1 . From the lush green hill you can see Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, in the distance. Populations of deer, rabbits and turtle live here. The air is stinky and the only signs that we are standing above a 24-metre (79 feet) deep landfill are the methane gas pipes rising from the grass.

Ljubljana is the first European capital to commit to going zero-waste. But fifteen years ago, all of its refuse went straight to landfill. “And that is expensive,” says Nina Sankovic of Voka Snaga, the city’s waste management company. “It takes up space and you’ re throwing away resources.”

So the city decided to change course.

It began in 2002 with separate collection of paper, glass and packaging in Roadside container stands. Four years later the city began collecting biodegradable waste door to door; separate collection of biowaste is set to become mandatory across Europe in 2023, but Ljubljana was nearly two decades ahead of the curve.

In 2013, every doorstep in the city received bins for packaging and paper waste. And, most controversially, scheduled collections of the residual waste were cut by half-forcing people to separate their rubbish more efficiently.

The results have been impressive. In 2008, the city recycled only 29.3% of its waste and was lagging behind the rest of Europe. Today that figure is 68%, and its landfill receives almost 80% less rubbish, putting it at the top of there cycling leader board of EU capitals. The Slovenian capital now produces only 115kg of residual waste per capital annually(the European city with the lowest figure is the much smaller Treviso, Italy, at 59kg).

2 . Lithium (锂) is called “white gold” for good reason. The metal’s value has been growing rapidly over the last several years, mainly because it is an essential material of lithium-ion batteries, which play an important part in several key sustainable technologies, e. g. electric cars.

As ocean waves, wind and solar power have grown into major players in the energy industry, lithium has also become key to building a future free of petrol. But getting lithium comes at a huge cost. As with most metals, its mining is damaging. It often works like this: Briny water, containing lithium and other metals, is pumped to the surface from underground. Then it sits in pools to allow the water to evaporate, leaving the rest behind as poisonous matter. Workers use chemical reactions to remove the lithium from that, making it into powder which is then packaged and shipped to the buyers around the world. Any accident that releases mine matter into surrounding communities or the groundwater supply could have damaging long-term impacts.

Indigenous (原住民) communities often bear the result of the damage, and political leaders have paid little attention to their concerns. In Arizona, for example, an expanding lithium mine is threatening the Hualapai Tribe’s historical sites. And for politicians who have promised to work with native peoples to deal with it, mining lithium and other precious metals is putting them into a dilemma: How do you ensure the availability of materials which are essential to the future while protecting indigenous people’ rights?

Mining of the metal is expected to increase greatly in coming years. Over time, that will make electric cars inexpensive and, therefore, more popular.

As environmentally conscious consumers buy electric cars in ever-greater numbers, it’s important to be aware of the dirty process that powers those clean air vehicles.

3 . The first rule of popular science is to reveal the wonder and mystery of the world. For that reason, Sentient (Picador), written by photographer and wildlife film-maker Jackie Higgins, is my pick of the year. According to my interviews with many readers, I select other four newly-published books in 2022.

This book describes how our ancestors hunted and consumed ancient animals such as mammoths, bison, giant camels and many more now-extinct species. The diet of the Clovis peoples of North America was a menu described as “a record of a lost world”. This book explains how our dinners robbed the world of so many large animals. It gives inspiration for how modern humans can be at peace with nature.

In 1999, Mann published a graph showing the rapid post-industrial rise in global temperatures. Two decades later, his book The New Climate War remains convinced that we can prevent climate change. This book sets out a common-sense approach to carbon pricing and a revision of the Green New Deal. Of course, there are still many people who deny that climate change is even happening.

Physicist Kate Greene imagines that she spends four months in a geodesic dome in Hawaii, with five other people, to mimic living in a colony on another planet. The story describes the future of our Earth. Kate makes readers cherish the natural environment. “No sunshine on our skin, and no fresh air in our lungs,” Greene turns the frustrations into a moving story.

The birds were once common across the peninsula. But as development over the last 100 years reduced the habitats on which the bird depends, the species became endangered. Mark Walters travels the state to report on the natural history and the current situation of Florida’s flag ship birds. This book can raise people’s awareness of protecting the birds’ habitats.

