For the first time since the Middle Ages, Italy has more woodland than agricultural land. Forests now stretch across 60,000 square miles of the Italian Peninsula, overly concentrated in mountain areas, but which nevertheless represent the gradual reversion of cultivated land to woodland again. The milestone was officially hit in 2020, but only revealed this […] The post Italy’s Forests Larger Than Agriculture Land for the First Time Since the Middle Ages appeared first on Good News Network.

When Chef Erin Wade learned that most of her staff had experienced sexual harassment at her restaurant Homeroom in Oakland, California, she was stunned. The inciting incident back in 2015 involved a father of four who reached under a server’s blouse in front of his children. “We’re a family restaurant, our specialty is mac and cheese!” Wade recalls with lingering disbelief. Yet the more she spoke with employees, the clearer it became that Homeroom was not a particular hotbed for harassers. The problem, in fact, was everywhere. “My staff said they’ve experienced harassment in every restaurant they worked at, but they never before dared to bring the issue to their management.” The restaurant industry remains rife with harassment: Nearly 80 percent of female staff and 49 percent of male staff report having experienced sexual harassment at work from clients, chefs and co-workers, according to a 2014 study by Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United. Two-thirds of adults in the U.S. have worked in restaurants at some point in their lives, according to one survey, so the magnitude of the issue is enormous. And existing training programs, such as bystander training, have been shown to have short-term effects, but limited lasting impact without broader organizational changes.  At Homeroom, Wade and a group of female staffers decided to create a three-step system, simple enough to function for the nearly 100 employees even during a chaotic dinner rush. Customer behavior was color-coded: yellow, orange or red. “Yellow refers to a creepy vibe or unsavory look,” Wade explains. “Orange means comments with sexual undertones, such as certain compliments on a worker’s appearance. Red signals explicit sexual comments, touching, or repeated incidents in the orange category after being told the comments were unwelcome.” Image courtesy of Erin Wade When a staff member experiences harassment, they report the color — “I have a yellow at table three” — and management is required to respond immediately, no questions asked. With a yellow, the employee could choose to switch tables. Orange means the manager or another server immediately takes over the table. If red is reported, the manager ejects the customer from the restaurant.  The surprising result: Since Homeroom implemented the system over ten years ago, the most egregious harassment has ceased to be a problem. Yellows and oranges still occur, but Wade has to reflect for a while before she remembers the last time a server saw red. She believes that the system is “so effective because it changes the power dynamics at a very basic level. It doesn’t require staff to question their feelings and cuts off bad behavior before it can even start. Maybe a customer is checking out a server and thinking about making a move, and then a totally different person takes over and they never see the first server again.” She has since expanded the three-step system for use with racist incidents or even when clients are just plain rude. “If someone wears a really offensive t-shirt, like a white guy wearing a shirt with the N-word, he shouldn’t eat here,” Wade says. “I’d rather lose a customer.” Most importantly, since Wade first wrote publicly about the system in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed, the anti-harassment recipe has spread far beyond the now three Bay Area Homeroom restaurants. The government agency tasked with enforcing harassment legislation, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, adopted the method as a national best practice after consulting with Wade. “I walk into places all the time and discover they’re using it,” Wade says. “I was at [the cocktail bar] True Laurel in San Francisco recently and saw our poster hanging on the wall.” The model has spread beyond California, often through former Homeroom employees who opened their own establishments elsewhere –– for instance, at Good Times Bagels in Boise, Idaho, founded by a former Homeroom manager. Since selling her majority stake in Homeroom in 2020, Wade has been investing in other restaurants and coaching other restaurant founders across the U.S. and in countries as far away as Copenhagen. “A lot of the hospitality leaders there already knew about the system or were using it in their restaurants and bars,” she says.  What surprised Wade most was how organically the model spread. “It’s taken on a life of its own,” she says. One reason the system works, Wade believes, is precisely because customers often do not realize it is being used. “We never announced it,” she says. “To me, that’s part of the elegance of it.” If a server experiences discomfort, another staff member could simply take over the table without publicly confronting the customer unless the situation escalated to a red. “From a hospitality perspective, that’s actually better,” Wade explains. “Most of the time it just means a different person takes over your table. I didn’t see the benefit of announcing why.” Weighed down by negative news? Our smart, bright newsletters deliver the uplift you’ve been looking for. Or click here to choose exactly which ones you want [contact-form-7] Some restaurants display the policy publicly as both a point of pride and a deterrent. Wade understands that approach as well. “Some want guests to know: we’re aware of these issues, so don’t try something.” But at Homeroom, discretion has remained central, except for when a customer