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How Minecraft and other video games are teaching kids about climate change

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Monday, April 29, 2024

Earlier in April, more than 60 million people were presented with a mission: Track down and vanquish a golden, fire-breathing dragon terrorizing a vulnerable village.That is, a digital village in the metaverse of Minecraft, a videogame that allows its many users to explore and build their own worlds. In this new Minecraft minigame, “Heat Wave Survival,” players are facing up against the Heat Dragon, a villain developers created to represent the deadly threat of extreme heat as global temperatures rise.This is just one of the many ways that climate change is infiltrating game night. Around the world, developers and designers are intentionally weaving climate change characters like the Heat Dragon, as well as potential solutions, into board games and video games to help engage users in the fight to slow global warming.Today, we are exploring how the climate movement is growing within the gaming universe—and what that could mean for the real world.Climate Gamers: The main goal of Minecraft’s “Heat Wave Survival” is to slay the mighty heat dragon, but throughout the mission, players get tips on how to recognize the symptoms of heat-related illnesses and the best ways to respond such as hydrating or finding a cool space, reports Fast Company.The team, led by the nonprofit Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, is also developing a second game in its series in which players are in charge of building their own city supplied by renewable energy, with the option to install heat-resilient infrastructure such as shade structures. The games are primarily aimed at young students.But this isn’t the first initiative of its kind. In 2019, the United Nations launched its Playing for the Planet Alliance, with the goal of helping the video game industry shrink its environmental footprint and engage its players in climate action.Each year, the Alliance—which has dozens of members such as Sony and Google—hosts a “Green Game Jam,” where companies are encouraged to integrate more eco-friendly themes into their games. In 2023, developers added nature conservation elements into 41 games, Bloomberg reports. For example, the company Rovio Entertainment added a temporary new challenge to the popular game Angry Birds, in which users were tasked with saving virtual endangered animals in the Amazon.However, the video game industry itself has its own emissions issues to reckon with. Along with the energy required to play a game, engineers use large amounts of energy to power computers during development, and manufacturing of game accessories and devices uses vast quantities of plastic and batteries, which can contribute to the growing problem of electronic waste after they are disposed of, Claire Asher writes for Mongabay.In December, a CNET report found that “only a portion of gaming companies release climate impact data,” but that a growing number of developers are making efforts to reduce emissions through the use of renewable energy in their supply chains.Clean Energy Simulations: Outside the virtual world, a new energy-oriented version of the classic board game “Settlers of Catan” is being released this summer. The original iteration was created in 1995 and tasked players with creating their own nation from scratch on an undeveloped island. The new game, dubbed “Catan: New Energies,” will introduce more of the modern-day struggles that come along with rapid industrial growth, and the emissions associated with them.In the game, players must choose between investing in expensive clean energy options or low-cost but high-polluting fossil fuels (sound familiar?). Though “Catan: New Energies” does not outright mention the term climate change, if pollutant levels get too high, “the game ends in catastrophe” and the player with the most renewable energy tokens wins, according to Catan’s website.Benjamin Teuber, co-developer of the new game, told NPR that during the development phase, the testing team would “always manage to over pollute.”However, games offer unlimited chances to explore how to wrangle in runaway emissions: “We had heavy discussions afterwards,” Teuber said. “We all felt kind of bad, we learned a thing or two, and the next game we played differently.”But what about the real world, where research shows that there won’t be unlimited opportunities to slow emissions before climate change irrevocably alters ecosystems and cities? Board games and simulations can “inspire players to learn about the climate crisis and motivate them to act,” Sam Illingworth, a game developer and science communications expert at Edinburgh Napier University in the United Kingdom, wrote in the Conversation.“As we face the urgent challenges ahead, I believe that such games can play a crucial role in fostering understanding, dialogue and action.”This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Forget slaying dragons, the newest gaming trend is saving the virtual world (and maybe ours too).

Earlier in April, more than 60 million people were presented with a mission: Track down and vanquish a golden, fire-breathing dragon terrorizing a vulnerable village.

That is, a digital village in the metaverse of Minecraft, a videogame that allows its many users to explore and build their own worlds. In this new Minecraft minigame, “Heat Wave Survival,” players are facing up against the Heat Dragon, a villain developers created to represent the deadly threat of extreme heat as global temperatures rise.

