3 . Traditionally, profiting from forests often meant capitalizing on timber (木材) —choosing commercial timber. Yet increasingly, there is an understanding that it’s of greater significance to keep trees standing than cut them down for financial profit. Money is not everything. We have to recognize real and lasting value is from natural resources. But money is a fact of life.

Good news is that we can expect entire natural woodland is left undamaged and still provides a revenue (收益) stream. Leaving woodland complete does not necessarily mean that we do not touch it at all. Conservation work may involve building back biodiversity or the removal of foreign plant species.

A healthy woodland system can provide a range of yields (产物). Besides eatable yields—top fruit, berries, and food crops, it produces substances for chemical use. The non-timber forest products provided by natural ecosystems vary significantly depending on where they are. But there are always more ways to explore to acquire revenue.

A project in the UK, for example, shows woodland itself is also a draw for visitors. It engages a community who creates a sustainable area of woodland. The community largely obtains revenue by opening up parts of the natural woodland to the public with an adventure playground and outdoor recreational activities on the site. It also offers courses on nest building, special wildlife events and more. The project is thought to have great uniqueness. It centers round the existing natural land; the yields that woodland provides become by products.

Recreational activities, tours, and classes are just the commencement. A rich and bio-diverse woodland can be an ecosystem that draws in more people looking for a beautiful place to stay. Woodland has great value in ecological and social terms. And when you nurse it, it could also add to the income from your land.

4 . A method to transform a commonly thrown-away plastic to a resin (树脂) used in 3D printing could allow for making better use of plastic waste. A team of Washington State University researchers developed a simple and efficient way to transform polylactic acid (PLA)(聚乳酸), a bio-based plastic used in products such as filament, plastic silverware and food packaging to a high-quality resin.

“We found a way to immediately turn this into something that’s stronger and better, and we hope that will provide people the inspiration to upcycle this stuff instead of just throw it away,” said Yu-Chung Chang, a postdoctoral researcher in the WSU School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and a co-corresponding author on the work. “We made stronger materials just straight out of trash. We believe this could be a great opportunity.”

Although it’s bio-based, PLA, which is categorized as a number 7 plastic, doesn’t break down easily. It can float in fresh or salt water for a year without degrading (降解). It is also rarely recycled because like many plastics, when it’s melted down and re-formed, it doesn’t perform as well as the original version and becomes less valuable.

“It’s biodegradable and compostable, but once you look into it, it turns out that it can take up to 100 years for it to rot away in a landfill,” Chang said. “In reality, it still creates a lot of pollution. We want to make sure that when we do start producing PLA on the milliontons scale, we will know how to deal with it.”

While the researchers focused on PLA for the study, they hope to apply the work to poly-ethylene terephthalate (PET) (涤纶树脂), which is more common than PLA and has a similar chemical structure and presents a bigger waste problem. They have filed a temporary patent and are working to further optimize (优化) the process. The researchers are also looking into other applications for the upcycling method.

6 . Scientists often compare coral reefs(珊瑚礁) to underwater rainforests, yet unlike the leafy plant base of a forest, corals are animals. The soft creatures are naturally half-transparent and get their brilliant color from algae(藻类) living inside them. When corals experience stress from hot temperatures or pollution, they halt the interdependent relationship with algae, typically pushing them out and turning white. Corals are still alive when they are white, but they're at risk and many eventually die, turning dark brown.

Scientists around the world are looking for means to protect and maybe increase corals. One common option is to create more protected areas — essentially national parks in the ocean. Beyond nature preserves, some conservationists are looking to more hands-on methods. One research center in the Florida Keys is exploring a form of natural selection to keep corals remaining. The reef system in the Keys has been hit hard by climate change and pollution, which is especially tough, because corals there help support fisheries worth $ 100 million every year.

To keep the wild ecosystem alive, Erinn Muller, the center's director, and her team are harvesting samples of the corals that survived the environmental stress naturally, keeping them to make them reproduce, and then reattaching them to the reef. They have 46,000 corals on plastic frames under the sea. So far, the center has regrown over 70,000 corals from five different species on damaged reefs.

In The Bahamas, Ross Cunning, a research biologist at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium, focuses on corals with genes that could make them natural candidates for restoration projects. He published a study of two Bahamian reefs, one that survived an extreme 2015 heat wave, and one that didn't. "We think their ability to deal with these higher temperatures is built into their genes," says Cunning. There's evidence of corals evolving more quickly to resist rapidly warming climate. The big question scientists need investigate, adds Gunning, is how much more heat corals can adapt to.

