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Unit 5 At War with the Planet
第五单元 与地球的战争
Barary Commmoner
巴里·康门纳
People live in two worlds. Like all living things, we inhabit the natural world created over the Earth's 5-billion-year history by physical, chemical, and biological processes. The other world is our own creation: homes, cars, farms, factories, laboratories, food, clothing, books, paintings, music, poetry. We accept responsibility for events of our own world, but not for what occurs in the natural one. Its storms, droughts and floods are "acts of God" free of human control and exempt from our responsibility.
人类生活在两个世界中。和所有的生物一样，我们生存在这个经过50多亿年物理、化学、生物变化所形成的地球上，即自然世界。另外一个世界则源于人类的创造，如家庭、汽车、农场、工厂、实验室、食物服装、书籍、绘画音乐、诗歌等。我们为人类世界所发生的一切承担责任，却对自然世界的变化无能为力。风暴、干旱、洪水等都是上帝的“手笔”，人类无法控制，也无须负责。
Now, on a planetary scale, this division has been breached. With the appearance of a continent-sized hole in the Earth's protective ozone layer and the threat of global warming, even droughts, floods, and heat waves may become unwitting acts of man.
但如今，从全球的角度看，这个界限已被打破。对地球起保护作用的臭氧层出现空洞，全球变暖威胁人类，甚至干旱、洪水、热电波等都可能是人类的无心之过。
Like the Creation, the portending global events are cosmic: They change the relationship between the Dlanet Earth and its star, the sun. The sun's powerful influence on the Earth is exerted by two forces: gravity and solar radiation. Gravity is a nearly steady force that fixes the planet's path around the sun. Solar radiation-largely visible and ultraviolet light-is vast stream of energy that bathes the Earth's surface, fluctuating from day to night and season to season. Solar energy fuels the energy-requiring processes of life; it creates the planet's climate and governs the gradual evolution and the current behavior of its huge and varied population of living things. We have been tampering with this powerful force, unaware, like the Sorcerer's' Apprentice, of the potentially disastrous consequences of our actions.
正如宇宙的建立，这种预示性的全球事件影响深远。它们改变了地球与它的恒星太阳之间的关系。太阳通过两种力量对地球产生强烈影响：重力和太阳辐射。重力是一种使地球轨道绕太阳运转的稳定力量。太阳辐射——大部分为可见光和紫外线—是沐浴着地球表层的取之不尽、用之不竭的能量，它会随日夜和季节的变化而改变。太阳能为生命进程提供必需的能量：它创造了地球上的气候并支配着庞大而多样的生物群的逐渐进化和当前的行为。我们一直在滥用这股强大的力量，就像传说中的“魔法师的学徒”一样，并没有意识到我们的这种行为很可能会导致灾难性的后果。
