Dayton Paul K
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA.
Am Nat. 2003 Jul;162(1):1-13. doi: 10.1086/376572. Epub 2003 Jun 27.
The last century has seen enormous environmental degradation: many populations are in drastic decline, and their ecosystems have been vastly altered. There is an urgent need to understand the causes of the decline, how the species interact with other components of the environment, and how ecosystem integrity is determined. A brief review of marine systems emphasizes the importance of natural sciences to understanding the systems and finding solutions. These environmental crises coincide with the virtual banishment of natural sciences in academe, which eliminate the opportunity for both young scientists and the general public to learn the fundamentals that help us predict population levels and the responses by complex systems to environmental variation. Science and management demands that complex systems be simplified, but the art of appropriate simplification depends on a basic understanding of the important natural history. It seems unlikely that meaningful conservation and restoration can be accomplished unless we recover the tradition of supporting research in and the teaching of natural history. We must reinstate natural science courses in all our academic institutions to insure that students experience nature first-hand and are instructed in the fundamentals of the natural sciences.
许多种群数量急剧下降，其生态系统也发生了巨大改变。迫切需要了解种群数量下降的原因、物种如何与环境的其他组成部分相互作用，以及生态系统的完整性是如何确定的。对海洋系统的简要回顾强调了自然科学对于理解这些系统和寻找解决方案的重要性。这些环境危机恰逢自然科学在学术界几乎被摒弃，这使得年轻科学家和普通公众都失去了学习有助于我们预测种群数量以及复杂系统对环境变化的反应的基础知识的机会。科学和管理要求简化复杂系统，但适当简化的技巧依赖于对重要自然历史的基本理解。除非我们恢复支持自然历史研究和教学的传统，否则似乎不太可能实现有意义的保护和恢复。我们必须在所有学术机构中恢复自然科学课程，以确保学生能够亲身体验自然，并接受自然科学基础知识的教导。
