悦读｜迈克尔·麦卡锡《消失的飞蛾：自然与喜悦》（双语）

编者按：

近年来，“绿色化工”蓬勃发展，提倡废物再利用与资源化，从源头上根治环境污染，为自然环境保护和生态文明建设提供解决方案。“绿色化工”贯彻了我国的新发展理念，为可持续发展注入了强大的动力，推行“绿色化工”，保护自然，势在必行！

《消失的飞蛾：自然与喜悦》（The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy）是英国著名的自然文学写作者迈克尔·麦卡锡的纪实性回忆作品，该书曾被评为“《泰晤士报》2015年最佳自然图书”。书中有对自然细致的观察，有生动的童年故事，有飞蛾暴风雪的壮景，也有几十年来持续的环境恶化、人为的破坏导致家雀在英格兰销声匿迹的凄凉之景，以及韩国的新万金工程使滨鸟的迁徙路线和栖息地受到严重影响等。书中所提及的那些景象和数字触目惊心。

本篇节选自该书，译者姚瑶。让我们一起走进这部作品，走进美丽丰饶却又脆弱无比的大自然。

《消失的飞蛾：自然与喜悦》

（节选）

The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy

(Excerpt)

By Michael McCarthy

文/迈克尔·麦卡锡

译/姚瑶

This price support meant that for the first time it became profitable to plough up any marginal land, any piece of down-land or moor or scrub or damp pasture which had not previously grown crops, but which, conversely, might be very wildlife-rich.

价格支持意味着，耕耘任何贫瘠的土地，任何一块洼地、沼泽、灌木丛甚至潮湿的牧场，任何先前没有耕种的土地，如今都变得有利可图，而这些地方可能原本有着丰富的野生动植物资源。

Furthermore, generous capital grants were made available to do this, and to get rid of any pesky obstructions in the way of the big new modern machines, such as hedges, copses, woods, ponds, and ditches—landscape features where wildlife, of course, had also long flourished.

再者，慷慨的资本拨款让这件事变得切实可行。在通往大型现代新机械的路上，人们清除了惹人讨厌的路障，比如树篱、树林、池塘和沟渠——长久以来，这些地方也是野生动植物繁衍生息的家园。

A frenzy of subsidised bulldozing began, of hedgerows especially, thousands of miles of them disappearing, some of them hundreds of years old, as the landscape, especially in eastern England, was reshaped from the traditional patchwork-quilt of small to medium-sized fields variegated with their hedges and woods and quirky corners, to vast plain prairies of wheat and barley, Kansas-style.

疯狂的补贴式推平开始了，首当其冲便是灌木藩篱，数千英里的藩篱消失不见，有些已有百余年历史。在英格兰东部，从传统的由藩篱、树林和奇形怪状的角落连缀而成的拼布被子如今变成了广阔的平原——堪萨斯风格的大草原，辽阔平坦，种满了小麦和大麦。

And let’s not forget the orchards. Age-old orchards, atmospheric groves of gnarled, lichen-covered trees which had borne fruit time out of mind. They were grubbed out by the hundred.

我们不应该忘记，那里曾有很多古老的果园，枝干虬曲，树皮粗糙，被地衣覆盖的树木使人们忘记了时间。如今它们成百上千地被连根挖去。

All of this, energetically encouraged by the Ministry of Agriculture, naturally began to affect wildlife, and the damage was compounded by two new farming techniques, still barely comprehended by the public at large, the change from spring-sown to autumn-sown crops, and the shift from hay to silage.

所有举动都得到了农业部的积极支持，这些举动自然会影响到野生物种，而两种农业新技术——从春播作物转为秋播作物，从干草变为青贮饲料的应用更加剧了这种破坏。

New varieties of crops sown in autumn were known to be more productive and could be harvested much earlier than traditional spring-sown cereals, in July or August rather than September, but they had enormous disadvantages for wildlife, particularly birds, which were doubly hit.

众所周知，新型秋播作物更高产，和传统的春播作物相比，收获时间更短，无须等到9月，7、8月份就能收割，但这些作物对野生动植物的负面影响则是巨大的，尤其是对鸟类，它们会受到加倍伤害。

Autumn sowing meant that the stubble from the previous harvest, rich in seeds which flocks of songbirds such as finches fed on right through the autumn and winter, was now quickly ploughed back into the ground, and the finches’ food supply disappeared; and when the spring came, the autumn-sown crops were already up in the fields, and so high that other farmland birds such as skylarks and lapwings could no longer nest in them.

