... Yet the Mao era's ecological devastation pales next to that of China's current industrialization. A fourth of the country is now desert. More than three-fourths of its forests have disappeared. Acid rain falls on a third of China's landmass, tainting soil, water, and food. Excessive use of groundwater has caused land to sink in at least 96 Chinese cities, producing an estimated $12.9 billion in economic losses in Shanghai alone. Each year, uncontrollable underground fires, sometimes triggered by lightning and mining accidents, consume 200 million tons of coal, contributing massively to global warming. A miasma of lead, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other elements of coal-burning and car exhaust hovers over most Chinese cities; of the world's 20 most polluted cities, 16 are Chinese.
The government estimates that 400,000 people die prematurely from respiratory illnesses each year, and health care costs for premature death and disability related to air pollution is estimated at up to 4 percent of the country's gross domestic product. Four-fifths of the length of China's rivers are too polluted for fish. Half the population-600 or 700 million people-drinks water contaminated with animal and human waste. ...
I'd argue that our global industrial culture has become more destructive and less accountable than Mao era China's. We've encouraged the Chinese, and the people of every other country, to substitute one form of Maoism for another. We've even reinvented our own Lysenkoism.
Global Central Land Planning
We rejected the centrally planned industry and agriculture of Mao, and for good reason; it starved people.
Will we reject the monotone industry and agriculture of global collectives like Wal-Mart and Monsanto for the same reason? Will we have the strength to look at the system we live under and see that it doesn't work, that it's starving people?
Agrarian author Wendell Berry referred to our system of commerce as an absentee economy. Someone sitting in Bentonville, AK, can make decisions for millions, without ever having to directly face those injured by the consequences. Without any means of accountability for the level of havoc they wreak, they are held almost solely to the measure of how much profit they've made for absentee investors.
... Thus corporate ownership frequently seeks to remove all social and ethical constraints on a company's pursuit of ever-greater profits and growth. Anything that is legal is considered allowable, and if profitable, is deemed desirable, regardless of the social or ethical implications. Corporate acts of patriotism and altruism become nothing more than public relations strategies designed to minimize societal constraints on profits and growth.
... As corporate consolidation takes place globally [and] vertically ... free market coordination is replaced by corporate central planning. Ironically, corporatism is transforming capitalism into a perverse form of communism, in which corporate ownership, rather than government ownership, is replacing individual private ownership and central planning by corporations, rather than government, is replacing free market allocation of resources.
The fundamental flaw in capitalism is its lack of attention to the need to continually renew, regenerate, and reproduce the natural and human resources that must support productivity over the long run. Economic investments today are investments in more efficient means of extraction or exploitation, not investments in renewal or regeneration of the natural and human resource base. In other words, any system that naturally encourages the exploitation of nature and of people is incapable of protecting nature and people from its exploitation. ...
Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense, by John Ikerd, 2005
So what else is a massive, transnational corporation but a central planning agency for their fraction of the global economy? 'Okay, now, everybody grow corn and wheat! Mark, set ... go!!!' Unelected people thousands of miles away telling you how to live and what you can buy and what you and your family are worth.
In The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein, she included the following quote from someone who'd gotten to live under both sides:
Pieces of a living city cannot be auctioned off without taking into consideration that there are indigenous traditions, even if they seem odd to foreigners ... But these are our traditions and our city. For a long time we lived under the dictatorship of the Communists, but now we have found out that life under the dictatorship of business people is no better. They couldn't care less about what country they are in.
- Grigory Gorin, Russian writer, 1993
When people starve in North Korea, it's a terrible tragedy. When people starve under a global agribusiness regime, it's an unfortunate failure of the market that needs to be corrected by making it even easier for a small handful of companies to take over world food production. When neoliberals talk about freeing the market, they're only ever talking about making the world safe for corporate mercantilism; where everyone is supposed to believe that we can all get rich by aspiring to export more than we import. All of us. Ahem. Sometimes, there are ponies.
Which is working so well for us already. Look what's happened the the soil that supports us all in parallel with the glorious Green Revolution, emphasis mine:
... During the past half century, human land use and associated activities have degraded some 5 billion ha (about 43%) of Earth's vegetated land. Such land degradation results in a reduced productive potential and a diminished capacity to provide benefits to humanity. Much of this degradation (on about 3.6 billion ha) is linked to desertification, the spreading of desert conditions that disrupt semiarid and arid ecosystems (including agroecosystems).
... Degraded lands may suffer from destruction of native vegetation communities, reduced agricultural yields, lowered animal production, and simplification of once-diverse natural ecosystems with or without accompanying degradation of the soil resource. On about 2 billion of the 5 billion ha of degraded lands in the world, soil degradation is a major part of the problem ... In some cases the soil degradation occurs mainly as deterioration of physical properties by compaction or surface crusting, ... or as deterioration of chemical properties by acidification ... or salt accumulation ... However, most (~85%) soil degradation stems from erosion--the destructive action of wind and water.
