Global Suicide Pact: Darfur Engine, Pt 2

by: Natasha Chart

Thu May 08, 2008 at 20:00

This is the ongoing story of a species whose leaders have a death wish, and whose members at large mostly don't. Also, sometimes they got to wondering what should be done about a large geopolitical concentration of fellow beings operating under the brand name "China".

(9) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (10) Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. (11) There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (NIV)

We remember the past very selectively. It's certainly true that much of it, for most people, was horrible. And with the American view of history so much informed by the history of the Europeans, which ran heavy in the famine, epidemic and arbitrary gibbeting direction, it could be easy to assume that things were like that everywhere. In some cases, that's also certainly true.

Non-European peoples weren't societies of saints before colonial explorers got there; they had their own problems, their own demons. It isn't necessary to remember them as perfect to understand that what was done to them was wrong. Reserving justice only for the 'deserving' undermines the rule of law, destroys the social compact through alienating and arbitrary corruption, and must be regarded as ethically suspect human-to-human behavior from the perspective of every religious faith I've looked into.  

In many cases, the ancestors of the people in what we now regard as the developing world achieved remarkable things that it's easy for us to lose sight of, seeing them as we do through the lens of a present in which their polity has often been through the wringers of some or all of repeated foreign conquest, deliberate cultural erasure, guerrilla warfare, Cold War coups, land dispossession and structural adjustment.

Just because many of them have been brought low, even to the state of the European peasantry of the pre-colonial and colonial eras, it shouldn't eclipse their past works, some of which were bloody amazing. It shouldn't necessarily make us despair for their future. After all, the European peasantry eventually did pretty well for themselves.

Paradise Burned

Nearly 500,000,000 people are being maintained, chiefly upon the products of an area smaller than the improved farm lands of the United States. Complete a square on the lines drawn from Chicago southward to the Gulf and westward across Kansas, and there will be enclosed an area greater than the cultivated fields of China, Korea and Japan and from which five times our present population are fed. - F.H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries, 1911

For four thousand years the Chinese farmed their countryside and maintained its fertility. They farmed the same countryside, over and over again for generations. If its productivity did not increase, neither did it seem to decrease.

The contrast between the results of the original Chinese model and the European model of commodity extraction applied to the fertile Americas could not be more stark:

The forest became drastically reduced because of profligate cutting practices. The soil was progressively eroded and exhausted by European-style agriculture. Evidentally the settlers and their descendants mistook a temporary gift of nature for a permanent one. They assumed that depletion of one site could be made up by continuous expansion into others, "and in the long run," Mr. Cronon writes, "that was impossible." Seen from this angle, "the people of plenty were a people of waste." - From the New York Times book review of Changes In The Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England., by William Cronon.

The people of waste, indeed. Consider what they'd inherited, what they could have maintained and copied for their own use, perhaps even shared, for our eventual benefit:

[emphasis mine] ... Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks-they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country.

... Planting their orchards, the first Amazonians transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In a widely cited article from 1989, William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously estimated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthropogenic origin-directly or indirectly created by human beings. In some circles this is now seen as a conservative position. "I basically think it's all human-created," Clement told me in Brazil. He argues that Indians changed the assortment and density of species throughout the region. So does Clark Erickson, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist, who told me in Bolivia that the lowland tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the planet. "Some of my colleagues would say that's pretty radical," he said, smiling mischievously. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, "lots" of botanists believe that "what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia." The phrase "built environment," Erickson says, "applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes."

"Landscape" in this case is meant exactly-Amazonian Indians literally created the ground beneath their feet. According to William I. Woods, a soil geographer at Southern Illinois University, ecologists' claims about terrible Amazonian land were based on very little data. In the late 1990s Woods and others began careful measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of inhospitable terrain. But they also discovered swaths of terra preta-rich, fertile "black earth" that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings.

Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn't leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. ...

Chemically speaking, fire is only a showy display of oxidation. The process whereby electrons are stripped away from atoms, quite commonly by interaction with oxygen. This releases energy, the capacity to do work, most of which will be lost as waste heat.

It's happening inside your cells right now. It's an integral part of digesting and utilizing the food we eat. It happens in every living cell, this controlled burn. It even gives off waste heat. The most important oxidation reactions for living things involve carbon compounds, starches mainly, or as you might have heard them called, carbohydrates.

