評論
打印
Unit 5 At War with the Planet
第五單元 與地球的戰爭
Barary Commmoner
巴里·康門納
People live in two worlds. Like all living things, we inhabit the natural world created over the Earth's 5-billion-year history by physical, chemical, and biological processes. The other world is our own creation: homes, cars, farms, factories, laboratories, food, clothing, books, paintings, music, poetry. We accept responsibility for events of our own world, but not for what occurs in the natural one. Its storms, droughts and floods are "acts of God" free of human control and exempt from our responsibility.
人類生活在兩個世界中。和所有的生物一樣，我們生存在這個經過50多億年物理、化學、生物變化所形成的地球上，即自然世界。另外一個世界則源于人類的創造，如家庭、汽車、農場、工廠、實驗室、食物服裝、書籍、繪畫音樂、詩歌等。我們為人類世界所發生的一切承擔責任，卻對自然世界的變化無能為力。風暴、干旱、洪水等都是上帝的“手筆”，人類無法控制，也無須負責。
Now, on a planetary scale, this division has been breached. With the appearance of a continent-sized hole in the Earth's protective ozone layer and the threat of global warming, even droughts, floods, and heat waves may become unwitting acts of man.
但如今，從全球的角度看，這個界限已被打破。對地球起保護作用的臭氧層出現空洞，全球變暖威脅人類，甚至干旱、洪水、熱電波等都可能是人類的無心之過。
Like the Creation, the portending global events are cosmic: They change the relationship between the Dlanet Earth and its star, the sun. The sun's powerful influence on the Earth is exerted by two forces: gravity and solar radiation. Gravity is a nearly steady force that fixes the planet's path around the sun. Solar radiation-largely visible and ultraviolet light-is vast stream of energy that bathes the Earth's surface, fluctuating from day to night and season to season. Solar energy fuels the energy-requiring processes of life; it creates the planet's climate and governs the gradual evolution and the current behavior of its huge and varied population of living things. We have been tampering with this powerful force, unaware, like the Sorcerer's' Apprentice, of the potentially disastrous consequences of our actions.
正如宇宙的建立，這種預示性的全球事件影響深遠。它們改變了地球與它的恒星太陽之間的關系。太陽通過兩種力量對地球產生強烈影響：重力和太陽輻射。重力是一種使地球軌道繞太陽運轉的穩定力量。太陽輻射——大部分為可見光和紫外線—是沐浴著地球表層的取之不盡、用之不竭的能量，它會隨日夜和季節的變化而改變。太陽能為生命進程提供必需的能量：它創造了地球上的氣候并支配著龐大而多樣的生物群的逐漸進化和當前的行為。我們一直在濫用這股強大的力量，就像傳說中的“魔法師的學徒”一樣，并沒有意識到我們的這種行為很可能會導致災難性的后果。
