Are we greening our cities, or just greenwashing them?
Architecture and urban design is chasing a green fever dream. Everywhere you look, there are plans for “sustainable” buildings, futuristic eco-cities and aquaponic farms on the roof, each promising to add a green touch to the modern city.
All of these are surely good ideas at some level. They are trying to repair some of the damage our lifestyle has done to the planet. But, despite the rhetoric of reuniting the city with nature, today’s green urban dream is too often about bringing a technologically controlled version of nature into the city and declaring the problem solved, rather than looking at the deeper causes of our environmental and urban problems.
One of the most striking examples is Apple’s “spaceship” campus now under construction in Silicon Valley. Though it seems to be sustainable and energy efficient—80 percent of its 175-acre site is preserved for landscaping, it is by any measure a huge, expensive and massively resource-intensive project. As a suburban white-collar workplace, it must include vast garages for 13,000 Apple employees. Thus, it will leave no smaller environmental footprint than a traditional office park.
Designing a perfect green building or eco-city isn’t enough to save the world. Although our buildings, like our cars, have been inefficient environmentally, architecture isn’t directly responsible for humanity’s disastrous environmental impacts. An economic system based on the destruction of nature is the real problem. No green building can help us repair the ecological damage we have caused, nor can any number of aquaponic farms bring us back to the real nature.
Instead of adding “nature” to the urban lifestyle, architects may work to design better relationships between our cities and nature, and to promote just relationships between the people in them.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________如今一次性塑料制品（disposable plastic products）在我们生活中随处可见，很多人已经将其视为必不可少的生活用品。请简述使用一次性塑料制品的好处和弊端，可参考表格信息；并谈谈你对使用一次性塑料制品的建议。
Advantages | Disadvantages |
便利，卫生（hygienic adj.） | 塑料制品对人体潜在危害 |
可回收，反复利用 | 不可生物降解（not biodegradable） 威胁野生动物存活 |
用途广泛（如医疗用品） | 增大碳足迹，对环境负面影响 |
Meet the Woman Who Gives Rescued Farm Animals a Second Chance at Life
Shortly after doctors diagnosed ten-year-old Jenny Brown with bone cancer, they had to cut off her right leg below the knee to save her life. Facing a year of chemotherapy (化疗) after the surgery, Jenny begged her mother for a kitten. The orange calico Jenny named Boogie rarely left her side, licking tears from her cheeks after hospital visits and curling up in her lap as she adjusted to life with a prosthetic (假肢的) leg.
“My relationship with Boogie showed me that animals think, feel, and suffer as much as we do,” says Jenny, now 44.
In 1994, Jenny graduated from Columbia College Chicago and began a career in television and documentary production. On the side, she volunteered as a videographer for animal rights groups, and in 2002, she shot undercover footage of horrible animal mistreatment at several Texas farm animal stockyards. “After seeing that, I knew I needed to help animals,” says Jenny.
A year later, she gave up her film career and with her fiancé, Doug Abel, a film editor, opened the Woodstock Farm Sanctuary, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rescuing and recovering farm animals, on a 22-acre property they bought in the rolling hills of Woodstock, New York, the next year.
In August 2007, she received a call from Animal Care and Control of NYC about a small goat it had found hopping around Prospect Park. Jenny guessed it had run away from one of the city’s murder-houses. The goat’s legs were severely injured, probably from being bound together with wire, and its mouth was covered in aching.
Jenny and her team brought the goat, which they named Albie, to the preserve, but they soon realized that Albie’s left front leg was injured beyond repair. After a veterinarian(兽医) cut off the leg. Jenny asked Erik Tomkins, the doctor who makes Jenny’s prostheses, to fashion a leg for Albie. To date, seven of the preserve’s animals have received prosthetic limbs or braces. “On most farms, animals with these illnesses would be immediately killed,” says Jenny.
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Is Banning Single-use Plastic the Right Option?
The harmful effects of using plastic are becoming increasingly apparent. Plastic does not decompose, but breaks down into smaller and smaller particles. It threatens our nature as well as our health. One popular solution to the problem is to prohibit single-use plastics. In the UK, supermarkets are being encouraged to set up plastic-free aisles, in which the food is displayed loose, and shoppers are encouraged to make more environmentally-friendly choices in packing and transporting their food.
Such plans are well-intentioned, but it may not be beneficial to eliminate(清除) the use of single-use plastic altogether. One of the fields where single-use plastic has a vital role is the food industry. When food or fresh goods are packed in plastic, they are protected and preserved, helping them remain fresher and keeping them from spoiling. Single-use plastic is also crucial in the medical industry. This is not just because of its low cost. It helps to prevent the spread of infection and that is the biggest benefit of the material in the medical field.
