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【阅读理解】Reading: The Woman Who Let the Land Speak
On a cold Tuesday in March 2019, Mira Novak unwrapped a glass jar and held it against the light.
Inside, ten dead bees lay in a loose bead of amber.
"Not one of mine," she said.
Her assistant, a 24-year-old accountancy graduate named Owen Pike, wrote the date in a directory already thick with failures.
They were standing on eleven hectares of vacant land beside a former petroleum depot in Rotherham, where Mira, then 51, had spent four years trying to revegetate a stretch of ground that most people had written off.
She had not intended to become a beekeeper.
In 2008 she was a lecturer in soil science, publishing on contaminant uptake in urban grasses, until a recession and a round of downsizing left her department with an obligation it could not meet.
The redundancy was a milestone she did not welcome.
A colleague suggested she cast her eye over the old depot, closed since 1987, where a curious mix of aboriginal weeds and exotic imports had taken hold.
Preliminary tests showed lead at 340 parts per million in places, and benzene traces that made commercial cultivation impossible.
Yet something else appeared on the sample sheets: 62 species of bee, more than anyone had recorded in the surrounding countryside.
Mira felt the pull of an idea.
She would not clean the land; she would let it speak.
Her method was not romantic.
She drew a hierarchy of tasks, and top of the list was not honey but habitat.
With a small grant of 18,000 pounds from a regional biodiversity fund, she and Owen organized a communal effort: 40 volunteers, 1,900 metres of new hedgerow, 23 log piles, and a pond dug by hand.
They ploughed nothing.
They sprayed nothing.
They let nettles predominate in one corner and let brambles stitch the edges.
"You have to be consistent," she told the volunteers, who included a truant teenager, two retired miners, and a woman who kept bees on a waterfront balcony.
"A bee does not need your pity. It needs a map."
The results were stunning.
By 2015 the site held 118 bee species.
A local paper ran the story under the headline "The Woman Who Gave a Wasteland a Second Life."
Mira found the phrase inferior and said so.
The turn came in 2017.
A property developer, a dynamic man named Callum Reid, bought the land for 2.4 million pounds.
He had a glossy plan: 310 apartments, a skyscraper of 14 storeys, and a "green roof" that his brochure described as a haven for wildlife.
Mira was not against housing; she was against the arithmetic.
She asked to see the ecological survey.
Reid's consultants had found 9 bee species on a single site visit in February, when most bees are dormant.
"That is not a survey," she said at a public meeting.
"That is an alibi."
The room was fraught.
Reid said she was emotional.
She said he was ignorant.
Neither was entirely wrong.
What followed was a slow defeat.
Mira launched an appeal, raised 31,000 pounds in eight months, and got 4,700 signatures on a petition.
She commissioned an independent report, which confirmed 121 species, including two scarce mining bees.
The council asked for a revised plan.
Reid agreed to offset the damage by creating a new meadow 1.6 miles away.
Mira called the offset a mock remedy.
In the end the council approved the scheme by 7 votes to 4.
The meadow was never built; the recession of 2020 gave Reid a convenient excuse, and the company downsize removed the ecologist from the payroll.
The first excavator arrived on 3 November 2019.
Mira stood at the barrier and watched the earthwork begin.
She did not stop.
She and Owen moved the surviving colonies, 46 hives in all, to a patch of grassy land behind a hospital, where a sympathetic doctor had secured permission.
The move cost 12,000 pounds and most of her savings.
Two colonies failed within a month.
Mira was guilty of hoping anyway.
"Grief is not a strategy," Owen said one evening, and she laughed, because he was right and because she had no other.
She began to give lectures again, unpaid, to anyone who would listen.
She told her audiences that a brownfield is not a blank space; it is a recipe of old poisons and new chances, and the two are not easily separated.
She told them that a bee's compass is not the same as ours.
She told them to pay attention.
In the spring of 2023, four years after the diggers came, I walked the new estate with Mira.
The green roof was real, though thin.
Between two apartment blocks, in a strip of unplanned ground, she stopped and pointed.
A single mining bee was working a da
Questions
1. What was Mira Novak's initial reaction to the jar of dead bees in March 2019?
A. She said they were not from her colonies. B. She decided to abandon the project. C. She blamed Owen Pike for the loss. D. She called for an immediate investigation.
2. How many bee species were recorded at the site by 2015?
A. 62 B. 121 C. 118 D. 9
3. What does the word "dormant" most likely mean in the sentence "Reid's consultants had found 9 bee species on a single site visit in February, when most bees are dormant"?
A. Active B. Inactive C. Breeding D. Migrating
4. What can be inferred about Mira's view of the council's decision to approve the scheme?
A. She was relieved that housing would be built. B. She accepted it as a necessary compromise. C. She thought the decision ignored the site's ecological value. D. She believed the offset meadow was a real solution.
5. Which of the following best serves as a title for the passage?
A. A Beekeeper's Victory B. The Battle for a Wasteland C. The Woman Who Let the Land Speak D. The Developer Who Built a Green Roof