|  It's
now accepted radical change is needed urgently to reclaim
our threatened Earth. But, as Adrian Glamorgan discovers,
China may not be dragging its feet.
Borneo from the air is endless jungle, cut suddenly
by thin roads for logging, and the square deforested
gashes leave nothing. Beneath the thundercloud reveals
more jungle and remote terrain. There are surely people
below, in stray villages and riverside huts, carrying
on lives I cannot imagine. Jungle stretches on and on,
cut by more lines of these probing, gashing roads, and
here and there are snaking rivers, now turned chocolate
brown, churning their heavy sediments downwards to the
ocean, spilling into the South China Sea, leaving a
choking plume, staining clear waters.
Australia seems so far away, but jumbos travel to East
Asia daily. In the seas are the heavily burdened iron
ore ships, plying from the blast furnace heat of the
Pilbara to the blast furnaces of China. But merging
with the clouds are what these steelworks and factories
have created as poisonous byproduct: grey brown walls,
folds and curtains of endless smog well out to sea,
spewing out from the Pearl River Delta, or from west
to east of Beijing. NASA satellites records images of
the murky brown mantles that sometimes stretch thousands
of kilometres, conveyor belts of sulphur dioxide, nitrous
oxide, particulate mercury and lead, the belch of industry
across China and into the western Pacific Ocean. Invisibly,
carbon dioxide and methane wraps itself round the planet
like a warm blanket.
It's supposed to be relatively clear as we land in
Hong Kong, but the sky seems like a bad haze day in
Melbourne. The majestic mountains of Lantau show another
side to the laser-neon city, more ethereal outline than
detail because of the smog.
Behind the city, much of Hong Kong is still as natural
as when the British first came in the 1800s to trade
with the Chinese upriver. In those days, the cultivated
Chinese didn't need anything from Europe, so the British
started to cultivate the opium habit amongst the people
of Canton, and when local officials protested, the British
went to war, and thus acquired, through the Opium Wars
and hard negotiation, Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New
Territories. It all got handed back in 1997, with a
promise by the Chinese communists that Hong Kong would
remain a special administrative zone with its own capitalist
and democratic traits, until 2047. So Hong Kong has
got on with what it does best, making money.
Hong Kong is exciting, amazing, and wonderful, even
if totally unsustainable. Once its wealth was built
on manufacturing textiles; now it claims to be one of
Asia's world cities, relying on services like merchant
banking, finance, human resources. There are many Australians
here, pilots for Dragon Air or human resource managers
taking care of personnel from New Zealand to India,
expats making a fortune and mainlanders scratching out
a living, as well as the seven million who travel the
public transport and hug the Manhattan-like skyscrapers
and brush past top name labels shopping precincts.
Most don't need to pay tax, and the government has
a reluctance to legislate anything. So sewage pours
into the harbour, dogs swimming at the beach get toxic
attacks from raw pesticide outflow, plastic bags blow
about, and people make money, and more money. HK powers
itself by two coal fire stations and ageing goods vehicles
that are largely responsible for the asthma, bronchial
infections, Hong Kong Hack and sore eyes that eventually
drives so many expatriates back home early. So much
money to be made, but who wants their child to breathe
in all that? The local Steiner school shifted up towards
the peak to get away from the pollution, but visibility
is still low on many days. Sulphur from coal adds to
the glare.
The locals conveniently blame mainland China for the
pollution. In 1979, nearby on the Pearl River delta,
a fishing village called Shenzhen was singled out to
be the first Special Economic Zone by the all powerful
Deng Xiaoping. This was the beginning of the China boom.
In the 1990s, Shenzhen constructed "one highrise
a day, one boulevard every three days," so that
a village has become in a lifetime nine million people.
Although it's a key goods manufacturing area, it is
also becoming a major high tech locale: Apple makes
its iPods here, and IBM's personal computer division
of IBM is now in Chinese hands.
Last December's Bali conference shows that the world
now accepts the immediate reality and dangers of climate
change. Few were surprised that the United States pretended
otherwise, but it was more of a surprise to hear reports
that China has been playing a constructive role behind
the scenes to work on cutting emissions. Yes, China
opens up new coal fired power stations each week, but
they also close coal stations down. Some observers believe
China is now world leader in windpower technology and
production, perhaps leaving Germany in second place,
and is pursuing solar energy strongly, picking up Australian
talent abandoned by the Federal Government during the
last decade.
While some Australians might grumble that the Chinese
are going to make climate change worse by buying more
fridges and driving more cars - undoubtedly so - we
might be further surprised to learn of the plan to build,
from the ground up, several eco cities like Dongtan,
on the Yangtze estuary, to be a totally green city of
500,000 people. How many Australian state governments
are planning eco cities with only electric and hydrogen
cars allowed in their precincts, with complete self
sufficiency in water and energy and zero energy building
principles? China may have outstripped the US in 2007
for carbon emissions but, along with India, represents
only a tiny proportion of the total greenhouse gases
ever emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Some radical changes must take place. With the help
of raw materials from Australia, and around the world,
China has had a growth rate of 7% and just powers along.
However, some researchers measure the cost of contaminating
air, the waters, the land, and the food, at about 7%,
giving no net gain to China, and perhaps an irreparable
loss. The Olympics will need Beijing to shut down its
factories for a fortnight, but it is no solution to
pollution.
Once nations like England, France, Belgium, Germany
and the United States built their wealth by invading
other countries and building great empires and, when
that was no longer in fashion, created unequal trade
deals after independence to achieve the same. Now, we
don't usually invade other people's countries to steal
their things: instead, we are invading the future. The
new imperialism is taking the good air, water, and earth
that is ours and would once have belonged to those who
come after us, but through our selfish waste is now
ours alone, to be burnt up and contaminated in a brief
instant.
The Earth Century is ours to share. But not to take.
Chinese, Australian, Bornean - we are all one, needing
to caretake the present to preserve the simple gifts
of life for our future.
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