Replacing plastic with other materials is neither simple nor straightforward, mainly due to the challenge of finding an alternative that combines all the most desirable plastic properties. For example, glass products are a potential alternative, but cleaning them would be extremely expensive while increasing the risk to health. Another issue is that alternative materials to plastic are often more environmentally harmful than plastic. Take paper bags, for example. Research by the Northern Ireland Assembly shows four times more energy is required to manufacture a paper bag than a plastic bag. If people respond by simply using other materials, a ban on single-use plastic can end up making the problem worse.
Clearly there is a need to reduce plastic waste and its impact on the environment. However, simply banning their single use may not be the best option.
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Kangaroos can “talk” to us
Kangaroos can “talk” to people, according to a new study. The report is the first research of its kind to be done on marsupials—a type of creature whose young get carried in skin pockets on their mother’s body. It suggests kangaroos are cleverer than previously thought.
Researchers from the University of Roehampton in the UK and the University of Sydney in Australia tested kangaroos at the Australian Reptile (爬行动物) Park, Wildlife Sydney Zoo and Kangaroo Protection Co-operative. The scientists put food in a box that the kangaroos could not open, and waited to see what the animals would do. Rather than giving up, 10 out of the 11 kangaroos actively looked at the person who had put the food in the box and then looked at the box. The researchers said this could be interpreted as the kangaroos requesting help to open the container.
Dr Alexandra Green, a co-author of the study, told The Guardian newspaper that some of the kangaroos actually approached the person and started scratching (挠) and sniffing (嗅) him, then looked back at the box. “So they were really trying to communicate,” Green said. This behaviour is not uncommon in animals. However, it is usually only seen in domesticated animals, such as pets or farm animals. The lead author of the study, Dr Alan McElligott, explained, “Through this study, we were able to see that communication between creatures can be learnt and that the behaviour of looking at humans to access food is not related to domestication. “Indeed, kangaroos showed a very similar pattern of behaviour we have seen in dogs, horses and even goats, when put to the same test,” he added.
It is hoped that the study will give people a more positive attitude towards kangaroos, which are sometimes seen as harmful creatures that damage farmers’ crops.
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A plan to restore green spaces
The UK government has revealed a plan to protect and restore England’s wild life. It focuses on at-risk species by making canals, rivers and streams cleaner and expanding green spaces.
The new Environmental Improvement Plan sets goals to create or restore more than 5,000 square kilometres of wildlife habitats across England and restore 400 miles of rivers. It will create or expand 25 national nature reserves. New woodland will also be planted alongside rivers. At the moment, access to green spaces is not equal across the UK. Around 4% of people live more than 10 minutes away from their nearest park. The Environmental Improvement Plan aims to make sure households in England are within a 15-minute walk to a green space.
As well as helping more people to act close to nature, the plan should increase England’s biodiversity. A species Survival Fund will be set up to help some of England’s most endangered animals, such as red squirrels (松鼠) and watch rats. The Government has set targets to boost these species by 2030. There are also targets to reduce food waste, glass, metal, paper and plastic by 2028, and to improve the quality of water in rivers.
New rules mean that the Government will have to consider the environmental effects of any policy it puts forward. These goals are part of a 25- year plan that was launched in 2018. The aim of the plan is to improve the environment “within a generation ” which is roughly 25 years.
Although lots of people have welcomed the plan, not everyone is impressed. Pail de Zylva, from the charity Friends of the Earth, said it wasn’t clear enough how the goals would be met and that many of them were like promises the Government had already made but not yet delivered.
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Does Recycling Work For Plastic?
Dealing with plastic waste is always a tough problem. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), half of the world’s plastic waste ends up in a landfill, 19% burned, and another 22% escapes waste management systems and goes into uncontrolled dumpsites.
So environmentalists suggest plastic waste should be recycled properly, which proves an effective way to handle other waste like paper, cardboard, metal and glass. However, a new study by Greenpeace, and reporting in the Boston Globe, suggests that recycling plastic is a “myth” and raises a major question about the future: does recycling work? Unfortunately, the short answer is “not really.”
There’s been a lot of debate over what really happens to recycled plastic. But scientists say that recycling plastic waste has mostly failed because it’s very difficult to collect and nearly impossible to sort. Because plastic is often made from harmful materials, it can be harmful to the environment to reprocess.
Much of the solution falls on big companies to change the way they do business. The way forward seems to be mostly to cut down on companies’ reliance on plastic packaging, and to move toward reusable packaging and packaging-free alternatives. Above all, companies need to phase out all single-use plastics. For the consumer, living more plastic-free is the only real solution available. Avoiding drinks in plastic containers, using a travel mug or reusable water bottle, bringing your own reusable bag, buying in bulk and cutting back on pre-packaged foods are all a good start.
