eco-accountant

Greeks blazing path to new post-consumer civilization. Take note, China!

2012-01-18T18:52:00.000-08:00

No doubt times are tough in Greece. Lots of conflict, lots of suffering. Austerity--meaning living with less--is being forced on the 11 million citizens , although in reality it's more accurate to say the Big Boys are stripping things away--like jobs, income, health care, myriad services, and the "stuff" from retail stores consumers used to pack home in the back seat.

And yet, even as the bankers who tendered foolish loans to the Greek government now strand in line and quibble with hedge fund managers over dividing up their pounds of Greek flesh, and union workers and activists march in the streets, a surprising number of younger urbanites are blazing a path back to the land. A reverse migration, so to speak. One that bears watching by those of us here, and even more by those in China.

Just this week we learned China's population had recently tilted toward the urban, with more than half its 1.4 billion citizens now residing in cities. (of course, if you follow China, you know it's tough to make an accurate head count of the millions of migrants who reside in "informal" dwellings or in the alleys) In China, migration still means from farm to city, still registers as a move away from backwardness toward modernity. It's still pretty much how most of us think about 'progress' and the future.

As George Will reminded us last Sunday on This Week, "creative destruction (a la Mitt Romney's job at Bain capital) is often a good thing...Especially in agriculture," he added. Case in point. We in the US grow chubby and diabetic from a surfeit of foodstuffs with only two percent of our population toiling in the fields. That frees up the rest of us for really important, modern, work. China's leaders seem determined to follow our example, loading on the chemicals, expanding the range of GM crops, crowding cows, pigs, and chickens into "factory farms" to spike productivity.

So why then are young Greeks (and many young Americans) bucking the trend, trading in that desk job and urban affluence for life in the dirt--and creating vibrant eco-villages, where conviviality and community count more than urban amenities? An official umemployment rate of 35% for people between the ages of 15 and 29, accounts for a hefty chunk of their motivation.

Greece's agricultural sector added 32,000 jobs between 2008 and 2010--most of them snatched up by Greeks, not low-paid immigrants. And it's not just young Greeks. The biggest influx has been among people aged 45-65! And it helps that families have held on to the land and actually have a place to go back to. It would be tougher for certain Chinese to reclaim land now covered in factories or shopping malls, but there are hectares of "sick land" awaiting the skillful touch of permaculturists, or "land doctors" inspired by Aldo Leopold's example (see previous post).

The hopeful signs in Greece include the increase in agricultural school enrollment along with a rise in people studying sustainable agriculture. In other words, they're not replicating the disastrous model of industrial, fossil-fuel-based, chemically-intensive agriculture we've used to misfeed our masses into a public health epidemic and to destroy our landscapes and waterways. No epidemic of rotundity in sight for the Greeks. Just lots of exercise and healthy organic food. (cf. "With work scarce in Athens, Greeks go back to the land," nytimes.com/2012/01/09/europe)

As one interviewee phrased it, "for me it's like going forward, because I think we neglected the land." Well said, sister! (a former teacher, no less) May others share your conviction. We'll need all the hard work and ingenuity we can muster to keep land fit to live upon, to grow healthy food, and to create jobs for the millions of unemployed and misemployed youth (and middle-aged folk). And not just in Greece.

Far more than Athens, China's 150 or more cities with populations exceeding one million, and its numerous mega-cities with more than 10 million, are incredibly complex--and therefore, vulnerable--systems. With farmland disappearing and being degraded at a prodigious rate, disruptions emanating from the land, primarily food and water, pose an enormous threat to the stability and viability of China's glittering (and polluted) post-modern cities. The film Blade Runner was a warning. Aldo Leopold's writings, and let's hope, Greece's back to the land movement, offer alternatives that make good sense.

Could Aldo Leopold save China?

2012-01-04T18:14:00.000-08:00

Land despoilation has evicted nations, and can on occasion do it again.
Aldo Leopold, The Conservation Ethic (1933)

Before my daughter Kai moved to China in 2005, I had a dim awareness that twenty-five years of breakneck development, heaped upon centuries of abuse, had so utterly despoiled its environment. I'd read China on the Edge: the crisis of ecology and development by He Bochuan in 1991, and Elizabeth Economy's The River Runs Black: the environmental challenge to China's future in 2004. But until I set foot in Gansu Province where Kai and her small family lived, I could never have imagined landscapes so ravaged by human abuse, nor a city made so toxic and ugly as her adopted home city of Lanzhou.

Nestled in a narrow river valley at 5,000 feet, Lanzhou is an arid place surrounded by mountains which have been denuded of almost all vegetation, and made bereft of the animal species which fluorished in the forests here decades or perhaps centuries ago. Terraced hillsides--from top to bottom--bear testament that humans once tried to farm these slopes. In Mark Elvin's Retreat of the Elephants (2004), I learned the forests were felled and these mountains were badly over-grazed centuries ago. Now, however, the government pays former farmers and herdsmen to plant trees on the barren slopes in a desperate attempt to hold back the encroaching Gobi Desert and the devastating sandstorms that swoop down from Inner Mongolia and pummel Lanzhou's 3.5 million residents each Spring.

In 2007, the last year Kai lived there, some seedlings still clung to their precarious perches, menaced by landslides, tortured by drought, battered by sandstorms. Many others had withered and died, or been swept down the slope by cascading soil.

The few humans still residing on the mountain landscapes lived in caves and small villages, tending goats and pitiful orchards. The 40 mile drive from the airport to the city meanders through these mountains. We passed through fewer than a dozen villages, but more than 100 caves.

In spite of its hideous coal pollution, Lanzhou aspires to be a modern city, featuring high rise apartment buildings, myriad restaurants and food vendors, well-stocked retail stores, open markets, discos and kareoke bars, and a major university. Life here is far more comfortable than in the surrounding villages and caves, at least for the people with enough money to rent an apartment. But it's also far less healthy. And, for the numerous migrants who make their living on the streets and must sleep in alleys, the constant immersion in air thick with sulfur dioxide and metal particulate from the prodigious burning of coal exacts a very heavy price in human health--lung cancer, chronic lung disease, and birth defects, among many other.

So what could the writings of America's wisest environmentalist, author of A Sand County Almanac and its seminal essay "The Land Ethic," contribute to China's burgeoning ranks of environmental activists, especially given that Leopold died in 1948, a year before Chairman Mao's People's Revolution? Much.

And I think the best place to begin might be The Essential Aldo Leopold (1999), edited by Curt Meine and Richard L. Knight, with a focus on a few of the more pertinent chapters--"Ecological Restoration" (Ch. 8), "Education" (Ch.17), and "Land Esthetics" (Ch.19). The editors have culled Leopold's prolific writings for the pithiest of the pithy, distilled his wisdom into bite-sized chunks.

Leopold loved the American wilderness, but realized that 'land health' had to extend to private farms and woodlots as well as National Parks and national forests if the American experiment was to be sustained. And that required undoing the considerable damage our ancestors had already inflicted on the formerly pristine landscapes of our aboriginal predecessors. Thus, he spoke of "reconstruction," "restocking," "rebuilding," and of "doctoring sick land." He was America's first proponent of ecological restoration, and there is still much to be gained from studying the insights distilled into these three chapters.

First, two observations about pedagogy that are essential to capturing Leopold's tone and spirit.
"Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind; I have no hope for conservation born of fear." (Essential...p. 263) And, of course, China's people, more than most, have much to fear from the ravages of environmental despoilation. Much of their urban environment suffers toxic air and water. Much of their countryside has been sullied by over-use of farm chemicals, erosion, and pollution from mining coal and heavy metals. Thus, according to Leopold's dictum, China's environmentalists must fear fear itself--and eschew it as a motivational strategy.

And related to the preceding comment, leopold said, "Conservationists have, I fear, adopted the pedagogical method of the prophets; we mutter darkly about impending doom if people don't mend their ways (guilty!). The doom is impending, all right...But do people mend their ways for fear of calamity? I doubt it. They are more likely to do it out of pure curiosity and interest." (Essential...,p.305)

Then again, the impending doom of Beijing's water crisis had better motivate at least a critical mass of CCP leaders and Beijing citizens. I'm just not convinced "curiosity and interest" are up to the challenge of such an imminent and tragic catastrophe. But Leopold is far wiser than I.

So, more detail from these two chapters next post. And may China's small but rapidly growing cadre of environmentalists--Ma Jun (China's Water Crisis), the "water warriors," the environmental lawyers, the citizens fighting new coal plants, resisting the theft of their farmland, struggling to provide their children with clean air and pure water, borrow freely from Leopold's wisdom and insight--and may my fellow Americans support them and do the same for our numerous environmental issues.

Whither Beijing?

2011-12-22T16:40:00.000-08:00

Beijing's been suffuring bad air of late, so bad in fact that the Atlantic's James Fallows called it an "Air-Quality Catastrophe" (www.theatlantic.com/international/2011/12/chinha-air-quality-catastrophe-its-back) So bad that even the CCP's house organ, The China Daily, acknowledged the catastrophe, and in a very rare moment of candor, noted that lung cancer rates have increased by 60% over the last decade, though the smoking rate hasn't changed. (seemed to me it was about 90% among men, rare among women). And, from personal experience and the greater knowledge of my China-hand friend Bill, who lived there several years, Beijing's air quality seems almost "light" compared with several other northern cities--Shenyang, Jihin, Lanzhou, Harbin, and Changchun, among others.

As Alaxandra Harney, a Beijing resident and author of The China Price wrote in her NYTimes blog (http://blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/now-do-you-see-the-smog/?) "I feel like I'm living in a giant experiment with human health," which if memory serves me well, is something I've written here a few times. And I prefer to broaden the notion of experiment beyond its effects on human health, pointing out that what's happening in China is actually a trial balloon testing whether humans can endure in eco-systems totally shorn of their beauty, stability, and integrity (to quote the criteria in Aldo Leopold's 'Land Ethic'). That is, can China's great mega-cities and lesser conurbations continue to fluorish in a land so hideously polluted that biodiversity is a fading memory, air and water is toxic, the shrinking acreage of farmland is kept on life-support with unconscionable volumes of pesticide and fertilizer, and the deserts are inexorably expanding from the north and northwest?

My quest here has been to expose the folly of China's grand experiment. To shatter the the confident pronouncements from economists on high that China's state capitalist model is a great success, eventhough it is when measured in the narrow terms of their one absurd criterion--GDP growth. And, of course, to point out that our home-grown Republicans quietly love this hybrid of capitalism-gone-wild and Communist Party rule, and seek to impose its salient features on our own landscapes and labor force. So fond of the China Plan are our GOP stalwarts, in fact, that they're willing to ignore its Big Government to swoon over the capitalist utopia the communists have made. No unions, subsistence wages, no environmental or worker health and safety regulations, the world's largest reserve army of labor being ripped from the impoverished soil of rural villages to man and woman the machines that make so much of the stuff that fills our retail shelves. They like the generous subsidies to exporters, the currency manipulation that keeps China's goods so cheap, the harsh repression that keeps things the way they are. Or, rephrased in their terms, "freedom to exploit, freedom to pollute, freedom to cheat, freedom to keep the people down."

American corporations, from Wal-mart to Nike, to Apple, GM, and GE, have in fact out done the CCP in their great zeal to keep labor disorganized and regulations weak and unenforced, even as they cringe from time to time at the egregious violations of intellectual property rights. Build it cheap (in China), sell it dear (in the US and Europe). What's not to like?

But we must ask the questions US corporations never will. How viable is a nation built upon dead and dying eco-systems? How viable is Beijing, glittering ultra-modern city of 20 million that makes New York and London look small and sordid, if its air kills its citizens, and its heavily polluted water sources run dry--as its main aquifer is predicted to do by 2015? Surely then the grand experiment will turn to dust, with profound ramifications that will indeed, "shake the world."

Change--there and here--must come from a radical restructuring of our relationship to the land. And in that task there could be no more valuable resource than the writings of Aldo Leopold. It is to those we will turn next post. Coming soon (really).

The inadvertent wisdom of the 1%

2011-11-06T16:12:00.000-08:00

Occupy Wall St. protests spread to small towns in Oregon this past week, The Dalles, Maupin, Hood River, several under the rubric "Occupy the Gorge!" These are week-long events like flash jams, designed to provoke thought without provoking violence and resentment among the locals. Smart kids, these occupiers. Gives me a warm feeling to know they're out there fighting a good fight, bringing increasing attention to just how bad our current system is, and how continuing business as usual is not an option. The banksters have over-reached. They've crashed the global capitalist system merely by playing out the WTO scenario they themselves created. Ever more of our fellows understand that Wall St. eats at the soul of America, truly is a giant vampire squid sucking on the face of Main St., pumping real wealth out of our national body--our pensions, 401Ks, IRAs, and a goodly chunk of our monthly incomes--and squirting it into the coffers of a very few billionaires and multi-millionaires.

The Occupy kids are inspiring the rest of us to ponder what's gone wrong. And, more importantly, to think about what we can do to create a new economy, one which values social justice, ecological justice, and the common good--perhaps along the lines laid out in David Korten's Agenda for a New Economy, my copy of which grows ever more dog-eared from repeated readings. At their best, the kids in tents have ochestrated a long overdue national seminar.

Inadvertently--or more accurately, ironically--the Wall St. banksters broke a system that had to be broken if we commoners are to have even a small chance at leaving a liveable planet for our grandkids--and for the other members of the biotic community. That's the inadvertent wisdom of the 1%. They squeezed the rest of us to get it all for themselves, only to discover--too late--they needed us to produce the 'real wealth' upon which life depends, to keep the economy functioning by creating both the supply and the demand for the critical material things and they don't manufacture in their derivative factories--the networks where trillions of dollars zap around the earth at the speed of light, creating uncontrolled sums of 'phantom wealth.' In fact, according to Korten's credible tally, they have more wealth embedded in their electronic ledgers than has ever been created as facts of the ground in all of human history. Just lend a few billion to an investment bank over here, watch them leverage it 40:1 in some shady investment--then sell that investment (derivative) as if it were real. And so it goes--an exponentially growing pyramid of phony wealth that makes instant billionaires of its brokers and hedge fund managers, who then feel entitled to snatch the planet's real wealth without a twinge of conscience or understanding.

But like I said, thank Buddha they've done gone and crashed this insidious global economy before it crashed the planetary ecology--the "realist" of the real wealth. And more gratitude to the intrepid occupiers who have picked up the banner of ecological sanity and are figuring out how to run with it. Now the rest of us concerned environmentalists need to join the throngs--buoy the discourse to another level, contribute whatever wisdom we've gleaned from our time here to the Intellectual/Political Commons. Move from tents to living rooms and meeting halls. We're all in this mess--the Great Disruption-- together.

If we want our grandkids to eat, we'd best plot a sustainable, wholesome alternative to industrial agriculture. If we want them to inherit a habitable planet, we'd best plot a green energy future...ditto for water, drug policy, education, justice/penal system, etc. May we respond to the occupiers insirational gambit. There's much work to be done.

Solving China's Water Crisis--with desalination?!--not a chance!

2011-10-27T17:51:00.000-07:00

Inspired by two brilliant books about water, The Big Thirst (reviewed here several weeks back) and more recently, Cynthia Barnett's Blue Revolution, I felt primed to provide my friends in China with a few insights gleaned from those tomes. Then I happened across an article in the NY Times that halted me dead in midstream--"China takes a Loss to Get Ahead in the Business of Fresh Water" (Michael Wines, 2011/10/26). I was too late. China, the article proclaimed, had solved its own water crisis and was moving on to help everyone else solve theirs. As it has with wind and solar technologies, China was making a big move to dominate yet another green growth sector, preparing to become the world leader in desalination technologies.

Startled I was. The breakthrough desal plants were in Tianjin, a mega-port city of 20million which serves as the sea link for Beijing, and is an industrial powerhouse on its own. I'd heard a couple of years back that Tianjin had abandoned the previous high tech solution to its critical water crisis--the one a parched Beijing still pins its hopes on--the South-North-Water-Diversion Project, originally slated to slack the thirst of visiting tourists during the 2008 Olympics with abundant Yangtze River water (see earlier posts), and to provide them and local residents with long showers and spewing fountains--forever.

One branch of the $90 billion pipeline/canal mega-project would have pumped Yangtze River water 1600 km north to Tianjin, putting a timely halt to the over-pumping of its nearly exhausted aquifers and the concomitant subsidence and sinkhole problems plaguing the city. But officials there tired of the delays and fretted over the escalating costs. Like me they looked at the data and just said no. Yangtze River water so laden with raw sewage and industrial toxins that all the filtration plants in China can't render it fit to drink. But they keep trying.

So, somewhere in the arcane machinations of Communist Party bosses, Tianjin's piece of the diversion plan got scrapped. And desalination emerged as the new silver bullet. More like a rusted lead bullet, I thought at the time. Maybe even a slingshot. Costly, limited, and just plain foolish given another salient fact about Tianjin--seven rivers run through it! Of course, given that this is China, all seven are polluted beyond redemption--at least by affordable technologies. So their toxic slurries flow into the Bohai Sea to extend the biologically 'dead zone' in what was once the "Fish Barn of the Emperor" ever closer to Japan. And, of course, to provide the raw material for desalination.

And now an NYTimes article touts this desperate, costly technology as yet another feather in China's high-tech miracle headdress. Time to take a closer look.

In Blue Revolution, Cynthia Barnett informs us that desalination costs anywhere from 10 to 300 times as much as ground water--a wide range reflecting the wide variability in abundance and drinkability. Tianjin, unlike most of the rest of northern China has abundance, with its network of filthy rivers, but apparently the expense of rendering class 5 polluted water drinkable outweighs the cost of desalting filthy sea water.

Far better, argues Barnett, to follow the example of China's fellow Chinese in Singapore, who not that long ago confronted an even more dire shortage in their island mini-state. That is, they developed a 'water ethic'--meaning they conducted a massive campaign to reconnect the people with their water sources, a connection that had been "left behind and forgotten in the country's mad race from the Third World to the First." (p.169) Sort of like China, whose peole have been sundered from the joys of free running, fresh, clear water and the ecosystems they once supported. No drinking, but also no swimming, fishing, or picnics on the banks. Study Singapore, China.

Singapore's new water ethic saved and recycled enough water that they scrapped plans for a second desalination plant--and saved a pile of money.

So, Tianjin--and Beijing--make your polluters clean up their mess at the source; that is, upstream at the factory sites, the villages, the cities, the farms. Use the new nano-technologies described in the two "blue books" cited above to conserve irrigation water and to purify sewage and industrial effluent. Mobilize your citizens and school children and help them reconnect with their water sources--where it comes from, where it goes, how its used, the joys it could provide, its key role in human health and biological diversity.

Examples abound, from Perth Australia to San Antonio, Texas--and Singapore. Desalination is so yesterday. A vestige of the "dumb-water" era we're leaving behind. Not an economic growth area, but a small and shrinking market compared with the eco-friendly strategies of agro-ecology and the myriad conservation innovations emanating from the smart-water people. (see especially Barnett's chapter 9, "The Business of Blue") There are affordable solutions, generalizable to your whole parched north and polluted south.

The Chinese people deserve to once again enjoy one of the Earth's most abundant, and yet valuable, miracles. May ii come to pass.

The Argentine "Miracle"--A Way Out for Greece? (hell no! but Krugman says yes)

2011-10-20T17:46:00.000-07:00

European leaders meet again this weekend to toss around improbable solutions to the Greek crisis, aka, the "Euro-crisis." Because they've already proven the crisis is intractable, at least under the rules they created, their real task will be to put off disaster yet a little longer, hoping some unforeseem miracle will make the debt go away--or that their dithering will at least allow their own countries' banks to off-load more toxic Greek bonds before default happens.

And this time around, the players can ruminate over the thoughts of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, a very serious neo-Keynesian, who weilds his prize like a cudgel to thrash the notions of non-believers (in Keynesian stimulus), whom he disparages as "very serious people," and lay people (like me) who comment on his blog eventhough we lack Ivy League credentials. But Krugman, like virtually all economists, lacks environmental credentials, so I'll attack his "Argentine solution" from the green perspective.

The "Miracle on the Pampas"--Argentina's rapid economic growth following its 2002 soverign default--involved "de-pegging" its peso from one-to-one parity with the US dollar, repudiating its debt, and embracing Monsanto's genetically-modified soy to export its way out of poverty. There was a huge global market just waiting for the change. First Europe, then China "demanded" tons of soy to feed livestock--the Europeans because Mad Cow disease forced them away from feed "augmented" with protein derived from discarded animal parts (like brains), and the Chinese because their mushrooming consumption of pork, chicken, beef, and farmed fish required prodigious amounts of cheap feed.

The world, it seemed, was begging for mega-tons of new soy. Unfortunately, neither the Argentine people nor its environment would benefit from the agricultural "revolution." But Monsanto, Carghill, Wall St. banks, and a few wealthy agribusiness types would profit enormously.

Krugman latched onto a NY Times story published on Oct. 6, 2011, "How Greece Could Escape the Euro," by Floyd Norris (www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/business/global/how-greece-could-escape-the-euro...) "That's what I'd been thinking," Krugman wrote in his blog that day. Argentina had shown the world how to escape the 'debt trap'--that ignominious place where Greece finds itself now, burried so deep in i.o.u.'s that all the austerity it inflicts on its people only reduces tax revenues further, and all the bailouts (loans) it sacrifices for only sink it further into the red. The debt treadmill--running ever faster, but still losing ground. Thus rebellion, riots, repression, and chaos. Looks like a very bad recession, where the instability and violence will overwhelm the "good" effects of less consumption and smaller environmental footprints.

When it comes to environemtnal and social issues, we've learned we can't expect practicioners of the "dismal science" to get their heads out of their elegant and oh-so-abstract models long enough to notice the facts on the ground--that is, (1)Argentina's fatal embrace of GM soy monoculture and the consequent uprooting of traditional agriculture, (2) the "enclosure" of the agricultural commons by foreign, absentee owners, and (3) the poisoning of the land and people with prodigious amounts of Roundup (glyphosate), the "weed killer" that kills all the microfauna--which give soil its fertility--and has caused miscarriages, and rampant health problems among farm workers and those living in the soy-monoculture hinterland. (4) There's also been a mass exodus of former small farmers to urban slums, and (5) a steep spike in poverty and malnutrition. (6) The fecundity and biodiversity of Argentine crop land and forests squandered in the greedy quest for short-term profits. "Short-term" because the current "green desert" of soy monoculture is exhausting the soil, gradually rendering it an infertile medium requiring ever more fertilizer, and giving rise to noxious, Roundup-resistant superweeds which require ever more toxic herbicides. It won't be too much longer before the soil won't produce anything at all.

All these facts and many more nefarious details are laid out in Seeds of Destruction: the hidden agenda of genetic manipulation, F. William Engdahl's 2007 jeremiad against the Rockefellers' quest for global dominance via the control of global food supplies--an angry, but well-documented "conspiracy theory"--and, with considerably less attention to the Rockefeller/Henry Kissinger/CIA's dirty little imperialist tricks, The World According to Monsanto: pollution, corruption, and the control of our food supply, by the French journalist, Marie-Monique Robin. I hope both are circulating among the Wall St. occupiers--in all the cities in which brave citizens are calling out the "bankers who broke the world."

And, of course, I hope they're also passing around dog-eared copies of Agenda for a New Economy: from phantom wealth to real wealth, David Korten's hyper-relevant treatise on "Why Wall St. can't be fixed and how to replace it." Could anything provide more critical for all those discussions in the tent city seminars?

As Korten says in his Preface, our current Wall St.--induced crisis presents "an unparalled opportunity to open a long-overdue conversation around some basic yet previously unasked questions." Amen! My favorite is, "Is it possible that the whole Wall St. edifice is built on an illusion that has no substance, yet carries deadly economic, social, and environmental consequences for the larger society?" Why, yes it is, David. And I am so grateful to those who are saying "Enough!" with their tents and bodies.

Eco-accounting (timidly) enters the mainstream--here, but not in China

2011-10-05T09:44:00.000-07:00

Huge shock posted on the "Grist" website (www.grist.org/coal/2011-09-30) last week, "Coal is the enemy of the human race, mainstream eeconomics edition." Not that we didn't know that, especially anyone who's had the misfortune to reside in the hell-hole cities who heat their buildings and power their factories with dirty coal. The shock was that the declaration of coal's antipathy to human life appeared in The American Economic Review, about as mainstream as it gets, under an equally shocking title, "Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States." (my emphasis) The article's small photo of a huge stack belching smoke reminded me--too much--of the monstrous, squat flue outside the kitchen window of my daughter's best friend in Lanzhou, China. That stack's billows of gray smoke coated everything in view, and the lungs of everyone who breathed in that airshed, including my daughter's and her year old Olivia's, thick in gritty soot. Dirty coal's massive sulfur dioxide releases singe the lungs and kills people--well over a million each year in China, where the government refuses to keep accurate statistics and bullies the World Bank to tone down its reports. But much of China's coal is laden with heavy metals--mercury, arsenic, lead, and cadmium--and its incineration releases zillions of tiny particulates which infiltrate the lungs and find their sinister way into the host's organs, especially the brain. Cancer, birth defects and mental retardation ensue.

So it's a great thing a reputable economics journal finally devoted space for researchers to point out the obvious--coal makes people sick and kills many--and that has economic consequences! One tiny step for ecological accounting. But what, I wondered, would be the implications of roping in and tallying up all the consequences of our current mode of doing business--what economists have so blithely dismissed as "externalities." We'd shudder at what we have wrought--and denied with the learned passivity of our taken-for-granted way of thinking. As one of my son-in-law's Chinese friends told me in Lanzhou, "We're poor here. We must burn (cheap) coal."

Indeed, replumbing Lanzhou's--or any other dirty-air city's--energy infrastructure for natural gas or wind power would be costly. But China spent hundreds of billions the past few years on far less worthwhile infrastucture projects such as high-speed rail, new airports, and sprawling highways to accomodate the trappings of "modern prosperity" and the budding car culture. I can't help but think the CCP can only continue such a perverted model of development by brutally silencing activists who dare point out the horrendous costs to human and environmental health of China's coal-powered industrial juggernaut. Keep the people thinking "this is the only way," and keep providing them more cell phones, private autos, and other gadgets.

Make no mistake. Environmental accounting is a subversive activity--here as well as in China. It would expose our industrial agricultural model as an insidious, unsustainable monster, an egregiously expensive, woefully uneconomic waste of soil, water, and biodiversity. A killer of fisheries and aquatic ecosystems in our rivers, lakes, and near off-shore oceans. A major contributor to destroying the culture and economic viability of small towsn rural American and the accumulated "land wisdom" of our farmers. The major contributor to America's obesity epidemic, and thus a huge factor in the health crisis which threatens our economic as well as physical well-being. A too-powerful lobbyist for trade and foreign policies that impose their model onto vulnerable and or corrupt nations. In short, we can't afford industrial agriculture. And only the fact that so many of the costs are hidden keeps alive the myth that Big Agribusiness is the essential key to feeding a hungry planet, the "modern" way to grow food (and biofuels).

So just turn that eco-accounting spotlight on any sector of our economy and watch the cockroaches scurry. Like that nasty Keystone XL pipeline and the Canadian tar sands debacle--and the propaganda offensive Big Oil and Big Nat. Gas are waging to fool us. Turn that spotlight onto the aggregated economic activity we call "globalization" and you expose the mother of all cockroaches, a terrifying specter of our own creation that is sundering the very web of life in a million violent and subtle ways. And, perhaps, it will steel the resolve we need to slay this monster if we are to keep this planet "fit to live upon." The world needs a million festivals of eco-accounting!

Chinese fight back against corrupt polluters

2011-09-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

Few actions could do this troubled planet more good than a vigorous environmental movement all across China. And the intrepid Chinese have been battling corrupt local officials, organized crime (control much of the "rare earth" mines in southern China and other highly polluting industries), and foreign multi-nationals(Apple, BP) for years now--with only snatches of success. But lately, it seems, they're getting better organized, and perhaps more desperate to oppose the proliferating cancer clusters born of toxic air and water.

The most recent example represents the flip side of the Republican Party's jihad against green jobs on this side of "Chimerica." In China, the government, both national and local, heavily subsidizes green energy with freely available low-interest loans, free land, export subsidies, tax breaks, lax regulation, etc. As one TV pundit remarked, "It looks as if they're trying to drive western producers (think Solyndra, eventhough it has other problems) out of business so they can eventually charge "monopoly prices" for solar panels in a world desperate to lower its carbon footprint before Manhattan Island becomes a new Atlantis and Miami an octopuse's garden. But their zeal for cleaner energy also reflects an existential threat--their people are dying from dirty energy, and their climate has become radically unstable. But for now, let's "get small" and focus on the "lax regulation" component of China's comparative advantage.

"Hundreds of demonstrators in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang on Sunday (9/11/11) were camped outside a solar panel manufacturing plant that stands accused of contaminating a nearby river...the latest move in a four-day protest that has sometimes turned violent." (www.nyt.com/2011/09/19/world/asia/chinese-protesters-accuse-solar-panel-plan...) It's not just the artifically cheap RMB and all those subsidies that have driven so many of our domestic panel producers out of business, but also the ironic fact of "ugly greenness," the dirty side of clean energy.

And about those "green jobs" our Republicans reject in favor of slick, oily "black jobs" from their drill-baby-drill platform, or mountaintop removal's "brown jobs, the solar plant employs 10,000 (!) workers. Of course, while their product is certainly greener than coal, the improperly disposed of fluoride used in solar panel production rendered the local river a "no swim zone" for fish--who floated belly up by the hundreds--and even killed pigs "whose sties had been washed with river water." Pigs!--tough, resilient, smarter than your average dog--but no match for fluoride.

My environmental/journalistic hero, Ma Jun, author of China's Water Crisis and now director of the nonprofit Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, reports that protests over pollution are on the rise. "People have a growing awareness of the damage caused by environmental pollution and a growing sense of rights (my emphasis)." The rights part is critical, in that it signals the beginning of the end for the disastrous "first the economy, then the environment" slogan which has privileged GDP growth over human and environmental health. Pollution--ecological injustice--has awakened the mighty Chinese people the way economic injustice awakened their forefathers.

For the people it may be no more growth uber alles, a sense that clean drinking water and free flowing, clear rivers and lakes--where children can swim and play and adults can ponder life surrounded by scenic beauty--have real value. And, let's hope, a conviction that cleaning up the air they and their children breathe must become a top priority--above new airports, high-speed rail, and a sprawling highway system.

So, beloved Chinese people, you deserve clean rivers, bountiful fisheries, pristine air, lush forests, healthy food, scenic beauty, and a stable climate as much as any other people on this planet. You are a great people with a great history and culture. You are a force in the world. May you now chose to use your modest prosperity to begin making your homeland a place of health and beauty--for yourselves, your children, and all your fellow humans.

Weeds just say "No!" to Roundup

2011-09-15T09:50:00.000-07:00

Bloomberg's Businessweek would be the last place an eco-accountant would search for information about 'Superweeds'--unless, of course he's pointed there by a website more congenial to his views. Like, let's say a "Grist" article "Superweeds go mainstream" (www.grist/industrial-agriculture/2011-09-09-superweeds-go-mainstream) that references a Businessweek piece, "Attack of the Superweed: New strains resist Roundup, the world's top-selling herbicide" (www.businessweek.com/magazine/attack-of-the-superweed-09082011.html) Although I must confess to reading Bloomberg occassionally on my own, watching their business channel, reading the Financial Times, and, in general, harboring a morbid fascination for the workings of the global economy, the Beast responsible for the promiscuous mixing of living and non-living elements around the globe, from Australian iron ore, Brazilian soya, and Malaysian forests bound for China, to the stow-away cargo of seeds, insect larvae, bacteria and viruses wreaking havoc with ecological stability.

