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我要談論一個極細微的想法-關於基準線的改變,因為這個想法可在一分鐘內解釋完畢,所以我先告訴你們三個故事,來填補演講時間。第一個故事跟達爾文-我心目中的英雄有關。如你們所知,1835年他在這個地方,你們以為他在追蹤雀類,但並非如此,事實上他在收集魚類。他形容其中一種非常「普遍」,就是帆鰭石斑(sailfin grouper),牠們直到80年代都是漁獲量大宗,現在這種魚已被列在世界自然保護聯盟的瀕危物種紅色名單上。我們已在加拉帕戈斯群島和其他地方聽過這個故事很多次,所以並沒有什麼特別之處,但重點是,我們仍前往加拉帕戈斯群島,我們仍然認為它是原始的,手冊上仍說它的生態未曾改變,所以,這裡發生了什麼事?
第二個故事也說明了另一個概念,稱為腰圍的改變,因為-(笑聲)我1971年前往那裡研究-一個位於西非的潟湖,我前往那裡是因為我成長於歐洲,我希望以後在非洲工作,我想我可以融入那個地方,但我遭受嚴重的曬傷,說服了我確實不屬於那裡;這是我第一次被曬傷。
這個潟湖被棕櫚樹環繞,你們可以看到,還有一些紅樹林。潟湖裡有羅非魚,約20公分長,一種叫做黑顎羅非魚(blackchin tilapia)的品種。以捕捉這種羅非魚為主的漁業持續捕獲大量魚類,他們曾有過一段黃金時期,他們的獲益高於加納平均所得。27年後,當我前往那裡時,這種魚的大小已縮水一半,成魚的長度是5公分,牠們已受基因演化的推動而改變。潟湖中仍有魚類,人們仍快樂地捕魚,魚也快樂地生活在那裡;所以什麼也沒改變,但一切都改變了。
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以下為系統擷取之英文原文
I'm going to speak about a tiny, little idea. And this is about shifting baseline. And because the idea can be explained in one minute, I will tell you three stories before to fill in the time. And the first story is about Charles Darwin, one of my heroes. And he was here, as you well know, in '35. And you'd think he was chasing finches, but he wasn't. He was actually collecting fish. And he described one of them as very "common." This was the sailfin grouper. A big fishery was run on it until the '80s. Now the fish is on the IUCN Red List. Now this story, we have heard it lots of times on Galapagos and other places, so there is nothing particular about it. But the point is, we still come to Galapagos. We still think it is pristine. The brochures still say it is untouched. So what happens here?
The second story, also to illustrate another concept, is called shifting waistline. (Laughter) Because I was there in '71, studying a lagoon in West Africa. I was there because I grew up in Europe and I wanted later to work in Africa. And I thought I could blend in. And I got a big sunburn, and I was convinced that I was really not from there. This was my first sunburn.
And the lagoon was surrounded by palm trees, as you can see, and a few mangrove. And it had tilapia about 20 centimeters, a species of tilapia called blackchin tilapia. And the fisheries for this tilapia sustained lots of fish and they had a good time and they earned more than average in Ghana. When I went there 27 years later, the fish had shrunk to half of their size. They were maturing at five centimeters. They had been pushed genetically. There were still fishes. They were still kind of happy. And the fish also were happy to be there. So nothing has changed, but everything has changed.
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我的第三個小故事是,我是將拖網引進東南亞的幫兇,在70年代-嗯,從60年代開始-歐洲進行了很多開發項目,漁業開發意味著對已有10萬名漁夫的國家施壓,強迫他們進行工業捕漁。這條小船相當難看,名為「慕蒂亞拉4號」,我乘著它出海,我們在整個南中國海南部,特別是爪哇海進行調查。我們所捕獲的,我們不知道該如何形容,我們所捕獲的,現在我知道是大海底部,我們捕獲的90%是海綿,及其他附著於海底的動物。事實上,大多數魚類只是碎片上的小點,成堆的碎片是珊瑚魚類,基本上這等於將海底搬上甲板,然後隨意丟棄。
這些照片非常特別,因為這個轉變非常迅速,你在一年內做了一項調查,然後開始進行商業性捕魚。海底發生改變;在這個例子中,一片堅硬的海底或軟質珊瑚變成一灘爛泥。這是一隻死烏龜,牠們無法食用,牠們會被扔掉,因為已經死亡。有一次我們抓到一隻活的,牠還沒被淹死,人們想殺死牠,因為牠很美味。這座由碎片形成的山,事實上是每當漁民進入一片從未被捕撈過的區域時收集而成的,但這不會被記錄在案。
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My third little story is that I was an accomplice in the introduction of trawling in Southeast Asia. In the '70s -- well, beginning in the '60s -- Europe did lots of development projects. Fish development meant imposing on countries that had already 100,000 fish to impose on them industrial fishing. And this boat, quite ugly, is called the Mutiara 4. And I went sailing on it, and we did surveys throughout the southern South China sea and especially the Java Sea. And what we caught, we didn't have words for it. What we caught, I know now, is the bottom of the sea. And 90 percent of our catch were sponges, other animals that are fixed on the bottom. And actually most of the fish, they are a little spot on the debris, the piles of debris, were coral reef fish. Essentially the bottom of the sea came onto the deck and then was thrown down.
