Introducing Hope Scroll: News without noise, hope without hype

I made a news site for you all for Earth Hope's birthday.

To celebrate Earth Hope’s second anniversary, I’m excited to unveil a new website, Hope Scroll, a feed of environmental progress stories that doesn’t wait for a newsletter or email. Think of it as an extension of my Hopeful Headlines, but updated much more frequently. You won’t find all these stories in one place anywhere else.

Don’t worry, Earth Hope isn’t going anywhere. These two projects will bolster one another. Earth Hope is a weekly newsletter, and Hope Scroll is a headline feed that solves a big problem: There’s simply too much good news for one determined news project to share. It can’t all fit into a newsletter.¹

Finding and sharing HOPE through all the noise

Has anyone else wondered what the heck happened to our information landscape? Social media feeds want you to stay on their platforms, so they no longer promote external links to reputable news sources. Instead, there are “content creators” spewing a constant stream of, well, crap. To see a few pictures of your friends and family on vacation or to catch up with your favorite organization doing good work, you must scroll past ads that generate revenue for billionaires. Meanwhile, real news, well-researched by human beings, has to fight through the noise to reach a reader’s eye. The result is that we’re growing dumber and more afraid, rather than informed and confident we can still solve the world’s most pressing problems. It’s only getting worse. Can we stop this madness?

Hope Scroll’s main highlights:

• Zero recycled content from X, TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook. We’re not about chasing algorithms or growing popular for popularity’s sake by stealing other creators’ content.

• Human-curated from human sources — absolutely zero AI slop or clickbait.

• Algorithm-free. No matter what you click on, you’ll always see progress stories. No matter what anyone else “likes,” you still see ALL progress stories. No virality. No bots. No influencers. No self-created bubbles. We’re not gathering any data on you in hopes of selling you something later. Wow!

• Readers can save stories to read later. Click the heart, and it saves a story to your own favorites page, no login required. Hello! Substack still doesn’t have this feature.🤯

  

• Readers can anonymously submit story suggestions via our Contact page. All ideas are welcome, but must be delivered in a link and can’t contain obscene words.

  

• Readers can save the site to their home screen on desktop or mobile, kind of like an app. A red dot will appear when new stories are added.

  

  

• Links directly to the most acclaimed human-written content on the planet, from reliable solutions-oriented publications like High Country News, NPR, The Guardian, The Conversation, Mongabay, and BBC, but also off-the-beaten-path local radio and TV stations covering volunteerism and success stories in their own backyards. We also include the most well-regarded solutions-, progress-, and rewilding-oriented Substack newsletters (Rewilder Weekly, The Weekly Anthropocene, Fix the News, Granite Goodness), as well as news directly from conservation organizations like Mossy Earth, The Nature Conservancy, Island Conservation, tribes, and state wildlife agencies.

• None of my autobiographical pieces, poems about ants, or eco-rants.😉 All of my hopeful reporting. (Earth Hope was never supposed to be about me, but it has at times veered into interesting lanes.)

• Not your typical social feed. No photos or videos of friends, family, or colleagues posting weird quotes, odd stories, or probably irrelevant speeches, no matter how cheerfully delivered.

• Simple. Retro. Like a Web 1.0 RSS feed from 1999, but prettier and with a few more perks.

• 100% free.

Please share Hope Scroll

I read once that no one will know what you need if you never ask. My biggest request today: Share Hope Scroll with just one person you know. You can share this article or share the site itself: https://hopescroll.earth/

What about the bad news?

The U.S. Endangered Species Act is under attack. Science is being silenced. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s directives are being diluted. Our public lands are under attack. American Prairie, which I’ve written about several times, has been ordered to take its bison — our national animal — off public lands by September. Tens of thousands flee wildfires in Europe, while many millions choke on smoke in North America, both caused by climate-change-induced drought. You can read this news a thousand times anywhere else, where it is magnified ad nauseum. If you’re like me, reading news like this makes you want to crawl into a hole and never come out. Meanwhile, the good news is something indulgent, something for the back page and human interest section, next to recipes and health hacks? How does that get us anywhere?

What I do is remind people that millions of us still care, are still working hard, have not forgotten, and are not giving up. Conservation as an issue is supported by 80 percent of Americans, across all demographics and political persuasions.

