China's Environmental Woes Are Diverse, Numerous, and Mighty

For anyone that isn't as aware of China issues as I am, China has some serious environmental problems.

Dai Qing is one of the main spokespeople as to the environmental disaster that is contemporary China, and although she is most famous for her activism against the Three Gorges Dam, she seems to be widely knowledgeable about other environmental issues in China as well. She was recently profiled at The Globe and Mail, and the quotes taken from her pretty much give a accurate brief overview of China's current environmental situation:

The cost includes environmental devastation on a massive scale. Eighty per cent of the country’s rivers and lakes are drying up, she says. Sixty per cent of the water in seven major river systems is unsuitable for human contact. A third of the land is contaminated by acid rain. Two-thirds of the grassland have become desertified, and most of the forest is gone. Forty per cent of the arable land has been degraded by fertilizers and pesticides. Of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, 16 are in China.

Although there is little doubt among the general public that this disaster is a result of China's hyper-speed modernization and industrialization, academics and China hands are often aware that one of the most influential men of the 20th century (who happened to have one of the highest kill counts too, although I think Stalin and Hitler get more air-time in the U.S.) also had a decent role to play in raping and pillaging the lands of China.



Although the environmental catastrophe of modern China is fairly widely known and felt (even California suffers as a result), the origins of this situation well predate the founding of the P.R.C. in 1949. In a paper titled The Environmental Legacy of Imperial China Mark Elvin lays out some of the environmental challenges that Imperial China faced. Although I have not read it (yet!), Elvin apparently goes into far more detail in his book on the environmental history of China.


In other recent news that I have seen concerning China's environment, In the capital of the southern province of Guangdong, the government officials apparently are doing everything they can in order to clean things up for the 2010 Asian Games, the biggest multi-sporting event in the world after the Olympics. In the China Daily (a newspaper owned by the Communist Party of China, and often seen as the official mouthpiece of the P.R.C. government), a professor of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) claimed that a "5 to 10 percent crop loss is foreseeable by 2030 if climate change continues." He also states that the production of "rice, wheat and corn may suffer a 37 percent decline." A Greenpeace report on food security in China make the claim that China may lack a sufficient food supply for its population by 2030, and "loss of arable land and water scarcity will cut China's overall food production by up to 23 percent by 2050." Food concerns may be an increasing problem in the coming decades for China if climate change really does affect East Asia in the way that it has been predicted:

Credit where credit is due: I got the image from Sean Bennett, but I do not know where it is originally from.

However, the world need not fear climate change: We can save most of the world by blowing up select portion of it! Well... kind of. Apparently volcanic explosions have the effect of lowering global temperatures,

and through "geoengineering interventions" human beings could replicate similar effects. At least that is what a recent piece over at the Yale Global Online says. It could be an ingenious way to re-balance an over-heated planet, but it would be treating the symptoms (global warming) rather than the root of the problem (a civilization which is highly dependent of emitting toxic substances). I am also concerned about the possibilities of human being tampering with things that are incredibly complicated and effectively unpredictable. However, I would have to do loads more research on geoengineering and its possible uses to mitigate climate change before forming an educated opinion. For now I will just categorize it away in my brain as an interesting, novel, and potentially disastrous or wondrous method of destroying or saving humanity.


On a lighter note, here is a page I found about dancing presidents. Sometimes I have trouble believing that the brilliant minds who write for FP also put up such goofy things as that. But that is nothing compared to the most sex-ready Obama that you have ever seen (unless you are Michelle Obama). I had no idea he was such a sought after "partner" in China.

EDIT: Another China environment story in the CSM about a city that is trying to get clean.