7 . About 12 million tons of plastic wastes are entering the oceans every year. This garbage pollutes the water, kills wildlife and breaks down into small pieces that fish and other creatures eat.

Now a group of Spanish fishermen will receive economic support to catch plastics. It is part of a new project. Carlos Martin is one of the fishermen taking part in the project. He and his partners collect the plastic in the ocean and bring it back to land every week. Martin thinks rivers carry a lot of plastics to the sea. He says his most concern is no more than that the plastics often get caught in the nets, which makes nets not work properly. They take on mud（泥）, causing the nets to break because they weigh so much.

Under the new programs, one million pounds will support ocean cleanup efforts for fishermen like Martin. The money is coming from the European Union and the Catalan government. Sergi Tudela, the General Director of Catalonia Fisheries, is responsible for the cleanup project. He said, "We are hopeful that if we are successful in this project, we can apply it to other areas in the Mediterranean（地中海）."

Government reports show that the amount of plastic wastes washing up along the Spanish coastline has grown by 65 percent in just six years. Fishing equipment makes up a large part of the about 8 to 12 million tons of plastics left in the world's oceans every year.

Martin says the fishing community now understands how big the problem is. He says, "In the past we didn't see it that way. We took the plastic garbage and threw it back into the water. I think that after a few year here we have realized the problem. Nothing is thrown into the water; we collect everything and bring it to shore.

8 . An endangered species is a group of animals that could soon become extinct.     1     Many species are nearly extinct and could disappear off the face of the earth very soon if we don’t do anything to save them. There are many reasons why species become endangered.

Habitat destruction is the main reason why animals become endangered and this happens in two ways. When humans move into a new area, the animals’ habitat is destroyed and there is nowhere for them to live and nothing to eat because humans chop down trees and build houses and farms.     2     Chemicals in rivers and poisons on farms cause the destruction of animals’ homes and food supplies.

    3     Animals have been brought to the edge of extinction because they are killed for their highly-valued meat, fur, bones or skin, or just for sport. Overfishing has resulted in many large sea creatures like whales and sharks becoming endangered species.

So what can individuals and governments do to protect endangered species? We should take care not to pollute natural areas, and farmers or companies who destroy animal habitats should face severe financial penalties.     4     Governments can help, too, by making it against the law to hunt, fish or trade in endangered species.     5    

Rain is great importance to us. Without rain, our water supply would be cut off and we would die, so will plants and animals. Therefore, too much rain does a lot of harm to us. It floods fields, towns and cities, causes us great losses. So far man's control over rain had never ceased. If they can gain more effective control over rain, we will enjoy more free from nature. Fortunate, we human beings have taken steps, such as planting more trees and using weather forecasts, it helps avoid flood damage and protect our water supply. I am greatly convinced that only if we join the hands to fight our common enemy can we live a rosy life.

10 . If plastic had been invented when the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England, to North America - and their Mayflower had been stocked with bottled water and plastic-wrapped snacks, their plastic waste would likely still be around four centuries later. Atlantic waves and sunlight would have worn all that plastic into tiny bits. And those bits might still be floating around the world’s oceans today, waiting to be eaten by some fish or oyster, and finally perhaps by one of us.

Because plastic wasn’t invented until the late 19th century, and its production only really took off around 1950, we have a mere 9. 2 billion tons of the stuff to deal with. Of that, more than 6. 9 billion tons have become waste. And of that waste, a surprising 6. 3 billion tons never made it to a recycling bin - the figure that shocked the scientists who published the numbers in 2017.

No one knows how much unrecycled plastic waste ends up in the ocean, the earth’s last sink. In 2015, Jenna Jambeck, a University of Georgia engineering professor, caught everyone’s attention with a rough estimate: between 5. 3 million and 14 million tons of plastic waste each year just come from coastal regions.

Meanwhile, ocean plastic is estimated to kill millions of marine( 海 洋 的 )animals every year. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by it. Some are harmed visibly, stuck by abandoned things made of plastic. Many more are probably harmed invisibly. Marine species of all sizes, from zooplankton to whales, now eat microplastics, the bits smaller than one-fifth of an inch across.

“This isn’t a problem where we don’t know what the solution is,” says Ted Siegler, a Vermont resource economist who has spent more than 25 years working with developing nations on garbage. “We know how to pick up garbage. Anyone can do it. We know how to deal with it. We know how to recycle.” It’s a matter of building the necessary institutions and systems, he says, ideally before the ocean turns into a thin soup of plastic.