The two main components of land degradation--damage to plant communities and deterioration of soil--are not independent of each other. Rather, they interact to cause a downward spiral of accelerating deterioration ... Due to overgrazing, deforesation, or inappropriate methods of crop production, vegetation becomes less dense and vigorous, and thus provides the soil with less and less protection from erosion. Simultaneously, as the soil is degraded by such processes as erosion and nutrient depletion, it becomes less and less capable of supporting a protective canopy of vegetation.
... Although rivers like the Mississippi and Yangtze were muddy before humans disturbed their watersheds, current sediment loads are far greater than before. To gain some perspective on the enormous amount of soil transported to the sea by these rivers, consider the Mississippi's sediment load (only a fifth as great as that of the Yangtze or the Ganges). If the 300 million Mg of sediment were carried to the Gulf of Mexico by dump trucks, it would take a continuous, year-round caravan of more than 80,000 large trucks, stretching all the way from Wisconsin to New Orleans (1600 km) and back, with a 20-Mg load being dumped into the Gulf about every 2 seconds.
Accelerated erosion occurs when people disturb the soil or natural vegetation ... [and] is often 10 to 1000 times as destructive as geological erosion, especially on sloping lands in regions of high rainfall. Rates of erosion by wind and water on agricultural land in Africa, Asia, and South America are thought to avegage about 30 to 40 Mg/ha annually. In the United States, the average erosion rate on cropland is about 12 Mg/ha--7Mg by water and 5 Mg by wind. Some cultivated soils are eroding at 10 times these average rates. In comparison, erosion on undisturbed humid-region grasslands and forests generally occurs at rates considerably below 0.1 Mg/ha. ...
The Nature and Properties of Soils, 13th Ed., Ch. 17, by Nyle C. Brady and Ray R. Weil, Pearson Education, Inc., 2002. If you know a soil scientist, they have this textbook.
Editorial Note: The 'ha' abbreviation stands for hectares, with one hectare equivalent to about 2.47 acres. Five billion hectares is around 12.4 billion acres, 3.6 billion hectares is about 8.9 billion acres, and 2 billion hectares is about 4.9 billion acres. And, yeah, holy ****ing ****, that's a lot of land.
The 'Mg' abbreviation stands for megagram, or a metric ton, 1,000 kilograms.
If it weren't bad enough how the land has been managed, look how they've handled our water supplies:
... Water tables are dropping a meter or more each year beneath a large area of irrigated farmland in north China; they are falling 20 centimeters a year across two-thirds of India's Punjab, that nation's breadbasket. One-fifth of irrigated land in the US is watered by pumping in excess of the recharge rate. The Southwest receives only 6 percent of the country's available water as rainfall, but its large irrigated farms and growing urban areas account for 36 percent of the nation's water use.
... The Ogallala Aquifer that supplies agriculture, indultry and home use in much of the southern and central plains states has an annual overdraft 130 to 160 percent in excess of replacement. This vitally important aquifer will become unproductive in another thirty years or so. The Ogallala Aquifer is the irrigation source for much of the American breadbasket; when it becomes unproductive, the US heartland will go dry. ...
Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture, by Dale Allen Pfeiffer
All the mistakes that one community might have made, and suffered for, in caring for their land in the past can now get multiplied around the globe before the feedback effects kick in. As Brady and Weil said in the same chapter quoted above, "When viewing the nearly barren hills in central India, or in parts of Greece, Lebanon, and Syria, it is hard to imagine that agricultural communities once flourished in these places."
Exploitation of the land has been a chronic flaw of human agriculture, but people who refused to learn could be replaced by those who would. Now, these parasitical factory cropping systems forcibly displace locally appropriate food production and agricultural systems that might have protected the soil better, moving so fast that they replace those who've learned with those who think they know everything, and are gravely mistaken.
And for what?
So some dude in a lab can cook up something new and pointless out of dirt cheap corn syrup to clog your arteries and overload your pancreas with. As crowning civilizational achievements go, this one bites.
Accountability
There's a tendency to blame capitalism for this sort of thing, the anti-democratic corporatocracy in which we all live, for whose favor both the governments of China and the US dance. But it really calls for a more specific description, maybe post-capitalism? Nah. That sounds like an art movement, and suggests that it's modern. Really, it's the same corporate mercantilism that Adam Smith himself was reacting against when he wrote Wealth of Nations, and said in Book 1, Chapter 10:
... [T]he policy of Europe occasions a very important inequality in the whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labor and stock, by restraining the competition in some employments to a smaller number than might otherwise be disposed to enter into them. The exclusive privileges of corporations, or guilds, are the principal means it makes use of for this purpose. The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable.
