可可英语外刊阅读（英文外刊阅读-纽约客2022）

“城中话题”

the talk of the town:

a person or thing that many people in a town, city, etc., are talking about in an interested or excited way

e.g. The poor boy married a girl from a rich family, and he is the talk of the town now.

IN DEEP

It’s rare that a tiny country like Nauru gets to determine the course of world events. But, for tangled reasons, this rare event is playing out right now. If Nauru has its way, enormous bulldozers could descend on the largest, still mostly untouched ecosystem in the world—the seafloor—sometime within the next few years. Hundreds of marine scientists have signed a statement warning that this would be an ecological disaster resulting in damage “irreversible on multi-generational timescales.”

像瑙鲁这样的小国能够决定世界大事的进程，实属罕见。但是，由于复杂的原因，这种罕见的事件正在上演。如果瑙鲁得以实现，那么在未来几年的某个时候，巨大的推土机将会降临到世界上最大的、几乎仍未被触及的生态系统——海底。数百名海洋科学家签署了一份声明，警告说这将是一场生态灾难，造成的破坏“在几代人的时间尺度上是不可逆转的”。

瑙鲁的岩石海岸线

Large swaths of the seabed are covered with potentially mineable—and potentially extremely valuable—metals, in the form of blackened lumps called polymetallic nodules. For decades, companies have been trying to figure out how to mine these nodules; so far, though, they’ve been able to do only exploratory work. permits for actual mining can’t be granted until the I.S.A. comes up with a set of regulations governing the process, a task it’s been working on for more than twenty years.

海床上的大片区域都覆盖着潜在的可开采的——也可能是极具价值的——金属，它们以被称为多金属结核的黑色块状形式存在。几十年来，企业一直在试图弄清楚如何开采这些结核;但到目前为止，他们只能进行探索性工作。在国际海底管理局制定出一套管理这一过程的规章制度之前，实际的采矿许可证是不能被授予的。国际海底管理局为此已经努力了20多年。

太平洋5000米神的多金属结核 polymetalic nodules from 5000m depth of Pacific ocean on white backgroud

The complexities continue. To apply for a mining permit, companies need to team up with a country that’s party to UNCLOS. (Most of the nations in the world are, but not, significantly, the United States.) And this is where Nauru comes in. It’s sponsoring a company called Nauru Ocean Resources, which is a subsidiary of the Metals Company, a Canadian firm. The Metals Company wants to mine a nodule-rich region of the Pacific between Hawaii and Mexico known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. In June, not long before the Metals Company went public as a “special purpose acquisition company,” Nauru notified the I.S.A. that it was invoking what’s become known as the “two-year rule.” The rule—which is actually part of an annex to UNCLOS—says that, “if a request is made by a State,” the I.S.A. “shall” finalize the regulations within two years. As it has now been six months

since Nauru invoked the rule, this leaves just eighteen months for the work to be completed.

复杂的情况仍在继续。要申请采矿许可证，公司需要与《联合国海洋法公约》的缔约国合作。(世界上大多数国家都是如此，但美国并非如此。)这就是瑙鲁的作用所在。它赞助了一家叫瑙鲁海洋资源的公司，这是一家加拿大公司金属公司的子公司。金属公司想要开采位于夏威夷和墨西哥之间的太平洋上一个富含结核的地区，这个地区被称为克拉里昂-克利珀顿区(Clarion-Clipperton Zone)。今年6月，在金属公司以“特殊目的收购公司”的身份上市前不久，瑙鲁通知国际海底管理局，它将援引所谓的“两年规则”。该规则实际上是《联合国海洋法公约》附件的一部分，它规定，“如果一个国家提出请求”，国际海洋法公约“应在两年内确定规则”。现在已经过去六个月了，由于瑙鲁援用了这一规则，这项工作只剩下18个月的时间来完成。

In mid-December, the I.S.A. held a meeting at its headquarters in Kingston. Because of COVID, many countries didn’t send delegates, and some that did objected to the two-year timetable, on the ground that it couldn’t responsibly be met. Nevertheless, Michael Lodge, the I.S.A.’s secretary-general, said in a press release dated December 14th that the authority would forge ahead: “We have a busy schedule in the coming two years, but I am confident that our common purpose will enable us to make the expected progress.”

12月中旬，国际海底管理局在金斯敦的总部召开了一次会议。由于新冠肺炎疫情，许多国家没有派代表，一些国家反对两年的时间表，理由是不能负责任地履行。尽管如此，国际海底管理局秘书长迈克尔·洛奇在12月14日的一份新闻稿中表示，该机构将继续向前推进:“未来两年我们的日程安排得很紧凑，但我有信心，我们的共同目标将使我们取得预期的进展。”

Both Nauru and the Metals Company have portrayed the effort to mine the seabed as essential to cutting carbon emissions. Clean-energy technologies such as electric-car batteries, at least in their current form, require metals, including cobalt, that are found in the nodules in relatively high concentrations. “Nauru is part of a pioneering venture that could soon power the world’s green economy,” a video produced by the country’s government declares. “We’re in a quest for a more sustainable future,” Gerard Barron, the C.E.O. of the Metals Company, says in the same video.

