U.N. Report Warns Nature Crisis

A new U.N. report focuses on the negative effects of human activity on nature. It says one million plant and animal species on land, in the seas and in the sky are now in danger of extinction.

The 1,800-page report took three years to finish. 【小题1】 The Earth has always suffered from human activity, it says. However, these scratches (划伤) have become deep scars (伤疤) over the past 50 years. Species are going to extinct several hundred times faster than the average rate during the past ten million years. It’s something that has never happened before in human history.

【小题2】 Since 1970, the human population has doubled. The global economy has grown by four times. To feed, clothe and give energy to this fast-changing world, lots of forests have been cut down. 【小题3】 Furthermore, hunting, overfishing and pollution have also been killing species in great numbers.

The problem can be fixed, the report says. 【小题4】 The amount of land and sea that is under protection needs to increase rapidly. The report suggests governments move away from using GDP as a key measure of development. Long-term effects must be considered, too.

Professor Eduardo Brondizio of Indiana University is an author of the report. He says, “We all know what needs to be done. The knowledge is there. 【小题5】”

I have worked as a keeper at the National Zoo for 11 years. Spot and Stripe are the first tiger cubs (幼兽) that have ever been born here. Globally, a third of Sumatran cubs in zoos don’t make it to adulthood, so I decided to give them round-the-clock care at home.

I’ve got two children — the younger one, Kynan, was extremely happy about the tigers arriving — but all of us really looked forward to being part of their lives and watching them grow. I wasn’t worried about bringing them into my home with my wife and kids. These were cubs. They weighed about 2.5kg and were so small that there was absolutely no risk.

As they grew more mobile, we let them move freely around the house during the day, but when we were asleep we had to contain them in a large room, otherwise they’d get up to mischief. We’d come down in the morning to find they’d turned the room upside down, and left it looking like a zoo.

Things quickly got very intense due to the huge amount of energy required to look after them. There were some tough times and I just felt extremely tired. I was grateful that my family was there to help. We had to have a bit of a production line going, making up “riser milk”, washing baby bottles, and cleaning the floors.

When Spot and Stripe were four months old, they were learning how to open doors and jump fences, and we knew it really was time for them to go. It was hard for us to finally part with them. For the first few days, Kynan was always a bit disappointed that the cubs weren’t there.

I’m not sad about it. I’m hands-on with them every day at the zoo, and I do look back very fondly on the time that we had them.

At age four, I found a garden behind the kitchen. My eyes became glued to the patterns of roses across my childhood landscape. I saw them and felt a sense of joy and adventure. 【小题1】

When spring arrived, I ran so fast through the house, speeding ahead of my mother’s voice. I dashed out of the front door and threw myself on a fresh carpet of grass. Excited, I bounced to my feet and had three more cartwheels before landing by her side. 【小题2】 And I sat beside her, playing with mud pies in the flower bed. Work done, she rewarded me with an ice-cold glass of bittersweet lemonade.

【小题3】 She fed love to a generation of people with purple peas and greens. She encouraged me to go anywhere in the world that would make me happy. Since then. I have planted her gardens through art installations (装置) throughout the world, in countries of the people that I meet. Now they are lining parks and courtyards, painted on walls and even in bare lots off the street.

Gardening has taught me that planting and growing a garden is the same process as creating our lives. It begins in the spring, when you break up the soil and start anew. 【小题4】 The gardener must then make sure that the proper nutrients are correctly mixed in the soil. Then it’s important to aerate the topsoil and leave it loosely packed on the surface. When our gardens are balanced with care, we can harvest the beauty of living a life of grace. 【小题5】 So cultivate (培育) your garden for giving and plant those seeds for the future. The garden is the world living deep inside of you.