I'm an ecologist, mostly a coral reef ecologist. I started out in Chesapeake Bay and went diving in the winter and became a tropical ecologist overnight. And it was really a lot of fun for about 10 years. I mean, somebody pays you to go around and travel and look at some of the most beautiful places on the planet. And that was what I did.
我是一名生态学家, 主要是珊瑚礁生态学家。 我的研究工作起步于Chesapeake海湾 我冬天出去潜水 一夜之间成为一名热带生态学家 这项工作充满了乐趣 前后大约十年 我是说,有人付钱 让你四处旅行 欣赏地球上 风景最美的地方 那就是我的工作。
And I ended up in Jamaica, in the West Indies, where the coral reefs were really among the most extraordinary, structurally, that I ever saw in my life. And this picture here, it's really interesting, it shows two things: First of all, it's in black and white because the water was so clear and you could see so far, and film was so slow in the 1960s and early 70s, you took pictures in black and white. The other thing it shows you is that, although there's this beautiful forest of coral, there are no fish in that picture.
最后我到了牙买加 在西印度群岛 那儿的珊瑚礁的确是 结构上最为奇特的 为我平生所罕见 这张照片 很有意思,它显示了两点。 首先,它是黑白的 因为水是如此清澈 你可以看得很远 曝光很慢 那是六十年代和七十年代早期 照片都是黑白的 它显示的另外一点 纵然有这些 美丽的珊瑚丛 照片上却看不到鱼
Those reefs at Discovery Bay, Jamaica were the most studied coral reefs in the world for 20 years. We were the best and the brightest. People came to study our reefs from Australia, which is sort of funny because now we go to theirs. And the view of scientists about how coral reefs work, how they ought to be, was based on these reefs without any fish. Then, in 1980, there was a hurricane, Hurricane Allen. I put half the lab up in my house. The wind blew very strong. The waves were 25 to 50 feet high. And the reefs disappeared, and new islands formed, and we thought, "Well, we're real smart. We know that hurricanes have always happened in the past." And we published a paper in Science, the first time that anybody ever described the destruction on a coral reef by a major hurricane. And we predicted what would happen, and we got it all wrong. And the reason was because of overfishing, and the fact that a last common grazer, a sea urchin, died. And within a few months after that sea urchin dying, the seaweed started to grow. And that is the same reef; that's the same reef 15 years ago; that's the same reef today. The coral reefs of the north coast of Jamaica have a few percent live coral cover and a lot of seaweed and slime. And that's more or less the story of the coral reefs of the Caribbean, and increasingly, tragically, the coral reefs worldwide.
牙买加 Discovery湾的那些珊瑚礁 是全球过去的20年中 最受研究者关注的珊瑚礁 当时我们是最优秀最杰出的 曾经有人从澳大利亚跑来研究我们的珊瑚礁 这多少有些滑稽 因为现在我们跑去研究他们的珊瑚礁 科学家们关于 珊瑚礁的正常生长状态的观点 都建立在这些 不存在鱼类的珊瑚礁上 然后,到了1980年 一场飓风袭来,飓风Allen 我把半个实验室 搬到了我家里 狂风大作 海浪高达25 到50英尺 珊瑚礁消失了,新的岛屿形成了 我们想,“哦,我们真是太聪明了。 我们知道飓风 历来都在发生。” 我们在《科学》杂志发表了一篇论文 那是第一次有人 描述珊瑚礁 被一场大飓风毁灭的情景 我们对未来作出了预测 结果我们全盘皆错 原因就是 过度捕捞 还有就是最后一个食藻生物 海胆死了 海胆死后几个月之内 海藻就开始生长 那是同一个珊瑚礁 15年前的那个珊瑚礁 这是今天的同一个珊瑚礁 牙买加北海岸的珊瑚礁 还剩下百分之几的活珊瑚覆盖率 和大量的海藻及烂泥 这大致就是 加勒比海珊瑚礁的故事 并悲剧性地日益成为 全球珊瑚礁共同的命运
Now, that's my little, depressing story. All of us in our 60s and 70s have comparable depressing stories. There are tens of thousands of those stories out there, and it's really hard to conjure up much of a sense of well-being, because it just keeps getting worse. And the reason it keeps getting worse is that after a natural catastrophe, like a hurricane, it used to be that there was some kind of successional sequence of recovery, but what's going on now is that overfishing and pollution and climate change are all interacting in a way that prevents that. And so I'm going to sort of go through and talk about those three kinds of things.
