【推荐1】Nature is all about relationships: the interconnected links between the living and lifeless, and how they harmonize beautifully into a whole that might not be immediately apparent to us humans, as the complexities of the world sometimes escape the grasp of our relatively short-sighted understanding. Perhaps that's why the urgency of the climate crisis and other environ-mental issues don't truly hit home for some; because that important data is presented in a dry, factual way that doesn't touch the deeper parts of our collective soul, in a way that would move us to realize what is being lost.

Clare Celeste is an environmentally-minded artist creating artworks that aim to highlight the precious biodiversity of the planet. Using paper that is complexly cut and then hand-assembled piece by piece, Celeste forms imaginary landscapes of plants and animals that are folded or pressed between glass.

Growing up in Brazil, Celeste says that her earliest childhood memories were of green, tropical ecosystems slowly being eaten up by the rapid expansion of nearby cities.

Celeste said, “When I made a series of combinations, I realized that many of the species in the illustrations had already gone extinct. Humans have wiped out 68 percent of all our planet's biodiversity since 1970, so working with old illustrations can be very heartbreaking as much of the diversity in these beautiful old illustrations has been wiped out by human activities.”

Celeste explains some of the motivations behind this series of paper works: “I wanted to convey the beauty of our planet's plants and animals, while also introducing a more architectural or human-made element with the geometric (几何图形的) patterns. Having grown up in Brazil, I was surrounded by dense urban spaces that often had rich jungle growth just wanting to break through the concrete architecture. I suggest we go back to our love: our love of nature, of our children, of future generations. Because when we love something deeply, we are required to act—to save it when it is threatened.”

【推荐3】“THEY’RE ALL IN TROUBLE,” says Kenyan ecologist Paula Kahumbu. “All elephants are in major, major trouble.”

Populations of the three species have declined: savanna (热带草原) elephants forest elephants and the smaller-eared Asian elephants. And we’re to blame. We’ve expanded (扩张) into elephant territory, building homes and roads, cutting down forests and planting crops. Besides, with the rise of poaching (偷猎), the number of elephants has decreased and became dangerously low in the past five decades.

“Poaching doesn’t just destroy animals,” says Kahumbu, “it gradually weakens society.” That’s why her organization monitored poaching cases in Kenyan courts, launched a campaign called Hands Off Our Elephants and educated children on the value of wildlife. Kahumbu’s goal is noble and urgent: to change “the whole national awareness about conservation.”

Now, she’s taking her message to an international stage with Secrets of the Elephants, a four-part series on National Geographic. It explores the hidden lives of elephants in four habitats — Asia, plus African forests, deserts, and savannas — as well as the people who are racing to save the animals.

“We kind of know what they need, but we aren’t always generous enough.” Secrets of the Elephants, she hopes, will familiarize people with the wildlife that lives among them.

While making the series, the difficult situation of some elephants shocked her. “You look at their faces and they look so sad,” she says. She particularly noticed this in Asia, where Asian elephants and people live in increasingly close distance.

“Despite decades of research into African elephants, much research into Asian elephants has fallen behind — which is why our programme in the following pages will focus on this species,” she adds.

【推荐2】It was Lefteris Arapakis’s first expedition on a fishing boat, and he didn’t expect what the nets would pull up. There were scorpionfish, red mullet and sea bream. But there was also a bright red can of Coke.

Arapakis, whose family had plied (定期往来) the waters near Athens for five generations, pulled the can out of the net and turned it over to look at the sell-by date stamped on the bottom —1987, seven years older than him. It had been in the Mediterranean for almost three decades.

Every day, the fishing boat — and thousands just like it on the crystalline Mediterranean — caught old bottles, plastic foam, flip-flops and other detritus (碎屑) in its nets. And every day, its crew tossed everything back into the undulating waters, only hauling back what would bring cash.

So Arapakis, now 28, had an idea: he would try to convince the fishing industry to treat plastic as a catch. In 2016, he launched a nonprofit focused on sea cleanup and fishing education called Enaleia, a play on Greek words that calls to mind sustainable fishing. Once the fishers brought the plastic ashore, he would recycle it and pay them for their trouble. Six years into the project, he has signed up more than half of Greece’s large-scale fishing fleet — hundreds of ships — to pull in the plastic they gather as they spy the Mediterranean. He plans to keep expanding globally.

This year, after Arapakis spread his efforts across Greece and much of Italy, he expects to gather nearly 200 tons of plastic — enough to fill a football field five feet high with tiny pieces of plastic. That’s more than 7,500 pounds of plastic every week. And others have taken notice: the United Nations Environment Program named him a Young Champion of the Earth in 2020 — its highest environmental honor for people under 30.