秋季播种意味着上次收割留下的麦茬会被犁入土壤中，这些麦茬含有丰富的种子，像雀鸟这样成群结队的鸣禽正是靠啄食种子度过秋天和冬天的，结果现在雀鸟的食物消失了。等到春季来临，秋播作物已经长成，长得那么高，像云雀和麦鸡这种农田鸟类便无法在其中做窝。

The disappearance of haymaking, one of the age-old activities in the farming calendar, and with it of hay meadows and their replacement by fields of artificially fertilized ryegrass, was an even more detrimental change. Hay is grass which is cut just the once, in late summer, then dried so it does not rot when kept in a barn, and fed as fodder to horses.

干草的消失也是一种更为有害的变化。制作干草是农耕历史上的一项古老活动，但随着新技术的发展，人工培育的黑麦草取代了干草。干草只是在夏末割一下，而后晾干，这样贮存在谷仓里就不会腐烂，可以作为饲料喂给马匹。

In 1950 there were still three hundred thousand horses working on British farms, but thirty years later they had nearly all gone, outpaced by the march of the machines. With them went the need for hay. Cattle could be fed on something else: silage, grass cut while still green,which rots down into a gunk that cows find perfectly acceptable.

1950年，有30万马匹在英国的田间地头辛勤工作。但是30年后，这些马匹几乎尽数消失，被机器取代，对干草的需求也随之消失。牛可以用别的东西来喂：青贮饲料，或者鲜嫩欲滴的绿草。绿草会腐烂成黏糊糊的一团，奶牛们竟然能接受。

A special variety, perennial ryegrass, was discovered to be ideal for the job, and to make it grow as quickly as possible it was treated with large amounts of artificial fertilizer, meaning it could be cut at the beginning of June or earlier, and then cut again six weeks later, and perhaps for a third or even a fourth time before summer was over.

人们发现，有个专属品种——黑麦草——相当适合这项工作。为了让它尽快成熟，人们便用大量的人工肥料进行浇灌，这就意味着可以在6月初甚至更早的时候进行收割，6周后还能再收割一次，夏天结束前，说不定还能收割第三次甚至第四次。

All across England, ryegrass fields began replacing the hay meadows and ancient grazing pastures which had been among the countryside’s great delights, as they were botanical treasure houses crammed with wild flowers such as buttercups, red clover, yellow rattle, lady’s bedstraw, knapweed, green-winged orchid, ox-eye daisies, kidney vetch, and many many more, presenting an animated chaos of colour which could dazzle the eye. Abundance at its most enchanting.

放眼全英国，黑麦草地逐渐取代干草地和古老的牧场，这些地方曾是乡村的妙趣所在，它们都是植物宝库，野花星罗棋布，比如毛茛、红花苜蓿、佛甲草、篷子菜、矢车菊、绿翅兰花、春白菊、疗伤绒毛花，还有很多很多，数不胜数，色彩缤纷，让人眼花缭乱，那是自然丰度最为迷人的地方。

It is thought that about 97 per cent of them have gone now. In the ryegrass leys which replaced them, there was but one species only: ryegrass. It was green concrete, as the phrase has it. It had been so heavily fertilised that it out-competed any other plant; nothing else could survive.

专家们普遍认为，这些野生植物有97%已经消失，只有一种植物留存下来：黑麦草。正如人们所说的那样，它就是绿色混凝土。黑麦草地需要施重肥，仅此一招便将其他植物赶尽杀绝，没有任何植物能够幸存。

The process was known as ‘improvement’. (Traditional grassland, where it survives, is now referred to as ‘unimproved’.) But improvement was damaging to more than wild flowers. The various species of birds which nested or foraged in traditional meadows, such as corn buntings, quail, whinchats, and (once upon a time) corncrakes, had in the past always had room to breed successfully before the hay was cut in late July. But with the much earlier cuts for silage usually repeated, their nests and eggs and chicks were mangled by the machines. Continually. They were as doomed as the sparkling wild flowers were.

这个替代的过程被称为“改良”。语言真是有趣的东西，“改良”，传统草地如今成了“落后”的代名词。可是改良伤害的并不仅仅是野花野草，也伤害了在传统草地里筑巢或觅食的各种鸟类，比如黍鹀、鹌鹑、野翁和（曾经有过的）长脚秧鸡。从前，在7月末收割干草前，这些鸟儿多半在草地里筑巢繁殖；但是现在为了制作青贮饲料而提早收割，还要反复收割好几次，鸟巢、鸟蛋和雏鸟都被机器碾碎了。它们和那些光彩熠熠的野花一样，频频遭到侵害，命运早已注定。

That might all seem bad enough, the bulldozed hedges, filled-in ponds, grubbed-out orchards, the destruction of the autumn stubbles, the destruction of the hay meadows; but Farmer Giles, the ruddy-faced commonsensical custodian of the countryside, who knew so much better than those folk in towns about how to look after it properly with his age-old wisdom, or so the poor deluded population of the British Isles continued to think, put the tin hat on it all with poisons. Agricultural poisons.

