Things Are Good

Tiny Gardens Everywhere: Let’s Get Growing!

When times get tough it’s time to get gardening! Actually, even when times are easy it’s time to get gardening. Even a small plot of land can produce a lot of benefit for you, your community, and improve where you live. Historian Dr. Kate Brown recently published a book Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City about how little plots of land made bog changes in our modern cities.

After hearing or reading what Dr. Brown has to say I’ll bet you’re going to start plotting out your plot.

From the eighteenth century to the twenty–first, the surprising history and inspiring contemporary panorama of urban gardening: nurturing health, hope, and community.

This manifesto for the next food revolution by acclaimed environmental historian Kate Brown speaks to nature lovers, food activists, social–justice warriors, urban planners, WOOFers, and the climate–concerned.

Ever since wage labor in cities replaced self–provisioning in the countryside, gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots. They composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most productive agriculture in recorded human history, without use of fossil fuels. The ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, too: in Nazi Berlin, working–class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews; in Washington, DC, Black southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding homeownership.

Check out the book here.

Fish Use Doorbells in Utrecht

Fish like to go anywhere the water is good for them, and sometimes that means urban areas. In the Netherlands the city of Utrecht has installed a doorbell for the fish to get in and out of a part of the city. Yes, a doorbell. Utrecht is a city with canals (no surprise for the Netherlands) and therefore a series of dams. Usually a fish ladder is used to help fish get across barriers but in many contexts and for many fishes the ladder just doesn’t work. Thus, a delightful doorbell has been added.

An underwater camera allows people to watch a livestream of the waterway and the fish that inhabit it. This camera transmits constantly during the migration season 24 hours a day. In 2026, this season will start on 2 March. The idea is that when someone sees a fish waiting to go through, they press the doorbell. Each time someone presses the doorbell a photo is automatically taken of the fish. This allows the fish to be tracked but is also a great way for people to try and identify the fish they have seen as well as learn more about that species.

Public Ownership of Public Transit Matters

Picture of the St. Pancras train station platform with trains waiting for passengers.

Right wing politicians love to sell public assets to the private sector to alleviate costs on the public, but in the long term that thinking is incorrect: in many sectors the costs still fall back on the public. The British railway system is one such example that public selling of their publicly built and run transit system resulted in an abject failure. It was so bad that people literally died as a result.

Many large public infrastructure projects take capital, time, and have ongoing costs directly due to the physical operation (think rails, engines, etc). This meant that the only place to save money as a private operator was in reducing labour costs, so layoffs occurred and with that came a crisis in a knowledge.

A decade-wide gap in skills was the consequence. With the growth in passenger demand came a huge growth in the number of infrastructure projects being carried out, and this skills bottleneck, combined with an industry structure that exacerbated costs by maximizing the number of organizational interfaces, meant work was being delivered too slowly and at too high a price. Cost escalations became unbearable for government in 2017 and resulted not only in the curtailment of the national electrification programme, but also in the abandonment of other enhancements across the country, particularly in and around the north of England. Meanwhile, there was a glut of new train orders, many for new electric trains for which there were no longer overhead wires planned to power them.
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The rail industry needs democratization, so that decisions about the railways we use are made closer to us. That means moving power, including over spending, away from Westminster. Democratic accountability at local and regional levels is key to unlocking the cycle of proposed and cancelled investment, and in pushing operators to do better. That means devolution of decision and funding powers to both the regions and cities, but also delivering sufficient industry funding autonomy so that it can respond quickly to these demands and rise above electoral cycles and fiscal anxiety.

Renewables Overtakes All Other Energy Sources

Solar Panels during Dusk Photo by Magic K

Solar just keeps winning on every metric! The International Energy Agency (IEA) released their 2026 Global Energy Review and it provides a good look into the use and generation of energy on a global scale. Growth of energy demand slowed slightly to 1.3% while the growth in renewables is quite noteworthy. Last year solar was the single biggest contributor to energy supply and this marks the first time that renewables have led primary energy growth. It’s not just solar where the renewable success is coming, it’s across the board with renewables being the preferred energy source.

The increase in generation from renewables and nuclear power in 2025 exceeded the total growth in electricity supply. The 2025 increase in solar PV of 600 terawatt-hours (TWh) was the largest-ever electricity generation increase by any source in one year, outside of periods of post-crisis recovery. The rise in solar PV alone met around 70% of electricity generation growth. Renewables combined now virtually match total global generation from coal. In the European Union, the share of solar PV and wind reached 30% in 2025, surpassing that of fossil fuels for the first time. Electricity generation from natural gas and from nuclear power continued to grow at the global level in 2025.

Real Time Street Level Vehicle Exhaust Emission Monitoring

small car

A team of researchers have used the NYC traffic congestion charge as a place to test out some of their hypothesis. Spoiler: the city got better and air quality improved. The research team were able to figure out how to monitor pollutants on individual streets instead of neighbourhood or city-wide levels. They used cameras and phone data to track traffic (removing personally identifiable information). Their method has increased monitoring accuracy and showed that previous pollutant monitoring solutions could vary widely by up to almost 50%

It also helps with better modelling by figuring out which transit options will reduce pollutants the most.

For one, they modeled what would happen to emissions if a certain percentage of travel demand shifted from private vehicles to buses. In another scenario, they looked at what would happen if morning and evening rush hour times were spread out a bit longer, leaving fewer vehicles on the road at once. They also modeled the effects of replacing fine-grained emissions inputs with citywide averages — finding that the rougher emissions estimates could vary widely, from ?49 percent to 25 percent of the more fine-tuned results. That underscores how seemingly small simplifications can introduce large errors into emission estimates.
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To study that, the researchers looked at what happened to vehicle traffic at intervals of two, four, six, and eight weeks after the program began. Overall, congestion pricing lowered traffic volume by about 10 percent — but there was a corresponding drop in emissions of 16-22 percent.