Another year, another Year. After the official 2009 International Year of Natural Fibres – following my favourite, the International Year of the Potato in 2008 – we are now two days into the UN-designated International Year of Biodiversity. And though the celebrations of spuds and sisal may have happily passed you by, this one, I would suggest, is worth noticing.

一年又一年。2008年我的最爱——国际马铃薯年之后便是09年的国际天然纤维年。现在我们又在为期两日由联合国举办的国际生物多样性年中。尽管在土豆和剑麻的庆祝会中你可能过的很开心，但这一次我认为是很值得关注的。

For a start, it marks one of the most spectacularly broken, but least-known, of all environmental promises. In 2001, EU heads of governments said they would aim to "halt" human destruction of the world's wildlife and wild places by 2010, and the next year world leaders, meeting at the Johannesburg Earth Summit, committed themselves to "a significant reduction" in the rate of loss by the same date.

首先，它标志着一次伟大的突破。在所有的环境性承诺中，它最为著名。在2001年，欧盟各国政府首脑表示直至2010年他们会停止人类毁灭野生动物及栖息地的行为。而在02年的约翰内斯堡地球峰会上，世界各国首脑再次承诺会明显减慢它的速度。

Fat chance. Not the slightest effort has been made to deliver on those undertakings: if anything, the extermination has accelerated. And the UN's attempt to shame governments by designating the Year does not look like having much effect either

在众多优越的条件下他们却没有丝毫兑现承诺,如果有的话，那就是毁灭的更加快了。因此联合国试图根据这年实施的措施毫无效果来对政府施压。

This is serious stuff. Species are now going extinct at between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural rate: by some estimates, half of the 13 million or so forms of life on the planet will disappear by the end of the century. That would be the greatest extinction since the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, from which life took millions of years to recover.

物种正以1000到10000倍的自然速率灭绝，这是非常严重的事情。有人估计，在这颗星球上的13000000种生命形态中有近一半会在本世纪末消失。这将会是65000000年前恐龙灭绝后最大的的一次，并且得花上数百万年来恢复。

The destruction of the wild places where the species live is even more damaging than the extinctions themselves. And it is increasingly clear that this threatens even more of an economic crisis than an ecological one. For the world's economies are wholly owned subsidiaries of the environment.

野生动物栖息地毁坏的危害性远比生物自身灭绝严重。并且越来越清晰的是这甚至能牵连到经济危机，而不单单是对生态的威胁。对于世界经济的全部资本来讲环境相当于一个子体。