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环境科学的主要任务是什么？

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To see the golden sun and the azure sky, the outstretched ocean, to walk upon the green earth, and to be lord of a thousand creatures, to look down giddy precipices or over distant flowery vales, to see the world spread out under ones finger in a map, to bring the stars near, to view the smallest insects in a microscope, to read history, and witness the revolutions of empires and the succession of generations, to hear of the glory of Simon and Tyre, of Babylon and Susan, as of a faded pageant, and to say all these were, and are now nothing, to think that we exist in such a point of time, and in such a corner of space, to be at once spectators and a part of the moving scene, to watch the return of the seasons, of spring and autumn. To hear... The stock dove plain amid the forest deep, That drowsy rustles to the sighing gale. —to traverse desert wilderness, to listen to the dungeons gloom, or sit in crowded theatres and see life itself mocked, to feel heat and cold, pleasure and pain, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, to study the works of art and refine the sense of beauty to agony, to worship fame and to dream of immortality, to have read Shakespeare and Beloit to the same species as Sir Isaac Newton; to be and to do all this, and then in a moment to be nothing, to have it all snatched from one like a jugglers ball or a phantasmagoria...

Life, like science and art, is a theory about the world: a theory that in our case takes bodily form. By a succession of adaptations, most of which are favourable and none of which are lethal, living things have invested in particular expectations about the future course of their environments. If those theories are good enough, then life will prosper and multiply; but if they are outmoded by changing conditions, their embodiments will dwindle and perish. Science and art are two things most uniquely human. They witness to a desire to see beyond the seen. They display the crowning successes of the objective and subjective views of the world. But while they spring from a shared source—the careful observation of things—they evoke different theories about the world; what it means, what its inner connections truly are, and what we should judge as important. Science and art have diverged. As science became more successful in its quest to explain the seen by unseen laws of Nature, so art became increasingly subjective, metaphorical, and divorced from realistic representation.

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail drivens into the body on the cross of life. The strange thing is that each one who has gone through that bitter disillusionment adds to it in his turn, unconsciously, by the power within him which is stronger than himself.

The love of beauty is an essential part of all healthy human nature. It is a moral quality. The absence of it is not an assured ground of condemnation, but the presence of it is an invariable sign of goodness of heart. In proportion to the degree in which it is felt will probably be the degree in which nobleness and beauty of character will be attained. Natural beauty is an all-pervading presence. The universe is its temple. It unfolds into the numberless flowers of spring. It waves in the branches of trees and the green blades of grass. It haunts the depths of the earth and the sea. It gleams from the hues of the shell and the precious stone. And not only these minute objects but the oceans, the mountains, the clouds, the stars, the rising and the setting sun—all overflow with beauty. This beauty is so precious, and so congenial to our tenderest and noblest feelings, that it is painful to think of the multitude of people living in the midst of it and yet remaining almost blind to it.