1 . Elephant lover Sun Xiao wrote a children’s book Samburu, I’m Back, which is a way for Sun to explain knowledge about the elephants themselves. The book was published last year and became bestsellers.     1     Most of them were mothers, saying that their children cried and were moved by the emotional bond between the baby elephants and their mother.

Sun says he has loved animals since childhood.     2     He watched, shocked, as an adult elephant from a circus stood stock still, seemingly ignoring the pain，as its keeper beat it again and again with a stick after they had finished their performance. From then on, Sun made up his mind to help the poor animals.

    3     Besides, he tried to raise public awareness about the urgent need to protect them from the poachers (偷猎者). He adopted all kinds of methods, such as posting hundreds of articles he wrote on social websites, sharing photos he took of elephants and writing children’s storybooks featuring elephants.

Sun is a witness to the story told in his book Samburu, I'm Back. He was, at the time, in Kenya working for Save the Elephants, a UK-registered charity based in Nairobi. In Kenya, he and his peers found two baby elephants heading toward the dangerous area where their mother was killed.     4     Finally, they had to use a tranquilizer (镇静剂) gun and transport them to an elephant shelter.

Sun stayed in Kenya with the STE for three months to watch elephants closely for his research.     5     He says that a good elephant watcher can remember the names of hundreds of elephants and will recognize each of them on sight. As long as they know which is which, they are able to understand the interactions and relations between different groups.

2 . The last time Jack Hanson took an airplane, he was a junior at the University of Vermont. To return from a term abroad in Copenhagen, he flew from Denmark, ________ in Iceland, and landed in New York.

But the next term, one of his professors asked students to ________ their individual energy usage. And when Mr. Hanson did the ________, he realized that just one leg of that international flight ________ more energy, and more greenhouse gas emissions(排放), than all the other things that year ________ — the driving and heating and lighting and eating and everything else.

He was ________. “I just couldn’t ________ it,” he says. “It really is an extreme. It’s an extreme amount of energy, an extreme amount of ________.”

So Mr. Hanson decided to stop ________. Since then, he has traveled by train and bike and car, and has even written a song about the ________ of getting home to Chicago on an overnight bus. But he has not been on an airplane.

And he has never found travel more ________, he says. He knows that some people find this hard to ________, including many friends and family members. They decide Mr. Hanson’s approach is ________.

Go more ________, and travel begins to return to what it once was: a slow change of one place to another, a sense of space, an unwinding of time.

3 . There is a kind of climate pollution that we can’t see clearly. It isn’t in our rivers, lands or skies, it is in our minds. When climate disinformation goes unchecked, it spreads like wildfire, undermining the existence of climate change and the need for urgent action.

Like the biosphere that sustains us, the health of our information ecosystems is vital to our survival. As an artist, I feel a responsibility to create new ways of seeing the disinformation that has come to define the age of fake news.

Social media sites are honed to grab our attention. Using sophisticated algorithms, the corporations behind them decide what billions of people see around the world, dictated by what keeps you hooked, but also by what the companies paying social media sites choose to put in front of you.

Powerful corporate actors deploy clever influence campaigns via ads targeted at specific users based on what social media firms know about those people. Major oil and gas companies have spent billions of dollars over the years persuading consumers about their green proofs, when only 1 per cent of their expenditure in 2019 was on renewable energy. This is known as corporate greenwashing. Still, fossil fuel firms maintain that their climate policies are “responsible” and “in line with the science”.

To expose the scale of corporate greenwashing online, I was part of a team that recently launched Eco-Bot.Net. Co-created with artist Rob “3D” Del Naja of the band Massive Attack and Dale Vince, a green entrepreneur, Eco-Bot. Net’s AI-powered website ran throughout the COP26 climate summit, exposing climate change misinformation by releasing a series of data drops for heavily polluting sectors, including energy, agribusiness and aviation.

Academic definitions of climate disinformation and greenwashing were used to unearth posts across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and visualize them on our website. Eco-Bot.Net then flagged greenwashing ads and posts on the original social media site with a public health warning.

By digging into our data, journalists have already revealed that companies are targeting specific demographics in order to influence public perceptions about climate change – and even alter government policy.

One data drop focused on the 100 biggest fossil fuel producers, companies that have been the source of 71 per cent of global carbon emissions. It found that 16 of these companies ran 1705 greenwashing and climate misinformation ads globally on Facebook and Instagram this year. In total, they spent more than £4 million creating influence campaigns that generated up to 155 million impressions.

Social media companies could end most of the harms from climate disinformation on their platforms if they wanted to. Flagging systems were swiftly introduced to warn users of posts containing disinformation about covid-19. The scientific consensus on human-caused global warming has been resolute for decades, so why can’t a similar flagging system be implemented for related disinformation?

It is true that Twitter and Facebook have both introduced climate science information hubs, but these are little more than PR exercises that fail to directly tackle climate disinformation on any kind of scale.

This epidemic of climate change disinformation on social media is eroding collective ideas of truth. In this post-truth age of disinformation, we hope that the public, the press and policy-makers will be able to use our data findings to see what is hidden by what we see online.

For the first time, we can witness the regional scale of corporate greenwashing. The era of climate denial and delay is largely over — except, as Eco-Bot.Net has revealed, on social media.

