Pollution kills hundreds of thousands every year in China
Share your Thoughts
Posted on August 30, 2007
Filed Under Greenhouse gas emissions, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
I finally had a chance to read this long and very tragic article in last Sunday’s New York Times about the death toll resulting from China’s rapid industrialization. 
The numbers boggle the mind — hundreds of thousands of people choking on the most polluted air in the world, dying of heart attacks, lung disease, and more.
And that’s just for starters. Intensive large scale agriculture since the 1950s has depleted aquifers and is now creating deserts in northern regions of the country, most every water source is contaminated, and millions of people almost never see a blue sky.
China doesn’t know how to stop this. As its economic engine continues to roar, its future is being quickly destroyed. It’s the sped-up version of the industrialization that happened here over 150 years, and in the Soviet Union in 50.
But now the world is so big, so much consumer demand, and China is meeting it at the cost of its people, its once-magnificent lands and waters. Its air is now the deadliest in the world, according to National Geographic, and winds send that pollution wafting over Japan and the Koreas and right across the Pacific to the North America coast.
We are all a part of this. This is the model we choose to run our world every time we buy one of those inexpensive consumer goods made in China, with every visit to Wal-Mart, China’s biggest customer.
So, before we blame the Chinese, let’s look to our own values and behavior, our own’s government’s trade and financial policies, our own corporations who found a cheaper way to get consumer goods to us by going to China to manufacture them.
If this world cannot figure out another way to organize the way humans live on this planet, China will only be a portend of things to come; we will all end up consumed by the disasters we have made.
Technorati Tags: China pollution kills, China industrialization, Wal-Mart and China
Photo Credit: Photograph by The Eng Koon/Getty Images
Comments
Leave a Reply
