mostly void

[5 years later]

highly throwable imp: hoohoohee

Eggs are used in this recipe because they smell gross and don't come off easily (due to their tendency to harden/cook in the sun). This is not a situation for applesauce, which will come off in a light rain.

While unconventional, the substitute you're looking for here is sourdough starter. It's goopy, it'll smell atrocious in the hot sun, and it'll harden onto the walls like cement. If you try to get it off with water, you'll end up with a sticky dough.

Now, you can go to Península Valdés and find that the whale population there is growing year after year, people can see them from their windows. In Iberá, where yaguaretés were extinct for over 70 years, there's now a population of 35 and growing, after being reintroduced just five years ago. As for rainforests?

We've becoming very, very good on restoring them. Natural environments, when given space and time to heal, can return to that they were. And after all, all natural enviroments are managed by human societies. It is up to us to implement a good management, un buen gobierno.

I firmly believe our children and grandchildren will see a restoration of Earth like never before.

Spix's Macaws were extinct in the wild for 70 years, and now captive breeding and conservation groups have reintroduced a small population (with more on the way) and there are babies being successfully raised in the wild again.

And what else is there, but hope? We exist for the grace of hope. Those who have lost all hope don't stay here. If you are here to send an ask like this, it is not because you have given up, it's that you are hoping someone will show you that that hope is worth having.

It is!! It always is!!

The population of an entire island working together to eradicate every last rat and mouse to save the native bird populations. They had to trap a bunch of the birds and keep them in captivity so they wouldn’t be hurt by the rodenticides, and released them after the rodents were gone. Normal residents helped by phoning in tips whenever they saw rodents. And they did it. Lord Howe Island, last I read, remains rodent free, and the native bird populations are rebounding!

Acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer, both of which were terrifying specters of my childhood, have been largely dealt with. Ecosystems devastated by acid rain are also recovering.

In 1991, the first captive-raised condors were re-introduced to Big Sur, Pinnacles, and Bitter Creek.

In 2006, three months before I turned eighteen, the first wild pair of condors was seen nesting in Big Sur in over a hundred years. A hundred years.

We did that. We fixed it.

How about another example.

When my mom was small, in the 1960s, there were many, many days of the year she was not allowed outside. Days and days they had recess indoors, because the air was so poisonous to breathe. Here's an article about it, with some good pictures.

My mom was 13 in the picture on the left. She was 50 in the picture on the right.

In 1987, there were 27 California Condors in the world, all captive.

In 2024, there were 566.

369 of them fly free.

That happened within my lifetime, and I'm not even 40 yet.

When you lose hope, think of our stories we're telling you. Recount them to yourself like a prayer. That's what I do.

There are 369 California Condors flying free in the sky right now.

There is no more acid rain.

There is an ozone.

There are wild tigers.

There are still birds on Lord Howe Island.