Opinion Sur
In the context of an unprecedented environmental crisis, the Chinese Government seems to be forced to choose between economic growth and environmental protection. Is there any way out?Only 1% of the 560 million people that make up the Chinese urban population can breathe clean air. Around 500 million people in that country are lacking in drinking water access and air and water contamination levels have made cancer become one of the main causes for death.
Almost two thirds of the Chinese energy needs are covered by the extraction and combustion of coal, one of its most abundant –and also most contaminant- natural resources. Through the intensive use of that mineral, in 2005 China became the greatest global emission agent of sulfur dioxide, a toxin responsible for respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses as well as the fall of acid rain in South Korea and Japan.
This somber environmental scenario is, of course, the other face of a vertiginous growth process that maintains two digit rates and that has transformed China into the world’s largest consumer good producer.
While the urban population keeps growing fast due to the rural migrations, the positive and negative effects of change juxtapose. Millions of people get out of poverty every year while social inequalities aggravate and the natural resources, in particular water, tend to become exhausted or contaminated.
Is there any choice? The Chinese Government, as most governments in the countries undergoing industrial development processes, seems to be forced to choose between progress and environmental protection. Between giving up speed in the socio-economic take off or resigning health, quality of life and the environment.
“Let us grow first” has been the slogan implemented for 30 years, ever since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms were dawning. The Chinese are right to claim that that was the slogan of all the economic powers that experienced an industrial development between the XIX and XX century. None (neither the US, nor Japan or the great European countries) managed to grow without leaving behind a heavy environmental burden they paid attention to only later on.
The problem is that China’s size and the weight it carries in the world economy and environment renders its experience unprecedented. Its impact is gigantic and the planet is running out of time. Probably the Chinese, who are reaching industrial development later than Europe and the US, may not enjoy the privilege of growing first and taking care of the environment later. At least it seems difficult that they will continue to do so for long.
However, although we must acknowledge that the Chinese government’s own environmental initiatives testify to the concern and attention the environmental problem has generated, the results still appear to be meager in relation to the challenges.
A Problem with Long-standing Roots
Maybe it is not the Chinese’s fault only. Their case may only be the utmost expression of a much more significant disruption in our social organization form. The way China has searched for development (which has been successful in several aspects) is nothing else than its own version of the road opened by the West during the Industrial Revolution.
In the last centuries our civilization has taken gigantic steps towards the conquest of nature, following a method (scientific, technological and economic) that the Asians have only adopted and adapted to their own idiosyncrasy. Maybe the environmental emergency China is suffering is not only the Chinese’s responsibility.
The problem could lie in the definition itself. Why do we talk about the “conquest of nature”? Besides our current obsession for that ubiquitous –and sometimes little defined- sustainability concept, the fact is that our relationship with the environment (with nature) has been for centuries one of conquest in the sense of submission and dominion. The industrialization never included the words “harmonious” or “sustainable” in its dictionary.
Also, the way we have put forward the relationship between economic progress and the environment is prior to the Industrial Revolution. Their roots are even deeper and are associated, in my opinion, to the way scientific progress developed in the West.
From the very foundation of the scientific method, we made a categorical separation between reason and matter, between the mind and human actions and nature. From the dawn of modern science a paradigm, a vision of the world in which, as Francis Bacon put it, nature had to be “enslaved” and “subdued to render a service” consolidated. We have done so ever since, and certainly with great success. We subjected and enslaved nature, we forced it to render us a service. But apparently the time to pay has come, although the bill may look somewhat high. We have reached the limits of a paradigm that was born years ago and that has served us well in many aspects, but whose continuance now threatens our own existence.
I regret to repeat it, but the Chinese may not be the only ones to blame.
They could be, instead, the last great chapter of a “Bacon way” accelerated industrialization; the last application of a growth system that takes the environment as a mechanism that must be forced to pay a tribute. Maybe China is closing a period; maybe it is “the last industrialist”.
Yet out of necessity as well as conviction, China should turn at the same time, although gradually, into the first experiment of a new development paradigm. Not one that denies industrial development or that postpones the social promotion of its hundred million inhabitants with resignation. But one that incorporates in its own basic suppositions, in its essential conditions of functioning, a balance -absent in development processes until now- with the environment.
It is relatively simpler to be respectful of the environment once the development process has taken place. The challenge the Chinese are facing is certainly greater: to take care of the environment while they are growing… and quickly. It may not appear simple, but do we have many choices left?
