2024年4月2日发(作者：)

ships in the desert课文翻译

Unit 3 - Ships In The Desert

Ships In The Desert

I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship

capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn't a

good day.

We were anchored in what used to be the most productive

fishing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow,

the prospects of a good catch looked bleak.

Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves

lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry

sand-as far as I could see in all directions.

The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand,

scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon.

Ten years ago the Aral was the fourth largest inland sea in the

world, comparable to the largest of North America's Great Lakes.

Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it

has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow

cotton in the desert.

The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across, the

sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked.

Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were

still canning fish -brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail

through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles

away.

My search for the underlying causes of the environmental

crisis has led me to travel around the world to examine and study

many of these images of destruction.

At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic

Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the

sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist

in the late fall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through

time.

Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was

cracked and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core

sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing.

He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago.

"Here's where the U.S. Congress passed the Clean Air Act," he said.

At the bottom of the world, two continents away from

Washington, D. C., even a small reduction in one country's

emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the

remotest and least accessible place on earth.