North & Central America

This archive covers progress stories from North and Central America, spanning the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the nations of Central America. Readers will find reporting on health, environment, community resilience, and policy advances across the region.

Salmon in stream, for article on U.S. overfishing list

The number of fish on U.S. overfishing list reaches an all-time low

By / / Good News For Humankind

Overfishing in U.S. waters just hit a hopeful milestone: 94% of tracked fish stocks are no longer being overfished, the best result since federal record-keeping began. Atlantic mackerel populations off the Gulf of Maine and Cape Hatteras have recovered enough to come off the overfishing list, alongside Gulf of Mexico cubera snapper and a Washington coast coho salmon stock that holds deep meaning for Pacific Northwest tribal nations. What’s most encouraging isn’t any single year’s numbers but the steady downward trend across multiple years, suggesting real structural progress. With roughly 3.3 billion people worldwide relying on seafood as a primary protein source, getting fisheries right is one of the most consequential food-system stories on the planet — and the U.S. is showing it can be done.

Person touching pregnant belly with hands forming a heart, for article on LGBTQ+ fertility coverage

Aetna agrees to provide equal fertility coverage for LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. in landmark settlement

By / / Good News For Humankind

LGBTQ+ couples who were charged a “queer tax” of up to $100,000 for fertility treatment just won a major shift at Aetna, including a $2 million fund to reimburse families who paid out of pocket. The settlement ends a policy that required same-sex couples to fund a year of treatments themselves before coverage kicked in, while heterosexual couples qualified after a simple conversation. It started with Emma Goidel and Ilana Caplan, who drained their savings through multiple rounds of IUI and IVF before suing under the Affordable Care Act’s ban on sex discrimination in health care. Their win creates a template other insurers can follow, and a legal path other families can walk, toward fertility care that treats every family as worth building.

Technicians carrying photovoltaic solar module while installing solar panel system on roof of house, for article on Solar for All grants

U.S. President Joe Biden announces $7 billion in federal solar power grants

By / / Good News For Humankind

Solar for All, a new $7 billion federal program, is set to bring rooftop and community solar to more than 900,000 lower- and middle-income households across the United States. Sixty grants will flow to state projects, tribal nations, and multi-state efforts, with participating families expected to save a combined $350 million each year on their energy bills. Alongside the funding, nearly 2,000 American Climate Corps positions will train local workers — in partnership with building trades unions — to install and maintain these systems. For communities long left out of the clean energy boom, it’s a real shift: the people who’ve shouldered the heaviest costs of fossil fuels are finally being placed at the front of the transition.

A Polar bear surrounded by arctic wilderness, for article on Alaska petroleum reserve drilling limits

Biden limits oil drilling across 13 million acres of Alaskan Arctic

By / / Good News For Humankind

Thirteen million acres of Arctic Alaska just got a stronger legal shield, with the Interior Department banning new oil and gas leases outright across more than 10 million of them. The protected lands include Teshekpuk Lake, a summer gathering place for up to 100,000 geese and a continental waystation for birds that winter as far south as South America. A companion decision blocks the proposed 211-mile Ambler Road, which would have cut through caribou migration corridors and affected subsistence hunting in more than 60 Alaska Native communities. The rule won’t end every fight over Arctic drilling, and Indigenous voices remain genuinely divided. Still, safeguarding a wild expanse the size of Indiana is the kind of durable win conservation movements everywhere can build on.

Inside Passage Landscape, for article on Haida land title

British Columbia agrees to hand title of a million acres of land back to the Haida Nation

By / / Good News For Humankind

Haida title recognition just became real: nearly half a million hectares of Crown land across more than 200 islands off Canada’s northwest coast are being transferred to the Haida Nation, after Haida citizens approved the “Rising Tide” agreement by a wide margin. What makes this remarkable is how it happened — not through a generations-long court battle, but through direct negotiation with British Columbia, sparing the Nation the ruinous legal fights other Indigenous peoples have endured. Premier David Eby called it “long-overdue,” and advocates are already pointing to it as a model. For Indigenous land-rights movements worldwide, it offers something hopeful: proof that governments can choose to act with integrity, rather than wait to be forced by a judge.

