September 23, 2026

Good News for Humankind 🌏

Your daily spark of possibility — one real milestone for change from around the world.

South Korea’s forest wood volume has grown 30-fold since 1950s

South Korea's reforestation is often reduced to a single number: 10 billion trees. The real story is what happened after planting day.

A new study of over 9,000 archival records found tree survival rates were often below 50% in the 1950s — and only climbed above 90% once officials began systematically checking, and replanting, what failed.

By 2020, the country's forests held roughly 30 times more standing wood than in 1952, and now cover 63% of the country.

Chapter 3: Presence| 3-4 God, Spirit, the Tao, Brahman

Across cultures and centuries, in traditions that never spoke to one another, a strikingly similar claim keeps surfacing: that the ground of existence is not neutral, not hostile, not indifferent — but innately nourishing, innately good.

In the Tao Te Ching, the Tao is described again and again in exactly this language. "It nourishes and completes all things," Lao Tzu writes. "All things arise from Tao. They are nourished... developed, cared for, sheltered, comforted."

In the Hindu Vedantic tradition, the ultimate reality, Brahman, is described as sat-chit-ananda — existence, consciousness, and bliss. Ananda isn't something Brahman produces or grants. It's what Brahman is, at its root — a fullness that lacks nothing, present everywhere, in everyone, all the time.

Mahayana Buddhism teaches something remarkably close: buddha-nature. Every being, the tradition holds, already carries within it the seed of full awakening — unconditioned, boundless, and, in the words used to describe it, nurturing and sustaining. It doesn't need to be earned or built. It only needs to be uncovered or revealed, like the Sun behind the clouds.

Among the Lakota people, this same intuition takes the form of Wakan Tanka. The nineteenth-century Lakota chief Luther Standing Bear described it as a great unifying life force that flowed in and through all things — the flowers of the plains, blowing winds, rocks, trees, birds, animals — and was the same force breathed into the first human.

Some call this God. Some call it Spirit, the Tao, Brahman, buddha-nature, the Great Mystery.

The name doesn't matter. What matters is the shared claim underneath all of them: that existence is fundamentally nourishing, that everything is connected to that nourishment at its root, and that we are part of that connection — not isolated, not separate, not depleted, not alone, no matter what we do wrong, no matter what happens next.

And that this is good. This is goodness.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book The Antihero's Journey: From Burnout to Real Contribution in Polycrisis Times. To read other excerpts, go here.

Peter Schulte Burnout & purpose coach, recovering hustle hero. ​​​

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