Even more shocking to the folks at Monsanto, "Attack of the Superweed" strikes at the heart of Monsanto's all-out propaganda campaign that premises "we must have genetic engineering" if the world is to feed the 10 billion people projected to inhabit planet earth by 2100. That their campaign convinces average people, like my friend Matt and neighbor Harry, that they must grudgingly accept GE crops, is an unhappy measure of just how large a task we face in moving our industrial-agricultural juggernaut nation onto a sustainable path, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that current policies are worse than foolish--killing us, killing the soil, dangerously shrinking biological diversity in seeds and plant species, making us fatter, wasting precious phosphous, inflicting unconscionable cruelty on animals, poisoning our ground and surface water with chemicals and animal waste and creating massive 'dead zones' in our near-offshore oceans.(there's much more, but that already feels like over-kill)

The opening "visual" in "Attack..." sets an alarming tone. "Justin Cariker grabs a 7-foot tall (!) Palmer pigweed at his farm, bending the wrist thick (!) stem to reveal how it has overwhelmed the cotton plant beneath it." And this tree-like "weed" survived massive chemical drenchings with Roundup. As farmer Cariker observes on behalf of all his brethren trapped on the same chemical treadmill, "We're not winning the battle."

Monsanto's response? Panic. Their "we're in this business to feed the 10 billion" propaganda shattered by the inconvenient truth that their "miracle" innovations have only served to monopolize the seed industry and boost sales of Roundup. So, it's back to the men and women in lab coats, challenging them to re-engineer cotton, soy, canola, and corn seeds to provide immunity to more toxic herbicides.

Meanwhile farmers who paid premiums for Monsanto's GE seeds, counting on savings from using less herbicide, are having to apply ever more Roundup (annual sales of more than $11 billion), often augmented with more toxic chemicals. And still the superweeds proliferate. Farmers are losing money and Monsanto is losing credibility. Meanwhile, the increasing toxicity of herbicides is intensifying the negative impacts on soil and water.

As Aldo Leopold would say, "Bad!" (or more fully, "an act is wrong if it decreases the beauty, stability and integrity of the biotic community," The Land Ethic)
The Bloomberg article likens the increased use of increasingly toxic agricultural chemicals to industrial agriculture's even uglier practice--prolific overuse of anti-biotics in factory-farmed pigs, chickens and cattle--primarily to hasten growth, but with the unintended, if totally predictable effect of spurring evolutionary growth of resistant bacteria to a broad range of drugs we humans count on to prevent epidemic outbreaks. Our fatally-flawed global economy privileges short-term profits over long-term ecological health--i.e., sustainablity. We currently function undera global economic system in which WTO rules (written by our own multi-nationals during the Clinton administration) allows producers to avoid paying the full ecological/public health costs of production, and instead "socializes" them onto the biotic community while keeping the profits close at hand. More of the "earth is steeply tilted" rebuttal to Thom Friedman.

Meaning that the economic playing field strongly favors those who play fast and loose with our children's future.That is, those like multi-national corporations operating in China and other lesser-regulated venues, encouraged by WTO rules to denude and befoul the environment, to risk the health and safety of their workers, to pay as little as possible for labor, and to scour the earth in search of corrupt and or desperate politicians willing to sell their people's biological heritage to get rich quick.

Never has ecological accounting been so badly needed. For without knowing the full costs of a product to the environment and human health and well-being, we can't write new rules that force producers and consumers to pay the full "cradle-to-cradle" impact of their products. And ecological health will continue to degrade until it can no longer sustain anything but those amazingly resilient weeds and pests.

China's "America Problem"

2011-09-07T17:54:00.000-07:00

At first glance it might appear China's problem with the US is fading away, the economic and political clout of the foreign devils ineluctably withering to insignificance. The USA is now a "sunset power" as the Chinese say, making way on the big stage for the greatest nation the world has ever seen. In their view, the great Han people will soon finally and forever be restored to their rightful place of global dominance after too long a time abused and exploited by nefarious foreigners. Theirs will be a peaceful reign, they say. No ambitions for imperialist-style wars or territorial acquisitions. And we in the West still have a role to play, just a diminished one. One frought with impossible contradictions.

American capitalists and American consumers have proven invaluable in China's meteoric rise, as have the capitalists of their vast overseas diaspora who originally got the ball going. Once western capitalists had rigged the WTO architecture in their favor in 1998, they quickly explored the wide open playing field, seeking the cheapest possible labor, the fewest environmental or other noisome regulations. They were finally free to "unlevel" the field by tilting it steeply in their favor.

In China they found a disciplined, hard working labor force and a Communist Party leadership which understood what capitalists need without having to moderate "business-friendly" policies to appease other constituencies. Sort of like Rick Perry's Texas, but much bigger. China is a "right to work" empire. No independent labor unions to cause a stink at working conditions that are patently unsafe or pay scales that are abysmally low. The "liberals" and tree huggers are kept in check. There's a potential consumer base of 1.4 billion people, and a seemingly inexhaustable, entirely expendable reserve army of labor numbering in the hundreds of millions. A planned economy, designed by men seeking to get rich quick, tossing carrots at entrepreneurs, and flogging the workforce with a big stick--and just enough carrot stubs to subsist. In the land of Marx and Mao, all the capital versus labor dynamics described in Kapital, volumes 1-3 have been acted out in fast forward.

But having cut through all the "fetters" on bourgeois perogatives found in western democracies, surely the axis of capital wouldn't get so greedy as to "dig their own grave?" To push the extremes of wealth and want so far as to impoverish the very consumers needed to keep the GDP ponzi scheme going. But that now appears to be exactly what they've done--exactly what was needed to save the humans from their own plunder-the-earth folly. Was it in time? Will it be enough?

China's leaders have riveted themselves to a fast moving treadmill, and pulled out all the stops that might have kept the pace sustainable. If they can't sustain the GDP on its steep trajectory, with just enough crumbs dropping off the table to keep the masses content, then disgruntled workers and peasants, with their long history of rebellion and heads schooled in pro-labor, pro-revolution, Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought, are likely to drop their chains onto the factory floor and quick step the CCP's "capitalist roaders" toward the dust bin of history.

So forget that China has appropriated so much of its workers' hard earned labor power and invested it in US Treasuries--accumulated surplus now threatened by massive quantitative easing, the Mother of All Debt Crises, and a prolonged stagnation that can only end in soverign default--and focus instead on the prospects for China's GDP growth once US and European consumers capitulate to their newly imposed penury. We can't grow jobs because China can manufacture everything from Nike shoes to Apple iPads far more cheaply than we--or the Greeks, Spanish, Italian, or French. Thus the western "job dearth" and the massive shortfall in aggregate consumer power which has come round to biting the Chinese dragon on its big, scaly butt.

But as I've said so many times before--we had to have the global economy crash before it completely ruined the habitability of our only planet. Now the rest is up to us. Create a new, ecologically sustainable, socially just economy from the not yet cold ashes of the old. Or endure a barbarous chaos. Survival with dignity won't be easy. But then nothing worthwhile ever is.

Zombie scientist, "Frankenfood can feed the 10 billion!" (NYT, 8/18/11)

2011-08-31T18:01:00.000-07:00

Just when I thought the double whammy of two recent books, Jeffrey Smith's Genetic Roulette: the Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods (2007) and Marie-Monique Robin's The World According to Monsanto (2010), had driven a splintery stake through the heart of Frankenfood, the venerable New York Times funishes a Monsanto apologist (and former Condi Rice science and technology advisor in Dubbya's State Department) with precious column inches to extol the virtues of genetically-enginnered food (Nina V. Federoff, "Engineering Food for All"). Not surprisingly, it turns out she's just another "science-lite" yahoo, now so common among the GOP, diggin up old and disproven claims in her zest to help Monsanto's struggling bottom line.

Federoff pleads for the government to "tear down that wall [of excessive regulation]" that's keeping this "new" science from working its bounty-producing magic. But to make her case she merely resurrects the oft-discredited shibboleths of the biotech industry and repeats them with the zeal of a convert fresh from the revival tent. "New molecular methods that add or modify genes can protect plants from diseases and pests and improve crops," she argues, adding that "The results have been spectacular [!]" Maybe there's something new, I thought, only to be led through a brightly shining maze of half-truths and outright falsehood. So let's parse her claim of the spectacular.

Her two big spectaculars are the once organic friendly, parsimoniously applied Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), now zapped into corn, cotton, rice, etc. in careless, industrialized mass production, and "Roundup Ready" soy and canola. Big deal, Dr. Federoff. Monsanto makes a bundle exhausting the usefulness of a rare weapon against garden pests by its mass application--with myriad negative "unintended consequences," and she calls the results "spectacular." Monsanto adds to that bundle by peddling soy and canola laced with a gene making them reistant to their own best-selling herbicide, Roundup. Roundup sales--far more profitable than seeds--soar. For a time. Predicatably the weeds, like the insects, are living, evolving life-forms. And they're evolving to resist Bt and Roundup, while Monsanto's human lab rats have frozen plant genome's in time. Not a fair fight. Evolution wins. Industrial agriculture loses, at great cost to the global food supply.

But in the process, Monsanto has bought up hundreds of seed-selling competitors, patented its seeds, aggressively marketed them to farmers keen on boosting yields and using less pesticide/herbicide, and then has hyper-aggressively enforced its claimed intellectual property rights. They hire Pinkerton dectectives and retain roomfuls of legal talent to bully and intimidate all the "seed cleaners" and non-GMO farmers who refuse to drink their GM kool aid (as depicted in Food, Inc.).

Worse still, those "spectacular" results are fraught with serious problems, which Federoff conveniently, disingenuously, neglects to mention. Jeffrey Smith's Genetic Roulette takes up the slack there, as I've noted in several previous postings. Most notably, these franken crop monoliths are giving rise to super weeds and super pests--AND THE YIELDS ARE ALREADY AT BEST NO BETTER, AND AT WORST LOWER than from conventional seeds. Nice little boost there for a few years--Federoff writes as if farmers are still enjoying a huge economy in their pesticide costs with Bt, and the soil saving benefits of no-till farming with Roundup Ready. In reality they're having to apply more, and more toxic, pesticides and herbicides to complement Bt and Roundup. The economies and environmental benefits are rapidly vanishing--or in many cases, already vanished.
Frankenfood definitely won't help feed a hungry planet.

So we must see the boosters of GMOs for what they truly are--shills for Monsanto and the Biotech Industry. Unfortunately that includes our State Department and Department of Agriculture. Monsanto is Big Agribiz, and its exports help reduce our yawning trade deficit. So its been federal policy to boost those exports, and we haven't been timid in doing so.

As newly released "WikiLeaks" cables have shown, our diplomats abroad have used heavy-handed tactics to bribe and brow-beat nations into accepting Monsanto's patented seeds. (cf. "New WikiLeaks Cables Show US Diplomats Promote Genetically Engineered Crops Worldwide," (Truthout.org, 2011-08-25). We've employed the promise of aid and the threat of cutting off aid. We've employed the WTO to enforce "free trade" strictures on nations refusing to import franken seeds for health and environmental reasons. We've been very bad.

So Monsanto's success in planting their revolving-door moles deep inside the US government has paid off handsomely for that very evil, totally unscrupulous corporation.

But take heart! From Oct. 1 to Oct. 16 anti-GMO protestors will march from New York City to Washington, D.C. demanding that franken products be labeled--a modest, reasonable demand totally in keeping with the spirit of transparency and freedom of (informed) choice--and something a majority of Americans want. May the march be HUGE! May those of us in the hinterland rally with our local organic growers in support of the march. And may this be the fatal blow to an industry whose only goals are monopoly profits and expanding market share.

Frankenfood must die!

Worst Case Eco-scenarios Coming to Pass in China

2011-08-23T17:38:00.000-07:00

I frequently repeat Aldo Leopold's observation that all our technological marvels are "in one sense mere parlor tricks compared with our utter ineptitude in keeping land fit to live upon," because it's so danmed important. That line first appeared in his essay "The Conservation Ethic" back in the mid-1920. I only wish Leopold's contemporaries, my grandpa's generation, had heeded his warning, or that "The Greatest Generation" of my father would have added ecological stewardship to their wartime heroics and their ethic of material sacrifice for the good of the whole. At least they bequeathed us a model showing that American society could mobilize when given an urgent task--a model I hope we make use of very soon.

Instead, up through my own generation and that of my children, we Americans, inspite of having reined in some of our worst excesses, have done poorly by "the Land," a term Leopold used to signify soil, air, water and all the living creatures in the biotic community. And now time is running out for my grandchildren.

Yet as huge and destructive as our consumer-driven ecological footprint continues to be, China has roundly surpassed us when it comes to life-threatening ecological abuse. They have failed-- utterly--to keep land fit to live upon. A current report by the Earth Policy Institute, "Expanding Deserts, Falling Water Tables, and Toxic Pollutants Driving People from Their Homes" (23 Aug, 2011) chronicles myriad examples of human-induced ecological breakdown from Yemen and Tunisia to Iran, Syria and Iraq; from Brazil and Mexico to India-- and China.

We humans are liquidating forests for furniture, building materials and paper. We're depleting aquifers, altering the climate, plundering the earth, fouling our air and water, setting off wholesale extinction. Deserts are on the march, forcing humans and other creatures to squeeze into already crowded habitats. Examples appear across the planet, but no where with such speed and magnitude as in China.

Here is a salient passage from the EPI report.
In China, desert expansion has accelerated in each successive decade since 1950...over the last half century some 24,000 villages in northern and western China have been abandoned either entirely or partly because of desert expansion...China is heading for a Dust Bowl like the one that forced more than 2 million "Okies" to leave their land in the United States in the 1930s (cf. Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, for an astonishing account of that eco-catastrophe). But the dust bowl forming in China is much larger and so is the population. Arable land is scarce, and getting ever scarcer.

I suppose it's fortunate--from this one perspective, at least--that China's economy and cities are growing so fast. Lots of demand for new, low-wage workers. Unfortunately, they're fueling the very same frenzied growth that's killing China's land--and its people.

China's desert-fleeing refugees may number in the tens of millions, but they're not the worst casualties of Land abuse. China's government, despite its policy of tightly controlling the "bad news," admits to more than 450 "cancer villages" and has published (always suspect) statistics showing cancer is now the leading cause of death in the Middle Kingdom (EPI report, p.2)--a charge I've been making here for at least two years. Toxic coal smoke, ubiquitous male smoking, and highly polluted water have a way of generating lots of cancer cells.

The woefully lax enforcement of environmental protections--just like what Republicans claim would help us create more jobs here--has meant that corporate profits and the Almighty God of rapid GDP growth come at the expense of the people's health. With 1.4 billion people, the CCP seems to reason, surely we can spare a few hundred million for the greater good of "modest prosperity." And, thus, turn environmental abuse and exploitation of workers' health into COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE over the scruples-fettered producers in Europe and America-- and rapidly increase global market share in everything form textiles and shoes, to high-speed trains and solar panels. Lots of people are getting filthy rich in China (and in the global corporations who manufacture or source there) off of other people's cancer.

These are the reasons I so vehemetly disagreed with World Watch's report on a "greening China" last week. Electric cars and solar panels won't touch China's cancer epidemic or its public health and ecological catastrophe. Keeping Land fit to live upon must become more important than the unsustainably robust GDP growth that is creating its own grave diggers--and a multitude of dead for them to bury. A quality of life worth living for requires a quality of environment worth working for. May the Chinese people find the courage to do that work.

A Greener China?--we can hope

2011-08-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

Although I'm generally a fan of the Worldwatch Institute and regard its iconic hero Lester Brown as a great environmentalist, I have issues with some of their policies (especially GMOs and China). Their report #185, "Green Economy and Green Jobs in China," is the latest case in point. If this report fairly analyzes the best environmental policies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), then the Chinese people are still on course for horrific ecological collapse. And eventhough Worldwatch issued a standard disclaimer that the authors wrote independently of Worldwatch, and thus their views "are their own," the Worldwatch name on the report signals tacit endorsement of its findings.

During the Maoist era, with all its hideous abuses, at least the ideal of criticism/self-criticism meant that any well-informed cadre could point out the shortcomings in policy--a s/he understood it. In that spirit, the "Green Economy..." report warranted some hefty and pointed criticism, even if its authors are sincere and well-meaning researchers, not party hacks attempting to "astro-turf" over a flawed and ultimately disastrous policy. I fault Worldwatch for not moving the discourse forward with any form of astute analysis.

I harbor a suspicion that, like the popular, but oft criticized (especially by me) Thomas Friedman, Lester Brown and Worldwatch strive to maintain a working relationship with party officials and progressive forces in China--and thus mute their criticism of bad policy. Unfortunately that also means they mute their criticism of the raging ecological crisis that will soon derail China's high speed GDP growth express and bring exteme hardshiop and dislocation to its people. So let's look now at the report, beginning with its opening paragraph.

Over the past decade, and especially during the 11th Five-Year period of 2006-10, China has prioritized green development in almost all its leading economic sectors. One of the greatest promises of China's green transition (1) is the potential for expanded employment in industries and economic sectors that can help slow and possibly reduce (2) the country's environmental impact.

Please note, in addition to the fact that the authors' focus is on job-creating potential, the two underlined phrases from the preceeding: (1) the authors apparently believe China is in the midst of a transition to a green economy, and (2) that transition just might actually reduce what is unquestionably a radically unsustainable environmental impact/footprint. Or, put more bluntly, it might only slow the race to ecological collapse--which obviously neither the authors nor Worldwatch regard as the profound and imminent crisis it is. But, before the fall, more Chinese will have jobs--and fewer Americans, Europeans and Japanese.

This allegedly Great Transition consists of three aspects: new policies in energy, transportation and forestry. Of course, as evidenced in my previous posts, China's most critical ecological crisis involves its highly polluted, mostly unusable, often carcinogenic, and woefully scarce supply of fresh water--especially scarce in the north, but equally polluted everywhere.

Omission of this fact already condemns the report as fatally inadequate. But even what is in that 11th Five Year Plan barely scratches the surface of the life-and-death struggle between unregulated economic growth on the one hand, and the life-sustaining functions of healthy ecosystems on the other.

Neither the CCP leaders nor the report's authors appear to take seriously that the very life of their great civilization and its people depend utterly upon Great Nature's mostly free gifts--clean air, clear rain and spring water, healthy soil, biodiversity--and its free services such as forests purifying air and water and protecting us from floods and drought; soil fertility providing us with nutritious plant energy; biodiversity providing us with animal and plant protein; and rivers, lakes and oceans providing us with abundant fish.

China's headlong, twenty-plus year rush to "modern prosperity" has sullied and mostly wiped out these free services. A five year plan to reduce the rate of growth of coal-burning power plants may be laudatory under less dire circumstances, but it beggers belief for anyone who's had to breathe the toxic air in China's industrial cities--or who's aware of China's #1 status as Greenhouse Gas Emitter. (Not that the US, Canada, Australia, or India are doing any better--we're not even doing as much. Neither are our problems as dire). And regardless of other nations' lassitude on the global warming issue, China's "green" reforms aren't green. Just a slower shade of gray.

But then comes the second purportedly great green policy change--electric vehicles. China aims to soon be the world's number one producer of said very low emission vehicles--again an advance over the ominous prospect of 600 million new gas-guzzling, US-style Buicks and pick ups pouring out of Chinese factories and onto their newly expanded highway system.

Let me be clear--Any American-style mass car culture in China (or India) will be an ecological disaster. Because each of those "green" cars will still require iron ore, rubber, glass, aluminum, and plastic--massive volumes in total. And, of course, massive amounts of energy, i.e., coking coal to "cook" the ore into high-grade steel and the bauxite into aluminum. An electric vehicle footprint will still be enormous, the "gain" over gasoline combustion engines significant, but ultimately irrelevant.

And, again, the US occupies the moral low ground, a population rigid in its belief that cheap gas and a culture built around the private auto/RV/SUV/ATV/jet ski/pick up truck is our birthright--and therefore, non-negotiable. A political non-starter. It would be downright unAmerican, and political suicide, to even hint that we have no more right to an ecologically-devastating car culture than do the Chinese or Indians. A not even acknowledged moral dimemma. Thus, for the ignorant and thoughtless, no dilemma at all.

Lastly, #3--plans to reforest much of China's denuded landscape--does address several critical needs. But only if ecological health is given precedence over economic desires. China desperately needs thriving forests to nurture what little forest-related biodiversity remains. It needs forests to hold back the life-killing expansion of deserts across the north and northwest. It needs healthy forests to begin to restore the functioning of a badly abused water cycle which has spread drought widely across the landscape. But the wrong kind of forestry will on make matters worse.

As those who follow China's environmental struggles know, economically-opportunistic foresters have replaced native forests with fast-growing, water-sucking, often genetically-modified species, thereby altering the entire ecosystem to wring a few more board feet out of a hillside. They're smitten by the same "King Midas" mindset as all the other fast-growthers, all too ready to sacrifice long-term ecological health for a quick profit. Only to see it all collapse. For anti-ecological thinking is always bad thinking. It's unsustainable thinking. Inviting a million unintended consequences into the tent's back door while mesmerized by the glitter of rapid, but short-term growth.

So no, China's Great Leap into solar and wind technology will not save it from ecological decline. In the absence of a bold move away from coal, it will only slightly postpone the day of reckoning. In all humility, I plead with the powers that be to read and take seriously my version of a Green Five Year Plan--but only as a starting point for a vigorously debated discourse. I do pretend to have answers, but am also realistic enough to know my ideas are mere suggestions, not a definitive roadmap for a way out of the ecology-trap in which China now finds itself.

Too much is at stake here for Worldwatch to go mushy over China's inadequate plan for greening itself. The ecological crisis demands targeted, unfiltered criticism of the 11th Five Year Plan's shortcomings. We have to trust that there are enough sincere people in the CCP--and among the people-- who want a form of socialism that truly "serves the people" that they can prevail over those corrupted bureaucrats whose only goal is to live out a life of comfort and luxury. Ten thousands protests a year shows us that is true--that there is more than an inchoate sense that ecology matters. May it come to pass.

August 8, 2011--all hell breaking loose

2011-08-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

Sandwiched between commemorations of the horrific atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Aug 6) and Nagasaki (Aug 9), we humans created two new and on-going historic events, neither of which will match the conflagrations which pushed the horrors and illogic of "total war" to new depths back in 1945. For that we can be grateful, eventhough we refuse to take seriously the prospect of nuclear holocaust or to make the forceful effort to ban such weapons. Instead, as with so many other threats--global warming, ecological devastation, loss of biodiversity, rampaging inequality, mushrooming debt--we "kick the can down the road," whistling with crossed fingers as we skulk through the graveyards of buried hopes and missed opportunities. And then, as happened today, a bloody arm reaches out of the grave to snatch our bodies--and demands payment for our careless excesses.

This time stock prices went into freefall around the globe as investors fretted about monumental debt and languid economic growth--the European Union fraught with chaos and indecision, the USA rent with political bickering and legislative gridlock. Meanwhile, in no longer so jolly Old England, poor Afro-Carribean immigrants are imitating Greece's anti-austerity mobs, looting and putting the torch to parts of London to protest lack of employment and police discrimination.

The touted global economy, not so long ago hailed as the vessel which would carry the planet's 6 billion humans to the promised land of universal prosperity, now locked in the throes of financial and social meltdown. A utopian vision, grinding into a dystopic nightmare.

But, asks the eco-accountant in a quiet and disregarded voice, what does it all mean for the environment?

First, economic slowdown means less consumption, and thus, less gutting of eco-systems in search of raw materials and fossil fuels, less waste, less pollution, reduced greenhouse gas emissions. It will, as I've oft said, significantly reduce our ecological footprint in a way we've been unable to achieve via scientific argument and moral suasion. "Hey, pal. Don't buy that jet ski/motor home/6,000 sq. ft. house/etc--it's bad for the earth." "Screw you, asshole! I'm an American! Free to choose. Worked hard to buy the good life, and no commie, pinko, enviro-nazi can tell me what I can't have!" And so it goes. Legions of new consumers in China, India, Brazil and elsewhere lining up to buy what we Americans take for granted, willing to work harder and longer than we do, aspiring to be as shrewdly entrepreneurial and aggressive as any American or European CEO.

But on the other hand (apologies to Harry Truman, who futilely searched till his dying day for a one-handed economist), instability is a bad thing for societies and other ecological systems. High unemployment, rampant inequality, and violence born of despair make for an inherently unstable society. Humans and other animals are not doing well in Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, or other war-torn venues--the ultimate in instability. Certainly London will struggle to prosper so long as angry mobile gangs terrorize its denizens and burn down its shopping malls. But then, living things aren't doing all that well in nations rocked by climate instability either--prolonged drought in Texas, much of Australia, eastern Russia and elsewhere; torrential rains in Pakistan, India and northwest Australia. Nor in nations plundering their own soil and water in economic frenzy--as in China, parts of Canada and the US, Brazil and too many other places to list.

So, as the global economy unravels, either precipitously or gradually, we'd best study those blueprints for a new economic order that provide human societies and the ecosphere in which they are embedded with the best chance of regaining stability. (cf. Korten's Agenda for a New Economy, McKibben's Deep Economy, Gilding's The Great Disruption, Jackson's Prosperity Without Growth, and many others) And then to create an on-line forum where people can build on one another's ideas, branching out into conferences and forums, and coalescing into networks of working groups, some of which already exist. Please feel encouraged to post your own ideas here as comments. May stability return soon. May a million good ideas bloom.

The end of 'dumb water'?--rave review of "The Big Thirst"

2011-07-26T14:06:00.000-07:00

Books that excite my ageing brain cells thrill the hell out of me, especially when the author splashes colorful metaphors and "ahah!" insights on every page. The Big Thirst: the secret life and turbulent future of water (Charles Fishman, 2011) rates five stars on all counts. It's one of those rare books replete with "didya know" factoids to thrill (or pester) your spouse or housemates, to excite or bore your fellow wokers around the water cooler.

I even pushed the limits of polite pre-dinner conversation to drop a few zingers on two local water utility executives. "You guys know where the water on earth came from?" I asked in all humility. "Do you know whether water is still being created or added somehow?" And, after a few nips at the pot stickers and a slug of wine, "How old is the water in your reservoirs?" I paused and scanned their faces for hints of violence. Instead they looked intrigued. They offered their own stories of Eugene's water supply--worried moments in early Spring 2010, fear of complacency setting in in our current wet year, the uncertainties resulting from climate change. If we have a dry year, or worse, a prolonged drought, these two men must impose the restrictions--and field the complaints in board rooms filled with angy patrons. When they finished their stories, I added a few more rave impressions of the book, then headed back to saute a few wild prawns from the endangered Gulf of Mexico, water on my mind, wondering how much longer we'd tolerate the foolish practices of industrial agriculture that render so much of that water body a dead zone. I sipped my pinot and focused on cooking.

Before I read The Big Thirst, I "knew" some things about water. China is in dire straints. Las Vegas is the epitome of water profligacy, closely followed by Phoenix. And Australia had been hammered by record drought--before its northeastern part was hit by record flooding and a killer typhoon last year. Charles Fishman disabused me of several out-dated and false notions and left me feeling smugly well-informed. Except that things are changing all the time, and I already need to read the sequel--which he may or may not be working on. Better still a web page updating all hius case studies and adding new ones into the mix.

Fishman weaves some shocking Australian drought stories thoughout his narrative--because he sees that continent as a preview for what's in store for most of the rest of us as climate change works its unpredictable uncertainty on planet eaarth (to borrow Bill McKibben's new name for a planet undergoing radical shifts in its rainfall and weather patterns). Tales from Australia where "there is no debate about the 'reality' of climate change" (p. 167), might just keep my water exec friends up awake at night, because, as one of the book's prominent themes makes vididly clear, we all suffer from old thinking, a complacent mindlessness born of a century of abundant water.

Every Australian city, save for Darwin on the relatively lush north coast, has suffered radical jolts to the taken-for-granted water supply upon which their economies, well-being, and mode of life were predicated. New water sources are hard, in not impossible, to find.

And 'old thinking' about water makes for very contentious politics--whether its Atlanta, Ga; Las Vegas, Nevada; Beijing, China; or Toowoomba, Australia. People don't readily surrender their dumb ideas about water, even when the science is clear and compelling. Water illiteracy is rife and it dies a hard death. It's as if one hundred years in which most affluent nations solved their 19th century water crises with chlorine, reservoirs and central water mains, "hard wired" us for water stupidity which only shows up under the hard glare of drought. And when it does we tend to meet the new reality with denial, wishful thinking, and a stubborn clinging to beliefs and values that are wildly dysfunctional. As Fishman observes more than once, "ample rainfall covers many sins"--and, conversely, drought exposes many follies.

Fishman deals very little with China's water crisis, my great obsession. Instead he captivated me with his chapter on India, "Where Water is Worshipped, but Gets no Respect." And where "24/7" water is almost as rare as the Yangtze River white dolphin. As cynical as I was about India's corrupt bureacracy and the glaring mismatch between its high-tech accomplishments and its intractable poverty, the mismanagement of its water stunned me. Huge mega-cities where water flows from taps just 90 minutes every other day. The sacred Ganga (Ganges) freighted with every noxious substance known to humans. Why the disconnect? Fishman asked. "Well, the water leaving the factory with acids and toxins is going to the gods. They'll be responsible for it." Blame shifting on a cosmic scale!

The good news and true value of The Big Thirst is that Fishman sees human civilization being pushed by climate change into a difficult transition from an era of 'dumb water' to a bright new era of, well, 'smart water.' "Change or die," you might say. But even when survival depends on it, such changes in thinking and behaving around water come with pain and conflict, quickly or very slowly, depending on the skill of water educators--and the urgency of the crisis.

Fishman lays out the blue prints for a society wanting to build a smart water system in its own watershed, and sprinkles his narrative with enough success stories to demonstrate people can shed their "water illiteracy and water mythology," the two biggest impediments to new ways of thinking. For, as he points out, because all water crises are ultimately local, so must be the solutions. Technologies such as reverse osmosis and ultra violet radiation--part of a package of "IPR," that is, indirect potable reuse--equip us to transform slurries of human poop and battery acid into pure drinking water--purer than that in an alpine lake. And in terms of conservation, agriculture, which currently uses up 2/3 or more of our fresh water, can become far more efficient--and already has, right here in the USA, where water productivity on our farms has increased 90% since 1980.

As he says, "our profligacy is good news--it means we can change quickly." And we'll need to, for as he also points out, "once climate change hits (as most notably in Australia), it hits at a pace and severity that no one predicted in the climate models." So that means even wantonly profligate, water stupid Las Vegas can, and has, changed--dramatically. And, let's hope, even the worst offenders, China and India can follow suit.

But, of course, our profligacy is also the bad news, as his riveting case studies of Atlanta, Ga., Toowoomba, Australia, and several cities in India make so compellingly clear. Water stupidity can be fatal for a city and its people. Unclean water still kills hundreds of children each day. And below a certain water threshhold, economies and societies collapse. The race is on. May smart water prevail. And may the end of the dumb water era soon come to pass.

Death by car glut

2011-07-19T15:48:00.000-07:00

Economic turbulence reigns, soverign debt crises threaten the Eurozone, and the US economy perches on the brink of default, but damn if automakers aren't looking at that same glass and pronouncing that it's not just half full--it's about to overflow. By 2016, say the dudes at Nissan, they'll be selling 82% more cars than they did last year. Ford Motor Co. projects a 50% bumb during the same period, and Volkswagen pledges to keep pace. Overall, that makes for a total of 115 million new car sales in 2016--20 million more cars than the 95 million total estimated by IHS global insight. Great comfort to stockholders, I'm sure, but even projections which astonish by their grandiosity send shudders through an eco-accountant's little green heart. If they're even close to right, the planet's in even more trouble than my cassandra-like predictions indicate. And that's no mean feat.

