2 . If you’re looking for something fun to do, pack a picnic dinner and take your family or friends to a beautiful place to eat. However, there’s a wrong trend to view picnics as an excuse to transport food in single-use plastic containers. Sure, it means the cleanup is easy at the moment, but it just puts it off to a later point, when it takes the form of volunteer cleanups and landfill management.     1     What follows is advice on how to pack such a picnic.

Using reusable containers is the easiest way to reduce waste.     2     For example, to reduce packaging, you can take along things like a loaf of bread, a whole watermelon, whole vegetables, a knife and a board to cut your food when you’re ready to eat. It doesn’t all have to be done and sealed (密封) before you leave the house.

Using washable dishes and cutlery for a picnic does not require much more work than single-use ones.

You’d have to carry the waste out anyway in a trash bag, so why not pack your dirty plates and cutlery into a bag and put them in the dishwasher at home?     3    

Forget the single-use, single-serve drink bottles.     4     Fill a large thermos (保温瓶) or personal water bottles with water, juice or lemonade at home. Compared with a single-use plastic cup, they have the added advantage of keeping your drinks colder for longer.

Cloth bags are amazing. I use them for so much more than just buying food at the store. They’re perfect for packing sandwiches, dried or whole fruit, and other snack foods. You can use them to pack glasses or plates to prevent breaking. They can also work as a napkin, tea towel, or trash bag if needed.     5    

4 . As seabird biologist Bonnie Slaton slides off a small boat and walks through high water, the brown pelicans (鹈鹕) spread their wings overhead until she reaches Raccoon Island. The narrow island is a small piece of land separating the American state of Louisiana from the Gulf of Mexico. During the seabird breeding (繁殖) season, the placer, one of the few remaining places of safety for the pelicans, is full of noise.

Twelve years ago, there were 15 low-lying islands with breeding areas for Louisiana’s state bird. However, today, only about six islands in southeastern Louisiana have brown pelican nests and the rest have disappeared underwater.

Slaton and other scientists set u cameras to observe pelican nests on the island. The cameras show that in recent years the pelicans have faced some natural disasters. The main killer of them is flooding, which can wash away all the nests, as happened in April 2021. The disappearing islands are the location of a story of successful conservation. For many years, scientists have worked to bring the pelicans beck from tally dying off.

Mike Carloss is a state wildlife biologist in Louisiana. He said he never saw brown pelicans as a child in the 1960s. Their populations had been killed by the use of DDT, a kind of farm chemical. It thinned eggshells and prevented pelicans from giving birth to young birds. The beloved birds were completely gone from Louisiana, only appearing on the state flag. But a long-running effort to save them led to the birds’ return. After DDT was stopped in the U.S. in 1972, biologists brought young pelicans from nearby Florida to let them inhabit empty islands across the Gull of Mexico again. More than 1,200 pelicans have been set free in southeastern Louisiana over 13 years.

The brown pelicans can live more than 20 years. So, the final effect of disappearing breeding areas is uncertain and it will sill take time to become clear. And the future for pelicans is uncertain on the islands.

5 . The San Diego County Water Authority has an unusual plan to use the city’s scenic San Vicente Reservoir (水库) to store solar power so it’s available after sunset. The project could help unlock America’s clean energy future.

Perhaps ten years from now, if all goes smoothly, large underground pipes will connect this lake to a new reservoir, a much smaller one, built in a nearby valley about 1100 feet higher. When the sun is high in the sky, California’s abundant solar power will pump water into that upper reservoir. It’s a way to store the electricity. When the sun goes down and solar power disappears, operators would open a valve (阀门) and the force of 8 million tons of water, falling back downhill through those same pipes, would drive machines capable of producing 500 megawatts of electricity for up to eight hours. That’s enough to power 130, 000 typical homes.

“It’s a water battery!” says Neena Kuzmich, Deputy Director of Engineering for the water authority. She says energy storage facilities like these will be increasingly important as California starts to rely more on energy from wind and solar, which produce electricity on their own schedules, without considering the demands of consumers.

