1 . Conservationists go to war over whether humans are the measure of nature’s value. New Conservationists argue such trade-offs are necessary in this human dominated epoch. And they support “re-wilding”, a concept originally proposed by Soule where people curtail economic growth and withdraw from landscapes, which then return to nature.
New Conservationists believe the withdrawal could happen together with economic growth. The California-based Breakthrough Institute believes in a future where most people live in cities and rely less on natural resources for economic growth.
They would get food from industrial agriculture, including genetically modified foods, desalination intensified meat production and aquaculture, all of which have a smaller land footprint. And they would get their energy from renewables and natural gas.
Driving these profound shifts would be greater efficiency of production, where more products could be manufactured from fewer inputs. And some unsustainable commodities would be replaced in the market by other, greener ones — natural gas for coal, for instance, explained Michael Heisenberg, president of the Breakthrough Institute. Nature would, in essence, be decoupled from the economy.
And then he added a caveat: We are not suggesting decoupling as the paradigm to save the world, or that it solves all the problems or eliminates all the trade-offs.
Cynics (悲观者) may say all this sounds too utopian, but Breakthrough maintains the world is already on this path toward decoupling. Nowhere is this more evident than in the United Sates, according to Iddo Wernick, a research scholar at the Rockefeller University, who has examined the nation’s use of 100 main commodities.
Wenick and his colleagues looked at data carefully from the U.S. Geological Survey National Minerals Information Center, which keeps a record of commodities used from 1900 through the present day. They found that the use of 36 commodities (sand, iron ore, cotton etc.) in the U. S. Economy had peaked.
Another 53 commodities (nitrogen, timber, beef, etc.) are being used more efficiently per dollar value of gross domestic product than in the pre-1970s era. Their use would peak soon, Wernick said.
Only 11 commodities (industrial diamond, indium, chicken, etc.) are increasing in use (Greenwire, Nov.6), and most of these are employed by industries in small quantities to improve systems processes. Chicken use is rising because people are eating less beef, a desirable development since poultry cultivation has a smaller environmental footprint.
The numbers show the United States has not intensified resource consumption since the 1970s even while increasing its GDP and population, said Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller University.
“It seems like the 20th-century expectation we had, we were always assuming the future entailed greater consumption of resources,” Ausubel said. “But what we are seeing in the developed countries is, of course, peaks.”
1. What does the underlined word “trade-offs” refer to in the first paragraph?| A．The balance between human development and natural ecology. |
| B．The profitability of import and export trade. |
| C．The consumption of natural resources by industrial development. |
| D．The difficult plight of economies growth. |
| A．They believe that mankind should live in forests with rich vegetation. |
| B．They believe that mankind will need more natural resources in the future. |
| C．They believe that mankind is the master of the whole universe. |
| D．They believe that mankind should limit economic growth. |
| A．Natural resources cannot support economic development. |
| B．More resource consumption will not occur in a certain period of time. |
| C．Excessive resource consumption will not affect the ecological environment. |
| D．All resource consumption in developed countries has reached a peak. |
| A．Urbanization and re-wildness. |
| B．Human existence and industrial development. |
| C．Socioeconomic development and resource consumption. |
| D．Commodity trading and raw material development. |
Quake Strikes Chile
On the night of February 27, an 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck in Chile, damaging over 500,000 homes and killing more than 800 people.
The earthquake released much more energy than the one that devastated Haiti in January (Richter scale: 7.0), but left 200 times fewer fatalities – the death toll in Haiti has topped 230,000.
To say that Santiago looks far better today than Port-au-Prince is
One answer is that the Haitian quake had a shallow hypocenter. The earthquake near Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, was only about 15km below the surface,
There was also an element of chance. So much depends on what time of a day an earthquake happens.
“In Chile, a lot of car parks collapsed, but there was nobody in them because it was the middle of the night,” David Galloway, a seismologist (地震学家) at the British Geological Survey, told AFP.
On the other hand, the earthquake in Haiti happened in the afternoon
But the deadly destruction and huge loss of life in January cannot only
“The quality of construction and building codes in Haiti were obviously not as strong as
Chile had regulations in place
Haiti, by contrast, the poorest country in the Latin America, has no building codes
Also, Chile’s government is far
No one ever expects an earthquake, and in that sense it’s always a piece of bad luck,
| A．The fish in it has died out. |
| B．It has stopped flowing. |
| C．It’s got badly polluted. |
4 . As the arc of coronavirus misery rose in 2020, a hopeful development on another dangerous curve may have escaped your attention. The curve tracking the rise of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from energy use went totally flat in 2019, according to a report released in February by the International Energy Agency (IEA). Another international report found very slight growth in global emissions during the same time span, compared with prior years.