So, doubting that "cradle-to-cradle" manufacturing will have taken root in the next five years, capitalism's flag ship industry will be piling stress on a fragile planet at a level threatening several critical thresholds. ("cradle-to-cradle" means a product's ecological footprint has a zero net sum in terms of energy and material use) In the absence of such prudence, and in the knowledge that a large proportion of these new vehicles will likely be manufactured in China, India and Brazil where environmental standards are abysmal, the ecological impact of 90-100 million new autos each year staggers the imagination. When will iron and coal miners in Australia and Brazil run out of rocks to ship to China? When will "peak oil" assert itself with a vengence? When will China's and India's already clogged urban roads reach gridlock? When will all that burned coal required to make those cars heat the planet into radical instability? Long before 2020, is my guess.

The prospect is so mind-boggling, the vision so absurd, and the results so destructive, that any rational leader or international organization would declare it a non-starter. "Can't do that!" the presidents of Europe and America, along with the Chinese Politburo would say. "We must find better ways to move people and goods around," the UN General Assembly would proclaim, as they launched a new global initiative--with some real teeth and some serious funding for alternatives. Actually they'd have done that years ago, and all our carbon footprints would be a fraction of what they are now. Instead we continue to act as if there are no ecological limits to consumption--and race headlong toward catastrophe.

The pundits and politicians tell us not to worry about peak oil or global warming. We hear an authoritative looking fellow on TV telling us, "We can convert all our cars and trucks to natural gas--America's newly abundant and clean (sic) fossil fuel," and we think that another inevitable technological fix is close at hand--so why make expensive and costly changes to the American way of life? Like Julian Simon told us twenty years ago in his book The Ultimate Resource, only fools worry about limits. Human ingenuity has rendered the notions of ecological limits superfluous. We can always outsmart nature. So live it up! Robust consumer spending makes the world go round. Shopping is, as President Junior Bush exhorted us, our patriotic duty.

But then we look around. The weather seems crazy. Those damned cars still look and act more like cars did 20 years ago than some new earth-friendly, miniscule- footprint breakthrough. To power them we're taking insane risks to retrieve deep offshore oil and to cook fuel out of tar sands at a net energy loss. Be build pipelines and refineries everywhere. Court dictators. Ship the stuff half way round the planet, inviting the inevitable spills. Pave over farmland for parking lots and highways. Folly.

Our fossil-fuel intensive industrial agriculture creates enormous dead zones in already polluted and over-fished oceans as it demands ever more chemicals just to maintain stable harvests, all the while causing foolish levels of erosion. The biotech miracle has made a few corporations rich with its false promises and destructive shrinking of biodiversity. But it has not fed the hungry masses or given us anything close to a sustainable food supply. Bubbles!

So won't someone please tell the cornucopians they have no clothes? And do it soon, before 100 million new cars, year after year, chokes the planet--in exhaust, solid waste, congestion, depletion of resouces

"The Man from Beijing"

2011-07-09T16:00:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge fan of Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen mysteries, tales set mostly in contemporary Shanghai in which the hero struggles to be an honest cop and a faithful Communist Party member--while writing poetry and eating mouth-watering meals in his spare time. Inevitably his cases drag Chen into the darker aspects of modern Chinese society, sordid niches where organized crime and high-level corruption force our hero into harrowing physical and moral peril.

I'm also a fan of the Kurt Wallander mysteries on PBS, which star Kenneth Branagh. So when I read that The Man from Beijing was written by Henning Mankell, the same author who conceived the Wallender mysteries, and considered "The first novel to take up the present question of globalization" (El Correo Espanol), I snatched up a copy and immersed myself in grisly mass murder and deadly Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intrigue. It proved to be an entertaining and enlightening ride, as the mass murders in a small Swedish village lead our female judge protagonist to Beijing and take the reader into a subplot involving a major schism in the CCP which plays out in Africa. That proved yet another bonus, as I've been deeply intrigued with China's ambitious projects in Africa as laid out in two recent books, China Safari: on the trail of Beijing's expansion in Africa (Serge Michel, et.al., 2008), and The Dragon's Gift: the real story of China in Africa (Deborah Brautigan, 2009).

The revenge-driven man in Beijing who dispatched his personal body guard to slaughter an extended family in a small Swedish village (after murdering several members of the same family in Nevada), turns out to be a corrupt party official who's amassed both a financial fortune and enormous political clout by being more ambitious, more corrupt and far more ruthless than his competitors--always taking care that those who might threaten or expose him are paid off--or dispatched. He cuts corners to make the lowest bids on lucrative contracts, hiding his own role behind a long, convoluted paper trail. So that when projects collapse or otherwise go bad (recall the shoddy school construction in Sichuan Province that killed hundreds of young children during a recent earthquake as surrounding buildings held firm--and hundreds of other incidents) he's in the clear. But he has a nemesis. His own sister, a true servant of the people who represents the principaled faction of the CCP, loathes both corruption and the neo-imperialist adventures in Africa. Because her brother is deeply involved in both, she considers him a "cancer on the Party," which doesn't work out too well for her.

So with official corruption frequently making headlines in the NYTimes--the disgraced head of China's high-speed rail program, officials behind Wuhan's current construction binge being two of the latest casualties--The Man from Beijing offers one author's ideas as to the extent of the corruption and the intensity of the power struggles
roiling China. Many millionaires and several billionaires have made their fortunes in China's fevered rush to modern prosperity-- building, revamping, and expanding cities, and constructing some of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in human history. We know massive corruption and unprecedented inequality have been unintended by-products, and that there are still many honest and principled cadre in the CCP who lament the capitalist excesses. Perfect grist for yet another murder mystery. Though I definitely prefer Inspector Chen.

Greece, America and "The Great Disruption"

2011-06-29T17:18:00.000-07:00

Last week's financial media buzzed about Greece's impending doom, warning that a "disorderly default" could raise havoc with the EU's banking system, presenting a "Lehman Moment" for the entire system of global finance (just as the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. in 2008 precipitated the Great Recession). Chaos, pundits, say, is contagious, and would proliferate like swine flu through an uninnoculated tribe. Meaning, in this case, that Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Italy (for starters) would find it so hard to borrow money to pay their bills that they too would default--overwhelming the best efforts of the ECB (European Central Bank) and the IMF.

On the other hand, not letting Greece default by providing bailout billions in exchange for austerity, would merely be "kicking the can down the road," the latest of a string of cliches which seem to spread even faster than swine flu among the chattering economic heads.

Only one path can avoid catastrophe--Greece must become more "competitive" and export its way back to prosperity. That is, the Greek people must, for the indefinite future, learn to live with less while producing more. Ideally, at least in this scenario, the Greeks would set an example for the profligate Americans and British, who sooner or later will have their own economic "Come to Jesus" moments. Average folk must work harder for less pay and benefits. Legislatures must make cuts to environmental and worker health and safety regulations ("Slash the budgets of all government regulatory agencies!!" as our homegrown yahoos would shout). And then sell those cheap exports to big nations with big trade surpluses--China, Germany, South Korea, and Japan. And sell off assets such as ports, telecoms, airports, islands, farmland, etc., again to China and Germany.

But, the more astute ask, what can Greece manufacture for export that the Chinese or Germans don't already own an insurmountable 'competitive advantage'? Certainly not autos or solar panels on the high value-added end. And clearly not shoes, toys, or textiles on the low end. When it comes to exports, the advent of the chinese juggernaut has, so to speak, "sucked all the oxygen out of the room." Which leaves selling off assets to raise a little cash, squeezing wages and consumption down to Bangladeshi levels, and crossing the fingers that (1) Greeks don't protest too hard, (2) that magic happens.

If default can't be avoided, which all respectable economists think unlikely, then at least keep putting the steel-toed boots to that dented up can until it's far enough down the road that bankers won't be hurt--meaniong that delay will have given the time they need to shift the debt burden off their own balance sheets and onto the backs of taxpayers (via national banks and the IMF).

So the Greek crisis appears intractable, but EU dithering over bailouts can keep the zombie walking yet a few more months--assuming no paralyzing general strikes or revolutions. But what about the USA? The Tea Party and its minions in Congress seem determined to play "default chicken" with the Democrats over raising the debt ceiling, betting our nation's solvency that Obama will blink first and make savage cuts to the federal budget. "Unthinkably irresponsible!" shout the Dems. "So's borrowing a trillion dollars a year from China and printing a flood of cash (ref to the Fed's QE2)," retort the Republicans. And they're both right!

Turns out no one knows how we'll get out of this mess. Consumer spending, much as Obama tried to stimulate it, remains languid as the middle class seeks to pay down debt, stave off foreclosure and keep or find a job, while wages shrink or remain stagnant (my friends in public education have been wracked by both lay-offs and pay cuts, as have public workers across the US--just like the folks in Greece).

The rich get richer, but most regard paying taxes as an infringement of their sacred right to be "filfthy rich by 40," as they say at Goldman Sachs.(tax evasion even worse in Greece, we hear) So looks as if we'll have a Greek-sized helping of austerity right here too. Sell off some ports and oil shale to China. Import less, shop less, protest more. Maybe begin taking seriously that the "green shoots" withered about the time that phrase had become the hottest cliche, that the "double-dip" is a downward plunge with a stubborness like Dr. Seuss's Zax when it comes to reversing direction, and that neither the Keynesian stimulators nor the neo-classical austericists have any clothes. We'll need to make this new road by walking--and there will be many false starts and serious disruptions.

There are better options, but we're not likely to try them until we've had our financial "Pearl Harbor"--but the bombers have already left the deck and will soon reach their targets. At least according to Paul Gilding's newest book, The Great Disruption. But damned! Once we gain escape velocity over denial's force field, he says, we'll surprise ourselves at just how many resources we can mobilize--just like our forefathers and mothers did after the Japanese attack on our Pacific Fleet. And how much ingenuity we can mobilize in the Commons of public ideas, once the "Merchants of Doubt," the Chamber of Commerce, and Fox "News" are forced to relinquish their death grip on public discourse, and the super rich can no longer dominate everyone else's economy.

The book is a little like a mix of Bill McKibben's books, Deep Economy and Eaarth, only with lots more of Gilding's biography and lots fewer McKibben-level insights.
Still, it's an important contribution to a burgeoning literature posing creative responses to our global ecological and economic crises; books which proclaim the good news that there is life after shopping--and that we humans can build a new economic system that provides for basic material needs, while doing a far better job of respecting natural limits and promoting non-material goodies such as neighborliness and conviviality. It's a place we'll be happy to see our grandkids inhabit--but carving out the road from here to there will be very hard and very messy. Not a bad challenge for the generations that have lived far too high on the material hog for far too long. May we accept that challenge--and have enough time to bring the vision into reality.

Are bankers and the super rich saving the planet?

2011-06-20T17:53:00.000-07:00

I don't come to praise bankers, those greed-smitten souls who plunged the global economy into a deep and lingering recession, but rather to (grudgingly)acknowledge the historic, and possibly progressive role they're performing. Less like heroes and more like the protagonists in classic Greek tragedies--madly pursuing their narrow self-interests only to discover a nasty surprise at journey's end, akin to Oedipus setting out to exercise his will to power only to end up unknowingly killing his father and having sex with his mother. Such are the games the gods play with us mere mortals. Now, perhaps, including Gaia, the earth goddess. Only this time around what at first glance seems marvelous for the bankers and super rich, but terrible for everyone else, will turn out tragic for the plutocrats and give the rest of us a chance to salvage our eco-systems before they collapse.

After all, who but the bankers could have most of the developed world--led by the Greeks, Irish and Portugese--gearing up for tougher times ahead? Lower wages, smaller pensions, a decline in material consumption and living standards, a frantic search for new ways to provide for our basic needs.

Suspend disbelief for a few incredulous seconds and imagine a zealous clutch of environmentalists appearing in 3 minute segments on the evening news, rolling out a passel of public service announcements and infomercials, exhorting us to consume less stuff, use lots less energy, and get very serious about reducing and reusing before we even think about recycling. Most of us would reach for the remote at the first mention of "green" or sacrifice. We'd go on with life as usual as the green NGOs lobbied governments worldwide, but recoil in horror if Congress ever became serious about imposing strict energy and environmental standards and mimimizing CO2 emissions, or to make all new goods adhere to the "cradle-to-cradle" principle--whereby the full life-cycle of every product must be planned out before its manufactured. (I can already hear thunderous chants of our new energy policy drowing out the greenies, "DRILL BABY, DRILL!!!--off-shore, way off shore, Canadian tar sands, hydraulic fracking of shale from Texas to North Dakota, Wyoming to New York. Coupled with snarling demands to cut taxes--including those on gas and all other forms of energy. Heaven forbid we tax gas at the pump or kilowatts at the meter, to stem consumption!)

Clearly it's been futile telling us Americans we must radically transform our economy and mobilize our entire society if we are to stave off ecological disaster. We're a pretty entitled bunch. We see affluence and 'progress' as our birthright, more and bigger as our new Manifest Destiny. So we speed ahead to a global population of 10.1 billion, watch bemusedly as 1.4 billion Chinese and 1.2 billion Indians--23% of the planet's population--toil and strive to live like us, never asking if there's enough iron ore and coking coal in Australia, enough copper in Chile, enough forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, and enough greenhouse gas leeway in atmosphere, (etc.) to support such a frenzy, without crashing the life-support systems that, well, support life!

But now we're seeing the first blips of the "unplan," that is, the rash of unintended consequences emanating from the great zeal of bankers and corporate CEOs to maximize their profits and bonuses, beginning to set the green "radicals" environmental program in motion, unfortunately in an uncoordinated, messy way. And it will remain messy until a critical mass of us realize this economic crisis is just the elusive opportunity, the wee small opening, which we must grasp with both hands.

There's a new book about this, several actually. But I'll focus next time on just one (or two), Paul Gilding's The Great Unraveling, which makes compelling claims that the "end of history" is nigh, so let's go shopping era is over--and there will be hell to pay during the disruption. But Gilding is an optimist (I'm keeping my powder dry on that one), who believes in HOPE (my Buddhism says that's always risky--the flip side of fear, but he insists it's critical). So he and his friend Thom Friedman (Hot, Flat, and Crowded) have created a synergy--Thom strongly endorsed Gilding's book in his NYT column last week, and Gilding gives Thom lots of credit for pointing the way to a clean energy future.

I've never been much of a Friedman fan, but at this point in time we need all the ideas we can get--and he's one pundit who writes seriously about these issues (in between sometimes contradictory proclamations, and an over-zealous, unwarranted faith in technology).

So next time--a quick walk through The Great Disturbance.

LET THEM EAT OIL!!

2011-06-12T17:28:00.000-07:00

Hydrofracking will save us gas-guzzling Americans, say the ads flooding our airwaves. It's a miracle drug, methadone for our fossil fuel addiction, delivering us from dependency on imported oil, rescuing us from global warming, saving us from higher prices at the pumps. This panacea for our energy ills can blast both oil and natural gas from its deep earth hiding places, liberating enough from beneath New York's sod and concrete alone to power its homes and commercial centers for 50 years.

So it's a new verse to add to the "drill, baby drill" chorus. Energy industry hucksters proclaiming the coming of a new millenium from every TV set in America, never mentioning that tiny little downside--water. And, as it turns out, soil, vegetation and animal life. Not their job, they say. "We've been doing this for sixty years with nary a serious environmental mishap," said Tom Ridge, former Homeland Security Czar and Pennsylvania governor turned oil exec, in response to a grilling on the Colbert Report.

But about that water problem. They're working on it. Two kinda big problems--(1)the highly toxic chemicals they squirt into the shale to liberate the oil (or nat. gas) pollute ground and surface water, even when channeled through local sewage treatment plants, and (2) "the sheer volume of water required poses challenges, especially in South Texas, which faces a severe drought and rapidly diminishing water levels in the local aquifer." Not to worry. There's probably enough left to squirt out all the oil, and then, like the gamblers on Wall St. said, "IBG"--I'll be gone! Meanwhile a frenzy akin to gold rush fever grips South Texas--thousands of new jobs in this impoverished backwater, higher property values for the locals, a chance to make a killing selling off their mineral rights to Big Oil, tax revenues for struggling towns.

Not much local opposition in Texas (but there is in New York and Pennsylvania). As a local said, pointing to the fancy new pick-up he'd just bought for his wife, "That's oil money," a mere $35,000 chunk of the $525,000 windfall he "earned" from selling the mineral rights around his mobil home. Notice he didn't say "that's water money," garnered as it was from selling off his and his neighbors' safe drinking water, and thus their health. ("Shale Boom in Texas Could Increase U.S. Oil Output," www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28business/energy-environment/28shale)

So where's the EPA when people, the land, and the biotic community need its protection? "Big Government ain't welcome here," say the newly, and very temporarily, rich. Besides Big Oil's best friend ever, former VP Dick Cheney, made sure his buddies at Halliburton and the oil corporations wouldn't be bothered by pesky regulators. In a great piece titled "What Will Fracking Do to Your Food Supply?" (www.gilttaste.com/stories/327) Barry Estabrook shines a light on Cheney's dark machinations. In 2004, when the oil/gas shale rush was in its infancy, the Bush/Cheney EPA declared that fracking "posed little or no threat" to drinking water, followed by the Energy Policy Act, into which Cheney's agents in Congress insinuated a "Halliburton loophole," which "specifically exempts fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, the CLEAR Act, and from regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency." (nifty work, Dick!!)

So, just as neither the FDA nor Dept. of Agriculture tests genetically-modified food because they pre-emptorily declared them "substantially equivalent" to non-gm crops, government agencies charged with protecting the public health from industrial over-reach weakly protest that "their hands are tied."

With so many jobs being dangled at the reserve army of the unemployed, with Big Oil poised to spend $25 billion dollars this year alone to drill 5,000 new wells, and with promises of having found "three of the world's biggest oil fields in the last three years right here in the U.S.," what chance do mere citizens have of pointing out the inconvenient truth--this process poisons the land, renders it unfit to live upon or grow things on? Well, look at New York, where the battle's joined.

Organic farmers who know their grassfed cattle will be declared ineatable, their groundwater breeding toxic grass and vegetables--have joined forces with urbanites, environmentalists and rural citizens to oppose the quick and dirty profits that will sulley their homeland for decades. Their foes are some of the most powerful in the world, and victory is far from assured. But they're fighting.

One can only wish the people of South Texas (and Wyoming and South Dakota) and those in the Obama administration could stand up to the "drill, baby, drill" yahoo's who would sell their souls--and the welfare of their children and grandchildren--for quick profit and cheap gas. May millions join the resistance.

Is Beijing (and all north China) Dying?

2011-06-02T09:51:00.000-07:00

"North China is dying," says the New York Times. Their evidence? "A chronic drought is ravaging farmland. The Gobi Desert is inching south. The Yellow River...is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water. The rapid growth of megacities--22 million in Beijing and 12 million in Tianjin alone--has drained aquifers that took millenniums to fill." Shocking details inside the shockingly understated headline, "Plan for China's Water Crisis Spurs Concern" (http://nytimes.com/2011/06/02/world/asia/02water.html?)

"Concern"?! I'd guess "panic" better captures the mood of planners in Beijing, watching their Plan A diversion spawn a dozen train wrecks, when they have no Plan B. The clock is running out on Beijing's major aquifer--set to gurgle its last gallons through the city's pipes sometime in 2015--but how clear and fresh will those last cubic feet be?

The stop-gap "emergency" commandering of supplies from surrounding (and increasingly distant) provinces has about run its course, and is making water refugees of farmers and citizens who migrate in droves to cities such as Beijing and Tianjin in search of livelihood--and water. Admittedly I'm bitter because the Politburo has yet to adopt the water reforms outlined in my Green Five Year Plan--to clean up what they have at the source of pollution. (so if you know anyone in that group...) Tianjin, after all, has seven rivers flowing through it, all polluted beyond drinkability by agricultural run-off, industrial effluent, and raw sewage. Cleaning up those pollution sources would be difficult politically, but far easier an engineering task than the colossal gamble of the South-North Diversion Project, now tens of billions of dollars over budget, six years over schedule, and beset with seeminly intractable problems of pollution, now compounded by drought in the very region from which it fetches its water. As I've pointed out here a few times in recent years, and the article reiterates, the Yangtze River water now scheduled to flow from Beijing's taps in 2014, is very likely to be too polluted to sprinkle on house plants, let alone to ingest into one's body--inspite of the 426(!!) treatment plants being built along the eastern route (to Tianjin) alone. What keeps this thing alive?--politics and lack of courage.

"Water is life," wise people have said, pointing out that our bodies are two-thirds water, and all the things we eat are comprised of "virtual water." So the aphorism's converse is brutally obvious, absence of water is death! So why flirt with death, which now stands on Beijing's threshold?

The real problem is that while the South-North Water Project may never succeed in diverting drinkable water to China's capital, it has succeeded all too well in diverting people's attention from the severity of the crisis for more than fifteen precious years--the span of 3 Five Year Plans which could have addressed the problem systemically--down to its roots. For all those squandered years, belief that Big Technology was solving the problem allowed China's leaders to put off tough actions that would have forced factory owners, farmers and municipal officials to clean up their own messes at the source. Instead, rivers and lakes have grown ever more polluted, and its farmers and urban officials have plundered the nation's aquifers as if there was no tomorrow--and now there may not be.

It's tragic to watch a nation slowly commit suicide by pollution. Equally tragic--and terrifying--will be the social, economic, and political instability which flows from the lack of water once aquifers and emergency measures run dry. Beijing's leaders are obsessed with stability, clamping down on protesters and dissent, spurring the economy to full employment with whatever stimulus dollars and export chicanery are required to keep people content. But they're now courting ecocide across a vast expanse of their nation, a radically destabilizing crisis next to which the Cultural Revolution will seem tame.

China may still have three or four years to clean up its act, during which the shortages will grow ever more acute. Failing to act boldly and expeditiously guarantees the consequences will be catastrophic.

Exploding watermelons: metaphor for China's agriculture?

2011-05-25T17:57:00.000-07:00

The CBS headline was stark, "Chemical-infused watermelons explode in China: overdoses of growth chemicals create 'land mines' in farm fiasco" (May 17, 20110). For China's enterprising farmers, like its ambitious industrialists, "rushing forward to modern prosperity" often entails shortcuts, elbowing patience and rumination to the sidelines. Juice those watermelons and watch the profits soar. Who could know nature would dump heavy rain on the fields at just the wrong time, unleashing a frenzy of hyper-growth that exceeded the capacity of the stripped green shells. Pop, pop, pop, went the melons, bursting with hormone-induced exuberance and busting the incomes of the opportunistic farmers. Must find better ways to subdue nature!

Technological exuberance also explains the full body hug China's leaders have visited upon biotech, embraced as a quick fix to the daunting problem of feeding 1.4 billion mouths with too little land and even less water. They swallowed Monsanto's false promises like a golpher snake swallows golphers. Too little land?--just "engineer" the seeds to produce more--on even the poorest of soils, with the bare minimum of water, fertilizer and pesticide. After all, men in lab coats can bend nature to their will, with agriculture the latest chapter in the Great Helmsman's "War on Nature."

And so it goes that China's leaders, eager to dominate all cutting edge sectors of the globalized economy, have gone one better than the free market zealots in the US, cutting regulation on biotechnolgy and slathering on the subsidies in a frenzy of technolphilia that makes Monsanto's most fervent boosters swoon. If agricultural exports and the proliferation of patented gm seeds were to comprise a major share of America's efforts to reverse its yawning trade deficit and control the world's food supply, China would pull out all the precautionary stops to go us one better. No hesitation in the world's largest authoritarian capitalist system--full speed ahead with GMOs!--and any other chemical magic that boosts yields, from growth hormones to protein-boosting melamine in milk. And everything done to excess--antibiotics, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides. If a little is good, a lot must be better. And China, with the size of its population and the velocity of its economic growth, is far bigger and moves far faster than any nation on earth. But nature intruded again with her damned thresholds!

Fertilizer laden rivers, lakes and near-offshore seas ran putrid with algea blooms, so the technicians waltzed in to save the day--with GMOs. Bt corn, rice and cotton would reduce the need for pesticides. Roundup (or generic glyphosate) resistant plants would dramatically reduce the need for herbicides and for erosion-promoting tilling. More productive seeds would obviate the need for fertilizer, which China's farmers were applying at twice the rate of their US counterparts to feed four times as many people (of course, much of what the US produces goes to exports or ethanol). In short, not only would GMOs feed the 1.4 billion, they would clean up China's horribly polluted waterways and save the environment (except for that damned air).

And so it is that when Jonathon Watts, in his When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China will save mankind --or destroy it (2010) puts the focus on agriculture, we encounter a Communist Party leadership smitten with the purported magical powers of genetically modified foods to answer Lester Brown's haunting question, "Who will feed China?" They would "force the spring" and double the harvest with the magic of gene guns, zapping whatever traits they desired into a plant's genome. Only genes don't work that way, and bad epistemology makes bad science, makes disastrous agriculture. Unintended consequences, the bane of technophiles everywhere, reared their ugly heads--Bt resistant pests, glyphosate resistant weeds, wild mutations that make for great science fiction but lousy food. Racing ahead of everyone else, China has shown us the GM future, and its a terrible stark place. We should be thankful for the cautionary example--if only our media would pick up the story.

Instead we race ahead as if the Chinese hadn't already demonstrated the abysmal failure of this misguided technology. [see F. William Engdahl's Seeds of Destruction (2007), Jeffrey Smith's Genetic Roulette: the documented health risks of genetically engineered food (2007), and Marie-Monique Robin's The World According to Monsanto:Pollution, Corruption and the Control of Our Food Supply (2010)] May the rapidly proliferating non-GMO groups in this country spark the emerging resistance to this disastrous threat. (visit jeffrey Smith's website for details).

Monsanto's reckless experiment with our food

2011-05-11T11:57:00.002-07:00

The people of this company are poison: like the god of death, they take away life.
                                                                --A member of the Community Media Trust in Andhra Pradesh, India
"The hope of the [biotech] industry is that over time the market is so flooded [with GMOs] there's nothing [anyone] can do about it. You just sort of surrender."
                                Don Westfall, a Washington-based consultant for biotech companies

The World According to Monsanto provides a banquet of shocking facts, leaving the reader with a full brain and a bad case of outrage. A better book than I'd expected--comprehensive, well-documented, crafted in very readable prose, it left me with a worse than anticipated sense of despair. Monsanto's rap sheet of skuldugery, prefidy, and bullying, abetted at every turn by and its agents in the US government, exceeded expectations of even a cynic like me.

The author, Marie-Monique Robin, first published the book in 2008 in her native France, where such investigations are less plagued by Monsanto's insidious political clout. The daughter of farmers, Robin grasps the enormity of Monsanto's threat to the global food supply far more clearly than most journalists.

A chance encounter with a friend--let's call him Barry--underscored just how important it is to get the word out about GMOs.

The outrage and fresh facts swirled in my head as I made my way to the gym last Wednesday, so when I bumped into Barry I asked him what he knew about genetically-engineered food. "Not much," he said, "except they may help people in Africa and Asia grow more food." (great job, Monsanto public relations pros)

Barry's no intellectual slouch. He's been a political activist of the leftist persuasion the whole 20+ years I've known him, far better informed on most issues than I am. Unfortunately, he's an accurate barometer of American sentiment on this issue. Eventhough a Google searh shows that lot of my countrymen consider Monsanto "evil," many people look at the planet's growing population and reluctantly acknowledge that "we'll need breakthrough's in biotechnology to stave off global hunger."

After all, most of us can't be experts on every issue. Finite energy and competing demands make it even harder to take an active role even in those issues we consider really important. We elect "progressive" political leaders like President Obama and most of Oregon's Congressional representatives, hoping they'll do the right thing. We donate to NGOs such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth hoping they will do the heavy lifting. And they do, especially Greenpeace.

"Oh, no," I said to Barry, "that's not Monsanto's goal, and certainly not the reality on the ground." I sketched out a few salient points then left Barry to do a bit of cardio. But I couldn't shake the fact that he'd been so swayed by Monsanto's spurious and outright deceptive propaganda campaign. Time has come to refute Monsanto's false promises and sound the alarm about the terrifying unintended consequences their GMOs have unleashed on millions of hectares across the planet.

The False Promises of Biotech.
Who better to lay out the gospel of according to Monsanto than CEO (1995-2001)
Robert Shapiro, "biotechnology's chief evangelist" during its rebranding period from the nasty chemical company responsible for PCB's and Agent Orange, to a post-industrial "life sciences" corporation that would "save the world." A good buddy of President Clinton, Shapiro served in "Slick Willie's" administration as assistant to trade representative Mickey Kantor (a future Monsanto board member) at the time he was drafting very pro-GMO guidelines for the WTO.

Here's what Shapiro promised (Robin, p188). He noted that the world's human population was predicted to double in thirty years and stated,

It's a world of mass migration and environmental degredation at an unimaginable scale...The whole system has to change. There's a huge opportunity of reinvention...At Monsanto we are trying to invent some new businesses around the concept of environmental stability...(he goes on to detail the rapid loss of top soil due to erosion, the increased salinization due to irrigation, and the unsustainablity of a petro-chemical-intensive industrial agriculture)...So in the best case, we have the same amount of land to work and twice as many people to feed...The conclusion is that new technology is the only alternative. (my emphasis, but who knows, as an evangelist he might well have shouted that last line.)

Biotechnology, he explained, was an information technology, which allowed farmers to replace non-renewable raw materials and energy with "sophisticated use of genetic information." So that if we "put the right information in the plant we use less stuff and increase productivity." Of course in Monsanto's world, that 'right information,' such as the insecticide Bt or the gene for resistance to Roundup herbicide, could be zapped into each plant's DNA--precisely and without negative side effects. And that would permit far fewer applications of expensive and ecologically disruptive chemicals--just for starters.

Wizards in the lab would soon be able to engineer plants to grow anywhere, resist any pest, express any nutient, bear more fruit, and even make pharmaceutical drugs. Monsanto, Shapiro explicitely stated, "would save the world." (pp.190-91)

And here we are in 2011, fourteen years after Shapiro's grandiose promises, and nothing but impending disaster to show for it. Roundup Ready soy blankets vast swaths of North America and much of the southern cone of South America--along with resistant weeds and dead soil, its fertility-generating microfauna killed off by Roundup's lethal effects. But so much Roundup (and supplementary) herbicide is now required to subdue increasingly-resistant weeds that some research indicates it may be affecting the plants' immune systems--the "Sudden Death Syndrome" discussed in my post of Mar. 5,-- along with the reproductive capabilities of cattle, pigs and poultry fed on GM-soy and corn as indicated by increased rates of infertility and spontaneous abortions. (Dr. Don Huber, Purdue University professor).

Meanwhile, like my friend Barry, the world awaits the miracles of more productive and resilient crops, and grows more skeptical by the day. It has become crystal clear to anyone paying attention, that Monsanto is in the business of GMOs just so they can patent the seeds and force farmers into paying more for them--every year. Since the early 90s, they've sought to monopolize the seed business by buying out hundreds of smaller competitors. And they've sold lots more Roundup, the principal source of their profits.

So as the effectiveness of these puny and over-promised Bt and Roundup resistant technologies wane, and their impact on the health of critters who consume them grows more menacing, we're left to ponder the immensity of this experiment gone terribly wrong. As GMO expert and author, Jeffrey Smith, observed, "the country has been turned into a huge laboratory where potentially dangerous products have been set loose for the last ten years without the consumer being able to choose" (because Monsanto has mustered its political clout to defeat all efforts at labeling). The experiment limps along zombie like, kept upright by massive spraying of the very herbicides and pesticides which the technologies were to have rendered superfluous--inciting increasing numbers of farmers to ask "what hath Monsanto wrought?" May they soon join the organic and non-GMO farmers and lead a mass movement against this disastrous technology--while we still have a viable amount of land to chart a healthier course.

Who will feed the 10.1 billion?

