How Big is the Ecological Footprint of Your Food?

There is no doubt that eating less meat is good for our planet. However, if you are not ready to give up meat entirely, how to make a more     1     choice? Or have you ever thought about where the fish in your soup comes from? Or have you ever wondered how to reduce environmental impact of your meals?

‘We are what we eat!’ confirms the important notion that food and human are     2    . Food is culture, a sense of identity and a personal preference. But globally, our food system accounts for     3     a quarter of manmade greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why we should rethink our food consumption and include “the good food for the planet Earth” into our next recipe!

An expert from WWF Sweden (瑞典世界自然基金会) discussed the role of WWF at one meeting about future food. WWF Sweden aims to     4     production and consumption of food to increase sustainability. There are three interesting tools     5     by WWF Sweden that can help you to make the right choice on food consumption.

“Our Planet Plate” is a campaign with which WWF Sweden hopes to raise climate change     6     about food consumption. Aiming to address the goal of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, WWF provides information on how much greenhouse gases a meal should release to achieve the goal.

WWF Food Calculator is a tool that gives you an idea of how much greenhouse gas emissions your breakfast, lunch or dinner leads to. This tool can     7     how much carbon dioxide is released from the ingredients you use to cook. If you want to reach the goal of 1.5 degrees emission reduction, you are looking at having approximately 11 kg of CO2 equivalent food per week. You do not have to be     8     to reach this goal, but you have to be creative with your recipes. For instance, you could choose free-range meat or opt for local fish over mass-produced meat or     9     fish.

Initiated by SLU, a ‘Meat-Guide’ has been taken up and expanded by WWF Sweden since 2015. The Meat-Guide bases on five     10     of climate, biodiversity, chemical pesticides, animal welfare and antibiotics. You can download the Meat-Guide app onto your phone and use it the next time you do your groceries.

3 . Overcoming extreme cold, cruel ice and people dismissing him as mad, Slovenian Davo Kamicar became the first person to ski non-stop down Mount Everest.

After a dramatic fall over almost sheer cliffs of snow, stones and ice, 38-year-old Kamicar emerged in his base camp after five hours of skiing. “I feel only absolute happiness and absolute tiredness,” he said.

At one stage he had to speed over stretches of ice that collapsed and broke underneath him and could have sent him falling into the deep crevasses (裂缝) that dot the mountain.

The descent (下落) had been seen by many as insanely dangerous. The Darwin Awards website, which documents deaths which are foolhardy, urged people to log on to Internet broadcasts of the attempt. “Keep your eyes peeled for a live Darwin Award,” it said.

However, the only body to make the news was the corpse (尸体) of an unknown mountaineer which Kamicar zipped past as he descended, one of an estimated 120 corpses, thought to litter the slopes.

“This mountain is always full of surprises. Seeing a dead man out there was a really shocking experience,” he said.

Thanks to strategically placed cameras on the mountain and one attached to his safety helmet, hundreds of thousands of people witnessed his descent on the Internet, which was one of the record highs ever. During the run more than 650,000 hits were registered on his expedition website jamming it for a time as others tried to access the site.

Weather conditions were so severe that Kamicar had to abandon plans to rest on the summit before attempting to descend. Instead, suffering from fatigue, as soon as he reached the top he put on his skis and flung himself back down the mountain.

Dealing with the mountain had already cost Kamicar two fingers when a previous failed attempt saw him get frostbite as a fierce storm lashed the peak.

Kamicar comes from a skiing family and took part in his first Himalayan skiing expedition in 1989. Since then, he has been tireless in raising funds and sponsorship for more expeditions, with Everest as the permanent goal.

4 . If we are observant(善于观察的), we can find that most of the flowers in nature are red, orange and yellow. If we have seen a black flower, it is a chance in a million. People have made census (统计) to colors of more than four thousand kinds of flowers and discovered that only eight of them are black. Why are black flowers so rare?

As we know, sunlight is formed by seven different kinds of colored light. The wave length of each light changes, so the quantity of heat in each light changes, too. Flowers, especially their petals (花瓣) , are very weak and easy to the harm caused by high temperature. Black flowers can take in all the light waves, which cause the flowers to dry up in a high temperature. So the black flowers can hardly continue their lives. While red flowers, orange flowers and yellow ones can protect themselves from sunlight by reflecting（反射） the red light, orange light and yellow light, each of which has a large quantity of heat.

