World Environment Day became the topic of «Conversations about the Important». BIST students learned about the Ecological Doctrine of the Russian Federation, the history of the holiday, its goals and objectives, basic terminology, as well as priority areas for ensuring safety in the environmental sphere, and the laws of the biosphere by American biologist and ecologist Barry Commoner.

They learned that over the course of ecology’s development as a science, four main ideas about what ecology is have emerged:

• for biologists, it is the science of the relationships between living organisms.
• for geographers, it is the science of changes in Earth’s ecosystems during natural evolution and as a result of human activity.
• for economists, sociologists, marketers, and architects, it is the science of the natural and artificial environment.
• for chemists, physicists, and specialists in technical sciences, it is the science that studies human impact on nature.

The ideas are different, but all these directions together are what we generally call ecology.

The questions of who is considered the first ecologist in world history and in Russia, what the most serious environmental problem is in our country and the world as a whole, the reasons for environmental degradation, which city and regions in our country are the most environmentally friendly, and the data from the latest annual «Environmental Performance Index» ranking, where Russia ranked 112th out of 180, were of no less interest.

The discovery for many was the existence on Earth of the «seventh continent» – a huge island entirely made up of garbage and plastic – the Eastern Garbage Continent, also called the «Great Pacific Garbage Patch».

They also discussed questions such as «What is environmental culture?», «What needs to be done to prevent littering nature?», «How to keep the air clean?», and others. The overall conclusion: our future depends on the state of our planet. It is impossible without a respectful interaction with the surrounding world.