China and the Environment & the Revelation

Issue:
The NYT’s has completed a three part series on China’s epic pollution crisis. The first article introduces China’s roaring economic growth and population growth as pollution reaches dangerous extremes. The second article discusses the cause of groundwater depletion due to development. This last article addresses the toxic cyanobacteria that turned the big lake, Lake Tai, fluorescent green. The lake is “the center of China’s ancient ‘land of fish and rice,’ succumbed this year to floods of industrial and agricultural waste.”
“At least two million people who live amid the canals, rice paddies and chemical plants around the lake had to stop drinking or cooking with their main source of water.”
The article goes on for five shockingly written pages of environmental degradation and environmental injustices. Since the 1950’s the lake was dammed and phosphates and other pollution-borne nutrients made the lake eutrophic. In the 1980’s chemical factories started drawing and dumping prolific amounts of water from China’s third largest source of freshwater.
By the 1990’s the north arc of the lake had 2,800 factories. The lake used to contain three very common fish species and a popular crustacean. The water also used to be used to irrigate rice paddy fields. Now, farmers swear that they do not enter the rice paddies without gloves or goulashes because the water caused their skin to peel off. The prominent activist working to protect the ecology of the lake and the water resource highlighted in the article was arrested for months before the algae bloom appeared. He was sentenced to three years “on an alchemy of charges that smacked of official retribution,” said the NYT’s writer. The journalist also claims that the local government views environmental warriors as a greater threat that environmental degradation. The reasoning, the chemical factories transformed the economy.
“By the mid-1990s, taxes on chemical industry profits accounted for four-fifths of local government revenue, according to a report from the city of Yixing, which oversees Zhoutie.”
What does this example in a Lake in China mean for the rest of the world? Although, the fingers are pointed at the communist power of this country, is extreme environmental degradation not likely in a democratic society? Rather is it a transition of values and standards? Are officials in this local government thinking now, what ought we to do? How do we promote a healthy, preventative, “what ought we to do” in this country and globally?

Site: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2007/10/14/world/asia/choking_on_growth_3.html


Deed:
Instead of a deed this week I wanted to share my thankfulness for taking a philosophy class. I have four more classes to take in the spring then I will have earned my Undergraduate degree. I have been taking course at NAU for 12 terms and only have one more! But the Environmental ethics course has been stimulating and invaluable to my education. Although, it has been difficult transitioning from making slides from my root samples, then thinking in this whole new mind stretching, philosophical way, then going to an ecology class back to straightforward science, it has been painfully exciting. I have an old catalog but I hope every emphasis is required to take this course. It is necessary to illustrate that there is more to science than just a scientific lens.
So as an environmental scientist, ONLY trained to do and read science…the PHI 331 class has been invaluable! I’ve enjoyed this new world of thought so much I take offense when my “fellow” scientists-to-be devalue the importance of other disciplines. Some don’t realize that our human perspective is limited! And the only way to understand it ALL is to think things out in all disciplines. All disciplines have their place and perhaps those places should not have such distinct borders.
This revelation that perhaps science should become more interdisciplinary is what pushed me to purse getting a sociology class accepted for my program. A course focused on human populations and the environment; the history of the emergence, growth, and organization of human populations and distribution patterns in relation to natural resources and environmental stress. I hope this class will reveal an avenue of knowledge by sociologists that is not addressed by natural scientists.