高级英语第一册第三课背景资料-al gore
高级英语第一册Unit3 Ships in the Desertword版本
coast but now water had turned into sand therefore they were surrounded by sand and could not move. • 2) dune: a rounded hill or ridge of sand heaped up by the action • 3) that stretched... to the horizon: that extended as far as the eye could see; that extended to the far off place where the sky meets the earth
• 2) lap: to strike geቤተ መጻሕፍቲ ባይዱtly with a light, splashing sound
• 3) in all direction: everywhere
5. The other ships … to the
horizon
• l) How could the other ships be at rest in the sand? • The other ships were also anchored in the original
高级英语第一册课文翻译
高级英语第一册课文翻译第一课中东的集市中东的集市仿佛把你带回到了几百年、甚至几千年前的时代。
此时此刻显现在我脑海中的这个中东集市，其入口处是一座古老的砖石结构的哥特式拱门。
你首先要穿过一个赤日耀眼、灼热逼人的大型露天广场，然后走进一个凉爽、幽暗的洞穴。
这市场一直向前延伸，一眼望不到尽头，消失在远处的阴影里。
赶集的人们络绎不绝地进出市场，一些挂着铃铛的小毛驴穿行于这熙熙攘攘的人群中，边走边发出和谐悦耳的叮当叮当的响声。
市场的路面约有十二英尺宽，但每隔几码远就会因为设在路边的小货摊的挤占而变窄；那儿出售的货物各种各样，应有尽有。
你一走进市场，就可以听到摊贩们的叫卖声，赶毛驴的小伙计和脚夫们大着嗓门叫人让道的吆喝声，还有那些想买东西的人们与摊主讨价还价的争吵声。
各种各样的噪声此伏彼起，不绝于耳，简直叫人头晕。
随后，当往市场深处走去时，人口处的喧闹声渐渐消失，眼前便是清静的布市了。
这里的泥土地面，被无数双脚板踩踏得硬邦邦的，人走在上面几乎听不到脚步声了，而拱形的泥砖屋顶和墙壁也难得产生什么回音效果。
布店的店主们一个个都是轻声轻气、慢条斯理的样子；买布的顾客们在这种沉闷压抑的气氛感染下，自然而然地也学着店主们的榜样，变得低声细语起来。
中东集市的特点之一是经销同类商品的店家，为避免相互间的竞争，不是分散在集市各处，而是都集中在一块儿，这样既便于让买主知道上哪儿找他们，同时他们自己也可以紧密地联合起来，结成同盟，以便保护自己不受欺侮和刁难。
例如，在布市上，所有那 1些卖衣料、窗帘布、椅套布等的商贩都把货摊一个接一个地排设在马路两边，每一个店铺门面前都摆有一张陈列商品的搁板桌和一些存放货物的货架。
讨价还价是人们习以为常的事。
头戴面纱的妇女们迈着悠闲的步子从一个店铺逛到另一个店铺，一边挑选一边问价；在她们缩小选择范围并开始正儿八经杀价之前，往往总要先同店主谈论几句，探探价底。
对于顾客来说，至关重要的一点是，不到最后一刻是不能让店主猜到她心里究竟中意哪样东西、想买哪样东西的。
高级英语第三课背景简介
introduction of the text
1.type of literature: a piece of exposition
2.the purpose of a piece of exposition:
to inform or explain 3.ways of developing the thesis of a piece of exposition: illustration,definition,comparison,contrast,analogy, identification,analysis,ect
The shrinking of the Aral Sea has been called "one of the planet's worst environmental disasters". The region's once-prosperous fishing industry has been essentially destroyed, bringing unemployment and economic hardship. The Aral Sea region is also heavily polluted, with consequent serious public health problems. The departure of the sea has reportedly also caused local climate change, with summers becoming hotter and drier, and winters colder and longer.
Formerly one of the four largest lakes in the world with an area of 68,000 km2 (26,300 sq mi), the Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. By 2007, it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into four lakes – the North Aral Sea, the eastern and western basins of the once far larger South Aral Sea, and one smaller lake between the North and South Aral Seas. By 2 0 0 9 , t h e s o u t h e a ste r n lak e ha d d is a p pe a r e d a n d t he southwestern lake had retreated to a thin strip at the extreme west of the former southern sea; in subsequent years, occasional water flows have led to the southeastern lake sometimes being replenished to a small degree. Satellite images taken by NASA in August 2014 have revealed that for the first time in modern history the eastern basin of the Aral Sea had completely dried up.The eastern basin is now called the Aralkum desert.
(完整word版)高级英语第三课ShipsintheDesert.docx
Lesson 3 Ships in the DesertAL Gore1. I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing afifty -ton catch on a good day. But it wasn’ t a good day. We were anchored in what used to be th most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow, the prospects ofa good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping againstthe side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand——as far as I could see in all direct The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all theway to the horizon. Ten years ago the Aral was the fourth -largest inland sea in the world,comparable to the largest of North America ’Greats Lakes. Now it is disappearing because thewater that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton inthe desert. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishingfleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people werestill canning fish——brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.2. My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to travel aroundthe world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of theearth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in thesky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about thetunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier onwhich we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago.where the U.S Congress passed the Clean Air Act, ”he said. At the bottom of the world, twocontinents away from Washington, D.C., even a small reduction in one country's emissions hadchanged the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.3. But the most significant change thus far in the earth’ s atmosphere is the one that be the industrial revolution early in the last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industrymeant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it —— bringing rising levels of carbondioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth.Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski planelands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together,scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course of that inexorable change.During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day’ s measurements, end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is——there at the earth —— to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.4. Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in asmall tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After ahearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to arendezvous point where the ice was thinner——only three and a half feet thick——and submarine hovered in the water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers,and resub merged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately thethickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a result of global warming. I hadjust negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U.S. Navy to secure the release ofpreviously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what ishappening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours afterwe met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in aneerily beautiful snowscape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or“ pressure ridges” of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CO2 , levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature willrise with them——indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidlyin the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice here will thin; andsince the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world’ s weather system, the consequ thinning cap could be disastrous.5.Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after I returnedfrom the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distributionin the Arctic, and a second team reported a still controversial claim (which a variety of data now suggest) that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 percent in just the last decade.Moreover, scientists established several years ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle,the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the temperatureof the earth is steadily rising.*6. As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction can befound exactly halfway between the North and South poles —— precisely athe equator in Brazil ——where billowing clouds of smoke regularly blacken the sky above the immense but nowthreatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is being burned to create fastpasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when I went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlierand earlier in the dry season now, with more than one Tennessee ’worths of rain forest beingslashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America*7. But one doesn't have to travel around the world to witness humankind’ s assault on Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere.On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signalsthe loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunset——a watching from a place where pollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether——youcan sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This “ noctilucentcloud ”occasionallyappears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness; shimmering above us with atranslucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds havebegun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. (Alsocalled natural gas, methane is released from landfills, from coal mines and rice paddies, frombillions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass andfrom a variety of other human activities. ) Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen inthe past, all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where itcondenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun’ s rays still strike lon sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.8. What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotionswe feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feel awe for our own power: just as men tear tusks fromelephants ’ headsuchin quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matterfrom its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness. Inthe process, we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, because methane has beenone of the fastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vaporin total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even consideringglisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights ofcivilization that we can’seet these clouds for what they are —— aphysical manifestation of theviolent collision between human civilization and the earth?*9. Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all witnessedsurprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment——the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with whichthe sun burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growingmountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven’wet launched amassive effort to save our environment? To come at the question another way: Why do someimages startle us into immediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? Andwhy do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kin. of paralysis,focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painfuldistraction?10.Still, there are so many distressing images of environmental destruction that sometimes itseems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them. Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.11.A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of threedifferent categories, according to the theater in which it takes place. There are“ l “ regional” battles, and“ strategic” conflicts. This third category is reserved for struggles thatthreaten a nation’ s survival and must be under stood in a global context.12.Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. For example, most instanceslike acid rain, the contamination of underground aquifers, and large oil spills are fundamentally regional. In both of these categories, there may be so many similar instances of particular local and regional problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the patter n appears to be global,but the problems themselves are still not truly strategic because the operation of the global environment is not affected and the survival of civilization is not at stake.13.However, a new class of environmental problems does affect the global ecological system,and these threats are fundamentally strategic. The 600 percent increase in the amount of chlorinein the atmosphere during the last forty years has taken place not just in those countries producingthe chlorofluorocarbons responsible but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the Pacific Ocean —— all the way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky. The increased levels of chlorine disrupt the global process by which the earth regulates the amountof ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is allowed through the atmosphere to the surface; and itwe let chlorine levels continue to increase, the radiation levels will also increasethat all animal and plant life will face a new threat to their survival.14.Global warming is also a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and otherheat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 per cent since World War II, posing aworldwide threat to the earth’ s ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determinesthe pattern of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures,ocean currents, and sea level. These in turn determine the distribution of vegetative and animal life on land and sea and have a great effect onthe location and pattern of human societies.15.In other words, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has beentransformed because our civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global environment,not just a particular area. All of us know that human civilization has usually had a large impact onthe environment; to mention just one example, there is evidence that even in prehistoric times, vastareas were sometimes intentionally burned by people in their search for food. And in our own timewe have reshaped a large part of the earth’ s surface with concrete in our cities and carefully ten rice paddies, pastures, wheat fields, and other croplands in the countryside. But these changes,while sometimes appearing to be pervasive, have, until recently, been relatively trivial factors inthe global ecological sys-tem. Indeed, until our lifetime, it was always safe to assume that nothingwe did or could do would have any lasting effect on the global environment. But it is precisely that assumption which must now be discarded so that we can think strategically about our newrelationship to the environment.16. Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global environment. Yet weresist this truth and find it hard to imagine that our effect on the earth must now be measured bythe same yardstick used to calculate the strength of the moon’ s pull on the oceans or the f the wind against the mountains. And it we are now capable of changing something so basic as the relationship between the earth and the sun, surely we must acknowledge a new responsibility touse that power wisely and with appropriate restraint. So far, however, We seem oblivious of thefragility of the earth’ s natural systems.*17.This century has witnessed dramatic changes in two key factors that define the physicalreality of our relationship to the earth: a sudden and startling surge in human population, with theaddition of one China ’ s worth of people every ten years, and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution, which has allowed an almost unimaginable magnification of ourpower to affect the world around us by burning, cutting, digging, moving,and transforming the18.The surge in population is both a cause of the changed relationship and one of the clearest illustrations of how startling the change has been, especially when viewed in a historical context.From the emergence of modern humans 200,000 years ago until Julius Caesar’ s time, fewe 250 million people walked on the face of the earth. When Christopher Columbus set sail for theNew World 1,500 years later, there were approximately 500 million people on earth. By the timeThomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the number had doubled again,to 1 billion. By midway through this century, at the end of World War II, the number had risen tojust above 2 billion people.19. In other words, from the beginning of humanity’ s appearance on earth to 1945, it took m than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of 2 billion people. Now, in the courseof one human lifetime——mine——theworld population will increase from 2 to more than 9billion, and it is already more than halfway there.20.Like the population explosion, the scientific and technological revolution began to pick upspeed slowly during the eighteenth century. And this ongoing revolution has also suddenly accelerated exponentially. For example, it is now an axiom in many fields of science that more newand important discoveries have taken place in the last ten years that. in the entire previous historyof science. While no single discovery has had the kind of effect on our relationship to the earth thatunclear weapons have had on our relationship to warfare, it is nevertheless true that taken together,they have completely transformed our cumulative ability to exploit the earth for sustenancemaking the consequences of unrestrained exploitation every bit as unthinkable as the consequencesof unrestrained nuclear war.21.Now that our relationship to the earth has changed so utterly, we have to see that changeand understand its implications. Our challenge is to recognize that the startling images ofenvironmental destruction now occurring all over the world have much more in common than their ability to shock and awaken us. They are symptoms of an underlying problem broader in scope and more serious than any we have ever faced. Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation——theyall have a common cause: the new relationship between human civilization and the earth’ s natural balance.22.There are actually two aspects to this challenge. The first is to realize that our power to harm the earth can indeed have global and even permanent effects. The second is to realize that the only way to understand our new role as a co-architect of nature is to see ourselves as part of a complex system that does not operate according to the same simple rules of cause and effect we are used to. The problem is not our effect on the environment so much as our relationship with the environment. As a result, any solution to the problem will require a careful assessmentof thatrelationship as well as the complex interrelationship among factors within civilization and between them and the major natural components of the earth’ s ecological system.23.There is only one precedent for this kind of challenge to our thinking, and again it is military. The invention of nuclear weapons and the subsequent development by the United States and the Soviet Union of many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons forced a slow and painfulrecognition that the new power thus acquired forever changed not only the relationship betweenthe two superpowers but also the relationship of humankind to the institution at war-fare itself. The consequences of all-out war between nations armed with nuclear weapons suddenly included the possibility of the destruction of both nations —— completelyand simultaneously. That sobering realization led to a careful reassessment of every aspect of our mutual relationship to the prospectof such a war. As early as 1946 one strategist concluded that strategic bombing with missileswell tear away the veil of illusion that has so long obscured the reality of the change inwarfare —— from a fight to a process of destruction.”24.Nevertheless, during the earlier stages of the nuclear arms race, each of the superpower s assumed that its actions would have a simple and direct effect on the thinking of the other. For decades, each new advance in weaponry was deployed by one side for the purpose of inspiring fear in the other. But each such deployment led to an effort by the other to leapfrog the first one with a more advanced deployment of its own. Slowly, it has become apparent that the problem of the nuclear arms race is not primarily caused by technology. It is complicated by technology, true; but it arises out of the relationship between the superpowers and is based on an obsolete understanding of what war is all about.25.The eventual solution to the arms race will be found, not in a new deployment by one sideor the other of some ultimate weapon or in a decision by either side to disarm unilaterally , but ratter in new understandings and in a mutual transformation of the relationship itself. This transformation will involve changes in the technology of weaponry and the denial of nuclear technology to rogue states. But the key changes will be in the way we think about the institution of warfare and about the relationship between states.26. The strategic nature of the threat now posed by human civilization to the global environment and the strategic nature of the threat to human civilization now posed by changes in the global environment present us with a similar set of challenges and false hopes. Some argue that a new ultimate technology, whether nuclear power or genetic engineering, will solve the problem. Others hold that only a drastic reduction of our reliance on technology can improve the conditionsof life——a simplistic notion at best. But the real solution will be found in reinventing and finally healing the relationship between civilization and the earth. This can only be accomplished by undertaking a careful reassessmentof all the factors that led to the relatively recent dramaticchange in the relationship. The transformation of the way we relate to the earth will of course involve new technologies, but the key changes will involve new ways of thinking about the relationship itself.( from Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, 1992 )11。
高级英语第一册Unit 3 文章结构+课文讲解+课文翻译+课后练习+答案