This is just one of the many ways that climate change is infiltrating game night. Around the world, developers and designers are intentionally weaving climate change characters like the Heat Dragon, as well as potential solutions, into board games and video games to help engage users in the fight to slow global warming.

Today, we are exploring how the climate movement is growing within the gaming universe—and what that could mean for the real world.

Climate Gamers: The main goal of Minecraft’s “Heat Wave Survival” is to slay the mighty heat dragon, but throughout the mission, players get tips on how to recognize the symptoms of heat-related illnesses and the best ways to respond such as hydrating or finding a cool space, reports Fast Company.

The team, led by the nonprofit Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, is also developing a second game in its series in which players are in charge of building their own city supplied by renewable energy, with the option to install heat-resilient infrastructure such as shade structures. The games are primarily aimed at young students.

But this isn’t the first initiative of its kind. In 2019, the United Nations launched its Playing for the Planet Alliance, with the goal of helping the video game industry shrink its environmental footprint and engage its players in climate action.

Each year, the Alliance—which has dozens of members such as Sony and Google—hosts a “Green Game Jam,” where companies are encouraged to integrate more eco-friendly themes into their games. In 2023, developers added nature conservation elements into 41 games, Bloomberg reports. For example, the company Rovio Entertainment added a temporary new challenge to the popular game Angry Birds, in which users were tasked with saving virtual endangered animals in the Amazon.

However, the video game industry itself has its own emissions issues to reckon with. Along with the energy required to play a game, engineers use large amounts of energy to power computers during development, and manufacturing of game accessories and devices uses vast quantities of plastic and batteries, which can contribute to the growing problem of electronic waste after they are disposed of, Claire Asher writes for Mongabay.

In December, a CNET report found that “only a portion of gaming companies release climate impact data,” but that a growing number of developers are making efforts to reduce emissions through the use of renewable energy in their supply chains.

Clean Energy Simulations: Outside the virtual world, a new energy-oriented version of the classic board game “Settlers of Catan” is being released this summer. The original iteration was created in 1995 and tasked players with creating their own nation from scratch on an undeveloped island. The new game, dubbed “Catan: New Energies,” will introduce more of the modern-day struggles that come along with rapid industrial growth, and the emissions associated with them.

In the game, players must choose between investing in expensive clean energy options or low-cost but high-polluting fossil fuels (sound familiar?). Though “Catan: New Energies” does not outright mention the term climate change, if pollutant levels get too high, “the game ends in catastrophe” and the player with the most renewable energy tokens wins, according to Catan’s website.

Benjamin Teuber, co-developer of the new game, told NPR that during the development phase, the testing team would “always manage to over pollute.”

However, games offer unlimited chances to explore how to wrangle in runaway emissions: “We had heavy discussions afterwards,” Teuber said. “We all felt kind of bad, we learned a thing or two, and the next game we played differently.”

But what about the real world, where research shows that there won’t be unlimited opportunities to slow emissions before climate change irrevocably alters ecosystems and cities? Board games and simulations can “inspire players to learn about the climate crisis and motivate them to act,” Sam Illingworth, a game developer and science communications expert at Edinburgh Napier University in the United Kingdom, wrote in the Conversation.

“As we face the urgent challenges ahead, I believe that such games can play a crucial role in fostering understanding, dialogue and action.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Read the full story here.
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How a species of bamboo could help protect the South from future floods

In the face of mounting climate disasters, tribes, scientists, and Southern communities are rallying around a nearly forgotten native plant.

