On A Clear Day...You Are Definitely NOT in China
Sat Sep 01, 2007 at 04:46:58 PM PDT
As some of you know, I just returned from a nearly 3 week trip to China with my family. I've only begun to process my impressions and thoughts about the trip, which I hope will ultimately form the basis of several diaries.
But there was one impression so deep that I felt the need to write about it even before I've fully processed it. And it's not the impression I thought would be the deepest. Much as I love Al Gore and long to see him on the campaign trail, I've never been terribly "green." I reflexively support his positions on the environment and global warming because, well, he's Al Gore, and besides, they make sense. I support them because I want my bis-bis-bis-bis-bis-bisnietos and bisnietas, born long after I die, to be able to live on Earth's surface and breathe its air and drink its water. But I rarely feel passionate about environmental issues. Which is another way of saying, I rarely feel truly scared about environmental issues. Spending a couple of weeks in China, however, has significantly increased my Environmental Fear Factor.
I was warned that the air quality in Beijing was bad, and even renewed a long-expired prescription for Albuterol for my once-asthmatic daughter as a precaution. But I was unprepared for what passes for air in Beijing. And it wasn't just Beijing; it was everywhere, including areas far from any major city. In 17 days, we saw a blue sky only once.
Ironically, while we were away, the New York Times posted a series of articles about China, including this one about the relationship between China's explosive economic growth and its worsening environmental problems:
Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut.
Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.
Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics.
Environmental woes that might be considered catastrophic in some countries can seem commonplace in China: industrial cities where people rarely see the sun; children killed or sickened by lead poisoning or other types of local pollution; a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of the ocean no longer sustain marine life.
One major pollutant contributing to China’s bad air is particulate matter, which includes concentrations of fine dust, soot and aerosol particles less than 10 microns in diameter (known as PM 10).
The level of such particulates is measured in micrograms per cubic meter of air. The European Union stipulates that any reading above 40 micrograms is unsafe. The United States allows 50. In 2006, Beijing’s average PM 10 level was 141, according to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics. Only Cairo, among world capitals, had worse air quality as measured by particulates, according to the World Bank.
I can tell you though, that reading these words (which I did only upon my return) would not have meant much to me without seeing it, and more importantly, breathing it.
Our Chinese tour guide was a delightful and thoughtful fellow with excellent English and a sense of humor, who gave us often surprisingly frank insights into the enormous changes in Chinese politics and culture over the last few decades. He offered candid views of Chairman Mao, the surprisingly poor scope of Chinese health insurance coverage, the gender imbalance caused by the government's "one child" policy, and the parameters within which "free speech" is permitted. The environment, however, was one of only two subjects about which we quickly realized he could not speak frankly (the other was Taiwan). Answers to our questions about it were either avoided, or answered with rote talking points, with a skill worthy (if that's the right word) of Tony Snow. It's not smog, it's fog. China is a humid country. It's only like this when it's really hot. It's only like this in the cities. And the Yangtze River. And towns and villages near the Yangtze River. And in completely empty areas on or near the Yangtze River. And then, when there were too many questions, China's growth didn't cause global warming, that was caused by America and Europe and now they want to prevent anyone from catching up to them....
Such rationalizations can't obscure the truth the way that the smog obscures the half-built high-rises and cranes that crowd the hazy skylines of Beijing, Xi'an, Chongqing, Wuhan and Shanghai. China, simply put in a tourist's terms, is a treasure chest whose contents can only be accessed while standing in a glass vault filled with smoke and sulfur.
It was not the hole-in-the-floor toilets still found in the smaller cities and towns, or the stink of the fish markets on the streets of poor neighborhoods, that made me wonder, "How can people live like this?" It was the air, the dry itch in the back on my throat, and the almost ceaseless gray haze that hid both the sun and the clouds while holding in the sweltering heat.
China's newspapers cover environmental problems only in terms familiar to those of us who decode White House pronouncements on the efficacy of The Surge in Iraq: an admission of "challenges" is necessarily followed by inspirational sounding descriptions of progress and hurdles overcome. And in truth, the government is trying to deal with some of the environmental consequences of what is China's real "Great Leap Forward" of the last twenty years. It's just that many of its attempted fixes have spawned their own negative environmental consequences. For example, China's mammoth Three Gorges Dam project is on the itinerary of many tours as a symbol of national pride and of China's commitment to controlling its environment. We spent half a day viewing and learning about the dam, which intended not only to generate power but also to control the often catastrophic flooding along the Yangtze River and its tributaries However, as reported by the Wall Street Journal(subscription) here and here, the dam (the world's largest) has caused unanticipated erosion, silt build-up, water pollution and landslides, even though the dam has not yet become fully operational. (The dam also required the relocation of over a million people, which has had its own unintended environmental consequences.)
Anyway, this is just one of the things that my trip to China has moved me to think about, and hopefully, to write about. For now, I need to continue processing. But in China, along with the Great Wall and the Forbidden City and Terra Cotta Warriors, along with emerald green rice paddies and terraced orange groves, there lies a stark warning not only of what can happen when economic growth is unconstrained by concerns about the environment, but of how environmental damage may be much harder to undo than to prevent. For this intellectual but not-very-passionate supporter of environmental reforms, it was an eye-popping, jaw-dropping lesson.