Carbon hydrated, which is to say, carbon atoms joined to hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Photosynthesizing plant cells take water (H2O) carbon dioxide (carbon and two oxygens, CO2) and unburn it, if you will, into long chains of CH2O molecules linked together as fructose, cellulose, deoxyribose, what have you, and free oxygen (O2). Plant cells that don't photosynthesize, and almost all other living cells, take those starches and burn them, combine them with oxygen to produce water and carbon dioxide again.

We eat the bodies of other living things in large part for their exotic carbon compounds. We combine that carbon with oxygen, slowly, with lots of intermediate steps, capturing and reusing as much of the released energy as possible.

The pleasing warmth of our skin is the product of the form of steady combustion we're dependent on, that for humans, allows us to dependably fire the sugar-hungry engines of our brains.

We burn gently alive. So do other beings, all the other chemical machines.

Everywhere in the soil are bacteria and other organisms burning through the carbon that was left over from the waste or dead bodies of plants, animals, fungi and single-celled beings. When it's in soil, these carbon compounds are called soil organic matter (SOM), which I've mentioned before and will again.

SOM is one of the most valuable substances on earth if you're a land-dwelling mammal, which I'm going to guess that you are. It's the main difference between a gloriously black and crumbly prairie soil, nurturing of plants and acquisitive of water, and a fine grade of dead beach sand or rock dust. It's an excellent fertilizer and a strong component of pest and disease resistance in healthy ecosystems.

SOM is worth more than any metal, from a cosmic perspective far more rare, worth almost as much to us as free oxygen. Oh yes, oxygen again.

Soil-dwelling beings combine SOM with oxygen to burn it to live. Much of it gets released rapidly again as carbon dioxide after being digested, some of it is turned into very hard-to-digest carbon compounds that can remain in the soil for a long time before some enterprising fungi or bacteria get around to eating them.

SOM needs to be continually added back to the soil at a rate faster than the beings that live in the ground can burn it off or there will be a steady decline in soil quality and fertility. This can only be covered up for so long by chemical fertilizers. At some point, it simply becomes too resource intensive to replace what naturally ought to have been there.

The style of mass cash-crop agriculture hatched in Europe that uses the land as if it were a factory does not replace SOM. It doesn't keep it at a steady state. It provides for a rapid burnoff of all that makes good soil distinct from sand, and it increases atmospheric carbon dioxide, which, for reasons unknown, decreases soil organic matter.

This month's National Geographic[3] notes that global warming induced climate from increased carbon dioxide is already burning away the water stored in the glaciers of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau that feeds China's Yellow River, with over 3,000 of 4,077 lakes in one county there having dried up. They profile a Tibetan herding family that lost the better part of the animals that supported their nomadic lifestyle during the drought and had to accept a resettlement package from the Chinese government, because they simply couldn't support themselves anymore. Much of the Yellow River, the magazine explains, is now biologically dead; poisoned by industrial dumping and drained by agriculture, the water that remains is now often the death of the plants, animals and people who depended on it before.

The Chinese farmed and worked in their country in the old ways for forty centuries. It was a good country that they kept passing down to successive generations as an abundant foundation for new life. They haven't been doing it the new way for even a full century yet, and their land is dying. Just as the rich, beautiful land of the Americas is.

In 2005, there were 51,000 pollution-related protests across China [3] before the worst effects have even hit yet, when they already have environmental refugees. More than 40% of their land is now desert and another 800 sq miles or more become deserts every year [2].

China's fate, if they hold to their present road, is not to be the next global superpower. It's to starve. It's to be inundated with sand storms from the encroaching Gobi as 30 million surplus young men, men who will never be able to find a nice woman to settle down with because their parents' generation were ashamed to have daughters, realize that the taps have run dry.

That story writes itself.

Just As Broken

... Yu Baofa, a leading Shandong oncologist who has studied the villages of Dongping County, calls it "the cancer capital of the world." He says the incidence of esophageal cancer in the area is 25 times higher than the national average.

The more than four billion tons of wastewater dumped annually into the Yellow River, accounting for a full 10 percent of the river's volume, has pushed into extinction a third of the river's native fish species and made long stretches unfit even for irrigation. Now comes the human toll. In a 2007 report China's Ministry of Health blamed air and water pollution for an alarming rise in cancer rates across China since 2005 -- 19 percent in urban areas and 23 percent in the countryside. Nearly two-thirds of China's rural population, more than 500 million people use water contaminated by human or industrial waste. It's little wonder that gastrointestinal cancer is now the number one killer in the countryside. ... [3]

Does it hurt less when someone in your family dies of cancer than it does when they die by a machete? I'm dubious.

