Welcome to the Anthropocene
欢迎来到人类纪
Humans have changed the way the world works. Nowthey have to change the way they think about it, too
人类改变了世界运行方式,现在,人类不得不改变他们思考世界的方式
THE Earth is a big thing; if you divided it up evenly among its 7 billion inhabitants, they wouldget almost 1 trillion tonnes each. To think that the workings of so vast an entity could belastingly changed by a species that has been scampering across its surface for less than 1% of1% of its history seems, on the face of it, absurd. But it is not. Humans have become a forceof nature reshaping the planet on a geological scalebut at a far-faster-than-geological speed.
地球是个庞然大物。如果你把它均分给其间的70亿居民,每个人能分到近1万亿吨。表面看来,一个渺小的物种,生命不及地球的万分之一,在其表面跑跑跳跳竟能永久性地改变如此巨大实体的运行机制,想一想都是荒谬之事。不过确有其事。人类已经成为重塑地球地质年表的自然力量,其速度比地质构造自然演化的过程快得多。
A single engineering project, the Syncrude mine in the Athabasca tar sands, involves moving 30billion tonnes of earthtwice the amount of sediment that flows down all the rivers in the worldin a year. That sediment flow itself, meanwhile, is shrinking; almost 50,000 large dams haveover the past half- century cut the flow by nearly a fifth. That is one reason why the Earthsdeltas, home to hundreds of millions of people, are eroding away faster than they can bereplenished.
【2015考研英语阅读欢迎来到人类纪】相关文章:
最新
2016-10-18
2016-10-11
2016-10-11
2016-10-08
2016-09-30
2016-09-30