2011-05-04T17:42:00.000-07:00

10.1 Billion Humans (by 2100). Three riveting NYT stories got lost amongst the national euphoria of Osama bin Laden's execution and that dead man photo controversy. The first on May 3, "U.N. Forecast 10.1 Billion People by Century's End," took my breath away, eventhough my personal exit strategy says my molecular hologram will have well dispersed by then.

A Perfect Fish? The second story appeared May 2, "Another Side of Talapia, the Perfect Factory Fish," almost as a prequel to the 10.1 billion story. It starts out as if anticipating the great food shortages in store for us humans, laying out a litany of astonishing facts about that little African native lake fish--now available in the seafood section of everyone's local market. But then the tone turns dark, and the author overwhelmed me with crushing details of talapia's not-so-eco-friendly side, and the gruesome fact that most of the candidates for this low-cal (and very low Omega 3) fish dinner are raised in over-crowded, polluted, and completely unregulated ponds and lakes of China. Add to that pernicious mix the fact that they're being fed a diet of gm-soy and gm-corn--just like caged chickens, only laced with testosterone to accelerate growth, and a sprinkling of fish meal to boost those low omega 3 levels. And finally, they're killed, frozen, and packed in carbon monoxide to preserve color before being "refreshed" in your fish monger's back room and laid in a bed of ice with tiny slices of lemon and a few parsley sprigs. No surprise then that Seafood Watch, which helps us consumers eat fish in an environmentally responsible way, says "Eschew talapia!!"

Talapia, then may be a perfect "factory fish" because it thrives in crowded pens, but looks like it will only feed the 10 billion if consumers stay ignorant of its downside or things get so bad we humans will eat anything at any environmental cost. For now, however, a marketing buzz seeks to convince consumers that those "naturally" and sustainably-raised little swimmers will fight off heart disease (which they won't) and let the planet's woefully-depleted ocean fisheries get a little respite from the mega-trawlers (which they won't). Just look at our consumption habits.

In 2010 the US imported 52 million pounds of fresh talapia, mostly from fish farms in Honduras and Nicaragua. But, as with so many other economic niches, the Chinese juggernaut seized the fish by the fins and now is driving our Central American entrepreneurs out of business with an impossibly low "China price" (sometimes called the "Wal-mart price"). Thus last year the Middle Kingdom shipped 422 million pounds of "refreshed" (i.e. frozen) talapia to the US.--8 times the fresh lot, thereby returning a sizable quantity of our gm-soy exports (mixed of course with those of Argentina and Brazil and a goodly smattering of locally grown product.

The Third story (an original eco-accountant fabrication). "Monsanto boasts it--and only it--can feed the 10 billion." (my money says the agribiz/biotech sharks will seize the 10 billion population figure and make it the cornerstone of a new advertising blitz). I imagine something like this:

Overpopulation? (they will ask rhetorically) That's a term we no longer need to use, thank to the miracles of modern biotechnology. We at Monsanto, and our many friends who have likewise invested billions to feed the billions, have repealed the dark tomes of Malthus. With the wonders of genetic modification there is no reason anyone should go hungry in this century or the unforeseeable future. We've improved the world's basic crops: corn, rice and soy, and are on the verge of breakthroughs in redesigning pigs, talapia and salmon, with other plants and animals not far behind. Everything will grow faster. Food will be safer and more nutritious. We're developing traits that allow tomatoes and oranges to thrive in the vast unused land of Antarctica or in the desert wastelands of North Africa and Mongolia. We've conquered nature and made life better. Trust us (but don't regulate or monitor us--of course, our army of lawyers and lobbyists and our shills in Congress and the executive branch will make sure that doesn't happen).

Next week I'll challenge my own fabrication with highlights from The Seeds of Deception; the hidden agenda of genetic manipulation, 2007, F. William Engdahl's alarming expose of US Agribiz and its master plan to dominate the world's food supply. His favorite, oft repeated quote hints at the book's carefully researched theme. "Control oil and you control the nations; control food and you control the people"...Henry Kissinger

A China Green 5 year plan, III. Save your children

2011-04-26T17:39:00.000-07:00

Less than four years ago two of my own granddaughters still lived in Lanzhou, China, one of the six most polluted cities on earth. The younger, Anna Rain, had gestated there in my daughter's belly until a month before her delivery on January 15th, 2007. Four weeks later she and her family returned to Lanzhou for the last month and a half of coal-burning season, and the final five months of her mom and dad's stint as missionaries there. Anna's older sister, Olivia, had just shaken off a nasty case of bronchitis--a deep, hacking cough that had us all worried-- before the family's return to that hideously polluted air shed.

Lanzhou, a city of 3.5 million in northwestern Gansu Province, is not a fit place for human habitation with its toxic air and undrinkable water. Much worse, however, is the plight of Lanzhou's children--born and unborn, as the air is rife with the most lethal of heavy metal particulate--arsenic, mercury, lead and cadmium--all spewed into the air from scrubber-less smoke stacks in noxious clouds of sulfur dioxide. The problem grows exponentially worse during the colder months, that is, from November 1st until about the end of March, when 600 primitive coal sheds fire up to steam heat the city. Air pollution affects most Chinese cities, and is worse during winter months in all the cities across northern China.

Someday, Lanzhou's local officials promise, they'll close these spewers of unscrubbed coal smoke, replacing them with cleaner burning natural gas--and power from the new wind farm on the city's outskirts will do some of the work. But for now Lanzhou is poor, and the local high-sulfur, particulate-laden coal is the cheapest energy source at hand. And so the children and pregnant mothers will be left to ingest still more arsenic, more mercury, more lead and cadmium, creating still more birth defects and mental retardation, as well as more lung cancer and chronic lung disease.

My daughter had the freedom and money to move Anna and Olivia out of Lanzhou and back to the US. Of course, very few if any Chinese families in these highly-polluted cities have that option. And the children and, thus the nation, suffer because of it. Children, we all know, aren't like us adults when it comes to the effects of toxic air and carcinogenic water. They're little, so "pound for pound of body weight, [they] drink more water, eat more food, and breathe more air than adults," as writer and mother of two, Sandra Steingraber points out in her important book, Raising Elijah. That children are obviously far more vulnerable to environmental toxins than are we adults is no less obvious just because Chinese officials, like our own, completely ignore the profound implications of their failure to treat that fact as true.

In spite of the Chinese government's zeal in hiding health statistics, we know China leads the world in per capita birth defects--in a nation with one-fifth of the world's population and the greatest accumulation of foreign currency ever in history. Because we know the Chinese dote on their precious only children, one would expect such startling statistics to prompt quick and forceful action, putting a healthy chunk of that 3 Trillion dollar stash of foreign currency to its highest and best use, as proposed in earlier installments of my Green Five Year Plans (see March archive). Previously I suggested a few ways to clean up the water and begin re-foresting the millions of acres denuded during the Great Leap Forward and the more recent thirty-year period of rapid GDP growth.

But cleaning up the air must warrant equal priority if Lanzhou's children, and those of China's other highly-polluted cities and smelter towns, are to enjoy the fruits of the modern prosperity their parents have worked so hard to attain.

Their children's health is certainly more important than building additional miles of high-speed rail and the glitzy train stations and new airports under construction across China's vast expanses. To its credit, China already leads the world in implementing solar and wind technology, as well as in research in developing the highly problematic "clean coal" technology. The real pay-off will come with energy conservation--making buildings more efficient with the "green cities" concept-- along with replacing coal plants with clean, renewable energy. Meanwhile, install those smokestack scrubbers!

May Olivia and Anna's generation of Chinese brothers and sisters, and all who come after them, be free to grow healthy bodies and live happy lives under blue sky days and night skies filled with stars, breathing clean air and drinking clear blue water. May their rivers again be filled with fish, and their mountains cloaked with verdant forests. May we all live in peace.

Belly bulgers and budget busters; neither we nor China can afford the "Western" diet

2011-04-19T16:57:00.000-07:00

NY Times food reporter Mark Bittman posted a column April 12, 2011 with the evocative title, "How to Save a Trillion Dollars"--wholesome food for thought, as they say. And a timely point, given the partisan bickering and ominous portent surrounding the burgeoning US fiscal deficit. Tell us, Mark, how can we save a TRILLION dollars?

Bittman's point: too many Americans are eating themselves into morbidity, to the point that we'll never keep spiking health care costs in check. And, without containing medical expenses, we're doomed to either accelerate our nation's already rapid slide into debt oblivion or leave tens of millions more Americans without health care--two rotten options. Bittman offers a third, one which sets in motion a host of salutary ramifications such as promoting ecological health along with that of humans and our economy--slicing that Trillion dollars off the budget deficit by changing the way we eat, the way we exercise, and the way we grow food.

The politburo in Beijing should take note. As I've written here before, China's embarked on a road to ruin, racing ahead to modern (sometimes they say "modest") prosperity at the cost of crashing the environment and unleashing a public health epidemic of historic proportions. The largest and most rapid rural to urban migration in human history--by far--has created new lifestyles for hundreds of millions of Chinese: more sedentary, more polluted, more stressful, more divorced from nature, and with new and different food choices more like those in the USA--only with "Chinese characteristics." They eat lots more meat now, but more and more the beef and poultry are "factory farmed," fed a diet of GM-corn and soy, shot up with antibiotics and growth hormones, like we do in the hideous feedlots and chicken warehouses shown in the film Food, Inc. Now, as the politburo comtemplates providing health care for all (partially to reduce the household savings rate and free up more money for the vaunted move to a "consumer society"), they are certain to encounter a dilemma similar to our own; namely, they'll go broke trying to provide decent health care to a nation of 1.4 billion very unhealthy people.

Bittman offers a few compelling statistics to make his case for us Americans. By 2020 type 2 diabetes is projected to cost us $500 billion a year--that's half the trillion we need to save. Add to that the savings we could garner from preventing our number one killer, cadiovascular disease, projected to take $800 billion a year of our money by 2030 if we don't radically change our lifestyle--and we're getting to some real big numbers here. Big, hideous numbers that we need to stare at until they sink in. Do we really want our children and grandchildren to squander trillions of their dollars to treat preventable diseases? No more than we want them to have lives plagued by sickness and the ennui of chronic disease.

Much better Bittman argues to "create an environment in which an apple is a better and more accessible choice than a Pop-Tart...and build a food distribution system that favors real food, and market that." While we're at it let's create incentives for agriculture to move away from its current agribiz bias and begin favoring organic, smaller scale, non-GMO farms--to preserve the soil, the diversity in seed stocks, and the land wisdom and lifestyle of the small farm. The so-called efficiencies of giant monocropped farms and gargantuan, cruel and unhealthy livestock factories will be short-lived. And their demise will be rapid, with profound ramifications. Best to make the transition now--for Obama and his Dept. of Ag. to move away from its cozy relationship with Monsant0, Carghill and Archer-Daniels Midland and begin embracing healthy, sustainable agriculture. You don't have to look that far down the road here in America--and even less far in China--to see that unsustainable means just that--unsustainable water consumption, soil depletion, the losing "chemical/GMO-treadmill" race with weeds and insects--it can't go on much longer. May we find the courage to change.

The timely death of "green" nukes?

2011-04-12T16:18:00.000-07:00

"Folks," the captains of industry ask, "what are we going to do about energy?" It's not a serious question, but a rhetorical scare tactic. As in Monday's (4/11/11) Wall St. Journal, "The future of nuclear power is in doubt, but how else will the world keep the lights on and reduce carbon emissions at the same time?" (http://online.wsj.com/article..., "The Burning Issue")

How else, indeed? These fellas, of course, think conservation a filthy word, never to be uttered in the company of rich and powerful men--unless, God help us, there are mega-bucks to be made. Better still if there's at least the prospect of JOBS into the bargain, making the plan an easier sell to the public.

In timely fashion, Japan declared its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant's recent catastrophe a near-perfect "7," up from a "5." And not because of new developments, but rather of a "reassessment" of radiation releases during those early days of hydrogen explosions and helicopter water drops. Seems that when the top story exploded off two (or three?) reactor buildings, the storage ponds for used fuel rods lost most of their cooling water as well as their structural containment. The super hot, radioactive rods sat there naked, beaming great currents of toxic atoms into the common airshed. And, the explosion also hurled many radioactive bits quite a distance from the site. Finally (?) all those millions of gallons of sea water dropped and hosed onto the fiery reactor core and super-heated "cooling" ponds had to go somewhere--and they did: either into the air shed as steam--and then into lungs of humans and dairy cows or onto grass and rice they consume, or pooling onto the surfaces at the ramshakle site, where they eventually flowed back into the sea. A hot, hot zone, indeed.

The Japanese government lost another layer or two of credibility with these tardy exposures. They didn't say "Sorry. Shoulda toldya sooner...but, you know, we've been busy." Instead they softened the blow. "Sure, it's a '7' now, but nothing like Chernobyl--still just one-tenth the radiation released there." Great news! "And by the way," they added, "we'll be relocating citizens from a slighter larger area--just to be really safe." With their credibility as shattered as reactor 3, the Japanese government might as well have borrowed a line from Fox New's shameless demagogue, Bill O'Reilly--"We're lookin' out for you!" (the "you" being the rich and powerful, he implies with an Irish wink, but the dumb heads who watch his show are supposed to think he's their guy). Aren't the Japanese smarter than Fox watchers?

So, what to do? The newly infamous Koch Brothers, along with other barons of coal, oil and natural gas, who never intended to slaken their rush to dirty profits just because of a little climate change, can now salve our fears of dark, chilly nights in front of a blank TV screen. "Don't worry. We'll never run out of coal." Nor Natural gas. "It's clean! Domestic supplies are abundant and growing--thanks to hydraulic fracking (don't worry about those tree huggers screaming about tainted water and mini-earth quakes--they're just alarmists). Domestic, let us remind you, means decreasing our dependence on foreign oil, which will be increasingly significant as we move to electric and hybrid green cars."

And "nearly domestic" pertains also to our good buddies to the north who pledge to ship us all the oil we can use from the technological wonderland of Alberta's tar sands. No worry that they're in cahoots with US oilmen to build a huge pipeline (TransCanada's Keystone XL) across the American heartland--and atop the Ogallala Aquifer, which unsustainably irrigates much of our agricultural bounty--to refineries in Texas. They never say, "Oil or water?" But instead promise both if we acquiese to the pipeline--then threaten that the crude would likely be shipped to China and Japan if we don't give in. Tough choice: cheap gas from a friendly neighbor with a "tiny" threat to the environment, or increasing energy independence on Arab nations which mean us harm? Again, the ecological disaster in Alberta is completely framed out of the discussion, and the threat from the pipeline is minimized.

Once again the master strategy is revealed--at home and in Japan. Mollify the public conscience about the global warming and other ecological costs of their profligate energy consumption (far less profligate in Japan than here). And keep making money hand over fist from a public which seems to lack the imagination that things could be different--and still be just fine. So wake up Canada! And pay attention America. Do the ecological accounting. Our children and grandchildren deserve a planet that hasn't been ravaged, over-heated and used up by this generation. May we find the courage and wisdom to change our thinking--and our acts.

The Dark Side of Diversity

2011-04-04T18:35:00.000-07:00

The April 3rd NYT carried an op-ed piece that pissed me off--and complicated my thinking. The theme that all diversity is a good thing keeps circulating into my in-box in new guises. The essay "Mother Nature's Melting Pot," (http://nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03Raffles) is the latest of three jolts to my sensiblity around the issue of introduced and alien spieces in just the last three weeks. In his opinion piece, Hugh Raffles takes on environmentalists (like me) who think invasive species have wreaked far more havoc than they've added to the "beauty, integrity and stability" of the biotic community (the criterion for judging an act right or wrong according to Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic," of which I am an avid proponent). Like our human immigrants, he says, introduced plants and animals have added a valuable infusion of biological diversity to the American landscape.

To those in what he labels the "native species movement," Raffles screams, "You're wrong!", equating anyone who opposes the introduction of (say) brown tree snakes into Hawaii's biotic community with those who tote automatic rifles and prowl the Arizona/Mexico border in search of alien humans. After all, his logic argues, brown tree snakes have punched their evolutionary ticket in Guam, proliferating across the island with astonishing vigor. They've dominated the natural selection cage fight, demonstrating that all those bird species they've driven extinct didn't have the right stuff to go to the next round of the evolutionary contest. "Sorry birds, you've been voted off the island." But unlike Survivor's non-survivors, they don't get to hear Jeff Probst say, "pack your stuff--you're headed home." Extinction is forever.

Raffles would have us environmentalists take a seat and be mere spectators in evolution's great game. "We shouldn't play God," I can hear him say, as he actually says, "Designating some [species] as native and others as alien denies this [virtuous?] ecological and genetic dynamism." So he speaks for the mute and much maligned invasives--zebra mussels, nutria and kudzu--contending that they all perform valuable eco-system services in their adopted homeland. Really, Hugh? So why not add Guam's tree snakes to his list? He can charter a jet liner, pack a dozen or so browns in first class and ferry them to Oahu and Hilo where they will add much needed diversity to a land bereft of snakes. Or, easier still, just order Hawaii's speciest inspectors to relax the hateful bias against this remarkable specie and quit yanking them out of the wheel wells of Hawaii-bound aircraft. The snake's wily nature will do the rest. In a decade or so the verdict will be in as to which of the islands' native birds have earned the right to stay in the game. Now there's "ecological and genetic dynamism" in action.

As Raffles exclaims, "non-native plants and animals have transformed the American landscape in unmistakably positive ways." Just like the millions of human immigrants who've spiced up the old melting pot, or if you prefer, added zest to the salad bowl.

So, what to make of globalization's added spike to an already wantonly promiscuous inter-mixing of peoples, cultures, plants, animals and microbes? Is this one of those "if it doesn't kill you, it will make you stronger" moments? I do have an opinion.

Let me repeat one of my favorite Aldo Leopold pronouncements. Observing the stunning feats of technological innovation of his day--the airplane, the telephone, television, the internal combustion engine-- (which I update to include smart phones, space travel, the internet, 3-D, GPS, nuclear power, lasers, etc., etc.), Leopold said, "are they not in one sense mere parlor tricks compared with our utter ineptitude in keeping land fit to live upon?"

Yes, Aldo, you got that right. We modern humans live as though the health of the land doesn't matter. And so we not only neglect land health, we neglect even thinking about what that means--just as we neglect to educate our children as to why and how the health of the biotic community really matters. And, with your "Land Ethic," Aldo, you also gave us criteria for judging our behaviors: "right" if it respects and promotes the "beauty, stability, and integrity of the biotic community; 'wrong' if it does otherwise."

Thank you for that, Aldo. Now may we find the courage to put your wisdom into practice. To call out the dangerous folly of those who simplisticly argue, as even my eco-hero Vadana Shiva does, that "diversity in nature and culture must be defended,"-- regardless of the context.

Some cultures, after all, destroy the earth, exploit, oppress and murder other people, drive myriad other species to extinction, enslave "livestock" in factory farms, give privileged status to soulless corporations, patent and poison our food supply and make the multitudes fat and unhealthy, and attempt to "enclose" the social and ecological commons in every way imaginable. The purveyors of that culture defend it with their billions, but Shiva, far more than I, attacks it relentlessly. So amend your edict, Vandana.

Likewise many species that are just fine in their (balanced) natural ecological niche, rupture the integrity and stability of foreign ecosystems when they hitch a ride on a freighter, an airplane or unsuspecting tourist, or are intentionally transplanted to an exotic locale. Then their "intrinsic worth" conflicts with the health of that invaded ecosystem, and a good environmentalist would squash them. May Gaia grant us the wisdom to know the difference.

**for a fun and thought-provoking forray into this issue, read T.C. Boyle's latest novel, When the Killing is Done. In it he pits do-gooder environmentalists intent on eradicating invasive species against the "love every creature" animal rights radicals in a real life drama that played out in California's Channel Islands (a chain which extends from San Diego to north of Santa Barbara, and has been plagued with numerous invaders from black rats to feral pigs, rabbits, golden eagles and many others, each noble in its native, balanced context, and each wildly destructive in its transplanted unbalanced setting. Its that "stability/integrity" variable that's the difference that makes a difference.)

Disaster Greedism--Japan's tragedy as economic opportunity

2011-03-25T16:43:00.000-07:00

CNBC's abrasive economic pundit Larry Kudlow grates on me in the best of times. He's one of those "no nonsense" radicals who calls himself a conservative. A man who wields patriotism like a cudgel, always sports an American flag lapel pin, ceaselessly boasts of America's greatness, and does everything in his power to ensure his America will be congenial to the rich and super rich--and to hell with everyone else! The economy, after all, exists to make the enterprising ever richer. Only then (maybe) can some crumbs trickle down to the less-able.

Kudlow's great zeal for making a buck burst from his lips in the immediate aftermath of Japan's tragic quake, tsunami, and nuclear catastrophe. "The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll," he told his viewers, "and we can be grateful for that." (my emphasis) Profits over people?! "Hell yes!" says Larry. "Could it be any other way?" Only if you think Joe Stalin made the USSR a nice place to live, he'd answer.

Word has it cold-hearted Kudlow apologized for his candor, but we who know the man, know his original blurt reflected his true thoughts. After all, when disaster strikes, it's time to roll out the charts and put your broker on speed dial. There's big money to be made for those not mired in compassion and sentimentality. And so it goes.

Even before the waters receded and the reactors over-heated, the biz channels buzzed. "Japan should see a brief decline in GDP--then a steep spike as hundreds of billions flow into the coffers of construction firms and the myriad suppliers of cement, steel, lumber, asphalt, and coal. Whole towns, villages and cities must be rebuilt--along with roads, bridges, and cell phone towers. A bonanza for Canadian and Alaskan timber barons, who can fire up the chain saws and lay waste vast swaths of pristine old growth--because Japan always demands the best wood, and there ain't a whole lot left outside the temperate rainforests of North America's northern Pacific coast. Smart money seeks out those stocks and goes very long.

And a bonanza for Australia. All those thousands of belly-up mini-vans we saw bobbing and tumbling in the swift current must be made again. That means millions of tons of iron ore, millions of tons of coking coal to cook the ore into steel.

And Japan will import tons more thermal coal to fire up power plants needed to replace electricity lost to nuclear catastrophe. Colombia, Indonesia, and even the US will see coal exports spike.

And there's agriculture! Tens of thousands of hectares soaked in salt water, rendered unproductive for years to come. Thousands more (we can't know yet how many) poisoned by radioactivity. Poisoned soil, tainted crops, "hot" water, worthless dairy cows. (opportunities here for the yakuza to buy cheap, re-label, fake the provenance, and make a killing. There must be special, restricted-access web sites where a true economic warrior can invest in the shadow economy). Meanwhile American agribiz and global markets can redirect food supplies to the highest bidder and reap super profits. Cargill, Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), Monsanto.

Disasters are profitable even in poor nations like Haiti, but they are surely best when they occur in affluent nations where charitable NGOs don't get in the way of profit and desperate victims can afford to pay top dollar.

So switch off CNN and click over to Blumberg News and CNBC. Spot the winners, liquidate the bonds and IRA's, and leverage the old portfolio to the hilt--this gold rush won't last long.

Accounting for Catastrophe--Japan's tragedy

2011-03-16T17:53:00.000-07:00

It's impossible to imagine the pain being inflicted upon millions of Japanese citizens who've watched family members, friends and neighbors swept away and crushed by an earthquake and tsunami far stronger than any on record for that area. The pain of human loss is, of course, the most intense we suffer, but the destruction of homes, neighborhoods, communities, farms, workplaces, shops and entire cities, and the loss of all earthly possessions also evokes profound grief. Deeply sad and disoriented, the Japanese now confront the terrors of radiation.

Will the nuclear catastrophe ultimately be "merely" several times worse than Three Mile Island? Or, more likely now, will it match or even exceed the disaster of Chernobyl? We watch on cushions bristling with metaphorical pins. Are the nuclear workers the new kamikazees, willingly sacrificing their lives, this time for the welfare of their fellow citizens rather than the honor of their Emperor? Will their heroism and sacrifice make any difference? How many citizens will suffer radiation sickness and cancer? How many unborn children will suffer birth defects? All for an economic and political alternative to imported oil in a nation poor in fossil fuels, but rich in its demand for energy.

Yesterday (Tues, 3/15) NPR carried a story from Chernobyl as we approach the 25th anniversary of what has been the benchmark for nuclear catastrophe--the "7" on a scale of 1-7. Three Mile Island, on that scale, anchors the "5" spot. A reporter had taken the tour of the "dead zone" surrounding the exploded reactor, only to find it a "nuclear Eden," rich in biodiversity, with birch trees, vines and shrubs over-growing the last vestiges of human habitation and animal life frolicking in grand profusion. Sort of like the book/film The World Without Us. But, he reported, "there's something eerie about it." A reminder that biodiversity is not of itself a virtue, especially when it threatens the stability, beauty and integrity of an ecosystem--Aldo Leopold's criteria for Land health. Think introduced species. Think mutants. Chernobyl now has both. It's a terrible toxic fecudity, biologically intriguing, and ecologically alarming.

In the poisoned land that will be toxic for millenia to come--that is, not fit to live upon--many birds have brains only a fraction the size of the healthy members of their species. Albinism, rare in nature, is epidemic in this tainted garden. The web of life here is rent with missing species, distorted with grotesque mutants. When the nuclear genie escapes the bottle, there is hell to pay. Now the Faustian bargain has come due. Or, in economic terms, the "externalized costs" of nuclear power have hit Japan with a force equal that of the great tsunami. The "friendly atom" has gone savage, reminding us, yet again, that all so-called externalities--that is, costs foisted off to the environment, human health, or future generations in the service of short-term profits and material affluence--eventually come back to bite us hard on the butt.

Yet, mainstream economic accounting, as Lester Brown points out in World on the Edge, makes a virtue of externalizing costs. Those folk call it comparative advantage in their realm of abtractions. But in the physical world externalizing means off-loading the costs of production onto the environment and human health--as I've written here so many times in relation to China.

As Brown persuasively argues, we need a revolution in economic thinking comparable to the revolution in astronomy launched by Copernicus. "No," we must say to the Philistines on Wall St. and Capitol Hill and all the disciples of neoliberalism, "the earth does not revolve around the economy-- the economy revolves around the earth!" And not even like a gigantic planet such as Jupiter or Neptune, but as a puny moon. Ignore that law and you invite catastrophe.

There must be humility in the economic department where hubris has dwelt far too long. Meanwhile may the people of Japan find comfort from their great suffering. And may we all be a bit wiser by the horrible lessons Nature and human folly have inflicted upon them.

Monsanto's GMO smoking gun/an interlude from China's Green 10-year plan

2011-03-05T18:16:00.000-08:00

Second only to China's ecological crisis, I've devoted many keystrokes to the threat genetically-modified plants pose to the global food supply--because that threat is dire! And it's getting worse--which is to say the dire creeps ever closer to the present, lurking out there in my grandkids' teen years-- unless the good guys step up and win a few rounds, putting this hideous genie back inside a hermetically-sealed beaker.

On these very pages I've unleashed a flurry of reasons I think GM crops are a ticking bomb. But now we have something more ominous--if anything can be more ominous than putting all your corn, soy and rice DNA in one monolithic gene basket, thereby halting evolution in its tracks--for our major food crops--but not for the insects and plant pathogens that just keep right on mutating. Since bio-diversity is the foundation upon which sustainability rests, reducing that diversity down one patented, monopolized gene set represents the height of folly--but also a winning strategy for maximizing short-term profits. Which is, of course, the problem.

In the long-term we the living are surely all dead, including all the men and women in lab coats and their bosses in suits over there at Monsanto. But if they, like I, have kids and grandkids, then we really need to think a few more generations into the future--seven generations would be nice, like the Native American who left this continent in far better shape for our European ancestors than we're leaving it for our children. So, we must ask, is it in the best interests of the next seven generations to unleash genetically-modified alfalfa onto millions of acres of US farmland? Eco-accountant says, "hell no! Are you crazy?!!"

And he has backing for his claim--from a real scientist, even though such sources are way out of favor with Senators hailing from my late mammie's home state of Oklahoma, lately a hot bed of climate-warming denial, GMO boosterism, and over-all radical deregulation. Those "mavricky" senators are well-paid for their roles as corporate shills, whether the issue is freeing natural gas from shale layers with hydraulic fracking--even if that means poisoning ground water and causing a few thousand little earthquakes, or freeing up our coal barons to mine without bothering over the safety of miners or those unfortunate enough to live close to "mountain-top" removal disasters. And now, as chair of the House Committee, Oklahoma's very own Frank D. Lucas has earned his contributions from Monsanto by greasing the skids for gm-alfalfa--against the scientific evidence which claims all that genetic tinkering might have a few rather serious unintended consequences.

Turns out there's a plant pathologist named Dr. Don Huber, now retired from Purdue University, but still very active in the American Phytopathological Society, who's seen some scary stuff out there in the pastures and feedlots of America. Namely, he spotted some very sick livestock--cows, chickens and pigs--and traced their illness to a new pathogen--but only among those animals subsisting on a diet of gm-soy and gm-corn--which, unfortunately comprises most of America's supply of eatable flesh and dairy products. He informed our Sec. of Agriculture, but his warnings went unheeded. Too much pressure from too many well-funded lobbyists and their shills in Congress. Not to mention Monsanto's own secret agents taking time out from their bio-tech careers to "serve" in the Ag. Dept. and help draft policies they can live with once back in the corporate fold.

The pathogen responsible for the serious plague of maladies threatening our burgers and nuggets "is prevalent in soy crops suffering from a disease called SUDDEN DEATH SYNDROME (my screaming) and corn crops suffering from Goss' wilt disease" (which must have a less aggressive PR firm). Turns out the cattle and chickens who eat the gm-stuff increasingly suffer from infertility and spontaneous abortions--at rates in cattle as high as 45%!!!

Those of us in the anti-GMO corral have warned for years now that you can't just jigger one little spot on the DNA sequence with a gene gun and expect only one neat and predictable outcome from your tampering. Genes work in clusters to express the various traits of their host. So it makes sense to me, if not to Representative Lucas, that stripping a plant's vulnerability to an herbicide (i.e., "plant killer") such as Round-up entails scrambling the clusters of genes which express other traits or control other functions of the plant's life cycle. Making it entirely likely that new pathogens can sneek in the back door blasted open by Monsanto's gene guns. Which is exactly what is happening.

Worse yet, corn pollen is blowing all over creation, contaminating non-gmo and organic corn with its cargo of polluted genes. Our nation's non-gmo corn and soy crops--already less than 20% of the total--live on tiny islands of virtue surrounded by armies of aggressive bullies. They're screaming for help, but our regulators can only hear the ka-ching of gold pieces being dumped into their bank accounts by Monsanto's legions of lobbyists. Not a good thing for this nation's--or the world's food supply.

So why such a dumb policy? Read two great block-busters for the answers: Seeds of Destruction: the hidden agenda of genetic manipulation by F. William Engdall (2007), and Marie-Monique Robin's excellent The World According to Monsanto: pollution, corruption, and the control of our food supply (2010)--also a movie. In short the revolving door between Monsanto and the US government swings both ways, and our food supply is the worse for it. By making bio-tech a cornerstone of the US economy and our agricultural exports the pivot point of our trade policy, we've invited agribiz execs to write our trade rules and dominate our environmental and agricultural policies. We've allowed the foxes to set up shop in the national hen house, and they're about to kill off all the chickens--and the cows too. Meanwhile spreading their toxic soy and corn meal (or syrup) into everyone's fries, corn chips and soft drinks (high-fructose corn syrup) and the myriad supermarket items laced with corn and or soy. We're a chubby and not very healthy population doomed to get worse--unless...

Past time to stop the villians. Monsanto is truly evil and its reach spans the world. Support your local organic farmers and work like hell to defeat Monsanto's lethal agenda.