Californians learned this during a heat wave this past summer. “Everybody in the state of California got a text message at 5:30 in the evening to turn off their appliances,” Kuzmich says. The sun was going down, solar generation was disappearing, and the remaining power plants, many of them burning gas, couldn’t keep up with demand. The reminder worked:People stopped using so much power, and the grid (电网) survived.

Yet earlier on that same day, there was so much solar power available that the grid couldn’t take it all. Grid operators turned away more than 2000 megawatt hours of electricity that solar generators could have delivered, enough to power a small city. That electricity was wasted. There was no way to store it for later, when operators desperately needed it.

Is rental fashion the future?

With a cost-of-living crisis and climate awareness sitting heavily at the forefront of our minds, many of us are having to make choices about what we    1    . Fashion is one of them. As of 2021, UK households    2    approximately 57.3 billion British pounds on clothing, significantly contributing to the very real effects of climate change that can be felt around the world.

Even the fastest of fashion retailers are taking note; this summer, BooHoo announced that they will be    3     a returns fee to try and help customers reflect on overshopping habits. Meanwhile, Love Island teamed up with eBay as their official partner for 2022’s series,     4     avoiding their usual tie-ins.

However, there will still be times where a new item feels like a    5    treat: to attend a wedding, to suit the requirements of a job interview, for that much-needed; confidence    6    on a date. For those who love to shop, getting oneself completely out of retail seems a little like a punishment, taking away yet another source of joy during already-undesirable times.

So here comes rental fashion. The set-up is simple. Rent three, five or ten items and swap (替换) every month, with prices starting from £39 a month for a three-item. In the case of any accidents, do not fear     7    and light damages (think broken zips and small stains) are accounted for in the pricing, as is laundry. If you fall in love, there are options to keep certain items longer, or if you’re not in the market for anything new, your     8    can be easily paused or cancelled.

At the end of each cycle, you’ll receive an email reminding you to choose your next box. With a three-item return, items can be returned at a local drop-off point, whilst bigger parcels will be     9    when the team make their next delivery. Think of it a kind of clothing library, where items are rotated in and out of your life instead of     10     dust.

7 . The woods are turning orange. Drifts of dry leaves are growing on forest floors and flying into street corners. From a distance, it is beautiful. But the air is still warm and summery. This turning and leaf fall is not the usual gradual preparation for winter in temperate zones(温带) but a stress response by trees trying to preserve water. We are now in a false autumn, caused by heat and drought. And it feels wrong.

There is, therefore, something deeply disturbing about such a graphic alteration of familiar rhythms, Droughts are not unknown to the UK, of course, and too many parts of the world are certainly familiar with far more severe versions. But increasingly they are occurring in the context of a climate emergency, and record-breaking heat. And the beauty of a false autumn, specifically, has an emotional effect, a deep weirdness, something mysteriously suggestive of evil or danger

Cultures across the world contain ceremonies for the propitiation(宽恕) of the weather; a sense of responsibility for the natural world—and the belief that it will punish us if we fail it—is as old as humanity. One of the reasons why the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is so effective is the directness with which it links the shooting of an albatross(信天翁)—the destruction of innocent wildlife—to a terrible change in the weather: no rain, just burning, death-dealing sun. We may not understand the mechanism, but at an instinctual(本能的) level it feels right.

And in a similar way it has not really been a surprise to hear that birds are struggling. In London,   young swifts (雨燕) were seen falling out of the sky. Fewer—and too early—nuts and berries mean some animals will not live through this winter. Older trees, with their longer roots, will hopefully survive, but young trees may not—all that promises further warming. There will always be a degree of uncertainty about the causes of specific weather events, but we cannot deny that we have not taken care of the albatross. Now we must hope we are doing enough to make sure that these fearful golden days are pot an autumn of autumns.