Reflections on Some Environmental Issues

Reflections on Some Environmental Issues

All told, Xinxiang, a city of about 600,000, seems to have somewhat cleaner air than when I was first here in 2001 though the bad air then may have been due to the spring burning of the winter wheat stubble. Now there are signs all over the countryside saying that such burning is prohibited and will be fined. I have seen this directive disregarded on a small scale, but the real test will come this spring after the winter wheat harvest when it's traditional to burn the stubble before turning over the soil. I can clearly recall in May of 2001 being able to look directly at the sun in the middle of the day and thinking that this was not a good thing.

The foreign affairs director said last week that the heat in his apartment building has not been turned on because the local government refused to allow the coal burning boiler to be used due to failure to meet pollution standards. In the seven-storey building where most of my classes are, they have yet to turn on the heat, but they are likely just saving money. In another classroom building the heat is on but not in the brand new art building. We have had heat in our apartment since November 15th, but I have heard no rumor that any of this variability has to do with pollution standards.

One sees very few pollution creating vehicles. Some taxis are pretty creaky, but I do not see any of them belching out black exhaust since they would be pretty easy prey to be stopped and fined by the police. (I would say extorted, but this is not Chicago.) There are plenty of public busses and vast majority of vehicles are electric bikes or bicycles rather than cars. Motorcycles are still common enough, but in terms of noise and exhaust pollution they seem well regulated.

However, even given the above, I can almost never see Taihang Mountain (太行山) though it is only about 4 miles from here, an hour or so away on my bike. I know what direction it's in, so if I want to go there I can just head north into the dusty smog and eventually it will appear. Anyway, it's a bit of a mystery where the smog comes from and why it varies so much from day to day. Surely the wind is a factor, but I've yet to see a clear pattern. There are two huge coal burning power plants right near the mountains, and I've bicycled right up to them, one of which looks very new, but I don't see the stacks putting out serious amounts of smoke. Within walking distance of school there are a few small coal yards where they produce these perforated cylinders of pressed coal that go into stoves in individual homes and I have seen them stacked up on the ledges of older flats, so some few people must still have permission to use them. Well, it's probably the usual stuff one would see anywhere. The little fish get caught and the big ones get away. The only thing I really know about these big fish is that they are somewhere upwind.

I can see very little evidence of any organized recycling effort. I do see older folks with 3-wheelers, who collect things like cardboard and plastic bottles, so they must take them somewhere. Also, I've seen some really down and out types going through the trash barrels on the street looking for plastic bottles for the most part. Virtually nothing is canned in aluminum or other metal cans, and just about the only thing that gets put into glass bottles is, thankfully, beer. Everything else is in plastic bottles, which in theory are recyclable.

A huge issue is plastic bags. They are everywhere. When you go to the store they put bags into bags and if you say anything they look at you as if there must be a language issue because you could not possibly be saying that you don't want your things inside of 3 bags. Plastic litter is one of the most noticeable differences from 20 years ago. In the early 90s just outside of Shenyang I once saw a man plowing a small field with a donkey, but there was so many plastic bags littering the soil that it seemed he was either growing or harvesting plastic bags instead of crops. I wish I'd had a camera to record this old to modern transition. Even the woman here who takes care of the compound and does some light cleaning and who once voiced her concern over environmental issues asked me if I wanted her to throw out my accumulated beer bottles. I said that I'd take them out myself for the 一毛钱 refund, a little more than a penny US, but not for the money but just to get them recycled. This seemed both to surprise and impress her.

I've already noted the terrible condition of the river that runs through town and passes near campus. Just walking in the neighborhood I can see drains in any number of places discharging waste water of various shades of tan and sickly green into the river. Some of the drains surely come from the campus. The river typically varies somewhat in color from dark grey to virtually black though on just one single day after a rain it was briefly a somewhat not totally unnatural muddy color. I plan to get some pictures one of these days. Even students have remarked that in their 19 or 20-year lives they can remember swimming and fishing in now lifeless hometown streams.

I've seen farmers in the local truck farm fields outside of town walk the rows of vegetables generously spraying what I take to be insecticides (they weed by hoeing or by hand—their labor being cheaper than the cost of herbicides) without gloves or masks. In reading my 360 students' journals on friendship, there were easily half a dozen who mentioned losing a high school classmate to cancer, often leukemia. A number also reported losing a young father to cancer, a father probably because of a dangerously polluted industrial work site. Of course, such things are plenty common enough in the US, where there was a recent report (in the UK Guardian newspaper) of a cancer cluster near a depleted uranium dumpsite.

Street sweepers are out daily in the morning to get the litter off the streets where people often just drop it because they know somebody will be by in the morning. Nevertheless, people, especially younger ones, do typically take the extra steps to put their trash in receptacles. However, I have also seen the street sweepers conveniently sweep the litter into the run off drains if they happen not to be covered.

I guess there's just not much of the good old 60s what-goes-around-comes-around awareness here yet. One possible reason for this obliviousness to environmental issues is the fact that even 20 years ago most everything was made of natural materials, so it didn't much matter where you dropped it. Furthermore, the previous non-consumerist economy meant that everything had to be used frugally, and you went shopping everyday with your basket as there were no plastic bags given out in stores. Thus, one must ask if the real issue is lack of environmental awareness or lack of foresight—both in China and the West—as to the implications of an immediately and maximally profitable capitalist-consumerist economy. In any case, I have seen some really stunning examples of the failure to deal with these issues here in China.

Once on a ferry from Hong Kong to Canton, I was amazed to see a trash receptacle lined with a plastic bag at the end of every single row of seats and signs about how you should put your trash in the proper place. I was pretty impressed. As we got into the estuary close to Canton, I saw the cleaning guy go dutifully up and down the rows and stuff each of these little plastic bags into two large ones. He then tied them off and proceeded to the fantail of the boat, where he gave them a quick windup whirl and tossed them right into the sea.

On a 3-day ferry trip going down the Yangtze River from Chongqing through the Three Gorges on the way to Wuhan, I saw an even more incredible example of this mindset built into the design of a ship. This 3 or 4-deck ferry had easily a few hundred people on it, and it was one of a constant stream of ferries going up and down the river. We'd pass one every hour or so and on they went day after week after month after year. On the ship you could get packaged eats, but it also stopped from time to time at riverside ports for the purchase of meals in styrofoam containers, which had just become available back then in 1988. Right on the railings up and down both sides on every deck there were numerous handy trash chutes, which seemed to show evidence of forethought. Well, in my wanderings around the ship I happened to go down to the first deck and what did I see but that the chutes were open at the bottom and every bit of trash dropped directly into the river. They might as well have instructed people just to throw their trash directly overboard. Perhaps the chutes could have been fixed with collection receptacles or maybe they were removed to save labor and avoid the cost and trouble of proper disposal. I'd like to think that this issue was taken care of soon after we traveled the river, but the recent official confirmation that the Yangtze River baiji dolphin is extinct leads me to think otherwise.

One last example is something I saw right through my apartment window earlier this semester. There is a copy center in the next building and I happened to see some fellow opening toner cartridges and dumping toner right into a sewer grate 10 feet outside the front door of the copy center. For a moment I felt like running out and hollering at him, but I've been here too long for that.

Life is good. The shelves are full. The neon lights blink and beckon. What you don't see won't hurt you. Welcome to the post-modern-high-tech human condition, most recently arrived in China. Yes, e.e. cummings, pity this busy monster, manunkind,/not. Progress is a comfortable disease. Yes, Alfred E. Neuman, What-me worry? Yes, Kurt Vonnegut, And so it goes…