Unit 3 Ships in the DesertShips in the DesertShips in the DesertAL Gore--------------------------------------------------------------------------------I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn' t a good day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow , the prospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand – as far as I could see in all directions. The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon . Ten year s ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North America's Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in anill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton In the user t. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fish – brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. "Here's where the U. S Congress passed the Clean Air Act, ” he said. At the bottom of the world, two continents away from Washington, D. C., even a small reduction in one country's emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.But the most significant change thus far in the earth' s atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial r evolution early in the last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it – bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air sever al times ever y day to chart the course of that inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day'smeasurements, pushing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is – there at the end of the earth – to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was thinner – only three and a half feet thick – and a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resubmerged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a re-suit of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U. S. Navy to secure the re-lease of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in an eerily beautiful snowcape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or "pressure ridges " of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CD, levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with them – indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice her e will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world's weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastrous.Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distribution in the Arctic, and a second team reported a still controversialclaim (which a variety of data now suggest) that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 per cent in just the last decade. Moreover, scientists established several years ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the temperature e of the earth is steadily rising.As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction can be found exactly halfway between the North and South poles – precisely at the equator in Brazil – where billowing clouds of smoke regularly black-en the sky above the immense but now threatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is being burned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when I went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dry season now, with more than one Tennessee's worth of rain forest being slashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America – which means we are silencing thousands of songs we have never even heard.But one doesn't have to travel around the world to wit-ness humankind's assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of our global environment arenow commonly seen almost anywhere. On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunset -- and it you are watching from a place where pollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether -- you can sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This "noctilucent cloud" occasionally appears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening dark-ness; shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. (Also called natural gas, methane is released from landfills , from coal mines and rice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other human activities. ) Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past., all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun's rays still strike long after sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotions we feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feel awe for our own power: just as men "ear tusks from elephants’ heads in such quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness. In the process, we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, be-cause methane has been one of the fastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vapor in total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even considering that threat, shouldn't it startle us that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky which glisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can't see these clouds for what they are – a physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment --whether it's the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the -un burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven't we launched a massive effort to save our environment? To come at the question another way' Why do some images startle us into immediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? And why do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kin. of paralysis, focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painful distraction?Still, there are so many distressing images of environ-mental destruction that sometimes it seems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them. Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respondappropriately.A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of three different categories, according to the theater in which it takes place. There are "local" skirmishes, "regional" battles, and "strategic" conflicts. This third category is reserved for struggles that can threaten a nation's survival and must be under stood in a global context. Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. For example, most instances of water pollution, air pollution, and illegal waste dumping are essentially local in nature. Problems like acid rain, the contamination ofunder-ground aquifers, and large oil spills are fundamentally regional. In both of these categories, there may be so many similar instances of particular local and regional problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the patter n appears to be global, but the problems themselves are still not truly strategic because the operation of- the global environment is not affected and the survival of civilization is not at stake.However, a new class of environmental problems does affect the global ecological system, and these threats are fundamentally strategic. The 600 percent increase in the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere during the last forty years has taken place not just in those countries producing the chlorofluorocarbons responsible but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the Pacific Ocean – all the way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky. The increased levels of chlorine disrupt the global process by which the earth regulates the amount of ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is allowed through the atmosphere to the surface; and it we let chlorine levels continue to increase, the radiation levels will al-so increase – to the point that all animal and plant life will face a new threat to their survival.Global warming is also a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and other heat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 per cent since World War II, posing a worldwide threat to the earth's ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determines the pattern of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures, ocean currents, and sea level. These in turn determine the distribution of vegetative and animal life on land and sea and have a great effect on the location and pattern of human societies.In other words, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been transformed because our civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global environment, not just a particular area. All of us know that human civilization has usually had a large impact on the environment; to mention just one example, there is evidence that even in prehistoric times, vast areas were sometimes intentionally burned by people in their search for food. And in our own time we have reshaped a large part of the earth's surface with concrete in our cities and carefully tended rice paddies, pastures, wheat fields, and other croplands in the countryside. But these changes, while sometimes appearing to be pervasive , have, until recently, been relatively trivial factors in the global ecological sys-tem. Indeed, until our lifetime, it was always safe to assume that nothing we did or could do would haveany lasting effect on the global environment. But it is precisely that assumption which must now be discarded so that we can think strategically about our new relationship to the environment.Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global environment. Yet we resist this truth and find it hard to imagine that our effect on the earth must now be measured by the same yardstick used to calculate the strength of the moon's pull on the oceans or the force of the wind against the mountains. And it we are now capable of changing something so basic as the relationship between the earth and the sun, surely we must acknowledge a new responsibility to use that power wisely and with appropriate restraint. So far, however, We seem oblivious of the fragility of the earth's natural systems.This century has witnessed dramatic changes in two key factors that define the physical reality of our relation-ship to the earth: a sudden and startling surge in human population, with the addition of one China's worth of people every ten years, and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution, which has allowed an almost unimaginable magnification of our power to affect the world around us by burning, cutting, digging, moving, and trans-forming the physical matter that makes up the earth. The surge in population is both a cause of the changed relationship and one of the clearest illustrations of how startling the change has been, especially when viewed in a historical context. From the emergence of modern humans 200 000 years ago until Julius Caesar's time, fewer than 250 million people walked on the face of the earth. When Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World 1500 years later, there were approximately 500 million people on earth. By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the number had doubled again, to 1 billion. By midway through this century, at the end of World War II, the number had risen to just above 2 billion people. In other words, from the beginning of humanity's appearance on earth to 1945, it took more than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of 2 billion people. Now, in the course of one human lifetime -- mine -- the world population will increase from 2 to more than 9 million, and it is already more than halfway there.Like the population explosion, the scientific and technological revolution began to pick up speed slowly during the eighteenth century. And this ongoing revolution has also suddenly accelerated exponentially. For example, it is now an axiom in many fields of science that more new and important discoveries have taken place in the last ten years that. in the entire previous history of science. While no single discover y has had the kind of effect on our relationship to the earth that unclear weapons have had on our relationship to warfare, it is nevertheless true that taken together, they have completely transformed our cumulative ability to exploit the earth for sustenance -- making the consequences, of unrestrained exploitation every bit as unthinkable as the consequences of unrestrained nuclear war.Now that our relationship to the earth has changed so utterly, we have to see that change and understand its implications. Our challenge is to recognize that the startling images of environmental destruction now occurring all over the world have much more in common than their ability to shock and awaken us. They aresymptoms of an underlying problem broader in scope and more serious than any we have ever faced. Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation -- they all have a common cause: the new relationship between human civilization and the earth's natural balance. There are actually two aspects to this challenge. The first is to realize that our power to harm the earth can in-deed have global and even permanent effects. The second is to realize that the only way to understand our new role as a co-architect of nature is to see ourselves as part of a complex system that does not operate according to the same simple rules of cause and effect we are used to. The problem is not our effect on the environment so much as our relationship with the environment. As a result, any solution to the problem will require a careful assessment of that relationship as well as the complex interrelationship among factors within civilization and between them and the major natural components of the earth's ecological system.There is only one precedent for this kind of challenge to our thinking, and again it is military. The invention of nuclear weapons and the subsequent development by the Unit-ed States and the Soviet Union of many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons forced a slow and painful recognition that the new power thus acquired forever changed not only the relationship between the two superpowers but also the relationship of humankind to the institution at war-fare itself. The consequences of all-out war between nations armed with nuclear weapons suddenly included the possibility of the destruction of both nations – completely and simultaneously. That sobering realization led to a careful reassessment of every aspect of our mutual relationship to the prospect of such a war. As early as 1946 one strategist concluded that strategic bombing with missiles "may well tear away the veil of illusion that has so long obscured the reality of the change in warfare – from a fight to a process of destruction.”Nevertheless, during the earlier stages of the nuclear arms race, each of the superpower s assumed that its actions would have a simple and direct effect on the thinking of the other. For decades, each new advance in weaponry was deployed by one side for the purpose of inspiring fear in the other. But each such deployment led to an effort by the other to leapfrog the first one with a more advanced deployment of its own. Slowly, it has become apparent that the problem of the nuclear arms r ace is not primarily caused by technology. It is complicated by technology, true; but it arises out of the relationship between the superpowers and is based on an obsolete understanding of what war is all about.The eventual solution to the arms race will be found, not in a new deployment by one side or the other of some ultimate weapon or in a decision by either side to disarm unilaterally , but ratter in new understandings and in a mutual transformation of the relationship itself. This transformation will involve changes in the technology of weaponry and the denial of nuclear technology to rogue states. But the key changes will be in the way we think about the institution of war far e and about the relationship between states.The strategic nature of the threat now posed by human civilization to the global environment and the strategic nature of the threat to human civilization now posedby changes in the global environment present us with a similar set of challenges and false hopes. Some argue that a new ultimate technology, whether nuclear power or genetic engineering, will solve the problem. Others hold that only a drastic reduction of our reliance on technology can improve the conditions of life -- a simplistic notion at best. But the real solution will be found in reinventing and finally healing the relationship between civilization and the earth. This can only be accomplished by undertaking a careful reassessment of all the factors that led to the relatively recent dramatic change in the relationship. The transformation of the way we relate to the earth will of course involve new technologies, but the key changes will involve new ways of thinking about the relationship itself.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------NOTESI) Al Gore: born in 1948 in Washington D. C., U. S. Senator (1984-1992) from the State of Tennessee,and U. S. Vice-President ( l 992-) under President Bill Clinton. He is the author of the book Earth in the Balance from which this piece is taken. 2) Aral Sea: inland sea and the world’s fourth largest lake, c. 26 000 sqmiles, SW Kazakhstan and NW Uzbekhstan, E of the Caspian Sea3) Great Lakes: group of five freshwater lakes, Central North America, between the United States and Canada, largest body of fresh water in the world. From west to east, they are Lake Superior,Lake Michigan,Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario.4) Trans-Antarctic Mountains: mountain chain stretching across Antarctica from Victoria I and to Coats I and; separating the E Antarctic and W Antarctic subcontinents5) Clean Air Act: one of the oldest environmental laws of the U. S., as well as the most far-reaching, the costliest, and the most controversial. It was passed in 1970.6) Washington D. C.: capital of the United States. D. C. (District of Columbia).is added to distinguish it from the State of Washington and 3 other cities in the U. S bearing the sonic name.7) freeze-locking: the metal parts are frozen solid and unable to move freely8)midnight sun: phenomenon in which the sun remains visible in the sky for 24 hours or longer, occurring only in the polar regions9)global warming; The earth is getting warmer. The temperature of the earth's atmosphere and its surface is steadily rising.10) Submarine sonar tracks: the term sonar is an acronym for sound navigation ranging. It is used for communication between submerged submarines or between a submarine and a surface vessel, for locating mines and underwater hazards to navigation, and also as a fathometer, or depth finder.11) greenhouse (effect): process whereby heat is trapped at the surface of the earth by the atmosphere. An increase of man-made pollutants in the atmosphere will lead to a long-term warming of the earth's climate.12) Julius Caesar: (102? B. C -- 44 B. C:. ), Roman statesman and general13) Christopher Columbus: ( 1451-1506), discoverer of America, born Genoa, Italy14) Thomas Jefferson: (17-13-1826 ), 3d President of the UnitedStates(1801-1809), author of the Declaration of Independence.15) Declaration of Independence: full and formal declaration adopted July 4,1776, by representatives of the thirteen colonies in North America announcing the separation of those colonies from Great Britain and making them into the United States16)Ozone depletion: A layer of ozone in the stratosphere prevents most ultraviolet and other high-energy radiation, which is harmful to life, from penetrating to the earth's surface.Some.environmental, scientists fear that certain man-made pollutants, e.g. nitric oxide, CFCs(Chlorofluorocarbons), etc., may interfere with the delicate balance of reactions that maintains the ozone’ s concentration, possibly leading to a drastic depletion of stratospheric ozone. This is now happening in the stratosphere above the polarShips in the Desert 课文讲解/Detailed StudyShips in the Desert--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Detailed Study1. Ships in the Desert [image-7]: Ships anchored in the desert. This is aneye-catching title and it gives an image that people hardly see. When readers read the title, they can’t help wondering why and how.Paragraph 1. typical example of environmental destruction[image-7]2. capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day: having the ability of cleaning and preparing for marketing or canning fifty-tons of fish on a productive day.catch: the amount of something caught; in the sentence it refers to the amount of fish caught e.g. The boat brought back a big catch of fish.3. but as I looked out over the bow, the prospects of a good catch looked bleak:a good catch did not look promising / hopeful.This is obviously an understatement because with sand all around there was no chance of catching fish, to say nothing of catching a lot of fish.bow[audio-1] : the front part of a shipant. sterncompare: bow[audio-2]: v. & n. to bend the upper part of the body forward, as away of showing respect, admitting defeat, etc.bow [audio-3]: n. a weapon for shooting arrowa long thin piece of wood with a tight string fastened along it, used for playing musical instruments that have stringsa knot formed by doubling a string or cord into two curved pieces, and used for decoration in the hair, in tying shoes, etcbleak: a) If a situation is bleak, it is bad, and seems unlikely to improve.e.g. His future looked bleak.bleak prospect; the bleakness of the post war yearsb) If a place is bleak, it looks cold, bare, and unattractivee.g. the bleak coastlinec) When the weather is bleak, it is cold, dull, and unpleasante.g. the bleak wintersd) If someone looks or sounds bleak, they seem depressed, hopeless, or unfriendlye.g. his bleak featuresbleakly adv.e.g. He stared bleakly ahead.“What,” he asked bleakly, “are these?”4. waves lapping against the side of the ship: waves touching the side of the ship gently and makes a soft sound lap can also be used as a noun.e.g. Your lap is the flat area formed by your thighs when you are sitting down. Her youngest child was asleep in her lap.He placed the baby on the woman’s lap.In a race, when you say that a competitor has completed a lap when he or she has gone round the course race.5. as far as I could see in all direction: that extended as far as the eye could see;6. that stretched all the way to the horizon: that extended to the far off place where the sky meet the earth7. comparable: something that is comparable to something else is a) as good as/ as big as/ as important as the other thing; b) similar to the other thinge.g. This dinner is comparable to the best French cooking.Our house is not comparable with yours. Ours is just a small hut while yours is a palace.8. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton in the dessert: Now it is becoming smaller and smaller because the water that used to flow into the sea has been turned away to irrigate the land created in the desert to grow cotton. The。
高级英语第一册第三课背景资料-The Gospel According to Al Gore