4 . What do the following animals have in common? Pandas, rhinoceros, Mexican burrowing snakes, pink pigeons and small tooth sawfish.

They are all endangered animals! Animals become endangered for a variety of reasons. Sadly, humans are behind every one of them!

For centuries, humans have hunted elephants for their tusks, and killed tigers for their beautiful fur, caught fish for food. While we still have elephants, tigers, and fish in the wild, we cannot say the same about many others that have simply died out!

Year 1505 was a dreadful turning point in the natural history of the island of Mauritius — European sailors discovered this beautiful island in the Indian Ocean and brought dogs, pigs, monkeys with them. The arrival of humans and those introduced animal species were bad news for dodo birds. About 50 pounds and flightless, dodo birds did not have any natural enemies until then. They picked fruit fallen from trees and built their nests on the ground. Shortly after humans set foot on Mauritius, however, dodo birds realized that they were in big trouble — men killed them for their meat, and those introduced animal species destroyed their nests and ate their eggs. The effects of excessive hunting and foreign species drove dodo birds to first become much fewer and then die out. The last dodo bird was killed in 1681.

Humans and animals have always competed for land and other natural resources. We clear an area of a forest for farming. We cut down trees and use wood to build beautiful houses. We build reservoirs to make sure that we have enough water to use. At the same time that we are trying to make our life comfortable, we destroy the habitats of wild animals.

More than once we have seen on television that rescue workers are trying their best to save seabirds in spilled oil. More than once we have heard about how emissions of carbon dioxide (二氧化碳的排放) and other gases have raised the earth's temperature and caused global warming. Pollution has a serious and long lasting effect. If we choose to do nothing and continue to pollute our planet Earth, our next generations will have to face an Earth without birds singing and beasts roaring.

5 . All animals exist in a network, connected and supported by each other. That’s why our global focus today should be on saving animals from extinction. By doing so, we are certainly keeping an ecological balance.     1     .

Support companies that promote environmental protection

When shopping either from your local or online stores, go for those companies with eco- friendly things. Whether looking for shoes, toys, bags or others, you can choose reusable products.     2     .

Avoid harmful pesticides

Harmful pesticides have resulted in much animal loss. They might be good for killing pests.     3     . The chemicals enter into the soil and last a long time, thus endangering native wildlife species. Worse, they spread throughout the food, causing damage to other large animals.

    4    

Don’t buy things made of horns, ivory and others that endanger animals. This saves the animals and their habitats. Even when traveling, be careful when buying souvenirs. Some could have been made from endangered animal products like ivory. It’s important to research the product before you can make the decision to buy.

Drive carefully

This is one of the easiest things you can do to join in animal protection.     5     . This will help reduce the road danger to endangered wildlife. Reducing car speed can reduce the animal accidents as much as possible.

6 . 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.

8 . 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.

It’s a wildlife expedition (远征) that has captivated (使着迷) the globe: a herd of 16 elephants trekking (跋涉) more than 300 miles from their home in Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve. The herd’s trek began in March last year when 16 elephants     1     (see) moving from the reserve. Nobody is clear why the herd set out on this unprecedented (前所未有的) trek. Some suggest environmental degradation may have pushed them;    2     believe they are simply lost. An expert in elephant psychology believes that they likely left because of habitat loss and increasing human disturbance,    3     may have led to decreasing availability of food and water.

“We can’t ignore the effect of rapid development of the local economy on the loss of wildlife habitat,”    4     well-known expert on Asian elephant migration wrote on his Weibo page. “Clear waters and green mountains are as     5     (value) as mountains of gold and silver. A healthy and complete ecosystem is the cornerstone of sustainable economic development.

China’s wild elephants     6     (double) in number to more than 300 since the 1990s, but their habitat has shrunk     7     nearly two-thirds over the same period. Though China has extremely harsh penalties for those     8     (catch) killing elephants, the combination of these factors     9     (mean) that the potential for human-elephant conflict will only rise. It’s     10     (extreme) challenging for them to coexist.

The big fear is that the intensity of conflict between humans and elephants can start as just a nuisance and quickly grow to the point where people or elephants get killed.