That is why red, orange and yellow flowers are very common in nature while black flowers are so unusual.

5 . Mapping Antarctica

Antarctica was on the map long before anyone ever laid eyes on it. Nearly 2,400 years ago, ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle believed that a great continent must exist at the bottom of the world. They though it was needed to balance out the continents at the top of the world. In the 1500s, mapmakers often included a fanciful continent they referred to as Terra Incognita(Latin for “unknown land”) at the bottom of their maps. But it was not until the 1800s -----after explorers had sighted and set foot on Antarctica----- that mapmakers got down to the business of really mapping the continent, which is one—and—a –half times rhe size of the U.S..

While the coastline could be mapped by ships sailing around the continent, it took airplanes—and later, satellites---to chart Antarctica’s vast interior(内陆). That job continues today. And it is a job that still require a mapmaker, or cartographer, to put on boots and head out into the wild.

Cole Kelleher is familiar with that. He is a cartographer with the Polar Geospatial Center(PGC), which is based at the University of Minnesota and has a staff at McMurdo Station. PGC teamed up with Google to use the company’s Trekker technology to capture images of Antarctica for the Internet giant’s popular feature, Street View. A Trekker camera, which is the size of a basketball, is set about two feet above a backpack. The camera records image in all directions. “It weighs about 50 pounds. I was out for two and a half days, hiking 10 to 12 hours each day,” says Kelleher. It was hard work, but really an incredible experience.” According to Kelleher there are plans to use the technology to create educational apps for museums.

The PGC staff at McMurdo Station provides highly specialized mapmaking services for the U.S. Antarctic Program. For one project, Kelleher used satellite images to map huge cracks in the ice. That helped a team of researchers know whether they could safely approach their field camp on snowmobiles. Another recent project was to help recover a giant, high—tech helium(氦气) balloon used to carry scientific instruments high into the atmosphere. These balloons are launched in Antarctica because there is no danger that they will hurt anyone when they fall back down to Earth. Using satellite images, Kelleher and colleagues created maps of where the balloon could be found.

Antarctica may no longer be Terra Incognita, but it still holds countless mysteries. Cartographers and the maps they make will continue to be essential in helping scientists unlock those secrets.

6 . Equipped only with a pair of binoculars (双筒望远镜) and ready to spend long hours waiting in all weathers for a precious glance of a rare bullfinch (红腹灰雀). Britain’s birdwatchers had long been supposed to be lovers of a minority sport. But new figures show birdwatching is fast becoming a popular pastime, with almost three million of us absorbed in our fluttering feathered friends.

Devoted birdwatchers, those prepared to travel thousands of miles for a sighting of a rare Siberian bird, are fast being joined by a new breed of follower whose interest is satiated by watching a few finches (雀科鸣鸟) on a Sunday walk or putting up a bird-box in the back garden.

“Almost three million UK birdwatchers is certainly possible if you include everyone with only a casual interest,” Stephen Moss said in his newly published book -- A Bird in the Bush: a Social History of Birdwatching -- which records the pursuit from the rich Victorian Englishman’s love of shooting rare birds to the less offensive observational tendencies of birdwatchers today.

Television wildlife programmes have helped to fuel the new trend. Last summer, BBC 2’s Britain Goes Wild was a surprise success. It pulled in three million viewers and led to bird-houses selling out across the UK as 45,000 people promised to put up a box.

Birdwatchers’ networking system first came to the attention of the nation in 1989, when a birdwatcher caught sight of the first Vermivora chrysoptera -- a golden-winged songbird from North America -- to be seen in Britain. He put a message out on the network service Birdline, and next day 3,000 birdwatchers proved the full pull of a truly rare bird as they visited the Tesco car park in Kent, where it had settled. Today, birdwatchers can log on to www.birdline.co.uk or have news of the latest sightings texted to their phones.

“Multimillion-pound spending on binoculars, bird food and boxes point to the increasing numbers of birdwatchers,” said David Cromack, the editor of Bird Watching magazine, “The number of people involved is so big that they have great potential to influence government decisions affecting the environment.”

7 . Ask someone what they have done to help the environment recently and they will almost certainly mention recycling. Recycling in the home is very important of course. However, being forced to recycle often means we already have more material than we need. We are dealing with the results of that over-consumption in the greenest way possible, but it would be far better if we did not bring so much material home in the first place.