is asked to leave, at which point he is told the reason (and in Wade’s experience, it was always a he). Remarkably, the original framework is virtually unchanged. “Like many systems that work, it’s effective the way it’s written,” Wade says. Erin Wade Recently, a fellow restaurateur suggested customers committing a “red” offense should receive a warning before being thrown out. Wade refused to dilute the policy. She said her friend could interpret it as she liked, but, “I said, if you want me to train your staff, it has to be the system as written,” she recalls. “I don’t think people should get warnings for behavior that’s clearly across the line.” The clarity, she argues, is precisely what makes employees feel safe. Wade, a lawyer by training and a feminist at heart, is not your typical restaurant owner. She has a degree from Princeton and worked in the restaurant industry before studying law, but found the experience in the kitchen so stressful and degrading that she didn’t see a future there. But after long days in her law office, when she craved mac and cheese, she couldn’t find a cozy restaurant open late at night to order her comfort food from. And so she founded Homeroom in 2011, with the slogan: “Homeroom is the best part of your day.”  “That’s my mission, for my clients as well as for my staff,” Wade says. “Therefore, we have a zero-tolerance policy.”  But she also realized that diversity was essential to the solution. When she started Homeroom, all shift managers on the floor were men. “That was part of the problem. You should never have any layer of management just composed of one group, whether female or male,” Wade argues. “Men and women often think differently about what they find inappropriate or threatening.” She now takes pride in the fact that she diversified every layer of management. “[A] restaurant is about so much more than food, it’s about community building and also creating social change through different means.”  For her, the deeper lesson is not simply demographic diversity but organizational trust. “This system only works if you already have a culture of communication and transparency,” Wade says. She implemented an open-book policy for the company, sharing financial information with employees and inviting staff to management meetings. “If you already have a lot of ways for staff to communicate with leadership, then saying, ‘I’ve got an orange at table five’ doesn’t feel scary,” Wade explains. “It’s not the first difficult conversation you’ve ever had.” Wait, you're not a member yet? Join the Reasons to be Cheerful community by supporting our nonprofit publication and giving what you can. Join Cancel anytime For instance, she invited employees to fill out feedback forms after every shift describing what had gone well, what had gone wrong and what could be improved. “We made hundreds of incremental improvements that way,” Wade says. “Not just around culture — around efficiency, staffing, workflow. It made the business stronger.” The approach requires significant investment of time and labor. But Wade argues the payoff extends far beyond employee morale. She says it increased productivity and retention, too, noting that employees stay an average of two-and-a-half years, compared to the industry average of fewer than 90 days, and that Homeroom’s financial metrics put it in the top one percent of restaurants in terms of revenue per square foot. “I think people stayed because they felt protected and connected,” she says. “This is just good business. Any customer-service business could use it.” The post Yellow Means Creepy: The Color-Coded Anti-Harassment System Used by Restaurant Workers appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Most people training for strength are working toward the wrong goal. The standard template of heavy loads, eight to ten reps, and cardio at the end (if there’s time) builds muscle. It does not reliably preserve speed, lateral capacity, or cardiovascular function across decades, according to strength and conditioning specialist Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S. The concept gaining traction among trainers is the “strengthspan”: the total range of physical capacity a person maintains over a lifetime, including absolute strength, aerobic capacity, explosive power, and functional mobility. Most programs address one or two of these. The rest decline. Mistake 1: training exclusively with heavy loads Heavy compound lifts build mass and maximal strength. They are also slow. “When you’re lifting maximally heavy weights, you’re lifting slowly,” Samuel says. “Doing that exclusively compromises your body’s ability to move fast and explosively.” Speed and explosiveness are use-it-or-lose-it qualities. Neglect them long enough, and the capacity degrades, regardless of what’s on the bar. The fix: one explosive session per week One session per week of deliberate, fast movement is enough. Kettlebell swings, box jumps, broad jumps, sprint intervals. The point is not more intensity but velocity done with intention. Mistake 2: avoiding low-rep sets Three to four sets of eight to ten reps build muscle and moderate strength. It doesn’t train maximal force production, which requires very heavy loads at low rep counts (sets of two, three, or five). Samuel’s version of this is blunt: “If you’re stuck under a car, who do you want to pick it up to save you — the guy who can deadlift 1,000 pounds once, or the guy who can deadlift 400 pounds eight times?” Force production also transfers to other physical activities in ways that hypertrophy training alone does not. The fix: low-rep work every two weeks Samuel recommends opening a workout with low-rep sets at least once every other week. It doesn’t require redesigning your entire program; it’s just a matter of a few sets at the front of an existing session. The strength gains accumulate across years. Mistake 3: training only in one