美文欣賞-No More Silent Spring

Rachel Carson was a scientist and a bird watcher. She noticed, in the late '50s, the gradual disappearance of some birds, and linked it to our use of 1)pesticides. She wrote a book about her fear that 2)robins would sing no more in future spring times. She called it Silent Spring. With that revolutionary book, Rachel Carson launched the environmental movement, a force that has swept the world.

Rachel: Humans have now acquired a fateful power to 3)alter and to destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

Journalist: What do you think, just in an 4)overview, the effect that this woman’s work has had on this country, and the world?

Interviewee: Her work helped to produce the first Earth Day.

TV: Earth Day - we can see what we all have in common: our planet!

Interviewee: The clean water act, the clean air act, the super fund, some of these were indirect results, but all of them 5)stemmed from the new awareness that was born as a result of Silent Spring’s publication.

In that century’s end, environmental challenges round the world make Carson’s words all the more timely: rain forest in danger, animal species dying up, people 6)choking on pollution, from Eastern Europe to China.

Rachel: We’re challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our 7)maturity and our 8)mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.

Rachel Carson died of cancer in 1964. There’s a wildlife preserve, named for her, in Maine, and her publishers still get occasional letters from people who just read Silent Spring.

1、pesticide n. 殺蟲劑，農(nóng)藥

2、robin n. 知更鳥

3、alter v. 改變

4、overview n. 總體印象，總體看法

5、stem v. 起源，發(fā)生

6、choke v. 嗆，噎

7、maturity n. 成熟

8、mastery n. 優(yōu)勢，精通