这就是我悲伤的小故事 我们所有的人在六七十年代 都有类似悲伤的故事 成千上万个 这样的故事在流传着 让人很难唤起 任何乐观的情绪 因为情况在日益恶化 日益恶化的原因是 在自然灾害过后 例如一场飓风 以前通常会有 一连串的恢复过程 但现在的情况是 过度捕捞、污染和气候变化 彼此相互作用 阻止这一过程的发生 因此我想梳理 并谈论一下 这三件事情
We hear a lot about the collapse of cod. It's difficult to imagine that two, or some historians would say three world wars were fought during the colonial era for the control of cod. Cod fed most of the people of Western Europe. It fed the slaves brought to the Antilles, the song "Jamaica Farewell" -- "Ackee rice salt fish are nice" -- is an emblem of the importance of salt cod from northeastern Canada. It all collapsed in the 80s and the 90s: 35,000 people lost their jobs. And that was the beginning of a kind of serial depletion from bigger and tastier species to smaller and not-so-tasty species, from species that were near to home to species that were all around the world, and what have you. It's a little hard to understand that, because you can go to a Costco in the United States and buy cheap fish. You ought to read the label to find out where it came from, but it's still cheap, and everybody thinks it's okay.
我们经常听到关于 鳕鱼的灭绝 我们很难想象 两次,有些历史学家说三次 殖民时期的世界大战都是为了 争夺对鳕鱼的控制 鳕鱼养活了大部分西欧人 也养活了 被遣送到安地列斯群岛上的奴隶 有首歌叫“告别牙买加” "阿开果饭和咸鳕鱼很美味” 表明了来自加拿大东北部的 咸鳕鱼的重要性 这一切都在八十和九十年代土崩瓦解 35000人丢掉了工作 那仅仅是 一系列枯竭的开始 从味道鲜美的大型种类 到味道一般的小型种类 从家门口的种类 到全球各地的种类 你还剩下什么。 这可能不容易理解 因为你们可以在美国的Costco 买到便宜的鱼 你们应该阅读一下标签看它来自何处 但鱼还是很便宜 所有人都觉得没事
It's hard to communicate this, and one way that I think is really interesting is to talk about sport fish, because people like to go out and catch fish. It's one of those things. This picture here shows the trophy fish, the biggest fish caught by people who pay a lot of money to get on a boat, go to a place off of Key West in Florida, drink a lot of beer, throw a lot of hooks and lines into the water, come back with the biggest and the best fish, and the champion trophy fish are put on this board, where people take a picture, and this guy is obviously really excited about that fish. Well, that's what it's like now, but this is what it was like in the 1950s from the same boat in the same place on the same board on the same dock. The trophy fish were so big that you couldn't put any of those small fish up on it. And the average size trophy fish weighed 250 to 300 pounds, goliath grouper, and if you wanted to go out and kill something, you could pretty much count on being able to catch one of those fish. And they tasted really good. And people paid less in 1950 dollars to catch that than what people pay now to catch those little, tiny fish. And that's everywhere.
