高密度电法:(原创听录)HOME---《地球美丽有赖你》（4）---一部超级经典唯美环保记录片

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The earth counts time in billions of years. It took more than four billion years for it to make trees. In the chain of species, trees are a pinnacle, a perfect living sculpture. Trees defy gravity. They are the only natural elment in perpetual movement toward the sky. They grow unhurriedly toward the sun that nourishes their foliage. They have inherited from those minuscule cyanobacteria the power to capture light’s energy. They store it and feed off it, turning it into wood and leaves, which then decompose into a misture of water, mineral, vegetable and living matter.

And so, gradully, the soils that are indispensable to life are formed.

Soils are the factory of biodiversity. They are a world of incessant activity where microorganisms feed, dig, aerate and trasform. They makethe humus, the fertile layer to which all life on land is linked(music)

What do we know about life on earth?

How many species are we aware of?

A tenth of them? A hundredth perhaps?

What do we know about the bonds that link them?

The earth is a miracle.

Life remains a mystery.(music)

Families of animals form, united by customs and rituals that survive today. Some adapt to the nature of their pasture, and their pasture adapts to them. And both again.

The animal sates its hunger, and the tree can blossom again.(music)

In the great adventure of life on earth, every species has a role to play, every species has its place, none is futile or harmful. They all balance out.(music)

And that’s where you homo sapiens---“wise human”---enter the story.

You benefit from a fabulous four-billion-year-old legacy bequeathed by the earth. You are only 200,000 years old, but you have changed the face of the world. Despite your vulnerability, you have taken possession of every habitat and conquered swaths of territory like no other species before you.(music)

Aftr 180,000 nomadic years, and thanks to a more clement climate, humans settled down. They no longer depended on hunting for survival. They chose to live in wet environments that abounded in fish, game and wild plants. There, where land, water and life combine. Human genius inspired them to build canoes, an invention that opened up new horizons and turned humans into navigators.(music)

Even today, the majority of humankind lives on the continents’ coastlines or the banks of rivers and lakes.(music)

The first towns grew up less than 6,000 years ago. It was a considerable leap in human history.

Why towns?

Because they allowed humans to defend themselves more easily. They became social beings., meeting and sharing knowledge and crafts, blending their similarities and differencies.

In a word, they became civilized.(music)

But the only energy at their disposal was provided by nature and the strength of their bodies. It was the story of humankind for thousands of years. It still is for one person in four---over one and a half billion human beings---more than the combined population of all the wealthy nations, taking from the earth only the strictly nessary.

For a long time, the economy seemed like a natural and equitable alliance. But life expectancy is short, and hard labor takes its toll. The uncertainties of nature weigh on daily life. Education is a rare privilege. Children are a family’s only asset, as long as every extra pair of hands is necessary contribution to its subsistence.

The earth feeds people, clothes them, and provides for their daily needs. Everything comes from the earth.

Towns change humanity’s nature, as well as its destiny. The farmer becomes a craftman, trader or paddler. What the earth gives the farmer, the city dweller buys, sells or barters. Goods change hands, along with ideas.

Humanity’s genius is to have always had a sense of its weakness.

Humans tried to extend the frontiers of their territory. But they knew their limits. The physical energy and strengh with which nature had not endowed them was found in the animals they domesticted to serve them.

But how can you conqure the world on an empty stomach?

The invention of agriculture transformed the future of wild animals scavenging for food that were humankind.

Agriculture turned their history on end.

Agriculture was their first great revolution developed barely 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. It changed their relationship to nature. It brought an end to the uncertainty of hunting and gathering. It resulted in the first surpluses and gave birth to cities and civilizations.

For their agriculture, humans harnessed the energy of animal species and plant life, from which they at last extracted the profits. The memory of thousands of years scrabbling for food faded. They learned to adapt the grains that are the yeast of life to different soils and climates. They learned to increase the yield nd multiply the number of varieties.

Like every species on earth, the principle daily concern of all humans is to feed themselves and their families. Ehen the soil is less generous and water become scarce, humans deploy prodigious efforts to mark a few arid acres with the imprint of their labors.(music)

Humans shaped the land with the patience and devotion that the earth demands in almost sacrificial ritual performed over and over.(music)

Agriculture is still the world’s most widespread occupation. Half of humankind tills the soil, over three quarters of them by hand. Agriculture is like a tradition handed down from generation to generation in sweat, graft and toil, because for humanity it is a prerequisite of survival.