In early 2024, Michael Fedoroff trekked out to Tuckabum Creek in York County, Alabama. The environmental anthropologist was there to help plant 300 stalks of rivercane, a bamboo plant native to North America, on an eroded, degraded strip of wetland: a “gnarly” and “wicked” area, according to Fedoroff. If successful, this planting would be the largest cane restoration project in Alabama history. He and his team got the stalks into the ground, buttressed them with hay, left, and hoped for the best.  A few days later, rains swept through the area and the river rose by 9 feet. “We were terrified,” said Fedoroff. He and his team raced back to the site, expecting to find bare dirt. Instead, they found that the rivercane had survived — and so, crucially, had the stream bank. Rivercane used to line the streams, rivers, and bogs of the Southeast from the Blue Ridge Mountains down to the Mississippi Delta. Thick yellow stalks and feathery leaves reached as high as 20 feet into the sky, so dense that riders on horseback would travel around rather than venturing through. In the ground underneath cane stands, rhizomes — gnarled stems just below the soil surface — extended out to cover acres.  When Europeans settled the land that would become North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama, they ripped up trees and vegetation to make way for agriculture and development. Pigs ate rivercane rhizomes and cows munched on developing shoots. Now, thanks to this dramatic upheaval in the landscape, more than 98 percent of rivercane is gone. Of those plentiful dense stands, called canebrakes, only about 12 are left in the whole nation, according to Fedoroff.  But as the Tuckabum Creek project demonstrated, rivercane was an essential bulwark against the ravages of floods. That vast network of tough underground stems kept soil and stream banks in place more effectively than other vegetation, even when rivers ran high. And as the South faces mounting climate-fueled disasters, like Hurricane Helene last year, a small and dedicated network of scientists, volunteers, Native stakeholders, and landowners is working to bring this plant back.  During Helene, the few waterways that were lined by rivercane fared much better than those that weren’t, said Adam Griffith, a rivercane expert at an NC Cooperative Extension outpost in Cherokee. “I saw the devastation of the rivers,” said Griffith. He had considered stepping back from his involvement in rivercane restoration, but recommitted himself after the hurricane. “If the native vegetation had been there, the stream bank would have been in much better shape,” he said.  Rivercane growing along the Cane River in Yancey County, North Carolina, created an “island” where it held the stream bank in place during Hurricane Helene. These photos show the river before and after the storm. Adam Griffith These enthusiasts are ushering in a “cane renaissance,” according to Fedoroff, who directs the University of Alabama program that hosts the Rivercane Restoration Alliance, or RRA, a network of pro-rivercane groups. The RRA and its allies are replanting rivercane where it once flourished, maintaining existing canebrakes and stands, and educating landowners and the general public on cane’s benefits. In addition to those rhizomes saving waterways from devastating erosion, rivercane also provides crucial habitat to native species, such as cane-feeding moths, and filters nitrate and other pollutants from water.  “When people grow to accept cane into their hearts, beautiful things happen,” said Fedoroff, whose team now has a $3.8 million grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to work on rivercane projects in 12 states throughout the Southeast.  Large restoration projects like this often involve collaboration with many major stakeholders: The Tuckabum Creek project, for example, looped in the RRA, the lumber and land management company Westervelt, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Rivercane enthusiasts stressed that consulting with and including tribes is essential in returning this plant to the landscape. Not only does rivercane bring ecological benefits, it also holds a cultural role for tribes — one that’s been lost as the plant declined.   Historically, Native peoples in the Southeast used rivercane to make things like baskets, blow guns, and arrows, but nowadays, many artisans have turned to synthetic materials for these crafts, said Ryan Spring, a historian and a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.  When Spring started his job at the tribe 14 years ago, no one knew much about rivercane ecology, he said. Now, Spring is actively involved in recentering rivercane in the cultural and ecological landscape. “We’re building up community, taking them out, teaching them ecology,” Spring said. “A lot are basket makers, and now they’re using rivercane to make baskets for the first time.” In mature patches of cane, the high density of roots and rhizomes helps keep soils in place during floods. EBCI Cooperative Extension There are challenges to the dream of returning rivercane to its former prolific glory in the Southeast. One is education: For example, rivercane is often confused for invasive Chinese bamboo, which means that landowners and managers generally don’t think twice before removing it. Another barrier to restoration efforts is the cost and availability of rivercane plants. They’re not easy to find in nurseries, and can run between $50 and $60 per plant or more, according to Laura Young of the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation.  But Young has found a way around this problem. She does habitat and riverbank restoration in southeastern Virginia, and six years ago, she wanted to plant a canebrake along a river near the tiny town of Jonesville. The cost was prohibitive, and so Young pioneered a method now known colloquially as the “cane train.” She gathered pieces of cane rhizome, planted them in soil-filled sandwich bags, then started a canebrake with the propagated cuttings — all for $6.  Fedoroff pointed out that the cane train method has one major drawback: Different varieties of rivercane are better suited for, say, wet spots or sunny spots, so transplanting cuttings that thrived in one area could result in a bunch of dead plants in another. At his lab, researchers are working on sequencing rivercane genomes so they can compare different plants’ traits and choose the best varieties for different locations. But, Young added, while the propagation method is imperfect, it’s cheap, easy, and better than nothing. Out of the 200 plants in her initial project, 60 took off.  “Rivercane is kind of like investing,” she said. “It’s not get-rich-quick. You just need to invest time and money every year, and then it exponentially pays off.” The cane train also offers a low-investment way for volunteers and private landowners to get involved in stabilizing stream banks. Yancey County, North Carolina, is home to numerous streams and creeks that suffered major erosion damage during Hurricane Helene. This spring, the county government, in partnership with several state and local groups, led a cadre of volunteers in a rivercane restoration project. They harvested thousands of rhizomes, contacted landowners along the county’s devastated waterways, and planted almost 700 shoots, a process they’ll repeat in 2026. “The county really showed up,” said Keira Albert, a restoration coordinator at The Beacon Network, a disaster recovery organization that helped lead the project.  That’s part of the power of a solution like planting rivercane: It’s an actionable, easy way for ordinary landowners and volunteers to heal the landscape around them. “There’s a lot of doom and gloom when we think about climate change,” Fedoroff said. “We become paralyzed. But we’re trying to take a different approach. We can’t get back to that pristine past state, but we can envision a future ecology that’s better.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a species of bamboo could help protect the South from future floods on Dec 11, 2025.

