1 . Situated along a river that winds through the mountains, surrounded by cedar (雪松) and bamboo forests, Nanmoku is about 70 miles northwest of the capital city. Once known for its silk, wood, and konjac root (魔芋根), Nanmoku is now Japan’s most aged village, with two-thirds of its residents over 65. Many buildings are abandoned and the population has dropped from 11,000 in 1955to about 1,500 today, according to town hall figures. At that rate, the village could be empty just over a decade.

Nanmoku is on the front lines of Japan’s rural depopulation, a trend seen in other Asian and European countries. However, some residents are working to change the trend by attracting young people. One such person is 24-year-old Satomi Oigawa, who moved to Nanmoku after graduating from college in Tokyo. She works for the village government, matching abandoned homes with potential new residents. Oigawa is learning about the village’s history as she integrates into the community. “Everything about this house is part of the village’s history,” she says.

Despite efforts to attract new residents, the village faces challenges. There are few jobs for young people, and the nearest hospital is an hour’s drive away. Some residents argue that instead of spending money to attract newcomers, the money should be spent on those already living in the village.

Mayor Saijo Hasegawa aims to keep the village’s population level in 15to 20 years’ time, hoping to maintain it at around 800 people. However, experts like Peter Matan le of the University of Sheffield say that while some villages may boom, they will still experience pushback against the overpowering trend. “Japan is currently losing 600,000 to 700,000 people annually, and that’s going to increase to more than a million by the 2030s,” Matan le says. “Under that situation, how do settlements maintain their populations, let alone increase them?”

2 . Economic growth is often considered as a sure way of increasing the well-being of people in low-income countries, and global surveys in recent decades have supported this strategy by showing people in high-income countries tend to report higher levels of life satisfaction than those in low-income countries. This strong connection might suggest that only in rich societies can people be happy. However, a recent study conducted by ICTA-UAB and McGill University in Canada suggests that there may be good reasons to question whether this link is universal.

While most global surveys gather thousands of responses from the citizens of industrial and urban societies, they tend to ignore people in simple-and-tiny societies on the fringe, where social group has a limited number of members and where the exchange of money plays a minimal role in everyday life with natives and local communities depending directly on nature.

The research, published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), consisted of a survey of 2,966 people from local communities in 19 globally distributed sites. Only 64% of surveyed households had any cash income. The results show that “surprisingly, many populations with very low incomes report very high average levels of life satisfaction, with scores similar to those in wealthy countries,” says Eric Galbraith, researcher at ICTA-UAB and McGill University and lead author of the study.

The average life satisfaction score across the studied simple-and-tiny societies was 6.8 on a range of 0-10. Although not all societies reported high satisfaction levels, four of the sites reported average scores higher than 8, despite many of these societies having suffered histories of neglect and control. The results are consistent with the opinion that human societies can support very satisfactory lives for their members without necessarily requiring high degrees of material wealth.

“While the reasons behind these findings remain unclear, the study provides valuable insights into how diverse communities achieve satisfying lives. It offers hope that understanding these factors can help others improve their well-being while addressing sustainability concerns.” Galbraith concludes.

3 . The Ministry of Education and three other ministries have jointly issued a notice about launching a national campaign on short-sightedness prevention and control to protect children’s eyesight.

A paragraph in the notice says that primary and secondary school students should engage in appropriate outdoor activities during class breaks. Additionally, 30 minutes of physical activity during the daily midmorning break will be organized to give students more time to engage in outdoor activities and long-distance viewing, enabling their eyes to rest fully from visual fatigue.

Midmorning breaks can address more than just vision problems. Physical activity during breaks helps children to not only exercise but also reduce stress, making subsequent classroom learning more focused and effective. At the same time, midmorning physical activities provide children a platform to engage in social activities, strengthening their social adaptation abilities.

Sometime toward the end of 2023 there was a huge demand after some schools did away with even 10-minute breaks for primary and secondary school students. The Ministry of Education responded by saying that it would further regulate activities in schools. Before the latest notice was introduced, several related policies had been guaranteeing midmorning physical activity for primary and secondary school students, which have now been implemented in many cities, showing good results.

To effectively utilize (利用) the 30-minute midmorning break, teachers play an essential role because they can enrich the activities to the maximum extent by combining the interests and hobbies of children of different age groups and adding various sports activities that will benefit children the most. At the same time, it should be clear that the midmorning break is not only the responsibility of physical education teachers. It requires joint efforts from physical education teachers, class teachers and other staff members to ensure the breaks are used effectively.

To make the most of the 30-minute midmorning break, it is also crucial to stimulate the enthusiasm of children. Innovating the form and content of the midmorning break and mobilizing children’s enthusiasm and initiative to participate in midmorning activities are urgent priorities.

4 . The United Nations’ International Year of Soils is hardly a media favorite. Maybe it’s because many people are like me, who recall Mom’s words: “Take off your shoes! Don’t bring dirt into the house! “With all the challenges in the world today, why would we recognize soils?

Simply put, soils are literally the base that humans stand on. Ignoring the importance of this meter-thick skin covering our planet is like ignoring the importance of the air we breathe.

Without healthy soils, we would not be here.

Soil provides the structure and nutrients needed to grow our food. It stores water that satisfies the thirst of the environment, agriculture and humans. It houses the largest amount of carbon (碳)on land, keeping the climate from warming even faster. It provides the necessary support for the habitat of all life on land-including diversity in the soil itself (in some regions, just a handful of soil contains microorganisms that are more than the people on Earth). In short, soil plays an essential role not only in feeding humans but in supporting the living things that produce the oxygen we breathe and purifying the water we drink. In other words, soil keeps our planet habitable.

