2019年考研英语二阅读 Text 4 原文翻译及答案解析

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dia Mirza and Adrian Grenier have a message for you: It's easy to beat plastic. They're part of a bunch of celebrities starring in a new video for World Environment Day — encouraging you, the consumer, to swap out your single-use plastic staples like straws and cutlery to combat the plastics crisis.

阿诺德·施瓦辛格、迪亚·米兹拉和阿德里安·格雷尼尔向你传达一个信息：战胜塑料轻而易举。他们参与了世界环境日新视频的拍摄，与众多名人一起鼓励你，作为消费者，替换掉你的一次性塑料必需品，如吸管和餐具，以对抗塑料危机。

The key messages that have been put together for World Envirornnent Day do include a call for governments to enact legislation to curb single-use plastics. But the overarching message is directed at individuals.

为世界环境日整理出的关键信息确实包括呼吁政府制定立法来限制一次性塑料。但总体信息是针对个人的。

My concern with leaving it up to the individual, however, is our limited sense of what needs to be achieved. On their own, taking our own bags to the grocery store or quitting plastic straws, for example, will accomplish little and require very little of us. They could even be detrimental, satisfying a need to have "done our bit" without ever progressing onto bigger, bolder, more effective actions - a kind of "moral licensing" that allays our concerns and stops us doing more and asking more of those in charge.

然而，我对将责任留给个人的担忧在于，我们对需要实现的目标认知有限。例如，仅仅自己带购物袋去杂货店或放弃塑料吸管，收效甚微，且对我们要求甚少。这些行为甚至可能适得其反，满足了‘已尽己责’的心理，却未能推进到更大胆、更有效的行动——这是一种‘道德许可’现象，它安抚了我们的担忧，阻碍了我们进一步行动并向相关负责人提出更多要求。

While the conversation around our envirornnent and our responsibility toward it remains centered on shopping bags and straws, we're ignoring the balance of power that implies that as "consumers" we must shop sustainably, rather than as "citizens" hold our governments and industries to account to push for real systemic change.

当关于我们的环境和我们对它的责任的讨论仍然集中在购物袋和吸管上时，我们忽略了权力平衡，这暗示着作为‘消费者’我们必须可持续地购物，而不是作为‘公民’追究政府和行业的责任，以推动真正的系统性变革。

It's important to acknowledge that the environment isn't everyone's priority — or even most people's. We shouldn't expect it to be. In her latest book, Why Good People Do Bad Environmental Things, Wellesley College professor Elizabeth R. DeSombre argues that the best way to collectively change the behavior of large numbers of people is for the change to be structural.

重要的是要承认，环境并非每个人的优先事项——甚至不是大多数人的。我们不应该期望如此。在她的新书《为什么好人做环境坏事》中，韦尔斯利学院教授伊丽莎白·R·德桑布雷认为，集体改变大量人群行为的最佳方式是让这种改变具有结构性。

This might mean implementing policy such as a plastic tax that adds a cost to environmentally problematic action, or banning single-use plastics altogether. India has just announced it will "eliminate all single-use plastic in the country by 2022." There are also incentive-based ways of making better environmental choices easier, such as ensuring recycling is at least as easy as trash disposal.

这可能意味着实施政策，如对环境有问题的行为征收塑料税，或完全禁止一次性塑料。印度刚刚宣布将‘在2022年前消除国内所有一次性塑料’。还有基于激励的方式，使更好的环境选择更容易，例如确保回收至少与垃圾处理一样方便。

DeSombre isn't saying people should stop caring about the environment. It's just that individual actions are too slow, she says, for that to be the only, or even primary, approach to changing widespread behavior.

德桑布雷并不是说人们应该停止关心环境。她说，只是个人行动太慢，不足以成为改变广泛行为的唯一或甚至主要方法。

None of this is about writing off the individual. It's just about putting things into perspective. We don't have time to wait. We need progressive policies that shape collective action (and rein in polluting businesses), alongside engaged citizens pushing for change.

这一切并非要否定个人。只是要正确看待事物。我们没有时间等待。我们需要进步政策来塑造集体行动（并约束污染企业），同时有积极参与的公民推动变革。