Climate
Agriculture
Education

Shell facing first UK legal claim over climate impacts of fossil fuels

Survivors of a deadly typhoon in the Philippines have filed a claim against the UK's largest oil company.

Shell facing first UK legal claim over climate impacts of fossil fuelsMatt McGrathEnvironment correspondentGetty ImagesVictims of a deadly typhoon in the Philippines have filed a legal claim against oil and gas company Shell in the UK courts, seeking compensation for what they say is the company's role in making the storm more severe.Around 400 people were killed and millions of homes hit when Typhoon Rai slammed into parts of the Philippines just before Christmas in 2021.Now a group of survivors are for the first time taking legal action against the UK's largest oil company, arguing that it had a role in making the typhoon more likely and more damaging.Shell says the claim is "baseless", as is a suggestion the company had unique knowledge that carbon emissions drove climate change.Typhoon Rai, known locally as Odette, was the most powerful storm to hit the Philippines in 2021.With winds gusting at up to 170mph (270km/h), it destroyed around 2,000 buildings, displaced hundreds of thousands of people - including Trixy Elle and her family.She was a fish vendor on Batasan island when the storm hit, forcing her from her home, barely escaping with her life."So we have to swim in the middle of big waves, heavy rains, strong winds," she told BBC News from the Philippines."That's why my father said that we will hold our hands together, if we survive, we survive, but if we will die, we will die together."Trixy is now part of the group of 67 individuals that has filed a claim that's believed to be the first case of its kind against a UK major producer of oil and gas.Getty ImagesA family take shelter in the wake of Typhoon Rai which left hundreds of thousands of people homelessIn a letter sent to Shell before the claim was filed at court, the legal team for the survivors says the case is being brought before the UK courts as that is where Shell is domiciled – but that it will apply the law of the Philippines as that is where the damage occurred.The letter argues that Shell is responsible for 2% of historical global greenhouse gases, as calculated by the Carbon Majors database of oil and gas production.The company has "materially contributed" to human driven climate change, the letter says, that made the Typhoon more likely and more severe.The survivors' group further claims that Shell has a "history of climate misinformation," and has known since 1965 that fossil fuels were the primary cause of climate change."Instead of changing their industry, they still do their business," said Trixy Elle."It's very clear that they choose profit over the people. They choose money over the planet."Getty ImagesShell's global headquarters is in London which is why the claim has been lodged at a UK courtShell denies that their production of oil and gas contributed to this individual typhoon, and they also deny any unique knowledge of climate change that they kept to themselves."This is a baseless claim, and it will not help tackle climate change or reduce emissions," a Shell spokesperson said in a statement to BBC News."The suggestion that Shell had unique knowledge about climate change is simply not true. The issue and how to tackle it has been part of public discussion and scientific research for many decades."The case is being supported by several environmental campaign groups who argue that developments in science make it now far easier to attribute individual extreme weathernevents to climate change and allows researchers to say how much of an influence emissions of warming gases had on a heatwave or storm.But proving, to the satisfaction of a court, that damages done to individuals by extreme weather events are due to the actions of specific fossil fuel producers may be a challenge."It's traditionally a high bar, but both the science and the law have lowered that bar significantly in recent years," says Harj Narulla, a barrister specialising in climate law and litigation who is not connected with the case."This is certainly a test case, but it's not the first case of its kind. So this will be the first time that UK courts will be satisfying themselves about the nature of all of that attribution science from a factual perspective."The experience in other jurisdictions is mixed.In recent years efforts to bring cases against major oil and gas producers in the United States have often failed.In Europe campaigners in the Netherlands won a major case against Shell in 2021 with the courts ordering Shell to cut its absolute carbon emissions by 45% by 2030, including those emissions that come from the use of its products.But that ruling was overturned on appeal last year.There was no legal basis for a specific cuts target, the court ruled, but it also reaffirmed Shell's duty to mitigate dangerous climate change through its policies.The UK claim has now been filed at the Royal Courts of Justice, but this is just the first step in the case brought by the Filippino survivors with more detailed particulars expected by the middle of next year.

