简介：
Citizen Environmental Monitoring Could Keep Officials Honest
雾霾中少年，快到“公民环境监测”碗里来！
You know who you can't trust to report on government stewardship of the environment? That government.
在环境质量的监管问题上，谁是最不可靠的人呢？（你懂的,此处略去几个字）。
撰文/播音 戴维•别洛（David Biello）
翻译 李轩
For years Spain fudged its own fish catch numbers to protect the fishery business. In 2007, New Zealand cut a negative chapter from its State of the Environment report. When challenged, officials decided simply to stop issuing the report. That same year in the U.S. the Bush administration’s EPA concluded that climate change from greenhouse gas emissions was a serious threat. So the White House refused to make the report public.
西班牙曾多年捏造捕鱼数据，以保护国家的渔业；2007年，新西兰曾将一份环境报告中非常“负面”的一章彻底删去；同年，美国环境保护局得出结论，温室气体排放是气候变化的元凶之一，但布什政府拒绝将其公之于众。
Fortunately, the citizenry now has tools to fight such official duplicity. Smartphones, cheap satellite imaging and crowd-funded enterprises have made oversight possible that was undreamt of by past transparency advocates, environmentalists and other interested parties. That's the argument made by Yale University researchers in the journal Nature. [Angel Hsu et al, Development: Mobilize citizens to track sustainability]
不过幸运的是，现在的公众，在面对政府的欺骗行为时，手里有了反抗的工具。得益于智能手机、廉价的卫星成像技术和众筹企业的帮助，公众尽可以行使自己的监督权。放在过去，无论是“政府透明化”的倡议者，还是环保人士，或是其他利益相关团体，都可是不敢想象的事情。耶鲁大学的研究人员注意到了这一现象，并将结论刊登在了《自然》（Nature）杂志上。
It's the same team who previously used satellite derived estimates to point out that New Delhi has smog as bad or worse than Beijing.
此前，正是这一团队，用卫星数据估算出了新德里堪比北京（甚至比北京更糟）的雾霾状况！
A wide range of smartphone apps could allow citizens to do everything from monitoring air and water quality to tracking ocean plankton populations from space. Such decentralized data collection could even force governments to stay on the sustainability straight and narrow.
公众可以使用各式各样的手机App检测空气质量、检测水质。就算身处太空，也能跟踪监测海洋中浮游生物的数量。这些数据虽然零散，但也不可小觑，甚至能让政府如履薄冰！
（题图来源：http://www.epa.vic.gov.au/）