direction Standard gym programming of squats, deadlifts, lunges, bench press, and rows operates almost entirely in the sagittal plane. Forward and backward. Daily life involves two more: lateral movement (frontal plane) and rotation (transverse plane). A program that skips both prepares the body for gym movements and not much else. The fix: lateral movement at least once a week One lateral movement pattern per week closes this gap. This could be lateral lunges, side shuffles, recreational sports, or even just time with kids who don’t move in straight lines. It doesn’t need to be a structured session. It just needs to happen. Mistake 4: skipping dedicated cardio Lifting hard raises heart rate. It does not produce the same adaptations as sustained aerobic work — those are distinct, and they decline without specific training. “That kind of thinking will cost you down the line when you’re climbing stairs and you’re suddenly out of breath,” Samuel says. The effects show up far from the gym. The fix: 10 to 15 minutes of cardio per week Samuel’s number is deliberately small: 10 to 15 minutes per week, split into four to five-minute finishers at the end of two or three sessions. Burpee EMOMs, treadmill intervals, anything that keeps heart rate elevated for a few sustained minutes. Over the years, that’s enough for the cardiovascular adaptation to compound into something that matters.     Did this solution stand out? Share it with a friend or support our mission by becoming an Emissary.The post 4 training mistakes that shorten your long-term strength first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Up to 40 percent of food produced in Africa is lost between harvest and market. Not from drought or pest damage, but from the absence of one thing: refrigeration. The early numbers from solar-powered cold storage are hard to argue with. Provider Soko Fresh reports cutting spoilage rates from as high as 50 percent to under two percent. Farmers using the service earn up to 50 percent more per kilogram of produce. In a sector where margins are thin and infrastructure failures are routine, that’s not a small shift. The structural problem Cold chains, the network of refrigerated storage, transport, and handling that keeps food fresh from farm to market, are well established in countries like the US, the Netherlands, Japan, and China, where fresh produce stays marketable for weeks. In rural Africa, it can spoil within days. Conventional refrigeration requires reliable electricity, which most rural areas lack. Diesel generators work, but they’re expensive and emission-heavy. So farmers must sell immediately after harvest, at whatever price buyers will offer, with no leverage and no option to wait. “Cold storage remains one of the missing links in Africa’s agricultural value chains,” says Emmanuel Aziebor, regional director for Africa at CLASP, a nonprofit supporting energy-efficient appliance deployment. “When farmers can store produce for longer, they gain access to better markets, reduce waste and increase incomes.” How solar cold rooms work Off-grid solar cold rooms operate without grid power or fuel costs. Most providers charge farmers per kilogram stored rather than requiring them to buy equipment outright; a standalone unit runs roughly $30,000 (about 25,000 euros). The model is now operating across Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and South Africa. In Nigeria, ColdHubs has installed solar walk-in cold rooms at major agricultural markets, available for daily rental. In Rwanda, the same approach is being used for dairy cooperatives, keeping milk viable long enough to actually collect and sell it. Ethiopia is building cold-chain capacity to support horticultural exports, one of its fastest-growing agricultural sectors. Kenyan farmer Yvonne Anyonyi Mumiah grows rosemary, basil, and other herbs for European supermarkets. Before solar cold storage, transport delays or extreme heat could wipe out her harvest after all the work of growing it. “You can do everything right on the farm,” she says, “but if the produce is not stored properly, you lose both the product and income.” Electricity access is not the same as economic opportunity For decades, development efforts in Africa focused on extending grid access to households. That worked, up to a point. Connecting a household to electricity and giving it the means to earn money from that electricity are different problems, and only the first one got serious attention. “We have neglected the conversation around how people can turn electricity into opportunity,” Aziebor says. “We keep extending electricity infrastructure, but unless people can use that power productively, the economic benefits never fully materialize.” Solar cold storage sits alongside a wider push toward productive-use technology: solar irrigation for year-round farming, solar milling so rural communities can process crops near the source rather than selling unprocessed at low margins. The question in each case is the same: can electricity be made to generate income, not just light? Investment remains the constraint The technology works. The funding doesn’t. Commercial investors still treat agricultural projects in emerging markets as high risk, especially where business models haven’t proven out at scale. “These investors see emerging technologies as high risk because we lack enough proven business models with reliable returns,” says Denis Karema, CEO of Soko Fresh. “That makes funding for our type of projects expensive.” Carol Koech, vice president for Africa at the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, says the question is no longer whether the technology works. It’s whether enough bankable projects can be built to pull in institutional money. Grants and concessional finance are covering near-term gaps, but the commercial case needs more volume before private capital shows up at a meaningful scale.     Did this solution stand out? Share it with a friend or support our mission by becoming an Emissary.The post Solar fridges lift African farmers’ incomes by 50 percent first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

