【推荐1】When she first started learning about the climate change from one of her elders,Fawn Sharp was invited on a helicopter flight over the Olympic Mountains to survey the Mount Anderson glacier.But the glacier was gone,melted by the warming climate.Sharp had a deep sense of loss when she discovered the glacier wasn’t there anymore.

Loss is a growing issue for people working and living on the front lines of climate change.And that gave Jennifer Wren Atkinson,a full-time lecturer at the University of Washington Bothell,US,an idea for a class.

This term,she taught students on the Bothell campus about the emotional burdens of environmental studies.She used the experiences of Native American tribes(部落),scientists and activists,and asked her 24 students to face the reality that there is no easy fix—that “this is such an intractable problem that they’re going to be dealing with it for the rest of their lives”.

Student Cody Dillon used to be a climate science skeptic(怀疑论者).Then he did his own reading and research,and changed his mind.

Dillon wasn’t going into environmental work—he was a computer-science major.Yet,the potential for a worldwide environmental catastrophe seemed so real to him five years ago that he quit his job and became a full-time volunteer for an environmental group that worked on restoration(恢复) projects.

Six months into the work,he decided that Atkinson’s class was just what he was looking for—a place where he could discuss his concerns about a changing climate.

Atkinson said she hoped the class helped her students prepare themselves for the amount of environmental loss that will happen over their lifetimes.

“We are already changing the planet—so many species are going to be lost,displaced or massively impacted,” she said.“The future isn’t going to be what they imagined.”

【推荐2】Farming is destroying the planet, but there could be a much more environmentally friendly way to feed ourselves: using renewable energy to turn carbon dioxide into food. “This is becoming a reality,” says Pasi Vainikka at Solar Foods, a company that is building the first commercial-scale factory that will be able to make food directly from CO2.

There can be no doubt that immediate attention to find greener ways to grow food is required. Conventional agriculture, including organic farming, causes damage to the environment in many ways. It requires a lot of land, leading to habitat loss and deforestation. It is also the source of a third of all greenhouse gas emissions and releases other pollutants. It isn’t very efficient, either. Crops typically transform less than 1 percent of light energy into usable biomass (生物量).

Instead, Solar Foods plans to avoid photosynthesis (光合作用) altogether, and grow bacteria that use hydrogen as their source of energy. At the factory, renewable electricity will be used to split water to produce hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen will be added to large containers, where the bacteria grow, along with CO2 and ammonia (氨气). The end result will be a yellow powder called Solein.

Solein is made of bacterial cells and is up to 70 percent protein. It can be used as an ingredient in all kinds of foods. “We are aiming at replacing animal-sourced proteins, which we think have the highest environmental impact,” says Vainikka.

Compared with plant crops, Solein will use 100 times less water per kilogram of protein produced, 20 times less land and emit a fifth as much CO2, according to Solar Foods. There are other benefits, too: factories could be situated anywhere in the world and production won’t be affected by weather conditions.

“With Solar Foods and other companies scaling up their systems, this is truly beginning a new era of agriculture,” says Dorian Leger at Connectomix Bio in Germany. “I think these trends are exciting and will help bend the carbon curve as well as lead to improved global food supply security.”

【推荐3】Beginning 2020, the fifth generation of wireless technology is expected to be widely used throughout the world. The new network, called 5G, promises to give faster speeds and a higher capacity for the use of more devices. However, while some companies are competing to be the first to deliver 5G to the consumer, the environmental influences of the new network are being overlooked.

There is some evidence that the new devices and technologies associated with 5G will be harmful to ecosystems. The main component of the 5G network that will affect the earth's ecosystems is the millimeter waves. The millimeter waves that are being used in developing the 5G network have never been used at such scale(规模)before. Studies have found that there are some harms caused by these new technologies.

The millimeter waves, specifically, had a detrimental effect on birds. In a study, researchers observed that after exposure to radiation from a cell tower for just 5~30 minutes, the eggs of sparrows were disfigured. The disfiguration of birds exposed for such a short amount of time to these frequencies(频率)is significant considering that the new 5G network will have a much higher density(浓度)of base stations(small cells) throughout areas needing connection. The potential dangers of having so many small cells all over areas where birds live could threaten their population's survival.

Additionally, it was found that cellular devices were linked to many disturbances in the ecosystems of bees. In this study, beehives exposed for just ten minutes to 900MHz waves fell victim to colony collapse disorder(蜂群崩坏症候群). Bees are an incredibly important part of the earth's ecosystem. Around one-third of the food produced today is dependent on bees for pollination(授粉), making bees are a vital part of the agricultural system.

The impact that the cell towers have on birds and bees is important to understand, because all ecosystems of the earth are interconnected. If one component of an ecosystem is disrupted the whole system will be affected.