Either way, this flattening happened before COVID-19 temporarily hampered economic activity and carbon output. So, the promising CO2 trend stems from other factors: plunging use of coal in many economies and gains in renewable energy, according to the IEA report. “We’re flattening the curve, which is the first step toward bending it downward,” says Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State.
Pending final numbers, we’ll likely see actual reductions in CO2 emissions in 2020, “partly but not entirely due to the pandemic,” Mann says. “Perhaps even more significantly, we know that the flattening of carbon emissions is tied to the transition away from fossil fuel burning and toward renewable energy.”
That’s a structural change, and the shift has been accelerating. Mann predicts the final emissions report for 2020 will show a drop of about 5 percent. But that won’t thwart dangerous climate impacts in our future. “The problem is that we need further reductions by the same amount, year after year, for the next decade and beyond,” he says. The goal is to keep Earth from warming an average of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, which is projected to cause deadly heat waves, debilitating droughts and stronger storms. In fact, 2020 was on track to be one of the hottest years on record, according to Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Also, despite this emissions curve flattening in 2019, and likely decreasing in 2020, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere still reached a new high in 2020, and will continue to rise. Like a bathtub overflowing until the tap is shut off completely, CO2 levels will not stop rising until emissions are driven down to zero—either that, or until emissions are drastically slowed while CO2 is actually removed from the atmosphere.
Pieter Tans, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says he now sees “a golden opportunity to provide much-needed jobs by working on the energy transition.” To seize that opportunity, he says we must embrace this idea: “We humans are really in charge of, and responsible for, our own future, which includes the health of our planet.”
1. What do we learn about the current curve of CO2?| A．It wasn’t until Covid19 hit the economy that the curve flattened. |
| B．The flattening of the curve was as hopeful as the rise of the arc of COVID-19. |
| C．The flat curve means that we’re one step closer to bringing down CO2 emissions. |
| D．People in the economic fields used less coal, which contributed to the flat curve. |
| A．prevent | B．shield | C．oppress | D．fuel |
| A．If carbon emissions drops by 5% year after year, there will be no natural disasters like heat waves, droughts and storms. |
| B．If we shut off the tap of the bathtub overflowing with water, the carbon emissions are likely to drop to zero. |
| C．To protect our planet is to protect our future, a notion commonly identified with by humans. |
| D．The pandemic is not all bad in that it actually serves as a critical time for humans to make energy transition. |
| A．The development of the CO2 curve in human history |
| B．Pandemic, a golden chance for energy transition |
| C．A glimmer of hope for global emissions |
| D．Our determination to prevent CO2 emissions from rising |
5 . The average age is rising around the world - a demographic (人口) shift that may pose a significant challenge to efforts to control climate change.
Hossein Estiri at Harvard University and Emilio Zagheni of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany have found that energy use rises as we get older and not just because we tend to get wealthier. The study suggests that a larger greying population would mean a greater proportion of society would be consuming more energy. They combined two decades worth of data from thousands of U.S. households and used this to build a model to reveal how energy use varied across 17 age groups between 1987 and 2009. They found that, on average, children’s energy consumption climbs as they grow up, before dipping slightly when they leave home. Consumption then rises again when people hit their 30s, before briefly dropping after 55, and then beginning to climb again.
The study controlled for factors such as income, local climate and the age, type and size of a person’s home. The increase in energy use at various points in our lifespan seems to be down to lifestyle and how our needs change as we age. Why does demand surge so much in our 30s? “We need more of everything. More space, a bigger TV, two fridges,” says Estiri. The study found that in warmer parts of the U.S. energy use intensifies in people over the age of 65 probably as a result of the increased use of air conditioning. This suggests that there is a feedback effect between climate change and an ageing population that will only make matters worse.
Heatwaves have become more common in the U.S. in recent years and are expected to become more frequent due to global warming. More older people using more electrical energy to keep cool as temperatures rise could add to emissions, and thus drive more warming until our energy supply becomes entirely fossil fuel-free. “This mix of population, ageing and climate change on energy demand is really important to start thinking about,” says Estiri Benjamin Sova-cool at the University of Sussex. U.K, says the work shows the importance of demographics when it comes to cutting carbon emissions. Most modeling of climate change mitigation assumes people’s energy consumption either stays the same or only changes by a small amount over time.