4 . Ways to Reduce Plastic Waste

Plastic has been found virtually in everything these days. Your food is packaged in it. Your car, phone and computer are made from it.     1    . While most plastics are advertised as recyclable, the reality is that they’re “downcycled”. 

Luckily, there are simple steps you can take to dramatically decrease the amount of plastic waste you produce.

    2    

One of the easiest ways to keep plastic out of the landfill is to refuse plastic straws. Simply inform your waiter or waitress that you don’t need one, and be sure to state this clearly when ordering at a drive-through. Can’t stand giving up the convenience of plastic straws?     3    . Restaurant workers will be less likely to bring you a plastic one if they see that you’ve brought your own. 

Use reusable bags

About one million plastic bags are used every minute. A single plastic bag can take 1,000 years to degrade(降解). If you’re already bringing reusable bags to the grocery store, you’re on the right track. Purchase some reusable bags and help keep even more plastic out of the landfill. However, you should avoid those bags made from nylon or polyester (聚酯纤维).     4    . 

Use matches

    5    , if you need to light a candle, build a campfire or start a fire for any other reason. These cheap plastic devices can sit in landfills for years and have been even found in dead birds’ stomachs. If you can’t bear to part with your lighter, pick up a refillable metal one to help cut down on waste.

6 . Since the rise in car ownership in the 1950s, the US has started building roads in cities and across the country to provide enough room for automobiles. Houston, like many cities, is turning back the clock to make room for passers-by, cyclists and parks.

Memorial Park in Houston, Texas was halved by the Memorial Drive Highway in the1950s. It has now been reunited. The highway is still there, but the road goes underneath the 1,500-acre park.

The restoration (修复) of Memorial Park is part of a larger plan that was made after the city suffered from a serious drought. It was thought that 80 percent of the forested canopy (树冠) was dead. One of the ways to fight that was to reintroduce native plants and animals.

The city hired the landscape architectural company, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, to work with the Houston parks and the Memorial Parks Conservancy. The architects, led by Woltz, were inspired by wildlife crossings in the Northwest US and explored the possibility of using this idea in Memorial Park. Over the years, the park was cut into 20 pieces that were divided by highways, roads and parking lots. The only crossing was a 12-foot bridge.

After 10 years of planning and constructing, the Kinder Land Bridge officially opened in early February, 2023. The bridge consists of 100 acres of greenery, and while designed for people, has reconnected wildlife corridors (廊道). The reconstruction added 45 acres of native Gulf Coast prairie (草原) that’ll increase biodiversity in the park. “This project is not just about creating a passage or a bridge. This project is about ecology, it’s about biodiversity and water management. This project is a bridge into Houston’s future.” said Shellye Arnold, president of the Memorial Park Conservancy.

China’s accumulated experience in reducing food loss and waste is being shared with the world. This knowledge will help many countries improve their ability    1     (reduce) food loss and ensure food security, experts and officials said.

About 14 percent of the world’s food is lost during from    2    (produce) to retail (零售). Reducing that loss by 1 percentage point would be equal to a 28 million metric ton increase in grain output,     3    could feed 70 million people for a year. This is according to the State of Food and Agriculture 2019 report released by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

According to the FAO, over 155 million people experienced serious food insecurity in 2020, the    4    (high) number in the past five years. This was caused by conflict, extreme weather events and economic shocks    5    (relate) to COVID-19.

Wu Laping,     6    professor at China Agricultural University’s College of Economics and Management, said food loss and waste is    7    (large) affected by economic development. They noted that    8    (develop) countries lose food mainly before it is retailed, whereas developed countries mainly lose it after retail.

    9    example, food loss and waste mostly occurs in harvesting and storage in Africa and South Asia. Up to 30 percent of food loss was found during farmers’ storage in some areas in Africa, and 21 percent of food in the United States    10    (waste) during daily consumption, Wu told Economic Daily.

10 . New research from the University of Portsmouth has shown a marked increase in shipping in the North East Atlantic. Scientists now warn that more monitoring is required to help protect sea life.

Researchers at the University of Ponsmouth have discovered that rates (率) of shipping in the North East Atlantic area rose by 34 per cent in a five-year period. The research is the first detailed survey of shipping activity in the North East Atlantic. Researchers used data from over 530 million vessel (船) positions recorded by Automatic Identification System(AIS). They looked at the change in shipping between 2013 and 2017 across ten different vessel types. In total the study area covered 1.1 million km², including waters off Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany,Iceland, Ireland, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal. Spain, and the UK.

Lead author, James Robbins said: “This change is likely to put more pressure on the marine (海洋的) environment, and may influence the protection of at-risk species. Renewed monitoring effort is needed to make sure that protective measures are enough to save species under threat in a changing environment.”

Some of the greatest shipping increases were found in areas close to the Spanish coast. The Espacio Marino de la Costa da Morte saw a rise of 413 percent in vessel activity. It is an area used to protect seabirds.

Dr. Sarah Marley, Visiting Researcher at the University of Portsmouth, said: “Shipping is the most widespread human activity in our oceans, carrying a set of threats-from unnoticeable effects like underwater noise pollution to serious results when ships hit whales.”

Professor Alex Ford. from the University’s Institute of Marine Sciences, said: “Given the well-documented effects that shipping can have on the marine environment, it is necessary that this situation continues to be monitored-particularly in areas used to protect vulnerable (脆弱的) species which may already be under pressure.”