【推荐2】A woman and her friends were lucky enough to see wild Amur tiger, an endangered species, for two days during the New Year holiday. They spotted the rare animals while driving on mountain-climbing trips in Hunchun, Northeast China’s Jilin province.

The woman, surnamed Zhao, was driving with two friends when they first saw a cub tiger near the Sandaogou village of Hunchun on Jan. 1st, CCTV News reported. Zhao said the young tiger looked chubby and cute. When the tiger saw them, it turned and ran. “We wished to see a wild tiger once, and I didn’t expect our wish would come true on the first day of the new year!” Zhao said.

The next day, when Zhao and her friends drove to where they saw the young tiger a day before, they found an even bigger one. Compared with the cub, the adult did not rush to run away after seeing their car but sat there and watched them for a moment before it “walked slowly into the woods”, Zhao said.

“How lucky they are!” many netizens commented. The year 2022 is the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese lunar calendar.

According to reports, local residents in Hunchun have come across wild Amur tigers more than 30 times since the beginning of 2021. A large area in Hunchun is part of Northeast China’s Tiger and Leopard National Park, which is one of the country’s first five national parks. The parks will be partly open to the public and serve as “classrooms” for nature conservation education. The Amur tiger population in China saw a sharp decline in the 1990s. Thanks to preservation measures, the wild Amur tiger population has been experiencing rapid growth.

【推荐3】Bangladesh's floating gardens, built to grow food during flood seasons, could offer a continuous solution for parts of the world which are likely to suffer from flooding because of climate change, a new study has found.

Bangladesh's floating gardens began hundreds of years ago. The gardens are made from native plants that float in the rivers and operate almost like rafts (筏), rising and filling with the waters. Historically, they were used to continue growing food during rainy seasons when rivers were filled with water.

The farmers layer the plants about three feet deep, creating a version of raised-bed gardens that float in the water. Then, they plant vegetables inside those rafts. As the raft-plants rot away, they release nutrients, which help feed the vegetable plants.

But as climate change affected the volume of water in those rivers, the researchers wanted to understand whether Bangladesh's floating gardens could be a continuous farming practice. They interviewed farming families and found strong evidence that floating gardens provide stability, both in the amount of food available to feed rural populations and in a farming family's income.

They found that farmers typically use hybrid (杂交) seeds, which must be repurchased each year, to grow a diverse range of vegetables in the floating gardens. The gardens are also sensitive to pests, so farmers end up spending some money on both pesticides and fertilizers. But even with those expenses, they found, benefits outweighed costs. One farmer told the research team that he earns up to four times as much money from the gardens as from traditional rice fields.

However, before gaining profits, farmers often take out high-interest loans (贷款) to cover the investment costs of filling the beds and stocking them with plants. Luckily; there are also lower-interest loans from responsible government or non-governmental organizations, which could ease that burden.

【推荐3】Do you celebrate Earth Day? There are a few things you probably don’t know about this global environmental celebration.

The first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970. It has been celebrated on this day annually since. Every year people across the world come together to celebrate Earth Day. The celebration is marked by lots of different activities, from festivals to running races. Earth Day events typically have one theme in common: to show support for environmental issues and increase future generations’ awareness about the need to protect our planet.

In 1962, Gaylord Nelson began trying to convince the authorities to establish a festival about environmental protection after his election to the Senate（参议院）, but he was repeatedly told that Americans were not concerned about environmental issues. As a result, Nelson focused his attention on college students. He proved authorities wrong when participants from 2,000 colleges and universities, 10,000 primary and secondary schools and hundreds of communities across the United States got together in their local communities to mark the occasion of the very first Earth Day in 1970, showing their support for environmental issues across the country. Events were focused on pollution, oil spill damage, the loss of wilderness and the extinction of wildlife.

Over the years, Earth Day has grown from local people’s efforts to a global network of environmental activity. Events can be found everywhere from tree planting activities at your local park to online Twitter parties that share information about environmental issues. Earth Day is now celebrated in 192 countries, and by billions of people around the world.

How can you get involved? The possibilities are endless. Pick up trash in your neighborhood. Go to an Earth Day festival. Make a commitment（承诺）to reduce your food waste or electricity use. Organize an event in your community. Plant a tree. Plant a garden. Visit a national park. Talk to your friends and family about environmental issues such as climate change and pollutions.

The best part? You don’t need to wait until April 22 to celebrate Earth Day. Make every day Earth Day and help to make this planet a better place for all of us to live and enjoy.

【推荐1】Before you read any further, close your eyes and listen for a moment. Did you hear the weak sound of a nearby appliance? Or the distant rumble (隆隆声) of a plane overhead? What you likely didn’t hear is silence, and if you ask Gordon Hempton, that’s a problem.

As an acoustic (声音的) ecologist, Hempton has circled the globe three times searching for and documenting the planet’s disappearing natural soundscapes. Yet, the sound Hempton is most concerned about preserving is the most endangered of all: quiet. To Hempton, quiet isn’t the absence of sound, but the quieting of man-made noise pollution. In an ever-louder world, he has spent most of his life speaking up on silence’s behalf.

“When we look at the healthiest ecosystems that exist today on our planet, we’re finding they’re also the quietest places,” Hempton said. “They are the places taking carbon out of the environment, producing oxygen for us to breathe and where endangered species aren’t endangered. And research has shown if we were to start treating noise pollution as pollution, it would have salutary effects on every living thing, including ourselves.”

But despite evidence indicating that quiet makes us healthier and happier, Hempton warns that naturally quiet places are on the road to extinction. “In 1900, you had a good chance of finding peace and quiet in roughly 75% of the continental US. By 2010, that number was 2%, and it’s a similar phenomenon almost everywhere,” Hempton said.

Most recently, Hempton launched Quiet Parks International (QPI), a first-of-its-kind non-profit that aims to certify (认证) and preserve the Earth’s last natural soundscapes. To look for quiet, QPI members study light pollution and flight paths. When they locate an area that they believe has quiet potential, they’ll examine the surrounding area to check for things like power lines, railroads and other signs of noise pollution. Then, with the cooperation of local communities and governments, they send QPI engineers to test each potential site for at least three days. If no noise pollution is detected for several hours at a time, QPI will offer its designation (称号).

【推荐2】Our current climatic stable period is called the Long Summer. From the moment life began on the planet billions of years ago, the climate has swung often abruptly from one state to another-from tropical swamp (沼泽) to frozen ice age. Over the past 10,000 years, however, the climate has remained remarkably stable by historical standards: not too warm and not too cold. That stability has allowed human beings to thrive; farming has taken hold and civilizations have arisen.

But as human population has exploded over the past few thousand years, the fragile ecological balance that kept the Long Summer going has become threatened. The rise of industrialized agriculture has led to pollution on land and water, while our fossil fuel addiction has moved billions of tons of carbon from the land into the atmosphere, heating the climate ever more.

Now a new article in the Sept. 24 issue of Nature says the safe climatic limits in which humanity has blossomed are more vulnerable than ever and that unless we recognize our planetary boundaries and stay within them，we risk total disaster. But the fact is that it’s tough for policymakers to work out a new climate change agreement unless they know just how much carbon needs to be cut to keep people safe.

The problem is that identifying, those limits is a vague science-and even trickier to translate into policy. Scientists still aren’t certain as to how sensitive the climate will be to warming over the long term. It’s possible that the atmosphere will be able to handle more carbon or that disaster could be triggered at lower levels. But climate diplomats should remember that while they can negotiate with one another, ultimately, they can’t negotiate with the planet. Unless we manage our presence on Earth better, we may soon be in the last days of our Long Summer.