Cheers to points of hope

If you’re concerned about the world around you, it’s easy to find bad news, especially if the source is TV. Newspapers have a tradition of trying to incorporate as much local news with uplifting stories or interesting features as they can find.

One national news magazine (once a daily paper) does it like no other, their reporting mission to find positive angles and hope even in the most dire situations. That’s probably why the Monitor Daily, f.k.a. The Christian Science Monitor, has won seven Pulitzer Prizes.

Case in point: Points of Progress — a shortlist of hopeful news from around the world. In 2022 they chronicled 233 moments of progress mankind can feel good about. Here’s a sample:

Accessibility: An illiterate couple from Ivory Coast couldn’t read their smartphones, so their entrepreneurial son designed one that works on voice commands in 60 languages — also helpful to the vision-impaired.

In U.S. national parks, a game-changer: All-terrain wheelchairs for the disabled, with tank-like tracks that can traverse rocks, roots, streams and sand; clear fallen trees; plow through tall grass; and tackle uphill climbs. Imagine the new levels of access to America’s most beautiful scenery.

Rethinking recycle: A Kenyan refugee in the U.S. figured out how to provide internet access in a camp using solar panels, a model for broader applications. An engineer in Canada designed furniture built with recycled chopsticks.

Protecting resources: 2022 saw reports from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Austria of increased efforts to protect or improve the health of forests, oceans and water. From just one Ohio river, volunteers and officials removed more than 355,000 pounds of trash.

The United Nations is creating a framework to guide the elimination of plastic pollution by 2040, a proposal the U.S. favored. Recycling efforts have been used to excuse using more; plastic production has doubled in two decades. For an idea of scale, based on the sum of country reports plastic pollution ballooned to 348 million metric tons in 2017, up from just 2 million metric tons in 1950. Access to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment was declared a universal human right.

Human dignity: Spain’s new law gives over 370,000 domestic workers the same labor rights as other types of workers. Morocco expanded paid paternity leave from three to 15 days. Banks across the U.S. canceled or lowered overdraft fees disproportionately affecting lower-income households.

About 25,000 homeless in Houston were housed this year. The Netherlands achieved gender parity for the first time in its government and the U.S. women’s soccer team won equal pay with the men’s team.

As we embark on this new year, let’s raise a glass to hope.

For many more points of progress see csmonitor.com/world/points-of-progress.

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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Email sholeh@cdapress.com.