We, therefore, must stop considering ”soil“ a dirty word and remember that the food we eat and water we drink can be traced back to it. Businesses should adopt guidelines that ensure the long term health and productivity of soil. And local and national governments should provide policies that encourage soil protection.

Soil is one of the most important resources on our planet, and we have ignored it too long-at our own risk. The most important thing that can happen is a change in mind-set that recognizes soil is not dirt. It’s life beneath our feet.

5 . Electric vehicles (EVs) have long been advertised as environmentally friendly vehicles. This is true, to some extent. EVs do not emit any carbon dioxide into the environment, unlike conventional cars.

But scientists foresee a new problem. Cars run on batteries, and electric cars are no different. So once the battery reaches the end of its useful life, what will be done with it?

As the number of electric vehicles in use increases greatly, scientists must discover an effective recycling method for EV batteries.

While electric cars and gas-powered cars essentially function in the same way, a major difference between the two is their batteries.

Electric vehicles use lithium-ion (锂离子) batteries, which are larger and heavier than a non-EV car’s lead-acid (铅酸) batteries. Instead of fuel, EVs rely directly on their batteries for a source of energy.

When charging, electricity triggers (引起) chemical changes within the battery. On the road, the chemical changes are converted into electricity, thus powering the car. The continuous charge-discharge process reduces the charge (电荷) the battery can hold. Thus, the distance and time between the car’s next charging session decreases.

The battery’s average lifespan ranges from five to eight years to 10-20 at most, so drivers will need to replace EV batteries many times in the car’s life.

A major issue with EV batteries is the inconvenience they pose during dismantling (拆卸). EV batteries are made up of several hundred lithium-ion cells. Each cell contains risky materials and must be dismantled individually. If not dismantled correctly, the battery cells may even explode.

Additionally, recycling methods that do exist for these batteries are energy- and cost-intensive. In fact, in the European Union and the US, lithium-ion battery recycling rates are only 5%.

Companies are trying to find solutions. Nissan, a car company, is reusing their electric car batteries in automated guided vehicles in their factories. These vehicles deliver car parts to workers. Volkswagen also uses its batteries like Nissan, but also recently opened its first recycling plant.

6 . Digital reading appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Astonishing numbers of people with years of schooling are in effect illiterate. This month’s Ljubljana Manifesto (宣言) explains: “The digital field may promote more reading than ever in history, but it also offers many temptations to read in a superficial and scattered (零散的) manner — or even not to read at all. This increasingly endangers higher-level reading.”

That’s frightening, because “higher-level reading” has been essential to civilization. It enabled the enlightenment and an international increase in empathy. Without it, we would suffer a lot. As the Ljubljana Manifesto notes, “as much as one-third of Europeans struggle even with lower-level reading skills.” More than one-fifth of adults in the US “fall into the illiterate/functionally illiterate category”. Separately, post-pandemic reading scores for American 13-year-olds are the lowest in decades. And the Washington-based Center for Global Development recently estimated that literacy in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa among those with five years of schooling has decreased by 10% this past half century.

Experts in the Ljubljana Manifesto record the demerits of digital reading: “Recent studies of various kinds indicate a decline of critical and conscious reading, slow reading, non-strategic reading and long-form reading.” When you read a book on paper, you can be entirely inside the experience, absorb hundreds of pages of details thoroughly and begin to capture the world’s complexity. Online, says Maryanne Wolf of UCLA, we are “skimming, scanning, scrolling”. The medium is the message: doing deep reading on your phone is as hard as playing tennis with your phone. Recently, a bright 11-year-old told me I was wasting time on books: he absorbed more information faster from Wikipedia. He had a point. But digital readers also absorb more misinformation and seldom absorb fine perspectives.

In short, as professors from Northwestern University foresaw in 2005, we are returning to the days when only an elite (精英) “reading class” consumes long texts, which is worrying.

10 . It was a quiet early afternoon in the library, and we librarians were enjoying a chat at the library desk. Suddenly, a regular reader, who had been reading a magazine, marched up to us, gave us an annoyed “Shush (嘘)!” and went back to her seat.

Shocked into silence, we tried not to laugh. How strange for a group of librarians to be shushed by a reader! Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Well, it seems hard to explain. If you’re a baby boomer (婴儿潮出生的人) like me, you probably remember libraries as places of adults’ silent reading. These days, however, libraries are more like busy community centers, where being noisy to some degree is the new normal, especially when kids are taking part.

I am a loud librarian. My voice is naturally on the louder side. The hundreds of programs I led as a children’s librarian were filled with singing, dancing, movement exercises and cheerful readings of books with crowds of children and their caregivers. No shushing allowed!

Growing knowledge about the importance of kids and teens learning through hands-on experiences has since caused a sea change in how public libraries connect with young readers. These types of programs like board games, poetry reading and story times certainly aren’t designed to be silent.

But it’s a balancing act. Not all readers—or librarians—like the idea of a noisy library. It’s clear to me now that on the day my colleagues and I were shushed by a reader, we should have been using our “library voices” as we talked. Still, it’s unlikely that libraries will ever return to the days when they were places of silence. There’s just too much fun and learning happening. I heartily agree with my friend Rachel Payne, an early-childhood service educator at the Brooklyn Public Library, who told me, “When I visit a library and it is quiet, I always feel a bit sad. A library where conversations are happening and tables are full is a very good thing!”