Photo: Emilio Borraz Ortega / Unsplash (CC0)
In this edition of Squirrel News, fundraising from local groups has led to the preservation of pristine wilderness land in Patagonia, the UK passes an employment rights law with long-campaigned-for protections and benefits for workers, and a visiting healthcare programme brings down numbers of preterm births in Florida.
133,000 hectares of the Cochamó Valley in Chilean Patagonia will be protected from logging, damming, and development, thanks to local fundraising. The area includes 11% of the world’s remaining alerce forests, ancient water-resistant trees that were logged for use as ship’s masts and telephone poles.
Source: The Guardian
The Taronga Conservation Society, with 16 endangered animal recovery programmes across Australia, has obtained a large swath of farmland in New South Wales. They will rewild it to be an ultimately self-maintaining habitat for threatened native species like Koalas, platypuses, and spotted quolls.
Source: ABC News Australia
The new law includes guaranteed hours, prohibits firing and rehiring practices, eliminates legal loopholes that have led to exploitation of workers, and provides for sick pay and parental leave. Advocates say women, ethnic minorities, disabled people and young workers will especially benefit.
Source: The Guardian
The community maternal care model used by Central Hillsborough Healthy Start is straightforward and one that could be replicable elsewhere. With premature births on the rise in the US at a staggering cost to parents and society, a model like the Florida programme’s could be invaluable.
Source: The Conversation
Colorado already offers paid parental and medical leave. Starting in 2026, the offering will expand to 12 more weeks of paid leave for parents of babies born early and in neonatal intensive care units. That way parents don’t have to choose between working and spending time with their baby in the NICU.
Source: People
A World Health Organization summit is underway on ancestral medicine methods, intended to ‘intensify’ efforts to make such methods fit with modern healthcare delivery systems. People in 90% of WHO member countries use traditional medicine and officials say new AI technologies can bring the past and the future together.
Source: RTE
Using a combination of revived traditional methods, new climate-adaptive techniques, and modern technological advances, some farmers in western Canada are not only keeping up yield through the drier and wetter times with climate change, they are getting ahead of it with higher yields than ever.
Source: Reuters
MHFA trainings across the US teach rural community members with the most people contact, from teens to the elderly, to spot signs of mental illness and help sufferers find resources. Rural areas have far fewer providers but a growing mental health crisis. In one study, over 60% of participants used their training within six months.
Source: The Daidy Yonder
A UK woman with experience caring for a suicidal loved one has written a poem to help others in a similar situation. Performed in song by a group of people who have been affected by suicide, the song is now a film used to spread understanding of how to prevent suicide.
Source: NPR
Around the world, airfields no longer in use have become open spaces with multiple public uses like cycling, kite flying, pickup sports games, and community gatherings. In the midst of urban sprawl, they can be a refuge of green openness, creating possibilities that wouldn’t otherwise exist in dense city areas.
Source: Reasons to be Cheerful
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