1 . “Our first duty is to the place that raised us,” Omar Freilla says. “For me, it’s the South Bronx, the birthplace of hip-hop.”

Although the South Bronx was one of the nation’s poorest and most polluted areas, with crowded roads and poisonous industrial sites, Omar saw a different kind of potential amidst its challenges. He envisioned a new approach to the mountains of discarded materials.

“A lot of what people throw away is perfectly good,” he says. Omar was just out of college and he started thinking about how he could get this “good garbage” to people who could use it. Instead of destroying things like old windows and doors, why not clean them up and resell them? Why not hire people who live in the community to do the work? Better yet, why not make this business a “cooperative”, which means that the people who work in the business own it and share the profits?

To start his business, Omar put up flyers along the truck-jammed, trash-filled streets of his neighborhood, looking for people to work with him. He soon found four other dedicated workers. They rented a warehouse (仓库) and started looking for donations of used materials.

They called up hardware stores (五金店), building supply distributors, and contractors, providing free shipping from construction sites. Their warehouse began to fill up. A hardware store gave 2,000 gallons of paint that was still good but was being thrown away because it was past its expiration date (产品有效期). A distributor donated 80 new toilets from a project that had been canceled. Contractors added unwanted doors, sinks, ceiling fans — even theater seats and a giant popcorn machine!

In April 2008, Omar’s cooperative opened its doors for business and began selling construction supplies — at reasonable prices — to neighborhood builders and homeowners. With the help of city officials, he also began planning a new training program to help local residents learn the skills they need to get good jobs that help the environment and even start cooperatives of their own.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its     1     (surrounding). The town was surrounded by prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed     2     the berries. The countryside was famous for its rich bird life, and people traveled from great distances     3     (observe) them. Others came to fish the streams,     4     flowed clear and cold out of the hills.

Then everything began to change: mysterious illnesses swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was     5     shadow of death. There was a strange silence. The few birds     6     (see) anywhere were unhealthy. It was a spring without voices. Only silence     7     (lie) over the fields and woods. Even the streams were now lifeless. People no longer visited them,     8     all the fish had died.

No black magic, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it     9     (them).

In fact, this town does not actually exist. I know of no community that has experienced all the things I describe. Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere. A dangerous threat has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may     10     (easy) become a terrible reality we all shall know.

9 . Across the world, humans purchase around 1.3 billion single-use plastic water bottles a day. Because only about 9% of plastic is recycled, the vast majority of those bottles wind up in landfills, the ocean, or elsewhere in nature.

When beach-loving Madison noticed those plastic bottles during her family’s trips to California, the 12-year-old “just felt like this needed to change,” she told Smithsonian Magazine.

So as she began thinking about what to do for her school science fair back in 2021, the idea of a project centered on reducing plastic pollution quickly came to her mind: she would design an eatable water bottle called the Eco-Hero.

“One of my biggest ambitions for my project was wanting to help the world,” the confident young inventor said in a video on the website.

To bring her idea to life, Madison built upon the already established method by experimenting with common food materials. She also took inspiration from previous versions of eatable water bottles, though she focused on making hers bigger and more durable. She found that the combination of water, lemon juice, natural gum, and Alginic acid (褐藻酸) resulted in a gel pouch that wouldn’t break, could hold up to 3/4 cup of water, and would last in the fridge for three weeks.

Though she’d like to improve the Eco-Hero by making it able to hold more water, she believes her current version would work well as a replacement for the paper cups used by runners in races. All one needs to do is bite a hole in the water ball, drink the water, and then eat the pouch or throw it away to biodegrade.

Madison hopes the Eco-Hero inspires others to take better care of the planet. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be in a big way,” she told Smithsonian. “People can still make a difference in the world, even if it’s just in a small way.”

10 . Vast lands of America are dominated by corn, nearly 100macres of it, stretching from Ohio to the Dakotas. What once was forest today produces the corn that feeds people, cattle and, when made into ethanol (乙醇), cars.

Now, the nation’s airlines want to power their planes with corn, too. United Airlines signed a deal with a Nebraska ethanol company to buy enough sustainable fuel, to power 50,000 flights a year. The government could decide on its tax incentives (税收激励) for the industry as soon as December. “Mark my words, the next 20 years, corn farmers are going to provide 95% of all the sustainable airline fuel,” President Biden said in July.

The airlines’ ambitious goal would likely require nearly doubling ethanol production, which airlines say, with great expectation, would decrease their greenhouse gas emissions. If they succeed, it could transform America’s Corn Belt, stimulating farmers and ethanol producers, but potentially further damaging one of the nation’s most important resources: groundwater.

Corn requires a lot of water to grow and it can take hundreds of gallons to produce a single gallon of ethanol. But as airlines take the idea of ethanol, the vital groundwater faces serious risks. “We’re on track to massively increase water usage without any real sense of how sensitive our groundwater is,” said Jeffrey Broberg, who is concerned about groundwater in Minnesota, a major corn state.

The Department of Energy said in a statement that “water use is a critical part of the conversation surrounding bio-energy sustainability”. It pointed to a 2022 department study that concluded that the United States could significantly reduce pressure on groundwater by shifting fuel production away from water-intensive crops like corn, instead growing more crops that don’t require irrigation (灌溉), like various types of straw, grasses and trees. Hopefully, a better approach will be soon studied and adopted.