发布时间 : 星期三 文章新视野大学英语第四册第三版课文及翻译更新完毕开始阅读f6509ee279563c1ec4da71d6
和行为之中的。它们比任何一种文化的词语汇编里所列出的术语都更难理解。我的建议是：随时向对方询问，以得到一个明晰的解释和新的理解。为了取得商业成功，学会协调这些更深层次的文化差异是极其重要的。尽管将它们融入自己的思维方式和人际交往有点复杂，但这样的努力是非常值得的！
Unit4
What nature is telling you
倾听自然诉说
Let's sit down here, all of us, on the open prairie, where we can't see a highway or a fence, free from the debris of the city. Let's have no blankets to sit on, but let our bodies converge with the earth, the surrounding trees and shrubs. Let's have the vegetation for a mattress, experiencing its texture, its sharpness and its softness. Let us become like stones, plants, and trees. Let us be animals, think and feel like animals.
让我们在这儿坐下来吧，我们所有的人，就在这片广阔的草原上。在这里，我们看不见高速公路，看不见围栏，远离城市垃圾。我们不要铺毯子，就让我们的身体和大地、周围的树木及灌木来个亲密接触吧。让我们把草当垫子，感受它或许坚硬或许柔软的质地。让我们想象自己变成了石头、植物和树木，想象自己变成了动物，并像动物那样思考和感觉。
This is my plea: Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. We feel it between us, as a presence presiding over the day. It is a good way to start thinking about nature and talking about it. To go further, we must rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives.
这就是我的请求：倾听空气。你们可以听见它，感觉它，闻到它，品尝它。我们可以感到它就在我们中间，作为一种实实在在的存在，主宰着每一天。这是一个好方式，我们可以就这样开始思考自然，谈论自然。如果再想好点的话，我们就不如和自然说话，也就是和江河说话，和湖泊说话，和风说话，就像我们和亲人说话一样。
You have impaired our ability to experience nature in the good way, as part of it. Even here we are conscious that somewhere beyond the marsh and its cranes, somewhere out in those hills there are radar towers and highway overpasses. This land is so beautiful and strange that now some of you want to make it into a national park. You have not only contaminated the earth, the rocks, the minerals, all of which you call \alive; you have even changed the animals, which are part of us, changed them into vulgar zoological mutations, so no one can recognize them.
你们已经损坏了我们人类作为大自然的一部分以一种美好的方式体验大自然的能力。即使在这里，我们也
知道，在沼泽地和栖息于此的鹤之外的某个地方，在远处山里的某个地方，就建有雷达塔和高速公路立交桥。这片土地如此美丽与奇特，以至于你们中的某些人想把它变成一座国家公园。你们已经污染了土地、岩石、矿物——这些都是被你们称为已经“死去”但其实是非常有生命活力的东西。不仅如此，就连属于我们一部分的动物，也被你们改造了。你们把它们变成了低级的基因变异动物，以至于没有人能再认识它们。 There is power in an antelope, so you let it graze within your fences. But what power do you see in a goat or sheep, prey animals with no defenses, creatures that hold still while you slaughter them? There was great power in a wolf, even in a fox. You have inverted nature and turned these noble animals into miniature lap dogs. Nature is bound by your ropes and whips and is obedient to your commands. You can't do much with a cat, so you fix it, alter it, declaw it, and even cut its vocal cords so that you can experiment on it in a laboratory without being disturbed by its cries. 羚羊是一种有力量的动物，因而你们把它圈养在栅栏里。但是，山羊或绵羊，这些没有自卫能力的猎物、这些悄无声息任凭你们宰杀的动物，你们在它们身上看到了什么力量？狼身上有巨大的力量，狐狸身上也同样有巨大的力量。你们违背自然，把这些高贵的动物变成了小型的可以放在腿上把玩的哈巴狗。自然被你们的绳索和鞭子所束缚，屈服于你们的命令。对猫，你们无能为力，所以你们就设法修理它们、改造它们，剪掉它们锋利的爪子，甚至切断它们的声带，这样你们就可以用猫在实验室做实验，而不会再受它们叫声的干扰。
You have also made all types of wild birds into chickens - creatures with wings so impaired that they cannot fly. There are farms where you breed chickens for breast meat. Those birds are kept in low, repressive cages, forced to be hunched over all the time, which makes the breast muscles very big. One loud noise and the chickens go mad, killing themselves by flying against the walls of their cages. Having to spend all their lives stooped over makes an unnatural, crazy, no-good bird. It also makes unnatural, detached, no-good human beings.
所有的野生鸟类都被你们改造成了鸡禽——一种翅膀退化、根本不会飞的生物。你们有许多农场，专门用来词养鸡以提供鸡胸脯肉。这些鸡被关在狭窄压抑的笼子里，不得不一直弓着身体，这使它们的胸脯肌肉变得很大。如果突发一声巨响，鸡群会吓得发疯般乱跑，撞死在笼子壁上。一辈子都必须佝偻着背使得这些鸡变成了既不天然又不正常、毫无用处的禽类。同时，人类也变得很不自然、冷漠无情、残酷刻薄。 That's where you've fooled yourselves. You have not only altered, declawed, and deformed your winged and four-legged cousins; you have done it concurrently to yourselves. You inject Botox, or use plastic surgery, synthetic make-up and countless drugs. You have filtered and remolded humans into executives sitting in boardrooms, into office workers, into time-clock punchers. Your homes are filled with families disconnected from one another but tied to one great entity, television.
