What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For?

Washington Post Sept 26, 2010
【导读】 地球是人类赖以生存的家园，不仅仅是我们这一代人的，也是我们后代的家园。人类今日的所作所为会给后世带来怎样的影响，后世会责备我们什么，读读这篇发人深省的文字吧。
Through the middle of the 19th century, the US and other nations in the Americas approved of plantation slavery. Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today. Here are three contenders for future moral condemnation.

直到19世纪中期，美国及美洲其它国家还认可奴隶制。回望这些恐怖行径，我们不禁会问：古人他们当时是怎么想的？然而，对于我们当前的一些行为，我们的后代很可能会带着同样的不解提出同样的质疑。我们来看看未来可能会引发谴责的三件事。

Industrial meat production. Of the more than 90 million cattle in our country, at least 10 million at any time are packed into feedlots, saved from the inevitable diseases of overcrowding only by regular doses of antibiotics, surrounded by piles of their own excrement.①In the European Union, many of the most inhumane conditions we allow are already illegal or will be illegal soon.

工业化肉类生产。我们国家有超过9000万头牛，至少1000万终年被关在饲养场里，只能靠定期打抗生素来避免由于过度拥挤引发的疾病，被成堆的粪便包围。在欧盟，许多我们所允许的最不人道的做法已经非法行为或者即将非法。

The institutionalized and isolated elderly. Nearly two million of America’s elderly are warehoused in nursing homes, out of sight and, to some extent, out of mind.②Some 10,000 for-profit facilities have arisen across the country in recent decades to hold them. Other elderly Americans may live independently, but often they are isolated and cut off from their families. Is this what Western modernity amounts to-societies that feel no filial obligations to their inconvenient elders?

被收容和孤立的老人。将近200万的美国老人被安排在养老院，远离视线，在一定程度上远离我们的思维。在美国近十年来建立了近万所盈利性机构来赡养他们。另外一些老年人可能生活独立，但是他们经常被孤立，与家人断绝来往。社会觉得对于行动不便的老人没有孝敬的义务，这就是西方现代社会吗？

The environment. Of course, of these the most obvious candidate for condemnation is our wasteful attitude toward the planet’s natural resources and ecology. Desertification, which is primarily the result of destructive land-management practices, threatens a third of the Earth’s surface; tens of thousands of Chinese villages have been overrun by sand drifts in the past few decades.

环境。毫无疑问，在人类种种行径中，最该受到谴责的是我们对这个星球的自然资源和生态的浪费态度。沙漠化，这主要是破坏性土地管理措施的结果，威胁着地表的三分之一；在过去的数十年间，许多中国村落被沙堆覆盖。

Let’s not stop there, though. We will all have our own suspicions about which practices will someday prompt people to ask, in dismay: What were they thinking，even when we don’t have a good answer, we’ll be better off for anticipating the question.

然而，不止这些。我们都将有我们自己的怀疑，关于哪些行为会在某天令后人沮丧地问：他们是怎么想的，即使当我们没有最佳答案时，但想到这个问题情况就会有时改善。