The Gospel According to Al GoreAs more of the world practice the 1st, 4th., 7th, 8th, and 9th. planks of communism rather than the 10 Commandment system of God, a new religion of environmentalism is spreading across the globe. Since 1970, the establishment globalists have pushed down our throats more collectivism, more people control, more restrictions on free enterprise and private property in America, all in the name of environmentalism, than the Communists were able to achieve in 75 years. The "Reds" are being replaced by the "Greens."Perhaps more influential in raising the popularity of thereligion of environmentalism in recent years was theClinton/Gore administration. President Clinton and hisNew Age spokesman, Al Gore, consistently pushed an agendaof "control" and promoted false "science" using theiroffice and taking advantage of the Leftist "education"establishment to make sure our kids knew nothing else.The teaching of humanism in the schools for severaldecades has created a spiritual vacuum in the hearts of our people and it has opened those hearts to receive the New Age Spiritual answers such as Vice President Gore proposes. We have a pantheistic, pagan type philosophy dominating the thinking of the Vice President of the United States who is a zealous New Ager advocating "a new faith in the future" which will be a return to paganism's worship of the earth as sacred.Environmentalism is becoming the new religion of the world!"Earth in the Balance" by Al GoreVice President Al Gore offers some alarming clues about hisview of God in his book, Earth in the Balance; Ecology andthe Human Spirit.He starts out his book by asserting his pantheisticbeliefs. ....."we feel increasingly distant from our rootsin the earth....civilization itself has been on a journey from its foundations in the world of nature to an evermore contrived, controlled and manufactured world of our initiative and sometimes arrogant design.... At some point during this journey we lost our feeling of connectedness to the rest of nature.... We dare now to wonder: Are we so unique and powerful as to be essentially separate from the earth?"Gore identifies the root problem of Western culture in that "we lost our feeling of connectedness to the rest of nature" and finds answers in pantheism. He attempts to blend Christianity and pantheism where the source of all life, instead of God has become Mother God, (Mother Earth/Mother Nature also frequently referred to as Gaia). He, like the radical eco-feminists who support him, see the earth as the pagan goddess Gaia who "has been seriously 'wounded' by the expansion of human civilization, and now there must come a universal atonement for these many millennia of grief on 'her' part" through an event or process they call 'cleansing.'For Gore and other environmentalists, the Judeo-Christain faith is the source of ecological evil, from oil spills to global warming. He asserts it is ignorant Christians who are afraid to open their minds to teachings outside their own system of belief who have become a dangerous threat to the survival of humanity...blights on the environment. To Al Gore, it seems obvious that a better understanding of a religious heritage preceding our own by so many thousands of years could offer us new insights.Gore seeks wisdom from the world's pagan religions."The richness and diversity of our religious tradition throughout history is a spiritual resource long ignored by people of faith, who are often afraid to open their minds to teachings first offered outside their own system of belief. But the emergence of a civilization in which knowledge moves freely and almost instantaneously through the world has ... spurred a renewed investigation of the wisdom distilled by all faiths. This panreligious perspective may prove especially important where our global civiilzation's responsibility for the earth is concerned." (pp. 258-259)Al Gore embraces the mystical spiritual evolution teaching of Eastern religions, the same ones from which Adolph Hitler followed in building the Third Reich. He seeks his wisdom from the world's pagan religious where its basic premise is that man exists for nature. He endorses feminine substitutes for God. He commends Bahaism, the religion of Maurice Strong, head of the recent United Nations Earth Summit, as well as Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism. He affirms the New Age (spiritual evolution) teaching of Teillard De Chardin, the excommunicated Catholic archaeologist. He points to what de Chardin said, 'The fate of mankind, as well as of religion, depends upon the emergence of a new faith in the future.' Gore writes, "Armed with such a faith, we might find it possible to resanctify the earth, identify it as God's creation, and accept our responsibility to protect and defend it..."Gore likes to refer to Chief Seattle, who said 'Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth, befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know - the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.'We are part of nature and nature is part of us?God is part of us, and God is everywhere, and everything is God?Pure paganism!Who is Chief Seattle anyway?He is totally manufactured folks.According to April 21, 1992 issue of the New York Times, Chief Seattle "Is probably our greatest manufactured prophet in the history of the United States." But he is quoted all the time by these radical environmentalists.According to David Berg who is writing a book on the Chief, "In an embellished version of a single speech given by the 68 year old Chief in 1854, makes him out to be an environmental prophet which he was not." According to that speech he said "The earth is our mother....." and he goes on to say "I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie left by the white man who shot them from a passing train." Mr. Berg points out there were no buffaloes within 500 miles of Seattle's home on Puget Sound. And more interesting is that Chief Seattle's letter is dated some 15 years before the first railroad crossed the plains from Omaha to Sacraments California. And the great buffalo slaughter took place at least a decade after Seattle died.The whole letter is a lie. The words in that letter that Gore was so moved by, were actually written for a 1971 environmental movie completely fictitious in nature. And yet these environmentalists have made Chief Seattle one of the Gurus of their movement.They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served createdthings rather than the Creator--who is forever praised. Amen. [Romans 1:25]Gore calls for a new spiritual relationship between man and earth and points to ancient goddess or nature worship."The spiritual sense of our place in nature predates Native American cultures; increasingly it can be traced to the origins of human civilization. A growing number of anthropologists andarchaeomythologists, such as Marija Gimbutas and Riane Esler argue that the prevailing ideology of belief prehistoric Europe and much of the world was based on the worship of a single earth goddess, who was assumed to be the fount of all life and who radiated harmony among all living things. Much of the evidence for the existence of this primitive religion comes from the many thousands of artifacts uncovered in ceremonial sites. These sites are so widespread that they seem to confirm the notion that a goddess religion was ubiquitous through much of the world until the antecedents of today's religions, most of which still have a distinctly masculine orientation...swept out of India and the Near East, almost obliterating belief in the goddess. The last vestige of organized goddess worship was eliminated by Christianity as late as the fifteenth century in Lithuania."This is pure Pantheistic paganism in its truest form.He is just putting into words what the New Age Religion has been saying for a long time. What Gore is saying is he wants of to adopt a pan-religious perspective that will bring in other religions and mix them with Christianity so we have a pan-religious viewpoint. He advocates that we particularly be concerned with Native American Religions, all of which are very paganistic and pantheistic. That is a direct contradiction of scripture. The Bible states that the earth was created for man, not man for the earth. The Bible says that man was originally given dominion over this earth. Man lost that dominion as result of his sin. And that Jesus won that dominion back at the cross. And that when Jesus returns He will give that dominion back to those who put their love and trust in Him and man will once again exercise dominion over this earth.Does Al Gore make the distinction between fundamental neo-pagan pantheism and Biblical Christianity? In his book, he clearly makes that distinction."We are not used to seeing God in the world because we assume from the scientific and philosophical rules that govern us, that the physical world is made up of inanimate matter whirling in accordance to mathematical laws and bearing no relation to life, much less ourselves. Why does it feel faintly heretical to a Christian to suppose that God is in us as human beings? Why do our children believe that the Kingdom of God is up, somewhere in the ethereal reaches of space, far removed from this planet? By experiencing nature in its fullest...our own and that of all creation...with our senses and with our spiritual imagination, we can glimpse, "bright shining as the sun," an infinite image of God."He is not talking here about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. He is saying that God is in everything and everything is in God. It is a denial of whatthe Bible teaches that God is a personality separate and apart from His creation.The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, [Romans 1:18]The wrath of God is being revealed against certain types of societies - namely those who suppress the truth and unrighteousness as we have been doing in this country in recent years, by refusing to allow the truth of the creation and the truth of the origin of man to be taught in our public schools, but teaching only godless atheistic evolution. (see Romans 1:22-32) It goes on to say that one of the things that brings down the wrath of God is when men begin to worship the creation rather than the creator.Despite all their fear-mongering about the environment, Vice President Al Gore or the Clinton administration didn't care a whit about "saving the planet." They don't really believe there is any impending environmental holocaust. There are only two reasons these notions are being promoted: political expediency and personal empowerment. It simply boils down to this: Here's another way to panic people into ceding their own personal freedom and wealth and to allow the left to grab even more power and control over the lives of individuals.Mr. Gore calls for a wide bureaucratic superstructure to be imposed upon America's business. He wants to impose all kinds of environmental taxes. He wants to bring about a redistribution of wealth between countries, giving massive amounts of moneys to third world countries. He wants to shut down Americas industrial system because he sees it as simply a threat to the environment.Gore calls for the "rescue of the environment" to be "the central organizing principle for civilization." He writes in his book, "We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan, if you will, to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth." Gore calls for a vast array of new laws and expanded bureaucracies to preserve the earth's ecological balance.Al Gore makes it clear that he believes the threat to the environment is so severe that we need to resort to the kind of Draconian central planning that has failed so miserably in every place it has been tried: "Adopting a central organizing principle...means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution...to halt the destruction of the environment."That is his solution. Let's consolidate all of our legal, political, and governmental resources to launch ourassault on Western civilization, capitalism, and our very way of life.Al Gore's well-meant manual for global salvation only deepens our problems. Feminine or earth-centered spirituality may be "politically correct" today, but it mocks Biblical Christianity and points to the path that has led people from truth to myth since the beginning of time.America seems to be moving back to where it started, seeking meaning in life and power for living in occult wisdom. This revival reaches far beyond deep ecology and contemporary paganism. We are not looking at a phenomenon limited to the Green Movement or radical Goddess worshipers. While languages and idols may differ, essentially the same deception permeates our Western world and links it to the pagan beliefs of the rest of the world.Our cultural problem is separation from God, not from nature. While God told us to care for the earth, He warned us against pagan religions. Contrary to the revived myths now flooding the Western world,nature-worship brings violence and destruction, not peace and harmony to the land. Read Deuteronomy 8, 9, 18, and 28.See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather thanon Christ. [Colossians 2:8-10]。
高级英语第一册lesson3 ships in the desert 课文上课讲义
高级英语第一册l e s s o n3s h i p s i n t h e d e s e r t课文高级英语第一册lesson3 ships in the desert 课文Ships in the DesertAL GoreI was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn' t a good day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow , theprospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand – as far as I could see in all directions. The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon . Ten year s ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North America's Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton In the user t. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fish – brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. "Here's where the U. S Congress passed the Clean Air Act, ” he said. At the bottom of the world, two continents away from Washington, D. C., even a small reduction in one country's emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.But the most significant change thus far in the earth' s atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial revolution early inthe last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it – bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course of that inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day's measurements, pushing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is – there at the end of the earth – to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was thinner – only three and a half feet thick – and a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resubmerged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a re-suit of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U. S. Navy to secure the release of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in an eerily beautiful snowcape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or "pressure ridges " of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CD, levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with them – indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice her e will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world's weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastrous.Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distribution in the Arctic, and a second team reported a still controversialclaim (which avariety of data now suggest) that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 per cent in just the last decade. Moreover, scientists established several years ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the temperature e of the earth is steadily rising.As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction can be found exactly halfway between the North and South poles – precisely at the equator in Brazil – where billowing clouds of smoke regularly blacken the sky above the immense but now threatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is being burned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when I went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dry season now, with more than one Tennessee's worth of rain forest being slashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America – which means we are silencing thousands of songs we have never even heard.But one doesn't have to travel around the world to witness humankind's assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere. On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunset -- and if you are watching from a place where pollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether -- you can sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This "noctilucent cloud" occasionally appears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness; shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. (Also called natural gas, methane is released from landfills , from coal mines and rice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other human activities. ) Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past., all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun's rays still strike long after sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotions we feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feelawe for our own power: just as men "t ear tusks from elephants’ heads in such quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness. In the process, we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, because methane has been one of the fastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vapor in total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even considering that threat, shouldn't it startle us that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky which glisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can't see these clouds for what they are – a physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment --whether it's the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the -un burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven't we launched a massive effort to save our environment? To come at the question another way' Why do some images startle us into immediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? And why do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kind of paralysis, focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painful distraction?Still, there are so many distressing images of environmental destruction that sometimes it seems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them. Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of three different categories, according to the theater in which it takes place. There are "local" skirmishes, "regional" battles, and "strategic" conflicts. This third category is reserved for struggles that can threaten a nation's survival and must be understood in a global context.Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. For example, most instances of water pollution, air pollution, and illegal waste dumping are essentially local in nature. Problems like acid rain, thecontamination of underground aquifers, and large oil spills are fundamentally regional. In both of these categories, there may be so many similar instances of particular local and regional problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the pattern appears to be global, but the problems themselves are still not truly strategic because the operation of the global environment is not affected and the survival of civilization is not at stake.However, a new class of environmental problems does affect the global ecological system, and these threats are fundamentally strategic. The 600 percent increase in the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere during the last forty years has taken place not just in those countries producing the chlorofluorocarbons responsible but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the Pacific Ocean –all the way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky. The increased levels of chlorine disrupt the global process by which the earth regulates the amount of ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is allowed through the atmosphere to the surface; and it we let chlorine levels continue to increase, the radiation levels will all so increase – to the point that all animal and plant life will face a new threat to their survival.Global warming is also a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and other heat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 per cent since World War II, posing a worldwide threat to the earth's ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determines the pattern of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures, ocean currents, and sea level. These in turn determine the distribution of vegetative and animal life on land and sea and have a great effect on the location and pattern of human societies.In other words, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been transformed because our civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global environment, not just a particular area. All of us know that human civilization has usually had a large impact on the environment; to mention just one example, there is evidence that even in prehistoric times, vast areas were sometimes intentionally burned by people in their search for food. And in our own time we have reshaped a large part of the earth's surface with concrete in our cities and carefully tended rice paddies, pastures, wheatfields, and other croplands in the countryside. But these changes, while sometimes appearing to be pervasive , have, until recently, been relatively trivial factors in the global ecological system. Indeed, until our lifetime, it was always safe to assumethat nothing we did or could do would have any lasting effect on the global environment. But it is precisely that assumption which must now be discarded so that we can think strategically about our new relationship to the environment.Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global environment. Yet we resist this truth and find it hard to imagine that our effect on the earth must now be measured by the same yardstick used to calculate the strength of the moon's pull on the oceans or the force of the wind against the mountains. And it we are now capable of changing something so basic as the relationship between the earth and the sun, surely we must acknowledge a new responsibility to use that power wisely and with appropriate restraint. So far, however, We seem oblivious of the fragility of the earth's natural systems.This century has witnessed dramatic changes in two key factors that define the physical reality of our relationship to the earth: a sudden and startling surge in human population, with the addition of one China's worth of people every ten years, and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution, which has allowed an almost unimaginable magnification of our power to affect the world around us by burning, cutting, digging, moving, and transforming the physical matter that makes up the earth. The surge in population is both a cause of the changed relationship and one of the clearest illustrations of how startling the change has been, especially when viewed in a historical context. From the emergence of modern humans 200 000 years ago until Julius Caesar's time, fewer than 250 million people walked on the face of the earth. When Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World 1500 years later, there were approximately 500 million people on earth. By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the number had doubled again, to 1 billion. By midway through this century, at the end of World War II, the number had risen to just above 2 billion people. In other words, from the beginning of humanity's appearance on earth to 1945, it took more than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of 2 billion people. Now, in the course of one human lifetime -- mine -- the world population will increase from 2 to more than 9 million, and it is already more than halfway there.Like the population explosion, the scientific and technological revolution began to pick up speed slowly during the eighteenth century. And this ongoing revolution has also suddenly accelerated exponentially. For example, it is now an axiom in many fields of science that more new and important discoveries have taken place in the last ten years that. inthe entire previous history of science. While no single discover y has had the kind of effect on our relationship to the earth that unclear weapons have had on our relationship to warfare, it is nevertheless true that taken together, they have completely transformed our cumulative ability to exploit the earth for sustenance -- making the consequences, of unrestrained exploitation every bit as unthinkable as the consequences of unrestrained nuclear war.Now that our relationship to the earth has changed so utterly, we have to see that change and understand its implications. Our challenge is to recognize that the startling images of environmental destruction now occurring all over the world have much more in common than their ability to shock and awaken us. They are symptoms of an underlying problem broader in scope and more serious than any we have ever faced. Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation -- they all have a common cause: the new relationship between human civilization and the earth's natural balance. There are actually two aspects to this challenge. The first is to realize that our power to harm the earth can indeed have global and even permanent effects. The second is to realize that the only way to understand our new role as a co-architect of nature is to see ourselves as part of a complex system that does not operate according to the same simple rules of cause and effect we are used to. The problem is not our effect on the environment so much as our relationship with the environment. As a result, any solution to the problem will require a careful assessment of that relationship as well as the complex interrelationship among factors within civilization and between them and the major natural components of the earth's ecological system.There is only one precedent for this kind of challenge to our thinking, and again it is military. The invention of nuclear weapons and the subsequent development by the United States and the Soviet Union of many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons forced a slow and painful recognition that the new power thus acquired forever changed not only the relationship between the two superpowers but also the relationship of humankind to the institution at warfare itself. The consequences of all-out war between nations armed with nuclear weapons suddenly included the possibility of the destruction of both nations – completely and simultaneously. That sobering realization led to a careful reassessment of every aspect of our mutual relationship to the prospect of such a war. As early as 1946 one strategist concluded that strategic bombing with missiles "may well tear away the veil of illusion that has so long obscured the reality of the change in warfare – from a fight to a process ofdestruction.”Nevertheless, during the earlier stages of the nuclear arms race, each of the superpower s assumed that its actions would have a simple and direct effect on the thinking of the other. For decades, each new advance in weaponry was deployed by one side for the purpose of inspiring fear in the other. But each such deployment led to an effort by the other to leapfrog the first one with a more advanced deployment of its own. Slowly, it has become apparent that the problem of the nuclear arms race is not primarily caused by technology. It is complicated by technology, true; but it arises out of the relationship between the superpowers and is based on an obsolete understanding of what war is all about.The eventual solution to the arms race will be found, not in a new deployment by one side or the other of some ultimate weapon or in a decision by either side to disarm unilaterally , but ratter in new understandings and in a mutual transformation of the relationship itself. This transformation will involve changes in the technology of weaponry and the denial of nuclear technology to rogue states. But the key changes will be in the way we think about the institution of war far e and about the relationship between states.The strategic nature of the threat now posed by human civilization to the global environment and the strategic nature of the threat to human civilization now posed by changes in the global environment present us with a similar set of challenges and false hopes. Some argue that a new ultimate technology, whether nuclear power or genetic engineering, will solve the problem. Others hold that only a drastic reduction of our reliance on technology can improve the conditions of life -- a simplistic notion at best. But the real solution will be found in reinventing and finally healing the relationship between civilization and the earth. This can only be accomplished by undertaking a careful reassessment of all the factors that led to the relatively recent dramatic change in the relationship. The transformation of the way we relate to the earth will of course involve new technologies, but the key changes will involve new ways of thinking about the relationship itself.NOTESI) Al Gore: born in 1948 in Washington D. C., U. S. Senator (1984-1992) from the State of Tennessee,and U. S. Vice-President ( l 992-) under President Bill Clinton. He is the author of the book Earth in the Balance from which this piece is taken.2) Aral Sea: inland sea and the world’s fourth largest lake, c. 26 000sqmiles, SW Kazakhstan and NW Uzbekhstan, E of the Caspian Sea3) Great Lakes: group of five freshwater lakes, Central North America, between the United States and Canada, largest body of fresh water in the world. From west to east, they are Lake Superior,Lake Michigan,Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario.4) Trans-Antarctic Mountains: mountain chain stretching across Antarctica from Victoria I and to Coats I and; separating the E Antarctic and W Antarctic subcontinents5) Clean Air Act: one of the oldest environmental laws of the U. S., as well as the most far-reaching, the costliest, and the most controversial. It was passed in 1970.6) Washington D. C.: capital of the United States. D. C. (District of Columbia).is added to distinguish it from the State of Washington and 3 other cities in the U. S bearing the sonic name.7) freeze-locking: the metal parts are frozen solid and unable to move freely8)midnight sun: phenomenon in which the sun remains visible in the sky for 24 hours or longer, occurring only in the polar regions9)global warming; The earth is getting warmer. The temperature of the earth's atmosphere and its surface is steadily rising.10) Submarine sonar tracks: the term sonar is an acronym for sound navigation ranging. It is used for communication between submerged submarines or between a submarine and a surface vessel, for locating mines and underwater hazards to navigation, and also as a fathometer, or depth finder.11) greenhouse (effect): process whereby heat is trapped at the surface of the earth by the atmosphere. An increase of man-made pollutants in the atmosphere will lead to a long-term warming of the earth's climate.12) Julius Caesar: (102? B. C -- 44 B. C:. ), Roman statesman and general13) Christopher Columbus: ( 1451-1506), discoverer of America, born Genoa, Italy14) Thomas Jefferson: (17-13-1826 ), 3d President of the United States(1801-1809), author of the Declaration of Independence.15) Declaration of Independence: full and formal declaration adopted July 4,1776, by representatives of the thirteen colonies in North精品资料仅供学习与交流，如有侵权请联系网站删除 谢谢11 America announcing the separation of those colonies from Great Britain and making them into the United States16)Ozone depletion: A layer of ozone in the stratosphere prevents most ultraviolet and other high-energy radiation, which is harmful to life, from penetrating to the earth's surface.Some.environmental, scientists fear that certain man-made pollutants, e.g. nitric oxide,CFCs(Chlorofluorocarbons), etc., may interfere with the delicate balance of reactions that maintains the ozone’ s concentration, possibly leading to a drastic depletion of stratospheric ozone. This is now happening in the stratosphere above the polar regions.。
高级英语第三课Ships in the Desert
Lesson 3 Ships in the DesertAL Gore1.I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn’t a good day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow, the prospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand——as far as I could see in all directions. The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon. Ten years ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North America’s Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton in the desert. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fish——brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.2.My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. “Here’s where the U.S Congress passed the Clean Air Act,” he said. At the bottom of the world, twocontinents away from Washington, D.C., even a small reduction in one country's emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.3.But the most significant change thus far in the earth’s atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial revolution early in the last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it——bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course of that inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day’s measurements, pushing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is——there at the end of the earth——to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.4.Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was thinner——only three and a half feet thick——and a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resub merged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a result of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U.S. Navy to secure the release of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in aneerily beautiful snowscape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or “pressure ridges” of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CO2, levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with them——indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice here will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world’s weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastrous.5.Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distribution in the Arctic, and a second team reported a still controversial claim (which a variety of data now suggest) that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 percent in just the last decade. Moreover, scientists established several years ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the temperature of the earth is steadily rising.*6.As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction can be found exactly halfway between the North and South poles——precisely at the equator in Brazil ——where billowing clouds of smoke regularly blacken the sky above the immense but now threatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is being burned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when I went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dry season now, with more than one Tennessee’s worth of rain forest being slashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America——which means we are silencing thousands of songs we have never even heard.*7.But one doesn't have to travel around the world to witness humankind’s assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere. On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunset——and it you are watching from a place where pollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether——you can sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This “noctilucent cloud” occasionally appears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness; shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. (Also called natural gas, methane is released from landfills, from coal mines and rice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other human activities. ) Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past, all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun’s rays still strike long after sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.8.What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotions we feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feel awe for our own power: just as men tear tusks from elephants’ heads in such quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness. In the process, we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, because methane has been one of the fastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vapor in total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even considering that threat, shouldn’t it startle us that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky whichglisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can’t see these clouds for what they are——a physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?*9.Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment——whether it's the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the sun burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven’t we launched a massive effort to save our environment? To come at the question another way: Why do some images startle us into immediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? And why do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kin. of paralysis, focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painful distraction?10.Still, there are so many distressing images of environmental destruction that sometimes it seems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them. Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.11.A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of three different categories, according to the theater in which it takes place. There are “local” skirmishes, “regional” battles, and “strategic” conflicts. This third category is reserved for struggles that can threaten a nation’s survival and must be under stood in a global context.12.Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. For example, most instances of water pollution, air pollution, and illegal waste dumping are essentially local in nature. Problemslike acid rain, the contamination of underground aquifers, and large oil spills are fundamentally regional. In both of these categories, there may be so many similar instances of particular local and regional problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the patter n appears to be global, but the problems themselves are still not truly strategic because the operation of the global environment is not affected and the survival of civilization is not at stake.13.However, a new class of environmental problems does affect the global ecological system, and these threats are fundamentally strategic. The 600 percent increase in the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere during the last forty years has taken place not just in those countries producing the chlorofluorocarbons responsible but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the Pacific Ocean——all the way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky. The increased levels of chlorine disrupt the global process by which the earth regulates the amount of ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is allowed through the atmosphere to the surface; and it we let chlorine levels continue to increase, the radiation levels will also increase——to the point that all animal and plant life will face a new threat to their survival.14.Global warming is also a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and other heat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 per cent since World War II, posing a worldwide threat to the earth’s ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determines the pattern of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures, ocean currents, and sea level. These in turn determine the distribution of vegetative and animal life on land and sea and have a great effect on the location and pattern of human societies.15.In other words, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been transformed because our civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global environment,not just a particular area. All of us know that human civilization has usually had a large impact on the environment; to mention just one example, there is evidence that even in prehistoric times, vast areas were sometimes intentionally burned by people in their search for food. And in our own time we have reshaped a large part of the earth’s surface with concrete in our cities and carefully tended rice paddies, pastures, wheat fields, and other croplands in the countryside. But these changes, while sometimes appearing to be pervasive, have, until recently, been relatively trivial factors in the global ecological sys-tem. Indeed, until our lifetime, it was always safe to assume that nothing we did or could do would have any lasting effect on the global environment. But it is precisely that assumption which must now be discarded so that we can think strategically about our new relationship to the environment.16.Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global environment. Yet we resist this truth and find it hard to imagine that our effect on the earth must now be measured by the same yardstick used to calculate the strength of the moon’s pull on the oceans or the force of the wind against the mountains. And it we are now capable of changing something so basic as the relationship between the earth and the sun, surely we must acknowledge a new responsibility to use that power wisely and with appropriate restraint. So far, however, We seem oblivious of the fragility of the earth’s natural systems.*17.This century has witnessed dramatic changes in two key factors that define the physical reality of our relationship to the earth: a sudden and startling surge in human population, with the addition of one China’s worth of people every ten years, and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution, which has allowed an almost unimaginable magnification of our power to affect the world around us by burning, cutting, digging, moving, and transforming the physical matter that makes up the earth.18.The surge in population is both a cause of the changed relationship and one of the clearest illustrations of how startling the change has been, especially when viewed in a historical context. From the emergence of modern humans 200,000 years ago until Julius Caesar’s time, fewer than 250 million people walked on the face of the earth. When Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World 1,500 years later, there were approximately 500 million people on earth. By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the number had doubled again, to 1 billion. By midway through this century, at the end of World War II, the number had risen to just above 2 billion people.19.In other words, from the beginning of humanity’s appearance on earth to 1945, it took more than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of 2 billion people. Now, in the course of one human lifetime——mine——the world population will increase from 2 to more than 9 billion, and it is already more than halfway there.20.Like the population explosion, the scientific and technological revolution began to pick up speed slowly during the eighteenth century. And this ongoing revolution has also suddenly accelerated exponentially. For example, it is now an axiom in many fields of science that more new and important discoveries have taken place in the last ten years that. in the entire previous history of science. While no single discovery has had the kind of effect on our relationship to the earth that unclear weapons have had on our relationship to warfare, it is nevertheless true that taken together, they have completely transformed our cumulative ability to exploit the earth for sustenance —— making the consequences of unrestrained exploitation every bit as unthinkable as the consequences of unrestrained nuclear war.21.Now that our relationship to the earth has changed so utterly, we have to see that change and understand its implications. Our challenge is to recognize that the startling images ofenvironmental destruction now occurring all over the world have much more in common than their ability to shock and awaken us. They are symptoms of an underlying problem broader in scope and more serious than any we have ever faced. Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation——they all have a common cause: the new relationship between human civilization and the earth’s natural balance.22.There are actually two aspects to this challenge. The first is to realize that our power to harm the earth can indeed have global and even permanent effects. The second is to realize that the only way to understand our new role as a co-architect of nature is to see ourselves as part of a complex system that does not operate according to the same simple rules of cause and effect we are used to. The problem is not our effect on the environment so much as our relationship with the environment. As a result, any solution to the problem will require a careful assessment of that relationship as well as the complex interrelationship among factors within civilization and between them and the major natural components of the earth’s ecological system.23.There is only one precedent for this kind of challenge to our thinking, and again it is military. The invention of nuclear weapons and the subsequent development by the United States and the Soviet Union of many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons forced a slow and painful recognition that the new power thus acquired forever changed not only the relationship between the two superpowers but also the relationship of humankind to the institution at war-fare itself. The consequences of all-out war between nations armed with nuclear weapons suddenly included the possibility of the destruction of both nations——completely and simultaneously. That sobering realization led to a careful reassessment of every aspect of our mutual relationship to the prospect of such a war. As early as 1946 one strategist concluded that strategic bombing with missiles “may well tear away the veil of illusion that has so long obscured the reality of the change inwarfare——from a fight to a process of destruction.”24.Nevertheless, during the earlier stages of the nuclear arms race, each of the superpower s assumed that its actions would have a simple and direct effect on the thinking of the other. For decades, each new advance in weaponry was deployed by one side for the purpose of inspiring fear in the other. But each such deployment led to an effort by the other to leapfrog the first one with a more advanced deployment of its own. Slowly, it has become apparent that the problem of the nuclear arms race is not primarily caused by technology. It is complicated by technology, true; but it arises out of the relationship between the superpowers and is based on an obsolete understanding of what war is all about.25.The eventual solution to the arms race will be found, not in a new deployment by one side or the other of some ultimate weapon or in a decision by either side to disarm unilaterally , but ratter in new understandings and in a mutual transformation of the relationship itself. This transformation will involve changes in the technology of weaponry and the denial of nuclear technology to rogue states. But the key changes will be in the way we think about the institution of warfare and about the relationship between states.26.The strategic nature of the threat now posed by human civilization to the global environment and the strategic nature of the threat to human civilization now posed by changes in the global environment present us with a similar set of challenges and false hopes. Some argue that a new ultimate technology, whether nuclear power or genetic engineering, will solve the problem. Others hold that only a drastic reduction of our reliance on technology can improve the conditions of life——a simplistic notion at best. But the real solution will be found in reinventing and finally healing the relationship between civilization and the earth. This can only be accomplished by undertaking a careful reassessment of all the factors that led to the relatively recent dramaticchange in the relationship. The transformation of the way we relate to the earth will of course involve new technologies, but the key changes will involve new ways of thinking about the relationship itself.( from Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, 1992 )11。
高英第一册第三课习题答案.
