China is drying up and blowing away

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CHINA IS DRYING UP AND BLOWING AWAY

WASHINGTON -- There is a story concerning China, planes and seas that goes far beyond the military spy-plane drama we've been focusing on. This story of far greater mystery and depth could involve the United States and prove infinitely more dangerous than simple military confrontation. It carries us beyond the oceans and into the stratosphere, where a threat to America -- on its own continent -- is poised, a threat more alarming even than those missiles that Beijing so likes to brandish.

It has to do, says Lester Brown, the renowned environmentalist, with the stunning fact that "China is drying out and starting to blow away." Brown, founder of the new Earth Policy Institute and Worldwatch Institute, and other scientists point to satellite photos. Thousands of lakes and rivers across China have dried up, water tables have fallen everywhere in that vast land, and the rangeland and cropland in the immense northwest have markedly deteriorated.

Then, around the time that the U.S. surveillance plane was held in southern Hainan, a great dust cloud appeared. It drifted from China, moving northeastward in a matter of days across South Korea and Siberia until it covered fully one-third of the United States with the soil of China.

In one of the few articles on this dramatic development, Robert Weller wrote in Denver for The Associated Press: "A dust storm that started in Mongolia and picked up industrial pollution from China has spread a haze across a quarter of the mainland. ... The whitish haze has been seen from Calgary, Alberta, to Arizona to Aspen." He quoted an oceanographer from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland: "At one time, this dust cloud was bigger than Japan."

The Denver Post's Ann Schrader wrote evocatively in mid-April: "The haze hanging around Colorado since late last week may have been dirt near someone's yurt in western China less than two weeks ago. Three pulses of the very fine dust, kicked up on April 5 in the Sinkiang Basin near the Mongolian-China border, have surged halfway across the United States." (Scientists who shot laser beams from Boulder, Colo., into the sky discovered that the dust layer began about 3 miles above the Earth's surface and was several miles thick.)

There have been Chinese dust storms before, some of which have poisoned U.S. air, but scientists say that this phenomenon is more serious. Ironically, this year a large contingent of international scientists had been brought together by the Nati onal Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Science Foundation. Operating off the northeast coast of China in ships and a small plane, they were able to measure the density of particles in the air.

So while Washington was focusing on the standoff between the Chinese government and the United States over the plane in the South China Sea, to the north in the East China Sea, this more ominous "confrontation" between nations was quietly occurring.

China has always been a dry land, with percentages of arable land in most places in single digits, but desertification today is advancing swiftly because of many deliberate government policies. Once China changed from Marxist collectivism to a market economy in the past 20 years, for instance, the "family system" collapsed, and farmers began to harbor huge numbers of cattle, sheep and goats. (China today has 117 million cattle and 256 million sheep and goats, compared with 100 million cattle and 9 million sheep and goats in the United States.)

And so what vegetation there was, was destroyed. A government decision in 1994 required that all cropland used for construction be offset by land reclaimed elsewhere. This had the actual result of increasing wind erosion in plowed marginal lands in low rainfall areas, creating an ecological catastrophe of wind erosion and forcing people to migrate eastward. Such areas as the legendary Quighai-Tibet Plateau, once known for its grass reaching as high as a horse's belly, now are barren deserts.

"As the Chinese economy grows and people buy motor vehicles and heat bigger homes better, the resulting pollution will come to skewer or overwhelm our own pollution," says Russ Schnell, director of observatory operations for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder. Soon, perhaps in a decade, pollution levels will increase in California, and perhaps the rest of the United States, imported from Asia.

According to Brown, there are still some solutions. Highly erodible cropland can be converted back to grassland or woodland, livestock numbers can be reduced, tree-shelter belts across the windswept areas can be planted (as U.S. farmers did to end dust storms in the 1930s), and wind turbines could be introduced. But the Chinese government, which deserves credit for trying to grapple with its overpopulation and food shortages, has not shown a willingness to tackle these more complicated problems.

Meanwhile, what do these sobering environmental problems have to do with this winter's stand-off in the South China Sea? Well, quite a bit. It would be like the Chinese government, particularly if the situation worsens, to try to divert attention from these serious internal problems through military adventures abroad. In fact, it would be strange if Chinese officials, already employing a questionable nationalism to replace moribund communism, did not attempt to strengthen that nationalism by claiming the oil wealth of the South China Sea and reclaiming Taiwan.

In today's world, the economic, the political, the social, the psychological and the ecological barometers all rise or fall together. Meanwhile, keep looking up.

COPYRIGHT 2001 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

Originally Published on May-04-2001

-- Swissrose (cellier3@mindspring.com), May 06, 2001


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