Environment

Meet the border collies replanting burned forests one zoomie at a time

A wildfire-recovery trick from Chile is now loose in English nature reserves.

When a wildfire tears through a forest, replanting it is slow, sweaty, human work. Unless you outsource it to a dog. In Chile, two sisters strapped tiny seed-filled backpacks onto their border collies, cut a small hole in each pack, and let the dogs do what dogs do best: run, jump, and sprint into every nook a human planter could never reach. The seeds scattered behind them. The forest came back.

The idea has since jumped continents. As Erik Barnes reports, a nature reserve in East Sussex started handing seed packs to ordinary dog walkers, turning the daily afternoon stroll into a low-key rewilding operation. The project manager had a very good reason for recruiting golden retrievers instead of, say, bison.

And here's the part that should make you feel better about the muddy paw prints on your floor: the whole technique is borrowed from something wild animals have been doing for ages. There's even a no-backpack version for your own yard that requires nothing more than a tea strainer and a willing pup, though one safety check matters before you let your dog loose on the marigolds.

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Sponsored Story

From selling Pokemon cards to disrupting a $1 trillion industry

Mark Cuban delivered local papers, Warren Buffet sold packs of gum, Richard Branson bred parakeets… Today’s wealthiest business leaders started their entrepreneur journeys at a young age.

And Dan Novaes’ story is no different.

From selling Pokemon cards at the age of 7 to founding Mode Mobile, Dan’s EarnPhone has led to over $1B in savings for their ecosystem of over 490M users worldwide. His company was ranked the #1 fastest-growing software company in 2023 by Deloitte and plans are underway for a potential IPO on the Nasdaq (ticker: MODE).

From humble beginnings to generating over 32,481% revenue growth from 2019-2022, Mode Mobile is on the verge of disrupting a $1 trillion industry, and the opportunity to invest in Mode’s vision at $0.50/share is live. But this window is closing fast.

What did we learn?

The headline made it sound political and controversial… or like something out of Gotham City, but bats are quietly running parts of the US economy. Real, actual bats!

I love bats! Mammals that can fly, what’s not to love? Are bats the favorite oddball critter of the GOOD readership? Almost, but not quite! The winner was the majestic(?) manatee!

• Bats (flying mammal gothic pest control) (25.0%)

• Platypuses (assembled by committee, venomous) (15.0%)

• Axolotls (forever smiling, regrow their own limbs) (24.2%)

• Manatees (accidental mermaid cows, eternally chill) (35.8%)

As an aside: I have never been more grateful for spellcheckers than I was while crafting this poll!

Culture

The harmless little question that makes people quietly resent you

There's a better opener, and it's hiding in plain sight.

You think you're being friendly. You meet someone new, you reach for the safest icebreaker in the English language, "So, what do you do?", and according to the experts Elyssa Goodman talked to, that's roughly the moment they start to like you less.

The problem isn't the words. It's the subtext. Ask someone what they do, and their brain quietly translates it into a different question, one about ranking, value, and whether you're worth the next ten minutes. In a world where more and more people are trying to pry their self-worth loose from their job title, it turns out to be a clumsy way to say hello.

The good news: there's a swap so simple you'll wonder why nobody handed it to you years ago, plus one gloriously silly dinner-party question that reveals more about a person than their LinkedIn ever could.

On May 20, 1875, representatives from 17 nations gathered in Paris and signed the Metre Convention, arguably the most important treaty almost nobody has ever heard of.

Before this, measurement was glorious chaos. A "foot" might be the king's foot, your town's foot, or whatever foot happened to be standing nearby, and trading across borders meant endlessly arguing over whose units were the real ones. The Convention fixed that by creating the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, a quiet little institution outside Paris charged with guarding the official meter and kilogram on behalf of the entire planet.

The ripples are everywhere and almost completely invisible. Reliable measurement is why your medicine is dosed correctly, your bridges stay standing, and a bolt made in one country fits a nut made in another. These days, the units are even defined by constants of nature rather than metal bars in a vault.

The punchline? The United States signed in 1875, then spent the next 150 years cheerfully measuring everything in feet.

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