A Life in Danger

Lucy, aged 15, lives in Bournemouth with her parents. Her parents aren’t poor, and she was at a private school when she started getting bullied. This made her very unhappy and she began to misbehave. She made some new friends who went clubbing a lot. Later she even took drug and stole money to buy drug. Her parents were so worried about their daughter and so angry about her behavior that they decided to send Lucy to Turn-About Ranch (TAR), a tough camp for problem teens in Utah, in the USA.

Lucy didn’t like the idea of going to the ranch（牧场）in Utah, but after spending three months there, she’s changed her attitude. She said, “The staff at TAR cared about our emotional well-being but they also wanted us to be disciplined and respect the rules. They told us not to take any drugs, not even tobacco or alcohol, and they made us get up at 6.30 a.m. every day and to school work as well as jobs around the ranch. TAR is a real, working ranch with cows and horses, which we had to take care of.

At TAR they asked us not to wear make-up or jewelry or use hair products. They told us that teenagers with problems often use a cool appearance as a mask to hide behind and that they needed to break down those barriers to help us look inside at the confusion which causes our problem behavior. They also wanted us to take responsibility for all our actions.”

Her time there has made her more self-confident, less aggressive and much happier. She’s started a college course, she’s got a part-time job, and she’s also doing voluntary work helping underprivileged children. She hasn’t taken any drugs since she left TAR. Lucy says, “TAR made me think very hard about the friends I used to see and where my life was going. I realized that the drugs were starting to become the only thing in my life that I cared about, which meant I stopped enjoying other things and treated people badly. I ought to have realized that, and I know I shouldn’t have done a lot of things that I did. The ranch has really opened my eyes. They told me to believe I could achieve something with my life, and from now on I want to try.”

Royal Dutch Shell is launching a $ 300 million and forestry program, at a time when an increasing number of oil companies are putting money in carbon offset (碳补偿)plans to meet climate goals. The company will spend the money over the next three years on projects to store carbon, including large forests in the Netherlands and Spain, and will start offering motorists the option of purchasing carbon offsets when they buy petrol at the pump.

The executives of the company explained that these carbon offset projects were a new business opportunity for Shell, as well as a way to meet its climate targets. “We believe that over time we will be building a business, because these carbon credits will become more valuable as carbon becomes more limited," they said. Shell recently decided to cut its net carbon footprint (碳排放)by 2-3 percent in five years, which includes emissions (排放)from the products it sells. The company plans to produce carbon credits from the forestry projects, then sell these credits on to customers buying its oil and gas products, or apply the credits to its own operations to lower its carbon footprint.

Plants absorb carbon dioxide as they grow and restoring forests and other natural areas is considered one of the simplest ways to store carbon. However, the voluntary market for carbon credits based on forestry projects has its critics, as projects in developing countries can be hard to monitor. Shell's move has also been criticized by some environmentalists. They worried that there was a risk of " greenwash when companies invested in forestry projects. "There is an entire debate about whether forestry projects truly reduce emissions or not," they said, pointing out that planting in one area could cause deforestation (滥伐森林)to another.

Shell said it would rely on the third party to ensure its forest program to meet the Voluntary Carbon Standard and strict biodiversity requirements. Mark Lewis, head of climate change investment research at BNP Paribas, said, " Planting trees to offset emissions, as far as it goes, is a step in the right direction."

FaceApp has taken the world by storm, giving users the chance to see themselves age through its algorithm. 12.7 million people---some three million more than the population of New York City—reportedly downloaded it in one seven-day period last month.

Although the Russian app has become known for its privacy issues, the more interesting lesson of our FaceApp fling (尽情玩乐）is what it tells us about our society—and our future lives. It turns out we are more interested in aging than we realized. I’m surprised by this. Most younger people are in denial (否认）about old age, doing almost nothing to prepare for it. We rarely have a chance to plan for the future, with increasing time and financial pressures. Those pressures bring sacrifices that we may not always want to make: we can no longer afford to spend the time or the money needed to look after our elderly parents.

As a family doctor, I can see the loneliness epidemic developing. Elderly patients come to see me with no particular illness, no clear medical issue. After a few minutes of the consultation, I understand why: they're not sick, and often they don’t feel sick. They just need someone—anyone-to talk to.

Although loneliness has no medical classification, the health effects are real: the result of loneliness and isolation can be as harmful to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and is more damaging than obesity. But loneliness does not come with nearly enough health warnings.

So what next? Since 1980, we are living on average 10 years longer. At the same time, people are having fewer and fewer children, and they are having them much later in life. The snake of a world class health service is eating its own tail; its care is prolonging (延长) people's lives, but as the ratio of pensioners（退休人员）to working -age people increases, there are fewer taxpayers to fund that very health service.

Into this void have stepped NGOs, charities and volunteers. But in the long term, the only way to truly help the oldest meters of our society is to go back to the traditional values of intergenerational（两代间的） cooperation—often under same roof. Ultimately, we will need to evolve towards a culture where elderly care is treated the same as childcare, where employers recognize the duty of someone with an elderly parent the same way they recognize those of someone with a newborn child.