Sports can help you keep fit and get in touch with nature. However, whether you are on the mountains, in the waves, or on the grassland, you should be aware that your sport of choice might have great influence on the environment.

Some sports are resource-hungry. Golf, as you may know, eats up not only large areas of countryside, but also tons of water. Besides, all sorts of chemicals and huge amounts of energy are used to keep its courses （球场） in good condition. This causes major environmental effects. For example, in the dry regions of Portugal and Spain, golf is often held responsible for serious water shortage in some local areas.

There are many environment-friendly sports. Power walking is one of them that you could take up today. You don’t need any special equipment except a good pair of shoes; and you don’t have to worry about resources and your purse. Simple and free, power walking can also keep you fit. If you walk regularly, it will be good for your heart and bones. Experts say that 20 minutes of power walking daily can make you feel less anxious, sleep well and have better weight control.

Whatever sport you take up, you can make it greener by using environment-friendly equipment and buying products made from recycled materials. But the final goal should be “green gyms”. They are better replacements for traditional health clubs and modern sports centers. Members of green gyms play sports outdoors, in the countryside or other open spaces. There is no special requirement for you to start your membership. And best of all, it’s free.

“It is necessary for us to go to places that still look like the ocean as it was 500 years ago,” says Enric Sala, former professor at Scripps Institute of Oceanography. However, in most parts of the world, marine conservation is stymied by opposition from fishing, oil, and mining interests. A mere 7 percent of the world’s ocean has protection—mostly weak rules, and only 2.5 percent is highly protected. Outside of these zones, the ocean’s story is a continuing failure.

A few remaining parts of the ocean are the last wild places of the sea—the marine equivalent of the remotest old-growth forest in the Amazon—still unaffected by overfishing, pollution and climate change. Enric is working with the National Geographic Society and together launched the Pristine Seas project in 2008. Over the past 14 years, Pristine Seas has helped create 28 marine reserves, making up two-thirds of the world’s fully protected marine areas—covering more than two million square miles in all.

Now Sala and his team have set an even more ambitious goal: to see more than a third of the world’s ocean conserved for the purpose not just of sustaining biodiversity but also of replenishing(补充)fish stocks and storing carbon.

Pristine Seas worked with native Palauans(帕劳人)to give an ancient conservation tradition a modern change. For centuries, Palauans have used what they all “buls”, a Palauan word which means closure, to preserve and rebuild their reef fish stocks. Over the years they have created 35 reserves to protect marine life around their islands, some of which ban fishing permanently.

Sala and his team calculate that a 14-fold expansion of the fully protected part of the ocean, from 2.5 percent to 35 percent, would provide 64 percent of the biodiversity benefits while increasing the global fish catch by almost 10 million metric tons. Even that may sound impossible, but the alternative is awful. For now, we still get to choose.

Tolstoy, one of east Africa’s few remaining Super Tusker elephants, wandered the grasslands around Mount Kilimanjaro for more than five decades. That was until last year, when he died after being speared by a farmer seeking to protect his crops.

“This is happening more and more,” said ranger Daudi Ninaai from Kenya’s Amboseli ecosystem reserve. The ranger fears other elephants will meet the same fate, as the increasingly frequent conflicts between humans and wildlife are worsened by the increase of new commercial farms. Incidents of elephants’ crop robbing more than doubled from 156 in 2020 to 363 last year.

“It’s skyrocketing because the space is shrinking,” said Samuel Tokore, a senior official at Kenya Wildlife Service. The fenced farms have considerably reduced elephants’ ability to travel. Tall barriers have been thrown up across their ancient migration routes.

The problem begins partly from a state-led move to divide 1.35mn acres in Amboseli used by generations of native Maasai people into private lands. After the public land was divided up, some chose to sell them on to commercial farmers.

“The destruction of wildlife buffer zones (缓冲区) and corridors for industrial farming is at a tipping poinit,” WildlifeDirect’s Kahumbu said. Michael Kairu set up his farming business in Amboseli five years ago only to find out later about the threat it posed to wildlife. His 500-acre farm is located in what was once an elephant breeding ground. “Government agencies and communities should make it clear where you can farm,” said Kairu, whose customers include leading UK supermarkets. “I don’t want to be in the wrong place,” he said.