这个信息很难传达 因此我认为一种有趣的方式是 讨论一下垂钓运动 因为人们喜欢出去钓鱼 就像这个 照片上显示的是获胜的鱼 人们钓到的最大的鱼 有人花了很多钱 开着船 来到福罗里达州 Key West 附近的一个地方 喝很多啤酒 往水里扔一大堆鱼钩和鱼线 结果钓到了最大最好的鱼 获奖的这条冠军鱼 就被摆到船上, 让人拍照 显然这个家伙 对那条鱼激动万分 好了,那就是眼下的情景 但这个是五十年代的情景 同样的船同样的地方 同一个码头同一个船舷 获胜的鱼 是那么大 那些小鱼根本没法比。 获胜的鱼的平均重量 在250到300磅之间,巨型鲈鱼 你如果想外出捕捞点什么 你几乎肯定可以 捕到一条那样的鱼 而且味道极其鲜美 人们在1950年捕捞大鱼 所花的钱 比现在抓小鱼 所花的钱还少 到处都是如此
It's not just the fish, though, that are disappearing. Industrial fishing uses big stuff, big machinery. We use nets that are 20 miles long. We use longlines that have one million or two million hooks. And we trawl, which means to take something the size of a tractor trailer truck that weighs thousands and thousands of pounds, put it on a big chain, and drag it across the sea floor to stir up the bottom and catch the fish. Think of it as being kind of the bulldozing of a city or of a forest, because it clears it away. And the habitat destruction is unbelievable. This is a photograph, a typical photograph, of what the continental shelves of the world look like. You can see the rows in the bottom, the way you can see the rows in a field that has just been plowed to plant corn. What that was, was a forest of sponges and coral, which is a critical habitat for the development of fish. What it is now is mud, and the area of the ocean floor that has been transformed from forest to level mud, to parking lot, is equivalent to the entire area of all the forests that have ever been cut down on all of the earth in the history of humanity. We've managed to do that in the last 100 to 150 years.
不仅仅是鱼类 正在消失 工业化捕捞用的是大家伙 大机器 我们使用20英里长的渔网 极长的鱼线 带有100万到200万个鱼钩 我们使用拖网 那就是说使用一个 牵引式挂车那么大的东西 重达几千磅 挂上巨大的链子 从海底横扫而过 翻起海床来捕捉鱼类 可以把这想象成 推倒一座城市 或者一个森林 因为一切被一扫而光 那种栖息地的灭绝 简直令人难以置信 这是一张照片 一张典型的照片 显示了全球 大陆架的状况 你们可以看到底部的条纹 就好象你们能看到 刚被犁过的 玉米地 那里曾经是海绵和珊瑚丛 那是鱼类生长 至关重要的栖息地 现在却成了泥土 全球海底 从丛林变为 停车场式泥地的海域 相当于 人类历史上 被砍伐的 全球的 所有森林的面积。 这一点我们是在 过去100到150年间完成的
We tend to think of oil spills and mercury and we hear a lot about plastic these days. And all of that stuff is really disgusting, but what's really insidious is the biological pollution that happens because of the magnitude of the shifts that it causes to entire ecosystems. And I'm going to just talk very briefly about two kinds of biological pollution: one is introduced species and the other is what comes from nutrients. So this is the infamous Caulerpa taxifolia, the so-called killer algae. A book was written about it. It's a bit of an embarrassment. It was accidentally released from the aquarium in Monaco, it was bred to be cold tolerant to have in peoples aquaria. It's very pretty, and it has rapidly started to overgrow the once very rich biodiversity of the northwestern Mediterranean. I don't know how many of you remember the movie "The Little Shop of Horrors," but this is the plant of "The Little Shop of Horrors." But, instead of devouring the people in the shop, what it's doing is overgrowing and smothering virtually all of the bottom-dwelling life of the entire northwestern Mediterranean Sea. We don't know anything that eats it, we're trying to do all sorts of genetics and figure out something that could be done, but, as it stands, it's the monster from hell, about which nobody knows what to do.
