School of Sustainability

Eight weeks of Diné meals kept heart patients out of hospital

In the rural Navajo Nation, people living with heart failure face a familiar pattern: repeated hospitalisations and emergency department visits that punctuate life with the illness. A new randomised clinical trial has now tested whether food - specifically, food these patients grew up with - could break that pattern. The intervention was a meal programme rooted in traditional Diné ingredients and recipes, delivered to heart failure patients being cared for at two Indian Health Service sites.

The trial, called MUTTON-HF, was led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, the University of Pennsylvania and Gallup Indian Medical Center in New Mexico. It enrolled 206 adults. Half received usual care; the other half received eight weeks of medically tailored meals built around traditional Diné cooking. The patients eating the traditional meals ended up in hospital and the emergency department significantly less often than those on usual care.

The authors believe this is the first Indigenous 'Food Is Medicine' intervention shown to improve cardiovascular health outcomes. They note that earlier medically tailored meal trials for heart failure concentrated on urban patients in the period just after hospital discharge - a different population from the rural communities this trial served. The published summary gives no further detail on the meals themselves, the exact size of the reduction, or what the programme cost to run.

Regeneration International · Read the source

Sixteen bears outside the park are the ones that matter

Nobody traps a Marsican brown bear to count it. During 2025, researchers from ISPRA and Sapienza University covered the animal's entire known range in Italy's Central Apennines — around 6,000 square kilometres — and collected 854 hair samples. From those, genetic analysis picked out 70 individual bears. Scaled up, the estimate for the whole subspecies stands at around 81 animals: 43 females and 38 males, a population that exists nowhere else on Earth.

The census, run under Italy's DigitAP project, is the most complete picture ever assembled of the bear, and it divides the range into three rings. The historic core, centred on the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park, holds about 56 bears and has been stable or gently rising for a decade. Fold in the recently colonised edges — Valle Roveto, the Monte Genzana Alto Gizio Reserve — and the figure climbs to 65, a single continuous population. Then there is the outer ring: just 16 bears, scattered through peripheral country.

The numbers underneath are the uncomfortable ones. The core supports roughly 4.4 bears per 100 square kilometres; the periphery supports 0.4. Distance alone doesn't explain it. Areas joined to the core by suitable habitat corridors carry significantly more bears than areas equally far away but poorly connected, and areas with more road deaths, poisoning and poaching carry fewer. The researchers' conclusion is that these peripheral landscapes could hold many more bears — expansion is not failing for want of habitat, but for want of connection and lower mortality.

That gap is where Rewilding Apennines has been working, with local partners under the EU-funded LIFE Bear-Smart Corridors initiative — restoring orchards along the corridors, fitting bear-proof bins, running community outreach, and fencing off beehives and poultry runs with electric wire. The census gives that work a deadline: 16 bears are too few to hold on their own. Whether the number grows rests not on the park, which has done its job, but on connected corridors, fewer road deaths and poisonings, and villages willing to share the ground.

Rewilding Europe · Read the source

A walled cloister garden, read aloud by full moon

On the evening of 30 May, with the moon full, a small group sat on the veranda of a former Belgian pavilion in an Amsterdam park and took turns reading aloud. The texts were about caves, subterranean ecosystems, light pollution, and the moths and bats that pollinate after sunset. Around them, inside whitewashed walls, was the Shadow Garden, with evening primrose, sage and tall grasses among its plantings, all going dark by degrees.

The site has a layered history. The park hosted the Floriade of 1972, a world horticultural exhibition that gathered plants from across the globe into one place, and the Shadow Garden was once the monastery garden of the Belgian pavilion. Since 2021 it has been kept by Zone2Source, an art-and-ecology testing ground, working with the Onkruidenier, an artist collective made up of Jonmar van Vlijmen and Ronald Boer. Their question, pursued over years rather than an evening, is how people might tend a garden as a shared environment rather than a possession.

This was the second Gardener's Assembly, run with cultural worker Anne Diestelkamp as part of a wider Amsterdam network that grew out of a 2024 exhibition on gardening as artistic practice. The nocturnal programme ended with food: artistic researcher Chen Zhou built an edible landscape of four-coloured jellies, each layer standing for a stratum of ground - newly planted trees, an artificial topsoil under moss, buried concrete left by a cement works. Soil as something you could spoon up and taste.

None of this produced a harvest, and it was not meant to. What it produced was a group of people sitting in a walled garden after dark, noticing what the daylight version of gardening usually misses: the moths working the flowers, the bats over the grass, the ground cooling underfoot. It is a small thing. But the exchange network it belongs to is now in its second year, and the gardens it meets in need hands as well as readers.

Makery · Read the source