All good so far; amazing even, if you're the type to be amazed by human effort and ingenuity. It's what happens next, after our needs are met, that's the problem -- the mother of all environmental problems, in fact. De Wit pointed to the gray fog on the right edge of the diagram. The gray fog is waste.
聽到這里感覺還不錯，甚至不由得贊嘆--如果你傾向于為人類的努力和創(chuàng)造性折服的話。但在我們滿足自己需求后發(fā)生的事情才是癥結(jié)所在，甚至可以說是一切環(huán)境問題之母：德威特指向圖表右端的灰蒙蒙的色塊--廢棄物。
In 2015, he explained, about two-thirds of the material we scratched from the planet slipped through our fingers. More than 67 billion tons of hard-won stuff was lost, most of it scattered irretrievably. Plastic trash drifted into rivers and oceans; so did nitrates and phosphates leaching from fertilized fields. A third of all food rotted, even as the Amazon was deforested to produce more. Think of an environmental problem, and chances are it's connected to waste. That includes climate change: It happens because we burn fossil fuels and scatter the waste -- carbon dioxide -- into the atmosphere.
他解說道，2015年，我們從地球搜刮的物資約有三分之二從指縫間流走。超過670億噸來之不易的物資遺失了，大部分四散無蹤，不可挽回。塑料垃圾漂入江河海洋，農(nóng)田肥料滲出的氮和磷也緊隨其后。在亞馬遜被毀林造田用于耕種的同時，食品總量的三分之一白白腐爛。任舉一個環(huán)境問題，其成因多半與廢物有關(guān)。這也包括氣候變化--由我們?nèi)紵剂稀⒍趸紡U氣排向空中造成。
This may sound ridiculous, but as de Wit walked me through the numbers that morning, it felt like an epiphany. There was a unifying, exhilarating clarity to that wonky diagram, to the way it defined the task. Sure, it said, the threats we face are multifarious and overwhelming. Sure, they're planetary in scale. But really, to get along on this Earth, we must do just one thing: Stop wasting so much of it. De Wit pointed to a thin arrow that circled back, from right to left, along the bottom of the diagram, representing all the material we'd managed to capture through recycling, composting, and so on. It was only 9.3 billion tons: just 9 percent of the total.
也許聽起來不可思議，但在那個早晨，隨著德威特逐步解說數(shù)據(jù)，我感覺好像醍醐灌頂。那張靠不住的圖表及其改天換地的構(gòu)想?yún)s體現(xiàn)出一種前后貫通、振奮人心的明朗。的確，它說我們面對的危機千頭萬緒，勢不可擋。的確，其威脅是全球規(guī)模的。但歸根到底，要在這個地球上存續(xù)，我們就必須做到一件事：停止浪費那么多資源。德威特指向一個在圖表下部從右邊巡回左邊的細箭頭，它代表的是我們通過回收、堆肥等方式得以存留的物質(zhì)。只有93億噸，占總量的9%。
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