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By Root 1947 0

export: imported timber, hence exported deforestation. China ranks third in the world in timber consumption, because wood provides 40% of the nation’s rural energy in the form of firewood, and provides almost all the raw material for the paper and pulp industry and also the panels and lumber for the construction industry. But a growing gap has been developing between China’s increasing demand for wood products and its declining domestic supply, especially since the national logging ban went into effect after the floods of 1998. Hence China’s wood imports have increased six-fold since the ban. As an importer of tropical lumber from countries on all three continents that span the tropics (especially from Malaysia, Gabon, Papua New Guinea, and Brazil), China now stands second only to Japan, which it is rapidly overtaking. It also imports timber from the temperate zone, especially from Russia, New Zealand, the U.S., Germany, and Australia. With China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization, those timber imports are expected to increase even more, because tariffs on wood products are about to be reduced from a rate of 15-20% to 2-3%. In effect, this means that China, like Japan, will be conserving its own forests, but only by exporting deforestation to other countries, several of which (including Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and Australia) have already reached or are on the road to catastrophic deforestation.

Potentially more important than all of these other impacts is a rarely discussed consequence of the aspirations of China’s people, like other people in developing countries, to a First World lifestyle. That abstract phrase means many specific things to an individual Third World citizen: acquiring a house, appliances, utensils, clothes, and consumer products manufactured commercially by energy-consuming processes, not made at home or locally by hand; having access to manufactured modern medicines, and to doctors and dentists educated and equipped at much expense; eating abundant food grown at high production rates with synthetic fertilizers, not with animal manure or plant mulches; eating some industrially processed food; traveling by motor vehicle (preferably one’s own car), not by walking or bicycle; and having access to other products manufactured elsewhere and arriving by motor vehicle transport, not just to local products carried to consumers. All Third World peoples of whom I am aware—even those trying to retain or re-create some of their traditional lifestyle—also value at least some elements of this First World lifestyle.

The global consequences of everybody aspiring to the lifestyle currently enjoyed by First World citizens are well illustrated by China, because it combines the world’s largest population with the fastest-growing economy. Total productions or consumptions are products of population sizes times per-capita production or consumption rates. For China, those total productions are already high because of its huge population, and despite its per-capita rates still being very low: for instance, only 9% of per-capita consumption rates of the leading industrial countries in the case of four major industrial metals (steel, aluminum, copper, and lead). But China is progressing rapidly towards its goal of achieving a First World economy. If China’s per-capita consumption rates do rise to First World levels, and even if nothing else about the world changed—e.g., even if population and production/consumption rates everywhere else remained unchanged—then that production/consumption rate increase alone would translate (as multiplied by China’s population) into an increase in total world production or consumption of 94% in that same case of industrial metals. In other words, China’s achievement of First World standards will approximately double the entire world’s human resource use and environmental impact. But it is doubtful whether even the world’s current human resource use and impact can be sustained. Something has to give way. That is the strongest reason why China’s problems automatically become the world