国外英文文学作品 寂静的春天-英文版.doc

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1、国外英文文学作品 寂静的春天-英文版SILENT SPRINGBy RACHEL CARSON(ONE SINGLE BOOK WHICH BROUGHT THE ISSUE OF PESTICIDES CENTERSTAGE. WITH MASS SCALE POISONING OF THE LAND WITH PESTICIDES AND WITH THOUSANDS OF FARMERS COMMITTING SUICIDE. THIS BOOK IS ESSENTIAL FOR PUBLIC RESEARCH IN INDIA.) ContentsAcknowledgments ix

2、Foreword xi1 A Fable for Tomorrow 1 2 The Obligation to Endure 5 3 Elixirs of Death 15 4 Surface Waters and Underground Seas 39 5 Realms of the Soil 53 6 Earths Green Mantle 63 7 Needless Havoc 858 And No Birds Sing 103 9 Rivers of Death 129 10 Indiscriminately from the Skies 154 11 Beyond the Dream

3、s of the Borgias 173 12 The Human Price 187 13 Through a Narrow Window 199 14 One in Every Four 219 15 Nature Fights Back 245 16 The Rumblings of an Avalanche 262 17 The Other Road 277 List of Principal Sources 301 Index 357 Acknowledgments IN A LETTER written in January 1958, Olga Owens Huckins tol

4、d me of her own bitter experience of a small world made lifeless, and so brought my attention sharply back to a problem with which I had long been concerned. I then realized I must write this book. During the years since then I have received help and encouragement from so many people that it is not

5、possible to name them all here. Those who have freely shared with me the fruits of many years experience and study represent a wide variety of government agencies in this and other countries, many universities and research institutions, and many professions. To all of them I express my deepest thank

6、s for time and thought so generously given. In addition my special gratitude goes to those who took time to read portions of the manuscript and to offer comment and criticism based on their own expert knowledge. Although the final responsibility for the accuracy and validity of the text is mine, I c

7、ould not have completed the book without the generous help of these specialists: L. G. Bartholomew, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, John J. Biesele of the University of Texas, A. W. A. Brown of the University of Western Ontario, Morton S. Biskind, M.D., of Westport, Connecticut, C. J. Briejer of the Plant

8、 Protection Service in Holland, Clarence Cottam of the Rob and Bessie Welder Wildlife Foundation, George Crile, Jr., M.D., of the Cleveland Clinic, Frank Egler of Norfolk, Connecticut, Malcolm M. Hargraves, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic, W. C. Hueper, M.D., of the National Cancer Institute, C. J. Kerswil

9、l of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada, Olaus Murie of the Wilderness Society, A. D. Pickett of the Canada Department of Agriculture, Thomas G. Scott of the Illinois Natural History Survey, Clarence Tarzwell of the Taft Sanitary Engineering Center, and George J. Wallace of Michigan State Univer

10、sity. Every writer of a book based on many diverse facts owes much to the skill and helpfulness of librarians. I owe such a debt to many, but especially to Ida K. Johnston of the Department of the Interior Library and to Thelma Robinson of the Library of the National Institutes of Health. As my edit

11、or, Paul Brooks has given steadfast encouragement over the years and has cheerfully accommodated his plans to postponements and delays. For this, and for his skilled editorial judgment, I am everlastingly grateful. I have had capable and devoted assistance in the enormous task of library research fr

12、om Dorothy Algire, Jeanne Davis, and Bette Haney Duff. And I could not possibly have completed the task, under circumstances sometimes difficult, except for the faithful help of my housekeeper, Ida Sprow. Finally, I must acknowledge our vast indebtedness to a host of people, many of them unknown to

13、me personally, who have nevertheless made the writing of this book seem worthwhile. These are the people who first spoke out against the reckless and irresponsible poisoning of the world that man shares with all other creatures, and who are even now fighting the thousands of small battles that in th

14、e end will bring victory for sanity and common sense in our accommodation to the world that surrounds us. Foreword IN 1958, when Rachel Carson undertook to write the book that became Silent Spring, she was fifty years old. She had spent most of her professional life as a marine biologist卡森：海洋生物学家，写此

15、书时50岁，功成名就 and writer with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But now she was a world-famous author, thanks to the fabulous success of The Sea Around Us, published seven years before. Royalties from this book and its successor, The Edge of the Sea, had enabled her to devote full time to her own wri

16、ting. To most authors this would seem like an ideal situation: an established reputation, freedom to choose ones own subject, publishers more than ready to contract for anything one wrote. It might have been assumed that her next book would be in a field that offered the same opportunities, the same

17、 joy in research, as did its predecessors. Indeed she had such projects in mind. But it was not to be. While working for the government, she and her scientific colleagues had become alarmed by the widespread use of DDT and other long-lasting poisons in so-called agricultural control programs. Immedi

18、ately after the war, when these dangers had already been recognized, she had tried in vain to interest some magazine in an article on the subject. A decade later, when the spraying of pesticides and herbicides (some of them many times as toxicpoisonous as DDT) was causing wholesale destruction of wi

19、ldlife and its habitat, and clearly endangering human life, she decided she had to speak out. Again she tried to interest the magazines in an article. Though by now she was a well-known writer, the magazine publishers, fearing to lose advertising, turned her down. For example, a manufacturer of cann

