🌱 The Grumpy Optimists #168
A the Grumpy Optimists ocean special, kind of...
Happy Monday. 👋
Welcome back to another week. Last week I had the pleasure of attending an event all about why protecting our oceans matters. It’s not often I find myself feeling inspired to make changes after a climate event these days, but this time I really did. James Blunt was there too, and he wasn’t even the highlight, can you believe it?
While the message was pretty blunt that our oceans and seas are in trouble and we’re not doing enough currently, there was a room full of people filled with hope. From the Blue Marine Foundation (the same crew behind the Waitrose mackerel campaign I featured a while back) and their fight against bottom trawling with Stephen Fry and Theo James, to the people coaxing battered coral reefs back to life (fun fact: a coral polyp is basically an upside-down jellyfish).
The event was hosted by the wonderful 10 Percent for the Ocean (the same people who funded Attenborough’s latest film, Ocean) are running events all through London Climate Action Week, so go and see the work if you care about this stuff.
I left wanting to do something about how I consume fish, how I communicate the challenges we face and how as a society, we should care about the state of our oceans. On that note, there’s a few good wins for the oceans this week.
👀 News to make you feel good this week
🌳 Mangrove forests are healing after decades of human destruction. A new study finds the world’s coastal mangroves have been quietly staging a comeback since 2010, driven by stronger legal protection, greater public awareness after disasters like the 2004 tsunami, and the remarkable ability of these forests to regrow on their own once we stop chopping them down.
💭 My thoughts? Mangroves store up to five times more carbon than land forests and protect entire coastlines from storms, and yet we’ve been ripping them out for decades. A particular highlight of this story is the sliders in the BBC news story showing you the sheer impact of the growth.
🥚 Sainsbury’s ditches brown eggs in net zero drive. Sainsbury’s is switching its own-brand range to white eggs after a life-cycle assessment found they carry a roughly 13% smaller carbon footprint, mostly because white-feathered hens are smaller, eat less feed and lay for longer.
💭 My thoughts? A supermarket swapping egg colours is not going to save the planet. But the fact that they ran a full life-cycle assessment on the shell of your breakfast tells you how seriously big retailers are now taking supply-chain emissions. There appear to be some welfare standard increases too. For me, the main thing is we’re getting to the point big decisions for decarbonisation are happening.
⚖️ Seven US states sue Trump administration over deal to kill windfarm project. New York is leading a coalition of seven states challenging a deal in which the federal government agreed to pay TotalEnergies nearly $1bn to cancel an offshore wind lease and pledge the money toward oil and gas instead. The states argue it’s an unlawful abuse of taxpayer money and a breach of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. Courts have already struck down several of the administration’s earlier anti-wind orders.
💭 My thoughts? It’s not a prediction it’s more of a ‘here’s what’s actually possible if we stop treating climate, poverty and inequality as separate problems’ document.
🌍 Radical change can lead to a fairer and greener world. The World Inequality Lab launched its Global Justice Report, modelling how the world could raise living standards for most people, cut extreme inequality, and keep warming below 2C by 2100. It’s not a forecast but a deliberately ambitious blueprint, arguing wellbeing, equality and climate stability are one project rather than three competing ones.
How the ‘Picasso of ponds’ went from shaping golf courses to making freshwater homes for wildlife. Shaun Hancox spent years building golf courses with his family’s groundworks firm. Now he uses the same excavator skills to sculpt wildlife ponds for rewilding projects across Britain. Britain has lost at least 400,000 ponds over the past century, so his work is quietly rebuilding a whole lost habitat. Plus, I bet the people are a lot nicer…
🏞️ New record for dam removal in Europe, with over 600 barriers dismantled. A record 603 river barriers came down across 21 European countries in 2025, reconnecting over 3,740km of rivers. It’s the fifth consecutive record year, and removals are now six times higher than the first count in 2020. Iceland and North Macedonia removed their first-ever barriers. Most of what comes down isn’t grand hydropower dams but obsolete culverts and weirs nobody remembers the purpose of.
🐋 Deep South’s mega marine life gets historic new protections. New Zealand has finalised five new marine reserves along the Otago coast, protecting 308 sq km and increasing the total marine reserve area around mainland NZ by almost 50%. The network, co-managed with Kāi Tahu, took more than 13 years of negotiation between iwi, fishers, scientists and community groups. It comes into effect on 1 July.
🌷 Garden angels: the green-fingered communities turning neglected spaces into urban oases. A lovely piece on Londoners transforming bomb sites, disused estate corners and forgotten scraps of land into thriving community gardens. I love the community element of this too.
🚆 European Sleeper adds Breda and Eindhoven to Milan night train. From December, you’ll be able to get a train directly from the Netherlands to Italy for the first time in years. Budget seats start at €29.99, beds from €49.99, bargain!
👁️ One to watch
🐠 Vela: Palmyra Atoll. While we’re on the topic of oceans, I saw this video a few years ago and I loved it. It’s a short film about a remote Pacific island that has gone from war-torn scar to one of the healthiest reef-and-seabird ecosystems on the planet, now home to a research station studying climate resilience. If you want a reminder of what nature can do when we simply give it room to recover, this is it.
This week’s edition was written after a weekend of lots of cycling, running and good vibes.
🎧 My music recommendation for the week unfortunately comes in the form of another Ella Langley song, Loving Life Again.
George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