Green Five Year Plan (x2), pt. 2: forests, watersheds&clean water

2011-02-25T17:21:00.000-08:00

Only when the barren hills are covered [again] by lush forests will we see the yellow River turn clear--from a petition drawn up by 163 prominent scinetists in 1998 (quoted in China's Water Crisis, Ma Jun. 2004)

The first hair-raising shock of my China visit came during the sixty kilometer bus ride from the Lanzhou Airport into the city. The mountains were naked! Stripped of all vegetation, save for row upon row of freshly-planted saplings, already withering in the arid climate. And the nakedness continued for the entire forty mile trip into town.

As an avid lover of Oregon's wild rivers and temperate forests, the sight of mountain landscapes denuded of all vegetation pained my psyche--no forests, no shrubs, no grasses, and, of course, no wildlife. And when, for the full hour long drive, the scenery on either side of the highway never varied--except for dozens of caves, two tiny villages, and an orchard--the desolation overwhelmed me. How could my daughter live in this place? Where would she take little Olivia, my first grandchild, for nature walks? How could the Chinese tolerate such ugliness?

The barren slopes stretched up a thousand or so feet to their respective summits, neatly terraced every thirty vertical feet and punctuated with the pathetic 18inch saplings spaced ten feet apart the forty mile length of each terrace. I couldn't imagine the labor hours, particularly once we'd spotted a tree planting brigade high up on the west slope. No nifty little machines poking holes and thrusting seedlings into them. Just a small army of humans, former farmers and herdsmen recruited by the local government to lay down a "Green Belt" against the agressively encroaching Gobi Desert, now less than 100 miles north of Lanzhou.

Our airport shuttle, as sleek and modern as any in the US, cruised down the modern expressway with no tour guide to tell us what had happened to the forests that once cloaked these mountains. So I asked my son-in-law Chris who'd met me and my wife BJ at the airport. He didn't have a clue. And given what little I had read about China's environmental history, I knew it could be awkward to have Chris try out his halting Mandarin and ask a local. So I leaned close to his ear and spewed out my surmise.

"Chairman Mao did it," I said. I had read in China's Water Crisis that the landscapes of this province, Gansu, had once been forty percent forested. And I had also read that during Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward (1959-61), the people felled one-third of China's forest cover for firewood. So I devised a plausible scenario to explain the startling facts on the ground.

"You see, Chris, after he'd waged a costly and very bloody battle against US and UN troops during the Korean War, Mao determined to catch up to the West militarily. He devised a bold, if impulsive, plan to close the 'tank and airplane gap' in just one Five Year Plan."

My son-in-law showed a spark of interest, so I inflicted the rest of my musings on him, somewhere between miles twenty and thirty five (just guessing). "Why so much firewood?" I asked rhetorically. Well, it takes steel to manufature the tools of war. And it takes iron ore and coking coal--the kind that burns extra hot that China now imports my the millions of tons from Australia (see earlier post, "Eating Australia")--blazing away in blast furnaces to transform ore into strong, maleable steel.

But Mao spotted a short-cut. He'd substitute revolutionary zeal and firewood for coking coal. Millions of China's peasants could neglect their fields for a bit and melt their household pots and iron farm implements into steel--in backyard furnaces fueled by China's forests. The Great Helmsman would close the military gap with the imperialists by turning plowshares into spears (so to speak).

Instead the frenzied antics of the Great Leap transformed precious forests, cook pots and plows into worthless smoke and "pig turds" (the derogatory slang for the friable metal clumps spit out by the not-nearly-hot-enough wood furnaces)--and one of the greatest famines in China's history.

Historians estimate 30 million Chinese starved as a direct result of diverting farm labor into logging and furnace tending to the neglect of growing wheat and rice.

And of course losing that much forest cover has taken much longer to replace than the lost 30 million humans. In fact China only recently started trying, prodded by the "Yellow Dragon" sandstorms that pummel all of northern China from March until June. My daughter said Lanzhou averaged seven big blows each Spring they lived there. And the gritty residue piles up in the streets of Beijing (300,000 tons in the April, 2006 storm), where it does real economic damage.

Thus the Green Belt project--which has suffered rather serious setbacks and delays from the original goal of completion in time for the 2008 Olympics. But back to the role of watersheds in a greener China.

"Green Ten Year Plan," pt. 2. Ma Jun convinced me China's most critical environmental (and social) problem is its lack of safe drinking water. So last post I offered strategies to snag the low-hanging fruit of water clean up--namely, site source treatment of industrial effluent and human sewage. China has less water per capita than most countries, but they squander so much of what they have by allowing factory owners and municipalities to dump untreated waste in the "water commons." They waste lots more with profligate irrigation practices. And there's also corruption--officials taking money for water treatment devices, but never connecting them (cf. Minxin Pei's China's Trapped Transition).

But while that fruit is being picked, China should also use money now slated to build more airports and high speed trains to finance the green aspects of the next two Five Year Plans which target watershed restoration. And do it right. That is, by studying the soil composition and micro-climate before deciding what to plant, rather than just hiring a million farmers to poke saplings into eroding hillsides as I saw them doing all around Lanzhou (not just between the airport and the city).

Restoring forests all across China is an urgent task--for several reasons. It would be what Wendell Berry refers to as "solving for pattern"--that is, setting in motion one solution that, in turn, sets in motion a ramifying cascade of other solutions. To wit: forests will purify the water, and they will also provide habitat and migration corridors for wildlife (if done very wisely), restoring badly needed biodiversity. They will help clear the air of its heavy load of CO2 and stabilize the eroding hillsides which give the Yellow River one of the world's heaviest silt loads--which dirties its water and cloggs up its beds, causing needless floods. Forests will return beauty, stability and integrity to China's ravaged ecosystems. They are far more cost-effective than any infrastructure projects on the drawing board.

May the people of China embrace their need for forests and make their restoration a much higher priority than producing more cheap widgets--and flat screen TVs for an over-consuming export market.

My 10-year plan for China's ecological resurrection, part 1

2011-02-13T17:49:00.000-08:00

Enough of the gloom for a bit. Today, and for the next few posts, I seek to pierce China's Great Wall of Denial with beams of sunlight. For the following reasons:

(1) Because one of every five people on planet earth resides in China, and (2)because the ecological destruction there far surpasses that in any other advanced economy, and (3) because China has shot right on past the US to top culprit in greenhouse gas emissions and coal consumption and shows no sign of easing up on the accelerator, and (4) because China is gobbling up the planet's resources with no thought of tomorrow, and (5) because the cheapness of the products manufactured there has fueled a boom in consumption in the US and Europe and destabilized the global economy with trade imbalances...any solution to our global ecological crisis must involve the Chinese as a key player.

Of course, it must also involve the USA as the world's largest consumer of oil and finished goods. But I'll deal with that later.

First a word to the Chinese.

Dear friends,

You have worked tirelessly to pull hundreds of millions of your citizens out of poverty and to reassert your nation's important role in political and economic affairs. You've already provided modern prosperity to millions of your urban residents, and seem bound to extend modest prosperity to millions more in coming years. But I, like your Assistant Minister of the Environment, Pan Yue, and many others, see bumps along your path to attaining such goals in a sustainable fashion.

I know your children are very precious to you. They are China's future. And it is painfully obvious that without healthy children China's future will be bleak.

It should also be clear that you will never have healthy children without a healthy environment, no matter how many trappings of modern prosperity you shower upon them.

At this point in time, too many of your children are not healthy. And it is very clear that it is your terribly polluted air and water that is robbing them of good health, and thus, robbing China of the bright future you think is almost within your grasp.

Fortunately, the strategies and technologies exist that can begin to heal your environment. And, equally important, your enormous cache of foreign currency reserves gives you the ability to implement essential changes. Your recent and very vigorous campaign to create a modern transportation infrastructure offers an important model for what must come next.

Your next five year plan targets health care as a key goal. Building the vast infrastructure required to provide every citizen with modern health care will require trillions of dollars and several years, if not decades, to complete. And even then, if current trends continue, your legions of the ill will overwhelm even a German-quality health care system. Far better to put a halt to your ever-expanding epidemics of chronic lung disease and cancers of all types. And that requires massive emergency care for the natural and workplace environments you have so terribly abused.

No other investment could begin to have the impact of a major campaign to clean up you air, purify your water, and restore abused landscapes to health. Such investment should be the cornerstone of your new Five-year Plan. And the next several after that.

In fact, the task of making China's people and landscapes healthy again is so important to the rest of the world, I'm sure other nations, NGOs and wealthy individuals will rush to provide technology transfers, expertise, and financial assistance to your efforts. You're already the world leader in solar panels and wind turbines, and among the leaders in clean energy research. Yet there is much "low hanging fruit" you can easily pick and which could propel you several giant steps toward achieving the Healthy Society.

Let's tackle water first, as it seems to pose the most immediate threat to crashing your society.

As Ma Jun observed in his China's Water Crisis, many of your largest and most important cities, including Beijing (pop.20m), Tianjin (pop. 20m), and Chongqing (pop. 30m), suffer severe water shortages despite having major rivers flowing through them. And your greatest river of all, the Yangtze, has become the world's largest open sewer.

So, inspite of the fact your nation has one of the lowest ratios of fresh water to population, the crisis which threatens your health and prosperity owes more to to vast amounts of water wasted by pollution than to actual water shortages. This represents vast orchards of low hanging fruit.

Whereas you've discovered that treating Class IV water is beyond the scope of existing technology, purifying the effluent from individual factories, mines, and refineries, and the sewage and waste water from individual towns and cities is very much within current capabilities.

Surely a nation that can grid its vast expanses with high-speed rail and perfect mass production of solar panels can clean up its own water--and prevent millions of new cancers and water-borne diseases each year.

And there's a far larger two-for-one bonus in this realm, hanging low and just waiting to be picked. Agricultural water--which accounts for 60% of all water useage in China.

Current irrigation practices squander enormous quantities of this scarce resource. And too often, the water returned to rivers and lakes post-irrigation is heavily polluted with agricultural chemicals--pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers which render water unfit for human consumption--and are very expensive to remove. Those chemicals also kill important micro-organisms in the soil, thereby robbing it of its natural fertility--and requiring ever-more chemical applications.

Permaculture and organic farming techniques, which would restore agricultural land to greater productivity (second part of the double-bonus), would employ drip irrigation and offer many strategies to replace toxic chemicals. They would create an immediate and long-term bounty of pure water, with many profound positive ramifications for farmers, non-human species, soil health, and everyone downstream.

Let's put the eco-accountant visor on here and tally up the cost savings from reducing water pollution. (1) it solves the acute water crisis currently threatening to unleash hordes of environmental refugees and destabilize the nation, (2) it would halt the epidemic of cancer and the spread of cancer villages currently threatening to destroy China's future, (3) it obviates the need to relocate much of Beijing's population due to imminent water shortages, (4) it eliminates the need for the currently bogged down South-North Water Diversion Project (a $90 billion and counting fiasco, originally slated to bring Yangtze River water to the nation's parched capital by 2008, in time for the Olympics (hah!), (5) it solves the large part of China's acute agricultural crisis that stems from poisoned soils and contaminated ground water, (6) it would make it possible to restore fresh water fisheries to polluted lakes and rivers, and off-shore fisheries to nearby seas, (7) preclude the need to expand expensive, energy-intensive desalination plants in coastal cities such as Tianjin, (8) allow depleted aquafirs to natually replinish...and many more. The savings? Priceless. Or in human money terms, in the trillions, creating enormous windfalls from recaptured opportunity costs.

Given even this partial list, let's hope the men in Beijing and the citizens throughout the nation can make a priority of cleaning up their serious and prohibitively expensive water crisis. May it come to pass.

Republicans determined to make USA more like China

2011-02-06T17:48:00.000-08:00

Last week I inserted a snide aside, arguing that to truly be competitive with China we would have to let corporations, whatever their tax haven of record, trash our environment, ignore worker health and safety laws, abrogate pension and health care contracts, and generally do whatever they want. And right on cue, here comes the new Republican-dominagted Congress attemptign to do just that.

An editorial in today's (2/06/11) NYT, titled "Clean Air Under Siege," chronicles the spate of legislation designed by Big Coal and Big Oil. Republicans would tear off the fetters holding back US corporations from competing with China. Which, upon closer examination, means giving US-based transnationals the right to plunder this country's environment and its people with as much zest as they have been exploiting the Chinese workers and destroying the Middle Kingdom's environment.

"Competitiveness" turns out to mean giving free reign to avaricious men in board rooms at the expense of everyone and everything else. The and water sources.y pile up bad karma while reaping billions. But their evil deeds are affecting everyone else's breathing space

They planned it this way when a cabal of Republicans, neo-liberal Democrats and their masters in corporate America wrote the WTO rules during the Clinton administration. Now our manufacturing firms they tell us they're forced to move jobs off-shore to China, Mexico and other low-cost venues to be competitive.

Our retailers explain that they must buy their wares in China to give us consumers the lowest possible price, the "China price."

And lately even high tech firms have off-shored their Research and Development operations to Xian, China, the ancient capital and home to Terra Cotta warriors, in which a plethora of engineering colleges has produced a "Reserve Army" of technicians willing to work for $17,000/year. How many American engineers want to compete on that playing field?

So forget the "new sputnik moment" rhetoric, that rocketship has sailed. Time to end the ever-quickening race to the bottom. Time to re-tool our own economy to produce what we need in human-sized enterprises, and shelter these infant industries with protective tariffs.

Past time to slap hefty penalties on imports produced without regard to human or environmental safety. Protect Americans, but also protect Chinese and Mexican and Bangladeshi workers from the super exploitation of their health and welfare and of the air, water and soil they and their children need to lead healthy lives. Time to fight the tyranical, earth-destroying Republican agenda.

reading Moral Ground

2011-01-30T18:47:00.000-08:00

My latest issue of Orion magazine touted the new book, Moral Ground: ethical action for a planet in peril, Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson editors. Anything K.D. Moore writes is guaranteed to be filled with thoughtful insights, beautiful descriptions of the natural world, and great love for people and the earth. So I ordered the book straight away.

Its 88 essays include the thoughts of a wide gamut of people, clustered in groups of six to eight under broad headings, each of which answers the organizing question, "Do we have a moral obligation to take action to protect the future of a planet in peril?" "Hell yes," is the only reply. Followed by details. For example the first cluster of seven essays responds, "Yes, for the survival of humankind," the second answers, "Yes, for the sake of the children." And a score of my favorite environmental writers are here: Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, J. Baird Callicott, Robert Michael Pyle, and Kathleen Dean Moore, nestled among other luminaries from science, philosophy, religion and ecology.

Naysayers aren't represented here. So permit me a capsulized version of their talking points on climate change and the environment.

If you damned tree huggers are serious about saving humanity, children and the environment, the join us in helping grow the economy. And because the fastest way to grow the economy is to give more tax cuts to the rich and abolish all government regulation, we urge you to write your Congressman now and tell him (sic) to cut taxes and social spending, repeal the clean air and clean water acts, repeal OSHA, defund the EPA, the Department of Education and other bureaucracies, and privatize Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare.

After all China has proved that rapid economic growth flows like a raging torrent when you let factories, farms, refineries and cities just pour their toxic waste and raw sewage right into the closest river, lake or ocean, and permit your factories and power plants to send their unfiltered sulfur dioxide, CO2, and heavy metal particulate right up the pipe. Saves millions. Gives your country that competitive edge your guy Obama say he wants. If he's not just spouting empty 2012 reelection slogans, then let him make us more like China. Eliminate burdensome worker health and safety standards, and leave health care and pensions to individuals.

Sorry. Way too much. Back to K.D. Moore and her moving essay in Moral Ground, "The Call to Forgiveness at the End of the Day." After describing the dystopic, ecologically impoverished world our generations' neglect and greed created for her young grandaughter in 2025, tracking the transformation of her farm's pond from lushness to dried up, she makes the following observation:

"Poets warned us of the heartbreaking beauty that will remain when there is no heart to break for it. But what if it is worse than that? What if it's the heartbroken children who remain in a world without beauty. How will they find solace in a world without wild music? How will they thrive without green hills edged with oak? How will they forgive us for letting the frog-song slip away?"

I'm afraid I know the answer. When I visited my granddaughter Olivia, then one-year old, in Lanzhou, China in 2006, I entered a world without beauty. A city so hideously ugly and criminally polluted, a city so hazardous to human health, that it broke my heart my daughter and her husband could make Olivia live there.

Lanzhou's great ugliness didn't just happen. People killed the beauty inside the city by burning coal to power their factories and heat their homes, unleashing heavy sulfur dioxide smoke from hundreds of stacks that grid the city.

The smoke coated everything in black dust--including children's lungs. It freighted the air with its cargo of toxic arsenic, mercury, cadmium and lead, deforming the brains of the unborn, causing birth defects and miscarriages. As if the great life force were saying, "Not safe for this child to live here." Some 20-30,000 people die there each year from pollution (U.N. study, 2008), although the Chinese government's statistics are notoriously unreliable, especially when the truth reflects so poorly on their leadership.

They killed the sky with that same smoke. Children here almost never see the sky, day or night. My heart broke again at the thought Olivia could spend her life here just so my daughter's missionary team could tell people about Jesus. This horrible place where Olivia would never feel the awe and mystery of a dark night, the deep black of infinity painted with its milky trails of uncountable stars.

I wanted her to hear birdsong in the morning, not the cacophony of traffic noise where a chorus of thousand dashing cabs adds to the din of coal trucks and buses with their incessant beeping of horns. Birds can't live here. Neither should children. Nor even adults.

Outside the city of 3.5 million people, ranges of hills crease the earth, stretching out 40 miles north to the airport, and to the west where their curving slopes channel the Yellow River toward Lanzhou. But these are not the "green hills edged with oak" Moore describes. They are barren, denuded of all vegetation save for rows of dusty sapplings planted to hold back the encroaching Gobi Desert. Forest were long ago chopped down. The saplings' prospects looked bleak, with drought and erosion slaughtering them wholesale.

K.D. Moore waxes eloquent describing the heart-rending prospect of watching the last salmon die in their river. In much of China it's too late for such mournfulness. They've already killed the wild fish in the heavily polluted Yellow River. People shouldn't drink the poorly-treated water, but many have no choice.

My daughter's family, like Lanzhou's small middle-class, bought clean water in 5-gallon jugs for drinking, cooking and brushing teeth. Sparse showers--for Lanzhou, like most of northern China suffers from a terrible water shortage--spurts of brownish water leaving a thin residue of contaminates you don't want on your skin. No where for Olivia to swim in the hot summers. No place to see fish swimming in nature.

And no one mourned the demise of the last Yellow River carp, as Moore and her husband did for that hypothetical salmon.

So China makes a far stronger case for what's at stake than does Moore's cautionary tale. It's not a hypothetical portrait of what will surely come if we don't change our ways. In China dystropia is reality.

Saddest of all, the children don't know what's been lost. They are not heart broken living in a land without beauty. We humans adapt all too well to the downward sliding ecological benchmark.

And so one of Moore's most poignant observations rings doubly true: "Can I claim to love a morning if I don't protect what creates its beauty? Can I claim to love a child if I don't use all the power of my beating heart to preserve a world that nourishes children's joy?" No you can't, dear lady. And neither can I. Yet only we can love what's here now. "Who mourns for the passenger pigeon now?" Who can love what's gone extinct?

May we find the courage and will to preserve our priceless rivers and forests, and all the creatures whose lives depend upon them. Let us love our children and grandchildren by leaving them an Oregon as rich and diverse as we found it. And one day, may we find the wisdom and courage to restore it more closely to the full vitality and diversity the native peoples of this land once enjoyed. May it come to pass.

China's Plan B, Emigrate?

2011-01-23T11:56:00.000-08:00

"...here [in China], who knows when all hell might break loose, leaving no place to hide?...Everyone feels this at a certain level but doesn't say so. Why else would the people who hold all the power in our society be sending their sons and daughters abroad?" (Hu Fayun's novel, Ruyan@sars.come )

And why do "Farmers in Fujian province still pay 'snakeheads' tens of thousands of dollars to smuggle one person to Sydney, London, or New York?" ("China: from famine to Oslo," by Perry Link, New York Review of Books, Jan. 13, 2011, p.52)And why do only 25-30 percent of the approximately 145,000 Chinese students who go abroad each year for study return to live in China? (cited in same article)
As author Perry link says, "Insecurity, the new national mood, extends from laid off migrant laborers to the men at the top of the Communist Party." But for very different reasons, I'd add.

So what's with all the itchy suitcases? Can't the Chinese juggernaut keep plowing along until "modern prosperity" becomes the reality for all 1.4 billion of its citizens, leaving the developed world's workers and the middle classes collecting bottles and dumpster diving? Isn't China brinking on super power status, threatening to overtake the moribund "sunset power," the USA? Not so fast Thom Friedman.

Mass migration is always a very disruptive process, at both ends of the deal. But mass migration of environmental or political refugees from China would "shake the world"--off its axis. I used to worry (but not much) that relocating hundreds of millions of tons (are we to billions yet?) of Australia's land mass to China, in the form of iron ore and coal, might disrupt something--like the earth's magnetic field or a critical dynamic scientists have yet to understand. But that prospect ranks as less than trivial (far as I can tell) compared with the impact that hordes of Chinese fleeing political turbulence or ecological breakdown would have on life as we know it.

The men in Beijing appear willing to risk everything to prevent the former-- social/political chaos-- yet do almost nothing to stave off the latter--the collapse of the environmental systems critical to human life, like clean air, drinkable water and "land fit to live upon."

Why the blind spot? Greed, the Great Occluder of things important, say some. "Grasping and clinging" say the Buddhists. Failure to do the eco-accounting, say I, agreeing with them both.

It's as if the politburo's elite-level juggling skills have given rise to the dastardly sin of hubris. Over-confident in their abilities and dismisive of ecological principles, they've lofted too many balls in the air, dropping the green one into a dark black hole without even noticing. Bright colored balls marked "GDP growth," "riches" and "power" diverted their attention from the one ball needed to keep them alive. The one ball from which all development, all riches, and all power inevitably must flow. Drop the green one and the others turn hollow and shatter--but not right away. They've set the clock ticking, a time-bomb of ecological catastrophe, and are rapidly running out of room to act.

Link's NYR article reviews the book Mubei (Tombstone) by Yang Jisheng. It's an account of Mao's Great Famine, generally thought to have starved 30 million Chinese. Mao over-reached with his Great Leap Forward (1958-61), in which he pulled out all the stops to race ahead to industrial parity with the US and UK. China's environment and agriculture bore the brunt of the excess, much as it is doing today in the similarly hasty and careless campaign to overtake the West.

In an earlier post ("China's Great Ecocide") I made this same comparison, arguing, as Yang does in Mubei, that China's people, especially its rulers, need to review the Great Famine's history and heed the warning of 30 million deaths before they trod the final few steps down a similar past. Breakdowns do happen when people exceed the limits of ecological systems. But instead of taking account of landscapes creaking with ecological stress, they continue to pile on ever more stress, further diminishing the land's support capacity and bringing those limits ever closer. May they soon wise up.

A collosal coincidence of random weather events?--or...?

2011-01-14T17:22:00.000-08:00

Just as I wiped my brow and tallied my callories burned, the gym's wide screen TV flashed images of huge chunks of Australia under water--an area equal to two Texas's, they said. A car park turned into a floating parade, cars, buses and trucks tumbling and bobbing in an angry brown torrent washing out to sea. "An instant inland tsunami," reporters termed it, reminiscent as it was of the buses, trucks and cars flushed out to sea by the Indonesian tsunami's deadly backwash, but without the humans clinging desperately to them. Towns and large sections of Brisbane were inundated by raging rivers, vast expanses of farmland submerged in standing water, all the result of an extreme climate event.

I dismounted the elliptical and stood there gawking as CNN briskly moved on to a second, far more deadly weather disaster in northeastern Brazil. Mudslides, buried houses, 500 or more deaths. Five hundred deaths?! Why wasn't this the lead? Australia's floods "only" killed 26, and Brazil's in our hemisphere. Lack of on-site dramatic video perhaps? Nope.

Brazil out-paced Australia there too, with video clips capturing a shanty- covered hillside being flushed down the denuded slope. The cardboard and sheet metal that once formed people's homes gets sucked up in a violent slurry of mud and debris and piled against sturdier structures in the town below. Heart-rending. Deadly. But for dramatic flare, quickly topped by the next segment.

Another camera shows us a woman standing on what looks like a boat. She's clutching a puppy, pacing the deck, obviously paniced, as the boat is tearing at its mooring, about to break loose into another raging brown torrent, this one angrier, swifter and more massive than Australia's. A man hails her from a roof top of a river front building. The rampaging river crashes against its lower floors. He throws the woman a rope. She grabs it with her free hand, still clutching the puppy in the other. And she jumps free of the boat, plunging into the angry waters.

The current tears the puppy from her grasp, and she quickly snags the rope with her second hand. Miraculously men hoist her from the river, seconds before she would have been swept out of their reach. Hand over hand they pull her up the side of the building three floors to the roof top. The woman's pants have slipped to just above her knees, and CNN protectively blurs over her naked backside as three men hoist her over the roof's parapet. An amazing, breath-taking rescue. But there was more.

Another flood disaster in Colombia, where I learned its been raining steady and hard since November!--more than 40 days and 40 nights--an event of Biblical proportions. Even a news junkie like me hadn't heard of Colombia's plight until the disaster in Brazil pulled it into the media's radar. Nor had I heard of the deadly mudslides in the Philippines that killed more than 40 people. And Sri Lanka is suffering massive flooding.

All of the extreme weather events are attributed to a particularly strong La Nina, the most intense since at least the 1973-74 event, also the last time Brisbane flooded. And, as all the major media organs have slashed their budgets--and thus, their reporters and camera crews in the field, particularly in developing countries--even epic catastrophes become "invisible," kept from the developed world's attention, an optical version of that proverbial tree falling in the woods. That's one important issue. But I turn now to the larger one.

Climate change skeptics--when they're not throwing red meat to the masses about "Second Amendment solutions," or railing on at the Fox News chalkboard about Obam's sinister plan to take away everyone's guns and ammo and throw all true patriots into FEMA concentration camps--love to mock and belittle the believers. "Human-caused climate change?" they say. "A fabrication of radical environmentalists and scientists attempting to frighten us into the arms of a tyranical ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT!, from which their pay off will be tons of money to study their own fabricated "crisis."

And when they're not ranting about abberant winter snow storms in Germany disproving "global warming," they sometimes muse, "So what's so bad about a future in which you can harvest November tomatoes in De Luth and cucumbers in Green Bay? Or wear shorts in St. Paul at Christmas time? Their worst case is a world grown incrementally warmer over decades, but not any warmer than it's been in distant centuries where humans managed just fine. Reducing greenhouse gases will only derail our fragile economic recovery, they argue. And damned, if even liberal politicians who dispute their every word, aren't acting as if they agree when it comes to changing our behaviors.

So we let the coal barons convince the government it's just ducky if they rip up more land and ship off millions more tons of coal to China where they'll use the energy at one-forth the efficiency to make us cheap stuff we used to make for ourselves--and much of which we don't really need. And spew millions of tons of CO2 into the already over-stressed atmosphere. And, of course, we can't affect what those commies in Beijing do in their own country? (you mean like not buying stuff made in China?)

Climate change needs to scare us more before we'll do anything significant. So I say, let's use this collosal covergence of climate catastrophes to make a few points about the weather. The climate book I've found most riveting (so far) is Fred Pearce's With Speed and Violence: why scientists fear tipping points in climate change (2007). As with all systems and dynamics in Nature, we must attend to threshholds--or tipping points. Climate won't change in the gentle, linear fashion most convenient to our mode of thinking. It will come neither gently, nor gradually, but with speed and violence as we exceed key threshholds, like the devastating climate events still unfolding, and the other extreme events in recent months--the 1,000 year (?) floods in Pakistan, the 1,000 drought and fires in Russia, the massive flooding in Southwest China.

It's a teachable moment to point out just how vulnerable the underpinnings of our civilization are to climate disruptions.

These extreme events, horrible in themselves, also disrupted food supplies and forced tens of millions of people to leave their homes. What would happen if strong La Ninas occurred every ten years, instead of every 40? What about every five years? We'd have to move cities and towns--even without the predicted rises in sea level. We'd have to develop millions of hectares of new farmland so as to rotate production to compensate for the huge losses due to drought and flooding.

We must see the prospect of more catastrophes as one possibility--unfortunately a plausible one, that would entail painful disruptions to our way of life. It would be a mess. And a very expensive mess--far, far more expensive than acting now to drastically reduce our footprint. That is the moral imperative facing us today. May we find the courage, wisdom and good will to meet the challenge.

From Gridlock to (traffic) Anarchy: Beijing to Lanzhou

2011-01-09T18:03:00.000-08:00

The most flavorful sampling of China driving I've found is Peter Hessler's Country Driving: a journey through China from farm to factory, just out in 2010. He drove a rental car places foreigners rarely go, even by bus or train. Given the dangers and government restrictions on foreigners' driving themselves anywhere, the vast majority of ex-pats and virtually all tourists choose to be driven. My daughter and her husband never thought to get a driver's license and brave the world's most dangerous highways without a professional at the wheel. But Hessler is an adventuresome sort, and a hell of a writer, so his chronicle of solo road trips makes for fascinating reading.

China's burgeoning car culture means one thing in the mega-cities of Beijing and Shanghai, where roughly another thousand drivers make their first forray into heavy traffic each day, and where local governments have imposed strict limits on new registrations to hold back an auto onslaught that would otherwise swamp the infrastructure. And, as also true in the current expansions of health care and "green" energy infrastructures, the intricate layers of support require time, planning and money to construct.

For driving, as Hessler relates in hilarious anecdotes, a major factor in "Big Emerging Nations" such as China, is training a nation of non-drivers how to weild these powerful chucks of steel and glass without killing themselves and others. And that begins with recognizing that only the most rudimentary and incipient "ethos" of a car culture, something we grow up immersed in here in the US, exists among the new candidates signing up for driving classes. These are new comers to the craft of driving, very unlike American sixteen year olds who've ridden to soccer practice, music lessons and grandma's house since they were infants, and tugged the wheel left and right in video game simulations at the arcade or on the family desk top.

Hessler provides a constant diet of "found" jokes plucked from drivers' tests. To wit, question #282. "When approaching a railroad crossing, you should
a) accelerate and cross
b) accelerate only if you see a train approaching
c) slow down and make sure it's safe before crossing" (p. 6)

But that's where the laughing stops. As we know, driving is dead serious, and in China the emphasis is too often on "dead." The world's most populous nation leads the world not just in the absolute number of traffic deaths, but also in deaths per capita, which bears stark testimony to how far they still have to go in those driving schools.

Yet, in spite of those statistics and the fact that Beijing is still undergoing the awkward transition from a city where bicycles reigned not that long ago, to a bustling mega-city choking on private cars, trucks, buses and taxis, traffic seemed "orderly" and as safe or safer than in most American cities. Fleets of bicycles still stream along in the right lane of surface streets and "freight tricycles" packed high with boxes or hauling small potted trees still ply the disappearing hutongs (alley ways) and side streets, creating hazards not found in Portland, Oregon or San Francisco. But our taxi drivers skillfully navigated the crowded streets, and we didn't see accidents, which had been so common in Lanzhou, capital of the traffic anarchy which reigns outside the major cities--and in much of the "developing world." It was a danger my daughter Kai faced everyday of her two years in Lanzhou, often carrying little Olivia in a backpack.

Dangerous air had trumped dangerous traffic in my Sunday night "skype" sessions with Kai. The depressing photos of the smoggy skyline taken from her living room window couldn't prepare me for the caustic sting of sulfur dioxide in my lungs when I took my first breath there, nor for the sensation of having a 300 pound weight on my chest as I suffered though a bout of "pollution sickness" in Lanzhou's toxic airshed. But she'd omitted her horror stories of Lanzhou's wild taxi drivers, never mentioned her daily ordeals crossing streets where traffic lights and crosswalks were as scarce as seat belts and kid seats were non-existent. Missing parts of that "auto infrastructure."

