Get buried in a living mushroom coffin

Some weeks it's easy to find good stories everywhere I look, and other weeks I'm researching for hours and hours without anything standing out to me.

A few days ago, I came across a story about a unique burial that took place in North America for the first time, involving a casket make of living mushrooms. It caught my attention right away, and I spent the next few hours diving deeper into this fascinating re-imagination of how the end of a life can be the beginning of a new one.

I knew I wanted to make a video on it since I was blown away and figured some of our core community (you) would find it fascinating as well, but honestly, I didn't expect the video to perform very well.

They can't all be big winners, so I went ahead and made it anyways....

And much to my surprise, the video blew past 1 million views on both Instagram and TikTok, and I was even reached out to by a publication to comment on it (if they end up making an article, I'll send it through in next week's newsletter!).

Much more on this story below! As I continue to try and improve my storytelling and finding the people and ideas that are making the future better, I love getting surprised along the way.

Let me know what you think! 🍄

We're also covering Flint finally replacing lead pipes, Exxon losing a court case, Giant river otters returning to Argentina, and much more...

Friday, July 4 (watch)

💦 Flint, Michigan has finally finished replacing all 11,000 lead pipes after their decade long battle to clean up the city’s drinking water, finalizing their 2017 settlement to replace them at no cost to residents, which also inspired a rule for all lead pipes nationwide to be replaced over the next decade (NRDC, Matt Lavietes|NBC)

🏞️ Just four years after their first National Park, China announced plans to build the world’s largest system with 49 parks across 272 million acres to help protect wildlife species, habitats, and cultural significance with the help of local communities (Ronan O’Connell|National Geographic)

🥅 The driest desert on the planet is successfully catching fog water with nets to grow lettuce, with parts of Chile’s Atacama desert not getting any rainfall for years yet still miraculously managing to collected over 1,000 liters of water from the air with this relatively simple system (Rodrigo Gutierrez|Reuters)

🧺 sheldyn_dw_i (from our community) convinced their gym manager to switch to plastic-free laundry detergent for cleaning towels.

Monday, July 7 (watch)

🧑‍⚖️ A group of citizens just beat Exxon as the Supreme Court rejected an attempt by the Big Oil giant to cancel a $14 million fine for illegally polluting the air meaning more than a decade after this largest citizen-led lawsuit of its kind began, they’ll finally have to pay up (Nate Raymond|Reuters)

🪴 A team of 20 women in Kerala, India are maintaining a sort of 'Noah’s ark for endangered wild plants' by safeguarding over 2,000 native plant species, working as rainforest gardeners to preserve some of the most beautiful plants and help heal the natural world (Neelima Vallangi|The Guardian)

🛰️ The first set of mesmerizing images from a new satellite just dropped which can see through forest canopy with a special radar that can measure the woody biomass of tree trunks, stems, and branches to better understand forests and how much carbon they store (ESA)

✂️ Community win: carterjamesvg used hand pruners and a machete to remove invasive plants and garbage from a field in their neighborhood.

Tuesday, July 8 (watch)

🇳🇴 Norway cut their number of people experiencing homelessness in half by launching data-led programs to reduce evictions, supporting local action plans unique to each area, and providing permanent affordable housing which show promise that this is a solvable problem (Peter Yeung|Reasons to be Cheerful)

✈️ Eight countries are adding a tax on premium flyers like first class and private jets to raise hundreds of billion of dollars a year to help developing nations adapt to a changing climate, taxing a tiny percentage of super emitters to protect our planet and those in need (Kristin Toussaint|Fast Company)

🦦 Giant river otters were re-released into Argentina’s wilderness after 40 years of absence, marking the first time a mammal declared locally extinct in the nation has been brought back, thanks to conservationists working hard to protect and return a family of the largest otter species in the world (Shanna Hanbury|Mongabay)

🪏 Community win: silver_lavender99 is starting a garden with their neighbors to grow fruits, veggies, and native wildflowers.

Is the future of funerals... mushrooms? (watch)

🍄 The first living mushroom casket burial in North America just took place which might change funerals forever.

Mark Ancker passed away at 77 years old and wanted to be buried naked under a tree on his wooded property in Maine, so his daughter Marsya eventually accepted this unconventional wish and honored it by finding a casket from the startup Loop Biotech that’s grown using hemp fibers and natural mycelium (the root system of fungi).

Instead of a traditional hardwood casket and embalming chemicals, this pillowy white container called the Loop Living CocoonTM grows in a week and biodegrades after about 45 days to actually enrich and improve the soil.

And flowers planted above Mark’s resting place will grow into a garden that he becomes a part of, offering a beautiful full circle remembrance while nourishing the land, bringing a new meaning to the end really just being a new beginning. 

It’s a little out there, but maybe living mushroom caskets are the future of burials?

Thursday, July 10 (watch)

⛏️ 30 Indigenous Amazonian communities just won a historic court case against a gold mine in Colombia, with the court suspending mining leases until a dialogue is opened with the communities and a strategy is agreed on to clean the water and protect their heath, food security, and cultural heritage (Iván Paredes Tamayo|Mongabay)

💊 Chemists have found a way to use E coli bacteria to turn plastic into a popular painkiller called paracetamol (AKA acetaminophen), and honestly the science is a bit too complicated for me, but their study hints at commercial viability for cleaning up plastic waste (Nicola Davis|The Guardian)

🇵🇱 Poland generated more power from clean energy sources than coal for the first time last month, showing that renewable are the future of energy even in Europe’s most coal-dependent nation (Raphael Minder|Financial Times)

🪱 Community win: thrash.hobbit looks for earthworms while walking along his postal route and returns them to the soil to save their lives.

What else?

🦋 This beautiful butterfly is recovering in the UK.

🐊 Forget Tiger King, meet Crocodile Guardian.

🗳️ What happens when you put 200 votes across the political spectrum into one room? Apparently, people change their minds.

🏊 Paris's River Seine is open for public swimming for the first time since 1923.

🪵 A startup is burying logs from dead trees after fires to trap carbon underground.

📸 You can vote for the People's Choice winner of these breathtaking nature photos! (They're all amazing, but I think the sloth hug is my personal favorite.)

Spread this breath of fresh air🪴

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This newsletter was written by Jacob Simon. Over 1 million people are in our community across Instagram, TikTok, Threads, YouTube, and Bluesky. You can say hi on LinkedIn, or by emailing jacob@jacobsimonsays.com. See you next week for more :)