Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (68 page)

fish in the Yangtze River has declined 75%, and that river had to be closed to fishing for the first time ever in 2003. More generally, China's biodiversity is
very high, with over 10% of the world's plant and terrestrial vertebrate
species. However, about one-fifth of China's native species (including its
best-known one, the Giant Panda) are now endangered, and many other
distinctive rare ones (such as Chinese Alligators and ginkgos) are already at
risk of extinction.

The flip side of these declines in native species has been a rise in invasive
species. China has had a long history of intentionally introducing species
considered beneficial. Now, with the recent 60-fold increase in international
trade, those intentional introductions are being joined by accidental intro
ductions of many species that no one would consider beneficial. For exam
ple, in Shanghai Harbor alone between 1986 and 1990, examination of
imported materials carried by 349 ships from 30 countries revealed as con
taminants almost 200 species of foreign weeds. Some of those invasive
plants, insects, and fish have gone on to establish themselves as pests and weeds causing huge economic damage to Chinese agriculture, aquaculture,
forestry, and livestock production.

If all that were not enough, under way in China are the world's largest
development projects, all expected to cause severe environmental problems.
The Three Gorges Dam of the Yangtze River
—the world's largest dam, started in 1993 and projected for completion in 2009—aims to provide
electricity, flood control, and improved navigation at a financial cost of $30
billion, social costs of uprooting millions of people, and environmental
costs associated with soil erosion and the disruption of a major ecosystem
(that of the world's third longest river). Still more expensive is the South-to-
North Water Diversion Project, which began in 2002, is not scheduled for
completion until around 2050, and is projected to cost $59 billion, to spread
pollution, and to cause water imbalance in China's longest river. Even that project will be exceeded by the projected development of currently under
developed western China, making up over half of the country's land area
and viewed by China's leaders as the key to national development.

Let's now pause to distinguish, as elsewhere in this book, between conse
quences for animals and plants by themselves, and consequences for people. Recent developments in China are clearly bad news for Chinese earthworms
and yellow croakers, but how much difference does it all make for Chinese

people? The consequences for them can be partitioned into economic costs, health costs, and exposure to natural disasters. Here are some estimates or examples for each of those three categories.

As examples of economic costs, let's start with small ones and proceed to larger ones. A small cost is the mere $72 million per year being spent to curb the spread of a single weed, the alligator weed that was introduced from Brazil as pig forage and escaped to infest gardens, sweet potato fields, and citrus groves. Also a bargain is the annual loss of just $250 million arising from factory closures due to water shortages in a single city, Xian. Sandstorms inflict damage of about $540 million per year, and losses of crops and forests due to acid rain amount to about $730 million per year. More serious are the $6 billion costs of the "green wall" of trees being built to shield Beijing against sand and dust, and the $7 billion per year of losses created by pest species other than alligator weed. We enter the zone of impressive numbers when we consider the onetime cost of the 1996 floods ($27 billion, but still cheaper than the 1998 floods), the annual direct losses due to desertification ($42 billion), and the annual losses due to water and air pollution ($54 billion). The combination of the latter two items alone costs China the equivalent of 14% of its gross domestic product each year.

Three items may be selected to give an indication of health consequences. Average blood lead levels in Chinese city-dwellers are nearly double the levels considered elsewhere in the world to be dangerously high and to put at risk the mental development of children. About 300,000 deaths per year, and $54 billion of health costs (8% of the gross national product), are attributed to air pollution. Smoking deaths amount to about 730,000 per year and are rising, because China is the world's largest consumer and producer of tobacco and is home to the most smokers (320 million of them, one-quarter of the world's total, smoking an average of 1,800 cigarettes per year per person).

China is noted for the frequency, number, extent, and damage of its natural disasters. Some of these
—especially dust storms, landslides, droughts, and floods—are closely related to human environmental impacts and have become more frequent as those impacts have increased. For instance, dust storms have increased in frequency and severity as more land has been laid bare by deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, and partly human-caused droughts. From
a.d.
300 to 1950 dust storms used to afflict northwestern China on the average once every 31 years; from 1950 to 1990, once every 20 months; and since 1990, almost every year. The huge dust storm of May 5, 1993, killed about a hundred people. Droughts have increased

because of deforestation interrupting the rain-producing natural hydro-
logical cycle, and perhaps also because of the draining and overuse of lakes
and wetlands and hence the decrease in water surfaces for evaporation. The
area of cropland damaged each year by droughts is now about 60,000 square miles, double the annual area damaged in the 1950s. Flooding
has greatly increased because of deforestation; the 1996 and 1998 floods
were the worst in recent memory. The alternating occurrence of droughts and floods has also become more frequent and is more damaging than ei
ther disaster alone, because droughts first destroy vegetation cover, then floods on bare ground cause worse erosion than would have been the case
otherwise.

Even if China's people had no connection through trade and travel with
people elsewhere, China's large territory and population would guarantee effects on other peoples merely because China is releasing its wastes and gases into the same ocean and atmosphere. But China's connections to the rest of the world through trade, investment, and foreign aid have been ac
celerating almost exponentially in the last two decades, although trade (now $621 billion per year) was negligible before 1980 and foreign investment in
China still negligible as recently as 1991. Among other consequences, the development of export trade has been a driving force behind increased pol
lution in China, because the highly polluting and inefficient little rural in
dustries (the TVEs) that produce half of China's exports in effect ship their
finished products abroad but leave behind their pollutants in China. In
1991 China became the country annually receiving the second highest
amount of foreign investment behind the U.S., and in 2002 China moved
into first place by receiving record investments of $53 billion. Foreign aid between 1981 and 2000 included $100 million from international NGOs, a
large sum as measured by NGO budgets but a paltry amount compared to
China's other sources: half a billion dollars from the United Nations Devel
opment program, $10 billion from Japan's International Development
Agency, $11 billion from the Asian Development Bank, and $24 billion
from the World Bank.