Climate
Business
Science

Ocean Warmed by Climate Change Fed Intense Rainfall and Deadly Floods in Asia, Study Finds

Ocean temperatures warmed by human-caused climate change fed the intense rainfall that triggered deadly floods and landslides across Asia in recent weeks, according to an analysis released Wednesday

BENGALURU, India (AP) — Ocean temperatures warmed by human-caused climate change fed the intense rainfall that triggered deadly floods and landslides across Asia in recent weeks, according to an analysis released Wednesday.The rapid study by World Weather Attribution focused on heavy rainfall from cyclones Senyar and Ditwah in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka starting late last month. The analysis found that warmer sea surface temperatures over the North Indian Ocean added energy to the cyclones.Floods and landslides triggered by the storms have killed more than 1,600 people, with hundreds more still missing. The cyclones are the latest in a series of deadly weather disasters affecting Southeast Asia this year, resulting in loss of life and property damage.“It rains a lot here but never like this. Usually, rain stops around September but this year it has been really bad. Every region of Sri Lanka has been affected, and our region has been the worst impacted,” said Shanmugavadivu Arunachalam, a 59-year-old schoolteacher in the mountain town of Hatton in Sri Lanka’s Central Province. Warmer sea surface temperatures Sea surface temperatures over the North Indian Ocean were 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average over the past three decades, according to the WWA researchers. Without global warming, the sea surface temperatures would have been about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than they were, according to the analysis. The warmer ocean temperatures provided heat and moisture to the storms.When measuring overall temperatures, the world is currently 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than global average during pre-industrial times in the 19th century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.“When the atmosphere warms, it can hold more moisture. As a result, it rains more in a warmer atmosphere as compared to a world without climate change,” said Mariam Zachariah, with the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and one of the report's authors. Using tested methods to measure climate impacts quickly The WWA is a collection of researchers who use peer-reviewed methods to conduct rapid studies examining how extreme weather events are linked to climate change. “Anytime we decide to do a study, we know what is the procedure that we have to follow,” said Zachariah, who added that they review the findings in house and send some of their analysis for peer review, even after an early version is made public.The speed at which the WWA releases their analysis helps inform the general public about the impacts of climate change, according to Zachariah.“We want people everywhere to know about why something happened in their neighborhood," Zachariah said. “But also be aware about the reasons behind some of the events unfurling across the world.”The WWA often estimates how much worse climate change made a disaster using specific probabilities. In this case, though, the researchers said they could not estimate the precise contribution of climate change to the storms and ensuing heavy rains because of limitations in climate models for the affected islands. Climate change boosts Asia's unusually heavy rainfall Global warming is a “powerful amplifier” to the deadly floods, typhoons and landslides that have ravaged Asia this year, said Jemilah Mahmood, with the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health, a Malaysia-based think tank that was not involved with the WWA analysis.“The region and the world have been on this path because, for decades, economic development was prioritized over climate stability,” Mahmood said. “It’s created an accumulated planetary debt, and this has resulted in the crisis we face.”The analysis found that across the affected countries, rapid urbanization, high population density and infrastructure in low lying flood plains have elevated exposure to flood events.“The human toll from cyclones Ditwah and Senyar is staggering,” said Maja Vahlberg, a technical adviser with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. “Unfortunately, it is the most vulnerable people who experience the worst impacts and have the longest road to recovery.”Delgado reported from Bangkok, Thailand.The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – December 2025