In Lanzhou fleets of bikes and clusters of pedestrians played "chicken" with kamikazie taxi drivers, all of whom drove as if Mao himself handed out prizes for recklessness. Crumpled bikes and crowds of gawking on-lookers bore testiment to the frequent crashes. Ask them to slow down, as even my dare-devil son-in-law did with a particularly aggressive "top gun wannabe," and they'd act as if you'd asked them to renounce their manhood. Ask them not to smoke, as Kai insisted before she'd enter a cab with Olivia, and you'd get a dirty look, followed sometimes with a grudging agreement. As Hessler observed, Chinese cab drivers "smoke like its a competition." When two cabs crashed, as they frequently do, Kai said the drivers jumped out and settled damage claims with their fists.

In Beijing traffic police prowled the ring roads and side streets in force, keeping testosterone impulses in check. In Lanzhou, we never saw a motorcycle cop or a squad car "showing the flag." Kai said there used to be cops directing traffic at busy, "unsignaled" intersections, but so many got hit by speeding taxis, the authoriteies gave up. Cabs here were mostly little green Chinese-made vehicles, powered by natural gas tanks stored in their trunks--scarce room for luggage. And all their drivers were highly skilled by necessity. Darting in and out of narrow openings with a bus on one side and a coal truck or speeding taxi on the other focuses the mind--unless you're in the back seat cringing with your eyes closed.

Bigger "airport" taxis were VW Santanas, all black, with tons of trunk space and drivers who seemed to have graduated to the more sedate life style afforded by driving "middle-class" folk to and from the airport--forty smooth, uncongested freeway miles north of town.

I left Lanzhou admiring Kai's courage. How hard was it to live here? I wondered, knowing it was something no father could wish for his daughter--even less his year old grandaughter. Too many ways to die here. Yet Kai endured, "feeling her fear, but doing it anyway." And I knew she felt a mother's fear every day of those two years. One false move crossing the street and "bam!" One cab driver who cut things too close and "bam!" God's love got her through the ordeal she said. But not without terror-ridden nights, fights with her husband, and the constant flood of prayers to a God who'd seemed to have abandoned Lanzhou very long ago.

China: One billion cars?

2011-01-03T16:23:00.000-08:00

It's already "old" news that China surpassed the USA as the world's number one car market. But just like a few years back when China passed the US in greenhouse gas emissions, it was just the beginning of the story, one which continues to amaze by just how much worse it can get. China's huge, and moving with a velocity that tricks minds not trained to think that fast or that big. For example, just ten years ago, the number of cars and light trucks sold in China was just one tenth of that in the US. But by 2010 they had left us in the slow lane, with sales 50% greater than in the US--and still accelerating. We're baffled by the blur. "Incomprehensible!" we blurt. But it doesn't go away. It just gets worse.

Beijing and Shanghai may already be choking on car exhaust and grid-locked highways, but there are still more than 150 other cities with greater than a million residents where car ownership remains a rarity, and the vast expanse of rural China where private autos are rarer still. In other words, lots of room for growth. Investors wring their hands, eyes filled with dollar signs. "Get me into the China market!" they tell their brokers. Hedge fund managers are already there.

GM already sells more Buicks in China than in the US, and is ramping up production in its Chinese factories to make the dream of my favorite Beijing taxi driver come true. "Some day I will own a Buick," he said, back in 2006, and by now he probably does.

All the world's car makers salivate over the prospects of the Middle Kingdom's burgeoning auto market. The implications stagger the mind--just extrapolate that growth curve on out a decade or two, as economists are wont to do, and wowie!--a car (or two?) in every Chinese garage adds up to a billion freshly-minted autos! Lots of money to be made. Lots of iron ore to be sold, prodigious amounts of coking coal needed to cook it into steel. And there's all that rubber, aluminum, glass, plastic, etc, needed in volumes never before imaginable (I still can't imagine it). And think of the oil for gasoline, the cement and asphalt for highways. As Michael Klare presciently observed, there will be "resource wars!" But first, a period of mega-profits.

Resource providers like those who mine Australia, Brazil, Russia and Canada will grow filthy rich digging up their (or someone else's) homelands and shipping vast chunks to China (and India) where they'll flow into Japanese, Korean, German and US-owned car factories to elevate the living standards of hundreds of millions of Asians to "first world" levels. Oil states will reap bonanzas. Commodity prices will spike. Oil at $300 per barrel? US Gas at $5 or $6/gallon--so much higher in Europe. Consumers everywhere will shudder. Inflation will have its day. We'll drive less. But there will be a billion more of us driving. The biosphere loses--but so do all of us who depend on it for our continued existence.

I'm sick of the cliche that if something can't go on forever, then it won't. I'd rather focus on the fact that what's dangerous to my grandkids' futures is that we act as if unsustainable things can go on forever--until it's too late for the "soft landing," and we act surprised at the very messy, costly, and sometimes disastrous crashes which ensue (think global warming, China's water crisis, and its ecocide in general).

Yet it's difficult to change the "way of thinking" of people who have a deeply vested interest in perpetuating that way of thinking because it makes them richer every day the majority of the population tacitly accepts that mode of thought as "natural," and fails to envision alternatives.

I dwell so much on China for the reasons I mentioned in the opening paragraph--it's so damned big and changing so fast, that the looming crises get magnified. We Americans do most of the same ecologically unsustainable things the Chinese do--just slower and on a smaller scale. Thus China makes a great telescope into our own and everyone else's future--the vision's a bit hazy, like the air in China's cities on a good, "blue sky" day. But those of us who chose to peer into that telescope can still see the train wrecks taking shape. We need more Chinese to look into that telescope and see the mischief those foreign devils in expensive suits--in collusion with their own big bucks businessmen--are wreaking on the landscapes and future of a great nation. May we begin to think ecologically--and may we do it soon.

China: surging GDP, declining health

2010-12-24T16:52:00.000-08:00

Last month the NYT's David Leonhardt posed a question no one else ever seems to ask: "Which of the following countries had the smallest increase in life expectancy since 1990--Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, South Korea or Sudan?" Good distractors, I thought, recalling a test writting class I'd had decades ago in UC Berkeley's College of Ed. Tough choice there among Banglasdesh, with its grinding poverty, rampant disease and frequent natural disasters; Pakistan, with its rampaging civil war and covens of radical Islamists blowing up secular and sectarian enemies in acts of mass slaughter; or the poverty-plagued, war-torn Sudan, long the poster-nation for failed state misery, mass rape and the oppression of women. For most Times readers, I'm sure South Korea and China stood out as obvious "bad distractors," too prosperous and modern to languish among the planet's public health basket cases (unless they'd read my last post comparing China with Haiti, which only two did).

But those cherished two and the few others who read this blog might have harbored a lurking suspicion that China would draw at least a few votes, given how much I harp on the scrupulously hidden public health crisis unfolding behind Beijing's Great Wall of secrecy and censorship. And they, of course, would have been rewarded when Mr. Leonhardt announced that China's increase in life expectancy over the past twenty years had indeed lagged behind three of the most devastated nations on planet earth as well as its properous neighbor, South Korea.

In actuality, I consider the World Bank statistics Leonhardt used to make China first among his chosen public health catastrophes, to understate the magnitude of the biocide taking place in the Middle Kingdom, given that China's rulers so carefully monitored the data gatherers as well as the data they gathered. For where there is ecocide--the creation of "deadlands" through expanding deserts, and the proliferation of toxic chemicals in the soil, air and water--there is biocide. We humans may not succumb to poisons in our air and water as quickly as many plants and other animal species, but even our amazingly resilient internal systems can't hold out forever in cities and villages as polluted as most are in China. Most of us would eventually contract cancer from air and water so heavily laden with carcinogens. And we know thousands of miners will die each year in the world's most dangerous mines, and hundreds of thousands of factory workers will perish due to the absence of workplace health and safety standards we take for granted in the US, Europe and Japan. And we only know this because a few tenacious and courageous reporters and activists have managed to get information past the censors.

So for my friends in China I have one wish--for the Western New Year and your own which follows a month later--instead of building "socialism (or capitalism) with Chinese characteristics," retool your system and begin building capitalism (or socialism) with a human face." That is priviledge the welfare of your people over the growth in your GDP. Which means shifting the priority on you've had expanding exports and on transportation and export infrastructure to Health infrastructure--healthy water, healthy air, healthy soil, healthy food, healthy biodiversity. Use that 2.5 trillion cache of US dollars you've accumulated through your dominance of the global trade regime to reward your own people for their hard work and sacrifice. Give them clean air to breathe and clean rivers and lakes in which to swim and fish. Give them beautiful landscapes to admire and live in. Let your children see blue sky again and let them wonder at the heavens, hidden far too long behind that hideous smudge of coal smoke.

Preserve the fertile land you have left. Ban genetically-modified crops, provide incentives to keep the soil healthy and the restore the diversity of seeds to their once robust variety. Use permaculture to reclaim your dead lands. And may we in the US and elsewhere support you, collaborate with you, encourage you--and, most importantly may we make Health our top priority so we can lead by example.

Can China learn from Haiti?

2010-12-18T12:17:00.000-08:00

Haiti's great suffering, and the mass exodus of its people, provide a cautionary tale for all of us, most particularly those nations whose actions completely disregard Aldo Leopold's insight that "keeping land fit to live upon" far surpasses the importance of GDP growth or the accumulation of technological gadgetry. When we understand that Leopold's definition of "Land" referred to the entire biotic community; that is soil, air, water, flora, fauna, and the natural processes such as climate and fire, it becomes clear that the common notions of "progress," "growth," and "modern civilization" violate his admonition and completely shatter his Land Ethic--to wit, "a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." ("The Land Ethic," in A Sand County Almanac, Ballentine Books, 1970. p262)

There are, of course, billions of differences between the small nation which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic and the enormous geographic expanse and teeming population which comprise The People's Republic of China. For starters, China has a dozen cities with populations larger than Haiti's. It's GDP dwarfs that of the Western Hemisphere's perennial basket case to almost the same extent as its population. And its strong and well-organized central government has proven its capacity for responding to natural disasters, such as earthquakes, landslides and floods, which, although still very far from a "first world" ideal, stands in stark contrast to the Haitian government's chaotic impotence in fumbling through recovery efforts for the January, 2010 earthquake and the more recent cholera epidemic, which continues to rage after sickening more than 100,000 and killing more than 2,300.

We expect the UN and myriad NGO's and relief organizations to fill the gaps left by Haiti's acute helplessness, its poverty, endemic corruption, and a culture of violence that permeates its sprawling slums. And we expect China to clean up after its own natural disasters and epidemics--and thus far, it always has. The "Capacity" to fix one's own problems flows from a mix of competency--skills, training, and "tools"--and organization, the ability to mobilize, motivate, and coordinate the competent people in an effective, disciplined attack on the problem. Haiti's population has been systematically deprived of the skills, training, tools, and leadership needed to mobilize self-help efforts through decades of poverty, corruption, and violent oppression, much of it from ruthless, US-backed henchmen and their private armies of hired thugs. A glaring exception stems from the efforts of Partners in Health, Dr. Paul Farmer's organization which systematically builds capacity in the small communities described in the book, Mountains Beyond Mountains (Tracy Kidder's inspiring 2003 biography of Farmer).

But for all the glaring differences, China appears intent on following a similar path to ecological destruction, certain they are building their great nation into an economic and political superpower, even while destroying the biological underpinnings essential for human health. The fable of King Midas teaches children the folly of turning living things into gold. The fable of Haiti (and China) should teach us all the folly of transforming living ecological systems into inert commodities. Both Haitians and Chinese lack another, more important quality-ecological capacity, the mix of competence--skills, wisdom, motivation, and tools-- and organization--the leadership and social skills to mobilize, motivate and coordinate the competent people to effectively address environmental problems and to live in harmony with the biotic community.

Like Haiti, China has devastated its forests. And even though they are now furiously replanting across the northern plains and mountains in a desperate attempt to hold back the encroaching desert with a "Green Belt," and feverishly planting fast-growing, monoculture "tree farms" as replacements for clear-cut native forests of the southwest, neither effort offers great hope for replacing the many "services" healthy forests provide us for free--healthy soils, clean water, cleaner air, habitat essential for biodiversity, prevention of floods and landslides, and, when sustainably harvested, the wood for human consumption.

As a result both Haiti and China now suffer far more destruction from flooding than before they destroyed their native forests. The effects of devastated biodiversity and changes to local micro-climates are less often tallied in the accounting ledgers. More flooding alternating with more drought. Less stability, less integrity, less beauty. More erosion, less fertility. Ecological richness squandered for short-term gain: in Haiti, to make firewood and charcoal, and in China, to build furniture, siding and other wood products for export, as well as for construction projects in its burgeoning cities.

The current, seemingly intractable cholera epidemic in Haiti highlights the chronic water pollution plaguing most of that nation's inhabitants. China could suffer an epidemic of similar size--and the world might never know. Indeed, all indications are that hundreds of millions of its citizens already suffer less visible, chronic health problems from water contaminated by industrial toxins, agricultural chemicals, and untreated or poorly treated sewage (cf. China's Water Crisis, by Ma Jun, 2004). And, as I mentioned last posting, Beijing is on course to suffer a serious water crisis by 2015, when its principal aquifer is predicted to run dry, and the would be replacement source, the so-called South-North Water Diversion Project appears to have foundered on the intractable problem of transforming heavily polluted effluent into drinkable water.

China suffers these great environmental problems, each of which possessing a magnitude far greater, with a slower velocity, and thus less urgency, than their counterparts in Haiti. And the Communist Party government there works hard to dim their visibility to the public and the foreign press. But China's massive problems also progress with far greater momentum. When air and water pollution finally exceed the thresholds humans can endure and China suffers a public health catastrophe, it will truly "shake the world." Or, as in the title of Jonathon Watts' book (discussed last post), it will rattle the planet like a billion Chinese all jumping at once.

A major motivation for US governments to address Haiti's crises is to prevent the mass evacuation of ecological refugees from that island. Millions of desperate Haitians fleeing "Land not fit to live upon" for a chance to live the American Dream in Florida or New York. But imagine a huge chunk of China's 1.4 billion people who've rendered their homeland no longer fit to live upon--no longer able to provide the food, water and air essential to life. As Watts points out in When a Billion Chinese Jump, that ecological apocalypse already smolders like a living, if dystopic, diorama in Henan Province, "the foulest place in China." Bleaker than any venue in Haiti, Henan, China's most populous province, is also wealthier than any in Haiti, enough so that people can survive, hoping that economic growth will soon deliver them from environmental hell. But befouled landscapes and ill health also make for emotional distress and depression. Bleak environment, bleak outlook on life. Misery. "Land not fit to live upon" makes for a life not fit to live. Yet they cling to hope like it was an oxygen tube, providing life support until things get better. Even though things continually get worse.

The window of opportunity for China to reverse its path to ecocide is rapidly closing. Neither the Chinese people, nor the rest of us, can afford an ecological breakdown with the magnitude and momentum of what's brewing in the Middle Kingdom. May the Buddhists and other enviromental activists there bring wisdom to their brothers and sisters before it is too late.

China's High Speed (ecological) Train Wreck

2010-12-12T16:39:00.000-08:00

book recommendation: When a Billion Chinese Jump: how China will save mankind--or destroy it, Jonathan Watts, 2010.

headline of the week: "Grain Market Set to be Reshaped by China," Wall St. Journal, 12/10/10, p.C3

After ten days in Hopkinsville, Kentucky helping my daughter with her newborn son and three energetic little girls, even the hotel lobby's pile of Rupert Murdoch's Wall St. Journals radiated a strong appeal. So I took one complimentary copy for the plane ride home, only to discover the article cited above addressing one of my frequent themes, China and the global food supply.

And in those few and brief quiet snatches during the nine days in my daughter's house, I plowed through Watts' China travelogue, the most up-to-date and thorough east-west, north-south compendium of the Middle Kingdom's environmental woes I've yet discovered. Unfortuantely he confirmed most of my worst fears and added volumes of fresh data and observations to what I've laid out here in previous posts. He even takes one of my favorite whipping boys, Tom Friedman, to task for his dangerously wrong-headed contention that China is leading the world to a greener future, as in the following assertion: "[When] one-party autocracy...is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can have great advantages." (p.271) In Friedman's "hot, flat" world, China is the force that will "save mankind" from climate change catastrophe. But in Watts' and my world, China seems destined to destroy this planet's livability, with a huge assist from the US-based global corporate culture.

I'd hoped there'd be more "saving mankind" and less "destroying" it in Watts' book, but I found it impossible to argue with a man whose views so closely resemble my own, and who came by them through far more on-site research than my budget permits (his newspaper, The Guardian financed his "eco-tour").

Let's begin with food. As I've repeatedly mentioned here, Lester Brown's "Who Will Feed China" (1994) continues to serve as a warning to all of us that a massive global famine will ensue if a significant portion of China's 1.4 billion people "eat like us," as many millions are already doing, OR if China continues to lose farmland to development, pollution and increasing water shortages. Both dynamics now proceed apace, multiplying the likelihood of food catastrophe. As Brown told Watts more recently, "If [the Chinese] followed the US appetite, China would chew its way through 80 per cent of current meat production and two-thirds of the global grain harvest." (p. 144)

Thus, the statistics cited in the WSJ article at the top of this post, namely that "China's demand for imported corn will soar to about 25 million metric tons annually...by 2015, from this year's 1.3 million metric tons (that's a twenty-fold increase!!!)," should set off alarm bells, at least among sentient beings who aren't so narrowly focused on "wow! what a great opportunity for a killing in corn futures!" to recognize disaster in the making. Bullet trains speeding down the rails on a collision course.

Forget wheat and soy (and abolish organic!), our agribiz lobby will conclude. American farmers can get filthy rich growing and exporting corn--while helping the US trade balance! Think of it as China calling in part of its $2.5 trillion in US i.o.u.'s. Or think of it as the "rich" Chinese gobbling up all the planet's grain reserves, leaving virtually none for poor, food insecure nations. Things will get tense. Our agri-biz lobby might even relax its push for corn-ethanol subsidies (and hasn't that gone well?), sensing that the price of a bushel will soar well beyond what's practical for an inefficient fuel additive. I recommend (tongue in cheek) we environmentalists start financing our NGOs by buying up Monsanto stock--this exported corn will all be of the genetically-modified variety, given current trends in the US Congress, and the complete lack of information or worry about the health/ecological effects of GM crops in China, at least once a person ventures beyond the reach of China Greenpeace's Hong Kong stronghold.

China's looming food crisis will unavoidably intensify as its water crisis continues to worsen. Watts concurs with my opinion that water shortages are China's most urgent ecological problem, holding immense potential to wreak social and political chaos. As I've stated here, Beijing's huge $90 billion wager that it could replace its rapidly diminishing deep aquifer water supply with Yangtze River water piped 1500km north in the "South-North Water Diversion Project" has failed miserably, leaving China's capital city less than five years to find an alternative supply--or face relocating a substantial number of Beijing's citizens in a "North-South Population Diversion Project," certain to be the first of many great ecologically-induced dislocations in store for China in Nature's next two five-year plans.

But if food insecurity and water catastrophe threaten to "shake China's world," isn't there still hope China can "save mankind" by perfecting "clean coal," as James Fallows argues in the December Atlantic? Even here, Watts plays Cassandra, but only after luring his reader in with a few optimist tidbits. First good news: China is rapidly phasing out the primitive small-scale boilers that so thoroughly fouled the winter air in Lanzhou when my daughter lived there (2005-07), and replacing them with more efficient "supercritical" plants. So, far less sulfur dioxide and particulate matter, and less coal burned per unit of heat or energy produced.

But to keep pace with economic growth and history's most rapidly urbanizing population, China's still building between one and two new coal plants each week! And as I recently posted, China's coal imports are growing exponentially. So Watts' second point is still more important than increased efficiency.

To wit, "China is also ahead of other nations in developing and adopting Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) technology that turns coal into gas, removes impurities, maximizes efficiency, and can capture carbon." (p.184) The silver bullet!! AND, "Some of the technology is at an advanced stage of development" (all this while our own coal lobby induces both candidate and President Obama to praise the wonders of "clean coal" as if it will very soon put an end to all our CO2 and pollution problems, eventhough our lab jockies are nowhere close to developing that technology. Perhaps they plan to steal China's patented technology and build plants with the pirated blueprints).

In any case, there's a huge obstacle blocking the path to clean coal; namely, China's intensifying water crisis and its direct effects on the looming food crisis. Watts noted "Coal production was taking scarce water supplies from agriculture" (p.185) This could be another reason China has stepped up coal imports--they're importing "virtual water" from parched Australia as well as the USA, Colombia and Russia. Unfortunately, along with increased imports, domestic coal production continues to soar, exacerbating a water crisis already nearing breakdown levels. Worse still, the plan to "integrate coal-to-oil and IGCC into one system" (p.184) rachets the water problem to astronomical heights, due to the prodigious water volumes required to liquify coal.

As Watts observes, "The [state-of-the-art Shenhua-Ordos coal-to-liquid] facility was as clean and beautiful as industry gets, yet this plant was also an environmentalist's worst nightmare." (!) (p.309) "For each ton of diesel[liquified from coal], six and a half tons of water had to be piped from an aquifer 70 km away, and more than three tons of carbon dioxide were released into the air." Thus, adding coal liquification to gassified coal in one integrated system, not only nullifies the benefits of gassification, it also makes the problems of climate change and water shortages exponentially worse--and neither the Chinese nor the rest of us can afford that.

China's water crisis, its food crisis, and the planet's climate change crisis all interact in a complex of interlocking feedback loops--with negative effects for us all. If they could eliminate the wasteful production of exports for affluent US and European consumers--or, better,we could reduce our consumption of "stuff", China could take a giant step toward reducing the consumption of energy, water, forests (their own and their neighbors'), as well as the toxic air and water pollution eating away at their health, and the climate changing gasses heating up the biosphere. Eliminating or drastically reducing exports would "solve for pattern," to borrow a very useful phrase from Wendell Barry, setting in motion a ramifying sequence of solutions to some of the world's most urgent problems.

Without such a radical change, however, we are witnessing the unfolding of a global train wreck, one of such magnitude that it will shake, jolt and forever change civilization and life as we know it. May we find the courage and wisdom to change--long before my newest grandson is old enough to read his grandpa's warning. May it come to pass.

China: 1.4 billion US-style consumers?

2010-11-29T10:30:00.000-08:00

It strikes me as odd that anyone could see "cultivating the urge to splurge" (www.nytimes.com201011/28/magazine/28China-t.html) as the world's salvation. Yet, big as life, that's exactly what David Leonhardt argues under that headline in his NYT magazine essay.

His reasoning goes like this. The Chinese people save too much, primarily because their mostly privatized health care and education systems require cash on hand to access high quality services in both fields. Even through the haze of censorship, more Chinese people seem to be suffering from expensive "catastrophic" illnesses like chronic lung disease and cancer, and more Chinese parents believe education through high school and, preferably, college opens doors to the "harmonious society" with its trappings of modern prosperity. Thus, Leonhardt argues, to free up spending money for consumer goods, China's government needs to step in and "re-socialize" both services. If China prospers, he contends, we all prosper.

Meanwhile, back in the US, economists seem fixated on the statistic that "consumer spending" accounts for 70% of America's Gross Domestic Product--regardless of drops in income or household wealth (as when home equity and other assets plummet in value). It's never been clear to me how consuming that much more than we produce can be viable for more than a few years of very unbalanced and turbulent economic growth. Yet there it is, carved in stone, an oft-repeated shibboleth of TV and print media's most influential economic reporters. With bated breath, they scrutinize the monthly reports for signs that "the American consumer is back!"--finished with "deleveraging" household (i.e. credit card and mortgage) debt, and ready again to hit the mall with credit cards blazing.

Which somehow makes it an easy segue for them to advise China that they too need to ramp up consumption toward that magical 70% target, doubling their rate from the current figure of 34%. Certainly they deserve at least as high a living standard as we indulge in the USA, given that they work harder and have demonstrated the entrepreneurial skills required to sustain 10%+ GDP growth rates for 30 years! To attain this goal, the men in Beijing need to "unfetter" the bottled up consumer genie, by providing affordable health care and education at government expense, letting labor unions push for higher wages (as they did earlier this year), and re-orienting production away from its export-led model--to build the most gargantuan Consumer Society in the history of planet earth. And that will make the rest of us richer at the same time!

We in the US and our counterparts in Japan, South Korea, and Europe can again grow prosperous exporting consumer goods to the newly liberated 1.4 billion Chinese consumers, and, I also assume, again making more of the items we consume in our own factories. The Great Demand Dearth that has plagued the global economy since the US consumer went bust in 2008, will be vanquished!-- slain by the mighty dragon of Chinese consumption. Win!--Win!--Win!

So speed up those new coal-shipping facilities at the ports of Longview, Washington and Coos Bay, Oregon. Accelerate the open pit, closed pit, and mountaintop removal mining across the USA--and everywhere else. Ramp up the devouring of Australia's landscapes for coal and iron ore, intensify the rape of Canadian boreal forests for tar sand oil, the plundering of Brazil, Africa, and Russia for raw materials. We'll need exponentially more coal, oil, nuclear power, copper, iron ore, lumber, cement and other raw materials to build the new cities required for the additional 300 million villagers China wants to urbanize, and for the energy to heat and cool their apartments, fuel their cars, and power their new appliances. We can all get rich digging up the earth, chopping down the forests and heating up the planet!

So a Financial Times editorial this morning (11/29/10)--the first day of the new round of climate change talks in Cancun, Mexico--struck a discordent note. "We cannot gamble with the planet," they proclaim. We desperately need to do some "ecological accounting"! [ "read my blog!" I shouted at my screen] Therefore, the editorial continues, "Finance ministers should now be at the heart of climate change policy, [because] "We must put a number on the cost of degrading the earth to give the environment a value in political calculations." !!! (my emphasis) Can it really be that the bastion of the neo-liberal economic ideology that underpins free trade and globalization dares argue for "de-externalizing" the ecological costs of our way of life? Do woodchucks really chuck wood?

If, Buddha help us, anyone stops to take the FT editorial seriously, big, long-overdue changes might have half a chance (a few of the fervent might "do the google" and stumble upon my humble blog, among the many other and better sources their research could uncover). But then China's gallop toward a harmonious consumer society might encounter some substantial hurdles (as would the entire global economy's basic premise). Set a price on breathable air? clean water? public health? biodiversity? "keeping land fit to live upon"? Take seriously Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic? YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS!! I fear they'll quickly retrench and give us the same lethal response--"Let's wait and see what happens if we just race ahead a few more years."

More coal, fewer trees. More glittering cities, less biodiversity. More things, more cancer. More beef and poultry, more genetically-modified soy and corn--less biodiversity, less sustainability. Less "land fit to live upon." Eco-accounting just doesn't mix with the dominant model of globalization and not-so-free market economics. But perhaps there's just a sliver of hope that the Financial Times editors, and its influential readers ponder the full import of today's editorial. My hopes lay elsewhere, but I would certainly welcome their support in the life and death struggle for ecological health.

Feeding China's coal addiction...and the planet's demise

2010-11-27T13:39:00.000-08:00

Highly recommended articles: "Nations that debate coal use export it to feed China's need," (www.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/science/earth/22fossil.html) ; "Dirty coal, Clean future," by James Fallows, The Atlantic, Dec. 2010 ; and "In China, cultivating the urge to splurge," by David Leonhart, (www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/magazine/28China-t.html)

The composite portrait makes for alarming reading, tinged with a faint ray of hope in the Fallows article. We in the US, it turns out, are increasingly halting construction of new coal-fired plants on our own turf, while exporting exponentially growing volumes of coal to China. To wit, we shipped them a mere 2,714 tons of the thermal coal in 2009, but have since accelerated that to 2.9 million tons--a thousand times as much!--in just the first half of 2010. Yet, to put that into perspective, the tiotal seaborne trade in thermal coal (i.e. excluding the volume of coking coal) will reach 690 million tons this year--up from 385 million in 2001. And its primarily nations in the developed world who are shipping off their millions of tons of black rocks to fuel China's rampaging consumption, much of which is then used to manufacture products shipped back to consumers in the US. Thus, we're "exporting global warming," even while sometimes pretending we care about the perils of catastrophic climate change.

After all coal mining is labor intensive, creating lots of jobs in a high unemployment economy. And, as our neighbors in Longview, Washington argue, a new coal-exporting facility there will create 30 (!) high-wage jobs, facilitating trainloads of coal from expanded mining in the Rockies and western states. It will help our extreme trade deficit. And encourage the Chinese to eat the air pollution we don't want in our children's lungs.

Then along comes James Fallows to argue that this isn't all bad! China, unlike the US, is devoting tremendous funding and talent to developing the elusive "clean coal" silver bullet--our only hope for avoiding climate catastrophe. A compelling and well-argued thesis, which I'll discuss tomorrow. Family calls, and I want to answer.

Early warnings of China food crisis

2010-11-17T15:08:00.000-08:00

World financial markets took a bit of a tumble early this week, led by a steep drop in the Shanghai stock market and fueled by troubling news from both Ireland and China. Ireland because its banks were wobbling under a heavy debt burden and its government felt compelled to loan the bankers far more money than they had in Central Bank coffers. Soverign debt soared to frightening percentages of total GDP, and markets began demanding ever higher prices for Irish bonds, making it ever more difficult to finance the debt. A bailout looms. But Ireland's population of 4 million is just larger than that of Oregon, and smaller than scores of cities in China. So, as much as "contagion" may worry Germans, Greeks, Portugese, and all the bankers over-exposed to "periferal" debt, events in China--specifically its need to impose price controls to cool food-driven inflation--present a far bigger danger to global stability, and not just because McDonalds abruptly raised the price of a Big Mac this week.

Chinese inflation spiked more than four percent in October, a twenty-five month high, largely driven by food prices, which shot up more than 10% in the past year. This rise is more significant than it would be in the US, because food expenses account for a shocking one-third of the Chinese consumer price index. So the government decided to impose price controls--a fairly desperate, market distorting measure needed to prevent food riots and political instability. The Party also warned "speculators and hoarders" that harsh treatment awaits those attempting to profit from the shortages, say by selling vegetables and hunks of beef at exorbitant prices from a bench in a back alley. In China "harsh treatment" can mean death, especially for crimes which so directly threaten "social harmony"!

Given current domestic shortages, we can also expect aggresive buying on world food markets, with the predictable outcome of higher agricultural prices, about which the World Bank warned in today's Financial Times.

Lester Brown of the World Watch Institute highlighted the impact a nation of 1.4 billion people could exert on global food stocks if trends continued along the path they were blazing way back in 1994 when he wrote Who Will Feed China? His title question was meant to be provocative, sort of like, "has anyone but me projected current trends out 20 years or so?" The system explodes! Meaning that the route to prosperity and "food security" Japan and South Korea carved out on their rise to prosperity--that is, export-led manufacturing, large trade surpluses, rapid urbanization, and the ever-increasing volume of food imports needed to compensate for agricultural land and farm workers lost to "development"--would quickly exhaust global grain stocks.

Poorer, food insecure nations would suffer first, as China outbid them for increasingly scarce agricultural commodities. But before too long, China would be unable to procure sufficient food for its population at any price. Thus, sixteen years ago, Brown counseled the leaders in Beijing to make food self-sufficiency a top priority. And for a time they did. But by 2000, China's wheat harvests weren't able to meet domestic demand whenever any problem, even a minor freeze or drought, reduced output. In addition, while million of hectares of agricultural land was covered over with factories, cities and highways, the rapidly increasing "consumer class," began demanding a diet offering more meat, dairy and...beer. All of which required more grain.

