伟大的非虚构作品 | 第六次大灭绝
The 100 best nonfiction books
The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)
《观察者》杂志资深编辑Robert McCrum评出100部最优秀的英语非虚构作品，英文联播将陆续推送《卫报》书评，关注收看。今天推送的是伊丽莎白·科尔伯特的《第六次大灭绝》（中译本《大灭绝时代》）。
The human animal knows that it is born to age and die. Together with language, this knowledge is what separates us from all other species. Yet, until the 18th century, not even Aristotle, who speculated about most things, actually considered the possibility of extinction.
人类这种动物知道自己生来注定变老和死亡，这一知识加上语言把我们和其他物种分开。可直到18世纪，人们才真正想到灭绝的可能性，连预测到绝大多数事物的亚里士多德都没想到。
This is all the more surprising because “the end of the world” is an archetypal theme with a sonorous label – eschatology – that morphs in popular culture into many doomsday scenarios, from global warming to the third world war. Citizens of the 21st century now face a proliferating menu of possible future dooms.
这尤其令人吃惊，因为“世界末日”是个皇皇大哉的原型主题——末世论，在大众文化中，演化成诸多审判日景象，从全球变暖到第三次世界大战。21世纪的公民现在面临着遭遇末日的可能选项激增。
’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History is both a highly intelligent expression of this genre and also supremely well executed and entertaining. , which follows her global warming report (2006), is already set to become a contemporary classic, and an excellent place to start this new series of landmark nonfiction titles in the English language.
伊丽莎白·科尔伯特的《第六次大灭绝：一部非自然史》既是这一类型作品的高度知性表达，同时行文明快，颇有生趣。本书出版与2006年的全球变暖报告《一场大灾难的实地笔记》之后，堪为当代经典，也是一系列里程碑式的非虚构英语作品的卓越起点。
On the opening page of her investigation into the future of our planet, Kolbert quotes the great biologist EO Wilson: “If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfilment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.” This warning note sets the mood for the 13 chapters that follow, an urgent contemporary report on “the sixth extinction”.
科尔伯特调查我们行星的未来，第一页就引用了伟大生物学家EO威尔逊的话：“如果说人类进程中有危险，与其说是自身种族的存续，不如说是有机进化的终极反讽的实现：通过人智实现自我理解的瞬间，生命宣告其最美丽的创造的灭绝。”这行警语贯穿13章，一部关于“第六次大灭绝”当务之急的当代报告。
Kolbert’s perspective is both awe-inspiring and fearsome, but utterly engrossing, as you’d expect from a book whose premise is “we’re all doomed”. During the past half billion years, she tells us, there have been five mass extinctions on Earth, when “the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted”.
科尔伯特的视角令人敬畏，令人惊骇，但引人入胜，你可以想见，这本书的前提是“我们注定灭亡”。她说，过去5亿年终，地球有五次大规模灭绝，当时“行星经历了剧变，生命的多样性骤降”。
The history of these catastrophic events, notes Kolbert, tends to be recaptured just as humanity comes to realise that it is about to cause another one. Sure enough, in our postmillennial century, she finds that scientists around the world are now monitoring the next mass extinction, possibly the biggest devastation since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. With this difference: the impending cataclysm is… us.
科尔伯特指出，这些毁灭性事件史重被提起，因为人类认识到他们讲导致另一场灭绝。当然，新千年世纪中，她发现全世界科学家都在监测下一场大规模灭绝，可能是自小行星清除恐龙后最大的一场毁灭事件。有一点不同：即将到来的灾祸是……我们。
In 13 emblematic episodes, exquisitely narrated, Kolbert, a magazine journalist with the New Yorker, explores the possibility of our impending doom through the lives of, for instance, the , the Sumatran rhino and the black-faced honeycreeper of Maui, “the most beautiful bird in the world”.
纽约客杂志记者科尔伯特在十三篇叙述精巧、象征性的故事中，通过巴拿马金蛙、苏门答腊犀牛和毛伊岛食蜜雀的生活，发现我们大难临头的可能性。
Part of Kolbert’s concern is to educate the modern reader in the history of mass extinction. While the concept, as she puts it, “may be the first scientific idea that kids have to grapple with”, as they play with their toy dinosaurs, Kolbert instructs that, actually, it’s a comparatively recent idea that dates to Enlightenment France.
