公共英语三级课文第三章

Unit 3 Environment

Monologue

The Forest Service is responsible for the forests on public land in the US. It supervises almost 78 million hectares of forests, grasslands, rivers and lakes. It’s an agency of the Department of Agriculture. Forest Service officials say there are 4 major threats to forests and wild land in America. The first is the threat of fire and fuel. Fires are a natural enemy of forest growth, but they can also threaten lives and property. Fuel is dead plant material and small plants that grow under tall trees. The Forest Service estimates that up to one-fourth of the forests it supervises have dangerous levels of fuel. Sometimes foresters set controlled fires to remove the fuel. Other times the fuel must be cleared by hand. Another threat to forests is from invasive species. These are non-native plants and animals that push out native kinds. They can cause a lot of economic damage. Some invaders are insects, some are diseases, and others are plants like the fast-growing kudzu vine. The agency says another threat to the health of wild land is the loss of open space. It says over I hectare of forest or grassland is lost to development every minute. Development also leads to the division of large natural areas into smaller ones. The fourth threat to public land is what the Forest Service calls unmanaged recreation. People can hunt, fish and camp in many national forests. But careless use of motor vehicles and other actions can be destructive.

Passage

In Our “Rurban” Age

--T o know the countryside, you must live in the city

In his book Badgers, the naturalist Michael Clark describes surveying the animal back in the 1960s. Calling at a farm cottage, he asked an old countryman whether he knew of any badgers living nearby. “What are badgers?” came the reply. The countryman, Clark writes, “genuinely did not know of the species”.

Y ou can be a countryman, it seems, and know little of the country. But traditionally, country folks are regarded as being in tune with the land. They live there, don’t they? What can townies know of the “way of nature”?

This assumption infects much of our culture. It predicates the existence of a clear division between town and country. It enables the rural lobby to characterize itself as an indigenous culture, its “native” traditions and pastimes (hunting, fishing) threatened by an oppressive urban majority. The underlying message lies in that the countryside is best managed by country people. After all, they know about such things…

Unfortunately, too often, they don’t. As the historian Keith Thomas showed in his study Man and the Natural World, the growth of our knowledge about nature has come by correcting the “vulgar errors”of country people. And although Thomas was writing about the period between 1500 and 1800, that process continues today—what country dwellers take for granted is still being confounded by the careful observation of reality.

A study, from Y ork University, has cast strange new light on the farmers’ enemy—foxes. The more foxes a farmer kills, the more lambs he appears to lose to foxes. That is because: new foxes will almost certainly occupy the slain animals’ territory, and new animals, unused to the terrain,

may then choose more obvious prey—such as lambs.

The message of studies such as this is that natural systems are complex, unpredictable: understanding them requires patient observation and careful analysis. The lack of these conditions explains why, in the early modern era, grass snakes were killed as venomous, and gardeners destroyed worms because they were thought to gnaw plant roots.

The assumption that country people “ought” to know about things is based on an urbanrural divide that opened up in the 18th century. For a couple of centuries, city and country people did inhabit separate realms. But the car, the phone, the media and the Internet have contributed to the unifying tendency of what we call modern lifestyle; and the vast population outflow from cities into rural areas blurred the difference between urban and rural. Thus, a new word—“ruran”—has been coined to describe this condition. Most of us now work indoors or in an office, and even if we are involved in our primary industries, we are far more likely to be staring at a computer than communicating with the landscape. Human life has turned generally into a monoculture by work, sleep, shopping and TV—all actually identical whether performed in town or country.

Supplementary Reading

Cleaner Ways of T ravel

A Dutch lawyer drove his car from his suburban home to the edge of Amsterdam and parked. He took out a collapsible bicycle, unfolded it, and fastened his briefcase and tightly rolled umbrella to the side. Then he climbed on and cycled to his office. Not an eyebrow was raised, because the lawyer was only one of many Europeans who are switching from four wheels to two for in-city travel.

Stories like these are told with such enthusiasm by experts on air pollution that one would expect to see hardly a car on the streets of London or Paris in rush hour. Of course, this is not the case. The use of the bicycle is result of the increase, rather than the decrease, of cars in Europe. Although small European cars release fewer poisonous fumes than large American models, smog is filling the European air too. Cities are so jammed with cars that officials have begun to take action “People are beginning to realize what a dangerous contraption the car is,” says a Danish professor.

Can the car then survive? Certainly no one today can imagine life without it. In America a car appears to be essential. Drivers will crawl through midtown traffic rather than give up their vehicles. Many families even own two cars.

But we cannot continue to let car fumes poison us. City dwellers are already beginning to choke in the smog. A drastic change is needed if we are to go on driving. In the hunt for a way to save the car from extinction, all sorts of extreme methods have been proposed. The increased use of electric power is by far the most promising of the ideas put forward to date. Many pollution fighters have acclaimed it. At present, electric cars obtain their power from storage batteries. Every night the battery has to be recharged in the garage. This method is awkward, particularly for long-distance driving. It has been suggested that at some time in the future booths could be set up on highways. Drivers on the road would stop every so often, put a coin in the slot, and plug the battery into an electric socket for a recharge.

In-city traffic would benefit most from electric cars. Stop-and-go driving causes far more poisonous gases to be released. An air monitor in one large city recently measured the poisonous gases coming from cars on their way home in the evening rush hour. The amounts of

hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide released were four times as great as those expelled from vehicles moving at a steady pace on the highway.

In some American cities officials are not waiting for improved electric car models. They have ordered minibuses run on the standard-storage batteries. In this way they can reduce the number of diesel buses on the streets. Diesel exhaust not only smells worse than fumes from internal combustion engines, but also has large amounts of nitrogen oxides.

Some people think that an elevated system like the monorail would help to reduce pollution. The monorail, which is also powered by electricity, is often seen at fairs and entertainment parks. Traveling over the fairgrounds on its single rail, the monorail offers an excellent view of the attractions below. One day it may offer rush-hour travelers as good a view of the city below.

But a more electric world would not prevent air pollution. If power plants are to generate enough electricity to run transportation, as well as to produce heat, light, and energy for factories and homes, the plants will have to be greatly expanded. Moreover, utilities providing power have been repeatedly named as major offenders in air pollution. Nonetheless, it would be easier to control pollution from a few large sources than from every car, bus, industry, and house.