The Covid-19 pandemic has led to discussions in society around the right to personal freedoms and the responsibility towards others when it comes to wearing a mask in public places or confined spaces. Should we have the right to choose or do as we are told by the people who lead our countries?
Whatever your opinions on wearing masks and other measures to reduce the number of Covid-19 cases, when people are responsible in a society it functions more smoothly. Continue reading
The chances are high that you experienced a period of lockdown, of one form or another, in 2020. If so, did you value your surroundings more, perhaps you re-evaluated your surroundings? Did getting fresh air and walking outdoors bring you a new pleasure that you had never really appreciated before? The individual stress and difficulties of the pandemic have taught us to value our environment and it is this recognition of how important nature is to our mental health and wellbeing that we can build on during some of our English language classes. Continue reading
We use energy in everything we do, from the automatic things we do such as breathing to the more conscious things such as doing exercise. If the energy we eat equals the energy we use in our daily activities, we do not gain weight. The energy we consume is used to grow new cells, replace old cells, fight off illnesses, move, focus and concentrate. When we are young, much of our energy goes into growth, if there is any extra we store the unused energy as fat and muscle to use later. Continue reading
As a lecturer in geology, I often encounter the effects of changes in the balance of nature.
For me, the key to the question “How can we maintain a balance with nature?” is “what is the balance to be maintained?”
Is it to keep the world around us as it is — or even to return it to the Eden that it once was? Alas, that is no longer possible. Some changes are irreversible. The dodo and the Yangtze dolphin have gone forever, as have very many more species.
The wider changes unfolding around us seem to be large on a geological scale, as the landscape is refashioned, as cities grow, the world warms and the oceans acidify. Geologists call it the Anthropocene, the epoch in which geology itself is increasingly driven by humanity’s actions.
To a large extent, we will have to go with the flow. We cannot maintain pristine ecologies while the physical and chemical boundary conditions are changing within and around them.
There’s the nice concept of “ragamuffin ecosystems” (that is, ragged and untidy ecosystems), for instance, that spring up in the aftermath of cleared forests and abandoned factories. These are different from what went before, but they may now be as valuable in harbouring a variety of plants and animals as the beginnings of new, functional ecosystems.
Such orphans of human progress should be nurtured, along with what we find of nature reborn in ponds and allotments and untidy back yards, along highways and railway lines, and around derelict buildings.
Perhaps this phenomenon is not something to celebrate, exactly, for it is merely a shadow of the magnificence that went before. But maybe if these scruffy survivors are sufficiently cherished, and allowed to grow, then we might imagine how, eventually, the world could once more become a green and various place.
How can you use questions like this one in class? Find out more about a question-centered approach here.
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Jan Zalasiewicz is Senior Lecturer in Geology at the University of Leicester, UK, and is the author of The Earth After Us: What legacy will humans leave in the rocks? (OUP).