我们总是想到石油泄漏 或者水银 现在人们也经常谈论塑料制品 所有这些都很可恨 但真正隐伏的危险 是生物污染 来源于它对 整个生态系统造成的 巨大的变迁 我只想简要地讨论 两种生物污染 一是入侵物种 另外一个来源于营养素 这就是臭名昭著的 杉叶蕨藻 所谓的致命海藻 有整整一本书写的就是这个 实在是令人尴尬 它在偶然之间 被从摩纳哥的一个水族馆释放出来 它耐寒性强 用于装点水族馆 非常漂亮 它开始迅速地 过度生长 侵占了一度 生物种类繁多的 地中海西北部 我不知道你们中间有多少人记得这部电影 "异形奇花” 这就是"异形奇花”中的植物 它没有吞噬小店里的人们 而是疯狂生长 扼杀了 几乎所有的海底生物 遍及整个 地中海西北部 我们还未发现能够消灭它的东西 我们在尝试各种基因工程 来寻找解决办法 但是,就目前来说,它就是来自地狱的恶魔 人们对它无能为力
Now another form of pollution that's biological pollution is what happens from excess nutrients. The green revolution, all of this artificial nitrogen fertilizer, we use too much of it. It's subsidized, which is one of the reasons we used too much of it. It runs down the rivers, and it feeds the plankton, the little microscopic plant cells in the coastal water. But since we ate all the oysters and we ate all the fish that would eat the plankton, there's nothing to eat the plankton and there's more and more of it, so it dies of old age, which is unheard of for plankton. And when it dies, it falls to the bottom and then it rots, which means that bacteria break it down. And in the process they use up all the oxygen, and in using up all the oxygen they make the environment utterly lethal for anything that can't swim away. So, what we end up with is a microbial zoo dominated by bacteria and jellyfish, as you see on the left in front of you. And the only fishery left -- and it is a commercial fishery -- is the jellyfish fishery you see on the right, where there used to be prawns. Even in Newfoundland where we used to catch cod, we now have a jellyfish fishery.
现在我们来看另一种污染 生物污染 来源于过量的营养素 绿色革命 让我们过度使用人工氮肥 政府补助,是我们过度使用的原因之一 它沿河流而下 被浮游生物吸食 就是那些极小的植物细胞 生长于沿海水域 但是由于我们吃光了所有的牡蛎 和所有吞食这些浮游生物的鱼类 没有生物再去吞食这些浮游生物 所以它们越长越多 直到自然死亡 对浮游生物来说这是前所未有的 死亡后它沉入水底 然后腐烂 这就意味着细菌会将它分解 在此过程中 它们耗尽了所有的氧气 在所有的氧气被耗尽之后 就给任何无法游走的生物 造成一个完全致命的环境 最后我们所得到的 就是一个微生物动物园 被细菌所控制 还有水母,你们看 在你们的左前方 仅存的一个渔场 商业渔场 是个水母渔场 再看你们的右边,曾经有过对虾 甚至在纽芬兰岛 我们曾经捕捞鳕鱼的地方 现在也有一个水母渔场
And another version of this sort of thing is what is often called red tides or toxic blooms. That picture on the left is just staggering to me. I have talked about it a million times, but it's unbelievable. In the upper right of that picture on the left is almost the Mississippi Delta, and the lower left of that picture is the Texas-Mexico border. You're looking at the entire northwestern Gulf of Mexico; you're looking at one toxic dinoflagellate bloom that can kill fish, made by that beautiful little creature on the lower right. And in the upper right you see this black sort of cloud moving ashore. That's the same species. And as it comes to shore and the wind blows, and little droplets of the water get into the air, the emergency rooms of all the hospitals fill up with people with acute respiratory distress. And that's retirement homes on the west coast of Florida. A friend and I did this thing in Hollywood we called Hollywood ocean night, and I was trying to figure out how to explain to actors what's going on. And I said, "So, imagine you're in a movie called 'Escape from Malibu' because all the beautiful people have moved to North Dakota, where it's clean and safe. And the only people who are left there are the people who can't afford to move away from the coast, because the coast, instead of being paradise, is harmful to your health."
这类状况的另一个翻版 就是我们经常所说的红潮 即有毒水华 这张照片简直触目惊心 我已经谈论过无数次了 但它还是令人难以置信 在左边那张照片的右上角 是密西西比三角洲 那张照片的左下角 是德克萨斯和墨西哥交界处 你们所看到的是整个 墨西哥湾西北部 你们所看到的是一个有毒的 可以杀死鱼类的腰鞭毛虫水华 就是那些漂亮的小生物 在右下角 在右上角你们可以看到 黑色的云团 向岸边移动 那是同样的生物 当它飘到岸边,风开始刮起 小水珠进入空气 所有医院的急症室就挤满了 急性呼吸窘迫症患者 那是老人院 在佛罗里达西海岸 我和一个朋友在好莱坞演讲 我们称之为好莱坞海洋之夜 我在琢磨着怎样 向演员们解释目前的状况 我说, “好的,想象你身处一部叫做‘逃离马里布海滩’的电影 因为所有的俊男美女都 搬到了干净安全的北达科它州 这儿剩下的 都是那些没钱 搬离海边的人 因为海边不再是天堂 而会摧毁你的健康。”
And then this is amazing. It was when I was on holiday last early autumn in France. This is from the coast of Brittany, which is being enveloped in this green, algal slime. The reason that it attracted so much attention, besides the fact that it's disgusting, is that sea birds flying over it are asphyxiated by the smell and die, and a farmer died of it, and you can imagine the scandal that happened. And so there's this war between the farmers and the fishermen about it all, and the net result is that the beaches of Brittany have to be bulldozed of this stuff on a regular basis.