Shameless fundraising plug: Please support Hope Scroll and Earth Hope

Of course, Hope Scroll is an infant. It has barely been birthed out of my brain and contains so much potential to grow in interesting ways. What I know is that elevating solutions is something that MUST happen if we’re going to save this planet. The community we’ve built around Earth Hope has demonstrated that this content resonates and is important. I’m so passionate about this (and irritated and cranky at times, too). If you’ve ever gained anything from my work, if you believe in this type of change, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It helps cover the hosting fees and the long hours I put in over recent months to create this new site. My real birthday is coming up; consider it a birthday gift, as well as a way to celebrate Earth Hope’s 2-year anniversary. 🎂🎉🎁

Here’s a deal for $30 for the first year:

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Happy Birthday Earth Hope!

More scientists, conservationists, and journalists than ever before are talking about the importance of elevating solutions news. But who is actually doing it? And how do we stand up to these enormous social media platforms whose owners don’t have a clue what’s on their own platforms? Earth Hope and Hope Scroll are my answers. A big thank-you to all my subscribers and anyone who has ever supported this project with a donation, like, share, comment, or restack. You have helped create and boost hope.

I’m not a scientist. I’m not a conservationist. I’ve spent my entire career either writing news or helping people understand how they can get into the news and grab readers’ attention. Messaging is important. You can either inspire or you can instill fear. Both work. But the question is, for how long? Fear is disabling. Hope is a never-ending well of energizing truth.

Here are our accomplishments:

• Earth Hope reaches 15,000-30,000 readers a month in 92 countries and 49 states. (Come on, South Dakota, it’s nice over here).🌍🌎🌏

• We reach 7,000 followers and 3,600 subscribers via Substack. View our notes feed to get a sense of the action.

• Our site is recommended by professors, pastors, and therapists. 🙌🏼

• We started with zero presence on any other social media platform.

• We were the first to break the news of “Salmon everywhere one year after Klamath River dam removals,” a post that went viral and broke the rage algorithm.

• We’ve covered hundreds of success stories across all continents. And by “we,” I mean my humble self, your impatient, cranky hopester working from a stand-up desk and toting a Pixel phone in Northern California. I receive editing help from a longtime journalism colleague, as well as some beta reading from other writers I’ve met mainly on Substack. (Thank you🙏🏼💓.)

• Hope Scroll is born. To toot my own horn: I didn’t hire someone to build this. I created it myself, literally diving into the code with my own two hands (wrists that felt they were going to develop carpal tunnel at one point). Friends and family helped with beta testing and great suggestions for features.

Our goals over the next year, let me know if you can help:

• Expand our use by schools, universities, churches, and therapists. Mental health apps?

• Conduct more original reporting and interviews (this takes the most time and paid subscribers make it happen.)

• Double or triple our subscribers, both paid and unpaid.

• Grow Hope Scroll’s readers. Add features and enhance community interaction and connections. Add topics. (Any NatureStack advocates here? Why don’t we just go rogue?)

• Explore translation.

• Get a book deal.

• Gain a reader in South Dakota.😉

A snapshot of stories from the past two years:

Hopeful reporting:

Read more interviews here.

One man, one million cars' worth of pollution eliminated

Elephant seals multiply under Point Reyes cliffs once slated for mansions

Guerrilla solar activism:

My big, beautiful backyard solar

Another war that demonstrates solar's power

Eco-rants:

I'd fire WaPo's climate desk, too

The timber war radicals who want the West to burn

Growing up in China:

I dream of grasshoppers

What I learned about poetry from a Chinese soldier

On President Carter, China and my family

A rant against AI slop:

I'm for seeded watermelon

About caregiving and midlife:

Read more personal narratives here.

A patient new friend

As I went down in the river to pray ...

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THANK YOU. THANK YOU. THANK YOU. I LOVE YOU ALL.

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About Earth Hope

Earth Hope is a solutions-based journalism project that highlights environmental success stories to inspire action. I’m Amanda Royal, a former newspaper reporter and current eco-news junkie. Read more about this project and what inspired it. I aggregate news under my “hopeful headlines,” conduct original reporting and interviews, and share occasional personal narratives. Visit earthhope.substack.com for more stories. To understand why I write about hope, please read “As I went down in the river to pray …”

Google Lens told me this was a tussock moth caterpillar, then an armadillo (!), then a red shouldered hawk feather. My daughter felt it was a turkey feather.

1. I aim for 10 minutes or less of reading time for all my newsletters and articles. If I go over, email providers like Google and Yahoo truncate our stories.