Climate
Crisis
Health

MacKenzie Scott Has Given $26B to Nonprofits Since 2019. Here's What She Supported in 2025

The billionaire and author MacKenzie Scott revealed $7.1 billion in donations to nonprofits Tuesday, bringing her overall giving since 2019 to $26.3 billion

The billionaire and author MacKenzie Scott revealed $7.1 billion in donations to nonprofits Tuesday, bringing her overall giving since 2019 to $26.3 billion. Scott first pledged to give away the majority of her wealth in 2019 after her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Since, she's distributed large, unrestricted gifts to nonprofits without asking for applications or progress reports. Largely, her giving has focused in the U.S., though not exclusively. Scott doesn't have a public foundation and so it's not easy to independently track her giving. But she's revealed her gifts in occasional blog posts and essays posted to her website, Yield Giving, which also now includes a database of her grants. The amount of her annual giving has fluctuated, ranging from a reported $2.1 billion in 2023 to $7.1 billion in 2025. In 2025, Scott's gifts showed a particular focus on supporting colleges and universities, especially historically Black and tribal schools, as well as community colleges. She also gave major gifts to organizations focused on mitigating and adapting to climate change. A new emphasis on climate organizations When the list of 2025 recipients was published Tuesday, it included a number of significant gifts to climate groups, with the largest — $90 million — going to the collaborative Forests, People, Climate, which focuses on stopping tropical deforestation. The nonprofit Panorama Global has analyzed Scott's giving over the years and found that historically, giving to the environment has represented a small part of her overall donations. In 2024, only 9.4% of Scott's gifts went to environmental groups, though on average the amount of those gifts was larger than to other areas, according to their research. “What we’re now seeing is different years have different focus areas,” said Gabrielle Fitzgerald, founder and CEO of The Panorama Group. “So last year, there was a really big economic security focus. This year, I really see education and climate.” Scott's assets have grown even as she's given away a fortune When Scott started detailing her giving in 2020, her fortune was valued around $36 billion, according to Forbes. It's fluctuated over the years, but today, Forbes estimates her net worth to be $33 billion, even as she's given away more than $26 billion. Initially, Scott told grantees not to expect or plan for a second gift, but over time, she has given additional gifts to some of the same organizations, often larger than her original grant. “She clearly is getting comfortable with reinvesting in partners that she thinks are doing good work,” said Fitzgerald. At least one organization, CAMFED, which supports girl's education in African countries, has now received four gifts from Scott, including the largest so far, $60 million, in 2025, according to Scott's website. Many generous gifts to minority colleges and universities In addition to at least $783 million Scott gave to historically Black colleges and universities in 2025, her website details many gifts to tribal colleges, community colleges and scholarship funds. “It looks like she sees a lot of need, particularly in two areas ensuring people are getting higher education and ensuring that groups are working to protect the climate,” said Fitzgerald. While Scott has given to higher education since 2020, those gifts have historically been a smaller portion of her education funding. In a 2024 analysis, Panorama Global found nearly 30% of Scott's education grantees were focused on youth development. Marybeth Gasman, a professor at Rutgers University and expert on HBCUs, said she noticed that what sets many of the HBCUs who receive Scott's funding apart from others is steady, consistent leadership and Gasman said, “She’s very interested in institutions that are rooted in community.” The value of unrestricted grants Scott does not put any conditions on her donations, allowing recipients to decide how and when to spend the funds. Unrestricted funding is rare from major donors and foundations, with many choosing to support very specific projects over specific timeframes. However, research from the Center for Effective Philanthropy in 2023 found that concerns about nonprofits misusing Scott's funds or growing unsustainably have largely not been born out. In part, that may be because Scott's team researches and vets groups extensively before making donations. Unrestricted gifts can help nonprofits weather disruptions, test new approaches or technologies or invest in the systems and infrastructure that underpin their work. For example, after the Trump administration cut funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the nonprofit Village Enterprise, which runs antipoverty programs, used a grant it received from Scott in 2023 to keep essential programs running.Additionally, Scott allows groups the flexibility to decide whether to publicly share how much they've received, with more than a third of recipients in 2025 not disclosing the grant amounts in Scott's grant database. Fitzgerald said altgoether, she thinks Scott tries to not make her giving about herself. “In her essays, she’s always talking about other stakeholders and other people’s contributions," Fitzgerald said. "So it’s very different than many other philanthropists who are often the center of the story of their gift.” Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and non-profits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – December 2025

