‘pollute first, clean up later’

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Posted on February 9, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Mercury from China settling into the Willamette River of Oregon. Particulates from China’s coal-fired power plants settling into the lungs of Californians.

You see why toxic pollution is not just a national or state or local matter — it is a global problem and will require global solutions.

This superb article made it to my email box from the usually superb analysts at Foreign Policy in Focus. It is about China. It is about the headline for this post — a philosophy of development that mimics that of the western industrialized countries. We did it first; they just want to go the same route we went.

And poverty has dropped dramatically in China as a result.

Yet, at the same time, the country’s future has been seriously jeopardized — ruined forests and soils, contaminated rivers and lakes, deserts claiming more and more of the north, glaciers that supply water to millions receding under the impact of global warming, sand storms that choke residents of Beijing and worry 2008 Olympics organizers, toxic air pollution that harms east Asian countries on its way across the ocean to the west of the US and Canada.

In an effort to save its remaining forests, China banned timber-cutting. It is now the world’s leader in the import of timber products — saving its forests at the expense of those in other countries. We do this sort of thing, too — consume products at the expense of other nations’ environment (oil, for example, as in places like Nigeria).

Here is where the US consumer comes in (think Wal-Mart, not solely but certainly notably):

Although caused by weak environmental governance at home, China’s regional and global pollution is fueled in great part by the burgeoning demand internationally for cheap Chinese goods. For example, 7% of China’s CO2 emissions are estimated to result from the production of U.S. imports.

We like cheap consumer goods, even claim them by right. But they come at a cost; they come at a very high cost (not to mention the horrible labor conditions and low wages in China’s factories).

This way of development, of poverty reduction, is not sustainable.

It’s not as if nothing is being done, or that China doesn’t know it has a problem. This article briefly notes some encouraging efforts. But what is needed is something more — willingness on the part of the US to lead the way in cutting carbon emissions, willingness on the part of the global community to finance the development of cleaner technologies, willingness on the part of the US consumer to change habits and stop supporting ecological destruction and human exploitation by how we spend our time and our money.

As we pointed out the other day, China is chafing at suggestions that it should slow down its development to address the global warming crisis created by the West. We did it our way, they want to do it our way too, but at an even faster clip. But they can’t, if we have any hope of keeping most of this planet habitable. But they won’t change unless we do, unless we take up what that one Chinese official called our “unshirkable responsibility.”

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