幸运的是,我们还可以采取措施减缓全球变暖的影响。全球变暖主要原因是人类活动向空气里释放了大量吸热气体和微粒。最重要的原因包括像煤炭,天然气和石油等化石燃料的燃烧,和沙漠化。我们可以通过抑制化石燃料的消费减少像二氧化碳,甲烷,氮化物等吸热气体的排放,用技术保护地球的森林。
我们也可以采取措施减缓全球气候变暖的影响,适应任何可能发生的事情。通过严密的计划其他战略布局来减少全球变暖给我们带来的侵害。
但是我们不能就此止步不前,我们应该提倡那些长久的抑制全球变暖的政策,像使用清洁能源的汽车,采用保护环境的再生能源技术,停止宝贵森林资源的砍伐。
清楚的是,全球变暖是个大问题。 我们所有人,像政府,工厂,组织和个人都会齐心协力改变现状。幸运的是,你是其中一员。
9- What Is Happiness?
The right to pursue happiness is issued to Americans with their birth certificates, but no one seems quite which way it ran. It may be we are issued a hunting license but offered no game. Jonathan Swift seemed to being well-deceived.” The felicity of being “ a fool among knaves.” For Swift say society as Vanity Fair, the land of false goals.自从呱呱坠地,美国人就被赋予了追求幸福的权利,但似乎没人确信幸福究竟在哪里。正如它发给我们狩猎证,却不给我们提供猎物。乔纳森?斯威福特似乎持此观点,他抨击幸福的想法是“鬼迷心窍的上当,”是“骗子堆中的傻瓜”的自鸣得意。因为他视社会为虚妄目标聚集的名利场。
It is, of course, un-American to think in terms of fools and knaves. We do, however, seem to be dedicated to the idea of buying our way to happiness. We shall all have made it to heaven when we possess enough.当然用傻子、骗子这样的字眼来形容是不合美国的人的风俗习惯的,然后我们似乎确实沉溺于用金钱购买幸福的想法:只要有足够的钱,我们百年后就能上天堂。
And at the same time the forces of American commercialism are hugely dedicated to making us deliberately unhappy. Advertising is one of our major industries, and advertising is one of our major industries, and advertising exists not to satisfy desires but to create them-and to create them faster than any man’s budget can satisfy them. For that matter, our whole economy is based on a dedicated insatiability. We are taught that to possess is to be happy, and then we are made to want. We are even told it is our duty to want. It was only a few years ago, to cite a single example, that
car dealers across the country were flying banners that read “You Auto Buy Now.” There were calling upon Americans, as an act approaching patriotism, to buy at once, with money they did not have. Automobiles they did not really need, and which they would be required to grow tired of by the time the next year’s models were released.同时,美国的商业主义却又殚精竟虑故意使我们得不到幸福。广告是我们的支柱产业之一,其存在不是为了满足欲望。而是为了制造欲望——其制造速度之快,使我们的腰包应接不暇。就此而言,我们的整个经济是基于一种无法自拔的贪求无厌。我们受到的教育是“占有却为幸福”,然后我们就被迫产生贪欲。我们甚至被告知欲望是我们的义务。引用一个简单的例子为证:仅仅几年前,全国的汽车销售商还打着“你应该立即购买汽车”的横幅。他们号召美国人民:作为一种爱国主义行为,他们应该立即按揭购买他们并不真正需要的汽车,并且在次年新款汽车发布后他们会对原来这些汽车心生厌倦。
Or look at any of the women’s magazines. There, as Bernard De Voto once pointed out, advertising begins as poetry in the front pages and ends as pharmacopoeia and therapy in the back page. The poetry of the front matter is the dream of perfect beauty. This is the baby skin that must be hers. These, the flawless teeth. This, the perfumed breath she must exhale. This, the sixteen-year-old figure she must display she must display at forty, at fifty, at sixty, and forever.或者任意浏览一本女性杂志。正如伯尔纳德?德?渥托 曾经指出的那样,这些杂志开头几页的广告诗情画意,而最后则以类似药典和治疗手册结尾。前者是完美美女的梦想:这该是她婴儿般的股肤,这些是她无瑕的牙齿,这该是她呼出的香气,这该是她能保持到40、50、60岁甚至永远的16岁少女般的身材。
Once past the vaguely uplifting fiction and feature articles, the reader finds the other face of the dream in the back matter. This is the harness into which Mother must strap herself in order to display that perfect figure. These, the chin straps she must sleep in. This is the slave that restores all, this is her laxative, these are the tablets that melt away fat, these are the hormones of perceptual youth, these are the stockings that hide varicose veins.一旦读完这些隐约让人振奋的小说和专题文章,读者在杂志最后几页就会发现梦想的真相:这是家庭主妇必须得系上的背带,以展现其完美身材。这些是她睡觉时必须带上的颚带。这是可以恢复青春的药剂和装备,这是她减肥用的缓泻药,这些是消化脂肪的药片,这些是使外表年轻的荷尔蒙,这些是掩盖静脉曲张的长袜。
Obviously no half-sane person can be completely persuaded either by such poetry or by such
poetry or by such pharmacopoeia and orthopedics. Yet someone is obviously trying to buy the dream as offered and spending billions every year in the attempt. Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers, but what is trying to buy? 显而易见 ,即使心智不健全的人也不会完全相信这些诗境或是这些药典和矫正术。然后有人显然正在竭力购买这些广告所兜的美梦,并为此每年耗资数十亿美元。这种幸福市场无疑不会无人问津,但他们购买的究竟是什么呢?