But after relying on muscle power for so long, humankind found a way to tap into the energy burried deep in the earth. These flames are also from plants,… a pocket of sunlight, pure energy, the energy of the sun, captured over millions of yeas by millions of plants. More than a hundred millions of years ago, it is coal, it is gas, and above all, it is oil.(music)

And this pocket of sunlight freed humans from their toil on the land.

With oil, began the era of humans who break free of the shacle of time.

With oil, some of us acquired unprecedented comforts.

And in fifty years, in a single life time, the earth has been radically changed than by all previous generations of humanity.

Faster and faster!

In the last sixty years, the earth’s population has almost tripled and over two billion people have moved to the cities.

Faster and faster!

Shenzhen, in china, with its hundreds of skyscrpers and millions of inhabitants was just a small fishing village barely 40 years ago.

Faster and faster!

In shanghai, 3,000 towers and skyscrapers have been built in twenty years. Hundreds more are under construction.

Today, over half of the world’s seven billion inhabitants live in cities.

New York, the world’s first megalopolis, is the symbol of the exploitation of the energy.

The earth supplies to human genius the manpower of millions of immigrants, the energy of coal, the unbridled power of oil. Electricity resulted in the invention of skyscrapers. New York ranks as the sixteenth largest economy in the world.

America was the first to discover, exploit and harness the pheonomenal revolutionary power of black gold.

With its help, a country of farmers became a country of agricultual industrialists. Machines replaced men. A liter of oil generates as much energy as one hundred pairs of hands in twenty-four hours. But worldwide only three percent of farmers have use of a tractor. Nontheless, their output dominates the planet. In the united states, only three million farmers are left. They produce enough grain to feed two billion people. But most of that grain is not used to feed people. Here, and in all other industrialized nations, it is transformed into livestock feed or biofuels.(music)

The pocket of sunshine’s energy chased away the specter of drought that stalked farmland. No spring escapes the demands of agriculture which accounts for seventy percent of humanity’s water consumption.

In nature, evry thing is linked.

The expansion of cultivated land and single-crop farming encouraged the development of parasites.

Pesticides, another gift of the petrochemical revolution, exterminated them. Bad harvest and famine became a distant memory.

The biggest headache now was what to do with the surpluses engendered by modern agriculture.

But toxic pesticides seeped into the air, soil, plants, animals, rivers and oceans. They penetrated the heart of cells, similar to the mother cell that is shared by all forms of life. Are they harmful to the humans that they released from hunger? These farmers, in their yellow protective suits, probably have a good idea.

The new agriculture abolished the dependence on soils and seasons. Fertilizers produced unprecedented resulted on plots of land thus far ignored. Crops adapted to soils and clmates, gave way to the most productive varieties and the easiest to transport. And so, in the last century, three quarters of the varieties developed by farmers over thousands of years have been wiped out.

As far as the eye can see, fertilizer below, plastic on top. The green houses of Almeria in Spain are Europe’s vegetable garden.

A city of uniformly sized vegetables waits every day for the hundreds of trucks that will take them to the continent’s supermarkets.

The more a country develops, the more meat its inhabitants consume.

How can growing worldwide demand be satisfied without recourse to(without being able to use) concentration camp-style cattle farms?

Faster and faster!

Like the life cycle of livestock which may never see a meadow, manufacturing meat faster than the animal has become a daily routine. In these vast food lots, trampled by millions of cattle, not a blade of grass grows. A fleet of trucks from every corner of the country brings in tons of grain, soy meal and protein---rich granules that will become tons of meat. The result is that it takes 100 liters of water to produce one kilogram of potatoes,4,000 for one kilo of rice, and 13,000 for one kilo of beef. Not to mention the oil guzzled in the production process and transport. Our agriculture has become oil-powered. It feeds twice as many humans on earth. But has replaced diversity with standardization. It has offered many of us comforts we could only dream of. But it makes our way of life totally dependent on oil.

This is the new measure of time. Our world’s clock now beats to the rhythm of these in defatigable machines, trapping into the pocket of sunlight. Their regularity reassures us. The tiniest hiccup throws us into disarray. The whole planet is attentive to these metronomes of our hopes and illusions. The same hopes and illusions that prolifrate along with our needs, increasingly insatiable desires and profligacy. We know that the end of cheap oil is imminent. But we refuse to believe it. For many of us, the American dream is embodied by a legendary name-Los Aneles. In this city that stretches over 100 kilometers. The number of cars is almost equal to the number of inhabitants. Here energy puts on a fantastic show every night.(music) The days seem to be no more than pale reflection of nights that turn the city into a starry sky.

(未完待续)