... The costs of Asia's industrial revolution are etched in little hamlets like Badui, a Chinese village in rural Gansu Province.

--

... The woman said her husband had just died in his thirties -- "of a stomach ache," she explained -- but what struck me was the way the teenage sons stared at me, their heads lolling to the side and their mouths creasing into monstrous grins. Their hair was shaggy and unkempt and their expressions preposterous.

"Yeah, they're not right in the head," the mother said, as she saw me looking at them uneasily. "Nobody is in this village. That's why people in these parts call this the 'village of idiots.' I wasn't born here; I married into it. But the same thing is happening to me. I can feel it every day. My brain's getting fried up until eventually there'll be nothing left. ..."

--

... Then, smack in the middle of the path, was a lanky grandfather ... holding the hand of a little girl -- not just a little girl, but a miniature girl, who came up only a bit higher than his knees. ... She was the size of a toddler, and her split pants and lack of underwear showed that she was not yet potty-trained. But she stood and walked effortlessly on her own, and she gazed at me with solemn black sparkling eyes that were those of a child, not a baby.

... "She's Liu Yingchun, my granddaughter ... She's seven years old," he said, although I later worked out that by American conventions she was six.

"Then why is she so short?"

"Oh, kids here are like that," protested the grandfather, still beaming lovingly at her. "Plenty of the kids just never grow up, never learn to speak. But this girl, she's a smart one. She may yet learn how to speak. And she's growing. She's a growing girl."

--

... "What a cute baby!" I said ingratiatingly. It was perhaps the wrong moment, for he had just urinated where he was sitting. Everybody looked at him, and he began to play with his fingers in the urine. His mother picked him up, scolded him, and moved him away. "You dumbo!" she said to him lovingly, tapping on his chest. "You melon-head!"

"What's the baby's name?" I asked her.

"Wei Haiyun[, he's e[ight years old," she murmured softly.

... I was so stunned by his height that I took a piece of string and held it against him, cutting it off to record his height. (On returning home I measured it -- twenty-nine inches. That is the height an average American baby reaches at twelve months.) ... looking at his face alone I would have judged him a handsome boy of eight or ten. But he was miniaturized, roughly in proper proportions, and he behaved like a baby: He ran to his mother to be cradled when he was upset, and he had never learned to use the toilet.

--

I turned out that one-third to one-half of the 180 people in Badui have some serious physical disorder, and nearly all the peasants die early -- often in their forties. Many lose their minds, or become deaf or blind before they die. Women report frequent miscarriages and stillborn children, as well as periodic birth defects. Shortly before I arrived, a baby had been born with fingers fused on both hands. But what struck me most was how many tiny children there were like Haiyun, many not just short but also mentally retarded or deaf.

Similar problems, on a more modest scale, also confound thousands more peasants in other nearby villages, and everyone knows what the problem is: the effluent water dumped into the river by the Liujiaxia Fertilizer Factory just upstream. That river water is the only source of drinking water for Badui. The peasants know that the water is contaminated and that it will destroy their minds and bodies, but they are thirsty and there is no alternative. ...

Thunder From The East: Portrait of a Rising Asia - by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, Vintage publishing, 2001

There is no alternative.

Are the future hopes of those Chinese parents less destroyed than the future hopes of the Iraqi parents whose children are destroyed by bombs my taxes paid for?

The Chinese government probably doesn't want to have to do these things. Killing people and oppressing them is very tiresome, and often, they come to complain and eventually resist. Putting down rebellions is even more tiresome.

They're seizing at the first chance their people have had for real, mass prosperity. They do brutal things to hold on to power, but mostly, they probably want people to be reasonably satisfied and go about building the economy through the continuous processes of daily life. Which is pretty much what the US government wants of its own citizens: go to work, raise your family, buy stuff, don't make trouble. They probably don't see a way out of trying to copy what all the other successful countries are doing.

Which is sort of ironic, as I'll get to next time.

[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:

Transnational Maoism - All hail our corporate mercantilist overlords.
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.

Update: Citation added for the Badui story. How the **** did I forget that one!?