In Our "Rurban"Age
To know the countryside,you must live in the city
In his book Badgers,the naturalist Michael Clark describes surveying the animal back in the 1960s.Calling at a farm cottage,he asked an old countryman whether he knew of any badgers living nearby."What are badgers?"came the reply.The countryman,Clark writes,"genuinely did not know of the species".
You can be a countryman,it seems,and know little of the country.But traditional,country folks are regarded as being in tune with the land.They live there,don't they?What can townies know of the"way of nature"?
This assumption infects much of our culture.It predicates the existence of a clear division between town and country.It enables the rural lobby to characterize itself as an indigenous culture,its"native"traditions and pastimes(hunting and fishing)threatened by an oppressive urban majority.The underlying message lies in that the countryside is best managed by country people.After all,they know about such things...
Unfortunately,too often,they don't.As the historian Keith Thomas showed in his study Man and the Natural World,the growth of our knowledge about nature has come by correcting the"vulgar errors"of country people.And although Thomas was writing about the period between 1500 and 1800,that process continues today—what country dwellers take for granted is still being confounded by the careful observation of reality.
A study,from York Univesity,has cast strange new light on the farmers' enemy—foxes.The more foxes a farmer kills,the more lambs he appears to lose to foxes.That is because:new foxes will almost certainly occupy the slain animals' territory,and new animals,unused to the terrain,may then choose more obvious prey—such as lambs.
The message of studies such as this is that natural systems are complex,unpredictable:understanding them requires patient observation and careful analysis.The lack of these conditions explains why,in the early modern era,grass snakes were killed as venomous,and gardeners worms becuase they were thought to gnaw plant roots.
The assumption that country people "ought" to know about such things is based on an urbanrural divide that opened up in the 18th century.For a couple of centuries,city and country people did inhabit separate realms.But the car,the phone,the media and the Internet have contributed to the unifying tendency of what we call modern lifestyle;and the vast population outflow from cities into rural areas blurred the difference between urban and rural.Thus,a new word—"rurban"—has been coined to describe this condition.Most of us now work indoors or in an office,and even if we are involved in our primary industries,we are far more likely to be staring at a computer that communicating with the landscape.Human life has turned generally into a monoculture by work,sleep,shopping and TV—all actually identical whether performed in town or country.
好的话,会加分的哦,要人工翻译的哦
英语文章翻译谢谢啦
逐句翻译:体内的荷尔蒙 Up to the beginning of the twentieth century, the nervous system was thought to control all communication within the body and the resulting integration of behavior. 到20世纪初,神经系统的所有通信被认为控制身体内而产生的集成的行为。Scientists had determined that nerve...
哪位英语翻译高手帮我翻译一下这篇文章呀!谢谢了!(机器或谷歌翻译的请...
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求英语高手翻译文章,谢谢了。考试用的。不要上网翻译哦。
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英语翻译成中文!谢谢了
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10篇英语哲理文章 带翻译 谢谢
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能帮我翻译这篇英语文章么?
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英语文章求翻译, 英语大神 快来吧 ,求教~这还不是完整的,加qq4 2...
完整文章,以及翻译如下:The weekends are a time for families in Britain. Often the parents are not at work. Having worked a five-day week from Monday to Friday, Saturdays are a busy time for shops with many families going shopping. Sundays used to be a very special day of ...
哥哥帮我翻译一下下面的文章,谢谢了。
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翻译英语小文章 急!!! 谢谢~~
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请大家帮我把这段文章翻译成英语。不要机器翻译的、谢谢了
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