Excerpts from Silent Spring (1962)1
Rachel Carson
The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time reprented by the prent century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.tyranny
During the past quarter century this power has not only incread to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and a with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life. Strontium 90, relead through nuclear explosions into tpolitics是什么意思>高考卷子
miles awayhe air, comes to the earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in the soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on tho who drink from once pure wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, "Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation."四六级考试改革
苹果雨
It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth—eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained elements that were hostile as well as supporting. Certain rocks gave out dangerous radiation, even within the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there were short-wave radiations with power to injure. Given time—time not in years but in millennia—life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the esntial ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.
at all
The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man's tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the a; they are the synthetic creations of man's inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.
高中英语评课稿1 Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring," in Diane Ravitch, ed., The American Reader: Words that Moved a Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 323-325.
To adjust to the chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature's; it would require not merely the years of a man's life but the life of generations. And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into actual u in the United States alone. The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped—500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of bi
ologic experience.
Among them are many that are ud in man's war against nature. Since the mid-1940's over 200 basic chemicals have been created for u in killing incts, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as "pests"; and they are sold under veral thousand different brand names.
The sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—nonlective chemicals that have the power to kill every inct, the "good" and the "bad," to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in the soil—all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or incts. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called "incticides," but "biocides."maestro
The whole process of spraying ems caught up in an endless spiral. Since DDT was relead for civilian u, a process of escalation has been going on in which ever more toxic materials must be found. This has happened becau incts, in a triumphant vindication of Darwin's principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super races immune to the particular incticide ud, hence a deadlier one has always to be developed—and then a deadlier one
吊死问疾The "control of nature" is a phra conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was suppod that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itlf with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the incts it has also turned them against the earth.
