经济学人下载:永恒的守护者-荒野的未来

Ms Marris traces the emergence of a “wilderness cult” that she believes affects efforts to restore habitats to a previous form. She argues that early American environmentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, have been misread as its champions. Although Emerson described “essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf”, he also wrote of the “perfect exhilaration” of “crossing a bare common, in snow puddles at twilight, under a clouded sky”. And when Thoreau became determined to get away from it all in 1845, he retired to Walden Pond, a mere mile-and-a-half away from the nearest village. Preserving nature, Ms Marris writes, is a relatively recent preoccupation.

马里斯女士在书中追溯了“荒野崇拜”的起源，并称正是这种崇拜激发了复原居住地的行动。她认为，拉尔夫．瓦尔多．爱默生和亨利．大卫．梭罗等早期美国环境保护论者都被误读为了荒野崇拜的信奉者。虽然爱默生曾描绘过“不受人类纷扰的自然精髓：空间、大气、河流、树叶”，他也刻画过“黄昏时分，在缀满云朵的天空下，行走于坑洼的雪地上，穿越一片荒原”的“无上欣喜”。而当1845年梭罗坚决要离世隐居时，他选择了瓦尔登湖，一个离周边最近的村落仅有一英里半的地方。马里斯女士写道，保护自然，相对而言是近代的紧急要务。

Perhaps, but it has a longer history than the author fully acknowledges. A struggle between those who would remove man from a landscape and those who think we should actively manage the environment has existed since at least the 1930s. When the first global environmental organisation was established in 1948, it was called the International Union for the Protection of Nature: the organisation renamed itself in 1956, replacing “protection” with “conservation” in its title, because its members had grasped that people play an important role in shaping the natural world.

也许保护自然这一观念的产生比作者所认识到的还要早。早在上世纪三十年代或者更早时，就有人争辩应该对风景区进行隔离保护还是采取积极措施规划保护这个问题。1948年全球第一个环境组织成立了，当时名为国际自然保卫联盟（International Union for the Protection of Nature），1956年该组织更名，将名字中的“保卫”替换成了“保护”，因为联盟成员领会到了人类在自然世界的发展中所扮演角色的重要性。

Ms Marris’s book is an insightful analysis of the thinking that informs nature conservation. The author outlines the concepts of “re-wilding” habitats by introducing species that have been lost, of the “assisted migration” carried out by foresters who prepare for climate change by planting trees at the current limits of their ranges (and, indeed, the gardeners who transplant cuttings and seedlings from one part of the planet to another). She describes how ecosystems can be designed: nesting birds can be encouraged to breed on a site by manipulating it to suit them, for example. And nature can flourish in areas that are not wild, such as city roof-gardens.

马里斯这本著作为保护自然背后的思考提供了一份卓有见地的分析。作者通过介绍那些已经灭绝的物种引出了“原始化”栖息地的观念，还提到了“辅助性迁移”的观念，比如林务员为应对气候变化栽种树木以促进当地林木多样性（当然，还有园艺家们做出的努力，他们通过扦插移植和幼苗移植将一处的植物带向地球另一端的某处）。她还描述了设计生态系统的方法：比如改造一块地方的环境，使之能吸引筑巢的鸟儿在那里孵化幼鸟。还有，非原生态的环境中也可以充满勃勃生机，比如城市里的屋顶花园。

There are many reasons to value the natural world. Some people want to prevent certain species from becoming extinct, others to ensure the diversity of an ecosystem, to make use of clean air and water or to revel in the beauty of a landscape. Happily for both mankind and the natural world, Ms Marris concludes, many such causes can be aligned.

珍惜自然环境的动因有很多。有些人是为了防止某个物种灭亡，还有些人是为了确保生态系统的多样性，或者为了能呼吸到清洁空气，喝到清洁水，抑或是为了充分享受自然美景。马里斯女士总结道，令人高兴的是，不管是对人类还是对自然环境，许多此类的动因是殊途同归的。