But in the end, corporate America needs a deeper commitment to the plastic waste problem. “Companies must take action now to get rid of single-use plastics and packaging and not rely on false solutions such as recycling,” says Greenpeace.
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8 . Directions: Read the following three passages. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.
IKEA, known around the world as a supplier of furniture and other home goods, is taking steps to protect the environment. By 2030 IKEA plans to be a circular business, one whose products can all be reused or recycled rather than thrown away. To achieve this goal, the company is redesigning all of its products. How can it design products that will last longer and be easier to fix and that people can recycle when they are finished with them? By answering these questions, IKEA hopes to improve the sustainability of its business model.
IKEA wants people to be able to repair its products rather than throw them away when something goes wrong. To accomplish that goal, the company is standardizing the parts, materials and colors that it uses. This means that if a part needs to be replaced, it will be easy to find. In the past IKEA has only offered spare parts for some products; now it is greatly expanding the number of spare parts customers can purchase. This makes it feasible for customers to repair their own furniture. IKEA is also redesigning the parts of its products that are most likely to wear out quickly.
To extend the life of its products, IKEA is trying to make their maintenance easier. It is also making its products easier to take apart and transport, so the furniture is less likely to break when being moved or changing hands.
Sometimes people replace their furniture not because there is something wrong with it, but because their needs have changed. So IKEA is also trying to help people keep furniture for a longer time by making it easy to modify. Some pieces can be expanded or reduced in size as family members and guests come and go. Others have covers that can be exchanged for different look.
But even with all these efforts, it is likely that certain products will eventually no longer be usable. At that point they can be remanufactured — the pieces reassembled (重新组装) into something new-or recycled. And IKEA is designing products to make these processes easier. The company is also working to reduce waste in other areas, such as packaging and food waste from restaurants inside its stores.
These efforts to reduce the number of IKEA products that are abandoned and thrown in landfills will help create a more environmentally friendly economy.
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The problem of electronic waste
We have gradually come to realise that in two ways in particular, modern hi-tech can be bad for the planet. The first is its energy use; the worldwide scale of information technology is so enormous that electronics now produce fully two percent of global carbon emissions, which is about the same as the highly controversial emissions of aeroplanes. The other is the hardware, when it comes to the end of its natural life. This, increasingly, is pretty short. We have hardly noticed this important stream of waste, so much so that a Greenpeace report on the untraced and unreported e-waste two years ago referred to it as “the hidden flow”. We need to be aware of it.
The latest United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report estimates that worldwide, electronic waste is mounting by about 40 million tons a year. So what can we do about it?
The European Union has recognised the problem by adopting a key principle: producer responsibility. In other words, making it the duty of manufacturers of electronic goods to ensure their safe disposal at the end of their lives. In practice, an EU regulation now means that electronics dealers must either take back the equipment they sold you, or help to finance a network of drop-off points, such as public recycling sites. Its main feature is quite ambitious: it aims to deal with “everything with a plug”.
The new UN report suggests that all countries could do something about the problem with a change in design. Groups such as Greenpeace have led the way in putting pressure on major manufacturing companies to find substitutes for the toxic chemicals inside their products. Encouragingly, they have had some success in forcing them to develop non-poisonous alternatives to these. This may be the real way forward.
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Should Hand Feeding Dolphins Be Encouraged?
Some tourist centers train Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins to approach beachside public sighting areas or boats by hand-feeding them small amounts of fish every day. Because hand-fed males aggressively attack each other over the food, putting themselves and nearby humans in danger, tourist centers focus their hand feeding only on female dolphins, says Valerie Senigaglia at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia
But recent studies have shown that only 38% of the calves (崽) of hand-fed wild dolphins survive to three years of age, which is much lower than the average 77% survival rate for wild calves in general. To better understand why, Senigaglia and her colleagues evaluated the social behavior of dolphins around the Bunbury coast in Western Australia. In particular, they observed the individual behavior and movement of 35 dolphins, including 13 that had been hand-fed using a small boat. They regularly followed each dolphin for periods lasting from 20 minutes to 3 hours for two years in a row for a total of 180 hours.
They found that hand-fed dolphins swam in relatively large groups, but more readily broke away from them to join different ones. In general, they created weak ties with other group members. “You can feel lonely in a room full of people and it’s the same thing for dolphins,” says Senigaglia. Free-swimming dolphins that are fed by hand become less socially involved with their peers. As a result, their calves may grow up lacking vital social skills-which could explain, at least in part, why they are twice as likely to die before reaching adulthood as wild calves generally.
No wonder animal right activists are calling on the practice of hand-feeding dolphins to be stopped.
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