The Writing Life Too

Last weekend, just before Jessica fled Portland's heat wave to chill on the Oregon coast, she invited me to jot out a few opinionated paragraphs about a book that's been important to my writing. My name is Dale Sturdavant. I'm a retired history/literature teacher currently finishing up a "travel memoir" of my 2006 adventures in China. My journey started out as a visit to my then 29 year old daughter Kai in Lanzhou City on the occasion of my first granddaughter, Olivia's first birthday, but quickly morphed into a series of harrowing brushes with catastrophe. At every turn, it seemed, I bumped into another aspect of China's ecological crisis: toxic, coal-smudged air; tightly-rationed, undrinkable tap water; rice contaminated by acid rain and polluted irrigation water; and two violent sandstorms blowing off the expanding desert to our north.
Lanzhou is a city of 3.5 million on China's northwestern frontier, a rapidly growing metropolis on the banks of the Yellow River stuck in the awkward and dangerous limbo between a bicycle culture and an explosion of new cars, taxis and buses. Lacking an infrastructure of cross-walks, signals, traffic police and experienced drivers, anarchy reigns on the streets of Lanzhou. Crossing four lanes of speeding traffic without the advantages of signals or cross walks, and riding inside those speeding cabs as they darted between buses and other cabs proved terrifying. Watching my daughter do it carrying Olivia almost gave me heart failure. "Too many ways to die here," I concluded, and resolved to do all I could to convince Kai to come home. As it turned out Kai's judgment matched my own, and by June 2007 she, her husband and their two daughters were back in Oregon. The book I discuss below, Elizabeth Economy's The River Runs Black: the Environmental Challenge to China's Future (2004), proved enormously helpful in fitting my raw impressions into a larger context. Economy, who serves as Director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations is generally regarded, along with Lester Brown at the World Watch Institute, as this country's foremost authority on China's ecological crisis. Her book is readable and informative. Intended as an alarm bell to rouse American policy makers and activists, the book makes explicit the dangers China's ecological crisis pose to our own future. Unfortunately, glimmers of hope, while sometimes visible, pale in comparison to the sobering reality Economy describes. "Spaceship Earth" is headed on a disastrous trajectory.
As Economy makes painfully clear, China's environmental woes extend far beyond its infamous air pollution, glimpses of which were beamed into the world's living rooms during the Beijing Olympics, and which in most of China's northern cities, where coal provides the principal source of heat, is far more toxic than the smog of my LA youth. The World Bank estimates that at least 800,000 Chinese die from the effects of air pollution each year: a figure toned down to 400,000 in domestic Chinese media. But the environmental abuses stemming from thirty years of rapid economic growth threaten an abrupt halt to China's economic miracle. More importantly, as both Economy and China's Environmental Minister Pan Yue point out, the cumulative effects of decades of environmental abuse now threaten the basic underpinnings that make life possible: air, water, food and soil.
China leads the world in per capita birth defects, many of which are attributable to the tiny particles of mercury, lead, arsenic and cadmium in their coal-besotted air, and to the pervasive contaminants in their drinking water. China's water, Economy makes clear, rivals its air in lethality. The Huai River, which "ran black" during a disastrous chemical spill in 2001, giving Economy's book its title, is merely one extreme example among many of rivers killed by China's reckless style of development. Almost all of China's major rivers serve as dumping grounds for urban sewage and industrial waste, resulting in a proliferation of "cancer villages" and epidemics of gastrointestinal diseases. Virtually all of China's cities, including Beijing which masks its crisis to sustain its "First World City" image, suffer severe water shortages and survive day to day through plundering their non-renewable aquifers. As home to China's Communist Party leaders, Beijing manages to bully water away from farmers and outlying villages. Even so its wells are projected to run dry by 2015, perhaps sooner.
In a heroic effort to save China's capital, politicians ordered engineers to design the $80 billion dollar South-North Water Transfer Project to sluice abundant Yangtze River water through 600 miles of canals, though a tunnel under the withering Yellow River, and into the faucets of Beijing's hotels, office towers and apartment buildings. Originally slated for completion in time for the Olympics, the project stalled as a proliferation of new chemical plants, refineries and factories along the banks of the Yangtze spewed volumes of toxic waste into what was already referred to as the world's largest open sewer. Officials now say Beijing will get its new water supply in 2010, and construction workers are racing to complete dozens of additional water treatment plants along the route. Economy doubts they can ever make the water drinkable.
In an update of her research in the September/October 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs Journal, Economy paints an increasingly gloomy picture of China's water crisis. Because of surface water pollution, seventy percent of the country's total drinking water now comes from over-taxed aquifers. But 90 percent of the aquifers in China's cities are now polluted! Corrupt local officials continue to ignore the numerous laws requiring factories to treat their effluent and municipalities to treat their sewage. When citizens protest, the officials often unleash thugs to intimidate or arrest them. They muzzle journalists who might dare expose their malfeasance. Victories have been few, but the number of protests may be approaching a critical tipping point.
Other than the terrifying image of the planet's most populous nation unraveling into chaos because of water shortages, the prospect of China continuing to pump increasing volumes of greenhouse gases into our common atmosphere is the most alarming aspect of China's wanton disregard for environmental health. A popular slogan exhorts the people to "rush forward to modern prosperity," promising the average Chinese a lifestyle equivalent to that of an average America--if they persevere on their current path to development. And thus, our own lifestyle and stubborn refusal to live sustainably becomes implicated in any effort to convince the Chinese they should lower their aspirations so we don't have to lower our own.
Economy notes that China is rife with environmental NGO's and would-be activists chafing to redirect their society on a more sustainable path if only their leadership would support rather than repress them. Likewise we in the West have thus far lacked the leadership and sense of urgency to reach out to the Chinese (and Indians) and to develop the technologies and strategies for sustainable living that might inspire them to do likewise. In that task Economy's writings provide a good beginning point for anyone curious about what China's ecological crisis has in store for all of us.