1、高级英语Unit 03Ships 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 wasnt 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 ov
2、er 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
3、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 Americas Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to g
4、row 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 Pacif
5、ic 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 m
6、idnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late fall 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 c
7、ore sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. Heres 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 countrys
8、emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest and least accessible place on earth. But the most significant change thus far in the earths atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial revolution early in the last century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant
9、 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 eng
10、ines 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 days measurements, pushing the end of a steep line still higher on
11、 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-foot-thick slab of ic
12、e 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
13、, 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 result of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U. S. Navy to secure
14、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 itself, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standin
15、g in an eerily beautiful snowscape/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, CO2 levels are rising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperatur
16、e 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 worlds weather system, the consequences of a
17、 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 controversial claim
18、 (which a variety of data now suggest) that, overall, 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
19、below, the temperature 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
20、 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 Tennessees worth of rain forest being
21、 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 doesnt have to travel aro
22、und the world to witness humankinds 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 progre
23、ss. If the sky is clear after sunset - and it you are watching from a place where pollution hasnt 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;
24、 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
25、 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, whe
26、re it condenses at much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the suns 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 s
27、hould 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
28、 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, shouldnt it startle us that we have no
29、w 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 cant see these clouds for what they are a physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilization and the earth? Even tho
30、ugh 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 its the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the sun burns our skin, or the new
31、constancy of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling. Why havent 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
32、 on 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 respo