科尔伯特的部分意图在于教育出在大灭绝历史中的当代读者。如她所言，这种想法“可能是儿童必须掌握的第一个科学概念”，当他们玩玩具恐龙时。科尔伯特教育我们，实际上，这是可以追溯到启蒙运动时期法国的一种相对晚近的想法。
Until this moment in the western intellectual tradition, not even Aristotle (in his 10-volume History of Animals) had so much as considered the possibility that animals had a past.
这一西方知性传统之前，人们不曾想到动物可能有过去，甚至著有10卷本《动物史》的亚里士多德。
Later, in Roman times, Pliny’s Natural History includes descriptions of animals that are real, or fabulous, but none that are extinct. The word “fossil” was used to describe anything dug from the ground, as in “fossil fuel”. Even Carl Linnaeus, who pioneered his system of binomial nomenclature in the mid-18th century, catalogued only one kind of animal – those that exist.
后来的罗马时期，普林尼的《自然史》对动物的描述，真真假假，但没有灭绝的动物。“化石”一词用来描述从地下挖出来的东西，如“化石能源”。甚至卡尔·林奈——18世纪中叶动植物命名法先驱——只分类一种动物——那些存在着的动物。
It was the discovery of some American mastodon bones in what is now Ohio, during the early 18th century – an unintended consequence of French colonial exploration – that subsequently inspired Georges Cuvier, an anatomist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, to ask the essential question: “What was this primitive Earth? … And what revolution was able to wipe it out?”
18世纪早期，在美国现在的俄亥俄州发现了某些乳齿象骨，这是法国殖民探险者无心的发现，这才启发了巴黎国家博物馆的解剖学家乔治·居维叶，他问了这个核心问题：“这个远古的地球是什么？什么样的变化能将其清除？”
Revolutionary France celebrated the rights of man. Cuvier was never going to recognise the truth about some later extinctions: that Homo sapiens is the problem, not the solution.
法国大革命张扬人权。居维叶没想过能认识到有关后来几次大灭绝的事实：人类才是问题，而非解决方法。
Addressing the imminent next catastrophe with a certain grim relish, Kolbert spells out the results of her investigations: “One-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater molluscs, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed towards oblivion,” she declares, during the course of her odyssey through our natural world and its human-inspired devastation.
科尔伯特有点冷酷地应对这一即将降临的大祸，她写下调查结果：“三分之一的珊瑚礁、三分之一的淡水软体动物、三分之一的鲨鱼和鳐鱼、四分之一的哺乳动物、五分之一的爬行动物、六分之一的鸟将永远消失。”她遍览自然世界，看到了这场人类导致的灭亡。
Kolbert’s indictment of humanity is remorseless, and compelling: “The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific, in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and in the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys.”
科尔伯特对人类的指控冷酷无情，令人信服。“四处都在遭殃：南太平洋，北大西洋，北冰洋，荒漠草原、湖区、岛屿、山巅和峡谷。”
Readers of The Sixth Extinction will be unable to evade the conclusion that we do indeed find ourselves on the brink of a great catastrophe, one in which the agent involved is not an inanimate object (such as an asteroid) or a geophysical force (such as the extreme global warming disaster of 250m years ago) but a sentient creature: ourselves.
《第六次大灭绝》的读者难以忽视这一结论，我们正在出在大灾难的边缘，导致灾难的因素并非无生命的物体（如小行星）或地球力量（如过去2.5亿年间发生的极端全球变暖），而是知觉生物：我们自己。
Homo sapiens may have enjoyed brilliant success on Earth but we have done so at the expense of virtually every other species. We are, as the Observer’s Robin McKie has put it, “”.
人类在地球上取得了巨大的成功，但我们却以几乎所有其他物种为代价。如《观察家报》的罗宾·麦凯所言，我们是“地狱的邻居”。
The Sixth Extinction ends in a windowless room at the in California known as the , the world’s largest collection of species on ice.
《第六次大灭绝》在加利福尼亚保护研究所Frozen Zoo一所无窗的屋子中结束，这里世界上最大的冰藏物种库。
This, suggests Kolbert, may be the slender thread on which life on Earth will depend in future. Who knows? She underlines her final message with a quotation from the Stanford ecologist Paul R Erhlich: “IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.”
科尔伯特认为，这可能是地球生物未来依靠的一线生机。谁知道呢？她最后引用了斯坦福生态学家Paul R Erhlich的话：“把所有物种推到灭绝边缘，人类忙着锯掉他们赖以支撑的肢臂。”
We have been warned.
我们受到了警告。