China's Environmental Crisis: An Enquiry into the Limits of National Development

An Enquiry into the Limits of National Development

Vaclav Smil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315288390
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 1982, Vaclav Smil turned upside down traditional perceptions of China as a green paradise in "The Bad Earth", a disturbing book. This new volume, drawn on a much broader canvas, updates and expands on the basic arguments and perceptions of "The Bad Earth". This book is not a systematic litany of what went wrong and how much - but rather an inquiry into the fundamental factors, needs, prospects, and limits of modern Chinese society, all seen through the critical environmental constraints and impacts.

1
People's Mouths

The ideal land is small
its people very few,
where tools abound
ten times or yet
a hundred-fold
beyond their use ...
...
Where folks grow old
and folks will die
exchange a call.
and never once

—Laozi, Dao de jing

AS SO MANY stanzas from The Way of Life, the penultimate ode of that fascinating assembly of concise and profound thoughts of ancient Chinese mystics makes a perfect opening for addressing one of the most contentious uncertainties of modern civilization: how do people matter? Is the astonishing rate of population growth during the past five generations—tripling the global total in less than a century, from 1.7 billion in 1900 to more than 5 billion in 1990—the principal source of massive destitution afflicting at least three-quarters of mankind? Is it the leading cause of unsustainable exploitation of natural resources? Most fundamentally, is it the most important reason for the spreading environmental degradation, for the loss of irreplaceable ecosystemic goods and services that form the existential underpinning of any civilization?

Or are the larger populations the ultimate resource? True, in the short run they may be diluting capital, causing impoverishment and environmental degradation—but do they not adjust in the long run through increased creativity, inventiveness, and adaptation, which bring greater benefits—more food, better education, higher standards of living, more leisure—to an unprecedented number of people?

How does China's experience—necessarily quite important as the country currently accounts for slightly more than one-fifth of human-kind—illuminate this contrast? One ancient sign is clear enough: in a logical directness, the Chinese ideograms for population joined an upright standing person with an open mouth. This fundamental existential link between population and environment has not lost its importance, its acuteness, and its challenge in today's China.

Food, in per capita terms, is more abundant and in general more equitably accessible than at any time in China's long history, but the margin between adequacy and deficit remains slim while the irreplaceable environmental foundations bearing the intensive and continuously intensifying agriculture, now needed to feed nearly 1.2 billion people, have been weakening steadily. The most obvious manifestation of this trend has been an enormous shrinkage of per capita availability of farmland.

At the time when The Way of Life took its present form, late in the third century B.C., China's population was hardly more than twenty million people, and even in the country's most densely settled northern river valleys and plains people could draw on two or three hectares of farmland per capita for their subsistence. Laozi's clear preference, right down to the extreme of never exchanging neighborly calls, could still be a common reality. By 1990 China has moved farther from Laozi's ideal than even the boldest population forecasts could imagine just two generations ago: the country had more than 1.1 billion people, and it could rely on less than one-tenth of a hectare per capita for its food.

And yet the average Chinese in the year 1990 was undoubtedly better fed, housed, and schooled, had an access to a wider variety of goods, had more leisure, and, most important of all, had vastly longer life expectancy than at any time in the country's long history—in spite of the fact that the country's population more than doubled in just two generations! True, there is an obvious relative shortage of various natural resources when China's rich endowment is divided by the huge population, and even the official propaganda admits the severe cumulative damage to China's environment. But are not these negatives merely temporary, do not they actually stimulate the adaptive human response, do not they catalyze the eventually successful quest for a better life in an improved environment?

How Do People Matter?

The modern idea that population growth threatens worldwide pauperisation is simply a mistake.

—Friedrich August Hayek, The Fateful Conceit

Unchecked population growth threatens to destroy the quality of life just as surely as unchecked pollution.

—D.H. Michael Bowen, "People Pollution"

Contradictory answers to the question "How do people matter?" have been a prominent part of the Western intellectual jousting ever since the first vigorous debates about the nature and degree of links between population growth and food production.¹ Gradually, these concerns also came to encompass perceived scarcities of fossil fuels and other exhaustible minerals,² and, starting seriously in the 1960s, the ability of the biosphere to cope with mounting human insults.³ Not surprisingly, today's arguments and counterarguments are not fundamentally different from many past replays of the population-resources debate.

Modern catastrophists repeatedly predict imminent famines, on scales ranging from local to planetary. In 1968 one of their leading American gurus, Paul Ehrlich, opened his super-selling paperback, The Population Bomb, with the following prologue: "The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate ...."⁴

In reality, during the two decades between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, life expectancy at birth in China and India increased, respectively, from about fifty-eight to sixty-nine years and from forty-two to fifty-seven years⁵—but an undaunted, and unembarrassed, Ehrlich was back in 1990 with The Population Explosion.⁶ I think I can safely leave this opus unopened: its content is a foregone conclusion, and so are the contents of annual State of the World reports,⁷ and scores of state-of-the-planet pieces that have become fashionable since the mid-1980s with the intense politicization of global environmental concerns.⁸

Manning the opposite sides of these verbal barricades are ever-optimistic believers in human inventiveness, vigorous techno-fixers, and cornucopians. In their zeal to take apart the doomsaying sermons of environmental catastrophists, they view population growth as a wholly positive factor. Their current leading protagonist, Julian Simon, has produced a succession of books⁹ whose basic message he succinctly rephrased in rebutting Ehrlich's latest warnings: "To argue that population growth worsens poverty presumes that national wealth is limited by a country's physical resources. But overwhelming evidence refutes this notion It is not resources per capita but rather free political and economic institutions that most strongly influence national wealth and that must logically be the focus of efforts to augment it."¹⁰

The cornucopian position becomes even more appealing when seen in conjunction with James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which holds that the Earth's physical and chemical condition has been and is actively made fit and comfortable by the presence and evolution of life itself.¹¹ The Earth's life, through an array of complex feedbacks, could thus keep the biosphere in a remarkable state of constancy. Combination of these grand homeostatic controls and of human inventiveness should then assure the continued survival and increasing prosperity of our species.

