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.
听到这里感觉还不错，甚至不由得赞叹--如果你倾向于为人类的努力和创造性折服的话。但在我们满足自己需求后发生的事情才是症结所在，甚至可以说是一切环境问题之母：德威特指向图表右端的灰蒙蒙的色块--废弃物。
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.
他解说道，2015年，我们从地球搜刮的物资约有三分之二从指缝间流走。超过670亿吨来之不易的物资遗失了，大部分四散无踪，不可挽回。塑料垃圾漂入江河海洋，农田肥料渗出的氮和磷也紧随其后。在亚马逊被毁林造田用于耕种的同时，食品总量的三分之一白白腐烂。任举一个环境问题，其成因多半与废物有关。这也包括气候变化--由我们燃烧化石燃料、将二氧化碳废气排向空中造成。
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.
也许听起来不可思议，但在那个早晨，随着德威特逐步解说数据，我感觉好像醍醐灌顶。那张靠不住的图表及其改天换地的构想却体现出一种前后贯通、振奋人心的明朗。的确，它说我们面对的危机千头万绪，势不可挡。的确，其威胁是全球规模的。但归根到底，要在这个地球上存续，我们就必须做到一件事：停止浪费那么多资源。德威特指向一个在图表下部从右边巡回左边的细箭头，它代表的是我们通过回收、堆肥等方式得以存留的物质。只有93亿吨，占总量的9%。
评论
打印