• 3) Scientists were monitoring the air several times a day to chart the course of the climate change. • 4) Because the polar cap plays a crucial role in the world's weather system, the thinning of the polar cap might cause flood in many places of thcalls noctilucent clouds "ghosts in the sky". As a result of pollution, the clouds occasionally appear when the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness. And they appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere.
• 9) The two key factors are human population and the scientific and technological development. The dramatic changes that have occurred in these two factors are a sudden and startling surge in human population and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution.
高级英语第一册lesson3 ships in the desert 课文
高级英语第一册lesson3 ships in the desert 课文 Ships in the DesertAL GoreI was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn' t a good day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow , the prospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand – as far as I could see in all directions. The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon . Ten year s ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North America's Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton In the user t. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fish – brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisishas led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. "Here's where the U. S Congress passed the Clean Air Act, ” he said. At the bottom of the world, two continents away from Washington, D. C., even a small reduction in one country's emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.But the most significant change thus far in the earth' s atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial revolution early in the last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it – bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course ofthat inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day's measurements, pushing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is – there at the end of the earth – to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was thinner – only three and a half feet thick – and a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resubmerged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a re-suit of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U. S. Navy to secure the release of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in an eerily beautiful snowcape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or "pressure ridges " of ice that are pushed up like tinymountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CD, levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with them –indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice her e will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world's weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastrous.Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distribution in the Arctic, and a second team reported a still controversialclaim (which a variety of data now suggest) that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 per cent in just the last decade. Moreover, scientists established several years ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the temperature e of the earth is steadily rising.As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction can be found exactly halfway between the North and South poles – precisely at the equator in Brazil – where billowing clouds of smoke regularly blacken the sky above the immense but now threatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is beingburned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when I went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dry season now, with more than one Tennessee's worth of rain forest being slashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America – which means we are silencing thousands of songs we have never even heard.But one doesn't have to travel around the world to witness humankind's assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere. On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunset -- and if you are watching from a place where pollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether -- you can sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This "noctilucent cloud" occasionally appears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness; shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. (Also called natural gas, methane is released from landfills , from coal mines and rice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other humanactivities. ) Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past., all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun's rays still strike long after sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotions we feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feel awe for our own power: just as men "t ear tusks from elephants’ heads in such quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness. In the process, we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, because methane has been one of the fastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vapor in total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even considering that threat, shouldn't it startle us that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky which glisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the bright lights of civilization that we can't see these clouds for what they are – a physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilization and the earth?Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have bynow all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment --whether it's the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the -un burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven't we launched a massive effort to save our environment? To come at the question another way' Why do some images startle us into immediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? And why do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kind of paralysis, focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painful distraction?Still, there are so many distressing images of environmental destruction that sometimes it seems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them. Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of three different categories, according to the theater in which it takes place. There are "local" skirmishes, "regional" battles, and "strategic" conflicts. This third category is reserved for struggles that can threaten a nation's survival and must be understood in a globalcontext.Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. For example, most instances of water pollution, air pollution, and illegal waste dumping are essentially local in nature. Problems like acid rain, the contamination of underground aquifers, and large oil spills are fundamentally regional. In both of these categories, there may be so many similar instances of particular local and regional problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the pattern appears to be global, but the problems themselves are still not truly strategic because the operation of the global environment is not affected and the survival of civilization is not at stake.However, a new class of environmental problems does affect the global ecological system, and these threats are fundamentally strategic. The 600 percent increase in the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere during the last forty years has taken place not just in those countries producing the chlorofluorocarbons responsible but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the Pacific Ocean – all the way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky. The increased levels of chlorine disrupt the global process by which the earth regulates the amount of ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is allowed through the atmosphere to the surface; and it we let chlorine levels continue toincrease, the radiation levels will all so increase – to the point that all animal and plant life will face a new threat to their survival.Global warming is also a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and other heat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 per cent since World War II, posing a worldwide threat to the earth's ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determines the pattern of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures, ocean currents, and sea level. These in turn determine the distribution of vegetative and animal life on land and sea and have a great effect on the location and pattern of human societies.In other words, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been transformed because our civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global environment, not just a particular area. All of us know that human civilization has usually had a large impact on the environment; to mention just one example, there is evidence that even in prehistoric times, vast areas were sometimes intentionally burned by people in their search for food. And in our own time we have reshaped a large part of the earth's surface with concrete in our cities and carefully tended rice paddies, pastures, wheatfields, and other croplands in the countryside. But these changes, while sometimes appearing to bepervasive , have, until recently, been relatively trivial factors in the global ecological system. Indeed, until our lifetime, it was always safe to assume that nothing we did or could do would have any lasting effect on the global environment. But it is precisely that assumption which must now be discarded so that we can think strategically about our new relationship to the environment.Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global environment. Yet we resist this truth and find it hard to imagine that our effect on the earth must now be measured by the same yardstick used to calculate the strength of the moon's pull on the oceans or the force of the wind against the mountains. And it we are now capable of changing something so basic as the relationship between the earth and the sun, surely we must acknowledge a new responsibility to use that power wisely and with appropriate restraint. So far, however, We seem oblivious of the fragility of the earth's natural systems.This century has witnessed dramatic changes in two key factors that define the physical reality of our relationship to the earth: a sudden and startling surge in human population, with the addition of one China's worth of people every ten years, and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution, which has allowed an almost unimaginable magnification of our power to affect the world around us byburning, cutting, digging, moving, and transforming the physical matter that makes up the earth. The surge in population is both a cause of the changed relationship and one of the clearest illustrations of how startling the change has been, especially when viewed in a historical context. From the emergence of modern humans 200 000 years ago until Julius Caesar's time, fewer than 250 million people walked on the face of the earth. When Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World 1500 years later, there were approximately 500 million people on earth. By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the number had doubled again, to 1 billion. By midway through this century, at the end of World War II, the number had risen to just above 2 billion people. In other words, from the beginning of humanity's appearance on earth to 1945, it took more than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of 2 billion people. Now, in the course of one human lifetime -- mine -- the world population will increase from 2 to more than 9 million, and it is already more than halfway there.Like the population explosion, the scientific and technological revolution began to pick up speed slowly during the eighteenth century. And this ongoing revolution has also suddenly accelerated exponentially. For example, it is now an axiom in many fields of science that more new and important discoveries have taken place in the last ten years that. in the entire previous history of science. While no single discover y has had thekind of effect on our relationship to the earth that unclear weapons have had on our relationship to warfare, it is nevertheless true that taken together, they have completely transformed our cumulative ability to exploit the earth for sustenance -- making the consequences, of unrestrained exploitation every bit as unthinkable as the consequences of unrestrained nuclear war.Now that our relationship to the earth has changed so utterly, we have to see that change and understand its implications. Our challenge is to recognize that the startling images of environmental destruction now occurring all over the world have much more in common than their ability to shock and awaken us. They are symptoms of an underlying problem broader in scope and more serious than any we have ever faced. Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation -- they all have a common cause: the new relationship between human civilization and the earth's natural balance. There are actually two aspects to this challenge. The first is to realize that our power to harm the earth can indeed have global and even permanent effects. The second is to realize that the only way to understand our new role as a co-architect of nature is to see ourselves as part of a complex system that does not operate according to the same simple rules of cause and effect we are used to. The problem is not our effect on the environment so much as our relationship with the environment. As a result, any solution to the problem will require a carefulassessment of that relationship as well as the complex interrelationship among factors within civilization and between them and the major natural components of the earth's ecological system.There is only one precedent for this kind of challenge to our thinking, and again it is military. The invention of nuclear weapons and the subsequent development by the United States and the Soviet Union of many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons forced a slow and painful recognition that the new power thus acquired forever changed not only the relationship between the two superpowers but also the relationship of humankind to the institution at warfare itself. The consequences of all-out war between nations armed with nuclear weapons suddenly included the possibility of the destruction of both nations – completely and simultaneously. That sobering realization led to a careful reassessment of every aspect of our mutual relationship to the prospect of such a war. As early as 1946 one strategist concluded that strategic bombing with missiles "may well tear away the veil of illusion that has so long obscured the reality of the change in warfare – from a fight to a process of destruction.”Nevertheless, during the earlier stages of the nuclear arms race, each of the superpower s assumed that its actions would have a simple and direct effect on the thinking of the other. For decades, each new advancein weaponry was deployed by one side for the purpose of inspiring fear in the other. But each such deployment led to an effort by the other to leapfrog the first one with a more advanced deployment of its own. Slowly, it has become apparent that the problem of the nuclear arms race is not primarily caused by technology. It is complicated by technology, true; but it arises out of the relationship between the superpowers and is based on an obsolete understanding of what war is all about.The eventual solution to the arms race will be found, not in a new deployment by one side or the other of some ultimate weapon or in a decision by either side to disarm unilaterally , but ratter in new understandings and in a mutual transformation of the relationship itself. This transformation will involve changes in the technology of weaponry and the denial of nuclear technology to rogue states. But the key changes will be in the way we think about the institution of war far e and about the relationship between states.The strategic nature of the threat now posed by human civilization to the global environment and the strategic nature of the threat to human civilization now posed by changes in the global environment present us with a similar set of challenges and false hopes. Some argue that a new ultimate technology, whether nuclear power or genetic engineering, will solve the problem. Others hold that only a drasticreduction of our reliance on technology can improve the conditions of life -- a simplistic notion at best. But the real solution will be found in reinventing and finally healing the relationship between civilization and the earth. This can only be accomplished by undertaking a careful reassessment of all the factors that led to the relatively recent dramatic change in the relationship. The transformation of the way we relate to the earth will of course involve new technologies, but the key changes will involve new ways of thinking about the relationship itself.NOTESI) Al Gore: born in 1948 in Washington D. C., U. S. Senator(1984-1992) from the State of Tennessee,and U. S. Vice-President ( l 992-) under President Bill Clinton. He is the author of the book Earth in the Balance from which this piece is taken.2) Aral Sea: inland sea and the world’s fourth la rgest lake, c. 26 000 sqmiles, SW Kazakhstan and NW Uzbekhstan, E of the Caspian Sea3) Great Lakes: group of five freshwater lakes, Central North America, between the United States and Canada, largest body of fresh water in the world. From west to east, they are Lake Superior,Lake Michigan,Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario.4) Trans-Antarctic Mountains: mountain chain stretching across Antarctica from Victoria I and to Coats I and; separating the E Antarcticand W Antarctic subcontinents5) Clean Air Act: one of the oldest environmental laws of the U. S., as well as the most far-reaching, the costliest, and the most controversial. It was passed in 1970.6) Washington D. C.: capital of the United States. D. C. (District of Columbia).is added to distinguish it from the State of Washington and 3 other cities in the U. S bearing the sonic name.7) freeze-locking: the metal parts are frozen solid and unable to move freely8)midnight sun: phenomenon in which the sun remains visible in the sky for 24 hours or longer, occurring only in the polar regions9)global warming; The earth is getting warmer. The temperature of the earth's atmosphere and its surface is steadily rising.10) Submarine sonar tracks: the term sonar is an acronym for sound navigation ranging. It is used for communication between submerged submarines or between a submarine and a surface vessel, for locating mines and underwater hazards to navigation, and also as a fathometer, or depth finder.11) greenhouse (effect): process whereby heat is trapped at the surface of the earth by the atmosphere. An increase of man-made pollutants in the atmosphere will lead to a long-term warming of theearth's climate.12) Julius Caesar: (102? B. C -- 44 B. C:. ), Roman statesman and general13) Christopher Columbus: ( 1451-1506), discoverer of America, born Genoa, Italy14) Thomas Jefferson: (17-13-1826 ), 3d President of the United States(1801-1809), author of the Declaration of Independence.15) Declaration of Independence: full and formal declaration adopted July 4,1776, by representatives of the thirteen colonies in North America announcing the separation of those colonies from Great Britain and making them into the United States16)Ozone depletion: A layer of ozone in the stratosphere prevents most ultraviolet and other high-energy radiation, which is harmful to life, from penetrating to the earth's surface.Some.environmental, scientists fear that certain man-made pollutants, e.g. nitric oxide,CFCs(Chlorofluorocarbons), etc., may interfere with the delicate balance of reactions that maintains the ozone’ s concentration, possibly leading to a drastic depletion of stratospheric ozone. This is now happening in the stratosphere above the polar regions.。
