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By Root 2081 0

and area also guarantee that its environmental problems will not remain a domestic issue but will spill over to the rest of the world, which is increasingly affected through sharing the same planet, oceans, and atmosphere with China, and which in turn affects China’s environment through globalization. China’s recent entry into the World Trade Organization will expand those exchanges with other countries. For instance, China is already the largest contributor of sulfur oxides, chlorofluorocarbons, other ozone-depleting substances, and (soon) carbon dioxide to the atmosphere; its dust and aerial pollutants are transported eastwards in the atmosphere to neighboring countries and even to North America; and it is one of the two leading importers of tropical rainforest timber, making it a driving force behind tropical deforestation.

Even more important than all those other impacts will be the proportionate increase in total human impact on the world’s environments if China, with its large population, succeeds in its goal of achieving First World living standards—which also means catching up to the First World’s per-capita environmental impact. As we shall see in this chapter and again in Chapter 16, those differences between First and Third World living standards, and the efforts of China and other developing countries to close that gap, have big consequences that unfortunately are usually ignored. China will also illustrate other themes of this book: the dozen groups of environmental problems facing the modern world, to be detailed in Chapter 16, and all of them serious or extreme in China; the effects of modern globalization on environmental problems; the importance of environmental issues for even the biggest of all modern societies, and not just for the small societies selected as illustrations in most of my book’s other chapters; and realistic grounds for hope, despite a barrage of depressing statistics. After setting out some brief background information about China, I shall discuss the types of Chinese environmental impacts, their consequences for the Chinese people and for the rest of the world, and China’s responses and future prognosis.

Let’s begin with a quick overview of China’s geography, population trends, and economy (map, p. 361). The Chinese environment is complex and locally fragile. Its diverse geography includes the world’s highest plateau, some of the world’s highest mountains, two of the world’s longest rivers (the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers), many lakes, a long coastline, and a large continental shelf. Its diverse habitats range from glaciers and deserts to tropical rainforests. Within those ecosystems lie areas fragile for different reasons: for example, northern China has highly variable rainfall, plus simultaneous occurrences of winds and droughts, that make its high-altitude grasslands susceptible to dust storms and soil erosion, while conversely southern China is wet but has heavy rainstorms that cause erosion on slopes.

As for China’s population, the two best-known facts about it are that it is the world’s largest, and that the Chinese government (uniquely in the modern world) instituted mandatory fertility control that dramatically decreased the population growth rate to 1.3% per year by the year 2001. That raises the question whether China’s decision will be imitated by other countries, some of which, while recoiling in horror at that solution, may thereby find themselves drifting into even worse solutions to their population problems.

Less well known, but with significant consequences for China’s human impacts, is that the number of China’s households has nevertheless been growing at 3.5% per year over the last 15 years, more than double the growth rate of its population during the same period. That’s because household size decreased from 4.5 people per house in 1985 to 3.5 in 2000 and is projected to decrease further to 2.7 by the year 2015. That decreased household size causes China today to have 80 million more households than it would otherwise have had, an increase exceeding the total