Call for a climate culture shift 哈工大

哈工大研究生英语课文翻译

Call for a climate culture shift

1、In the fight against climate change, humans will need to do more than switch to energy-efficient light bulbs and buy `green' goods. As environmental scientist David Orr points out in Down to the Wire, what is needed is a radical shift in culture that alters our priorities. The question is whether that task, which seems impossible, can be made to happen. Orr's book,along with recent research and social initiatives, give hope that it can.

2、There is a growing scientific consensus that humanity is rapidly approaching a global climate catastrophe. Although we have increasing knowledge of the dangers and costs ahead there is little time to avert a disaster. Orr acknowledges these dire circumstances, but does not wallow in despair or defeatism. His book is a clear-sighted view of what we need to change now.

3、He describes three essential categories of radical change, in increasing order of difficulty. The first and most easily achievable is a redesign of the infrastructure for producing food, energy, water and other commodities so that it is powered by renewable sources.Second is an overhaul of education systems to develop ecological literacy and encourage creative, real-world problem solving. The third is to reform our political systems from the current corporate plutocracies to true democracier with real leaders.

4、We live, as Orr says, "amid the ruins of failed‘-isms"'.Both communism and capitalism have pursued policies of `growth at all costs' that has failed to account adequately for the value of natural and social capital assets, such as a stable climate, functioning ecosysterms and successful human communities. An alternative solution is needed to formulate a fundamentally different set of economic goals for society. Orr prescribes three such goals "that presently appear to be utterly impossible': First, he advocates a change in priority:instead of economic growth, we should switch to development that genuinely improves the quality of life for everyone. Second, consumer culture should be focused on needs, not wants; and third-hardest of all-we should summon "the compassion and wisdom to fairly distribute wealth, opportunity and risk.”

5、These goals and the policies to achieve them have long been on social and political agendas.Why have things not changed, and how can they be made to change? Orr addresses this adroitly, showing that human nature is flexible and that rapid cultural shifts have happened before. In the United States after the Second World War, for example, the culture changed to allow new social and taxation policies that created the middle class. The rapid fall of the Soviet Union resulted from the slow build一up of social problems until a tipping point was reached. It may only be a matter of time before people who share the goals of quality of life, fairness and sufficiency begin to outweigh those whose world view is locked into growth at all costs.

6、Some evidence that such attitudes are on the rise comes from the work of sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson,who have surveyed and categorized world views in the United States over the past four decades. Tn their book The Cultural Creatives (Crown Publishing; 2000), they break the US population into three groups: `traditionals; who include the religious right and others who hark back to the past; `moderns;who are the current dominant group and include the `growth at all costs' type; and `cultural creatives; including those with the values and goals that Orr promotes. The percentage of cultural creatives in the United States increased from almost nothing in the 1960s to 25%饰the year 2000, and is now close to 30% by some estimates. A political tipping point will occur when this percentage is large enough to begin to radically change the political dynamics of the country and, by extension, the world.

7、As Orr points out, many varied initiatives are already pressing towards a cultural

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