高级英语第一册lesson3shipsinthedesert课文
高级英语第一册lesson3 ships in the desert课文Ships in the DesertAL GoreI was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn' t a good day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productivefishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow , the prospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand–as far as I could see in all directions. The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunesthat stretched all the way to the horizon . Ten year s ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North America's Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that usedto feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton In the user t. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers acrossthe sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fish–brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia fromthe Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisishas led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in theTrans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a holein the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientistin the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. "Here's where the U. S Congress passed the Clean Air Act,” he said. At the bottom of the world, two continents away from Washington, D. C., even a small reduction in one country's emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.But the most significant change thus far in the earth' s atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial revolution early in the last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it–bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere andslowly warm the earth. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together,scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course ofthat inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day's measurements, pushing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is–there at the end of the earth–to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slabof ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was thinner–only three and a half feet thick–and a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resubmerged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a re-suit of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U. S. Navy to secure the release of previously top secret datafrom submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in an eerily beautiful snowcape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or "pressure ridges " of ice that are pushed up like tinymountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CD, levels arerising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with them–indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much morerapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice her e will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucialrole in the world's weather system, the consequences of a thinning capcould be disastrous.Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise.Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientistsreported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distribution in the Arctic,and a second team reported a still controversialclaim (which a variety ofdata now suggest) that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 percent in just the last decade. Moreover, scientists established severalyears ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the spring snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the temperature e of the earth is steadily rising.As it happens, some of the most disturbing images ofenvironmental destruction can be found exactly halfway between theNorth and South poles–precisely at the equator in Brazil–where billowing clouds of smoke regularly blacken the sky above the immense but now threatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is beingburned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when Iwent there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dry season now, with more than one Tennessee's worth of rain forest being slashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America–which means we are silencing thousands of songs we have never even heard.But one doesn't have to travel around the world to witness humankind's assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of our global environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere. On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the sky is clear after sunset -- and if you are watching from a place where pollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether -- you can sometimes see a strange kind of cloud high in the sky. This "noctilucent cloud" occasionally appears when the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness; shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. (Also called natural gas, methane is released from landfills , from coal mines and rice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut forestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other humanactivities. ) Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past., all this extra methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun's rays still strike long after sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix of emotions we feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feelawe for our own power: just as men "t ear tusks from elephantssuch quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are rippingmatter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balance between daylight and darkness. In the process, we are once again adding to the threat of global warming, because methane has been one of thefastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vapor in total volume, changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even considering that threat, shouldn't it startleus that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky which glisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the brightlights of civilization that we can't see these clouds for what they are physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilizationand the earth?Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by’ heads in –anow all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the environment --whether it's the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the -un burns our skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven't we launched a massive effort to save our environment? To come at the question another way' Why do some images startle us into immediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? And why do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kind of paralysis, focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some convenient, less painful distraction?Still, there are so many distressing images of environmental destruction that sometimes it seems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them. Before considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of three different categories, according to the theater in which it takes place. There are "local" skirmishes, "regional" battles, and "strategic" conflicts. This third category is reserved for struggles thatcan threaten a nation's survival and must be understood in a globalcontext.Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. Forexample, most instances of water pollution, air pollution, and illegal waste dumping are essentially local in nature. Problems like acid rain, the contamination of underground aquifers, and large oil spills arefundamentally regional. In both of these categories, there may be so manysimilar instances of particular local and regional problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the pattern appears to be global, butthe problems themselves are still not truly strategic because theoperation of the global environment is not affected and the survival ofcivilization is not at stake.However, a new class of environmental problems does affect theglobal ecological system, and these threats are fundamentally strategic.The 600 percent increase in the amount of chlorine in the atmosphereduring the last forty years has taken place not just in those countriesproducing the chlorofluorocarbons responsible but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the Pacific Ocean the–all way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky. The increasedlevels of chlorine disrupt the global process by which the earth regulatesthe amount of ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is allowed through the atmosphere to the surface; and it we let chlorine levels continue toincrease, the radiation levels will all so increase–to the point that all animal and plant life will face a new threat to their survival.Global warming is also a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and other heat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 per cent since World War II, posing a worldwide threat to the earth's ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determines the pattern of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures, ocean currents, and sea level. These in turn determine the distribution of vegetative and animal life on land and sea and have a great effect on the location and pattern of human societies.In other words, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been transformed because our civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global environment, not just a particular area. All of us know that human civilization has usually had a large impact on the environment; to mention just one example, there is evidence that even in prehistoric times, vast areas were sometimes intentionally burned by people in their search for food. And in our own time we have reshaped a large part of the earth's surface with concrete in our cities and carefully tended rice paddies, pastures, wheatfields, and other croplands in the countryside. But these changes, while sometimes appearing to bepervasive , have, until recently, been relatively trivial factors in the global ecological system. Indeed, until our lifetime, it was always safe to assume that nothing we did or could do would have any lasting effect on the global environment. But it is precisely that assumption which must now be discarded so that we can think strategically about our new relationship to the environment.Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global environment. Yet we resist this truth and find it hard to imagine that our effect on the earth must now be measured by the same yardstick used to calculate the strength of the moon's pull on the oceans or the force of the wind against the mountains. And it we are now capable of changing something so basic as the relationship between the earth and the sun, surely we must acknowledge a new responsibility to use that power wisely and with appropriate restraint. So far, however, We seem oblivious of the fragility of the earth's natural systems.This century has witnessed dramatic changes in two key factors that define the physical reality of our relationship to the earth: a sudden and startling surge in human population, with the addition of one China's worth of people every ten years, and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution, which has allowed an almost unimaginable magnification of our power to affect the world around us byburning, cutting, digging, moving, and transforming the physical matter that makes up the earth. The surge in population is both a cause of the changed relationship and one of the clearest illustrations of how startling the change has been, especially when viewed in a historical context. From the emergence of modern humans 200 000 years ago until Julius Caesar's time, fewer than 250 million people walked on the face of the earth. When Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World 1500 years later, there were approximately 500 million people on earth. By the time Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the number had doubled again, to 1 billion. By midway through this century, at the end of World War II, the number had risen to just above 2 billion people. Inother words, from the beginning of humanity's appearance on earth to 1945, it took more than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of 2 billion people. Now, in the course of one human lifetime --mine -- the world population will increase from 2 to more than 9 million, and it is already more than halfway there.Like the population explosion, the scientific and technological revolution began to pick up speed slowly during the eighteenth century. And this ongoing revolution has also suddenly accelerated exponentially. For example, it is now an axiom in many fields of science that more new and important discoveries have taken place in the last ten years that. in the entire previous history of science. While no single discover y has had thekind of effect on our relationship to the earth that unclear weapons have had on our relationship to warfare, it is nevertheless true that taken together, they have completely transformed our cumulative ability to exploit the earth for sustenance -- making the consequences, of unrestrained exploitation every bit as unthinkable as the consequences of unrestrained nuclear war.Now that our relationship to the earth has changed so utterly, we have to see that change and understand its implications. Our challenge is to recognize that the startling images of environmental destruction now occurring all over the world have much more in common than their ability to shock and awaken us. They are symptoms of an underlying problem broader in scope and more serious than any we have ever faced. Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation -- they all have a common cause: the new relationship between human civilization and the earth's natural balance. There are actually two aspects to this challenge. The first is to realize that our power to harm the earth can indeed have global and even permanent effects. The second is to realize that the only way to understand our new role as a co-architect of nature is to see ourselves as part of a complex system that does not operate according to the same simple rules of cause and effect we are used to. The problem is not our effect on the environment so much as our relationship with the environment. As a result, any solution to the problem will require a carefulassessment of that relationship as well as the complex interrelationship among factors within civilization and between them and the major natural components of the earth's ecological system.There is only one precedent for this kind of challenge to our thinking, and again it is military. The invention of nuclear weapons and the subsequent development by the United States and the Soviet Union of many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons forced a slow and painful recognition that the new power thus acquired forever changed not only the relationship between the two superpowers but also the relationship of humankind to the institution at warfare itself. The consequences of all-out war between nations armed with nuclear weapons suddenly included the possibility of the destruction of both nations–completely and simultaneously. That sobering realization led to a careful reassessment of every aspect of our mutual relationship to the prospect of such a war. As early as 1946 one strategist concluded that strategic bombing with missiles "may well tear away the veil of illusion that has so long obscured the reality of the change in warfare–from a fight to a process of destruction.”Nevertheless, during the earlier stages of the nuclear arms race, each of the superpower s assumed that its actions would have a simple and direct effect on the thinking of the other. For decades, each new advancein weaponry was deployed by one side for the purpose of inspiring fear in the other. But each such deployment led to an effort by the other to leapfrog the first one with a more advanced deployment of its own. Slowly, it has become apparent that the problem of the nuclear arms race is not primarily caused by technology. It is complicated by technology, true; but it arises out of the relationship between the superpowers and is based on an obsolete understanding of what war is all about.The eventual solution to the arms race will be found, not in a new deployment by one side or the other of some ultimate weapon or in a decision by either side to disarm unilaterally , but ratter in new understandings and in a mutual transformation of the relationship itself. This transformation will involve changes in the technology of weaponry and the denial of nuclear technology to rogue states. But the key changes will be in the way we think about the institution of war far e and about the relationship between states.The strategic nature of the threat now posed by human civilization to the global environment and the strategic nature of thethreat to human civilization now posed by changes in the global environment present us with a similar set of challenges and false hopes. Some argue that a new ultimate technology, whether nuclear power or genetic engineering, will solve the problem. Others hold that only a drasticreduction of our reliance on technology can improve the conditions of life--a simplistic notion at best. But the real solution will be found inreinventing and finally healing the relationship between civilization andthe earth. This can only be accomplished by undertaking a careful reassessment of all the factors that led to the relatively recent dramatic change in the relationship. The transformation of the way we relate to the earth will of course involve new technologies, but the key changes willinvolve new ways of thinking about the relationship itself.NOTESI)Al Gore: born in 1948 in Washington D. C., U. S. Senator(1984-1992) from the State of Tennessee,and U. S. Vice-President ( l992-) under President Bill Clinton. He is the author of the book Earthin the Balance from which this piece is taken.2) Aral Sea: inland sea and the world rgest lake,’ cs. fourth26000la sqmiles, SW Kazakhstan and NW Uzbekhstan, E of the Caspian Sea3)Great Lakes: group of five freshwater lakes, Central NorthAmerica, between the United States and Canada, largest body offresh water in the world. From west to east, they are LakeSuperior,Lake Michigan,Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario.4)Trans-Antarctic Mountains: mountain chain stretching acrossAntarctica from Victoria I and to Coats I and; separating the E Antarcticand W Antarctic subcontinents5)Clean Air Act: one of the oldest environmental laws of the U. S., as well as the most far-reaching, the costliest, and the most controversial. It was passed in 1970.6)Washington D. C.: capital of the United States. D. C. (District of Columbia).is added to distinguish it from the State of Washington and3 other cities in the U. S bearing the sonic name.7)freeze-locking: the metal parts are frozen solid and unable to move freely8)midnight sun: phenomenon in which the sun remains visible in the sky for 24 hours or longer, occurring only in the polar regions9)global warming; The earth is getting warmer. The temperature of the earth's atmosphere and its surface is steadily rising.10)Submarine sonar tracks: the term sonar is an acronym for sound navigation ranging. It is used for communication between submerged submarines or between a submarine and a surface vessel, for locating mines and underwater hazards to navigation, and also as a fathometer,or depth finder.11)greenhouse (effect): process whereby heat is trapped at the surface of the earth by the atmosphere. An increase of man-made pollutants in the atmosphere will lead to a long-term warming of theearth's climate.12)Julius Caesar: (102? B. C -- 44 B. C:. ), Roman statesman andgeneral13)Christopher Columbus: ( 1451-1506), discoverer of America,born Genoa, Italy14)Thomas Jefferson: (17-13-1826 ), 3d President of the UnitedStates(1801-1809), author of the Declaration of Independence.15)Declaration of Independence: full and formal declaration adoptedJuly 4,1776, by representatives of the thirteen colonies in North Americaannouncing the separation of those colonies from Great Britain andmaking them into the United States16)Ozone depletion: A layer of ozone in the stratosphere preventsmost ultraviolet and other high-energy radiation, which is harmful to life,from penetrating to the earth's surface.Some.environmental, scientistsfear that certain man-made pollutants, e.g. nitric oxide,CFCs(Chlorofluorocarbons), etc., may interfere with the delicate balanceof reactions that maintains the ozone’ s concentration, possibly leading to drastic depletion of stratospheric ozone. This is now happening in thestratosphere above the polar regions.。