在这点上，你们愚弄了自己。你们对自己带翅膀的和长四条腿的近亲兄弟姐妹进行了改造，剪掉了它们的
爪子，甚至让它们变得畸形。同时，你们也在对自己做这些事情。你们注射肉毒杆菌毒素，接受整容手术，使用人造化妆品和数不清的药物。你们把人类进行筛选和改造：有的人是坐董事会议室的高级管理人员，有的人是坐办公室的白领，有的人是每日要按考勤钟打卡的工人。在家里，每个家庭成员之间也没有联系，却都沉溺于一个大实体，那就是电视。
\wallpaper; your hair may be greasy. Don't spill liquor on that table: You'll peel off its delicate finish. You should have wiped your boots; the floor was just cleaned. Don't, don't, don't ...\this type of repression. You live in prisons which you have built for yourselves, calling them \offices, factories.
“小心烟灰，不要抽烟，否则你会熏脏窗帘。小心金鱼缸。不要把头靠在墙纸上，你的头发也许很油。不要把饮料洒在桌子上，你会把它精美的涂层弄掉。你应该先擦擦靴子，地板刚刚才打扫过。不要做这个，不要做那个，不要……”这太荒谬了！人类生下来不是忍受这种压抑的。你们住在自己亲手打造的监狱里，只不过你们把它们称之为“家”、办公室或工厂而已。 后面缺几段
Achieving sustainable environmentalism
实现可持续性发展的环保主义
Environmental sensitivity is now as required an attitude in polite society as is, say, belief in democracy or disapproval of plastic surgery. But now that everyone from Ted Turner to George H. W. Bush has claimed love for Mother Earth, how are we to choose among the dozens of conflicting proposals, regulations and laws advanced by congressmen and constituents alike in the name of the environment? Clearly, not everything with an environmental claim is worth doing. How do we segregate the best options and consolidate our varying interests into a single, sound policy?
在上流社会，对环境的敏感就如同信仰民主、反对整容一样，是一种不可或缺的态度。然而，既然从泰德?特纳到乔治?W.H.布什，每个人都声称自己热爱地球母亲，那么，在由议员、选民之类的人以环境名义而提出的众多的相互矛盾的提案、规章和法规中，我们又该如何做出选择呢？显而易见，并不是每一项冠以环境保护名义的事情都值得去做。我们怎样才能分离出最佳选择，并且把我们各自不同的兴趣统一在同一个合理的政策当中呢？
There is a simple way. First, differentiate between environmental luxuries and environmental necessities. Luxuries are those things that would be nice to have if costless. Necessities are those things we must have regardless. Call this distinction the definitive rule of sane environmentalism, which stipulates that combating ecological change that directly threatens the health and safety of people is an environmental necessity. All else is luxury.
有一种简便的方法。首先要区分什么是环境奢侈品，什么是环境必需品。奢侈品是指那些无需人类付出代价就能拥有的给人美好感受的东西。必需品则是指那些无论付出什么代价，都一定要去拥有的东西。这一区分原则可以被称为理性环保主义的至高原则。它规定，对那些直接威胁人类健康与安全的生态变化采取应对措施是环境保护的必需品，而其他则都属于奢侈品。
For example, preserving the atmosphere - stopping ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect - is an environmental necessity. Recently, scientists reported that ozone damage is far worse than previously thought. Ozone depletion has a correlation not only with skin cancer and eye problems, it also destroys the ocean's ecology, the beginning of the food chain atop which we humans sit.
例如，保护大气层——阻止臭氧损耗及控制温室效应——是环境保护的必需品。近来，科学家报告说臭氧层遭受破坏的程度远比我们先前认为的要严重得多。臭氧损耗不仅与皮肤癌及眼疾有关，而且它还会破坏海洋生态。而海洋生态是食物链的起点，人类则位于该食物链的顶端。
The possible thermal consequences of the greenhouse effect are far deadlier: melting ice caps, flooded coastlines, disrupted climate, dry plains and, ultimately, empty breadbaskets. The American Midwest feeds people at all corners of the atlas. With the planetary climate changes, are we prepared to see Iowa take on New Mexico's desert climate, or Siberia take on Iowa's moderate climate?
温室效应所可能引发的热效应是非常具有毁灭性的：冰川融化、海岸线被淹没、气候遭受破坏、平原干涸，最终食物消失殆尽。美国中西部地区的粮食供养着全世界。随着全球气候的变化，我们难道准备看到衣阿华州变成新墨西哥州的沙漠气候，而西伯利亚变成衣阿华州的温和气候吗？
Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect are human disasters, and they are urgent because they directly threaten humanity and are not easily reversible. A sane environmentalism, the only kind of environmentalism that will strike a chord with the general public, begins by openly declaring that nature is here to serve human beings. A sane environmentalism is entirely a human focused regime: It calls upon humanity to preserve nature, but merely within the parameters of self-survival.
臭氧损耗和温室效应是人类的灾难，而且是需要紧急处理的灾难，因为它们直接威胁到人类，且后果很难扭转。理性环保主义——唯一能够引起公众共鸣的环保主张——首先公开声明，自然是服务于人类的。理性环保主义是一种完全以人类为中心的思想。它号召人类保护自然，但是是在人类自我生存得到保证的前提之下。