2020中译国青杯英译汉原文

“中译国青杯”联合国文件翻译大赛

学生组——英译汉【原文】

Australia: Where Nature is Grieving

“When you walk into a forest that’s been burnt this badly, the overwhelming thing that

hits you is the silence. No bird-song. No rustling of leaves. Silence.” This is how Mike

Clarke, professor of zoology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, describes Australia’s

many forests recently decimated by bushfires.

“This stands out as the worst disaster in Australia’s recorded history,” Clarke says. The

figure of the area that has been burnt – 13 million hectares – is “hard to get your head

around.” For scale, this is an area bigger in hectares than Holland, Denmark and

Switzerland combined. All burnt to a crisp. Homes, forests, animals, plants –

everything in the wake of these intense infernos – incinerated. Gone.

Unprecedented scale

At least a billion animals were killed in the bushfires, according to approximate

estimates by Chris Dickman, professor in territorial ecology at The University of

Sydney. This figure is conservative, Clarke believes. “That’s just mammals, birds,

reptiles. If we added invertebrates to that, the numbers would be astronomical.”

One thing that must be clear, though, is that Australia’s bush has always burnt quite

severely. “The severity isn’t unprecedented,” says Alan York, professor of Fire

Ecology at the University of Melbourne. “What is unprecedented is their earliness in, or

before the usual fire season, and the volume of fires in so many places, which is far

more unusual.”

Koalas in northern New South Wales have had most of their habitat burnt. “Speculation

is that populations will become locally extinct,” according to York. The iconic nature of

the koalas sometimes overshadows other ecosystem horrors, Clarke adds. “They’re the

poster child of this crisis. But in reality, a whole suite of wildlife – large possums, all

sorts of plants that live in alpine ash, whole communities of organisms – are all at risk

now.”

The resilience of the Australian bush in question

It may take years for these species to recover. And that may require human assistance,

with captive-bred frogs in Australia’s zoos, for example. “Otherwise, we’re hoping

animals survived in unburnt pockets,” York explains. He remains somewhat optimistic,

saying the Australian bush has a “dramatic capacity to recover.”

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There are, however, caveats. Rainforests and alpine areas of Tasmania, for instance,

don’t have much experience of fires, so they’re more vulnerable to repeated fires, he

says. And under the current climate change model, increasing fires are inevitable.

Some of several “human interferences” that’ll most likely hamper recovery include

habitat removal from land clearing; introducing feral species which prey on native

species (feral cats have been known to come from ten kilometres away to the edge of a

fire to pick off prey, usually native); and a lack of urgent political action on climate

change.

The problem is, lots of critical resources have been incinerated. For example, many

fauna – cockatoos, parrots, possums, bats – rely on hollow logs on the ground, or on

trees to den in or breed in. Not only have those logs now gone, Clarke predicts that it

will take one to two centuries for them to appear again, hollowed out. “A lot of

Australian wood is hardwood. Fungi and termites hollow it really slowly. There are no

woodpeckers here,” he explains. Suddenly, the capacity to recover seems almost

insurmountable within our lifetime. “What could disappear in hours in bushfire could

take centuries to replace. Ecologists would call this a ‘complete state change’.”

Immediate measures needed

Experts say some immediate steps are being taken to help along the recovery of this

vast area. A moratorium on logging has been proposed, and pressure is building to act

more aggressively on the pest control of feral cats and foxes, in addition to introducing

weed removal. “Weeds recolonize areas disturbed by fire. They use resources that

native plants and animals might need,” York explains.

Identifying and protecting areas that did not burn is also an important subject for debate.

Specifically, some are arguing that cultural burns may be better than the hotter, more

intense, hazard reduction burning. Cultural burns are cool-burning, knee-high blazes

that were designed to happen continuously and across the landscape, practised by

indigenous people long before Australia’s invasion and colonization. The fires burn up

fuel like kindling and leaf detritus, so that a natural bushfire has less to devour.

Since Australia's fire crisis began last year, calls for better reintegration of this

technique have grown louder. But they may be of limited value at this crisis point,

according to Clarke. “We need to appreciate how different things are now. Cultural

burns happened to enable people to move through dense vegetation easily, or for

ceremonial reasons. They weren’t burning around 25 million people, criss-crossed by

complex infrastructure and in a climate change scenario,” he estimates.

Concrete measures to combat climate change are indeed crucial for the future of

biodiversity. In spite of green shoots of optimism in some quarters, the prognosis of

whether the bush will ever recover its biodiversity is looking somewhat grim. Breaking

it down, Clarke surmises that “A chunk of it will be good – a third will be able to

bounce back. A third is in question, but a third is in serious trouble. I’ve been studying

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fire ecology for twenty years, but we’re dealing with unchartered territory changing

before our eyes.”

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