In Brian Berry's succinct summary, "the difference, then, is between (a) those who measure population growth against the fixed resources of a spaceship earth and prophecy doom, and (b) those who see it as the source of the innovations that enable societies to redefine environments and create their futures. ... At this juncture the choice is not one of science but of ideology."¹² But I do believe that it is counterproductive to make such a restricted choice—and that science, a nonideological sine ira et studio approach, is actually of great help in understanding the complicated reality.

Simplistic verbal forays from the two antipodal, well-entrenched camps change little. Catastrophists and cornucopians are fighting over the same population-resources-environment ground, but both are adept at evading the best evidence and the most sensible arguments presented by the other side, and both all too often end up by presenting grotesquely extreme positions. Why add to these fixed salvos passing each other high above the ground of an infinitely more complex reality? Allegiance to one of these groups may confer a feeling of intellectual superiority and righteousness to devout practitioners, but critical appraisals of the population-resources-environment challenge must eschew such simplifications.

The odds against harmonizing population growth with both human and environmental well-being may be quite daunting, and endowing the technical fixes with planetwide omnipotence may be crudely arrogant, but discounting our inventive and adaptive capabilities is an equally narrow-minded lapse. The complexity of links among population growth, resource use, and environmental quality invalidates any appealing generalizations, especially those made at the global level. But it repays a close investigation of particulars, revealing almost invariably a mix of depressing trends and hopeful possibilities.

Catastrophists might be surprised to learn that this was also the parting credo of the man who is still generally seen as the great patron of their cause. Thomas Robert Maithus—so well known for his observations that "the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man" and that "this natural inequality ... appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society"¹³—closed the second, and so curiously rarely read, edition of his great essay with an appraisal whose eminent sensibility makes it truly timeless.

On the whole, therefore, though our future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population may not be so bright as we could wish, yet they are far from being entirely disheartening, and by no means preclude that gradual and progressive improvement in human society And although we cannot expect that the virtue and happiness of mankind will keep pace with the brilliant career of physical discovery; yet, if we are not wanting to ourselves, we may confidently indulge the hope that, to no unimportant extent, they will be influenced by its progress and will partake in its success.¹⁴

Consequently, with this book I will neither extend the litany of environmental doomsaying nor join the ranks of simplistic cornucopians who prefer convenient generalities to the uncomfortable singularities that abound in China. Even the country with more than one-fifth of mankind can start turning the tide of environmental degradation while improving the life of its people—but to dismiss, even to minimize, the impact its population size and growth have on the modernization effort and on the quality of the environment would be simply naive.

Simon's absolutist preference for unrestrained population growth leads him to argue that "most tragic are the tens or hundreds of millions of human lives not lived because individuals and countries such as China prevented births in the name of the now-discredited doctrine that population growth slows economic development."¹⁵ Undoubtedly, population growth does often bring potent economic benefits, and the scarcity of exhaustible resources may not be an unsurmountable obstacle to vigorous economic growth. But to support these arguments by comparisons with Japan, Hong Kong, or South Korea points out their very inapplicability to China.

These economies have the option (luxury?) of transferring large shares of their needs for food and essential natural resources abroad, in exchange for their manufactures.¹⁶ This is a choice closed to China precisely because of its population size: the cost of these purchases aside, even with modest per capita consumption levels the Chinese cannot import a third of their rice or virtually all of their timber.¹⁷ The resulting necessity to intensify agricultural output and to overexploit domestic resources cannot but degrade and pollute die environment. Given the country's population density, this environmental deterioration feeds back into the socioeconomic setup by spreading natural disasters, higher costs, reduced productivity, and declining quality of life.

Although China's population doubled during the two generations of the uneven post-1949 economic progress, all important modernization indicators—life expectancy, per capita income, food availability, access to education—have risen rather remarkably. But does this concurrent increase of population and well-being represent, in Simon's words, the "triumph of human mind and organization over the raw forces of nature"?¹⁸

This very phrasing betrays a profound misunderstanding of the true fundamentals of civilization's progress. To be sustainable in the very long run, this process cannot be a contest of forces. If so, we are bound to lose, because human ingenuity can succeed only when preserving irreplaceable environmental services that make all life possible. Indicators of human welfare may be rising, but the environmental foundations of this success show much worrisome wear.

In rich countries with very low population growth, nearly all of this pressure has come from rising affluence. These countries have thus an enormous degree of freedom to reduce environmental impacts merely by moderating their obvious, and frequently obscene, overconsumption.¹⁹ In China the environmental demands brought by the quest for better life are greatly accentuated both by the size and growth of the country's population: severe environmental pressure is exacted by merely feeding the people. I cannot see the fact that China must feed slightly more than one-fifth of humankind from less than one-fifteenth of die world's farmland simply as a welcome stimulus to engage human ingenuity in a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• China Impressions
• China's Environment
• 1. PEOPLE'S MOUTHS
• 2. EXISTENTIAL NECESSITIES
• 3. CHINA'S MODERNIZATION
• 4. ENERGIZING THE ADVANCES
• 5. GROWING FOOD
• 6. LIVING WITH THE LIMITS
• Notes
• Unit Abbreviations And Conversions
• Index