Green sea turtles, tigers, bluefin tuna, and southern African elephants are giving us something we could use a little more of lately: evidence that the world can get better when people put in the work. WWF’s new Living Planet Report highlights recoveries among these animals, alongside a much larger and deeply troubling picture of wildlife decline. There is still an enormous amount to repair, but I want to spend a little time with the creatures coming back, and with what their return asks of us.
The report’s headline finding is a 73 percent decline in the index of monitored vertebrate wildlife populations between 1970 and 2022. That measures the average proportional change in population sizes, rather than a count showing that 73 percent of all animals have disappeared. The distinction matters, even when the underlying news is grim. Habitat loss, overexploitation, and other pressures have taken a terrible toll.
There’s another finding tucked into that picture: around half of the populations tracked are stable or increasing. The losses among declining populations are severe enough to pull the overall index sharply downward, but recovery is happening in places where people have sustained the work. We have evidence of both destruction and repair, and we get to decide which one receives more of our effort.
Consider the green sea turtle, an animal whose basic ambitions include swimming, eating seagrass, and occasionally undertaking an enormous journey to lay eggs. A fairly reasonable agenda, although apparently it required international cooperation to keep us from ruining it.
In October 2025, the species moved from Endangered to Least Concern on the global IUCN Red List. That improvement followed decades of conservation. Protecting nesting and feeding habitats, reducing the killing of turtles and collection of their eggs, and addressing accidental capture in fishing gear have all been part of the effort. Some regional populations remain threatened, so the global improvement comes with responsibilities that continue.
In Hawaii, the end of commercial harvest and protection of nesting beaches helped a once badly depleted population grow. The State of the World’s Sea Turtles describes that recovery while warning that erosion, flooding, and warming nesting sands still threaten it. A protected beach remains a place that needs protecting.
I find something deeply moving in the amount of patience that takes. People begin work knowing they may spend years waiting for the results, and that someone else may be the one who finally gets to count the turtles returning. I think about the things my children will encounter as ordinary, the animals they will recognize, the places they will assume have always been there. Someone is making decisions about those things right now.
The larger report makes clear that conservation projects need help from the systems surrounding them. WWF and researchers at the University of Exeter point to changes in agricultural subsidies, farming practices, energy, and investment. Protecting habitat becomes much harder when our financial arrangements keep rewarding its destruction. We can fund restoration, support farming that safeguards nature, and require businesses to account for the damage their operations cause.
I’d like my children to grow up knowing that adults can notice a problem and organize themselves to do something useful about it. Tonight we’re going to the fire station’s annual open house, something they’ve held since I was a child. There are fire truck rides, lessons on stop, drop, and roll, and now a bounce house, because public safety has apparently acquired an inflatable department. My daughter is very excited. What stays with me is the continuity: people making time to teach another generation how to look after themselves. There is a version of that responsibility in every beach protected and every habitat restored. Our children are arriving in a world already in progress, and we still have a say in what happens next.
In Michigan, Attorney General Dana Nessel is asking a different question about the arrangements we’ve made to keep people well. She filed a federal lawsuit Thursday alleging that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan built and maintained an illegal health insurance monopoly through agreements that restricted competition. Her office says the company controls 65 percent of Michigan’s health insurance market and 79 percent of the PPO market. The state alleges that this power allowed it to raise premiums and out-of-pocket costs while pushing payments to healthcare providers downward.
Blue Cross disputes the allegations. The Wall Street Journal reports that the insurer says Michigan has a competitive insurance market, with local and national companies competing for business. The lawsuit seeks an order stopping the alleged conduct, along with financial remedies.
Having worked in healthcare quality and compliance, I read a story like this and think about what those financial pressures can mean inside a clinic. Staffing, time with patients, and the ability to keep providing a service are part of the care itself. The patient still needs treatment while everyone argues over who will pay for it.
Nessel’s office alleges that inadequate payments have contributed to reduced services and facility closures. That is a serious claim for the court to examine, and a useful question for the rest of us to keep asking: when an insurer negotiates lower payments, where do the savings go, and what happens to the people who need the care?
Meanwhile, scientists have been consulting a tortoise who has had approximately 194 years to work on his personal maintenance. Jonathan, believed to have hatched around 1832, lives on Saint Helena. Researchers studying his DNA found that some of the genetic control regions associated with mitochondrial energy production retained remarkably youthful organization. Mitochondria supply energy for cells, and their declining function is associated with aging. The findings, published October 7 in Science Advances, offer a clue for further research into how organisms stay healthy for longer.
Humanity has built an entire industry around longevity, and now we’ve arrived at the tortoise’s house with questions. I hope someone at least brought him a snack. Jonathan is blind from cataracts, so this is no claim that he has escaped every consequence of age. What interests the researchers is the preservation of certain cellular functions across an extraordinary lifespan. Understanding how that works could help them investigate healthy aging in other species, including ours.
Ezra is also enthusiastic about continued existence, although his current strategy involves wearing his beloved shoes through naps and bedtime. He will be excited about the fire station this evening, too, mostly because he’s excited about nearly everything and trusts that the details will sort themselves out.
Odin, our dog, has his own approach to a long and happy life: greeting my car from directly in front of it until I put my arm out the window. Calling him alongside the car only briefly solves the problem. He wants the greeting conducted properly, even if he has selected a deeply inconvenient venue.
The natural world remains full of lives worth paying attention to, some astonishing, some familiar, and some currently blocking the driveway. I want my children to have the chance to discover more of them. The turtles returning and the scientists patiently learning from Jonathan give me reasons to stay curious, and reasons to care about what we make possible.
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Tonight’s adventure involves fire trucks and a bounce house, while work on the house and property continues steadily. Halloween now has two Glindas and a Tin Man whose costume will mostly consist of a grey shirt asking everyone to use their imagination. He’s showing up anyway, which is one of my favorite things about him.