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When I was a young man, a young biologist in Africa, I was involved in setting aside marvelous areas as future national parks.
我年轻的时候，是非洲的一个年轻生物学家，我参与了一个项目，为国家公园规划未来的野生区域。
Now no sooner — this was in the 1950s — and no sooner did we remove the hunting,
不久后——这是1950年——我们刚取消打猎，
drum-beating people to protect the animals, than the land began to deteriorate, as you see in this park that we formed.
鼓动人们保护动物，接着土地开始恶化，这是我们建立的公园。
Now, no livestock were involved, but suspecting that we had too many elephants now,
这里并没有牲畜（破坏植被），于是我们怀疑是大象的数量太多了，
I did the research and I proved we had too many,
我做过调查，并得出了大象数量过多的结论，
and I recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain.
我建议应该减少它们的数量，把数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.
对我来说，我不得不承认这个可怕的结论，而坦率地说，这是个政治炸弹。
So our government formed a team of experts to evaluate my research.
所以政府组了一个专家团来评估我的调查结果。
They did. They agreed with me, and over the following years, we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage.
他们评估之后，也同意我的观点，在接下来的那些年，我们射杀了4万头大象来停止土地退化。
And it got worse, not better.
情形变得更坏了，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.
我很喜欢大象的，这是我人生中最悲哀的、最大的错误，我会带进坟墓。
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。它使我下定决心奉献我的一生去寻找解决方案。
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.
我来到美国，我大吃一惊，发现美国国家公园竟然是这个样子，荒漠化的程度跟非洲一样糟糕。
And there'd been no livestock on this land for over 70 years.
在这片土地上已经70多年没有牲畜的。
And I found that American scientists had no explanation for this except that it is arid and natural.
我发现美国科学家对此的解释没有什么特别，认为无非是干旱和自然条件导致。
So I then began looking at all the research plots I could over the whole of the Western United States
于是我开始收集和分析，我能找到的整个美国西部所有的野外，
where cattle had been removed to prove that it would stop desertification,
研究站的数据，那些地方的牛群都被移走了，来证明这样会停止荒漠化，
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.
可是我发现的却相反，看这个研究站，在1961年这片草地是绿的，到2002年变成这种状况。
And the authors of the position paper on climate change from which I obtained these pictures attribute this change to "unknown processes."
这些图片来自于研究气候变化的研究人员的论文，他们在观点论文中这种变化归因为“未知进程”。