And these pictures are extraordinary because this transition is very rapid. Within a year, you do a survey and then commercial fishing begins. The bottom is transformed from, in this case, a hard bottom or soft coral into a muddy mess. This is a dead turtle. They were not eaten, they were thrown away because they were dead. And one time we caught a live one. It was not drowned yet. And then they wanted to kill it because it was good to eat. This mountain of debris is actually collected by fishers every time they go into an area that's never been fished. But it's not documented.
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我們改變了世界,但我們不記得了。我們調整了我們的基準線,到達新的水平,但我們不記得其中曾經存在什麼。如果你將這些做個總結,會發生像這樣的情形。y軸顯示的是一些好現象:生物多樣性、虎鯨的數量、貴國的綠地、供水情況;隨著時間推移,情況發生改變,因為人們理所當然的行為而改變。每一代人們都會用他們有感知的生命開始時所得到的圖形作為一個標準,然後向前推論,將其中差異視為一項損失,但他們沒有意識到在損失之前發生了什麼事。你可以看到一個持續的變化,到了最後,你希望能保存那可悲的剩餘物。然而,在很大程度上,這正是我們現在想做的。我們想保存已消失或不復原貌的東西。
現在,人們應該思考這個問題對人們的影響。當然,在獵食性社會中,人們殺害動物,經過好幾代之後,他們不知道自己造成了什麼改變,因為,顯然動物在滅絕、變得稀少之前,數量總是相當豐富,所以數量豐富的動物不會消失,會消失的總是稀有動物。因此他們沒有意識到這個巨大損失。某一段時期,我們將注意力放在大型動物,在海洋中,這意味著大型魚類,因為我們的捕撈,牠們越來越稀少,過了一段時間後,幾種魚類僥倖留存,我們認為這就是基準線。
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e transform the world, but we don't remember it. We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don't recall what was there. If you generalize this, something like this happens. You have on the y axis some good thing: biodiversity, numbers of orca, the greenness of your country, the water supply. And over time it changes. It changes because people do things all naturally. Every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward. And the difference then, they perceive as a loss. But they don't perceive what happened before as a loss. You can have a succession of changes. At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers. And that, to a large extent, is what we want to do now. We want to sustain things that are gone or things that are not the way they were.
Now one should think this problem affected people certainly when in predatory societies, they killed animals and they didn't know they had done so after a few generations. Because, obviously, an animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare. So you don't lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. And therefore they're not perceived as a big loss. Over time, we concentrate on large animals, and in a sea that means the big fish. They become rarer because we fish them. Over time we have a few fish left and we think this is the baseline.
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問題是,為什麼人們接受這一點?好,因為他們不知道其中有所不同。事實上,很多人、科學家們會爭論,是否真的有所不同?他們會爭論這一點,因為以早期模式提出的證據,並不是他們希望的證據呈現方式。例如一些出自船長口中的逸聞,說在這個區域觀察到大量魚類,是不會被採用的,或通常不會被魚類科學家採用,因為它不是「科學」。所以現在的情況是,人們不知道過去的情形,即使我們生活在有文化的社會,因為他們不信任過去的訊息來源。
因此,海洋保護區可扮演這個重要角色,因為藉由海洋保護區,我們事實上可以重現過去,我們可以重現人們無法想像的過去,因為基準線已轉移到極低之處,這是為了讓可以看見海洋保護區的人們,及藉由它提供的見識而獲益的人們,使他們能重設他們的基準線。
那些因為沒機會而無法這麼做的人呢?例如住在中西部的人?我認為藝術和電影或許可以填補這個空白,還有模擬。這是一幅切薩皮克灣的模擬圖,很久以前,切薩皮克灣有灰鯨-在500年前。你們注意到,圖中的色彩和色調就像「阿凡達」中的一樣(笑聲)。如果你想想「阿凡達」,如果你思考人們為什麼會對它如此感動,不僅是其中的「風中奇緣」故事-為什麼人們會對這個影像如此感動?因為它喚起在某種意義上已失去的東西。所以我建議,我唯一要提供的建議是,卡麥隆拍攝海中版的「阿凡達II」。
非常感謝。
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nd the question is, why do people accept this? Well because they don't know that it was different. And in fact, lots of people, scientists, will contest that it was really different. And they will contest this because the evidence presented in an earlier mode is not in the way they would like the evidence presented. For example, the anecdote that some present, as Captain so-and-so observed lots of fish in this area cannot be used or is usually not utilized by fishery scientists, because it's not "scientific." So you have a situation where people don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.
And hence, the enormous role that a marine protected area can play. Because with marine protected areas, we actually recreate the past. We recreate the past that people cannot conceive because the baseline has shifted and is extremely low. That is for people who can see a marine protected area and who can benefit from the insight that it provides, which enables them to reset their baseline.
How about the people who can't do that because they have no access -- the people in the Midwest for example? There I think that the arts and film can perhaps fill the gap, and simulation. This is a simulation of Chesapeake Bay. There were gray whales in Chesapeake Bay a long time ago -- 500 years ago. And you will have noticed that the hues and tones are like "Avatar." (Laughter) And if you think about "Avatar," if you think of why people were so touched by it -- never mind the Pocahontas story -- why so touched by the imagery? Because it evokes something that in a sense has been lost. And so my recommendation, it's the only one I will provide, is for Cameron to do "Avatar II" underwater.
Thank you very much.