It’s very difficult for me to write an article about the future of the oceans without getting depressed, and even worse, making you, dear reader, also depressed. When I sat down to start this assignment, I spent quite some time staring into space, trying to find a way around this problem. How could I not be depressing, while still being truthful? I didn’t want to be Cassandra, full of doom and gloom, but I also didn’t want to be Pollyanna, sugar-coating a seriously bad situation. Feeling rather stuck, on a whim I googled “fate of the oceans.” Bad idea. The top hit was an article by Julia Whitty, who has been filming and writing about the seas for a quarter of a century. She detailed the problems of ocean acidification, plastic pollution, overfishing, hypoxic dead zones, warming oceans, the melting Arctic, likely extinction of polar bears, sea level rise, shutdown of ocean circulation, bottom trawling, ghost nets, aquaculture, shark finning, bycatch, collapsing ecosystems, mercury poisoning, algal blooms, declining biodiversity, bleaching coral reefs, sonar pollution, exploding jellyfish populations, earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes. The tagline of the article was: “Our oceans are under attack, and approaching a point of no return.” The date of the article? March 2006. Thirteen years ago, and still we’re drifting along, carrying on with business as usual, raping the oceans, eating and polluting the oceans and ourselves into oblivion. Coincidentally, March 2006 is also the month that I completed my first solo ocean row, 3,000miles across the Atlantic, to raise awareness of our environmental issues, in the hope of inspiring action. Thereafter I rowed, again solo, across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, with the same goal in mind. So the article’s publication date was also a painful reminder of my failure tomake the difference I had hoped for. I confess, I used to be oblivious to our environmental challenges. I was raised to appreciate and respect nature, but then in my twenties and early thirties I was living a conventional London professional life, as materialistic and self-centred as the next yuppie.

中文翻译：

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停止漂流，开始划船

我很难在不感到沮丧的情况下写一篇关于海洋未来的文章，更糟糕的是，让您，亲爱的读者也感到沮丧。当我坐下来开始这项任务时，我花了很多时间盯着太空，试图找到解决这个问题的方法。我怎么能不沮丧，同时仍然是真实的？我不想成为 Cassandra，充满厄运和忧郁，但我也不想成为 Pollyanna，在严重的糟糕情况下粉饰糖衣。感觉有点卡住了，一时兴起，我在谷歌上搜索了“海洋的命运”。馊主意。最热门的是朱莉娅·惠蒂 (Julia Whitty) 的一篇文章，她已经拍摄和撰写关于海洋的文章长达四分之一个世纪。她详细介绍了海洋酸化、塑料污染、过度捕捞、缺氧死亡区、海洋变暖、北极融化、北极熊可能灭绝、海平面上升、海洋环流关闭、底拖网捕捞、鬼网、水产养殖、鲨鱼鳍、兼捕、生态系统崩溃、汞中毒、藻华、生物多样性下降、珊瑚礁白化、声纳污染、水母种群爆炸、地震、海啸和飓风. 这篇文章的标语是：“我们的海洋正在遭受攻击，正在逼近不归路。” 文章的日期？2006 年 3 月。十三年前，我们仍然在漂流，照常进行业务，掠夺海洋，吞噬和污染海洋和我们自己。巧合的是，2006 年 3 月也是我完成我的第一次单人海洋划船的月份，横跨大西洋 3,000 英里，以提高对我们环境问题的认识，希望能有启发性的行动。此后我再次独自划船，跨越太平洋和印度洋，怀着同样的目标。所以这篇文章的发表日期也痛苦地提醒我，我未能实现我所希望的改变。我承认，我过去常常忽视我们的环境挑战。我从小就欣赏和尊重自然，但在我 20 岁和 30 岁出头的时候，我过着传统的伦敦职业生活，就像下一个雅皮士一样唯物主义和以自我为中心。