20、ed baby food claimed that such an article would cause “unwarranted无根据的，无保证的 fear” to mothers who used his product. (The one exception was The New Yorker, which would later serialize parts of Silent Spring in advance of book publication.) So the only answer was to write a bookbook publishers being fr

21、ee of advertising pressure. Miss Carson tried to find someone else to write it, but at last she decided that if it were to be done, she would have to do it herself. Many of her strongest admirers questioned whether she could write a salable book on such a dreary subject. She shared their doubts, but

22、 she went ahead because she had to. “There would be no peace for me,” she wrote to a friend, “if I kept silent.” Silent Spring was over four years in the making. It required a very different kind of research from her previous books. She could no longer recount the delights of the laboratories at Woo

23、ds Hole or of the marine rock pools at low tide. Joy in the subject itself had to be replaced by a sense of almost religious dedication. And extraordinary courage: during the final years she was plagued with what she termed “a whole catalogue of illnesses.” Also she knew very well that she would be

24、attacked by the chemical industry. It was not simply that she was opposing indiscriminate use of poisons butmore fundamentallythat she had made clear the basic irresponsibility of an industrialized, technological society toward the natural world. When the attack did come, it was probably as bitter a

25、nd unscrupulous肆无忌惮的，寡廉鲜耻的，不讲道德的 as anything of the sort since the publication of Charles Darwins Origin of Species a century before. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent by the chemical industry in an attempt to discredit the book and to malignVt. 诽谤，中伤 the authorshe was described as an igno

26、rant and hysterical woman who wanted to turn the earth over to the insects. These attacks fortunately backfirevi.产生与意料相反的结构d by creating more publicity than the publisher possibly could have afforded. A major chemical company tried to stop publication on the grounds that Miss Carson had made a misst

27、atement about one of their products. She hadnt, and publication proceeded on schedule. She herself was singularly unmoved by all this furor狂热；激怒. Meanwhile, as a direct result of the message in Silent Spring, President Kennedy set up a special panel of his Science Advisory Committee to study the pro

28、blem of pesticides. The panels report, when it appeared some months later, was a complete vindicationn辩护，证明无罪 of her thesis. Rachel Carson was very modest about her accomplishment. As she wrote to a close friend when the manuscript was nearing completion: “The beauty of the living world I was trying

29、 to save has always been uppermost in my mindthat, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done. Now l can believe I have at least helped a little.” In fact, her book helped to make ecology, which was an unfamiliar word in those days, one of the great popular causes of our time. I

30、t led to environmental此书的影响力 legislation at every level of government. Twenty-five years after its original publication, Silent Spring has more than a historical interest. Such a book bridges the gulf between what C. P. Snow called “the two cultures.” Rachel Carson was a realistic, well-trained scie

31、ntist who possessed the insight and sensitivity of a poet. She had an emotional response to nature for which she did not apologize. The more she learned, the greater grew what she termed “the sense of wonder.” So she succeeded in making a book about death a celebration of life. Rereading her book to

32、day, one is aware that its implications are far broader than the immediate crisis with which it dealt. By awaking us to a specific dangerthe poisoning of the earth with chemicalsshe has helped us to recognize many other ways (some little known in her time) in which mankind is degrading the quality o

33、f life on our planet. And Silent Spring will continue to remind us that in our overorganized and overmechanized age, individual initiative and courage still count: change can be brought about, not through incitement煽动，刺激 to war or violent revolution, but rather by altering the direction of our think

34、ing about the world we live in. 1. A Fable for TomorrowTHERE WAS ONCE a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of像棋盘般排列整齐的 prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spri

35、ng, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple（枫树） and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdropBackground of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings.

36、 Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the travelers eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The co

37、untryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall, people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shad

38、y pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blightn.枯萎病，荒芜 vt.破坏，使荒芜 v. 荒芜 crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: m

39、ysterious maladiesdiseases swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients.

40、 There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for examplewhere had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. T

41、he feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund垂死的，停滞不前的; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, 知更鸟，猫鹊，鸽子，樫鸟、鹪鹩and s

42、cores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigsthe littern.一窝（动物幼崽）s were small and the young survived only a few days. The ap

43、ple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination授粉作用 and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things.

44、 Even the streams were now lifeless. Angler钓鱼者s no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters（排水沟） under the eaves（屋檐） and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular（颗粒状的） powder still showed a few patches; Some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the

45、 lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves. This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. I know of no commun

46、ity that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe. Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. A grim specter 幽灵，妖怪，恐怖之物has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily b

47、ecome a stark reality we all shall know. What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America? This book is an attempt to explain.2. The Obligation to EndureTHE HISTORY OF LIFE on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large

48、 extent, the physical form and the habits of the earths 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 re

49、presented by the present century has one speciesmanacquired significant power to alter the nature of his world. 环境决定动植物。只有到了近代，人类的出现极大地改变了这一现象。During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude人类是地球的破坏者。对空气，大地，河流，海洋的污染使得整个生物链都深受其害，包括人类自己。而这种伤害大都是无法补救的。 but it has changed in character. The most alarming of a