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Education
Forests

Why we only recently discovered space is dark not bright

For centuries, Europeans thought that eternal daylight saturated the cosmos. The shift to a dark universe has had a profound psychological impact upon us

Adobe Stock Photo/Phoebe Watts A blue Earth ascends over the barren surface of the moon, against the black void of space. This famous photograph, Earthrise, was taken on Christmas Eve of 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders. After almost six decades, we take this image for granted. But imagine a different Earthrise, in which space isn’t black but bright blue, like the clear day sky. As strange as it may strike you, this is how most Europeans imagined it for centuries. We know our understanding of the universe has undergone other major transformations, with far-reaching effects. For example, the shifts from an Earth-centred to a sun-centred universe and from a finite to an infinite universe weren’t only scientific discoveries. They made people genuinely rethink their place in the cosmos. The shift from a bright to a dark universe is of comparable significance, but it has been almost lost to history. In recent years, through my research in literary history and the history of science, I have tried to piece together when this shift happened. When, so to speak, did space turn dark? And I’ve found myself asking: what happened to us in the process? Earthrise, a photograph taken from the lunar surface in 1968, crystallized the idea that space was darkNASA Consider the testimony of Domingo Gonsales, the protagonist of the first English science-fiction novel, Francis Godwin’s 1638 Man in the Moone. Travelling to the moon aboard a swan-powered spacecraft, Gonsales reports seeing very few stars – and these few, “by reason it was always day, I saw at all times alike, not shining bright, as upon the earth we… see them in the night time, but of a whitish colour, like that of the moon in the day time with us”. Why does he see fewer stars than we do from Earth? And why are they pale, like the moon seen in the daytime sky? Because his space simply is the daytime sky. The sun has dimmed the light of the brightest stars and drowned out completely that of fainter ones. From our perspective, Gonsales’s universe is upside down. In his version, it is in daytime that we see it as it really is, whereas at night it is obscured by Earth’s dark shadow. But if we ascended into space at midnight, we would eventually break out of the shadow, into the eternal day beyond. In Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moone, the protagonist Domingo Gonsales sets sail for the moon in his swan-powered spacecraftHoughton Library Gonsales doesn’t mention the shadow, but we catch a glimpse of it in another early space travel story, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Approaching Earth, Milton’s Satan sees “the circling canopy / Of night’s extended shade”. In imagining a premodern Earthrise, then, we should add this shadow into the picture – a dark cone extending from the gibbous planet into the blue heavens and disappearing below the lunar horizon. Other authors explain why space isn’t just bright, but bright blue. The most common explanation is that the “firmament” – the variously imagined vault of the cosmos – was blue in colour. This is the view, notes Milton’s contemporary, the atomist philosopher Walter Charleton, held “not only by vulgar, but many transcendently learned heads”. In looking at the day sky, they thought they were simply looking at the end of the universe. The path towards Earthrise This universe also appears in visual art. Here, again, comparison with Apollo 8 is instructive. Some hours after capturing Earthrise, the crew delivered a radio broadcast to Earth from lunar orbit. Commander Frank Borman wished Earthlings a merry Christmas and read from the biblical account of creation. For the first time, humans attained a comparable, godlike perspective on their blue planet, sparkling in the black abyss. But when premodern artists illustrated these same biblical verses, they often drew the inverse: dark Earths, suspended in azure heavens. To complete the alternative Earthrise, imagine one of these darker Earths, rather than the familiar “blue marble”, ascending over the lunar surface. And it wasn’t just poets and painters. Philosophers and scientists also imagined such universes. Aristotle describes “the shadow of the earth (which we call night)”. Two millennia later, so does Copernicus, writing that “while the rest of the universe is bright and full of daylight, night is