高级英语第一册第三课背景资料-Aral Sea Before and After Photos Pictures
Aral Sea Before and After Photos PicturesAral Sea before and after photos pictures gallery check out here. Centra l Asia’s vast Aral Sea dramatically retreated from 2006 to 2009. As a result, the easter section lost about 80 percent of the waters. What surprise the people is that the process just took 4 years, according to National Geographic.Fifty years ago the water disappeared from the shores of the Aral Sea, leaving behind it an ecological and economic wasteland plagued by toxic dust storms. Slowly, thanks to a new dam separating the sea into two, it has been creeping back in the northern Kazakh section. Before long, water could once again flow into the harbour at Aralsk, the former centre of a thriving fishing industry.The Kazakh steppe turns gradually to desert in the hundreds of kilometres of empty land separating Aralsk from the nearest major city. Cottages are smaller, the camels are scrawnier and clouds of dust almost obscure the isolated stations. In Aralsk, the wind howls from the empty shore, whipping up grains of sand against the whitewashed cottages. Even indoors, the wind whistles through cracks in the windows and moans through the plumbing.The region was once the Soviet Union’s fourth-largest producer of fish with a thriving processing industry. A mural at the railway station shows Lenin receiving the 14 tonnes of fish Aralsk sent to feed starving workers in the brand new Soviet Union. But this service received a harsh payback from Moscow. Back in the 1950s, the decision was made to divert the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, the two rivers that feed the Aral Sea, to transform Central Asia into one of the world’s largest cotton-producing regions. Cold-blooded calculations of the relative values of cotton production and the Aral fishing industry resulted in the decision to allow the sea to die. “It’s an old story, one that started 100 years before {Mikhail] Gorbachev, when the socialist vision of diverting the Siberian rivers to the south was first dreamed up,” says Alexander Peytchev of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has launcheda new project to refocus the attentions of donors on the sea. The easier option of exploiting the Amu Darya and Syr Darya was adopted as early as the 1930s, but it wasn’t until the early 1960s that over-exploitation started and people noticed that the sea was disappearing.By the time the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the seashore had retreated to 91 kilometres away from Aralsk and with it disappeared the livelihoods of many of Aralsk’s population. The sea’s surface area fell from 68,000 square kilometres in the early 1960s to just 17,160 square kilometres by 2004. Serik Duisenbayev, a project manager at the NGO Aral Tenizi, who was born and brought up in Aralsk, didn’t see the sea for the first time until he was 17. “Before then, I only heard stories about the sea from my parents,” he says.“The fish processing plant in Aralsk once employed more than 3,000 people,” says Duisenbayev. “However, the annual catch plummeted from 22,000 tonnes in the early 1960s down to 2,300 tonnes at the end of the following decade. In the final years of the Soviet era, Aral fishermen would travel to Balkhash and other lakes for several months a year, bringing their catch back to Aralsk for processing. But after Kazakhstan gained its independence, everything fell apart and the factory went bankrupt in the mid-1990s.”See Aral Sea Before and After Photos Pictures:。
高级英语第一册第三课沙漠之舟汉语翻译
第三课沙漠之舟艾尔?戈尔1.我头顶烈日站在一艘渔船的滚烫的钢甲板上。
这艘渔船在丰收季节一天所处理加工的鱼可达15吨。
但现在可不是丰收季节。
这艘渔船此时此刻停泊的地方虽说曾是整个中亚地区最大的渔业基地，但当我站在船头向远处眺望时，却看出渔业丰收的希望非常渺茫。
极目四顾，原先那种湛蓝色海涛轻拍船舷的景象已不复存在，取而代之的是茫茫的一片干燥灼热的沙漠。
渔船队的其他渔船也都搁浅在沙漠上，散见于陂陀起伏、绵延至天边的沙丘间。
十年前，咸海还是世界上第四大内陆湖泊，可与北美大湖区五大湖中的最大湖泊相媲美。
而今，由于兴建了一项考虑欠周的水利工程，原来注入此湖的水被引入沙漠灌溉棉田，咸海这座大湖的水面已渐渐变小，新形成的湖岸距离这些渔船永远停泊的位置差不多有40公里远。
与此同时，这儿附近的莫里那克镇上人们仍在生产鱼罐头，但所用的鱼已不是咸海所产，而是从一千多英里以外的太平洋渔业基地穿越西伯利亚运到这儿来的。
2.我因要对造成环境危机的原因进行调查而得以周游世界，考察和研究许多类似这样破坏生态环境的事例。
一九八八年深秋时节，我来到地球的最南端。
高耸的南极山脉中太阳在午夜穿过天空中的一个孔洞照射着地面，我站在令人难以置信的寒冷中，与一位科学家进行着一场谈话，内容是他正在挖掘的时间隧道。
这位科学家一撩开他的派克皮大衣，我便注意到他脸上因烈日的曝晒而皮肤皲裂，干裂的皮屑正一层层地剥落。
他一边讲话一边指给我看。
从我们脚下的冰川中挖出的一块岩心标本上的年层。
他将手指．到二十年前的冰层上，告诉我说，“这儿就是美国国会审议通过化空气法案的地方。
”这里虽处地球之顶端，距美国首都华盛顿两大洲之遥，但世界上任何一个国家只要将废气排放量减少一席在空气污染程度上引起的相应变化便能在南极这个地球上最偏而人迹难至的地方反映出来。
3.迄今为止，地球大气层最重要的变化始于上世纪初的工业命，变化速度自那以后逐渐加快。
工业意味着先是煤、后是石油消耗。
高级英语第一册第三课背景资料-Al Gore was inaugurated as the 45th Vice President of the United States
Al Gore was inaugurated as the 45th Vice President of the United States on January 20, 1993. President Clinton chose then-Senator Gore to be his running mate on July 9, 1992. He was formally nominated as the Democratic nominee for Vice President one week later at the Democratic National Convention in New York.Gore's Congressional career began when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976 where he served eight years representing the then 4th District of Tennessee. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and was re-elected in 1990, becoming the first candidate in modern history -- Republican or Democratic -- to win all 95 of Tennessee's counties. A candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 1988, Gore won more than three million votes and Democratic contests in seven states.Gore was born on March 31, 1948, and is the son of former U.S. Senator Albert Gore, Sr. and Pauline Gore. Raised in Carthage, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., he received a degree in government with honors from Harvard University in 1969. After graduation, he volunteered for enlistment in the U.S. Army and served in Vietnam.Returning to civilian life, Vice President Gore became an investigative reporter with The Tennessean in Nashville. He attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Vanderbilt Law School and operated a small homebuilding business.Vice President Gore is married to the former Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Aitcheson. They have four children: Karenna (born August 6, 1973), Kristin (born June 5, 1977), Sarah (born January 7, 1979), and Albert III (bornOctober 19, 1982). Vice President Gore owns a small farm near Carthage, and the family attends New Salem Missionary Baptist Church in Carthage.。
高级英语第一册第三课背景资料-Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech December 10
Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech December 10, 2007 : 10:06 AM SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE DECEMBER 10, 2007 OSLO, NORWAYYour Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen.I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life’s work, unfairly labeling him ―The Merchant of Death‖ because of his invention –dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name. Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken – if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose.Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, ―We must act.‖The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures – a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: ―Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, t hat both thou and thy seed may live.‖We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency – a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst – though not all – of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: ―They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.‖So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And athird. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong.We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Pol ar ice cap is ―falling off a cliff.‖ One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.Seven years from now.In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half million people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another. Climate refugees have migrated into areas already inhabited by people with different cultures, religions, and traditions, increasing the potential for conflict. Stronger storms in the Pacific and Atlantic have threatened whole cities. Millions have been displaced by massive flooding in South Asia, Mexico, and 18 countries in Africa. As temperature extremes have increased, tens of thousands have lost their lives. We are recklessly burning and clearing our forests and driving more and more species into extinction. The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed.We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel never intended that dynamite be used for waging war. He had hoped his invention would promote human progress. We shared that same worthy goal when we began burning massive quantities of coal, then oil and methane.Even in Nobel’s time, there were a few warnings o f the likely consequences. One of the very first winners of the Prize in chemistry worried that, ―We are evaporating our coal mines into the air.‖ After performing 10,000 equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that the earth’s average temperature w ould increase by many degrees if we doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.Seventy years later, my teacher, Roger Revelle, and his colleague, Dave Keeling, began to precisely document the increasing CO2 levels day by day.But unlike most other forms of pollution, CO2 is invisible, tasteless, and odorless -- which has helped keep the truth about what it is doing to our climate out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, the catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented – and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.We also find it hard to imagine making the massive changes that are now necessary to solve the crisis. And when large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them. Yet as George Orwell reminds us: ―Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.‖In the years since this prize was first awarded, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been radically transformed. And still, we have remained largely oblivious to the impact of our cumulative actions.Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth's climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: "Mutually assured destruction."More than two decades ago, scientists calculated that nuclear war could throw so much debris and smoke into the air that it would block life-giving sunlight from our atmosphere, causing a "nuclear winter." Their eloquent warnings here in Oslo helped galvanize the world’s resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.Now science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent ―carbon summer.‖As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, ―Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice.‖ Either, he notes, ―would suffice.‖But neither need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the planet.We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.These were not comforting and misleading assurances that the threat was not real or imminent; that it would affect others but not ourselves; that ordinary life might be lived even in the presence of extraordinary threat; that Providence could be trusted to do for us what we would not do for ourselves.No, these were calls to come to the defense of the common future. They were calls upon the courage, generosity and strength of entire peoples, citizens of every class and condition who were ready to stand against the threat once asked to do so. Our enemies in those times calculated that free people would not rise to the challenge; they were, of course, catastrophically wrong.Now comes the threat of climate crisis – a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?Mahatma Gandhi awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called ―Satyagraha‖ –or ―truth force.‖In every land, the truth – once known – has the power to set us free.Truth also has the power to unite us and bridge the distance between ―me‖ and ―we,‖ creating the basis for common effort and shared responsibility.There is an African proverb that says, ―If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.‖ We need to go far, quickly.We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action. At the same time, we must ensure that in mobilizing globally, we do not invite the establishment of ideological conformity and a new lock-step ―ism.‖That means adopting principles, values, laws, and treaties that release creativity and initiative at every level of society in multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously.This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent in all humanity. The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun’s energy for pennies or invent an engine that’s carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us. The generation that defeated fascism throughout the world in the 1940s found, in rising to meet their awesome challenge, that they had gained the moral authority and long-term vision to launch the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and a new level of global cooperation and foresight that unified Europe and facilitated the emergence of democracy and prosperity in Germany, Japan, Italy and much of the world. One of their visionary leaders said, ―It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship.‖In the last year of that war, you gave the Peace Prize to a man from my hometown of 2000 people, Carthage, Tennessee. Cordell Hull was described by Franklin Roosevelt as the ―Father of the United Nations.‖ He was an inspiration and hero to my own father, who followed Hull in the Congress and the U.S. Senate and in his commitment to world peace and global cooperation.My parents spoke often of Hull, always in tones of reverence and admiration. Eight weeks ago, when you announced this prize, the deepest emotion I felt was when I saw the headline in my hometown paper that simply noted I had won the same prize that Cordell Hull had won. In that moment, I knew what my father and mother would have felt were they alive.Just as Hull’s generation found moral authority in rising to solve the world crisis caused by fascism, so too can we find our greatest opportunity in rising to solve the climate crisis. In the Kanji characters used in both Chinese and Japanese, ―crisis‖ is written with two symbols, the first meaning ―danger,‖ the second ―opportunity.‖ By facing and removing the danger of the climate crisis, we have the opportunity to gain the moral authority and vision to vastly increase our own capacity to solve other crises that have been too long ignored.We must understand the connections between the climate crisis and the afflictions of poverty, hunger, HIV-Aids and other pandemics. As these problems are linked, so too must be their solutions. We must begin by making the common rescue of the global environment the central organizing principle of the world community.Fifteen years ago, I ma de that case at the ―Earth Summit‖ in Rio de Janeiro. Ten years ago, I presented it in Kyoto. This week, I will urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty that establishes a universal global cap on emissions and usesthe market in emissions trading to efficiently allocate resources to the most effective opportunities for speedy reductions.This treaty should be ratified and brought into effect everywhere in the world by the beginning of 2010 – two years sooner than presently contemplated. The pace of our response must be accelerated to match the accelerating pace of the crisis itself. Heads of state should meet early next year to review what was accomplished in Bali and take personal responsibility for addressing this crisis. It is not unreasonable to ask, given the gravity of our circumstances, that these heads of state meet every three months until the treaty is completed.We also need a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store carbon dioxide.And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon -- with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution. This is by far the most effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis.The world needs an alliance – especially of those nations that weigh heaviest in the scales where earth is in the balance. I salute E urope and Japan for the steps they’ve taken in recent years to meet the challenge, and the new government in Australia, which has made solving the climate crisis its first priority.But the outcome will be decisively influenced by two nations that are now failing to do enough: the United States and China. While India is also growing fast in importance, it should be absolutely clear that it is the two largest CO2 emitters —most of all, my own country –– that will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act.Both countries should stop using the other’s behavior as an excuse for stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment.These are the last few years of decision, but they can be the first years of a bright and hopeful future if we do what we must. No one should believe a solution will be found without effort, without cost, without change. Let us acknowledge that if we wish to redeem squandered time and speak again with moral authority, then these are the hard truths:The way ahead is difficult. The outer boundary of what we currently believe is feasible is still far short of what we actually must do. Moreover, between here and there, across the unknown, falls the shadow.That is just another way of saying that we have to expand the boundaries of what is possible. In the words of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, ―Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.‖We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures – each a palpable possibility – and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, ―One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door.‖The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. E ither they will ask: ―What were you thinking; why didn’t you act?‖Or they will ask instead: ―How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?‖We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.So let us renew it, and say together: ―We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act.‖。
大学高级英语第一册unit 3
Following the layers of ice in the core sample, his
finger came to the place where the layer of ice was formed 20 year ago. two continents: north america and antarctica Emission: the amount of pollution discharged least accessible:most difficult to get to Para 3 Paraphrase: industry means coal, and later oil Industry needs to use coal and oil as fuel to generate power. Paraphrase: bring rising levels… the earth. Make the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere grow, because heat can not easily get through carbon dioxide and go into the high altitude so carbon dioxide plays the role of a cover, keeping the heat near the earth.