推平的树篱，填平的池塘，连根铲除的果园，破坏殆尽的秋收麦茬，尽数消亡的干草地，这一切似乎已经足够糟糕。但是还有更糟的，农民吉尔斯是个乡村管理人，他面色红润，明白事理，比起那些用古老智慧照料田地的不列颠农民，他已经学会了用毒药。【此处译文似有误，试编改：但是还有更糟的，糟到无法收拾，农民吉尔斯——那个面色红润、明白事理的乡村管理人，比那些城里人更懂得如何用他知道的古老智慧照料田地，或者说不列颠群岛上那些受到蒙蔽的可怜居民一直这么认为——用上了毒药。农用毒药。】

Poisons for this, poisons for that. Kill off the insects. Kill off the snails. Kill off the wild flowers. Kill off anything that isn’t your money-making crop with herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, molluscicides… Farmer Giles loved them all, he turned on the tap and let a great flood of poison wash over the land, which, God help us, floods over it to this day.

毒害这个，毒害那个。消灭昆虫，消灭蜗牛，消灭野花，消灭一切不能赚钱的作物，大量使用除草剂、杀虫剂、杀菌剂、软体动物杀虫剂——农民吉尔斯钟爱这一切。他打开水龙头，让毒药的洪流冲刷土地。上帝保佑，这场洪水泛滥至今。

He began just after the war with the chlorinated hydrocarbon, DDT, the first of a new generation of synthetic pesticides—compounds made in the laboratory rather than from naturally occurring substances—and quickly followed it by spraying his fields with the even more powerful organochlorines, such as aldrin and dieldrin.

战争一结束他就开始了，用的是有机氯类农药DDT——第一款新一代合成农药，是在实验室里制造的混合物，而非天然存在的物质。他紧跟潮流，开始使用更为强大的有机氯类杀虫剂喷洒农田，比如艾氏剂和狄氏剂。

The problem was, these things didn’t just kill insects; it turned out they killed birds as well, in startling numbers (and for good measure they quickly killed off all the otters of lowland England, probably because they built up in the fat of eels, a favourite otter prey item).

问题在于，这些农药杀死的并非只有昆虫，事实证明，它们连鸟类也一起杀死了，并且数量惊人（除此之外，这些农药还快速杀死了英格兰低地的所有水獭，很可能是因为它们依赖于鳗鱼脂肪，这是水獭最爱的猎物）。

It was several years before anyone noticed that English otters seemed to have vanished, but the corpses of thousands of dead birds were all too visible at once, and in America especially they provoked a fierce public outcry, led by Rachel Carson with her magisterial exposé and denunciation of the agrochemical industry and all its works, Silent Spring, whose publication in 1962 can be taken as the start of the modern environment movement.

几年后，才有人注意到英国水獭似乎消失了，当时，成千上万的鸟类尸体似乎更为触目惊心，尤其是在美国，引发了强烈的公众抗议。这场抗议是由蕾切尔·卡逊领导的，她公开谴责农用化学品产业及其引发的后果，她于1962年出版的《寂静的春天》一书，可以视作现代环境保护运动的开端。

Dead robins littered across suburban lawns could not be ignored, no matter how loudly the US chemical industry screamed that Rachel Carson was an hysterical woman (the adjective and the noun each being half of the accusation), and so eventually DDT, aldrin, dieldrin, and other organochlorine compounds were banned, in America and Britain both.

死去的知更鸟遍布郊区草坪，任谁都无法忽视。无论美国的化学工业如何高声叫嚣，称蕾切尔·卡逊是个不可理喻的女人（形容词和名词各占了一半指控），最终 DDT、艾氏剂和狄氏剂以及其他有机氯合成物同时在美国和英国被明令禁止。

They were replaced with new generations of pesticides which generally did not kill birds directly, such as carbamates, organophosphates, pyrethroids, and more recently, neonicotinoids.

它们被新一代杀虫剂所取代，一般情况下，新杀虫剂不会直接杀死鸟类，比如氨基甲酸酯类农药、有机磷酸酯、菊酯类农药，最近用的则是新烟碱类杀虫剂。

I say generally, although some of these compounds were still bird-toxic, such as carbofuran, a carbamate which (although banned) remains the substance of choice for British gamekeepers who want to poison birds of prey, or parathion, an organophosphate used to kill bird pests such as queleas in Africa.

有些复合农药仍旧对鸟类有毒，比如克百威，是一种氨基甲酸酯（虽然已经被禁用），它仍旧是英国猎场看守人杀死猛禽的首选药物。还有巴拉松，一种用来杀死害鸟——比如非洲的奎利亚雀——的有机磷酸酯。

(Credit: goodreads.com）