China thus began its torrid relationship with imported soyabeans--primarily from Brazil and Argentina, but also from the USA, used mainly as feed for the proliferation of cattle, chickens and pigs required for "westernizing" food tastes. China is now the 800 ton dragon in the global grain silo. When her domestic supply falls short, as it increasingly does, that dragon takes a mighty bite out of world stocks. It's a worrying trend. One which colludes with my Cassandra-like predictions for continuing ecological disasters in China to portend a very ominous future for the world's food supply, and a huge heap of hunger, food riots, instability and chaos. Best to tend those gardens and support your local organic farmers. And hope the Chinese will change their environmentally destructive ways forthwith.

"Armistice Day," The G-20, and global imbalances

2010-11-11T13:25:00.000-08:00

Less than a half hour ago, my digital watch read 11:11 here on 11/11, and I strained to hear the bells chiming their remembrance of that moment ninety-two years ago when the "war to end all wars" ended, or more accurately, paused for a twenty year hiatus. Of course the bells don't chime on this side of the Atlantic, but we do have parades. And we don't commemorate President Wilson's act of great folly in inserting American troops onto the Western Front. Far worse, we rarely revisit the horrific wartime violations of Constitutional rights so painstakingly described in Harries and Harries' important book, The End of Innocence.

Instead we have football coaches ordering their young players to write emails to our soldiers "guarding the peace" in Iraq and Afghanistan, and sports announcers falling all over themselves to praise "our men and women uniform" who are supposed on the "front lines of freedom," willing to pay the ultimate price to protect our way of life, by which they mean not just freedom, but affluence.

For this one week each year we commemorate a moment of silence before every sporting event, invite the local veterans to hold the flag while we all sing "The Star Spangled Banner," our eyes filled with tears, our blood hot and racing in a freenzy of patriotic zeal.

Meanwhile, behind all the pagentry and national pride, our economy stumbles along, and the insidious corrosion born of high unemployment, increasing poverty, and rampant inequality works its awful power on our physical and spiritual infrastructure. We and the environment upon which all life depends, are dying from the new opiate of the masses--cheap goods and cheap credit--made possible by the wonders of "free trade" and by the collusion of "drug pushers" officially known as transnational corporations and the People's Republic of China.

Like any addict, we American consumers can't survive long without our regular fixes, which for us consists of plentiful cheap stuff--magical little do-everything cell phones, vivid as life flat screen TVs, and a surfeit of clothing, footwear, gadgetry, and energy consumption unsurpassed in human history. We've come to think of this mountain of cheap stuff and the electricity and fossil fuel to power it--the "Non-negotiable American Standard of Living"--as our birthright. So it's no suprise that we get a little cranky when we have to cut back. After all addicts usually need to continually up the dosage to keep that happy feeling. And because we're still so enthralled with the full shelves at Wal-Mart, and that new "Black Ops" game that's all the buzz, we're a little slow to grasp just how fragile this affluence bubble has become.

But today, as we in the USA honor our veterans, a gaggle of men in expensive suits gather half way round the world, in Seoul, South Korea, to haggle over how to make that "American standard of living" a reality for their own people--or at least to preserve and promote the weath and power of the elites they serve. And, be assured, there will be no ecological accountants shouting from the galleries to spoil their fun. Just smokey rooms bustling with serious men from Germany and China ranting on about the US Federal Reserve's irresponsible spate of "quantitative easing" ("QE2"), and equally serious US/UK representatives chastening their Chinese and German counterparts for their currency manipulation and failure to strengthen their domestic markets.

The global WTO system is about to crash and they know it. They just want the other guy to suffer the high cost of repairing it so their own constituents won't riot in the streets and toss them out of office.

America's "opium pushers," be they Chinese, German, Japanese or Korean, want to keep selling us "product." Their "export-led" economies are premised on the US market supplying the demand to compensate for the fact that their own workers lack sufficient wages to buy all they produce. Now all the big exporters hate QE2 because it's cheapening the US dollar and making it tougher for our consumers to buy as much "dope" as the pushers need to sell us to sustain their export-dependent growth.

When we, or others, point out that the US can no longer afford to be the world's consumer of last resort, that we can't continue sopping up all that suplus product and accumulating the monumental trade imbalances we'll never be able to pay off, they just change the subject--and scold us for the very "addiction" (profligacy) which has been the key to their prosperity. Just as our addiction to consumption makes us a very ill nation, Germany and China's addicition to our consumer demand has likewise eroded their economic health.

In this WTO system, we've created the worst kind of co-dependent relationships--one in which multiple parties must now simultaneously shed their addictions lest we all "hit bottom" together. Further, like all true co-dependents, these actors seem to prefer staying stuck in the problem and blaming others to taking ownership for the crisis and mustering the courage to get healthy.

May we soon find the insight and wisdom we need to pursue a new and ecologically healthy path.

Whazzup with America?

2010-11-03T16:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's election makes me wonder if we Americans are doomed to a long "tossing out" cycle, given that neither political party has a plan that can extricate us from the economic morass into which our own Big Finance and transnational corporations have pushed us. More likely the anger and chaos will just keep ramping up each election cycle until something breaks. Meanwhile I fear domestic corrosion, born of high unemployment, increased poverty, and rampant inequality will eat away the last bits of "hope" and "change we can believe in." Unless multitudes of concerned citizens forthwith pick up Bill McKibben's Deep Economy and/or David Korten's When Corporations Rule the World and Agenda for a New Economy and start up study groups at the locally-owned coffee shops and bookstores, I fear dark times ahead.

The way I see things, the transnational corporations which have "off-shored" jobs to Mexico, China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh--but mostly China, have set the rest of us on a course of inexorable economic decline, with social and political chaos being tugged along in its wake. So a few clear-seeing Democrats actually campaigned to repeal the tax breaks we currently award firms who move jobs overseas--and the US Chamber of Commerce tossed millions into campaigns to defeat those same Democrats. "Off-shoring can be good for American corporations," they say, "it makes them more competitive." So we dare not mess with that stampede of jobs to low cost venues, even if it means Americans will have less and less money to buy even the cheap, Chinese-made goods filling up our retail shelves. Yet, the poorer we become, the more difficult it will be to wean us off those cheap imports, and the deeper into hole we'll be.

So, unless Obama and Congress magically muster the courage to pull the punch bowl away (with a wall of tariffs to keep out targeted imports, and a host of targeted incentives to restart our manufaturing sector), those nagging trade imbalances--colossal debt to the Chinese, Japanese, Saudis, and others--will continue to pile into insurmountable mountains of I.O.U.'s in the coffers of foreign governments, with all the leverage and dependency that implies--for all parties. Until we just can't pay even the interest on our debts and either default or "monetize" the deficit via inflation (which "QE2" [or 3] could do by unleashing a large enough gush of newly printed-- and "unsterilized"-- money into the system). And since no president or Fed Chairman is likely to let the US default, you can bet your own stash of dollars (or gold) that
the Chinese and other US creditors are vigorously discussing just how close to that invisible, but very real, threshold they can let this highly dysfunctional, co-dependent relationship carry them.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnel will get his wish--Obama will be a one-term president, along with all the gridlock and partisan bickering that implies. Unless our president gets very bold very soon. Bold enough to steer us on a new course of environmental sustainability, ecological justice, and social justice. The shrill Republican and Tea Party spokespersons will scream, and their well-healed corporate sponsors will ensure they are heard. But only such boldness can remobilize--and this time, truly mobilize all that amazing verve and energy Obama once inspired in our youth (and so many others). This time the stakes will be far higher, but the situation should be grave enough that college kids and union workers, teachers and nurses, police and firefighters, hair stylists and plumbers, can see that it will take far more than a short-lived "get out the vote" campaign to set things right. Nothing short of taking power back from the "stateless," unpatriotic corporations that now control our Congress and much of our media--while enduring a vehement counter-attack from the right--can restore this nation to greatness and give our grandkids a fighting chance to live in a peaceful, healthy world. May we rise to the task.

Refuges for "mavericky" (non-GM) seeds?

2010-10-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

Last post I raised the prospect that Monsanto, like the men in Beijing, had bet the farm (so to speak) that they could out-smart and out-run Nature, and that their risky, but highly profitable GMO gambit was meeting with formidable resistance--in the form of Bt-resistant armyworms (and a slew of other "super bugs), and Roundup-resistant "pigweed" (Palmer amaranth) and at least nine other mutant super-weeds in at least 22 states which are now "infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn."

As the New York Times article ("Farmers cope with Roundup-resistant weeds," www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04 ) (under)states, "The superweeds could temper American agriculture's enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops... [because] if Roundup doesn't kill the weeds (or the bugs), farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for special seeds." Well, damn! It's about time, although the results have yet to result in a clear victory for healthy, sustainable agriculture.

Rather than going-organic, Chemically-addicted farmers, whether in a "refuge" or out, are merely spraying more and more toxic potions on those mutant pigweed stalks before they stretch out to their full seven foot potential and become tough enough to break a harvester. More chemicals+more plowing=dead soil micro-organisms, more erosion, more chemical residue on our food, and a larger dead zone out there in the already biologically-stressed Gulf of Mexico. Or as the article (unimaginatively) concludes, "such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water." (i.e, not to more guys willing to switch to "agro-ecology" or organic methods) And I suppose it's cold comfort to US agribiz that mega-farms in Brazil, China, and Australia now confront the same pesky problems. Tough to flaunt Nature's rules without being bitten where it hurts. And for Monsanto and its agribiz clients, that's in the pocket book.

So what about those "refuges" where "non-designer" seeds battle weeds and bugs without genetic protection, mentioned last post as a promising strategy for prolonging the usefulness of Bt against the European corn borer and (possibly) halting the northward march of fall army worms? First, I need to point out that it was an entomology professor at the U. of Arizona, not Monsanto, who broached the refuge idea, as reported in Science Magazine. Our preeminent corporate chemical peddler prefers to "stack" ever more, and more expensive, traits into their genetically engineered seeds, and to subsidize their customers' use of other bug and weed killers while their scientists sort the mess out. Refuges in which farmers planting cheaper non-GM seeds are reaping more profit from the near-absence of corn borers than are Monsanto's clients, are surely anathema to all agro-technophiles. Their apparent success in slowing the spread of resistant bugs raise several interesting questions.

First, count me as a big fan of refuges. Whatever genetic diversity we can nuture in our seed stock is surely a good thing. Monsanto's prolonged drive for monopoly profits has done all it can to eliminate that diversity, by buying up first smaller, then larger seed sellers, to the point where it has attained a dangerous level of control over this nation's corn (70%), soya (90%) and cotton (70%) crops. Such wide-spread genetic uniformity invites disaster. And while it can be staved off for a time by mobilizing chemical arsenals, that will ultimately prove to be futile effort, no match for rapidly-mutating insects and weeds.

So refuges there must be. But the amount and types of diversity on those refuges holds the key to their success.

Only broad genetic diversity in seeds--along with the dynamic, evolutionary imperative to freely mutate and be hybridized with other stocks--can keep pace with the new genetic arrays of insect and plant life which natural processes keep churning out. But even that will not be enough. Refuges must also be protected zones for farmers, spaces where human ingenuity of the "land wisdom" type is free to practice new (and old), non-chemical strategies for keeping unwanted insects and plant invaders at bay. Places where farmers employ helpful insects and "companion" plants routinely killed off by industrial agriculture's toxic chemicals, and where naturally occuring soil micro-organisms boost crops' natural resistance to pests.

In other words, undoing Monsanto's murderous grip on American agriculture requires we undo their stiffling grasp on farmers' ingenuity and their ability to communicate with one another, imposed as it has been by Monsanto's and other agri-businees firms' rigid contracts, and the dominant mindset of industrial agriculture which views the farmer as an inert cog in a vast machine.

There must be refuges free from contamination by industrial agriculture's reckless experiment with genetic modification and its profligate use of chemicals--until such time as all the land is again one big refuge. May that time be soon.

Worms eating Monsanto's profits

2010-10-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

The NPR story looked at first glace like praise for Monsanto's GM-corn, back on that October 7th evening as I listened to All Things Considered. But the report harbored two intriguing plot twists that sent me to the NPR website.

Reporter Dan Charles extracted the highlights of his piece from Science magazine and gave it the title "Genetically Modified Corn Helps Common Kind, Too." So far Monsanto's exec's respiration and heart rates were beginning a slow ascent in anticipation of the good news being broadcast to the army of opinion leaders among NPR's well-educated audience. As they'd already learned from the Science article, one of their most profitable products, corn seeds infused with the naturally occuring soil bacteria, bacillus thuringiensis (which everyone without a lab coat calls "Bt"), had proven to increase profits to corn growers by $7 billion over the past fourteen years by killing off corn borers.

Since the first plantings of Bt corn 14 years ago, corn borer populations have consistently decreased, and "big outbreaks," which had routinely occurred every six to seven years, ceased to happen. Far more corn survived to market, less pesticide needed to poison the borers. More money for the farmers. But now comes plot twist #1.

"Bt corn" now sprouts on 63% of all US soil devoted to the growing of corn, about 55 million acres out of the 88 million acre total. And it was the farmers growing "conventional" corn on those 33 non-GMO acres who reaped most of the benefit from the near-extirpation of the borers, about two-thirds of that $7 billion total, because their non-GM seeds were cheaper. "Free riders," some economists would call them, eventhough Monsanto snatched Bt from the arsenal of organic farmers--who, unlike Monsanto, have applied it sparingly for decades, and thus minimized the likelihood that common pests would develop resistance. Monsanto has qickly squandered that neat biological asset.

Nonetheless, agricultural entomologists are thrilled at the increased profits harvested by the non-GM farmers. Seems as if they think the existence of "refuges" where borers aren't eating toxic Bt with every bite of corn slows the build up of resistance to the "miracle" insecticide which now gets expressed in every cell of the entire corn plant--stalk, leaves, silk and roots, as well as the corn kernels. Not too precise that GM technology. And the reason they think refuges are the magic ticket to prolonging Bt's effectiveness is that there have been absolute disasters where they haven't--Plot Twist #2. And this is what really perked up my ears. The worms who ate Monsanto's profits.

Seems the agri-business kingpins in Puerto Rico figured that if a little BT corn was good, a whole island full would be massively better. No space for those pests to gain a foothold in Puerto Rico! So 100% of the island's corn farms planted exclusively Bt corn--and those pesky fall armyworms mutated their little guts to adapt to a steady diet of corn plants with a Bt chaser in every bite. Zap went the harvest. "What the f***!" screamed the farmers. "We pay a premium for these high-tech GM seeds, and this little worm wipes us out!" they howled. "Get that Monsanto rep down here--I want a refund!"

But then I reflected, Puerto Rico ain't Kansas. It's a tropical spot, where plants and insects flourish--year round. One where row upon row of genetically-identical corn, armed only with a non-evolving Bt gene, proved no match for the more genetically nimble worms. It was a slaughter.

In the Midwest corn belt, by contrast, harsh winters intervene to pose a thus-far insurmountable obstacle to tropical fall armyworms. But they are creeping (and flying in the moth stage) closer to Kansas, with outbreaks recently reported in northen Alabama. And the "corn belt" is creeping further south. So here's some bad news for Monsanto I stumbled upon in Corn&Soybean Digest. (http://cornandsoybeandigest.com/combat-armyworms).

"Bt cotton and corn have failed to provide full fall armyworm control in many areas," says Ryan Jackson, entomologist for USDA-ARS, Stoneville, Mississippi. AND, "With the large increases in corn production in the South, corn is likely to be the driver for fall armyworm infestations...Bt cotton and corn have never provided complete control of fall armyworms. They will infest the corn first. Once that dries, they will move into cotton and other host plants." !!! Like grass and alfalpha and who knows what else. (my emphasis)

Jackson recommends applying lots more spray. "Regardless of insecticide, it is recommended that spray volume be increased to increase control." And he also counsels, "Because of recent problems with resistance development to some of the organophosphate standards, such as Orthene, Diamond should be a good fit into insecticide chemistry rotation for plant bugs." (my emphasis)

As I've written many times before, biotechnology's GM quiver, never bulging to begin with, is about out of arrows. Despite the hype I've quoted from The Economist's GM-boosters, Monsanto's Bt and Round-up ready corn and soybeans aren't about to end world hunger. Far from it. As ever more bugs evolve a taste for Bt and ever more varieties of super weeds evolve resistance to Round-up--phenomena happening at an ever quickening pace, ever more farmers are just saying "No!" to Monsanto's more expensive genetically-modified seeds. And corporate scientists don't yet have an answer. In the "long run" the fatal flaw in a technology that runs contrary to natural selection will prove Monsanto's undoing. That "long run" can't come too soon for the world's farmers--and the rest of us whose subsistence depends on their success.

(and there's obviously more to say about those "refuges" in my next post. That logic needs much closer scruting--feel free [encouraged!] to add your thoughts in a comment)

Revenge of the Solar Panels

2010-10-14T17:01:00.000-07:00

President Reagan captured the "morning in America" mood best when he gazed at the White House rooftop, its sleek lines marred by Jimmy Carter's hunky solar collectors, and boldly ordered, "Mr. Workman, tear down those panels!"

And down they came. It was 1981, and America's 40th president replaced our first bold forray into soal energy with coal-powered heat in winter, coal-powered air conditioning in summer. President Reagan tossed out an image along with the sheet metal and silicon. The US, in this bold new era, would be a manly state, powered by "manly," All-American energy; that is coal and oil, the stuff from which our home-grown billionaires are made. No effete, metrosexual, hippie energy panel should crown our nation's most revered residence.

A symbolic gesture, that tearing down of panels, but one which radiated profound implications for this nation's economy as well as its energy future, and for the planet's warming climate. In the ensuing 29 years, we've grown ever more dependent on foreign imports, ever more energy insecure, ever more warlike in our efforts to gain and protect access to Middle East reserves, and ever more violent in our assault on the earth's ecosystems to fulfill our rapacious demand for crude.

We've reaped a terrible harvest of political, military, economic and ecological disaster as a consequence: trillion dollar wars; the super-corrupt "oil administration" of Bush-Cheney-Halliburton-KBR, which also unleashed the financial criminals to fleece the masses and bring the global economy to its knees; BP's catastrophic Gulf gush; development of the Canadian tar sands fiasco as our number one source of imported oil (a disaster, which despite the egregious environmental record it's already piled up, has only begun its evil doing); default of our leadership role in clean alternative energy; and 29 more years as the trend- setter for the worst type of fossil fuel-based "development," with all the attendant trampling by our "super-heavy footprint."

As Americans, exhulted Mr. Reagan, we are entitled (by God!) to consume as much oil and gas--and any other resource required to sustain our non-negotiable lifestyle--as we can pay for. For the "Great Communicator" and the noisy chorus of fossil-friendly boosters who wrote the scripts for his teleprompter, heretics the likes of Jimmy Carter were "girlie men" who suffered from a dearth of testosterone and patriotism, wimps unwilling to do whatever required to preserve the American way of life. Patsies willing to negotiate away our freedom to the men in the Kremlin and to our own homegrown, tree-hugging socialists.

And what became of those symbolic panels? Seems one made its way to New Hampshire where it was captured by none other than Bill McKibben, America's number one climate change hero. And he wanted to re-mount it atop the White House to make the opposite symbolic gesture--time to mobilize this nation's talents and resources to stave off climate disaster (cf. his book Eaarth: making a life on a tough new planet, the extra "a" in Eaarth symbolizes our planet's new reality).

President Obama, coached by top advisors, declined the gift. Seems the toxic half-life of anything associated with Jimmy Carter is longer than 30 years.

But in a more hopeful development, Obama announced he would install new, more efficient panels atop his abode. Fresh new symbols of the change he hopes we still believe in. A timely, if vacuous, gesture, given that Congress left climate-change legislation languishing in the empty halls, perceiving it to be as toxic as Hungary's escaped red sludge or some of China's rivers and airsheds.

But not nearly so powerful as McKibben's symbol could have been. Putting the latter's vintage panel above the presidential domicile would have signalled the beginning of a broad and energetic grassroots movement. An act of wise and bold statesmanship. Instead Obama again opted for caution and timidity--don't want to give Fox News any more fodder. As if they need it. Rather than energize his base, he chose to dishearten it--again. Even as he ventures out to local backyards to fire up the troops.

We're pissed off, Barack! You're tiptoeing around Karl Rove and Fox's resident rodeo clown as if docility will quash their thirst for your blood. Think again. Whatever you do their well-funded spin machine will transform into the coarse cloth of vitriol. They're like avaricious mob lawyers, willing to make up facts, tell the Big Lie, say anything to get their client off--only less principled.

But we grassroots environmental types are predisposed to like you. We crave your leadership, but loathe your pusillanimous, pandering penchant for peurile politicking. Man up, Barack! It's time to muster the courage to animate those great ideas we know you--and we--have.

China's Ecocide--a slow motion catastrophe

2010-10-05T18:32:00.000-07:00

Let me set the stage for assessing China's disastrous ecological state with a few quotations I excerpted from Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic," included in A Sand County Almanac (Ballantine Books, 1970, but first published in 1949, the year after Leopold's death). For me the wisdom, respect and love of land Leopold expressed in this small volume represent both a stunning critique of why our current mode of life propels us ineluctably toward catastrope, and a road map we must use to find our way back to a healthy, sustainable future. A wildlife "manager" by trade, Leopold's penetrating insights, his grasp of natural history and ethics, and his skill as a writer make A Sand County Almanac one of the three most important books we should be teaching in our schools and discussing in our churches, synagogues, mosques and community centers (along with what those other two books might be). Here are just three of the cogent insights we'll use to look at China, keeping in mind it's mostly the magnitude and velocity of ecological destruction that sets that nation apart from many others, including our own.

Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil. (p.253)

Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. (p.261)

Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets (cf. the film Blade Runner or David Mitchell's book Cloud Atlas for dystopic visions of where such alienation from the land will take us). He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities where crops grow...In short, land is something he has 'outgrown.' (pp.261-62)

It's clear to me that the vast majority of the [Han] Chinese people, which excludes many Tibetans, Uighurs and other oppressed minorities, love their country. But what is it they love? What is China if not its "land," which in Leopold's thinking includes soil, water, air, flora and fauna; and its people, which in Leopold's scheme of things are "just plain citizens" in that same land (or "biotic") community? So, if the soil is diseased by the abuses of acid rain, over-grazing, polluted irrigation water, and over-use of agricultural chemicals, and much of what had once been fertile agricultural land has been covered up by factories, cities and asphalt, and another third of the total has turned to desert, then clearly it's not the land that the Chinese love.

Nor can it be the water--a vital part of Leopold's "energy circuit"--which factories and mines use as dumping grounds for their toxic waste and towns and cities employ as disposals for human sewage. Throw in multiple dams on almost every river, and its clear China's egregious abuse of its freshwater resources has greatly impacted the flora and fauna which are vital to keep that "fountain of energy" flowing.

So then, does the current spike in nationalist fervor and patriotic pride signal a great love of the Chinese people for their fellow citizens? If so, then what do we make of the dispicable working conditions under which the men and women who produce China's material wealth toil in its mines and factories? Those dangerous and sordid workplaces where producing cheap goods for export to wealthier nations means employers sacrificing the health of their labor force for the sake of "competitive advantage." And what to make of the fact that as long ago as 1997, before much of the economic growth that followed China's admittance into the WTO in 2001, 60 million people found it difficult to get enough water for their daily needs and more than 600 million (!) are forced to drink contaminated water? (E. Economy, The River Runs Black, p. 68). Since then population has continued to grow, additional millions have migrated to cities where water consumption--showers, clothes washers, etc.--averages four times the per capita volume used in villages, and tens of thousands of new factories have hooked up to the water grid. And pollution has continued virtually unabated, forcing ever larger numbers of Chinese to poison themselves (mostly slowly) with industrial carcinogens and noxious microbes. Thus the spike in cancer villages all across China, and the unknown, unacknowledged health effects of subsisting on too little of the fluid which comprises 70% of our body mass. Kidney disease? Weakened immune systems?

And then there's the air! New sources of natural gas, wind and solar are coming on-line. But coal use continues to increase, and with it the toxic air pollution in most of China's cities.

Put it all together and it spells "eco-cide," the radical disruption of those energy flows, the death of the soil, the extirpation of plants and animals, the breakdown of the very foundations of human health--and thus of civilization itself. The myriad symptoms of advanced "land disease" indicate China has already entered "stage 4" of its ecological demise, even as its government and people celebate their new found status as an economic and political super power. Yet, even as its leaders play hard ball over currency issues and force the Japanese government into a humiliating retreat over a captured sea captain, its citizens have been forced to abandon thousands of villages because of encroaching deserts and depleted aquifers. Its children are being poisoned by heavy metals from coal smoke and metallugical plants, and its citizenry suffers from a public health catastrophe of historic proportions.

So expect torrents of environmental refugees from the water-scarce north to the wetter south, eventually including a sizeable portion of Beijing's residents. Expect an economic decline created by the physical decline of its labor force. Expect the plans for "universal health coverage," promised for 2014, to founder against the unrelenting tide of cancer and chronic lung disease. Expect social unrest, panic, violence, political repression and chaos. Expect a great nation's unraveling because it had no love or respect for the land, and like King Midas foolishly traded the precious bounty of this earth for gold and gadgets. And hope the Chinese people awaken from the false promises of "modern prosperity" to behold their impending doom and change before it's too late--if that horse hasn't already fled the barn.

China 1959, Great Leap to Great Famine; 2010, Great Rush to Great Ecocide?

2010-09-28T12:26:00.000-07:00

But are these [technological marvels] not in one sense mere parlor tricks compared with our utter ineptitude in keeping land fit to live upon? Aldo Leopold, "The Conservation ethic"

I think of Leopold's insight every time I read another story about China's economic progress, or one of the all-too-rare stories describing its ecological nightmares. In the former category, the Financial Times featured an on-line slide show of China's high-speed trains and dazzling new rail stations. These cavernous, architectural wonders look like science fiction brought to life, and put to shame the ramshakel, decrepit rail depots here in the US. (cf. FT.com, "China: a future on tract," September 23, 2010. click on the "Interative" feature, "China's rail ambitions," and then the camera icons for Beijing and Wuhan).

The super-sleek bullet trains, "borrowed" from Japanese and German designs, look to be three generations ahead of Amtrac's ageing machinery. As Tom Friedman effused in his recent column (9/26), these trains whisk passengers, cell phones to the ear, lap tops on laps, from Beijing to the port city of Tianjin, a distance of about 75 miles (110 km), in just 20 minutes, barely enough time to clear the inbox. It apparently shocked Tom into waxing euphoric about China's new turn toward the green, a opinion I disputed in last week's post.

But today, I read the other kind of story, this one about China's rapidly desertifying west and north in which sand storms are pushing deserts across agricultural grazing land, by Lester Brown at earthpolicynews@earthpolicy.org. Brown gets right to the point. "The thin layer of topsoil that covers the planet's land surface is the foundation of civilization... [and] sometime within the last century, as humans and livestock expanded, soil erosion began to exceed new soil formation over large areas." His verdict, we humans are "not keeping land fit to live upon," or to borrow a more colorful phrase, also from Leopold, "Our engineering has attained the pearly gates of a near millennium, but our applied biology still lives in nomads' tents of the Stone Age." Unfortunately Leopold's stinging critique of modern ecological folly applies to most nations, including the US. But nowhere is it more important to expeditiously reverse course than in China, with its 1.4 billion population.

China's head-long "rush to modern prosperity," the CCP's inspirational slogan for the past decade or so, has created a "Blade Runner world," in which the more affluent citizens of its mega-cities live like the privileged denizens of Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi classic, sequestered in high-tech, hermetically sealed apartments, pampered by labor-saving microchip gadgetry, while the air above constantly drips oily black goo and neon-lit dirigibles blasting a constant stream of promos for "off-world" vacations. Meanwhile the streets below teem with an underworld of crime and chaos. And the wizards of biotechnology have perfected genetically-human "replicants" who do all society's dirty work, including mining distant planets for the raw materials required by an industrial civilization that has clearly "outgrown the earth." (Thus the film answers that nagging question I've posed before, "where will China get essential raw materials once it's 'eaten' Australia?")

Like most of the world's people, China's leaders have turned their backs on the natural world, like the rulers in Blade Runner, "land is something [they] have 'outgrown." And so they mindlessly flout the basic primise of Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic;" that is, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." (A Sand County Almanac, p.262, Ballentine Books edition, 1970)

Reading Yiyun Li's bleak but powerful novel, The Vagrants, brought to mind an emerging parallel between that novel's setting--an impoverished Yellow River town in which inhabitants stagger through the poverty, fear and political repression of the post-Cultural Revolution, post-Mao era--and the "Blade Runner" society which exists in China's more prosperous mega-cities.

The novel's physical setting, "Muddy River," roils with mass "post-traumatic stress." Everyone acts as if disoriented by the violence, chaos and mistrust which were the CR's legacy. The book's older characters are particularly cowed by historical memory, anxious not to feel again the sharp lash of political violence, but confused as to what behaviors--by them or their children--can land them in prison, cost them their jobs and livelihood, or even lead to their execution. More to my point, the older citizens also fear a return to the abject poverty and mass starvation--the Great Famine in which 30 million starved--the enormous unintended consequence of Mao's tragically grandiose "Great Leap Forward," 1959-61. So how's that anything like today's China, in which rising prosperity and food security can be taken for granted?

If the current "great leap" will also bring along unintended consequences, are there already hints of what they might be? Is there any chance we're blinded to a looming ecological tragedy by the glitter of new rail terminals or a Shanghai skyline rife with sleek skyscrappers? Oh, yea.

When Chairman Mao decided to "force the Spring" in 1958 by commanding China's mostly-peasant population to drop everything--including tending the crops--in order to spur industrial production and close the yawning gap between China and its more developed enemies, by then including the USSR as well as the USA, no one dared tell the (red) emperor he had no tunic. So peasants neglected the fields and ventured into the nearby forests, felling one-third of China's trees for firewood destined to fuel back-yard furnaces in which they labored to transform pots, pans and farm implements into steel. Instead they got useless "pig turds," and failed harvests--the magnitude of which were disguised on paper by fearful bureaucrats until it was too late to change course--which fell far short of feeding the people.

Blinded by ambition and imperious grandiosity, Mao flouted the laws of nature, turned his back on the land to make the steel and grow the factories essential to build his "modern" war machine. But like always, Nature batted last, and 30 million lives later, forced Mao to abandon his dream.

Peasants resumed the job of feeding 700 million Chinese, but before the dust had much chance of settling, Mao unleashed his Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution in a concerted effort to stifle all those critical of the Great Helmsman's folly, under the guise of "purifying" China from the nefarious influence of "capitalist roaders." Ironically, it was latter, highly tormented group whose ideas came to power with Deng Xiaoping and steered China toward the "modern prosperity" of the present Blade Runner society.

Like Mao, China's current leaders are blinded by grandiosity, a vision of their nation as a prosperous global super power. The preeminent global power, poised to snatch the mantel of leadership from a decaying US. Also like Mao, the CCP's current leaders have declared war on Nature in their frantic rush to squeeze every ounce of GDP growth from their people and landscapes. And the ecological stress points have begun to revolt--expanding deserts, unbreathable air, poisoned water, cancer villages, and a carefully disguised public health crisis of historic proportions.

But what would a Great Ecocide, one with "Chinese characteristics," actually look like? And at what point will China cross that invisible threshhold, beyond which even radical change will be too late--if they haven't already done so. Those are the two burning questions I'll explore next post.

