【推荐1】A Fish and Wildlife Service proposal would protect the whitebark pine as an endangered species. Whitebark pines can live for up to 1,000 years and grow at elevations (海拔) as high as 12,000 feet. Environmentalists had requested the government in 1991 and again in 2008 to protect the trees. A nonnative fungus (真菌) has been killing whitebark pines for a century. More recently, the trees have proved vulnerable (易受伤的) to tiny insects that have killed large areas of forest.

The whitebark pines have almost disappeared in some areas, including the eastern edge of Yellowstone National Park, where they are a source of food for threatened grizzly bears (灰熊). This makes the government’s declaration of the Yellowstone area’s grizzly bears as a restored species a lie.

After being blamed for not taking steps to protect the trees, wildlife officials in 2011 admitted that whitebark pines needed protection, but they didn’t act rapidly, saying other species faced more immediate threats.

A lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which made the formal request for protection in 2008, expressed his disappointment that it took so long but said the proposal was still worth celebrating.

The government’s proposal described the threats to the trees as immediate and said the whitebark pines were one of many plants expected to be harmed as climate change moves faster than they can adapt. “Whitebark pines survive at high elevations already, so there is little remaining habitat in many areas for the species to move to higher elevations in response to warmer temperatures,” Fish and Wildlife Service officials wrote.

Government officials are working with researchers and private groups on plans to gather seed from trees, grow them in greenhouses and then plant them back on the landscape, according to Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Amy Nicholas. A proposal of that nationwide restoration is expected by the end of this year. “We do have options to restore this species,” Nicholas said.

【推荐2】As we all know, environmental pollution is still serious nowadays. Our group wanted to know how many students knew about each kind of the pollution and we wanted to learn how often they sorted rubbish. So we did a survey among the students in our school. Here are the results of our questionnaire (问卷).

The results of the questionnaire

【推荐3】The area in front of Janet and Jeffrey Crouch’s house in Columbia, Maryland, does not look usual for their neighbourhood. That is because the Crouches do not have a grass lawn(草坪). Instead, they have some small trees and many native plants.

In recent years, support for replacing lawns with native plants has been increasing in the US. It can be costly to keep a lawn looking good and green. But the Crouches had to spend much more money for the right not to have one.

People living in a house next to them complained to their homeowner’s association, or HOA. HOAs can make rules about the plants that homeowners in a neighbourhood are permitted to grow. Many HOAs require grass lawns. The HOA ordered the Crouches to pull out their native plants and put in grass. However, they refused. “We knew we were doing things that were beneficial for the environment, ” said Janet Crouch.

Lawns are called environmental dead zones in part because they provide no food or shelter for wildlife. They also do not support pollinators like birds, bees, and butterflies. Bee populations have been getting smaller in North America and may be getting smaller around the world.

There are other reasons that lawns are bad for the environment. They require a lot of water and chemicals. Large amounts of water can remove nutrients from the soil. After the water removes the nutrients, people buy even more chemicals to put on their lawns. Scientists say some of these chemicals might cause cancer and other health problems. There are over 16million hectares of grass lawns in the US. That means lawns use more water than any other irrigated(灌溉)crop in the country.

The Crouches’ battle against their HOA took three years. They say they spent $60, 000 fighting to keep their natural garden. They won. Because of their efforts, the state of Maryland passed a law that lets people grow native plants instead of grass, no matter what their HOA wants.

【推荐1】Opening a good book can take you on an adventure but sometimes, it’s not what’s on the pages, but what’s been left in them is the most exciting part for Sharon McKellar, a librarian at the Oakland Public Library. She has been collecting mementos left in the library for years. Now. she’s finally found a use for all those old family photos, notes, coupons recipes and concert tickets she’s collected in books over the years.

McKellar started the “Found in a Library Book” project — an online database of all the things found in books at the library. “It started out as my personal collection, but I put out a call to other library staff, just to see if anybody had anything they’d be willing to share, and was just totally inundated with other people’s little collections of all sorts of things they had found,” McKellar told CBS News.

McKellar has added 370 mementos to the library’s online collection -but she said she had a couple hundred more to upload. Many of the mementos are notes and some are book reviews left behind for the next reader: “I loved this book. It stole my heart and made me cry. When you find tear stains, you will know they are mine.”

McKellar said that while the origins of the forgotten mementos remain a mystery, some people have recognized items on the online database, “One person named Susan reached out because one of the love notes looked like her parents’ handwriting and the kind of notes they used to leave each other,” she said.

The project is fairly new, but McKellar hopes it inspires people to dive into books at their local library, “You never know what you’ll find. You just have a sense of shared space in community.” McKellar said. “I think part of why people are especially excited about that right now is we have obviously been in a fast-paced society. So, it is a way to sort of feel a connection with people who you don’t even know through these forgotten objects.”

【推荐2】The researchers found that more than half of the decline in the Colorado River’s flow is connected to increasing temperatures, and as warming continues, they say the risk of “severe water shortages” for the millions that rely on it is expected to-grow.

The study also examined the impact that action to control pollution of heat-trapping gases could have on the river’s water supply. Some decrease in the flow is likely no matter what actions are taken, but without any cuts to emissions, the river’s discharge（流量）could shrink by between 19% and 31% by the middle of this century.

The Colorado River starts high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Wyoming. On its route, this river supplies major cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and San Diego, as well as farms in the US and Mexico that grow the vegetables that feed, millions around the world. It supports around $1 trillion of economic activity each year.

Global warming is reducing the snowpack that feeds the river. As temperatures increase, snow cover in the region is declining, meaning less energy from the sun is reflected back into space and more warms the ground as heat. The river’s flow has also been cut down by a severe drought during the last two decades, leaving its two main reservoirs-Lake Powell and Lake Mead -barely half full.

Udall, a senior climate scientist at Colorado State University, says these new findings show that the only way to save the river is by addressing the root cause of the problem: climate change. “The science is crystal clear we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately,” he says. “We now have the technologies, the policies and favorable economics to accomplish greenhouse gas reductions. What we lack is the will.”