From T.D. Wiley Farms newsletter : FARTHER AFIELD One uneasiness we bear as parents over son Mike’s year-long China sojourn concerns issues with air, water and food quality in that nation. When promised teaching situations morphed into a bait-and-switch, Mike and buddy Quinton started pinching their yuán. The two stir-fry lots of rice and street vendor vegetables in a Hengyang high-rise, planning their eminent escape through Viet Nam, Cambodia, Thailand, Quin’s ancestral Indonesia, and on to the Land Down Under should funds suffice. Struggling to communicate at the most basic level, our boys are likely unaware of cadmium-laced rice from their Hunan province that recently sent thousands of panicked Chinese scrambling for Thai-grown rice. Recent scandals notwithstanding, China’s “farmers of forty centuries” feed a population four-times the United States’ on one-seventh the arable land base. This could soon become impossible according to a lengthy (7/27/2013) Wall Street Journal essay, “China’s Bad Earth”, in which authors Josh Chin and Brian Spegele examine authoritative estimates that between 8% and 20% of China’s croplands are contaminated with heavy metals. The pair reports, many Middle Kingdom researchers and environmental activists believe a Dickensian disregard for environmental consequences of the nation’s headlong rush to industrialize has resulted in pollution that now constitutes “an existential threat to the current regime”. China’s “grow first, clean up later” strategy, following models set by Britain, America and Japan, may now be untenable. Mounting public perceptions of a food system in peril were not alleviated this February when China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection embargoed results of a multiyear, nation-wide farmland contamination survey, declaring data a “state secret”. A fresh perspective from last week’s (8/10/2013) The Economist, “The East Is Grey”, reminds us that though China is currently our world’s most egregious polluter, it is also its greatest investor in green energy. Combusting half the world’s coal, Britain’s economic journal wisely notes for whom the coal burns – 25% of the Chinese economy churns out export goods for the West. Along with our manufacturing jobs, we exported much industrial pollution which, if acknowledged, makes “the rich world a lot less virtuous”. Currently, both Shanghai and Hengyang endure the worst heat wave in 140 years of recorded history, a phenomenon climate scientists unabashedly attribute, in part, to climate change. We pray son Mike returns with health relatively unscathed, but also a realization that Earthlings are together in a mess for which we all share blame and urgent responsibility to cleanse. -Tom Willey more info: online.wsj/article/SB10001424127887323829104578624010648228142.html economist/news/briefing/21583245-china-worlds-worst-polluter-largest-investor- green-energy-its-rise-will-have
Posted on: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 19:26:13 +0000
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