評論
打印
When I was a young man, a young biologist in Africa, I was involved in setting aside marvelous areas as future national parks.
我年輕的時候，是非洲的一個年輕生物學家，我參與了一個項目，為國家公園規劃未來的野生區域。
Now no sooner — this was in the 1950s — and no sooner did we remove the hunting,
不久后——這是1950年——我們剛取消打獵，
drum-beating people to protect the animals, than the land began to deteriorate, as you see in this park that we formed.
鼓動人們保護動物，接著土地開始惡化，這是我們建立的公園。
Now, no livestock were involved, but suspecting that we had too many elephants now,
這里并沒有牲畜（破壞植被），于是我們懷疑是大象的數量太多了，
I did the research and I proved we had too many,
我做過調查，并得出了大象數量過多的結論，
and I recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain.
我建議應該減少它們的數量，把數量降到土地能承受的水平。
Now, that was a terrible decision for me to have to make, and it was political dynamite, frankly.
對我來說，我不得不承認這個可怕的結論，而坦率地說，這是個政治炸彈。
So our government formed a team of experts to evaluate my research.
所以政府組了一個專家團來評估我的調查結果。
They did. They agreed with me, and over the following years, we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage.
他們評估之后，也同意我的觀點，在接下來的那些年，我們射殺了4萬頭大象來停止土地退化。
And it got worse, not better.
情形變得更壞了，而不是更好。
Loving elephants as I do, that was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life, and I will carry that to my grave.
我很喜歡大象的，這是我人生中最悲哀的、最大的錯誤，我會帶進墳墓。
One good thing did come out of it. It made me absolutely determined to devote my life to finding solutions.
也有一件好事。它使我下定決心奉獻我的一生去尋找解決方案。
When I came to the United States, I got a shock, to find national parks like this one desertifying as badly as anything in Africa.
我來到美國，我大吃一驚，發現美國國家公園竟然是這個樣子，荒漠化的程度跟非洲一樣糟糕。
And there'd been no livestock on this land for over 70 years.
在這片土地上已經70多年沒有牲畜的。
And I found that American scientists had no explanation for this except that it is arid and natural.
我發現美國科學家對此的解釋沒有什么特別，認為無非是干旱和自然條件導致。
So I then began looking at all the research plots I could over the whole of the Western United States
于是我開始收集和分析，我能找到的整個美國西部所有的野外，
where cattle had been removed to prove that it would stop desertification,
研究站的數據，那些地方的牛群都被移走了，來證明這樣會停止荒漠化，
but I found the opposite, as we see on this research station, where this grassland that was green in 1961, by 2002 had changed to that situation.
可是我發現的卻相反，看這個研究站，在1961年這片草地是綠的，到2002年變成這種狀況。
And the authors of the position paper on climate change from which I obtained these pictures attribute this change to "unknown processes."
這些圖片來自于研究氣候變化的研究人員的論文，他們在觀點論文中這種變化歸因為“未知進程”。