The idea “happiness,” to be sure, will not sit still for easy definition: the best one can do is to try to set some extremes to the idea and then work in toward the middle. To think of happiness as acquisitive and competitive will do to set the materialistic extreme. To think of it as the idea one senses in, say, a holy man of India will do to set the spiritual extreme. The holy man’s idea of happiness is in needing nothing from outside himself. In wanting nothing, he lacks nothing. He sits immobile, rapt in contemplation, free even of his own body. Or nearly free of it. If devout admirers bring him food he eats it; if not, he starves indifferently. Why be concerned? What is physical is an illusion to him. Contemplation is his joy and he achieves it through afantastically demanding discipline, the accomplishment of which is itself a joy within him.诚然,给“幸福”这一概念下定义远非易事:最好是尽量为这一概念确立一些极限,然后将两者折中。将幸福视为物质上的拥有和相互攀比,这就确立了其物质上的极限。将其视为一个人(比如印度的圣人)所感知的信念,则是确立了其精神上的极限。圣人的幸福是无需身外之物。无欲则无求。他静坐不动,陷入冥思,甚至脱离或者说近乎脱离自己的肉体。如果有虔诚的信徒带来食物,他硬听; 如果没有,他便淡然地饿着。有什么好牵挂的呢?对他而言,物质世界只是虚幻。宴想是他的极乐,而他通过修行来实现。这种修行要求之高,让人难以置信,其完成本身就是他内心的一种极乐。
But, perhaps because I am Western, I doubt such catatonic happiness, as I doubt the dreams of the happiness-market. What is certain is that his way of happiness would be torture to almost any Western man. Yet these extremes will still serve to frame the area within all of us and must find some sort of balance. Thoreau-a creature of both Eastern and Western thought-had his own firm sense of that balance. His aim was to save on the low levels in order to spend on the high.然而,或许因为我是西方人,我对这种令人精神紧张的幸福持怀疑态度,正如我怀疑幸福市场的梦幻一样。可以确信,他这种幸福方式对几乎任何一个西方人而言都是一种折磨。尽管如此,我们仍然可以利用这些极限来划定幸福的范畴,在这一范畴内每个人都得找到某种平衡。
梭罗,一个东西思想交融的人物,对这种平衡有他自己的坚定信念。他的目标是在低层次节约,在高层次上付出。
Possession for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighborhood would have been Thoreau’s idea of the low levels. The active discipline of heightening one’s perception of what is enduring in nature would have been his idea of the high, What he saved from the low was time and effort he could spend on the high. Thoreau certainly disapproved of starvation, but he would put into feeding himself only as much effort as would keep him functioning for more important efforts. 梭罗所理解的“低层次”,即为自己而去拥有,或与邻里明争暗斗而致拥有。他心目中的“高层次”,则是这样一种积极的人生戒律,即要使自己对自己界永恒之物的感悟臻于完美。对于他从低层次上节省下来的时间和精力,他可将其致力于对高层次的追求。勿庸置疑,梭罗不赞成忍饥挨饿,但他在膳食方面投入的精力仅果腹而已,只要可以确保他能去从事更为重要的事务即可。
Happiness is never more than partial. There are no pure states of mankind. Whatever else happiness may be, it is neither in having nor in being, but in becoming. What the Founding Fathers declared for us as inherent right, we should do well to remember, was not happiness but the pursuit of happiness market, is the cardinal fact that happiness is in the pursuit itself, in the meaningful pursuit of what is life-engaging and life-revealing, which is to say, in the idea of becoming. A nation is not measured by what it possesses or wants to possess, but by what it wants to become.从来就没有过完美的幸福。人类社会不存在尽善尽美。无论人们怎样界定何谓幸福,它既不在于拥有也不在于实现,而在于追求的过程。我们应该牢记:开国元勋们为我们所宣布的与生俱来的权利,不是享受幸福而是追求幸福。假如他们当初预见到现在出现的幸福市场,他们就会强调指出这样一个基本事实:幸福在于为之奋斗的过程,在于我们终生为之努力并从中获得启迪的事业,也就是说在于追求。对于一个民族的评价不是看它拥有什么或是幸福拥有什么,而是看它想要追求什么。
By all means let the happiness-market sell us minor satisfactions and even minor follies so long as we keep them in scale and buy them out of spiritual change. I am no customer for either Puritanism or asceticism. But drop any real spiritual capital at those bazaars, and what you come to will be your own poorhouse.当然,只要我们掌握好一个度,或者只作为一种精神调节,不妨从幸福市场买点满足感甚至可以花钱买点愚蠢的东西。我既不信奉清教徒的生活准则也不赞赏禁欲主义。但如果我们在这些市场上放弃任何真正意义上的精神财富,那么到头来我们
相关推荐: