The Sustainability Grid

Two female Asian king vultures, & they have a lot to discuss about the vulture crisis. The red-headed vulture earns the title "king" because it is often the first to arrive at a carcass, and other vultures routinely give way to it. Unlike most vultures, it doesn't feed in noisy, jostling groups; it is typically alone or in pairs. That bare, featherless head is a superb evolutionary adaptation. These vultures plunge deep into carcasses to feed, and bare skin is far more hygienic than feathered skin; it doesn't mat with blood or bacteria and is much easier to clean. They are critically endangered. Their population has crashed by over 90% in the last few decades — driven largely by the accidental use of diclofenac, a veterinary painkiller widely used in the cattle industry. Cattle treated with diclofenac die with the drug in their tissues, and vultures that feed on those carcasses suffer fatal kidney failure. A single drug nearly wiped out an entire guild of birds. Signs of recovery are now emerging with a ban on the use of diclofenac. Vultures are nature's sanitation workers. They clean carcasses before deadly pathogens like anthrax can spread. Without them, the disease burden on ecosystems and on us rises sharply. Clicked this in Bandhavgarh TR, India.

The garden is one of the best things you can give a child to grow up alongside. Recognising a blackbird by its song before you see it. Knowing a dandelion by name. Understanding that a ladybird in the vegetable bed is doing a job. These are things that stay. A child who grows up with their hands in the soil learns to look closely, to name what they find, and to understand that most of what lives around them is worth paying attention to. That kind of knowledge tends to last.

The little things in Singapore the LGU can adopt to start looking like Singapore.

Switzerland 🇨🇭 Solar panels on train tracks. A hell of a lot more logical than plastering over prime farmland.

In Nigeria, they'd steal the panels before 12 midnight that very day of installation and we'll all have a good laugh about how careless it was to put them there in the first place.

Amazing NEWS🚨: Scientists have discovered a fungus in the Amazon rainforest that naturally consumes plastic and could help save the planet