Today (2017 C.E. - 2025 C.E.)

This archive spans the years 2017 through 2025, a period marked by rapid advances in clean energy, medicine, technology, and social equity. It collects documented breakthroughs, policy wins, and scientific achievements from the present era. If you want evidence that progress is real and ongoing, this is where to look.

Aerial view of Northwestern University campus, for article on prison education program

For the first time, U.S. prisoners graduate from top university

By / / Good News For Humankind

Prison education just crossed a remarkable threshold: sixteen men at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois became the first incarcerated students in the U.S. to earn bachelor’s degrees from a top-ten ranked university. Northwestern’s program now enrolls around 100 students across two facilities, including a women’s prison, with graduates already planning law school and youth-focused nonprofits. One graduate’s mother, who hadn’t seen her son in nearly two decades, watched him walk across the stage in cap and gown. With Pell Grants finally restored to incarcerated students after a nearly thirty-year ban, this ceremony hints at what’s possible when elite institutions treat people behind bars as full participants in higher learning — a shift that could ripple through prisons and universities alike.

Aerial view of facility, for article on direct air capture

Heirloom Carbon Technologies opens first carbon capture facility in the U.S.

By / / Good News For Humankind

Direct air capture has gone commercial in the United States for the first time, with Heirloom Carbon Technologies opening a plant in Tracy, California that can pull 1,000 metric tons of CO2 straight from the sky each year. The company speeds up a natural process: heating limestone, then letting the mineral soak up atmospheric carbon on open-air trays in days rather than years. The captured CO2 is locked into concrete and stored underground, with companies like Microsoft and Shopify buying removal credits to fund operations. Heirloom went from capturing one kilogram to one million kilograms in just over two years, and hopes to keep copying the design. Tackling legacy emissions, not just new ones, may be essential to stabilizing the climate worldwide.

Human eye, for article on whole-eye transplant

New York surgeons perform world’s first successful eyeball transplant

By / / Good News For Humankind

Whole-eye transplant surgery has been performed successfully for the first time, with a team at NYU Langone Health spending more than 20 hours combining a donor eyeball, a partial face transplant, and a stem cell infusion into the optic nerve. The patient, Aaron James, lost much of his face in a 2021 electrical accident, and surgeons had carefully preserved his optic nerve in anticipation of exactly this kind of operation. Doctors say the transplanted eye is healthy and blood is flowing to the retina, though James has not regained sight. Restoring vision may still be years away, but this opens a real door for people with catastrophic eye injuries — proof that something once considered impossible is now a starting point.

Ocean Thermal Energy Generator Barge, for article on ocean thermal energy conversion

World’s first commercial-scale ocean thermal energy generator to be built off the coast of São Tomé and Príncipe

By / / Good News For Humankind

Ocean thermal energy conversion just crossed a threshold that has eluded engineers for nearly 140 years. UK-based Global OTEC Resources received independent certification for the cold-water riser pipe at the heart of its floating platform — the very component that has sunk previous attempts to turn ocean temperature gradients into electricity. The flagship vessel, Dominique, is a 1.5-MW system planned for deployment off São Tomé and Príncipe, an island nation of about 220,000 people that currently leans on imported fossil fuels. Because deep ocean temperatures stay constant, a working OTEC plant generates power around the clock, offering tropical island communities something solar and wind cannot: steady, locally produced baseload clean energy on the front lines of climate change.

Whale's tail, for article on sperm whale reserve

Dominica to create world’s first sperm whale reserve

By / / Good News For Humankind

Dominica’s new sperm whale reserve will safeguard roughly 200 whales living year-round in an 800-square-kilometer stretch of ocean off the island’s western coast — the first protected area in the world designed specifically for this species. Commercial fishing and large ships will be kept out, while local artisanal fishers can keep working the waters they’ve always known. Scientists have found that these whales pass down distinct cultural traditions across generations, a kind of learning once believed to belong only to humans. By treating whale protection as part of its own climate resilience, a small island nation is showing that nature-based conservation can be ambitious, community-minded, and quietly revolutionary all at once.

Colombia rainforest landscape, for article on Amazon deforestation

Deforestation in Colombia down 70% year-on-year

By / / Good news links

Since taking power last year, leftist President Gustavo Petro has enacted a slate of new policies aimed at protecting Colombian forests, including paying locals to conserve woodland. The recent gains in Colombia mirror similar advances in the Brazilian Amazon, where leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has cracked down on forest clearing.

View of mountains and water in British Columbia, for article on BC nature conservation agreement

British Columbia, Canadian government, and First Nations announce $1 billion conservation agreement

By / / Good News For Humankind

British Columbia’s new $1 billion nature agreement aims to more than double the share of the province protected from industrial activity, building on roughly 15 percent today. Signed by Canada’s federal government, the province, and First Nations leaders, it’s the first three-way conservation deal of its kind in the country — with Indigenous nations recognized as co-architects rather than consultees. The funding will go toward safeguarding old-growth forests, restoring degraded ecosystems, and supporting the salmon-bearing watersheds that communities have relied on for generations. As nearly 200 countries work toward the global goal of protecting 30 percent of lands and waters by 2030, this framework offers a hopeful template for how conservation and Indigenous leadership can move forward together.