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Regarded only as a failure in the plant's function, the accident at Chernobyl amounts to a serious but local fire that destroyed the plant. But the resultant release of radioactivity threatens many thousands of people all over Europe with cancer.
若僅僅被視為工廠功能的失敗，切爾諾貝利事故充其量也就相當于當地發生的一次破壞了工廠的嚴重大火。但隨之釋放出來的輻射，卻使整個歐洲數以千計的人面臨患上癌癥的威脅。
A free lunch is really a debt. In the technosphere, a debt is an acknowledged but unmet cost-the mortgage on a factory building for example. Such a debt is tolerable because the technosphere is a system of production which-if—it functions properly-generate—goods that represent wealth potentially capable of repaying the debt. In the technosphere, debts are repald from within and, at least in theory, are always capable of being paid off, or, in some cases, canceled. In contrast, when the debts represented by environmental pollution are created by the technosphere and transferred to the ecosphere, they are never canceled; damage is unavoidable. The debts represented by the radioactivity disseminated from the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, and by the toxic chemicals that enveloped Bhopal, have not been canceled. These debts were merely transferred to the victims, and are paid as they sicken and die.
免費的午餐實際上是一種債務。在技術圈中，債務是指已承認但尚未歸還的欠款，比如說抵在工廠建筑上的押金。這種欠款可以忍受，因為術圈是個生產系統，如果正常工作，生產的產品便代表著財富，日后定能還清欠款。在技術領域，債務從內部被償還，至少在理論上總能還清或者有時會被消除。相反，當債務以技術圈制造的環境污染的形式出現，然后又轉嫁到生態圈時，這種債務將永遠無法消除。造成破壞是不可避免的。切爾諾貝利核事故泄漏的放射性物質和彌漫在博帕爾的有毒化學物都是無法消除的債務。它們只是被轉嫁給其受害者，并以其受害者病亡的形式得以償還。
Since they inhabit both worlds, people are caught in the clash between the ecosphere and the technosphere. What we call the "environmental crisis"-the array of critical unsolved problems ranging from local toxic dumps to the disruption of global climate-is a product of the drastic mismatch between the cyclical, conservative, and self-cons-processes of the ecosphere and the linear, innovative, but ecologically disharmonious processes of the technosphere.
既然生活在兩個世界中，人們就陷于生態圈和技術困的激烈沖突中。我們所說的環境危機——一系列從地方性的傾倒毒物到全球性氣候受到破壞，這些關鍵而又未得到解決的問題——是一種激烈沖突的產物。這種沖突就存在于循環、保守而又和諧的生態圈進程與線性的、創新的卻破壞生態和諧的技術圈進程之間。
