Inspiring News Articles
Excerpts of Highly Inspiring News Articles in Major Media
Below are one-paragraph excerpts of highly inspiring news articles from the major media. Links are provided to the original inspiring news articles on their media websites. If any link fails, read this webpage. The most inspiring news articles are listed first. You can also explore the news articles listed by order of the date posted. For an abundance of other highly inspiring material, see our Inspiring Resources page. May these inspiring news articles inspire us to find ever more ways to love and support each other and all around us to be the very best we can be.
Is it natural for humans to make war? Is organised violence between rival political groups an inevitable outcome of the human condition? New research suggests not. A study of tribal societies that live by hunting and foraging has found that war is an alien concept and not, as some academics have suggested, an innate feature of so-called primitive people. Douglas Fry and Patrik Sderberg of Abo Akademi University in Vasa, Finland, studied 148 violently lethal incidents documented by anthropologists working among 21 mobile bands of hunter-gatherer societies, which some scholars have suggested as a template for studying how humans lived for more than 99.9 per cent of human history, before the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. They found that only a tiny minority of violent deaths come close to being defined as acts of war. Most the violence was perpetrated by one individual against another and usually involved personal grudges involving women or stealing. Only a tiny minority of cases involved more organised killing between rival bands of people, which could fall into the definition of war-like behaviour. Most of these involved only one of the 21 groups included in the study. In short they found that some of the most primitive peoples on Earth were actually quite peaceful compared to modern, developed nations. These findings imply that warfare was probably not very common before the advent of agriculture, when most if not all humans lived as nomadic foragers, Kirk Endicott, an anthropologist at Dartmouth College told the journal Science, where the study is published.
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The solution to stopping climate change might be buried on 10 acres in the Pauma Valley of California. "The idea is not just to produce food but to improve the soil," says Alvarez, Solidarity Farm's Climate Resilience Specialist. "We stopped using the plow to turn the soil, and we do a lot of composting and mulching to improve our soil health." Solidarity Farm had used organic principles in the 10 years since its inception, but it pivoted to carbon farming after the extreme heat in the summer of 2017. Carbon farmers cultivate plants and trees in a way that maximizes carbon sequestration in the soil. Among the most important practices for carbon farmers are minimizing soil erosion by planting perennials and ground cover, which also lowers soil temperatures, and only working the land by hand or with low-tech solutions. "The soil has the capacity to store more carbon than all plants on the planet together," Alvarez says. Solidarity Farms produces a diverse range of about 60 different fruits and vegetables, at least 70 percent of them perennial crops such as plums and pomegranates. Stacks of organic chicken manure in front of the vegetable beds wait to be distributed. The farmers enrich the soil with compost and mulch, while deterring pests with diverse crop rotation. According to soil tests, the Solidarity farmers have tripled the amount of carbon in the ground since 2018. "This equates to a drawdown of nearly 600 metric tons of CO2 per year, offsetting the emissions of 80 American households," Alvarez says.
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