clearly nothing but the Earth’s shadow, which extends in the shape of a cone and ends in a point”. There was nothing irrational about such views. Early European thinkers simply had no compelling evidence to the contrary, especially regarding the nature of outer space and of Earth’s light-refracting atmosphere. Without such evidence, why suspect that night is the rule and day the exception? What reason had a premodern Christian to break with centuries of tradition and no longer view the heavens – the abode of God, angels and blessed souls – as a realm of eternal light, but one of eternal darkness? A 13th-century manuscript depicts a grey Earth casting a black shadow into a blue universe (left). The newly created Earth is also imagined as a black marble surrounded by a blue cosmos in a 15th-century manuscriptHeritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy; Bibliothèque nationale de France Which isn’t to say bright space was universal, even in premodernity. Thinkers of the Islamicate world, for example, accepted dark space from the 9th century onwards, though the reach of their views in the West seems to have been limited. By all accounts, dark space had to be rediscovered by European thinkers in the 17th century. For one thing, the period saw major advances in the scientific understanding of the atmosphere. Indeed, “atmosphere” is a 17th-century word, and one of the first to use it in English was Walter Charleton, whose universe can be described as the missing link in the story: neither bright nor dark, but changing from one to the other as the observer turns towards and away from the sun. This is because Charleton’s universe is still bounded by a firmament – although a black one, “and not azure, as most suppose” – and is also filled with swarms of tiny particles or “atoms”, driving him to speculate about their visual effects. But for Otto von Guericke, who accepted an unbound, infinite universe, and made groundbreaking experiments studying the vacuum, space is, precisely, space. If we found ourselves in such “pure”, “empty” space, with “no body lighted by the sun either underneath or before” us, we would “see nothing other than shadow”. From this point on, dark space is increasingly accepted by European scientists and scientifically literate thinkers. But that isn’t where the story ends, because bright space still survives for centuries in the popular imagination. Fast-forwarding to 1858, here is the astronomer James Gall, imagining ascending into space in a work aimed at the Victorian general reader: “We look around, and oh, how strange! the heavens are black”. Gall knows space is black, but he doesn’t expect his audience to know it. And this audience isn’t necessarily uneducated in other departments. It isn’t an ignoramus or a child who, as late as 1880, still believes the universe is an “enormous sphere of blue” – it is a distinguished literary historian, David Masson. Isolated instances continue into the 1920s, the very doorstep of the Space Age. We are dealing, then, not only with a lost, but also remarkably recent shift in our cosmological imagination. Because some of the most striking evidence appears in literary works, especially space travel narratives, it was first noticed by literary scholars: C. S. Lewis and, more recently, John Leonard. But it is yet to receive sustained study, and its cultural impact remains almost entirely uncharted. This impact has been profound, although it often hides in plain sight. For example, it is widely recognised that images like Earthrise transformed our planetary and environmental consciousness. Earth became “whole” and “blue”, but also “fragile”: emblematic of the imperatives of political unity and ecological sustainability, as well as the threat of nuclear warfare and anthropogenic climate change. What isn’t recognised, however, is that this transformation wasn’t due solely to a new view of the planet, but also of what surrounded it. Whole Earths had been imagined, depicted and reflected on since antiquity. But most floated in bright universes, eliciting very different reactions. The impact of Earthrise was therefore even greater than commonly understood. Once such images entered mass circulation, they wiped away even the last remaining vestiges of the old, bright cosmos, searing its exact inversion into the popular imagination: Earth as a luminous oasis in a dark cosmic desert. Earth was never “blue” or “fragile”, as such. It appeared so against the lethal darkness around it, which now became not only a scientific but also a cultural and psychological reality.

Climate
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