Quick one off post ... it's the beginning of the end for China's "meteoric rise," one of the more hackneyed phrases mindlessly repeated in stories about the country's development from communist bubble state to land of free market capitalism unbalanced by any commitment to democracy.

I just LOVE being a clever know-it-all ... I remember the three years I lived in China and being overwhelmed by the dedicated, state-sponsored raping of its own natural resources and environment. I remember living on a lake in the southern province of Guangdong my first year that picturesquely swelled with piles of garbage that people just dumped in there (some of it OUR garbage of course). I remember moving to Beijing and being overwhelmed two springs in a row by choking, blinding dust storms that blanketed the city in this scary Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome haze, but with no hero zipping through it on a motorcycle, just millions of cars heating up the atmosphere and making me wheeze. I remember my first winter there, when I was studying Chinese at a university that burned its own coal, developing an undiagnosable throat disease that made breathing nearly impossible at night and talking, horror of horrors, impossible by day. I remember listening to CNN reports as I worked out at my super fancy hotel gym about China's lakes recently shrinking by 40 percent, all of its big, water-producing lakes (heh, "water producing" that's funny, you know what I mean), the lakes that irrigate this land which has faced famine after famine in the past caused by water shortages. And I remember thinking, China is totally going to crash and burn environmentally long before it "arrives."

You can't shoot for an American standard of living for over a billion people. I mean, we're less than a third of that number and we consume the lion's share of the world's resources at the moment. I recently read an essay by this American writer living in China arguing the West focuses too much on China's human rights and environmental issues and that it is a very narrow lens by which to understand China. I agree -- I mean, it's not like every time I turn on the air conditioner I'm thinking "screw it, I'm going to live for the present and future generations can clean up the problems I created because I am an evil, selfish person" -- no, I'm turning on the air conditioner and thinking ahh, that's much better. The people I met in China aren't a bunch of money and luxury-crazed demons ... they just want a sweet life, just like the one promised in the kind of mass media advertising campaigns that make me think face toner in pretty bottles is a really good and necessary idea.

But none of this changes the fact that China's yucky coal by-products are floating into the Western parts of the United States (it's a fact folks) and that it is seriously inhibiting its ability to feed itself. There has been a recent push by the ruling party (the ONLY party, the "Communist" party) to start thinking long term. Like, maybe we shouldn't cut down all our forests to make disposable wooden chopsticks because then the desert winds sweep through our deforested plains and blanket our capital city in a nasty, choking dust every spring. Or maybe we should start regulating factories and what grody things they are up to so, for example, the water supply for a city of half a million isn't poisoned when one of said factories mysteriously explodes (I'm talking about what happened in the northern city of Harbin last year in case you are too lazy to click on the link).

However, I have already read plenty of arguments that it is "too late" for any such measures and that we, meaning China and the world which will be affected as well by that massive country's environmental melt down, are facing a scary future indeed. I'm not sure what "too late" means though -- famine? Unstoppable desertification? One giant land of underground coal fires? I think we will adapt as humans, whatever happens, and that "too late" doesn't refer to a zero-sum situation but one in which our quality of life (meaning quality in a way that counts, like nutritious food, homes that aren't washed away in the floods of an overheated atmospheres and air that doesn't cause mysterious throat diseases) is gradually deterioated past the point of recognition and Tina Turner is singing "We Don't Need Another Hero!" in sexy rags and the children of the world are living in caves.