When Seymour Kankel, 10, was getting in the car to go to the summer camp in 2019, he wasn’t exactly keeping an eyc out for bears. But there it was, about 30 meters away, going calmly out of a dustbin. Different from Seymour, the bear wasn’t at all shocked to see him. Seymour immediately ran away.

Encounters like the one Seymour had aren’t that shocking. People and black bears are running into each other more and more. That’s partly because people are spending more time in wild areas-hiking and camping. They’re also living in areas near forests and mountains, areas where bears like to hang out. And the number of black bears has been growing since they were protected.

Black bears don’t usually bother anyone. But if a bear feels threatened, it might do something like a bluff charge. That’s when a bear runs towards a person but doesn’t attack. Even if no one is hurt, it can be frightening. And authorities may kill the animal in response.

People might be afraid of bears, but that fear goes both ways. Black bears living near people live in fear too, especially when they want to eat human leftovers. They’re weighing the high-calorie food against the risk often encountering people.

One way to reduce contact with bears is to remove the fast-food option. The hardest part is convincing people to do that. They need to keep bird feeders out of reach. They mustn’t leave pet food behind. Most importantly, they need to lock up the trash. Bears are changing their own behavior to coexist with people and their activities. And people will need to do the same — even if it means just locking up their trash.

It was a very hot day in late Summer. I was a young dad working in a local wood mill. It was dangerous, back-breaking work that paid very little. In the year I worked there, only four other people hadn’t quit and been replaced with new faces. Those of us who stayed did so just because there was no other work to find to support our families.

On this day all of us were covered in sweat and dust. When I looked around, every face I saw looked angry and frustrated. Suddenly, a voice called out, “Hey! There’s a deer in here,” A lost little female deer had wandered through the open loading bay doors and was now cowering in between the huge stacks of wood. All of us stopped working immediately and went looking for her as she ran about looking for a way out.

Now most people where I live hunt deer for meat in the fall but also treat them with great kindness the rest of the year. Many will even buy 50 bags of corn to help feed them during the harsh winter months. It was no surprise then that all of us were soon quickly working together to free this little creature. By blocking off all the other routes, we were able to guide her search back to the open bay doors. We watched as she jumped out of the building and back into the woods. Then we walked back in to work. I noticed something, though. On every face there was a joyful smile. It was as if this one single act of kindness had energized us again and reminded us of what life is all about.

A lot of people are scared of spiders (蜘蛛) and consider their webs to be dirt. But, growing up in Argentina and Italy, I remember seeing webs in the corners of my house and thinking they were gorgeous. Today I create works of art using these beautiful structures.

In my studio, I have a collection of spider webs and hundreds of different spiders. I spend a lot of time experimenting with them. I put a spider in a box and observe how it goes about constructing its web. I sometimes turn the box on its side to see how the spider reacts. Sometimes I put another spider in the box to see how it works with the structure the last one left in place. It may ignore that web and start again from scratch (从头开始) or begin adding to it.

I worked on digitizing webs. Though I see myself as an artist, I actually trained as an architect and the idea is to compare the properties of spiders’ webs with architectural structures to see if there are any similarities.

Of the thousands of species around the world, the one that interests me the most is the Stegodyphus dumicola. In groups, they make thousands of single threads (线), which are then entangled (缠) into a giant web that can lift the spiders straight up and transport them away. It is known as “ballooning”. During the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, for example, I exhibited the vast “aerocene” globes based on it. They aren’t sculptures but rather air-filled bubbles (气泡) that might one day float around the world, powered only by wind and the heat of the sun. I use them to challenge popular ideas about energy use and transportation.

My ambition is to take my work with spiders to the International Space Station, to conduct live experiments to see how they might behave and how they would build webs in a new environment without gravity. I am speaking to NASA about it. I hope to turn them into spidernauts.