“If we hadn’t taken action, we would have had that plastic floating around the Mediterranean forever,” Arapakis said. At the beginning, convincing fishermen to join was painstaking work, requiring a lot of face time in unfamiliar villages. It wasn’t easy: The industry doesn’t always cotton to environmentalists, since many fishermen think the global plastics activists want to take away their livelihoods.

【推荐1】In my latest novel, Aphrodite’s Tears, I wanted to draw on this ancient Greek tradition of sponge (海绵) diving; and explore the traditions surrounding the way of life. My fictional island of Helios, therefore, has a long association with sponge diving, and the heroine Oriel, a newcomer to the island and a diver herself, is keen to learn all about it.

Damian, the leader of the island, explains to Oriel that in his father’s generation, sponge diving was one of the main industries on the island. A sizeable group of islanders would leave each May-yet in the autumn, a smaller group would return. “In those days,” Damian explains, “one man in three was either dead or crippled (残疾的) from the caisson disease before they reached marriageable age.” Under Damian’s leadership, other means of earning a living are being developed-such as olive oil production. But some of the men continue to follow in their ancestors’ footsteps and dive for sponges, and each year there are still two or three deaths.

The emotional impact of these losses on the little island community is apparent to Oriel when she comes across a shrine (祠堂) by the port. There she sees tiny paintings that tell the story of the sponge divers, and before the paintings, so many flowers and gifts. They are laid by the women of the sponge-diving families, as offerings for protection for their men and as thanks for the miracle of their safe return.

Why, Oriel wonders, would these men take the risk? After all, with synthetic (合成的) sponges flooding the market, sponge diving is nowhere near as lucrative as it used to be. “It comes down to tradition,” Damian explains: “To the romantic young, it naturally seems a grand thing to sail away every summer to the shores of Africa and to come back, pockets full of money, hailed a hero... I have seen young boys playing at sponge fishing: swimming underwater, wearing the sponge-fisher’s mask and carrying their spear, pretending to detach sponges from the bottom of the sea. An aura (气息) of heroism surrounds the profession.”

【推荐2】Austrian company Tec-Innovation recently disclosed smart shoes that use sensors to help people suffering from blindness or vision damage to detect obstacles up to four meters away.

Known as InnoMake,the smart shoe may become a possible alternative to the decades-old waking stick that millions of people depend on to get around as safely as possible. The currently available model relies on sensors to detect obstacles and warms the wearer via vibration and an alert sounded on a Bluetooth-linked smartphone. "Sensors on the toe of the shoe detect obstacles up to four meters away.The wearer is then warned by vibration and/or acoustic (听觉的) signals.This works very well and is already a great help to me personally,"Markus Raffer, one of the founders of Tec-Innovation, himself visually damaged,said.

That sounds impressive enough, but the company is already working on a much more advanced version that combines cameras and artificial intelligence to not only detect obstacles but also their nature."Not only is the warming that I am facing an obstacle relevant, but also the information about what kind of obstacle I am facing. Because it makes a big difference whether it's a wall, a car or a staircase, Raffer claimed.

The advanced system is fix in the front of the shoes, in a waterproof and dust proof case. It is powered by a heavy-duty battery that can last for up to one week, depending on use.The battery can be charged in just three hours, using a USB cable.

The next step for Tec-Innovation is to use the data collected by its system to create a kind of street view navigation map for visually damaged people.

"As it currently stands, only the wearer benefits from the data the shoe collects as he or she walks. It would be much more sustainable if this data could also be made available to other people as a navigation aid,"computer scientist Friedrich Fraundorfer explained.

【推荐3】Are you an agreeable person— you know, a nice guy? If so, a logical follow-up might be: How are your finances? And here’s why: Agreeable people have lower savings, they have higher debts, and they’re also more likely to go bankrupt or default (违约) on their loans.

Sandra Matz is a computational social scientist at the Columbia Business School. And using a combination of questionnaires and bank data, she and her colleague found that people who scored as more agreeable on personality tests had a better chance of ending up in terrible financial crisis—especially if they were low-income to begin with.

The researchers also combined personality data on millions of people in the US and the UK with regional data on how many people were unable to pay their debts. And they found again, that the nicer a county or local area’s people on average, the worse their finances. Sandra thinks a factor could be that agreeable people just don’t care much about money. Maybe they pick up the tab (账单) more often, or loan money when they can’t afford to. They’re generous to a fault.

So how do you get them to wise up? We can say, “Don’t care about money just for yourself, but care about it for the people you love. Because if you manage your money badly, it’s not just going to affect you, but it’s also going to affect all the people you care about, and that you love deeply. “ This might translate agreeable people’s superpower —caring about other people— into better financial sense.

So if Sandra does succeed in teaching nice people to be stingy, who then will pick up the tab? Then it’s a matter of negotiating, right? So if the agreeable person says, “I can’t pay all the time, I only want to do that once in a while, but I also want you to give something back. ” That might mean agreeable people need to get a little more comfortable having unpleasant conversations.