1.People live in two worlds. Like all living things, we inhabit this 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 in 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 exempt8 from our responsibility.
人类生活在两个世界中。和所有的生物一样，我们生存在这个经过50多亿年物理、化学、生物变化所形成的地球上，即自然世界。另外一个世界则源于人类的创造，如家庭、汽车、农场、工厂、实验室、食物、服装、书籍、绘画、音乐、诗歌等。我们为人类世界所发生的一切承担责任，却对自然世界的变化无能为力。风暴、干旱、洪水等都是上帝的“手笔”，人类无法控制，也无须负责。
2.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，从全球的角度看，这个界限已被打破。对地球起保护作用的臭氧层出现空洞，全球变暖威胁人类，甚至干旱、洪水、热电波等都可能是人类的无心之过。
3.Like the Creation, the portending global events are cosmic: they change the relationship between the planet 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 a 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，这种预示性的全球事件是影响深远的。它们改变了地球与它的恒星太阳之间的关系。太阳通过两种力量对地球发挥重要作用：重力和太阳辐射。重力是一种使地球轨
道绕太阳转的稳定力量。太阳辐射——大部分为可见光和紫外线——是沐浴着地球表层的取之不尽、用之不竭的能量，它会随时间和季节的变化而波动。太阳能为生命进程提供必需的能量：它创造了地球上的气候并掌管着庞大而多样的生物的逐渐进化和当前的行为。我们一直在滥用这股强大的力量，就像传说中的魔术师的徒弟一样，并没有意识到我们的这种行为很可能会导致灾难性的后果。
4.We have become accustomed to the now mundane image of the Earth as seen from the first expedition to the moon — a beautiful blue sphere decorated by swirls of fleecy clouds. It is a spectacularly natural object; at that distance, no overt signs of human activity are visible. But this image, now repeatedly thrust before us in photographs, posters, and advertisements, is misleading. Even if the global warming catastrophe never materializes, and the ozone hole remains an esoteric, polar phenomenon, already human activity has profoundly altered global conditions in ways that may not register on the camera. Everywhere in the world, there is now radioactivity that was not there before, the dangerous residue of nuclear explosions and the nuclear power industry; noxious fumes of smog blanket every major city; carcinogenic synthetic pesticides have been detected in mo
ther's milk all over the world; great forests have been cut down, destroying ecological niches and their resident species.
自从人类第一次登月起，我们就一直习惯于如今这平常无奇的地球景象——一个被装点着旋涡状白云的蓝星球。这真是个壮观的自然天体。隔着那么远的距离，人类活动的明显痕迹无法被察觉。但这种曾无数次展现在照片、海报和广告上的景象都是误导。即使全球变暖这种灾害永不发生，即使臭氧层空洞仍然只是一种深奥的极地现象，人类活动已极大地改变了地球条件，这些也许是用照相机拍不出来的。世界的每个角落都出现了由核爆炸和核能工业的危险剩余物质所产生的辐射现象，那是从前不存在的；烟雾的有害烈焰笼罩在世界大都市的上空；各地都有报道发现母乳中有致癌的合成杀虫剂的成分；大片大片的森林被砍伐，摧毁了生态小环境，也毁灭了生存在其中的物种。
5.Clearly, we need to understand the interaction between our two worlds: the natural ecosphere, the thin global skin of air, water, and soil and the plants and animals that live in it, and the man-made technosphere—powerful enough to deserve so grandiose a term. The technosphere has become sufficiently large and intense to alter the natural processes t
hat govern the ecosphere. And in turn, the altered ecosphere threatens to flood our great cities, dry up our bountiful farms, contaminate our food and water, and poison our bodies —catastrophically diminishing our ability to provide for basic human needs. The human attack on the ecosphere has instigated an ecological counterattack. The two worlds are at war.
显而易见，我们需要认识这两个世界间的相互作用：一个是稀薄的地表空气、水、土壤和植物、动物们赖以存在的生态圈；另一个是人造技术圈——它庞大的力量完全配得上这一称号。如此庞大和强烈的技术圈已经改变了控制自然圈的自然进程。接着，被改变了的生态圈也已淹没我们的城市，耗尽丰厚的农场资源，污染食物和水源，并毒害我们的身体——使我们削弱了供应人类基本需求的能力。人类对生态圈侵害已遭到生态圈的反击。两大世界正处于交战状态。
6.The two spheres in which we live are governed by very different laws. One of the basic laws of the ecosphere can be summed up as "Everything is connected to everything else." This expresses the fact that the ecosphere is an elaborate network, in which each compon
ent part is linked to many others. Thus, in an aquatic ecosystem a fish is not only a fish, the parent of other fish. It is also the producer of organic waste that nourishes microorganisms and ultimately aquatic plants; the consumer of oxygen produced photosynthetically by the plants; the habitat of parasites; the fish hawk's prey. The fish is not only, existentially, a fish, but also an element of this network, which defines its functions. Indeed, in the evolutionary sense, a good part of the network—the microorganisms and plants, for example — preceded the fish, which could establish itself only because it fitted properly into the preexisting system.
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