This year sees the third edition of Zhu Yujie's group female art exhibition, a project hosted annually with the aim of offering more opportunities to women artists. The exhibition Metaphor and Gaze opened in Shenzhen's La Vie Art Center, on Feb 27.

"Women artists still have relatively fewer opportunities to show their works at art museums and galleries, and few group exhibitions concentrate on female topics, " Zhu says, "Only by constantly exhibiting works by female artists and writing about these artworks, can they be known by more people and be written into art history. "

The exhibition contains videos, paintings, and performance by 17 female artists. According to Zhu, the title Metaphor and Gaze is about artists expressing women's real desires, confusion and anxieties from different perspectives, and exploring the love, healing and growth shared by humans.

"In these unique times of the pandemic (疫情), we have had new life experiences and understandings, and I increasingly realize that art is the best medium to break down barriers and to bring people together. And for artists, their creation and thinking never stop," Zhu says. "In art history, the images of women are often just objects to be gazed at. In our exhibition, women are the subject of creation. "

Zhu says that she feels an increasing amount of people are supporting female art. While she overcame various difficulties hosting previous exhibitions with a limited budget, this year she was invited by Xiao Yu, founder of La Vie Art Center, who provided the place.

The art center is an industrial space with rough concrete walls, which, according to Zhu, contrasts with the fixed impression of women being frail, and allows the artists to communicate with the viewers through powerful artworks.

The exhibition also features a reading room section entitled Writing Her Power- Women's Situation and Writing, displaying books from 20 publishing houses on themes including female power, self-identity and relationships. Zhu says that books have played a major role in her learning.

Finland's system for returning drink containers started in the 1950s, and today almost every bottle and can is recycled. Convenience is the cornerstone of the system's success.

Nowadays there are almost 5,000 container-return machines across Finland. Most of them are located in the same shops that sell drinks, making returning them a convenient part of people's routine. Hotels, restaurants, offices, schools and event organizers return containers through their drink providers.

The return machines are easy to use. You place a bottle or can on a set of mini conveyor belts at the front of the machine. They carry it past a scanner and out of sight. The machine sorts the bottles and crushes the cans. When you're done, you press a button and the machine gives you a receipt. Plastic bottles are worth 20 to 40 cents, depending on their size, while glass bottles are worth 10 to 40 cents and aluminium(铝) cans are 15 cents. The returned containers are recycled or the materials are reused. Across Finland, on average, every Finn returns 373 items in a year: 251 aluminium cans, 98 plastic bottles and 24 glass bottles.

The government has entrusted this function to the private agency. "Palpa is completely nonprofit and receives no government funding," says Tommi Vihavainen, Palpa's director of producer services, ICT and communication.

Russia, the UK and other countries have shown interest in the Finnish system. "Most visitors want to see how the return system works in Finland," says Vihavainen. "We don't act as consultants, but we're proud to present our system."

In shallow coastal waters of the Indian ocean, Dugong, a kind of sea cow, is in trouble. Environmental problems pose such a major threat to its survival that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) upgraded the species' extinction risk status(地位) to vulnerable(脆弱的).

Much worse, Dugongs are at risk of losing the protection of the Torres Strait Islanders, who have looked after them historically, hunting them for food sustainably and monitoring their numbers. These native people keep their biodiversity, and have deep knowledge about their environment. But these people are also threatened, in part because rising sea levels are making it difficult for them to live there.

This situation isn't unique to Dugongs. A global analysis of 385 culturally important plant and animal species found 68 percent were both biologically vulnerable and at risk of losing their cultural protection.

The findings clearly illustrate that biology shouldn't be the primary factor in shaping conservation policy, says anthropologist Victoria Reyes-García.When a culture declines, the species that are important to that culture are also threatened. "Lots of conservationists think we need to separate people from nature," says Reyes-García. "But that strategy misses the caring relationship many cultural groups have with nature."

One way to help shift conservation efforts is to give species a "bio-cultural status," which would provide a fuller picture of their vulnerability. In the study, the team used a new way to determine a species' risk of disappearing: the more a cultural group's language use declines, the more that culture is threatened. The more a culture is threatened, the more culturally vulnerable its important species are. Researchers then combined a species' cultural and biological vulnerability to arrive at its bio-cultural status. In the Dugong's case, its bio-cultural status is endangered, meaning it is more at risk than its IUCN categorization suggests.

This new approach to conservation involves people that have historically cared for them. It can highlight when communities need support to continue their care. Scientists hope it will bring more efforts that recognize local communities' rights and encourage their participation — taking advantage of humans' connection with nature instead of creating more separation.