Tom Freedman--wrong again about China

2010-09-21T10:09:00.000-07:00

I despair Mister "World is Flat" will fail to spot China's approaching ecological cyclone until it whaps him in the face, fixated as he is on the freshness of the early rain bands. So I wrote to him after his Sunday column, "Aren't We Clever?" (NYT, 9/18/10)--composed in Tiajin, China, no less--once again lavished praise on Beijing for its bold leadership on environmental issues. And, as is his want, to chide us Americans for terminal stupidity. Not that we don't need chiding. Any ice water old Tommie can splash in our collective faces to awaken us from the complacent stupor about climate change, ecological crisis, and economic/social breakdown is a good thing. It's just that he was in Tiajin!--the heavily polluted mega-city (15 million or more) on the Bohai Sea, just east of Beijing, which has one of the dumbest water policies on planet earth, and he's waxing euphoric about China's leadership in green technology! As if the coal-smudged air entering his lungs and the toxic cargo of industrial effluent, raw sewage and agricultural chemicals carried by the nine rivers which converge in that city, as they churn languidly toward the heavily polluted sea with their stinking, undrinkable ugliness take a distant back seat to China's leading role in making the world's cheapest solar panels and wind turbines--most of which are exported to Europe! Didn't they let you outdoors there, Tommie?

I recommended that Mr. Friedman read Ma Jun's critically important China's Water Crisis before he writes any more misguided columns about China's new "greenness." Mr. Ma, one of China's leading environmental activists, somehow remains out of jail. He clearly loves his country and despairs at policies which privilege economic growth over ecological and human health. His focus on China's rampant pollution of its scarce water resources includes detailed historical and ecological analyses of
each of the Middle Kingdom's river systems and major aquifers. And he finds FOLLY dripping from every water-related policy decision, going back decades. Tianjin is such a hard case it warrants its own chapter, "Nine rivers converging in a land of water." Nine rivers!!--and not one suitable to provide drinking water even with the most advanced treatment technologies. Indeed, the water flowing from Tom's hotel shower head likely derived from Tianjin's new desalination plant--a very expensive, energy-intensive technology for rendering polluted sea water relatively safe for human consumption, but one rife with opportunity for a few corrupt officials to profit from their fellows' plight.

The "Nine rivers" chapter follows "Moving the Capital for Water," which describes Beijing water desperation as its last aquifers approach their 2015 dry up date, and its policy of "water bullying" extends to ever more distant farms, villages and townships with ever-diminishing results.

Like its sister city, Tianjin, Beijing opted to bring Chairman Mao's grandiose dream of bringing abundant Yantze River water from the wetter south to the parched northern plains. The so-called "South-North Water Diversion Project" was slated to fill Beijing's faucets in time for the 2008 Olympic Games, but then "shit happened," literally! No one in Beijing bothered to coordinate the gigantic engineering project (1,200 km of canals, hundreds of water treatment plants) with officials in the south. So all along the Yangtze new refineries sprouted, new factories added to the cargo of toxic waste, and burgeoning cities disposed of raw sewage in what's come to be known as "the world's largest open sewer," the almighty Yangtze.

Like Tianjin's toxic slurries, river water from the wet south has become too polluted to purify, and the "south-north" technological fix languishes with cost over-runs and the intractable problem of turning shit into drinking water. Last year Tianjin opted out and tossed all its eggs into the desalination bucket. It's a shame Mr. Friedman didn't notice. But when you're a celebrity, a best-selling author, and trotted out as an environmental expert with the world keenest eye for spotting trendy developments, your lense on the world can obscure some earth-shaking issues (the ecological cyclone) as it rivets its focus on more comfortable themes (the refreshing rain drops)--"China's kicking our ass in green technology, creating jobs."

One line from the "Aren't we clever?" column captures the article's pervasive irony better than I ever could. Friedman approvingly quotes Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, who observed, "The push for green in China...is a practical discussion on health and wealth. There is no need to emphasize future consequences when people already see, eat and breathe (and drink! Tom) pollution every day." (my emphasis, since he didn't "feel the need"). Oh, but there is a need, Tom! China's Communist Party officials at the local and national levels have squelched open discussion of these issues and unleashed the thugs on environmental activists to ensure economic growth stays in the driver's seat. It's how they stay in power, while, of course, enriching themselves, their friends and their privileged progeny. But my, "aren't they clever?"!!

Are "Cheap" solar panels an ecological bargain?

2010-09-14T10:34:00.000-07:00

If you believe it's generally good for public discourse when someone "complicates" our thinking, then the flaring controversy over cheap solar panels from China should give an intellectual shot in the arm to those who fear climate change, those who care about fair trade, and those who fret over the future of the US economy. Unfortunately that's still a tiny minority of the American people.

I often rant against the ecological, social and economic disasters created by the US and other national elite's having pushed and pulled so much of the world into a deeply "globalized" economic structure. Their claim is that the more everyone "liberalizes" trade relations and their own domestic economies, the more prosperous and "free" we'll all be. To their neo-liberal view of the world, it makes perfect sense that the US should buy its solar panels, as well as its wind turbines and electric cars, from China, which enjoys the same type of comparative advantage in manufacturing such green technologies as they do in making our textiles, toys, furniture and flat screen TVs. Make things where production costs are lowest, they argue, and the American consumers will get more for their dollar. As in "Save more, live better--shop Walmart."

But then those pesky unions and a bunch of liberal democrats barged in and filed a lawsuit with the WTO accusing China of violating free trade rules by subsidizing exports of clean energy technology such as solar panels and wind turbines. ("Union accuses China of illegal clean energy subsidies," NYT, 9/09/10, "On clean energy, China skirts rules," NYT 9/08/10). It turns out there's a vast constellation of factors behind the cheap price tags of goods made in China, including local governments providing large tracts of cheap land for the factories, and a bundle of subsidies to ensure the "China price" can beat the "American," "German" or "Danish" price for solar panels. Add in rock bottom prices for semi-skilled, highly disciplined, industrious labor and the virtual absence of environmental law enforcement or worker health and safety standards and you get a migration of transnational corporations following the exigencies of competition to the Middle Kingdom. And a lawsuit from the United Steelworkers Union that will linger in the arcane proceedings of the WTO until all the US solar manufacturers have been driven to bankruptcy.

Meanwhile in the halls of Congress a small, but vocal minority of Democrats occassionally rails against Chinese currency manipulation, pointing out that a nation with such large and persisting trade surpluses should suffer the usual appreciation of its currency--if the men in Beijing let the yuan "float" on the currency markets. As Paul Krugman said on September 12th, "You may see claims that China's trade surplus has nothing to do with its currency policy; if so, that would be a first in world economic history. An undervalued currency always promotes trade surpluses, and China is no different." ("China, Japan, America," NYT). But such critics are always opposed by the shills of America's transnational corporations--Chinese forceful "5th Column"--which benefit from the current arrangement of producing at third world costs and selling at first world prices. Republicans and neo-liberal Democrats cloak their arguments in the rhetoric of free trade while raking in campaign contributions from their corporate masters. But the ecological cost/benefit analysis gets more complicated.

As homeowners, public and private utilities and factory managers can all afford to buy--and thus, install--far more cheap Chinese solar panels than more expensive US-made ones, it's obvious we can do more to reduce greenhouse emissions via the "free trade" route than via the "buy American," protectionist strategy of imposing compensatory tariffs on Chinese panels to level the playing field. Besides, manufacturing the panels consumes large amounts of energy and water and involves working with hazardous materials. Factories in China don't require expensive worker protection, and don't have to clean up their environmental mess, they merely "externalize" environmental costs and the toll in worker health, thus resulting in a 30% drop in the cost of solar panels and saving American workers and the US environment from additional insults. Sounds awful, yet it's the same dynamic we support with all our other purchases of goods made in China. And we still benefit from all the extra installation jobs made possible by greater numbers of cheaper solar panels. (not the $20 production jobs, as the Steelworkers point out, but $10 jobs putting panels atop houses to power water heaters).

So what's the cost/benefit ratio of simply letting the current dynamic play out on the global stage?China will soon dominate the world market for solar, wind and electric cars--and they'll all be cheaper, at least for a while. President Obama's last best hope for resurrecting the US economy with a boom in green technologies with wither and die, with Republicans and climate change deniers dancing in triumph on its grave. The US corporations manufacturing in China will see their profits continue to rise--until that point in the not too distant future when consumer demand in the US and other developed nations is so moribund it can no longer afford to pay "first world prices." Even cheap green technologies will be unaffordable. And China's environment will be a bit worse off--barely noticeable in the context of the ecological disaster looming there--with its precarious water supply diminished ever closer to the breakdown point. The US will continue to lose manufacturing jobs--at leastuntil the working class and its supporters get far more active or decides it must cave in to Chinese level wages and working conditions.

We're in a huge pickle here in the US of A, and far more people are looking for someone to blame than are "complicating their thinking" and seriously thinking about where can go from here that can make life good for our children and grand children. We've got to get beyond the entitlement mindset with its conviction that the American standard of living is "non-negotiable." It's demise is not being negotiated. It's being eroded by the inexorable forces currently at work in the global economy. Only some very profound "new thinking"--a la Bill McKibben, Lester Brown (Plan B 4.0), David Korten and others who take seriously the ecological crisis as well as the economic crisis, and see the convergence of the two as an opportunity to change course, can prevent a catastrophe of historic proportion. May we find the wisdom and courage to learn from them.

Too many coal trucks on a Beijing highway?

2010-09-07T16:50:00.000-07:00

Events in China continue to shock me, even though I consider myself in the top 5% of cynics about that nation's environmental prospects. But an on-going traffic jam, stretching from Inner Mongolia's capital, Ho Hot, 100km east to the port city of Qinhuangdao on the Bo Hai Sea, began on August 14th, and continues to this day (so far as I can tell). Because truck traffic--I picture those sleek purple or blue "East Wind" trucks that comprise most of the traffic on China's non-urban highways--had grown so dense it gridlocked one of the most vital transportation routes in the country. The Chinese have overwhelmed their transportation infrastructure with the needs of their energy infrastructure. More specifically, the demand for coal continues to soar, despite the building frenzy of alternative sources-- new natural gas pipelines, wind farms, hydro-electric dams, and solar panel arrays-- and there just isn't sufficient rail capacity to keep pace. So Mongolian coal and other minerals gets piled on trucks--enough trucks to clog a major four lane "freeway" whenever one pops a flat, suffers a breakdown or crashes into another, which is to say, everyday.

Beyond the cute anecdotes of stranded truckers complaining about "highway robbery"from locals peddeling dry noodles at outrageous prices while playing cards on the tarmac, there is the harsh fact that China's insatiable demand for coal hasn't abated just because the boyz in Beijing pledged to get serious about global climate change back in December, amidst the acrimony and hollow pledges in Copenhagen. When a nation with such planning acumen and mountains of foreign exchange to finance the largest boom of new infrastructure construction in history-- from roads, bridges, railroads, ports, dams, water projects, and pipelines to glittering mega-cities and nuclear power plants-- can't roll out enough track and rail cars to haul coal to its ports to be trans-shipped to the bustling industrial cities on their eastern and southern coastlines, it has to mean that demand continues to race ahead at dizzing speed. Bad news for the climate. And for the citizens forced to breathe the toxic air produced to power their air conditioners in summer and their steam-heated radiators in winter.

Economic growth may have screeched to a halt in the US, Japan and Western Europe (save for Germany), but manufacturing and urbanization, the two largest demand factors for new energy, roar on in China. Their factories may be using coal more efficiently--as one of their highest priorities in the operative 5-year plan dictates, but there are just so many new apartment buildings to cool and heat, so many new appliances to power, and so many new factories demanding energy to manufacture the cars and appliances increasing numbers of their domestic consumers can now afford, as well as all the "stuff" still bound for American retailers.

Toss in the green house gas emissions from the Canadian tar sands debacle, and only the fact of a sluggish global economy is keeping us from making a complete mockery of the emissions targets scientists tell us we dare not exceed. So, I suppose it's a good thing those East Wind trucks aren't making better time, even though it can't be a good thing they're all idling those big diesels while playing cards and getting horrible mileage while creeping along bumper to bumper. May their solar panels and wind farms soon experience cyclones of growth and relegate the seams of Mongolia's coal to their rightful place inside the earth.

The genetically-engineered food bubble

2010-08-31T16:26:00.000-07:00

Few topics excite the boys at the Economist more than genetically modified food. They regularly trot out new spins on how biotechnology will feed the world, most recently with two articles in the Aug. 26th issue. Characteristically triumphalist in tone and content, "How to feed the world," and "The miracle on the cerrado" once again proclaim that the magical combination of enormous farms--"200 times the size of an average farm in Iowa"-- , the machinery and chemicals of industrial agriculture, the wizardry of genetically-altered seeds, and the embrace of global free trade, as practiced by Brazil's domestic agri-business giants on that nation's vast savannah (the Cerrado), represents a blueprint for Africa--and, indeed, the rest of the world.

A few lonely voices in the comments section pointed out that before its conversion into super farms, the Cerrado had been home to greater biodiversity than any region except the Amazon rainforest, and that the heavy footprint of industrial agriculture has already led to the highest rate of soil erosion in the world, and that three major rivers which feed the Amazon and the de Platina systems are "born" there. Further, the fact that the cerrado lies within tropical latitudes means farmers can crop year round--but also that bugs and weeds can mutate year round, requiring ever more chemicals to protect even the gm-crops, and giving the "invaders" a boost in rendering the engineered modifications ineffectual. Major rivers sytems are being freighted with a toxic cago of agricultural chemicals, at great cost to all the downstream users. But you'll never here such reservations from biotech's most zealous boosters.

Meanwhile the editors couldn't pass up an opportunity to whack environmentalists with this grand neo-liberal triumph in Brazil. In fact, they frame "How to feed the world," by setting up the straw man of agro-pessism, and tracing its lineage directly to Paul Erhlich's 1967 prediction that "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death," and the technophiles' favorite iconic whipping boy, the 1972 Limits to Growth, which dared argue that the world would exhaust key resources sometime in the 21st Century. In the neo-liberal universe THERE ARE NO LIMITS!!

Of course, they've conveniently forgotten equally off-target predictions from their camp: the 1950's proclamations that soon the "peaceful atom" would power our autos and aircraft and make electricity "too cheap to meter;" or the similar vintage claim that DDT was a miracle poison that would forever banish mosquitos and agricultural pests to historical archives; or, until the unfortunate 2008 crash, that unregulated free market economic policies had triumphed against communism and redered recessions obsolete. We need to make them watch a "blooper reel" filled with their predictions gone terribly wrong lest they continue to propagate their conucopian optimism against the laws of nature and common sense.

So what's with my claim that the "miracle" of gm-crops and industrial agriculture has inflated a gigantic "food bubble" that imperils the planet's food security? Let's begin with China, but not forget that the USA remains the epicenter of biotechnology and agribusiness. Most of Brazil's soya crop winds up on big trucks rumbling day and night across the cerrado's primative highway system bound for ports that are too small and inefficient for the volume now overwhelming them, and eventually onto cargo ships headed to China.

Once in the Middle Kingdom, the gm-soya beans get mixed with gm-corn kernals and made into feed for China's burgeoning beef and poultry "factory farms." As China's demand for animal feed now far exceeds its ability to supply it from domestic sources, it has greatly increased its imports of soya from the US and Brazil, and more recently of US gm-corn as well. Affluent Chinese consume far more meat and dairy every year, even as they also continue to lose vast acreages of farmland to urbanization, industrial development, acid rain, desertification and water shortages. Thus the increasing dependence on imports in a nation which not too long ago had made food security a top priority. But then, they've got to spend all those accumulated US dollars on something, and I suspect, they may have integrated a tich of neo-liberal ideology into their mostly mercantilistic trade policy. With their vast foreign exchange reserves, they can always buy their way to the head of the line for foodstuffs--another type of "security."

So the world's two biggest soy producers--the US and Brazil--and the world's largest corn exporter--the USA--are both dependent on the same "two-legged stool" of industrial ag. and biotechnology, and the world's largest population--China--is increasingly dependent on imports to feed its 1.4 billion mouths. Looks as if the neo-libs have set the stage for food catastrophe, doing all they can to mock Paul Ehrlich while creating the conditions essential to fulfilling his prediction--a Greek tragedy in the making, but one with real and dire consequences.

Which makes me the "agro-pessimist" they warned readers about. "Don't listen to that man!" they say. "Paul Ehrlich was wrong then. The agro-pessimists must be wrong now." And their clincher, of course, "Human ingenuity and free markets can defeat natural laws every time." Funny if it weren't so dangerous.

What's true is that their privatization of technolgies and monopolization of seed stocks stifle human ingenuity in agriculture, as the patenting seed germ plasm and the squeezing out all but their own small fleet of lab-techs--whose goals are not to feed the world, but to destroy the competition and make monopoly profits.

Thus the "miracle" of genetic engineering, which marketing propaganda implies can adapt any crop to any climate and any soil conditions, and resist all pest and diseases, has thus far given us a far more modest prize--mostly "Round-up Ready" crops designed to lock the farmer into strict contracts and copious use of Monsanto's highly profitable, but increasingly ineffective weed killer, and "Bt" crops in which every cell expresses the natually occurring, insect killing compound Bt--the overuse of which is rapidly giving rise to resistant insects, just as the overuse of "RR" has given rise to "super weeds." In other words, the shelf life of both popular innovations appears to be short, but we've already "bet the farm" on their continued success.

Meanwhile, farmers just pour on ever more herbicide and pesticide, running as fast as they can on the chemical treadmill, dreading the day when the super pest and super weed conquers their defenses--or when farmers go broke, or the soil structure collapses from having exceeded the economic or natural limits of man-made chemicals.

Thankfully, reaseach continues to demonstrate that small organic farms are more productive per acre, and infinitely more sustainable than the gigantic agribusiness mutants. May a hundred million organic farmers be there when the neoliberal miracles crash and burn.

China: Losing farmland to "agro-tourism"

2010-08-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

One of the China blogs I follow, http://www.insideoutchina.com/ , features an Aug. 8th post titled "Sichuan: Land of Abundance or emptiness?" in which recent visitors to that southwestern agricultural province report a major alteration to the rural landscapes. A powerful earthquake devastated the Chengdu Mountain region in 2008, bursting dams, unleashing floods and crumbling poorly built school houses with thousands of students inside--the latter a direct result of corrupt relations between local government (Communist Party or "CCP") officials and shady developers. I wondered if those same developers are behind government efforts to transform vast expanses of farmland into suburban-style clusters of villas and shopping malls.

The vistors quoted on the inside-out blog describe an ambitious reconstruction project in which "new peasant residences" replace the crumbled old houses destroyed in the '08 quake--mostly with apparent approval from peasants residing in the new "villas." But there's a catch. In exchange for a modern style house and a tiny plot of "garden space," the peasants must sign over the majority of their land to the developers. The tourists posting the guest blog refer to the transformation as a "win-win-win," as the peasants get a "free" villa, developers get huge tracts of land in exchange for building the neighborhoods of new villas, and the local party officials get their devastated province rebuilt and modernized at no expense. So what's the problem?

Unfortunately this is exactly the development model Lester Brown of World Watch warned us (and the Chinese government) about in his 1994 book, Who Will Feed China?, which is an oft-repeated theme in my blog. China has lost millions of hectares of farmland to urbanization and industrial development since it set out to chase modern prosperity in 1989. It's lost many additional hectares to desertification, pollution and acid rain. How much more can they lose, given the fact that the nation as a whole faces daunting water shortages and relentless pressures from diets that are increasingly rich in meat and dairy?

The "no problem people" cite the fact that China already imports lots of corn and soy more cheaply than peasants can grow it domestically. The tourists also asked the now landless former peasants how they'll make a living. "Migrant labor," they replied, leaving out a few key details. Will a daughter become a "factory girl" in Shenzhen, or a son a construction worker in some far off city, sending home sufficient savings from their meager pay packets to support mom and dad? Will the developers create jobs on their newly acquired land? If so what type--factory hands, retail clerks, or agricultural workers on new, large-scale industrial farms not yet in evidence? Or will they, as the blog hints, earn their livings in "agro-tourism"--that is, guiding domestic and foreign visitors around the few remaining traditional villages, where they can marvel at the beautifully-terraced, colorful tableaus featured in guide books and observe the quaint ritual of peasant farmers plowing the fields behind water buffalo?

This seems a particularly apt time to comtemplate Sechuan's future and its implications for the issues raised in "Who will feed...?" Will local officials opt for American-type industrial agriculture, with developers replacing traditional peasant farming with large-scale "agri-business," consolidating many small plots into far larger holdings, and injecting far more machinery to replace peasant labor? In that case productivity should soar, but with all the attendant ramifications of industrial farming--more fertilizer and pesticide, more irrigation water, the likely use of genetically-modified seeds, greater use of fossil fuels to power the machinery and manufacture farm chemicals, and the resultant loss of soil fertilitiy and of top soil to erosion. Or will they, as the article implies, transform farmland to suburbs, import more grain, and call it modernization?

The "third way," which I have advocated here before, would be to embrace "agro-ecology," create a network of revitalized eco-villages in which farmers practice permaculture and organic methods, linked to a global agro-ecology network where methods and ideas are shared and adapted to local conditions. The soil grows richer, farms use fewer chemicals and fossil fuels, diversity of seed stocks increase, and water systems remain healthy. And villages "modernize" in a far more sustainable and eco-friendly way than the dominant urbanization/suburbanization model.

With its dramatic increases in grain imports, primarily of gm-corn and gm-soy, China has kept pace with the increased demand for animal feed required to feed its increasing numbers of affluent consumers wanting more beef, pork and poultry in their diets--in spite of the continuing loss of its most produtive farmland. Should Sechuan's provincial government push ahead with the transformation of its most productive agricultural landscapes into suburbs it will certainly increase pressures on already stretched global grain stocks. Pressures which are likely to squeeze further the poor, food-insecure nations in drought-stricken West Africa or flood-ravaged Pakistan. In other words they will choose instability and crisis, and the world will be a less safe place.

As Brown warned us in 1994, if China continues the path blazed by Japan and South Korea, that is, if it continues to increase its grain imports toward the 80% level obtaining in those two developed nations, it will deplete the world's grain stocks before it attains eveh half that level--with disastrous consequences for poor nations, and eventually itself. Yet the cherished goals of food independence and food security are rapidly losing traction to "facts on the ground."

China-where garbage and deforestation cost billions

2010-08-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

Two big eco-accounting stories emanating from Southwestern China this week--massive landslides continuing in the southern, "Tibetan" corner of Gansu Province (my daughter's former home, and technically in the "northwet"), and floodwaters in the Yantze River washing thousands of tons of garbage down to the Three Gorges Dam where it's threatening to jam the navigation locks. It's "billion dollar garbage" which upriver towns conveniently "externalized" off their balance sheets, and onto those of the dam authority.

I found both stories at http://chinadigitaltimes.com/ , my most productive source for uncensored news from the Middle Kingdom. In an article, "China mudslides were predicted 13 years ago" (originally posted in Christian Science Monitor, August 12, 2010, by Peter Ford), we discover that massive deforestation in 1997 led two Chinese scientists to warn that "the destruction of the eco-system" left the town below vulnerable to "a rainstorm [flushing] debris down the gully, destroying farmlandhouses, roads, bridges, water facilities, and power systems and causing death and injury"--exactly what's happened there over the past two weeks. More than 1,000 bodies have been recovered, with many more still missing amidst the mud and debris.

Logging companies made off with windfall profits 13 years ago, externalizing the loss of the forest's eco-system services--stability of the soil, filtering of the rain water, preservation of normal micro-climate, habitast for diverse species, among many others--onto local residents, now with catastrophic results, and at a cost far in excess of those windfall profits. But China doesn't do "eco-accounting," so tragedies caused by plundering greedy men--floods, landslides, dust storms, cancer villages, poisoned water bodies--get written off as acts of nature. And certainly the extreme monsoon this year, the same weather pattern flooding Pakistan and parching Russia, deserves a huge chunk of blame--unless of course climate scientists firm up the link between that weather pattern and human-induced climate change. In which case we Americans and Chinese can point fingers at one another, for we are all guilty of inexcusable ignorance about, and wanton disregard for, the workings of natural systems. A similar mechanism created the mess at the dam.

According to an Aug. 2, 2010 Associated Press report, "Flood-borne trash threatens Three Gorges gates" by Tini Tran, the Three Gorges Corporation has spent some 10 million yuan ($1.5 million dollars) each year to clear about 200,000 cubic meters of floating waste from the dam area (3,000 tons per day!)--because "many [upriver] cities remain unequipped for garbage disposal." (!!) Unfortunately, the same is true for sewage, and both problems stem from out-of-control corruption and the destructive "to get rich [at any cost] is glorious" mentality. So local Communist Party officials, in collusion with organized crime and/or greedy businessmen, often pocket "infrastructure money" from Beijing intended for sewage treatment plants and solid waste disposal (cf. Minxin Pei, China's Trapped Transition"the limits of developmental autocracy, 2008). They often build the facilities, but never connect the pipes or pay for their operation.

This year's floods have been the worst in ten years--that is, the worst since completion of the Three Gorges Dam, built primarily for flood control (but secondarily for electricity generation and to facilitate navigation up to the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing). So far the dam has prevented a repetition of the massive loss of life suffered during the 1998 floods--a triumph in that regard. But in light of this year's bumper crop of garbage, perhaps they'll coin a new slogan in the Yangtze basin, "big rains bring floods of trash." As the Monitor article reports, "A layer of garbage about 60 centimenters deep (almost two feet) covering an area of more than 50,000 square meters began forming in front of the dam when the rainy season began in early July. It is now so deep as to threaten ships' propellers and, as one dam official observed, "The decaying garbage could also harm the scenery and water quality" (!?). As for harming the scenery, the China Digital Times web site features some amazing photos of the trash backed up against the dam http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/08/photos-garbages-in-three-gorges-dam/ .

In its well organized response to the floods and landslides, China's autocracy is proving far superior to Pakistan's and Russia's broken democracies. But it is second to none when it comes to creating the conditions for ever-more, ever-worse "ecological" disasters. May ecological wisdom come soon.

China's lose-lose war with nature

2010-08-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

The effort to control the health of land has not been very successful. It is now generally understood that when soil loses fertility, or washes away faster than it forms, and when water systems exhibit abnormal floods and shortages, the land is sick...Aldo Leopold, "Wilderness for Science" (in A Sand County Almanac, 1966).

Poor China. It's prolonged, unrelenting battle against Nature seems to have entered yet another phase--making that battle a cause to rally the national spirit against a politically-defenseless enemy (cf. "Chinese rulers use nature as a unifying enemy," Financial Times, 8/03/10). Yet, as headlines depicting the landslides and floods of August push the drought and crop failures of April and May off the front page, the heroic depictions of Red Army soldiers rushing to the rescue, and the celebration of the Communist Party's prompt, bold response to catastrophe mask the more important issue. As Aldo Leopold observed, "when water systems exhibit abnormal floods and shortages, the land is sick." Thus, it would be far wiser for China's policy makers to seek the causes of their land's increasing pathologies than to showcase acts of heroism, the "success" of the Three Gorges Dam and the CCP's leadership in a never-ending spate of what can only be Pyrrhic victories.

And again, what we witness in China presents us with a mirror of our own short-sighted attitude to natural calamities such as droughts, floods and wildfires. Indeed, as I write this posting, Russia continues to suffer historic drought and a deadly outbreak of forest and peat fires, Pakistan still suffers from historic destruction by monsoonal flooding, and abnormally hot, quirky weather seems to be the "new normal."

We would, therefore, all be wiser to begin from Leopold's starting point: "The most important characteristic of an organism (whether man or the land) is that capacity for internal self-renewal known as health." Leopold elaborates, "The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born." So we tinker away, sometimes on a monumental scale, to subdue outbreaks of pests, weeds or disease and calamaties such as droughts, floods and wildfires, but our efforts fail to bring us any closer to understanding the root causes of "biotic pain."

To take a more promising course, that is, to develop the science of land health, we need "first of all, a base datum of normality, a picture of how healthy land maintains itself as an organism." And, of course, "the most perfect norm is wilderness," or what we have left that best approaches conditions before human interference eroded the land's capacity for self-renewal.

Unfortunately, when it comes to China, centuries of "war" against nature (cf. Mark Elvin's, The Retreat of the Elephants, 2004) have left precious few wild landscapes to study as healthy baselines, and the cumulative effects of that war now threaten the stability of a society of 1.4 billion people. Worse still, Chinese politicians continue to exhibit a fixation on ad hoc "land doctoring"--building more dams and dikes--rather than advancing the science of land health--developing responses based on the principles of permaculture and agro-ecology, which recommend wetland restoration and reforestation in watersheds.

Continuing its history of mega-projects, such as the Three Gorges Dam and the South-North Water Diversion Project, onlt promises more tragedy, whereas embarking on a strategy of working with Nature's rhythms and restoring the Land to health offers at least a glimmer of hope. May they find the way.

The inconvenient weather!

2010-08-03T17:32:00.000-07:00

Russia's burning with 300 new forest fires per day, many raging out of control. "Worst ever," say the old timers. It's wheat crop withers and dies from unprecedented heat and drought--worst in at least 100 plus years when first records were kept. Neighboring Ukraine and Kazakstan, also major wheat exporters, are suffering bouts of heat and drought, with similar devastating effects on their wheat production. Every several years, the hot, dry sukovei wind sweeps across from Central Asia and makes very bad weather for wheat. But this time is different--the worst ever. A shrill warning of the link between climate and food.

China suffered record drought earlier this year, severely impacting food production in its southwestern "bread basket." Horrible flooding inundated the same region in recent weeks. In nearby Pakistan millions are suffering from monstrous monsoon rains--the worst in 80 years. Again food production takes a hit in a key agricultural region.

In our own hemisphere, flooded fields during planting season drastically reduced acreage planted to Canada's wheat crop. "Unseasonal" but not historic rains there. And then, of course, every American knows its been a terrible hot summer, and it's only the third day of August. But our wheat crop has yet to be affected--and may save the world from a horrendous famine.

The weather everywhere, it seems, bears frightening similarities to what the global warming/climate change Cassandras have been warning us about. Take for example, Heidi Cullen's new book, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms and Other Scenes From a Climate-Changed World. Cullen has been a regular on the Weather Channel. An attractive, engaging, very smart scientist with an affable, authoritative TV persona, Cullen's convinced me she's got a corner on the truth--one we'd best heed. And yet, in spite of her charms, her persuasive examples, and the absolute flood of other books warning us of the perils of climate change, the vast majority of Americans and the politicians who make our laws, still have doubts. "Why make costly changes when the science is still so uncertain and controversial?" some ask. Others languish in the comfort of confusion--"I guess there can't be much to worry about--remember that snow storm in D.C. last winter? Seemed to prove we were getting colder, not warmer. I'll need a lot more proof before I join Al Gore's hippie crusade." So they mock Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" and build an igloo labeled with his name on the D.C. Mall to demonstrate their loathing of liberal intellectuals who bear tidings of catastrophe. Seems we'll need several real duzzies to get people's attention away from Rush Limbaugh's and the Republican Party's anodyn assurances that "global warming is a great big liberal hoax." And by then it will be way too late to avoid a cascade of inconvenience.

Yet, the events happening on this very day should be warning enough for any sentient being. We take so much for granted--from our weather, to our food supply, to an affluenct lifestyle that we regard as a birth right rather than an accident of history and the product of previous generations' hard work. I fear it's an American cultural flaw that blinds us, inures us, leads us to adapt apathy and distraction as the best responses to manufactured uncertainty, even as very real and terribly imminent dangers stalk us from all sides. A terrible silence covers the land. Its name is ignorance, or perhaps denial. Fear to act, lest we abandon forever our comfortable, taken-for-granted island of prosperity, where everthing is easy, conflict never happens, and posterity demands nothing from us. Which leaders have the courage and will to connect the dots, knowing a cynical and entitled electorate punishes those who speak truth to catastrophe? May many emerge soon. May an awakened public demand no less of its leaders.