Science says that humans are naturally social creatures, but often in real life, nothing about interacting with others feels natural. Even the most confident people can struggle with what to say, how to read a room, or when to jump into a conversation. But according to Reddit, there are a handful of clever tricks that can give anyone a boost. When one user posed the question: “What’s an actual psychological ‘cheat code’ you use in social situations that works almost every time?” responsefs flooded in, revealing simple strategies for everything from memory recall to dealing with an enemy. The 15 tricks people swear by 1. Act like everyone loves you, even strangers “I pretend everyone I meet is in love with me. I mean, not literally. I’m not a complete narcissist. But I’ll start conversations with strangers who give me a smile or a knowing look. Assuming they like me makes me feel more likable. I’ve made friends more easily in my 30s than I did at any other time in my life.” 2. Switch gears during times of anger by getting a ‘yes’ “When someone is angry, like irrationally, psychotically angry, get them to say ‘yes’ to anything. (E.g. Are you mad? Do you want help? Do you want me to give you space?) It engages a different part of the brain, and after that’s engaged, you can help them with problem solving.” 3. Visualize it going well “Before I go to an event, I imagine the room, the people in it, and the way I want to feel while I’m in the room. Sometimes I imagine a light sweeping over everyone like it’s sprinkling good vibes. I’ve noticed that it makes me feel more confident and easy going when I have some anxiety about going somewhere.” 4. Deal with a loud talker by speaking quietly “Speaking at a lower volume if someone is being unnecessarily loud. One of my best friends has a LOUD voice she is completely unaware of, which can be incredibly annoying when we’re in public, so I will lower my speaking volume and she will subconsciously lower hers to match my volume.” 5. Make peace with silence “Being comfortable in silence is power. Especially in any sort of negotiation, complaint, somebody asking for something or vice versa. For some reason when you stay quiet, people break.” 6. Build people up behind their back “Build up people who are part of the same social circle but aren’t currently present. For example, if you’re out at dinner with your normal circle of friends and one of them isn’t there, talk them up and share something positive about them to the rest of the group. Without consciously thinking about it, we start to become aware of the kind of things people in our social circles say about us when we’re not present.” 7. Use flattery to deal with an enemy “Someone doesn’t like you? Give them a genuine compliment. Keyword: genuine.” Read the room 8. Raise a brow. Two, actually. “Raise my eyebrows when I smile hello. Usually we only do that for people we recognize so it makes people feel like they are already accepted.” 9. Take note of last conversation you had with someone “Remember what they said to you the last time you saw them. If you last saw them a month ago, if you remember they were doing a thing, remember that thing and mention it.” 10. A simple trick when you don’t remember someone “If someone comes up to you and says hi, and you can’t remember how you know that person, then say ‘how have you been’ instead of ‘how are you.’ 99% of the time they’ll start telling you about something that was going on the last time they saw you, and that will jog your memory about where you know them from.” 11. React to repetition with kindness “It’s a small one, but it comes up often enough that it’s been useful. People often repeat themselves and a knee-jerk response to someone bringing up something you’d already heard about is ‘You’ve told me this already,’ which incidentally has a somewhat negative connotation to it. Instead of saying that, say ‘I remember you told me about this.’ It’s more kindly affirming to the other person that you’ve listened when they told you the details/story in the past while also serving as a gentle reminder that they’ve already shared it.” 12. Smile at passive aggression “An effective way to deal with passive-aggressive comments is ‘stupid and cheerful.’ Don’t read into their comment, rise above it.” Just good life advice 13. Treat all staff with dignity “Always learn the names of the front office receptionists, custodians, maintenance crew at your place of work/volunteering/etc. Always say hello to them and treat them like human beings. You would be surprised at how nice they treat you and help you out.” 14. Let yourself be corrected “When you want to learn something – facts, rumors, gossip, etc. State the fact but leave 1 detail intentionally wrong. The other person will love to correct you and give you ALL the information. It feeds their ego, you learn what you wanted, everyone is happy with the result. It works when I use it. I know it works on me as well.” And finally… 15. Pretend the person you’re talking to is about to die “One thing that I’ll do when someone is irritating or boring me is to imagine (to myself! silently!) that they will actually die in the next 24 hours, painlessly. My job, then, is to help them have a good final 24 hours. It sounds morbid, but it’s not. There’s meaning and joy that can be pulled out of many moments, even dull and irritating ones.” At their core, many of these tricks are really just a different way of choosing kindness. And that truly is a strategy that works every time. This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated. The post 15 psychological ‘cheat codes’ people swear ‘work every time’ for social situations appeared first on Upworthy.