What if you could give your child a special gift? A gift that was never the same, always changing? Now what if this gift was free, readily available and lasted forever?

Where do you find such a gift? It's easy: Just open your eyes and look up at the sky with your child, and you'll discover "the theatre over your heads which presents all kinds of shows," or "the art gallery above." says Jack Borden, former Boston television reporter who founded "For Spacious Skies (FSS)", a non-profit educational organization with the purpose of "stimulating and sustaining public awareness of the appearance of the sky".

Borden's big vision is to bring about "new eyes" in young children in terms of how they see the sky. But the most effective teachers and influencers of children — their parents — need to become "sky aware" themselves in order to pass the gift along.

And there's the rub.

"Could you describe the sky right now, without looking out of your window? Are there clouds? If so, what do they look like? Nine chances out of 10, you don't have a clue about the sky's appearance," says Borden. "We know that people are not looking at the sky. If they perceive the sky at all, it's in the context of the weather or astronomy."

"Sky awareness means expanding your horizons so that you begin to see that the sky is the province, not just of the weather reporter, but of the photographer, the artist, the poet, the dreamer. of the physical scientist." says Borden.

And it's the province of parents and their children.

What parent doesn't want to foster observation ability, imagination, creativity, curiosity and environmental responsibility in their children? "There's a lot to this. There's more to it than I ever dreamed," says Borden.

The second little pig was unlucky. He built his house from sticks, which was blown away by a wolf. His brother, by contrast, built a wolf-proof house from bricks. The fairy tale could have been written by an agent for the construction industry, strongly favoring brick, concrete and steel. However, in the real world it would help reduce pollution and slow global warming if more builders copied the wood-loving second pig.

No other building material has environmental credentials (认证信息) as exciting and overlooked as wood. The energy required to produce a laminated wooden beam (层压木梁) is one-sixth of that required for a steel one of comparable strength. As trees take carbon out of the atmosphere when growing, wooden buildings contribute to negative emissions by storing the stuff. And for refitting older buildings to be more energy efficient, wood is a good insulator (绝缘体). A softwood window frame provides nearly 400 times as much insulation as a plain steel one of the same thickness and over a thousand times as much as an aluminium (铝) equivalent.

But such bigger stories are still uncommon. Governments can help push the industry to use more wood, particularly in the public sector — the construction industry’s biggest client. That would help wood-building specialists achieve greater scale and lower costs. Zero-carbon building regulations should be altered to take account of the emissions that are presented in materials.

Construction codes could be regulated to make building with wood easier. Here the direction of travel is wrong. Britain, for instance, is banning the use of timber on the outside of tall buildings after 72 people died in a tower fire in London in 2017. That is a nonsense. Grenfell Tower was covered in aluminium and plastic, not wood. Modern cross-laminated timber (交叉层叠木板) panels perform better in fire tests than steel ones do.

Carpentry alone will not bring the environmental cost of the world’s buildings into line. But using wood can do much more than is appreciated. The second little pig was not wrong, just before his time.

The earth is dying before us, yet we sit and watch. If the TV or the game system breaks, we run off to the stores to get it fixed immediately no matter what the cost. Why aren’t we willing to fix our earth? Are our televisions and game systems more important to us than where we live? Where shall we continue to live, until the end of time?

The earth is our home and cannot be replaced. We must take care of it. We have come up with so much technology that limits us instead of helping us. Take that game system we run to repair. What does it do? It occupies kids’ time! The earth has already given kids plenty of entertainment in the forms of fields and hills, forests and plains, water and land. However, instead of using what the earth has given us, and helping kids by giving them exercise as they run around, we decide to ruin kids’ minds with game systems that glue them to the screen for hours, and make them ignore their homework and chores. We have polluted this earth by making these things which do not even help in any way!

We have already messed up this world, we have ruined the air, water, and animals that it has so willingly provided for us. We need to stop this destruction of life and bring back the world we had before. It will not be easy, but everybody can help! What about something as simple as turning the lights off when you leave a room? Recycling what can be recycled? Picking up litter? Donating money to an environmental organization? None of these things are very hard. We can’t just always say, “Oh, the earth is a mess. Ah, well, those big companies that are polluting so much can stop and fix it.” Instead, we need to help out. It’s not only those big companies; it’s everyday things that we do too that are ruining the earth. So, stop and think about what you can do to make a difference to our world!