这又是触目惊心。 这是我去年初秋在法国度假时拍的 这是布里特尼海岸 被覆盖在 一片绿色海藻泥下 它之所以引起这么多关注的原因 除了它确实极其恶心之外 也是因为海鸟飞过时 因臭味窒息而亡 有一个农民也这样死去, 你们可以想象有此而滋生的丑闻 一场战争 在农民 和渔夫之间爆发 最后的结果是 布里特尼海滩必须定期地 铲除这些东西
And then, of course, there's climate change, and we all know about climate change. I guess the iconic figure of it is the melting of the ice in the Arctic Sea. Think about the thousands and thousands of people who died trying to find the Northwest Passage. Well, the Northwest Passage is already there. I think it's sort of funny; it's on the Siberian coast, maybe the Russians will charge tolls. The governments of the world are taking this really seriously. The military of the Arctic nations is taking it really seriously. For all the denial of climate change by government leaders, the CIA and the navies of Norway and the U.S. and Canada, whatever are busily thinking about how they will secure their territory in this inevitability from their point of view. And, of course, Arctic communities are toast.
当然还有气候变化 我们都知道气候变化 我想最具标志性的形象就是 就是北极海域 冰层的融化 想想那成千上万个 为寻找西北航道而死去的人们 现在西北航道就在那里 我觉得这有点滑稽 它地处西伯利亚海岸 也许俄国政府应当征收过路费 全世界的政府 都在严肃对待这件事情 北极附近国家的军队 都在严肃对待这件事情 不管各国领导人 如何否认气候变化 美国中情局 挪威海军 美国和加拿大的海军,等等 都在忙着考虑 如何从他们的角度 在这个无法避免的情势下 守住自己的地盘 当然,北极群落就完蛋了
The other kinds of effects of climate change -- this is coral bleaching. It's a beautiful picture, right? All that white coral. Except it's supposed to be brown. What happens is that the corals are a symbiosis, and they have these little algal cells that live inside them. And the algae give the corals sugar, and the corals give the algae nutrients and protection. But when it gets too hot, the algae can't make the sugar. The corals say, "You cheated. You didn't pay your rent." They kick them out, and then they die. Not all of them die; some of them survive, some more are surviving, but it's really bad news. To try and give you a sense of this, imagine you go camping in July somewhere in Europe or in North America, and you wake up the next morning, and you look around you, and you see that 80 percent of the trees, as far as you can see, have dropped their leaves and are standing there naked. And you come home, and you discover that 80 percent of all the trees in North America and in Europe have dropped their leaves. And then you read in the paper a few weeks later, "Oh, by the way, a quarter of those died." Well, that's what happened in the Indian Ocean during the 1998 El Nino, an area vastly greater than the size of North America and Europe, when 80 percent of all the corals bleached and a quarter of them died.
