高密度纤维板国家标准:(原创听录)HOME---《地球美丽有赖你》（5）---一部超级经典唯美环保记录片

(续上) 

Faster and faster!

Distances are no longer counted in miles but in minutes. The automobile shapes new suburbs where every home is a castle, a safe distance from the asphyxiated city centers, and where neat rows of houses huddle round dead-end streets. The model of a lucky few countries has become a universal dream preached by televisions all over the world. Even here in Beijing, it’s cloned, copied and reproduced. In these formatted houses that have wiped pagodas off the map. The automobile has become the symbol of comfort and progress. If the model were followed by every society, the planet wouldn’t have 900 million vehicles as it does today, but five billion.

Faster and faster!

The more the world develops, the greater its thirst for energy. Everywhere, machines dig, bore and rip from the earth the pieces of stars in its depths since its creation:minerals.(music) In next twenty years, more ore will be extracted from the earth than in the whole of humanity’s history.

As a privilege of power,eighty percent of these mineral wealth is consumed by twenty percent of the world’s population. Before the end of this century, excessive mining will have exhausted nearly all the planet’s reserve.

Faster and faster!

Shipyards churn out oil tankers, container ships and gas tankers to cater for the demands of globalized industrial production. Most consumer goods travel thousands of kilometers, from the country of production to the country of consumption. Since 1950, the volume of international trade has increased 20times. Over ninety percent of trade goes by sea. 500 million containers are transported every year, headed for the world’s major hubs of consumption, such as Dubai.

Dubai is one of the biggest construction sites in the world. A country where the impossible becomes possible, building artificial islands in the sea, for example.(music)

Dubai has few natural resources, but with the money from oil, it can bring millions of tons of material and people from all over the world. It can build forests of skyscrapers, each one taller than the last, or even a ski slope in the middle of the desert.

Dubai has no farmland, but it can import food.

Dubai has no water, but it can afford to expend immense amountof energy to desalinate sea water and build the highest skyscrapers in the world.

Dubai has endless sun but no solar panels. It’s the city of more is more where the wildest dream become reality.

Dubai is a sort of culmination of the western model, with its 800-metre high totem to total modernity that never fails to amaze the world.

Excessive? Perhaps.

Dubai appears to have made its choice. It’s like the beacon for all the world’s money. Nothing seems further removed from nature than Dubai, although nothing depends on nature more than Dubai. The city merely follows the model of wealthy nations.

We haven’t understood that we’re depleting what nature provides.(music)

What do we know of the marine world, of which we see only the surface, and which covers tthree-quarters of the planet?

The ocean depths remain a secret. They contain thousands of species whose existence remains a mistery to us.

Since 1950s, fishing catches have increased fivefold, from 18 to 100 million metric tons a year. Thousands of factory ships are emptying the oceans. Three-quarters of fishing grounds are exhausted, depleted or in danger of being so.(music)

Most large fish have been fished out of existence, since they have no time to reproduce.

We are destroying the cyle of a life that was given to us.

On the coastlines, signs of the exhaustion of stocks abound:

First sign: colonies of sea mammals are getting smaller, made vulnerable by urbanization of coasts and pollution. They now face a new threat: famine. In their unequal battle against industrial fishing fleets, they cannot find enough fish to feed their young.(music)

Second sign: sea birds must fly ever greater distances to find food.

At the cureent rate, all fish stocks are threatened with exhaution. In Dakar, tradional net fishing boomed in the years of plenty, but today, fish stocks are dwindling.(music)

Fish is the staple diet of one in five humans.

Can we envision the inconceivable? Abondoned boats, seas devoid of fish?(music)

We have forgetten that resouces are scarce. 500 million humans live in the world’s desert lands, more than the combined population of Europe. They know the value of water. They know how to use it sparingly. Here they depend on wells replenished by fossil water, which accumulated underground in the days when it rained on these deserts 25,000 years ago. Fossil water also enables crops to be grown in the desert to provide food for local populations. The field’s circular shape derives from the pipes that irrigate them around a central pivot.

But there is a heavy price to pay. Fossil water is a nonrenewable resource.

In Saudi Arabia, the dream of industrial farming in the desert has faded. As if on a parchment map, the light spots on this patchwork show abondoned plots./plans. The irrigation equipment is still there. The energy to pump water also. But the fossil water reserves are severely depleted.

Israel tured the desert into arable land.

Even though these hothouses are now irrigated drop by drop, water consumption continues to increase along with exports.

The once mighty river Jordan is now just a tricle.

Its water has flown to supermarkets all over the world in crates of fruit and vegetable.

The Jordan’s fate is not unique.

Across the planet, one major river in ten no longer flows into the sea for several months of the year.

The Dead Sea derives its name from its incredibly high salinity that makes all life impossible. Deprived of the Jordan’s water, its level goes down by over one meter per year. Its salinity is increasing.

Evaporation, due to the heat, produces these fine islands of salt evaporites-beautiful but sterile.(music)

(未完待续)