1 . For hundreds of years, America’s wilderness has been reduced due to growing cities, leaving outdoors lovers like hunters with fewer chances. By around 1900, too much hunting drove America’s deer nearly into extinction (灭绝), less than a half-million deer, from 45 million in 1450.

Law-makers began to make rules to protect deer and keep ecological balance (生态平衡). And it did make a big difference. By 2000, the deer population had come up to 38 million. Those days, millions of deer lived side by side with humans and could freely find enough food resources.

Gradually, the number of deer was increasing too rapidly, which was not good for both the animals and people. City hunting plays an important role in keeping ecological balance, particularly in places where the animals sometimes cause major problems.

“City deer hunting is a management practice used in many cities and suburban areas across the United States,” says Jason Andrews, program manager of the Urban Deer Hunt in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In the early 2000s, a high number of car accidents were caused by deer. And there was also significant vegetation degradation (植被退化) in many cities. Many possible solutions were researched by the city government. Some suggested hunting deer and other wild animals, but others were against that practice.

In the end, researchers determined that the most effective and sustainable (可持续的) population management solution would be hunting with bows. “City deer hunting is popular in cities that have too many wild deer as well as wooded areas,” says Andrews. “In Cedar Rapids, all parts of the city have right habitats to keep deer population, thus hunting is allowed. I must note that hunting is only allowed on private lands. No parks or any other public grounds can be hunted.”

3 . For more than 5,000 years, chopsticks have been the preferred dining utensil (用具) of a sizable swath of humanity. Nowadays, around a third of the global population uses chopsticks daily. This is both a fact of life and, these implements are often single-use, a serious environmental problem.

Every year, around 80 billion pairs find their way to landfills(垃圾填埋池) “In Vancouver alone, we’re throwing out 100.000 chopsticks a day. ”says Felix Bock, founder of the Vancouver-based startup Chop Value. “They’re traveling 6,000 or 7,000 miles from where they’ re manufactured in Asia to end up on our lunch table for 30 minutes.”

Since 2016, Bock has been on a mission to rethink disposable chopsticks. Rather than try to eliminate them, the engineer has been building a circular economy by giving them a second life. In their homebase of Vancouver, company staff pick up around 350,000 used chopsticks from 300-plus restaurants every week, all of which become book shelves, cutting boards, coasters, desks, and custom decorations. According to Bock, the startup has saved more than 50 million pairs of chopsticks from landfills since its launch.

“Once you see the volume, you think maybe that little humble chopstick can be the start of something big.” Bock says, “My expertise is in bamboo, so 1 always looked at chopstick differently. I used to joke to my friends that I would make something out of chopsticks, since most of the ones we use in North America are made of bamboo.”

Chopsticks are far from the only disposable dining implement to come under scrutiny in recent years. From plastic straws to polystyrene takeout containers, many components of our food cycle sacrifice environmental impact for convenience.

“I think change starts small，and change can be a very relatable thing that we all know from daily life,” Bock says, “Right now, we're focusing on the chopstick because it’s a very powerful story.