Lesson 6 Apology to the Future.ppt

1、By Scott Thomas Eastham,Apology To The Future,主講教師：紹興文理學(xué)院外語學(xué)院 陳金中,An Introduction of Scott Thomas Eastham,Scott Thomas Eastham is assistant professor of religion and religious education at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. The following essay is taken from the magazine USA Today,

2、May 1985. His other works include Nucleus: Reconnecting Science and Religion in the Nuclear Age (1987) and The Radix or the Original Radical Poem (1991).,About USA TODAY,Every day, USA TODAY is the trusted source of news and information for nearly 5.4 million readers. USA TODAY is the easy to use, c

3、omprehensive source of timely news and information, edited to inform and entertain todays time-pressed, affluent and influential readers. With a What it means to me style of journalism, USA TODAY keeps its focus on the reader and an eye on the trends emerging in the marketplace. With four unique sec

4、tions - News, Money, Sports and Life - USA TODAY provides readers with the information essential to manage their busy lives.,1. Topic of the Text 2. Structural Analysis of the Text 3. Detailed Study of the Text 4. Word Study 5. Key to the Exercises on the textbook 6. Relevant websites 7. Homework,Th

5、e protection of the environment against damage from human activities. It emphasizes the improve- ment of human relations not just with our natural surroundings, but also with one another, in order to prevent our living environment from further worsening.,The Topic of This Article,Key Words : damage

6、environment relation protection improvement,III.conclusion concludes the article with good wishes. (para16-17),Structural Analysis Of The Text,I.The introductory first paragraph foretells the reader of the coming of two subtopics. ( paragraph 1 ),My dear unborn grandchild:,Foam containers threaten t

7、he environment,Instances of our wrongdoing to the environment The chemical wastes we have been dumping heedlessly for years. The wrong way to dispose of or isolate the mountains of nuclear waste. Our societal addiction to fossil fuels. Species are going extinct at the incredible rate.,Solution: to c

8、ollaborate with the Earth, to become responsible partners with all the rhythms and dynamisms of the living Cosmos.,The victim of the war,Palestinians clean up a bombed area,Israeli soldiers are launched to fight Palestinian protesters,Salvaging the remains of the collapsed World Trade Center,A Yugos

9、lav soldier prepares to enter a radioactive-contaminated area,A. Instead of offering real help to the starving millions, the super- powers sell them weapons-meanwhile spending about a billion dollars a day on their own suicidal arms race. B. The threat of nuclear wars-The Big Finale. C. The wrongdoi

10、ng of the government.,Solutions: we would have to find alternatives to head-on conflict. Creative , constructive , dialogical ways,Instances of our wrongdoing to each other,Apology to the FutureBy Scott Thomas Eastham,My Dear Unborn Grandchild:By the time you read this, I shall be dead - and probabl

11、y not from old age. You have grown to maturity now, and by rights expect very little from your forebears. This is as it should be. Nevertheless, I feel I owe you at least two things - an apology and an explanation.,The apology takes precedence. I can guess that you are living on a devastated Earth,

12、the ruin of a garden planet, an Earth rendered well-nigh uninhabitable by forces set in motion by my generation and those that preceded us. I apologize for all of us who may be responsible. I am especially sorry because all the portents foretelling the kind of world you will inhabit are already pres

13、ent today. I wish I could say we dont know any better, but we do.,We know that the chemical wastes we have been dumping heedlessly for decades have probably caused irreversible damage to the human gene pool. There is undoubtedly more congenital suffering in your time, more weakness of limb and of br

14、ain, more people born then than now who might prefer to be dead. We know further that there is no safe way to dispose of or isolate the mountains of nuclear waste we are accumulating; by your day, the damage will be done. We know also that our societal addiction to fossil fuels is releasing far too

15、much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.,We have even predicted the catastrophic results of this greenhouse effect an inevitable warming and shift in the Earths climatic regions, melting of the polar ice caps, and thus floods, mass migrations, famines, etc. Nevertheless we scoff at alternatives to f

16、ossil fuels and nuclear energy. They are costly and unrealistic, we say, and so we gouge ever more deeply into the flesh of the Earth to find and burn up more of the same.,In a single century, we have turned the Earth into a sick old lady. Species are going extinct at the incredible rate of one ever

17、y other day. Some of that is natural selection, of course, but the lions share of the damage is mans doing. The food chain is going to collapse out from under us one day, but thats a problem for the future to solve, or so we say. Oh yes, we can see all around us the grim beginnings of your world.,It

18、s not just what were doing to the environment that speaks of the world we are creating for you, but just as evidently what human beings are doing to one another. At the latest estimate, some 50,000 people die of starvation every day -thats one death every other second. Instead of offering real help

19、to these starving millions, the superpowers sell them weapons - meanwhile spending about a billion dollars a day on their own suicidal arms race.,Most people are afraid of World War III, but dont realize that the Third World War is already well underway; more people have died in the approximately 16

