Travels on a Dirty Planet

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Zhenbing and I were on a six-week trip through China, investigating his homeland's environmental crisis, and it was not a cheering task. Everywhere, it seemed, the land had been scalped, the water poisoned, the air made toxic and dark. Despite having lived with China's pollution for decades, Zhenbing was not exactly a militant environmentalist. Born into a very poor rural family 30 years before, he, like most Chinese I met, was quite willing to put up with dirty air and water if it meant better pay, more jobs, a chance to get ahead. But our visit to the paper factory had shaken him. As we waited for the bus back downtown, I heard him murmuring, as if in a dream, "My poor country. My poor country."

China's environmental crisis demands the world's attention. China's population in late 1996 was officially 1.22 billion people, but the real number is almost surely higher; in any case, nearly a quarter of the world's people live there. The Chinese economy was the seventh largest in the world in 1996, and could be number one by 2010. Incomes have doubled since Deng Xiaoping initiated marketplace reforms in 1979, and the environmental effects have been devastating.

Nine of the world's ten most air-polluted cities are in China. According to the World Bank, water and air pollution kill more than 2 million people a year. Suburban sprawl and erosion gobbled up more than 86 million acres of farmland--as much as all the farmlands in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom--between 1950 and 1990. Farmland losses have increased in the 1990s, along with water shortages, raising questions about China's ability to feed itself in the future, especially as rising incomes lead to more meat-intensive diets.

And yet China's newfound wealth has only whetted people's appetites for more. The Chinese want to join the global middle class, with all that entails--cars, air conditioners, closets full of clothes, jet travel. China thus brings together two of the most disturbing trends in global environmental affairs: the large, growing population typical of poverty and the high-impact consumption patterns promoted by Western capitalism.

China is, in short, an evironmental superpower. Like the United States, the other environmental superpower, China can by itself all but guarantee that climate change, ozone depletion, acid rain, and other hazards will affect the entire world. What happens in China is therefore central to one of the great questions of our time: Will the human species survive the many environmental pressures crowding in on it at the end of the 20th century?

By the time I left China in 1997, I had spent most of six years trying to answer that question. My quest had taken me on a trip around the world that included stops in 19 countries and interviews with everyone from heads of state like V·clav Havel in Prague to starving peasants in war-torn Sudan. I left San Francisco in May 1991, 18 months after the Berlin Wall fell and three months after a U.S.-led army drove Iraqi invaders from Kuwait to maintain the flow of oil that modern economies crave.

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