Many people today feel numb, cynical, or convinced that their personal actions and political voice don’t really matter…but the environmental record tells a very different story.
➡️ In just a few decades, humanity has turned around problems so vast they literally rewired the brains of half a country and tore a hole in the sky.
Leaded gasoline quietly became one of the most damaging public‑health experiments in history. By the 1970s, millions of Americans had been exposed as children to harmful blood‑lead levels above 5 mcg/dL.
Lead is a potent neurotoxin, and exposure from leaded car exhaust alone stole IQ points from the U.S. population, with children losing several points each, on top of higher risks for heart disease, kidney damage, behavioral problems, and mental‑health issues later in life.
Then policy stepped in. Starting in the 1970s, countries began phasing out lead in petrol, and the results were extraordinary: in the United States, mean blood‑lead levels fell by more than 90% between 1976 and 1995, and globally this phase‑out has driven dramatic drops in blood‑lead levels and prevented immense IQ loss and many premature deaths in children.
Today, leaded gasoline has been eliminated worldwide: a health victory so successful that many people under 30 barely know it was ever “normal.”
The ozone story is just as dramatic. By the 1980s, everyday products were releasing chemicals that destroyed stratospheric ozone, opening a massive “hole” over Antarctica and increasing the risk of skin cancer, cataracts, and crop damage across the globe. In response, nearly every nation on Earth signed the Montreal Protocol, agreeing to phase out ozone‑depleting substances.
Since around 2000, ozone in the upper stratosphere has been recovering at roughly a percent or more per decade, and current assessments project that mid‑latitude ozone in the Northern Hemisphere could return to 1980 levels by the 2030s, followed by and polar regions by around 2060.
These are not small wins around the edges; they are civilization‑scale turnarounds that came from science, public pressure, regulation, and global cooperation.
The same logic applies to the supply chains behind our ingredients & it is why the EBI Network exists: to show what it looks like when sourcing is designed as a “good news story” from the ground up, rather than an extractive afterthought.
One of our supply partners is based in the Vohimana forest of Madagascar (News Story #5) where reforestation, community‑led conservation, and high‑value botanicals are being woven together to protect lemur habitat and restore a critically important rainforest corridor.
This carousel walks through 5 top environmental success stories as proof that when people push, the world really does change…
And as an invitation to create new good news stories in your own sphere of influence, including something as “behind the scenes” as where you source your ingredients.
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