... The pretense that corporations are necessary for the better government of the trade is without any foundation. The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is not that of his corporation, but that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence. An exclusive corporation necessarily weakens the force of this discipline. ...
You know how it is when you call some customer 'service' hotline with a terrible interface that burns through your cell phone minutes like there's no tomorrow and the person on the other end can't help you with actual problems because their company's too big to give a damn about you and what are you going to do anyway? Take them to court? Ha.
Though if the courts do care and are too obnoxious, if the laws passed inconvenience them enough, the company will just move. They don't have to put up with you and your representative government, which gives them leverage. Smith continued in that chapter:
... Corporation laws, however, give less obstruction to the free circulation of stock from one place to another than to that of labor. It is everywhere much easier for a wealthy merchant to obtain the privilege of trading in a town corporate, than for a poor artificer to obtain that of working in it. ...
Some of those dead White guys had a clue, now and again.
So don't just call this capitalism. Mercantilism, perhaps, if you think that might mean anything to the person you're addressing. But maybe, just call it what it most recently resembles: transnational Maoism.
We've taken a Great Leap Forward.
Millions have starved. What's worse, they starved in a world where food was more abundant than it had ever been before. Millions more are likely to starve; not only through a continuation of grossly unfair distribution and land allocation, but because of the destruction of the land itself.
We burned off a one-time payout of cheap fossil fuel and the accumulated soil productivity of millenia, and called it progress.
How many deaths before we insist that the architects of this human and environmental disaster become "dead ancestors," like Chairman Mao had the grace to name himself after his failures cost the lives of so many of his people?
At least he acted as though he'd cared about the people he'd so plainly hurt. At least he was capable of remorse.
People like Warren Anderson of Union Carbide, not so much. Because in the end, it's about accountability. Any group, company, bureaucracy, or government, that will neither police itself nor be held to account by those they interact with will become authoritarian and corrupt. It's inevitable. Unavoidable.
Any such group not held to account for the impact of its actions will become disconnected from reality and consequence. Will be blind to peril and careless of injustice.
Mao's compatriots in power had the good sense to say, "Enough!", at last.
Where are those people in the United States? Where are those people in the regulatory oversight bodies that govern our corporations? Where are those people in our Congress?
No Courage
It isn't courage to point a finger at people far away and say that they're doing something wrong. It might be correct, from both a factual or ethical standpoint, but in the grand scheme of things, so what?
What the blazes can I do about China? What the Devil could they possibly do about me complaining about them such that it requires any fortitude on my part to do it? Indeed, the people with the most influence on me (and probably on you, too) are most likely to do nothing more than pat me on the back for being sage and wise enough to see the Chinese as the Biggest Problem We Face.
I vote in the United States. A country that's key to the hatching and propagation of transnational Maoism, and which refuses to hold its corporate spawn to account for the destruction of lives and property in every country it touches, including China.
(I'm lucky to live in a country where I don't face jail for saying this, it's true, and it makes my talk relatively cheap. But isn't that a pretty low bar? Isn't that the least we humans should expect from a government, from each other?)
And in the US, there is less criticism of the corporate model of running things than there was of Mao in China during the Great Leap Forward. Part of that has to do with the fact that people dying in the countrysides have been outside our national borders. Part of it has to do with the fact that it's considered unAmerican to do so, a standard of debate rigidly enforced and self-enforced by both politicians and the media.
So you want some Maoist conformity? Come to the United States.
Listen to a bunch of cowards point fingers at their trade rivals, their business partners, for tactics they employ themselves. Listen to our politburo gloat about their free democracy, where no corporate criticism is allowed to be heard on the television and government and corporate jobs are nearly interchangeable. Listen to the parasitic wastrels in power extol the bounty of their unaccountable economic planning; rejoicing in the luxury of the few at the expense of the many, the invisible.
I vote here. I pay for this directly. Who am I to start any moral soapboxing with the flaws of the Chinese?
[1] "The War On Bugs" by Will Allen, 2008, Chelsea Green. A history of pesticides and modern agriculture.
[2] "Global Warning: The Last Chance for Change" by Paul Brown, 2007, Reader's Digest. Or, as they say at the Fafblog, "Global Warming: How F*cked Are We? The answer may surprise you! But only if you thought the answer was "not f*cked," 'cause it turns out we're pretty f*cked."
[3] "China: Inside the Dragon" a special issue of National Geographic, May, 2008.
Other GSP installments:
Darfur Engine, Pt 2 - The long burn.
Darfur Engine, Pt 1 - You didn't think the Chinese had no precedent, did you?
Amish Takeover - Apocalyptic dystopia? No thanks, I'd rather have a civilization.
The Efficiency Trap - Energy flow in living systems and their origins.
The End of Cheap - Political reality, meet physical reality. |
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