20、0 wars since World War II than perished in that great conflagration. Even as I write you, there are about 40 shooting wars being fought in and between so called Third World nations, most of them like quicksand pits - the more you struggle the deeper you sink.,The human death toll is already enormous

21、 today, even if we never use the massive thermonuclear arsenals weve been building up for the Big Finale -which could come at any moment. Every City in the U.S. and the U. S. S. R with a population of 25,000 or more is presently targeted with at least one nuclear bomb and the computer controls are n

22、ot only on hair triggers, but in addition they are notoriously unreliable. Every time lightning strikes the a municipal power grid in Colorado Springs, the North American Air Defense Command computers there register Soviet missile strike and prepare to strike back. Perhaps this is all old news to yo

23、u.,For you and your contemporaries, it may well be too late. Perhaps you are already living in the radioactive rubble of our nightmares; perhaps you know firsthand about genetic mutations, radiation damage, infant leukemia, shortened life expectancy, and all the other horrors weve been saving up for

24、 you.,I fear there is an inevitability here, too. Humankind has never yet developed a weapon it did not eventually get around to using on itself. When Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866, he supposed that, with such a terrible weapon in the worlds arsenals, nobody could ever countenance waging wa

25、r again. In the nuclear age, that kind of innocence is lost forever. Even if you have by some incredible stroke of providence been spared an atomic Armageddon, you will see our handiwork in all the other gruesome legacies we have left you and with which you must try to live - or should I say survive

26、?,Government is supposed to be the way we human beings handle our collective affairs, but we just cant seem to get the hang of it. Youd be appalled at what passed for government in this, our enlightened modern age. In the U. S., for instance, youd think we dont really believe anybody knows how to ru

27、n anything properly. Weve gotten very cynical, and expect fraud, malfeasance, and liars in public places. Dont mistake my meaning; its not one political party or the other thats at fault - its the system, the bureaucratic megamachine. Our entire society has been politicized, polarized, and factional

28、ized to the extent that everybody is, in the final analysis, at odds with everybody else,In such a perverse state of affairs, affairs of state tend to undergo some rather bizarre reversals. We have a Defense Department that prepares for and covertly wages aggressive war. We have an Interior Departme

29、nt that sells off public lands for private profit, and uses wasteful slash-and-burn clearcut lumbering techniques on the lands it does retain. We have an Environmental Protection Agency which stymies enforcement of the meager environmental legislation we do have on the books,We have a State Departme

30、nt whose unstatesmanlike business is to meddle in the internal affairs of other states, and a Commerce Department which does everything in its considerable power to put up barriers to free trade between free nations. We have an Energy Department whose major utility is to serve as a front for nuclear

31、 weapon procurement. We have an Education Department whose main function appears to be to dismantle public education from the top down. The list goes on and on.,For all of this, our generation owes yours an apology - but not without explanation. The explanation, however, is going to be harder for yo

32、u to comprehend. I can tell you what it is, by and large, but you will probably be unable to accept it. Im alive now, witnessing the genesis of your terrible world, and I can scarcely believe it myself. Its all the old human follies, writ large. Its greed and stupidity and self-interest and all the

33、banal and routine evils that go unnoticed as we single-mindedly conduct our business-as-usual.,The religions of humankind have been warning us for two or three thousand years that wed better shape up, or else, but we generally dont take free advice. It is no hideous horned monster that has arisen in

34、 the latter half of the 20th century. Its just the same old vices of the squabbling, petty, self-centered, bad-tempered, cantankerous human species, but the effects have been hugely magnified by our new technologies, magnified and projected directly to you. It is not a birthright weve left you, its

35、a birth wrong. (生不逢時(shí)） You have been grievously wronged long before the day of your birth, and I am ashamed to admit that you are going to have to judge our generation by its worst and most destructive elements.,You wont see the other side of it, of course, but there is another side it must seem inco

36、mprehensible to you that we of the 1980s could foresee all these things, yet collectively and individually squander our last best moment to turn the world around and leave a habitable planet for our progeny. So let me tell you a little of what we might have done, had we given ourselves - and you - h

37、alf chance.,After Hiroshima, we knew very well that, if humankind was to survive, we would have to find alternatives to head-on conflict -creative, constructive, dialogical ways to deal with the irreducible diversity of the human family. Peace is not just an accident, a lull between wars; peace is a

38、 hard-won achievement, a creative act, a societal work of art. It is also an imperative.,Nuclear weapons leave us no choice - either we human beings learn to live with people who disagree with us, or else we all go to hell in a handbasket. For human life in its entirety to endure, we are going to ha

39、ve to shed get rid of some of our deeply rooted cultural biases and pretensions. We are in the midst of discovering, for example, that Western technocracy is not the only way to live a human life, and that it is plain wrongheaded to try to solve global human dilemmas from within the structures and s

40、trictures of a single civilizational model - one, be it noted, which seems increasingly prone to flirt with its own total destruction.,We are also well aware that weve taken the Earth for granted far too long. Things have changed rapidly for the worse on our crowded planet; weve worn out our welcome