Water flowing from faucet, for article on PFAS drinking water limits

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announces first-ever national regulations for “forever chemicals” in drinking water

By / / Good News For Humankind

PFAS drinking water protections are now federal law, with the EPA setting the first-ever national limits on six “forever chemicals” found in tap water across the country. The rules are expected to reduce exposure for around 100 million Americans and will require roughly 6 to 10 percent of public water systems to upgrade testing and treatment. To help with the lift, $1 billion in federal funding is immediately available to states, with priority for the communities — often low-income and disproportionately communities of color — that have carried the heaviest contamination. After decades of industry resistance and slow-moving science, a binding national standard signals that public health can still win out, and offers a template for confronting the thousands of PFAS compounds still unregulated.

Honeybee by yellow flowers, for article on honeybee colonies

Hobbyist beekeepers help reverse America’s critical bee shortage in just 5 years

By / / Good News For Humankind

Honeybees are having a moment: the U.S. just hit 3.8 million managed colonies, the highest count ever recorded, with nearly a million added in just five years. The comeback didn’t come from a big federal push — it came from backyards and small landowners, often nudged along by smart state tax policy. Texas is the clearest example, where a law rewarding landowners who keep bees for five years has helped grow the state into the country’s third-largest colony hub. There’s still a real catch: wild pollinators remain in trouble, and more managed hives can crowd them out. Still, this rebound offers a hopeful template for pairing everyday enthusiasm with policy that actually works.

Tall old-growth redwood trees in northern California for an article about Yurok Tribe land return, for article on tribal co-management

Yurok Tribe becomes first Native people to co-manage land with the National Park Service

By / / Good News For Humankind

Yurok Tribe land return marks a historic milestone as the tribe reclaims 125 acres of ancestral territory and becomes the first Native nation to formally co-manage land alongside the National Park Service. The agreement returns the parcel known as ‘O Rew, near Orick in Humboldt County, after more than a century of displacement that stripped the Yurok of roughly 90% of their homeland. Ecological restoration is already underway, with thousands of juvenile salmon returning to a rebuilt Prairie Creek. The deal reflects a growing Land Back movement and sets a new precedent for Indigenous stewardship of public lands.

Charging an EV, for article on municipal fleet electrification, for article on tailpipe emission standards

Biden administration rolls out new tailpipe rules that will boost EVs and hybrids

By / / Good News For Humankind

New U.S. tailpipe pollution rules are projected to prevent more than 7 billion metric tons of planet-warming emissions over their lifetime, cutting passenger car pollution nearly in half by 2032 compared to 2026 levels. Rather than mandating a hard electric vehicle quota, the EPA lets automakers mix battery EVs, plug-in hybrids, and more efficient gas engines to hit the same pollution ceiling. A former EPA transportation chief called it the single most important climate regulation in American history, and cleaner air will especially benefit communities living near busy roadways. With transportation being the largest source of U.S. climate pollution, this rule nudges the world’s second-biggest car market closer to the pace of change already underway in Europe and China.

Mushrooms, for article on psilocybin public opinion

Nearly 9 in 10 Americans now think using psilocybin is ‘morally positive,’ in dramatic shift in public opinion

By / / Good News For Humankind

Supervised psilocybin therapy just got a remarkable vote of confidence: in a new peer-reviewed survey of 795 U.S. adults, 91% of liberals and 86% of conservatives called its use for psychiatric treatment morally acceptable. That’s the kind of bipartisan agreement you almost never see anymore. Researchers from Oxford, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Granada also found that strong majorities approved of psilocybin to enhance well-being in healthy people, not just to treat illness. The authors suggest compassion-based values help explain the consensus across political lines. As more states move toward legal, supervised psilocybin services, this quiet agreement among Americans hints at a broader, more humane shift in how societies might soon approach mental health.