Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [234]
Offsetting all of those dangers and discouraging signs, there are also important promising signs. Both WTO membership and the impending 2008 Olympic Games in China have spurred the Chinese government to pay more attention to environmental problems. For instance, a $6 billion “green wall” or tree belt is now under development around Beijing to protect the city against dust and sandstorms. To reduce air pollution in Beijing, its city government ordered that motor vehicles be converted to permit the use of natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas. China phased out lead in gasoline in little more than a year, something that Europe and the U.S. took many years to achieve. It recently decided to establish fuel efficiency minima for automobiles including even SUVs. New cars are required to meet exacting emission standards prevailing in Europe.
China is already making a big effort to protect its outstanding biodiversity with 1,757 nature reserves covering 13% of its land area, not to mention all of its zoos, botanical gardens, wildlife breeding centers, museums, and gene and cell banks. China uses some distinctive, environmentally friendly, traditional technologies on a large scale, such as the common South Chinese practice of raising fish in irrigated rice fields. That recycles the fish droppings as natural fertilizer, increases rice production, uses fish to control insect pests and weeds, decreases herbicide and pesticide and synthetic fertilizer use, and yields more dietary protein and carbohydrate without increasing environmental damage. Encouraging signs in reafforestation are the initiation of major tree plantations in 1978, and in 1998 the national ban on logging and the start of the Natural Forest Conservation Program to reduce the risk of further destructive flooding. Since 1990, China has combatted desertification on 15,000 square miles of land by reafforestation and fixation of sand dunes. The Grain-to-Green program, begun in 2000, gives grain subsidies to farmers who convert cropland to forest or grassland, and is thereby reducing the use of environmentally sensitive steep hillsides for agriculture.
How will it all end up? Like the rest of the world, China is lurching between accelerating environmental damage and accelerating environmental protection. China’s large population and large growing economy, and its current and historic centralization, mean that China’s lurches involve more momentum than those of any other country. The outcome will affect not just China, but the whole world as well. While I was writing this chapter, I found my own feelings lurching between despair at the mind-numbing litany of depressing details, and hope inspired by the drastic and rapidly implemented measures of environmental protection that China has already adopted. Because of China’s size and its unique form of government, top-down decision-making has operated on a far larger scale there than anywhere else, utterly dwarfing the impacts of the Dominican Republic’s President Balaguer. My best-case scenario for the future is that China’s government will recognize that its environmental problems pose an even graver threat that did its problem of population growth. It may then conclude that China’s interests require environmental policies as bold, and as effectively carried out, as its family planning policies.
CHAPTER 13
“Mining” Australia
Australia’s significance ■ Soils ■ Water ■ Distance ■ Early history ■ Imported values ■ Trade and immigration ■ Land degradation ■ Other environmental problems ■ Signs of hope and change ■
Mining in the literal sense—i.e., the mining of coal, iron, and so on—is a key to Australia’s economy today, providing the