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  3. Not Seeing the Forest for the Dollar BillsA)The U.S. Fish a

Not Seeing the Forest for the Dollar BillsA)The U.S. Fish a

游客2024-02-06  7
问题                     Not Seeing the Forest for the Dollar Bills
A)The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has finally declared the spotted owl an endangered species. The decision will, if the administration enforces the law of the land, drastically cut back logging in the owl’s habitat—old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest.
B)The logging companies are fighting back. They will go to court to "dispute the science" behind the finding. Knowing that the science is not on their side, they have also leaned on the administration not to enforce the law. And they are trying to get the law changed.
C)The law in question is the Endangered Species Act. The companies want it to take into account economic considerations. If it did, they say over and over to the press, the politicians, and the public, we would never choose to sacrifice 28,000 jobs for an owl.
D)That is not the choice at all, of course. The choice is not between an owl and jobs, but between a forest and greed.
E)The spotted owl is, like every other species, the holder of a unique genetic code that is millions of years old and irreplaceable. Even more important, the owl is a canary, in the old miners’ sense—a sign that all is well. It is an indicator species, a creature high up the food chain that depends upon a large area of healthy land for its livelihood. Every thriving family of spotted owls means that 4,000 acres of forest are well. The trees are living their full lives and returning stored nutrients to the soil when they die. Two hundred other vertebrates that live in the forest are well, as are 1, 500 insects and spiders and untold numbers of smaller creatures. The spongy soil under the trees is storing and filtering rain, controlling floods and droughts, keeping the streams clear and pure.
F)When old-growth is clear-cut, the trees and the owls disappear and so does everything else. Burned slash release to sky nutrients that have been sequestered and recycled by living things for 500 years. What’ s left of the soil bleeds downhill as from an open wound. Waters cloud and silt, flood and dry up. The temperature goes up, and the humidity goes down. It will take hundreds of years to regather the nutrients, rebuild the soil, and restore the complex system of intact forest, if there is still old-growth forest to recolonize, and it forest companies stay away.
G)There are unlikely to stay away. On their own land, they replant with a single, commercially valuable, fast-growing species and call it a forest. It bears as much resemblance to a 500-year-old natural forest as a suburb of identical ticky-tacky houses bears to Renaissance cathedral. Ecologists call such plantations "cornfields". It’s not at all certain how many cycles of these cornfields will be possible, given the loss of soil and nutrients when they are cut every fifty years or so.
H)In the past ten years, 13,000 forest-related jobs were lost in Oregon alone, though the annual cut increased. Jobs were lost to automation and to moving mills offshore, not to the Endangered Species Act.
I)The forest companies are interested not in jobs or forests, but in multiplying money. Old-growth forests make higher profit than second-growth plantations. Therefore 85 percent of the old-growth is already gone. The companies have stripped it from their own lands. Nearly all that remains is on federal land, owned by you and me. In Washington and Oregon, 2.4 million acres of old-growth are left of which 800,000 are protected in national parks. The rest, in national forests, is marked for cutting.
J)Our elected representatives are selling off old-growth logging rights in national forests at a rate of about 100,000 acres per year, and at a loss. Taxpayers are subsidizing this process. At the present cutting rate, all but the last protected bits will be gone in about twenty years. The owls will be on their way out—the 800,000 acres remaining will be too fragmented to sustain them. The jobs will be gone, not because of owls, but because of rapacious forestry.
K)If loggers and their communities cannot be sustained by second-growth cutting on private lands, then they were in trouble anyway. A compassionate nation would look for a dignified way to help them build a viable economy. It wouldn’t sacrifice the biological treasure of intact forest to keep them going twenty more years. That’s the kind of behavior we are righteously telling the Brazilians to stop.
L)The Endangered Species Act should not take into account economic considerations. Economics doesn’t know how to value a species or a forest. Its logic drives people to exploit resources to the point of extinction. The Endangered Species Act tells us that extinction is morally unacceptable. It was enacted by a Congress and President in a wise mood, to express a higher value than a bottom line. It should not be weakened. It should be enforced. [br] A large area of healthy land provides comfortable homes for the spotted owl.
选项
答案 E
解析 题干：一大片健康的土地能够为斑点猫头鹰提供一个舒适的家园。题干关键词为A large area of，healthy land和homes。文中E段第三句提到。它是一种指示物种，一种在食物链上端的生物，它的生活依赖于大片健康的土地。与题干意思一致，故选E。
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