Passage B
A bag of chips I bought recently in England had some bad news printed on the back. First, the chips had 14 g of fat. Worse,
they had caused 75 g of carbon to be released into the atmosphere.
The bag called my attention to my carbon footprint: those 75 g, added to the 2.3 million from the plane I took there and
back, plus the total of all the carbon impacts—the emissions into the air that contribute to global warming—of everything else
I do and buy. Footprints math uses life-cycle assessment, or LCA, which calculates the amount of carbon released over the
entire life history of those chips, from planting the potatoes to tossing the empty bag into the trash.
While our footprints are a significant measure we’ve all been getting used to, they do not tell the whole story. We don’t
just trample the planet; we also sometimes leave a positive impression. A more encouraging way to conceptualize our impact is
by our handprints, the sum total of all the reductions we make in our footprints. When she bought my plane tickets, my travel
agent also paid for a carbon offset—planting trees in a deforested region—as a boost to my handprint.
Handprints are the brainchild of Gregory Norris, a lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health. Norris was dismayed
to find that his Harvard students, after learning how to calculate LCAs, would say the planet would be better off if they had not
been born. “LCA was bringing nothing but bad news,” says Norris, “telling us every person hurts the planet every day.
Something was missing—that we can also benefit the planet. I needed to name these benefits to make them as tangible as
footprints. Handprints was a natural choice.”
Norris has set up a website, handprinter.org, which lets us calculate our handprint and pledge of confirm ways we intend
to enlarge it, with a Facebook status update about the action. Bonus: if your friends make the same move (like boosting fuel
efficiency by inflating tires to the correct pressure or saving paper by printing two-sided documents) because they learned it
from you, your handprint increases too. The more people you recruit, the bigger your handprints. Handprints can also be
grouped, and Norris envisions a day when families, schools and clubs, companies and cities—maybe even nations—could
compete on the size of their handprints.
Elke Weber, a cognitive scientist at Columbia University’s Business School and Earth Institute, says the handprint might
remedy a major reason so few people move from awareness of global warming to ongoing action. When folks harp on the harm
we do to the planet, we feel bad and want to do something to feel better—and then we tune out. But if we have a positive goal
in mind that we can take small, manageable steps toward, we feel good—and are more likely to keep going. Step by step by
hand.
【題組】54. Which of the following statements can be inferred from the passage?
(A) Pliny the Elder was a historian of nature.
(B) People living in Lebanon prospered recently.
(C) The Talmud had once demanded the woods from the Romans.
(D)Young people donated more than half a million to the Turkish.
寫作批改
VIP與詳解卡管理
私人筆記( 0 )