Para 4: Rendezvous point: a place where a submarine
was to pick them up Hover: to wait close by negotiate an agreement: achieve an agreement by negotiation To secure the release …: To ensure the making public of data which was originally classified as top secret. Eerily: mysterial (usu. Frighten, disturbed) eg: the eerily sound of owl. define: show the edge or shape of sth. Eg: sharply defined footprints on the fresh snow.
【ppt课件】高级英语上册课件3
by Al Gore
Background Information about Unit III
• Albert Arnold Gore • The Aral Sea • Great Lakes • Amazon and Amazon rain forest • Thomas Jefferson • Pollution
About the author
• Albert Arnold Gore Jr.
/wiki/Al_Gore
Albert Arnold Gore Jr. (born March 31, 1948) is an American politician who served as the 45th Vice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He ran for President in 2000 following Bill Clinton's two fouryear terms, but was defeated by the Republican candidate George W. Bush in a bitterly contested election that included multiple recounts and a Supreme Court decision that effectively decided the election in favor of Gore's rival. While Gore received the most popular votes, the states Bush won gave him a majority in the U.S. Electoral College and Bush was elected President. The election remains one of the most divisive and controversial topics in recent American Politics.
- 1、下载文档前请自行甄别文档内容的完整性，平台不提供额外的编辑、内容补充、找答案等附加服务。
- 2、"仅部分预览"的文档,不可在线预览部分如存在完整性等问题,可反馈申请退款(可完整预览的文档不适用该条件!)。
- 3、如文档侵犯您的权益，请联系客服反馈,我们会尽快为您处理(人工客服工作时间：9:00-18:30)。
Karenna Gore Schiff· Albert Gore, Sr.Earth in the Balance: on Environment Our beaches mirror the degradation of the environmentNeedles, dead dolphins, and oil-soaked birds - are all these signs that the sores of our familiar world are fast eroding, that we are now standingon some new beach, facing dangers beyond the edge of what we are capableof imagining?Source: Earth in the Balance, page 21The effects of global warming on polar ice are significantIndeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polarair warms, the ice here will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the world’s weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap would be disastrous.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 23America is not responding to environmental danger signalsEven though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assaulton the environment - whether it’s the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the sun burns out skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why haven抰 we launched a massive effort to save our environment?Source: Earth in the Balance, page 27Global warming is a strategic threatGlobal warming is a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide and other heat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 percent since World War II, posing a worldwide threat to the earth’s ability to regulate the amount of heat from the sun retained in the atmosphere. Thisincrease in heat seriously threatens the global climate equilibrium that determines the patterns of winds, rainfall, surface temperatures, ocean currents, and sea level.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 29Half of all American waters are pollutedDespite the progress made in the industrial world, many problems remain, from high concentrations of lead in drinking water, to the common practice in most older cities of mixing waste water with drainage runoff whenever it rains heavily, forcing a bypass of sewage treatment facilities; the rainwater and sewage are then dumped, untreated, into creeks, rivers, and the ocean. Almost half of all American rivers, lakes, and creeks are damaged or threatened by water pollutionSource: Earth in the Balance, page 109If we do nothing else, save the rain forestThe most dangerous form of deforestation is the destruction of the rain forests, especially the tropical rain forests clustered around the equator. These are the most important sources of biological diversity on earth. For that reason, most biologists believe that the rapid destruction of the tropical rain forests and the irretrievable loss of the living species dying along with them, represent the single most serious damage to nature now occurring.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 116Americans generate too much wasteThe American people have become embroiled in debates about the relative merits of various waste disposal schemes. Now, we must confront a strategic threat to our capacity to dispose of - or even recycle - the enormous quantities of waste being produced. There is only one way out: we have to change our production processes and dramatically reduce the amount of waste we create in the first place and ensure that we consider just how we intend to recycle or isolate that which unavoidably remains.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 145-146Industrialism has led to tremendous waste and pollutionThe waste crisis is integrally related to the crisis of industrial civilization as a whole. Just as our internal combustion engines have automated the process by which our lungs transform oxygen into carbon dioxide, our industrial apparatus has vastly magnified the process by which our digestive system transforms raw material into human energy and growth - and waste.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 147In the U.S., chemicals constitute most hazardous wasteThe amount of chemical waste dumped into landfills, lakes, rivers, and oceans is staggering. In the United States alone, there are an estimated 650,000 commercial and industrial sources of hazardous waste: two thirds of all hazardous waste comes from chemical manufacturing and almost one quarter from the production of metals and machinery.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 148The US should lead the global environmental movementIf the history of this century is any guide, it is safe to say that if we do not lead the world on this issue, the changes of accomplishing the massive changes necessary to save the global environment will be negligible. If the United States does choose to lead, however, the possibility of success becomes much greater. there would almost certainly be substantial economic and geopolitical benefits for the United States.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 176-177Environmentalism can only thrive where democracy thrivesMen and women must be politically empowered to help effect remedies to ecological problems. As the dramatic environmental problems in Eastern Europe show, freedom is a necessary condition for an effective stewardship of the environment. Almost wherever people at the grass-roots level are deprived of a voice in the decisions that affect their lives, they and the environment suffer. I have come to believe that an essential prerequisite for saving the environment is the spread of democratic government.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 179Calculate environmental impact when measuring profitThe heavy use of pesticides may ensure that the grain we grow achieves the highest possible short-term profits, but the excessive use of pesticides poisons the groundwater reservoirs beneath the field. When we add up the costs and benefits of growing the grain, the loss of that freshwater resource will be ignored. And largely because we have failed to measure the economic value of clean, fresh groundwater, we have contaminated more than half of all the underground reservoirs in the US.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 184Economics does not account for the cost of consumptionEvery time we consume something, some sort of waste is created, but this fact is conveniently forgotten by classical economists. When we consume millions of tons of CFCs each year, are they gone? If so, then what is eating the hole in the ozone layer? When we consume 14 million tons of coal each day and 64 million barrels of oil, are they gone? If so, where is al the extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere coming from?Source: Earth in the Balance, page 187Internal combustion engines interfere with earth’s cleansingWhen we seek to artificially enhance our capacity to acquire what we need from the earth, we do so at the direct expense of the earth’s ability to provide naturally what we are seeking. We frequently ignore the impact of our technological alchemy on natural processes. When we manufacture millions of internal combustion engines and automate the conversion of oxygen to CO2, we interfere with the earth’s ability to cleanse itself of the impurities that are normally removed from the atmosphere.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 207Civilization and the earth are increasingly in conflictThe disharmony in our relationship to the earth, which stems in part from our addiction to a pattern of consuming ever-larger quantities of the resources of the earth, is now manifest in successive crises. The loss of 1-?acres of rain forest every second; the acceleration of the natural extinction rate; the ozone hole; the possible destruction of the climate balance that makes our earth livable-all these suggest the increasingly violent collision between human civilization and the natural world.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 223The world must unite to save the environmentThe world is once again at a critical juncture. We are invading ourselves and attacking the ecological system of which we are a part. As a result, we now face the prospect of a kind of global civil war between those who refuse to consider the consequences of civilization抯 relentless advance and those who refuse to be silent partners in the destruction. The time has come to make this struggle the central organizing principle of world civilization.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 294Global Marshall Plan must include the First and Third worldsThe model of the Marshall Plan can be of great help. for example, a Global Marshall Plan must focus on strategic goals and emphasize actions and programs that are likely to remove the bottlenecks presently inhibiting the healthy functioning of the global economy. The new global economy must be an inclusive system that does not leave entire regions behind. The new plan will require the wealthy nations to allocate money for transferring environmentally helpful technologies to the Third World and to help impoverished nations achieve a stable population and a new pattern of sustainable economic progress. To work, however, any such effort will also require wealthy nations to make a transition themselves that will be in some ways more wrenching than that of the Third World.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 297-301Global Marshall Plan: Five strategic goalsIn my view, five strategic goals must direct and inform our efforts to save the global environment:1.stabilizing of world population2.the rapid development of environmentally appropriate technologies3. a comprehensive change in the economic 搑ules of the road?by whichwe measure the impact of our decisions on the environment4.negotiation & approval of a new generation of internationalagreements5. a cooperative plan for educating the world抯 citizens about ourglobal environment.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 305-307Every individual should take responsibility for the earthThis crisis will be resolved only if individuals take some responsibility for it. By education ourselves and others, by doing our part to minimize our use and waste of resources, by becoming more active politically and demanding change. each one of us can make a difference. Perhaps more important, we each need to assess our own relationship to the natural world and renew. a connection to it.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 366A balance between civilization and the earth is neededThe key is indeed balance - balance between contemplation and action, individual concerns and commitment to the community, love for the natural world and love for our wondrous civilization. I hope and trust we will all find a way to resist the accumulated momentum of all the habits, patterns, and distractions that divert us from what is true and honest, spinning us first this way and that.Source: Earth in the Balance, page 367Welcomes criticism as 搕oo environmental?After Earth in the Balance was published, I had a personal encounter with that verse from the Bible, 揥ould that mine adversary had written a book.?Adversaries, some of whom I suspect haven抰 read it, love to hate this book and attack it as 搕oo environmental.?br>I welcome that. I believe the environment should be a central issue in the year 2000, because, like it or not, the environment will be a fateful issue in the next decade and the new century.In the 8 years since the first edition of this book, we have made some real progress. We抮e cleaning up the great American rivers. We抳e strengthened the Superfund to clean up hazardous chemical waste sites. We refused, despite all the special-interest lobbying of Congress, to let up on big polluters who have a responsibility to clean up hidden poisons in our neighborhoods and on land where our children play.Source: New foreword to Earth in the Balance, p. xOzone protection is working; keep up diligenceEven as we seek to decrease ozone levels near the surface of the earth, where they harm us, we have made great progress in restoring the ozonelayer high in the upper atmosphere, where it protects us. Our worldwide ban on ozone-depleting substances is beginning to heal the delicate stratospheric ozone layer, which acts as a shield against cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation. In the last two years, we have measured an actual decrease in these substances in the stratosphere. If we remain diligent, we will be able to say in the future that because the world joined together to face this global problem head on, banning the chemical culprits and developing low-cost substitutes, the ozone hole over Antarctica will close by 2050, over the next two generations.Source: New foreword to Earth in the Balance, p. xiBig Lie: good environment is bad economicsThe argument made against this book is that excessive protection of the environment hurts the economy. The lobbyists’definition of excessive is almost always the same: any measure that gets in the way of short-term gain for their clients. It’s never stated this way, but it’s often little more than an appeal to tolerate profits that depend on ignoring pollution. The big lie in this debate is that a good environment is bad economics.We ought to seek, and we can find, sustainable growth that doesn’t undermine human health or the natural ecosystems that support life. The Clinton-Gore administration has been committed to that ideal. We have our environmental critics, but I think it抯 fair to say that in these years, we抳e had the strongest economy in the world, while we抳e repeatedly strengthened environmental protections, all across the board.The bottom line is that there is not only an environment to be saved but money to be made in reducing the buildup of greenhouse gases.Source: New foreword to Earth in the Balance, p. xiii & xviiiGlobal Warming is a clear & present threat; but preventableGlobal warming is no longer a distant threat; it’s as real, as clear and present an issue, with profound effects on people’s lives, as war and peace or recession and poverty--and the effects are only just beginning to be felt.There are still some scientists--a shrinking but vocal minority, invariable invoked by special interests--who deny or doubt climate change or its relationship to carbon dioxide pollution. The flaw in the argument this time is that if the skeptics are as wrong as it appears, and if we do not act now, the crisis of global warming will inflict enormous, evenirreversible damage. And it is preventable if we act now, wisely and boldly. It is worth remembering that big changes can occur quickly. There will probably be some climate surprises. Melting of the arctic tundra could release huge quantities of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas, which would greatly amplify climate change. Who can afford to wait?Source: New foreword to Earth in the Balance, p. xiv-xviStrengthen CAA; polluters pay for air cleanupLast November, under pressure from utility lobbies, the majority in Congress sought to write dozens of loopholes into the Clean Air Act, weakening enforcement of the law against old and dirty power plants. Instead, we need tough standards for soot and smog, with reasonable flexibility but a real timetable for implementation. In the Environment Decade, polluters should pay to clean up the pollution they抳e created rather than impose the burden on taxpayers.Source: New foreword to Earth in the Balance, p. xixKyoto goals are an indispensable first stepAs record floods alternate with record ice-storms, as record-breaking hot months are followed by even hotter months a year later, who can afford to wait? The US took the lead in convincing other nations that a voluntary international agreement to reduce carbon pollution was no longer enough--that we needed to negotiate a binding timetable to meet specific goals. When I led the US delegation to the Kyoto Conference in 1997, we worked with 180 other nations to put the world on track to reduce the carbon pollution pouring into the atmosphere. The Kyoto agreement isn抰 the final answer to global warming, but it is the indispensable first step.Our next step is to seek meaningful participation from developing nations and submit the Kyoto agreement to the Senate for ratification. I will stay and fight on this issue until we overcome the special-interest opposition, abroad and at home, that threatens to extend and worsen global warming. The Kyoto goals are both practical and economically beneficial.Source: New foreword to Earth in the Balance, p. xviiReplacing internal combustion is possible & will create jobsI was criticized for suggesting in this book that we should move away from the internal combustion engine over the next quarter-century. The attackwas never more than smoke and fumes; I was calling not for an end to the car industry but for new types of cars. Now the automakers themselves are investing heavily in alternatives to internal combustion; they are acknowledging that fuel cells and other environmentally preferable alternatives are key to future competitive success, at home and overseas.For those who want to attack my view, let me save you the trouble of reading the entire book.On pages 325-6, I wrote, 揑t ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a 25-year period.?It is possible; it needs to be done; it will create more jobs, not destroy jobs. I’m proud that I wrote those words in 1992, and I reaffirm them today.。