FOOTLOOSE FUN

The Isle of Wight Walking Festival is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year — and a number of similar events are taking place across the UK as the weather warms up.

BEST FOR ISLANDS

Isle of Wight Walking Festival

This festival celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2024, with an event in spring and another in autumn. Book onto the spring session to see the island’s natural world beginning to stir — guided walks take participants in search of red squirrels, passing through bluebell (风铃草) woods, wading the shallows on a seagrass harvesting project and exploring the steep, splendid scenery of West Wight. 11-19 May.

BEST FOR MOUNTAINS

Arran Mountain Festival

Anyone wishing to dip their toe into Scottish mountaineering should head to the Isle of Arran: not only are its hills said to represent the Highlands in mini size, but it also hosts the Arran Mountain Festival, with a programme of walks for multiple abilities. Head up Goatfell — the island’s highest point (874m) — or cross the A’Chir ridge, with vertical drops below. 17-20 May.

BEST FOR EASY WALKS

Suffolk Walking Festival

If the contours (等高线) of Wales, the English Lakes or the Scottish Highlands seem too hard, head to the more kindly slopes of Suffolk for this walking festival. Close to 60 guided walks explore this famously flat county, ranging from wanders beside the North Sea coast at mysterious Orford Ness to strolls amid the more picturesque landscapes of Dedham Vale. 11-26 May.

For Mother’s Day I asked for one thing: a house cleaning service. Bathrooms and floors specifically, windows if the extra expense was reasonable. The gift, for me, was not so much in the cleaning itself but the fact that for once I would not be in charge of the household office work. I would not have to make the calls, get multiple quotes (报价), research and compare each service, arrange payment and schedule the appointment. The real gift I wanted was to be relieved of the emotional labor of a single task that had been nagging (唠叨) at the back of my mind. The clean house would simply be a bonus.

My husband waited for me to change my mind to an “easier” gift than housecleaning, something he could one-click order on Amazon. Disappointed by my unwavering desire, the day before Mother’s Day he called a single service, decided they were too expensive, and promised to clean the bathrooms himself. He still gave me the choice, of course. He told me the high dollar amount of completing the cleaning services I requested (since I control the budget) and asked repeatedly if I still wanted him to book it.

What I wanted was for him to ask friends on Facebook for a recommendation, call four or five more services, do the emotional labor I would have done if the job had fallen to me. I had wanted to hire out deep cleaning for a while, especially since my freelance (自由职业的) work had picked up considerably. The reason I hadn’t done it yet was part guilt over not doing my housework, and an even larger part of not wanting to deal with the work of hiring a service. I knew exactly how exhausting it was going to be. That’s why I asked my husband to do it as a gift.

But, I was gifted a necklace for Mother’s Day while my husband stole away to deep sweep the bathrooms, leaving me to tend to our children as the rest of the house fell into total mess…

One long gray ship at the Port of Los Angeles is doing its part to combat climate change. On the ship, which belongs to Captura, a Los Angeles-based startup, is a system that takes into seawater and sucks out CO₂, which can be used for various purposes or buried. The decarbonated (不含二氧化碳的) seawater is returned to the ocean, where it absorbs more CO₂ from the atmosphere, in a small strike against the massive rise of the greenhouse gas.

After a yearlong experiment, Captura is planning to open a 1000-ton-per-year facility that will bury the captured CO₂ in rock formations under the North Sea. Equatic, another Los Angeles-based startup, is launching an even larger 3650-ton-per-year ocean CO₂ capture plant this year in Singapore.

Supporters say capturing CO₂ from the ocean should be easier and cheaper than a seemingly more direct approach: extracting it directly from the air. Direct air capture, which relies on fans to sweep air past absorbent chemicals, currently costs between $600 to $1000 per ton of CO₂ removed, largely because atmospheric CO₂ is so thin, making up less than 0.05% of the air. Earth’s oceans, in contrast, hold the gas at a concentration nearly 150 times higher, and absorb roughly 30% of all CO₂ emissions each year. Companies say they should ultimately be able to capture CO₂ at $100 per ton, or less.

Ocean capture advocates are seeking government support. In the US, direct air capture plants earn a $180 tax credit per ton of removed CO₂, but Ocean efforts currently don’t qualify. “A similar tax incentive (激励政策) for water-based CO₂ removal is absolutely needed,” says Ruben Brands, CEO of Equatic.

Even if the technology takes off, it will have to scale up massively to make a meaning contribution in offsetting (抵消) global emissions. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by 2050 we will need to remove some 5 billion tons of CO₂ every year to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5℃. So far, the ocean capture companies are pulling out only thousands of tons. Matthew Eisaman, a chief scientist at Captura, says, “We have an enormous challenge ahead of us.”

This is going to sound weird, but I want you to look closely for a moment at your thumbs. See how they bend flexibly forwards as well as back. The human thumb is not just a device for giving the thumbs-up sign or for picking up dropped keys. It is also one of the most efficient and sensitive tools in existence for determining the ripeness of fruit.

However, most of us don’t use them that way anymore. One of the most striking things about eating in the modern world is that we act as if we were sense-blind. Our noses can distinguish fresh milk from sour milk, and yet we prefer to look at the use-by date rather than sniffing. Senses, wrote the late anthropologist Jack Goody, are “our windows on the world” —the main tools through which humans acquire information about our environments.

But today, we have yielded many of the functions of our own senses to the modern food industry — which suits that industry just fine. A survey of 7,000 young people in 2011 found that most of them would be hypothetically (假设地) prepared to give up their sense of smell if it meant that they could keep their laptop or phone.

In reality, it is not easy to live without a sense of smell. According to the survey data produced by Fifth Sense, more than half of the respondents having smell loss said that cooking had become a source of stress and anxiety because they could no longer experience the joy of trying new recipes, and could not easily tell when something was burned, which even increases feelings of loneliness and depression and leads to the breakdown of relationships.

No human activity is more multi-sensory than eating, but to eat in the modern world is often to eat in a state of profound sensory disengagement. We order groceries on a computer, or takeaways on a phone, and they arrive wrapped in plastic, so that we can neither smell them nor see them before we take the first mouthful.