All of those transfers of money contribute to fueling China's rapid eco
nomic growth and environmental degradation. Let's now consider other
ways in which the rest of the world influences China, then how China influ
ences the rest of the world. These reciprocal influences are aspects of the
modern buzzword "globalization," which is important for the purposes of

this book. The interconnectedness of societies in today's world causes some
of the most important differences (to be explored in Chapter 16) between how environmental problems played out in the past on Easter Island or
among the Maya and Anasazi, and how they play out today.

Among the bad things that China receives from the rest of the world, I
already mentioned economically damaging invasive species. Another large-
scale import that will surprise readers is garbage (Plate 27). Some First
World countries reduce their mountains of garbage by paying China to accept untreated garbage, including wastes containing toxic chemicals. In addition, China's expanding manufacturing economy and industries accept
garbage/scrap that could serve as cheap sources of recoverable raw materials.
Just to take one item as an example, in September 2002 a Chinese customs
office in Zhejiang Province recorded a 400-ton shipment of "electronic
garbage" originating from the U.S., and consisting of scrap electronic equip
ment and parts such as broken or obsolete color TV sets, computer monitors, photocopiers, and keyboards. While statistics on the amount of such
garbage imported are inevitably incomplete, available numbers show an increase from one million to 11 million tons from 1990 to 1997, and an increase in First World garbage transshipped to China via Hong Kong from
2.3 to over 3 million tons per year from 1998 to 2002. This represents direct
transfer of pollution from the First World to China.

Even worse than garbage, while many foreign companies have helped
China's environment by transferring advanced technology to China, others have hurt it by transferring pollution-intensive industries (PIIs), including technologies now illegal in the country of origin. Some of these technolo
gies are then in turn transferred from China to still less developed coun
tries. As one example, in 1992 the technology for producing Fuyaman, a
pesticide against aphids banned in Japan 17 years earlier, was sold to a Sino-
Japanese joint company in Fujian Province, where it proceeded to poison
and kill many people and to cause serious environmental pollution. In
Guangdong Province alone the amount of ozone-destroying chlorofluoro-
carbons imported by foreign investors reached 1,800 tons in 1996, thereby
making it more difficult for China to eliminate its contribution to world
ozone destruction. As of 1995, China was home to an estimated 16,998 PII
firms with a combined industrial product of about $50 billion.

Turning now from China's imports to its exports in a broad sense,
China's high native biodiversity means that China gives back to other coun
tries many invasive species that were already well adapted to competing in China's species-rich environment. For instance, the three best-known pests

that have wiped out numerous North American tree populations
—the
chestnut blight, the misnamed "Dutch" elm disease, and the Asian long-
horned beetle—all originated in China or else somewhere nearby in East Asia. Chestnut blight already wiped out native chestnut trees in the U.S.;
Dutch elm disease has been eliminating the elm trees that used to be a hall
mark of New England towns while I was growing up there over 60 years
ago; and the Asian long-horned beetle, first discovered in the U.S. in 1996 attacking maple and ash trees, has the potential for causing U.S. tree losses
of up to $41 billion, more than those due to the other two of those pests
combined. Another recent arrival, China's grass carp, is now established in
rivers and lakes of 45 U.S. states, where it competes with native fish species
and causes large changes in aquatic plant, plankton, and invertebrate communities. Still another species of which China has an abundant population,
which has large ecological and economic impacts, and which China is ex
porting in increasing numbers is
Homo sapiens.
For instance, China has
now moved into third place as a source of legal immigration into Australia (Chapter 13), and significant numbers of illegal as well as legal immigrants
crossing the Pacific Ocean reach even the U.S.

While inadvertently or intentionally exported Chinese insects, fresh
water fish, and people reach overseas countries by ship and plane, other
inadvertent exports arrive in the atmosphere. China became the world's
largest producer and consumer of gaseous ozone-depleting substances,
such as chlorofluorocarbons, after First World countries phased them out in 1995. China also now contributes to the atmosphere 12% of the world's car
bon dioxide emissions that play a major role in global warming. If current
trends continue
—emissions rising in China, steady in the U.S., declining
elsewhere—China will become the world's leader in carbon dioxide emissions, accounting for 40% of the world's total, by the year 2050. China al
ready leads the world in production of sulfur oxides, with an output double
that of the U.S. Propelled eastwards by winds, the pollutant-laden dust,
sand, and soil originating from China's deserts, degraded pastures, and fal
low farmland get blown to Korea, Japan, Pacific islands, and across the Pa
cific within a week to the U.S. and Canada. Those aerial particles are the
result of China's coal-burning economy, deforestation, overgrazing, erosion,
and destructive agricultural methods.

The next exchange between China and other countries involves an im
port doubling as an export: imported timber, hence exported deforestation. China ranks third in the world in timber consumption, because wood pro
vides 40% of the nation's rural energy in the form of firewood, and provides