气候变化的其它效应-- 这是珊瑚白化。右边,是一张美丽的照片 那么多白色的珊瑚 只不过它们本来应该是棕色的。 事情的来由是 珊瑚是一种共生生物 有些微小的藻类细胞 生存在其内部 藻类为珊瑚提供糖分 珊瑚为藻类提供 养分和保护 但当温度过高时 藻类就无法制造糖分 珊瑚就说,”你这个骗子,你不交房租。“ 于是就把它们赶出去,于是它们就死了。 不是所有都死;有些存活下来了。 还有更多的在存活着, 但这确实是个坏消息。 让我试着帮助你们来感知一下, 想象你七月份去露营 在欧洲或者北美的什么地方 第二天早上醒来,你环顾四周, 发现百分之八十的树 在你视线所及范围内 都已经掉光了树叶,光秃秃地立在那儿 你回到家,发现 北美和欧洲 百分之八十的树 都已经掉光了它们的叶子 然后几个星期之后你在报纸上看到 噢,顺便说一下,四分之一的树都死了。 那就是印度洋所发生的状况 在1998年厄尔尼诺现象过程中, 在一个面积大大超过 北美和欧洲的区域 百分之八十的珊瑚发生了白化 四分之一珊瑚死去。
And then the really scary thing about all of this -- the overfishing, the pollution and the climate change -- is that each thing doesn't happen in a vacuum. But there are these, what we call, positive feedbacks, the synergies among them that make the whole vastly greater than the sum of the parts. And the great scientific challenge for people like me in thinking about all this, is do we know how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? I mean, because we, at this point, we can protect it. But what does that mean? We really don't know.
然而真正可怕的事情是 所有这些 过度捕捞,污染,和气候变化 每件事都并非发生在真空里, 但是因为存在着所谓的积极反馈 它们之间的协同作用 使得整体效应远远大于 局部的总和。 最大的科学挑战 对于象我这样思考这些问题的人 就是我们是否知道如何 把摔碎的蛋形人重新修复? 我是说,因为我们现在还可以保护它。 但那意味着什么? 我们真的不知道
So what are the oceans going to be like in 20 or 50 years? Well, there won't be any fish except for minnows, and the water will be pretty dirty, and all those kinds of things and full of mercury, etc., etc. And dead zones will get bigger and bigger and they'll start to merge, and we can imagine something like the dead-zonification of the global, coastal ocean. Then you sure won't want to eat fish that were raised in it, because it would be a kind of gastronomic Russian roulette. Sometimes you have a toxic bloom; sometimes you don't. That doesn't sell.
那么在20或50年之后 海洋会是一副什么景象? 不会再有鱼 除了一些小鲦鱼, 海水会很肮脏 所有那些东西 都充斥着水银,等等,等等 死亡区域会越变越大 然后它们开始汇合 于是我们可以想象类似 全球沿海地区的 划分出死亡区域。 你肯定不会想吃那儿出产的鱼, 因为那简直就是 饮食的死亡赌博游戏 有时你会碰上有毒水华 有时又没有 那是不会有市场的
The really scary things though are the physical, chemical, oceanographic things that are happening. As the surface of the ocean gets warmer, the water is lighter when it's warmer, it becomes harder and harder to turn the ocean over. We say it becomes more strongly stratified. The consequence of that is that all those nutrients that fuel the great anchoveta fisheries, of the sardines of California or in Peru or whatever, those slow down and those fisheries collapse. And, at the same time, water from the surface, which is rich in oxygen, doesn't make it down and the ocean turns into a desert.
但是真正可怕的 是正在发生的物理的,化学的 和海洋学的变化。 当海洋表面温度升高, 海水变轻, 海洋变得越来越 不易翻转。 我们称之为 越来越严重的层化 其后果是 所有的养分 那些供给大型鳀鱼渔场, 加州沙丁渔场, 秘鲁或其它地方渔场的养分 都放慢了速度, 那些渔场就倒闭了。 同时 表面氧气充足的海水 无法下沉, 海洋就变成了沙漠。
So the question is: How are we all going to respond to this? And we can do all sorts of things to fix it, but in the final analysis, the thing we really need to fix is ourselves. It's not about the fish; it's not about the pollution; it's not about the climate change. It's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today. So the question is: Will we respond to this or not? I would say that the future of life and the dignity of human beings depends on our doing that.
因此问题是:我们应该如何 对此作出应对? 我们可以 做各种事情来进行补救, 但最终, 我们最需要补救的 是我们自己。 这不是鱼,不是污染; 也不是气候变化。 而是我们自己。 我们的贪婪和对增长的需求 以及我们无法想象 一个不同于我们今天所生活的 自私的世界。 问题在于:我们是否将对此作出应对? 我要说生命的未来 和人类的尊严 取决于我们作出回应。
Thank you. (Applause)
谢谢。