“This study directly challenges that entire body of research by forcing it to solve the temporality and complexity of the consumption of energy.” says Sova-cool. “Houscholds do not behave in ways easy to predict or comprehend.”
1. Which of the following graphs can best illustrate how people consume energy?A． | B． |
C． | D． |
| A．An ageing population is remotely connected with climate change. |
| B．Factors like people’s income have little to do with energy consumption. |
| C．Global warming would be reversed if more fossil fuel-free energy were used. |
| D．Demand for energy is high in regions with large populations of older people. |
| A．People’s energy consumption stays steady over time. |
| B．It is necessary to predict how households use energy. |
| C．The consumption of energy varies with circumstances. |
| D．Population structure matters the most in cutting our carbon footprint. |
| A．Seniors over 65 are to blame for the ever increasing carbon emissions. |
| B．Various factors should be taken into account to address global warming. |
| C．Climate change calls for a greater emphasis on the control of the birthrate. |
| D．Our ageing population could make it even harder to combat climate change. |
Why bees are finally getting a break
While people have been confined to their homes this spring, wildlife has faced less human disturbance, traffic and polluting fumes. One animal that could see a much-needed revival is the wild bee.
One of the biggest environmental impacts of the global shut down has been the significant reduction in air pollution. Less fumes from cars on the road makes it easier for bees to find food, as air pollution substantially reduced the strength and longevity of floral scents, making it harder for bees to detect food. This means they often end up flying further to find food and bring it back to their nests. In contrast, shorter and more profitable “shopping trips” help them rear more young.
And as governments are tightening their purse strings due to the pandemic, many have stopped maintaining road verges (绿化带) which have turned into lush habitats as a result. “This unexpected quantity of flowers may well be another benefit for bees, with the unexpected food they provide boosting bee populations,” says Mark Brown, a professor of revolutionary ecology.
But a break for wild bees doesn’t mean it’s a good time for honey. Commercial beekeepers depend heavily on importing queen bees from around the world to replenish (补充) their colonies. Usually the bees are transported by plane, but since flights have been grounded they are being driven across the continent.
This could have serious knock-on effects for farmers, as commercial traveling hive are often relied upon for crop pollination. Take the Californian almond. Almond trees flower in February and March, and by April the visiting commercial hived have usually been moved to other parts of the country to poll in ate different crops. This re location has taken longer this year as some drivers have been told to self-quarantine for 14 days when crossing state borders.
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| A．Driving safely. | B．Doing the cleaning. | C．Reducing air pollution. |
8 . Human activities are killing wildlife at unprecedented rates, with causes ranging from environmental pollution to the built environment. For some bird species, night-time collisions (撞击) with power lines are driving substantial population declines.
Half of all avian species can see ultraviolet light. So James Dwyer, a wildlife biologist at utility consulting firm EDM International in Fort Collins, Colo., had the idea of using near-visible UV light to illuminate power lines. EDM’s engineering team and the Dawson Public Power District developed such light systems and installed them on a tower supporting a power line at Rowe Sanctuary.
Richard Loughery, director of environmental activities at the Edison Electric Institute, who was not involved in the project, says the new UV system adds an important tool for use in hotspots where endangered bird species nest and feed.
“I don’t want utilities to build lines wherever they want because there’s a new tool,” says biologist Robert Harms of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, who was not involved in the work.
| A．Some recommend that utility companies mark their power lines with plastic attachments to increase visibility. |
| B．But for existing lines, he says, the UV system could be “absolutely amazing”. |
| C．Over a 38-night period, crane collisions decreased by 98 percent when the lights were on. |
| D．The researchers did not observe any negative impacts on other species. |
| E．But now scientists have come up with a clever way to make the cables easier for birds to spot, without causing disturbances to humans. |
| F．Biologists reported that 300 cranes were killed in one month in 2009 from collisions with marked lines. |
If cities were people, Chengdu would be a “happy drifter (流浪汉)
It’s the leisurely and slow-paced lifestyle
One of the greatest pleasures in Chengdu is its food. Famous for the use of the tongue-numbing Sichuanese pepper corn and hot chillies, Chengdu dishes are an obsession for locals. “
In fact, according to Wang Xudong, editor-in-chief of Sichuan Cuisine magazine, Chengdu has the highest density of restaurants of any city in the world - there are around 40,000. No wonder it became the first Asian city that
Another important part of daily life is the city’s teahouses,
“Feet
根据以上现象，思考自己认同哪一方？以“Getting a Pet：From Breeders or Shelters？”为题，写一篇120-150字的文章。
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