瑙鲁和金属公司都表示，开采海床的努力对减少碳排放至关重要。清洁能源技术，如电动汽车电池，至少在目前的形式，需要金属，包括钴，在结核中发现的相对高浓度。瑙鲁政府制作的一段视频宣称:“瑙鲁是一项开创性的冒险项目的一部分，该项目将很快为世界绿色经济提供动力。”“我们正在寻求一个更可持续的未来，”金属公司的首席执行官杰拉德·巴伦(Gerard Barron)在同一段视频中说。

Marine scientists argue, though, that the potential costs of deep-ocean mining outweigh the benefits. They point out that the ocean floor is so difficult to access that most of its inhabitants are probably still unknown, and their significance to the functioning of the oceans is ill-understood. In the meantime, seabed mining, which would take place in complete darkness, thousands of feet under water, will, they say, be almost impossible to monitor. In September, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which compiles the “red list” of endangered species, called for a global moratorium（暂停）on deep-sea mining. The group issued a statement raising concerns that “biodiversity loss will be inevitable if deep-sea mining is permitted to occur,” and “that the consequences for ocean eco-system function are unknown.”

然而，海洋科学家认为，深海采矿的潜在成本超过了收益。他们指出，海底是如此难以接近，以至于大多数海底居民可能仍然不为人所知，他们对海洋功能的重要性也被误解了。与此同时，他们说，在水下数千英尺的完全黑暗中进行的海底采矿，几乎不可能被监测到。9月，编制濒危物种“红色名单”的国际自然保护联盟(International Union for Conservation of Nature)呼吁全球暂停深海采矿。该组织发表了一份声明，表示“如果允许进行深海采矿，生物多样性的丧失将不可避免”，“对海洋生态系统功能的影响是未知的”。

Critics maintain that the very structure of the I.S.A. biases it toward mining. To finance itself, the body depends on fees from companies doing exploratory work and on contributions from member states. Many member states seem to have stopped paying; a report from 2020 listed almost sixty countries that owe at least two years’ contributions. The I.S.A. is expected to receive a percentage of the profits from seabed mining if it moves forward. The potential for a conflict of interest would seem to be pretty basic. (The I.S.A. said that it could not comment at this time.)

批评人士认为，国际海底管理局的结构使其倾向于采矿。为了筹措资金，该组织依靠从事勘探工作的公司收取的费用和成员国的捐款。许多成员国似乎已经停止支付;2020年的一份报告列出了近60个欠至少两年会费的国家。如果继续推进，国际海底管理局有望从海底采矿中获得一定比例的利润。潜在的利益冲突似乎是非常基本的。(国际海底管理局表示，目前无法置评。)

Nauru, for its part, has a long history of disastrous business dealings. Starting in the early twentieth century, the island was stripped of most of its phosphate deposits, a process that reduced a good part of it to a wasteland. In 1968, Nauru, which had been administered by Australia, attained independence. The country used its wealth, which was still being generated by phosphate mining, to invest in a series of money-losing ventures. Now it is banking on sea-bed mining. Should the rest of the world allow Nauru to dictate the timetable for deciding how the seabed will be governed? The question would seem to answer itself. The noted oceanographer Sylvia Earle has called the attempt to carve up the ocean floor into mining claims the “biggest land grab in the history of humankind.” And yet, unless a lot of other nations finally decide to focus on the issue, this is what appears likely to happen.

就瑙鲁而言，它有着灾难性商业交易的悠久历史。从20世纪初开始，这个岛屿的大部分磷酸盐沉积物被剥夺，这一过程使它的很大一部分变成了荒地。1968年，曾由澳大利亚管理的瑙鲁获得独立。这个国家利用它的财富(这些财富仍来自磷矿开采)投资了一系列赔钱的企业。现在，它又把希望寄托在海底采矿上。世界其他国家是否应该允许瑙鲁来决定如何管理海底的时间表?这个问题似乎已经有了答案。著名海洋学家西尔维亚·厄尔(Sylvia Earle)称，将海底分割成矿产的企图是“人类历史上最大的土地掠夺”。然而，除非其他许多国家最终决定关注这个问题，否则这似乎是可能发生的。

“Countries have not really come to grips with the reality, which is that their hand is being forced by this two-year rule,” Duncan Currie, an international lawyer who advises the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, another group that has called for a moratorium on seabed mining, said in a recent interview. “And so, come July, 2023, a decision is going to have to be made as to whether to go down what is a very one-way street toward deep-sea mining at the enormous expense of the marine environment, or whether they’re going to continue to take a cautious view. And, unfortunately, it is an either-or situation.”

—Elizabeth Kolbert

深海保护联盟(Deep Sea Conservation Coalition)是另一个呼吁暂停海底采矿的组织，该组织的顾问、国际律师邓肯·柯里(Duncan Currie)在最近的一次采访中说，“各国还没有真正认识到现实，这是它们被迫采取行动的原因。”“因此，到2023年7月，人们将不得不做出决定，是走单行道，以海洋环境的巨大代价开采深海采矿，还是继续采取谨慎的态度。不幸的是，这是一个非此即彼的情况。”

——伊丽莎白·科尔伯特