The total amount of packaging increased by 12% between 1999 and 2005. It now makes up a third of a typical household’s waste in the UK. In many supermarkets nowadays food items are packaged twice with plastic and cardboard.

Too much packaging is doing serious damage to the environment. The UK, for example, is running out of it for carrying this unnecessary waste. If such packaging is burnt, it gives off greenhouse gases which go on to cause the greenhouse effect. Recycling helps, but the process itself uses energy. The solution is not to produce such items in the first place. Food waste is a serious problem, too. Too many supermarkets encourage customers to buy more than they need. However, a few of them are coming round to the idea that this cannot continue, encouraging customers to reuse their plastic bags, for example.

But this is not just about supermarkets. It is about all of us. We have learned to associate packaging with quality. We have learned to think that something unpackaged is of poor quality. This is especially true of food. But it also applies to a wide range of consumer products, which often have far more packaging than necessary.

There are signs of hope. As more of us recycle, we are beginning to realize just how much unnecessary material we are collecting. We need to face the wastefulness of our consumer culture, but we have a mountain to climb.

Lower Oxygen Levels Threaten Marine Life

Oxygen in the oceans is being lost at an alarming rate, with “dead zones” expanding rapidly and hundreds more areas showing oxygen dangerously exhausted, putting sharks, tuna, marlin and other large fish species at particular risk. Dead zones, where oxygen is effectively absent, have quadrupled(翻两番) in extent in the last half-century, and there are also at least 700 areas where oxygen is at dangerously low levels, up from 45 when research was undertaken in the 1960s.

The reasons behind this environmental collapse are multiple. Among all, pollutants generated by the industrial world have been the most destructive force to cause the unbalance, including a rising tide of plastic waste, as well as other pollutants. Seas are about 26% more acidic than in pre-industrial times because of absorbing the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with damaging impacts on shellfish in particular.

Low oxygen levels are also associated with global heating, because the warmer water holds less oxygen and the heating causes stratification(分层), so there is less of the vital mixing of oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor layers. Oceans are expected to lose about 3-4% of their oxygen by the end of this century, but the impact will be much greater in the levels closest to the surface, where many species are concentrated, and in the mid to high latitudes.

Another major cause for lower oxygen is intensive farming. When excess artificial fertilizer from crops, or wastes from the meat industry, runs off the land and into rivers and seas, it feeds algae(藻类) which bloom and then cause oxygen consumption as they die and decay.

The problem of dead zones has been known about for decades, but little has been done to tackle it. Now is high time to take actions and help the oceans function better.

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Flood-hit Venice’s shrinking population faces mounting problems

Venetians(威尼斯人) are fed up with what they see as inadequate responses to the city’s mounting problems: record-breaking flooding, environmental and safety threats from cruise ship traffic and the burden on services from over-tourism.

They feel largely left to their own devices, with ever-fewer Venetians living in the historic part of the city to    1    its interests and keep it from becoming mainly a tourist land.

The historic flooding this week---marked by three floods over 1.5 meters (nearly 5 feet) and the highest in 53 years at 1.87 meters(6 feet, 1 inch)---has    2    calls to create an administration that recognizes the uniqueness of Venice, for both its concentration of treasures and its    3    vulnerability.

Flood damage has been    4    estimated at hundreds of millions of Euros (dollars), but the true range will only become clear with time. The frustration goes far beyond the failure to complete and    5    78 underwater barriers that were designed to prevent just the kind of damage that Venice has    6    this week. With the system not yet completed or even    7    tested after 16 years of work and 5 billion Euros ($5.5 billion) invested, many are suspicious it will even work.

At the public level, proposals for better administering the city including    8    some level of autonomy(自制) to Venice, already enjoyed by some Italian regions like Trentino-Alto-Adige with its German-speaking minority, or offering tax    9    to encourage Venice’s repopulation.

Just 53,000 people live in the historic part of the city that tourists know as Venice, down by a third from a generation ago and dropping by about 1,000 people a year. That means fewer people watching the neighborhood, monitoring for public maintenance    10    or neighbors in need. Many leave because of the increased expense or the daily difficulties in living in a city of canals, which can make even a simple errand a hard journey.