41、 in the old homestead. These are the signs of our times. If the air is to be fit to breathe, if the grass and the trees are to continue to grow, if human life is to flourish along with its companion species, then we are going to have to learn - and learn damned quickly - to collaborate with the Eart

42、h, to become responsible partners with all the rhythms and dynamisms of the living Cosmos. This means that we are going to have to rely less on mechanisms of force - and more on the vital connections we share with the entire Creation and with one another,Along the same lines, we know also that human

43、 civilization, however high its technical or aesthetic attainments, is peculiarly vulnerable to its own garbage. Athens, medieval Europe, and Elizabethan England all succumbed to plague spawned in streets that ran with raw sewage, and our new techniques of biochemical interference are likely to be f

44、ar more devastating than the occasional rat-infested ship. We rightly fear that we shall be poisoned, buried, and memorialized by our own garbage.,I think we do know, above all and despite all, that life is a gift, a miracle, really, that it is fitting to celebrate and pass on enhanced to our descen

45、dants. Slow as we are to acknowledge it, we know that this gift is in our hands now - for better or for worse.,So what can I tell you? That in my generation, homo maniacus, the crazy fellow, is busy writing the epitaph for homo sapiens, the supposedly wise fellow with 6,000 years of accumulated huma

46、n experience to draw from? That all the beauty and wisdom and dignity that human life has painfully but steadily acquired over millennia will be squandered by a single, mindless generation in a wild frenzy of destruction? I dont know.,I certainly hope not, but it often seems like a hope against hope

47、. I hope our generation can see the alternatives and make the responsible choices - livingry instead of weaponry, creation instead of destruction, life instead of death. I wish I knew the outcome, but only you can know that for sure. Only you, my unknown and nameless grandchild, can properly judge y

48、our parents and grandparents and the world theyve handed over to you, the life theyve passed on to you. As for me, I only wish I knew whether we are even going to allow you to exist. Hollowly, YOUR GRANDFATHER,Passage one 1.not from old age: not die naturally, but is poisoned to death by the pollute

49、d environment or killed in a senseless war 2.by rights: rightly; with good reason. Here the author means that it is correct you do not claim anything from your forebears, but I feel we owe you two things at least. 3.forebear: forefather( literary word while ancestors a common word) 4. This is as it

50、should be: This is as we normally hope.( set expression),Passage two 5.take precedence: should be dealt with first 6.devastated: completely destroyed; greatly damaged 7.garden planet: a planet which is covered with trees and flowers in contrast to desolate and uninhabitable planets 8.rendered well-n

51、igh uninhabitable: made almost unsuitable for people to live on 9.forces set in motion: destructive forces which are activated or set to work 10.portents: warning signs 11. I wish I could say we dont know any better, but we do: I wish it were all because we have less than enough knowledge to make us

52、 realize we are doing wrong,Passage three 12.dumping heedlessly: discarding without proper care 13. Irreversible damage: damage that can in no way be repaired 14.the human gene pool: all the genes available to the human species considered as a whole 15. Congenital suffering: also birth defects; dise

53、ase that start at the time of birth but not necessarily hereditary 16.dispose of : get rid of ; throw sth. away 17.isolate: keep wastes strictly from leaking into the natural environment,18.addiction to fossil fuels: indulgence in using fossil fuels/ mineral fuels such as coal, petroleum and natural

54、 gas 19.inevitable warming: the global warming caused by the greenhouse effect 20. Shift in the earths climatic regions: the earth is divided into climatic zones based on average pearly temperature and precipitation 21.mass migration: the movement of large groups of animals 22.scoff at: speak in a s

55、cornful mocking way as it is ridiculous or inadequate,Passage Four,23. a sick old lady (para. 4) Mother Earth gone sick from all the damage, pollution, and devastation done by man In the West, the earth is thought to be a woman. By contrast, a weakening country in Europe is sometimes called the Sick

56、 Man of Europe, a phrase first coined in 1844 by the Russian Czar Nicholas I to refer to Turkey, which had long been in decline. On Feb. 21, 1853, he said this again in a conversation with Sir G. Seymour: I repeat to you that the sick man is dying; and we must never allow such an event to take us by

57、 surprise. ,24.one every other day (para. 4) Every two days there is one species which disappears from the face of earth (because of adverse living conditions). 25. the lions share . mans doing (para. 4) It is man who causes the greatest part of damage to the environment. the lions share: the greate

58、st part; nearly all, e.g. He never offers to buy any wine, but when a bottle is opened, he always takes the lions share. The phrase comes from one of Aesops fables. The story goes that several animals were hunting for food. The lion claimed 3 quarters of the food for himself, for his superior courag

59、e, and for his wife and young respectively. The other animals, being afraid of his anger, also gave up the fourth quarter to him.,26. the food chain . us one day (para. 4) A food chain is a serial process by which weak creatures are typically eaten by stronger ones in ascending order. For example, in the grassland foxes feed on rabbits, which in turn feed on grass. In oceans, tiny fish eat algae. In turn, these tiny fish are eaten by larger fish,