Anaerobic digesters—big mechanical bellies with their own microbiomes—let trillions of bacteria eat the scraps and burp methane you actually capture as fuel. According to Alan in Accounting, all that tossed food could power tens of millions of homes. I’ll let him argue the exact number. I’m busy keeping glaciers from melting too fast. A little help is appreciated.
And nothing goes to waste. The leftover sludge turns into fertilizer. The water gets cleaned and reused. Even the heat from burning the gas gets recycled to warm the tanks or nearby buildings.
In Toronto, garbage trucks run on renewable natural gas made from the city’s food scraps. Last night’s dinner is today’s rocket fuel.
If your city has composting programs, use them. If they don’t, ask why not. Composting isn’t magic. I supply the worms, you handle City Council.
Drones Reporting for Duty
Deforestation isn't about losing a shady place to sit. It's sacrificing the lungs of the planet. Forests absorb carbon dioxide and pump out oxygen, but when they disappear, all that stored carbon gets released back into the atmosphere, heating up the planet. Plus, fewer trees means more soil erosion, habitat loss for countless species, and less rainfall. I bet you didn't know that last one.
But now drones are out here, shooting seed pods into the ground—thousands per minute.
Forget volunteers with shovels and good intentions. These are precision-guided reforestation missiles hitting places too remote or too dangerous for people to reach.
And it’s working. Germination rates are clocking in around 80%. Which means these drones aren’t merely scattering seeds, they’re planting actual forests. Basically, you took the efficiency of modern warfare and aimed it at trees.
I didn't see that coming, but I'm here for it.
Who Likes a Cleanup Party? This Fungi.
Mushrooms can clean up oil spills, heavy metals, even radioactive fallout. Mushrooms. The same things you pick off pizza.
They’ve got these underground root networks—mycelium—that act like tiny recycling centers. Some of them stretch for miles underground, including one in Oregon that covers 2,400 acres. They release enzymes that break down stubborn pollution.
And you’ve tested this. In 2007, the COSCO-Busan spill dumped 58,000 gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay. Oyster mushrooms helped break it down in a matter of months.
Then, after California’s wildfires in 2017, volunteers laid out over 40 miles of mushroom-filled tubes around the burned areas. Forty miles. Of mushrooms. They soaked up toxins and kept poisonous ash from sliding into rivers or getting scooped up and dumped somewhere else. That’s not cleanup. That’s moving the mess to a new zip code.
Not bad for the fungus you spray the second it shows up in your lawn.
The Bottom Line
This is why I get excited about what you'll figure out next.
For every doom-and-gloom headline, someone says, “Hold my matcha,” and pulls off the impossible. You’re turning damage into regeneration, waste into resources.
Solutions are hiding in plain sight, and I've got mysteries you've yet to uncover. Time to get creative.
I'm still going to complain about single-use coffee pods and fast fashion. That's my brand. This week, though, credit where it’s due.
Keep it up. Mama's proud.
Progress, not perfection.
Mother Nature
P.S. Next week: Back to our regularly scheduled programming of me side-eyeing your questionable life choices. But hey, mushrooms are eating plastic!
Know someone who needs to hear good news? Forward this. Know someone who deserves a shout-out of planetary proportions? Email me. Spam is the least of my concerns right now.
