Twenty things, each chosen for what you can do at this one. The reader who has sixty seconds tonight; a little more bandwidth on Saturday.
The cards live inside a larger world of work — researchers running counters, photographers running cameras, citizens running databases, conservation funds buying acres one at a time. Most of what we cite is theirs.
What follows is short on purpose. Every entry is a place to do something specific: a free app to install tonight, a database to search this weekend, a primary source to bookmark, an org accepting donations on a transparent line item. We removed everything that did not pass that test.
Each is free, contributes to real research, and works the moment you install it.
Photograph any plant, animal, fungus, or invertebrate. An on-device model proposes an ID; a global community of naturalists confirms it; the confirmed observations feed the largest open biodiversity dataset in the world. A joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic.
Holds your phone toward a tree and tells you what is singing. Trained on millions of recordings in the Macaulay Library. Free, ad-free, sound and photo ID, works offline once you've downloaded your region's pack. Built by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
The companion database to Merlin. Submit a checklist of what you saw on a walk; it joins the largest open dataset of bird sightings ever assembled. Researchers use it to map migration, range shift, and population trend. Your Saturday morning becomes a data point.
Enter your ZIP code, get a list of native plants that support the birds and pollinators of your specific block. Sources its data from the Biota of North America Program. Filter by what kind of bird you want to bring in — finches, hummingbirds, ground feeders.
Local action is the highest-leverage move most readers can make. These three find your version of it.
480 accredited land trusts cover 46 US states and territories. Together they have protected 61 million acres — more than all the National Parks combined, and they have driven 70% of the growth in protected land since 2015. The locator on this page is interactive.
North America has 3,600 native bee species. 140 of them are mason bees. Xerces is the steady, science-led body protecting them — they publish region-specific native plant lists, nesting-block guides, and pesticide-free habitat protocols. The four-step pledge on this page is the entry.
If you rent, or your roof faces north, or solar panels are out of reach for any reason, community solar is the bridge. Arcadia manages over 3 GW of solar across 16 US states; you sign up in five minutes, your existing utility delivers your power, and you get a bill credit for your share of a local solar farm.
UK readers have a cleaner option than most: Octopus matches 100% of domestic electricity to renewable generation via REGO certificates, on every tariff, at no extra cost. The Agile tariff sometimes goes negative when the wind is up. The company has invested more than £2 billion in UK renewable infrastructure.
The umbrella body for the UK rewilding movement. Tracks the rewilding network across England, Scotland, and Wales, advocates for ecological recovery at the policy level, and supports specific landscape-scale projects — beaver reintroductions, wood pasture restoration, peatland recovery, marine no-take zones.
The diet pillar is the slowest-moving of the four. HappyCow is its quiet companion: a 25-year-old, community-curated map of plant-based restaurants, vegan-friendly cafés, and health-food stores in 240,000 listings across 185 countries. Free, ad-supported but ad-light, no subscription. The single most useful app when traveling or eating out and trying to stay on the planetary-diet side.
Each of these reports specific outcomes — acres bought, miles of ocean protected, beavers released. No vague "supporting our mission."
£100 protects one acre of priority habitat — usually rainforest, dry forest, or wetland — through a local conservation partner who holds the land. The Trust has helped protect millions of acres since 1989 by this exact mechanism. Sir David Attenborough on it: "The money that is given to the World Land Trust… has more effect on the wild world than almost anything I can think of."
The honest scoreboard of 30-by-30. 10% of the global ocean is "designated" protected; only 3% is actually managed and protected enough to produce conservation benefits. MPAtlas distinguishes the two with rigorous, peer-reviewed assessment — and runs the Blue Park Awards for the few MPAs that are doing it right.
The River Otter is the cradle of England's beaver return — wild beavers absent for 400 years are now in over 25 family territories along the river. The Trust ran the original trial and now stewards the population. Their appeal funds the next round of legal releases needed to keep the population genetically healthy.
The 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission's second-pass report — over 35 countries' worth of expert input — gives the most rigorous available answer to "what should we be eating, planetarily." The revised estimate: widespread adoption would save 15 million lives a year, while staying inside Earth's safe biophysical operating space. Plant-rich; modest meat permitted; honest about cultural adaptation.
Every figure on the counter traces to one of these. Bookmark them; they are how we, and you, stay honest.
The continuous measurement that opened the modern climate era. Since 1958, an instrument on a Hawaiian volcano has measured the air. The monthly mean is published in the open. Every CO₂ number on our counter pulls from this feed. April 2026 monthly mean: 431 ppm.
The single most authoritative annual ledger of global CO₂ flows — sources, sinks, land use, ocean uptake. Coordinated from the University of Exeter, peer-reviewed in Earth System Science Data, contributed to by more than a hundred researchers in 70 institutions. The 2025 edition projected a 1.1% rise in fossil emissions to a record high.
The single best plain-language explanation of what food costs the planet. Built on Poore & Nemecek's Science dataset — the 2018 paper that's the source of most planetary-footprint numbers in our cookbook. Charts are downloadable; data is public; Hannah Ritchie's prose is restrained and honest.
The most rigorous synthesis of climate science in the world. Three Working Groups (physical, impacts, mitigation), one Synthesis Report, three Special Reports — finalized through 2023, freely available, the source of nearly every climate projection in mainstream media. Each WG report has a Summary for Policymakers that runs about 30 pages.
Two resources that name the climate moves with the most leverage, ranked. Both have been peer-reviewed, both are free.
Started by Paul Hawken and now a research org of its own, Project Drawdown ranks every credible climate solution by total gigatons of CO₂e it could avoid by 2050. The interactive Explorer lets you sort by sector, scenario, and confidence level — and tells you which proposals are not recommended (vertical farms, blue hydrogen, stratospheric aerosols).
The single goal under the Convention on Biological Diversity: 30% of the global ocean meaningfully protected by 2030. This page tracks the gap between the 10% nominally protected and the 3% actually conserved, plus the science establishing what "effective" means in saltwater.
Curated to widen the daily walk, not to replace it. The reader who has thirty minutes; the reader who has an evening.
The largest dedicated environmental newsroom in the world. 110 million unique readers a year. Reports in eight languages. A Solutions Desk that covers what is working, alongside the harder reporting on what is not. Independent, non-profit, paywall-free.
Long-form essays, audio, films, and podcasts about ecology, culture, and spirituality. The closest in print to the Awe Walks editorial register — restrained, particular, citation-fluent. Each issue is themed; each piece sits in your week the way a slow walk does.
An Indigenous botanist's account of plants, gratitude, and reciprocity. The book most widely passed between strangers in the years since 2020. Quiet, scientific, animate. If you read one nature book this year, it is this one. Her 2025 follow-up, Bud Finds Her Gift, came out in September.
Macfarlane is the closest voice in print to the Awe Walks register — restrained, particular, footnote-fluent. Is a River Alive? moves through three rivers (a cloud forest in Ecuador, a strangled Chennai waterway, an as-yet-undammed river in northeastern Canada) and threads them around the Rights of Nature movement. #1 Sunday Times; Best Book of 2025 in The New Yorker, The Economist, The Guardian.
The reason we have a daily card is because most of the people who care about the living world do not have an extra hour a day to read, donate, watch, or volunteer. The card is sixty seconds. Everything on this page is for the weekend, the evening, the small bandwidth you sometimes find.
Today's walk →