When a Billion Chinese Jump (44 page)

This problem was almost unknown at the start of the decade, but of late the red tides have grown rapidly in both frequency and size.
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At first, they were only seen in the summer. But now in the warmer south, the red tides appear all through the year. In the worst areas, around the Yangtze and Pearl river estuaries, these harmful algae blooms create “dead zones” where the water is so starved of oxygen it is unable to sustain other forms of life.

Farms are the main source of this environmental stress. Fertilizer nitrates and phosphorus run off into streams and rivers, and eventually lakes and oceans. It is like pumping marine life with steroids or force-feeding growth stimulants. The primary benefactors are the organisms first in the food chain, such as algae and plankton. With the extra nutrition they grow quickly in the form of green slime on lakes or red tides in the sea, to their own benefit and their predators’ detriment. Some algae have become toxic, but most kill by suffocation, choking off oxygen and sunlight.

The scientific name for this phenomenon is “eutrophication,” a term that gets to the heart of the risks facing our species and our planet. In
essence, eutrophication means having too much of a good thing. Its origins are positive. The word comes from the Greek
εύ
, signifying good or well, and
τρoϕή
meaning nourishment. But like the process it describes, the word has self-degraded. Today, eutrophication is used with reference to stagnant bodies of water to describe an unwholesome combination of aging, overconsumption of nutrients, chemical imbalance, and unwelcome surface growth. The side effects of modern development are nourishing our waters to death.

Inland, the area of lake surface affected by eutrophication has increased sixtyfold since 1970.
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China’s great lakes, Dianchi, Taihu, Chaohu, and Xinlicheng, were now choked each summer with rancid green blooms. To explain why, Professor Zhou, the leading authority on the issue in China, presented three graphs that showed population, GDP, and fertilizer use jerking up in unison after 1980.

Harmful algae blooms are a problem across the globe, associated with modern farming methods, rising populations, and increased use of detergents. The world now has 400 oceanic dead zones. Red tides are frequent in the Baltic and off the southeastern United States. But they can be prevented. Zhou was calling on the government to build sewage treatment plants in every village by 2020, to use fertilizer more wisely, to ban phosphates in washing powders, and to use more organic materials to feed the land.

“This can be solved,” he assured me. “In the previous thirty years, we have focused only on development. We had to. Now we have the manpower and the money to think about how to balance development and the environment. That is the basis of ‘Scientific Development.’”

China’s oceans were certainly in need of a cleanup, but I was not convinced “Scientific Development” held all the answers. Shandong was already spending more on wastewater treatment than any other province, yet it was still surrounded by some of the most polluted seas on the planet.
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The Bohai Sea is worst affected because it is enclosed on three sides and surrounded by dense populations, heavy industry, and intensive agriculture. Once known as the “Emperor’s Fishery,” stocks have plummeted as pollution and overfishing have worsened. The prawn catch dropped by 90 percent in fifteen years, clam beds have been decimated, and, in some areas, locals can no longer catch big fish so they are living on small fry and fish eggs. The State Oceanic Administration has warned
that the Bohai Sea is so polluted it could “die” in years, by 2016 unless remedial action is taken.
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The same is happening with increasing frequency up and down China’s 18,000-kilometer coastline.
³⁶
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, China is the greatest polluter of the Pacific Ocean. Despite government controls, the domestic media frequently carries reports of sewage, fertilizer, and industrial waste being dumped into the sea with often dire consequences for the seabed. In many areas, heavy metals are accumulating in the mud and in the organs of fish.
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This highlights a blind spot in “Scientific Development”: it focuses on incremental improvements rather than overall limits. Instead of considering accumulated totals or ecological capacity, it sets periodic targets for production efficiency, energy intensity, pollution levels, and carbon emissions. This does not adequately factor in the finiteness of resources and the carrying capacity of the earth. It deals with acute symptoms of development but ignores chronic problems. Despite the government’s calls to create a sustainable, cyclical economy, the result has been an ever-greater depletion of resources and an ever-greater buildup of persistent pollutants.
³⁸

By the time an ecological wall is hit, it is often too late for remedial action. The long-term dangers of this approach can be seen from the pesticide DDT, which although banned in 1983, is even today found in harmful quantities in oysters, mussels, and squid, as are other persistent organic pollutants that were formerly discharged in large volumes in China, as elsewhere.
³⁹

Fish stocks are also being decimated by the failure to enforce limits on catches. Professor Dou Shuozeng, a young scholar at the institute, watched these trends with a mix of worry and fascination. In fluent American-accented English he told me there were too many fishermen and too many consumers. The yellow croaker, which was once China’s most important commercial fish, was now extremely difficult to find in the wild. Farther south, by the Yangtze, he said, the situation was even worse. “Almost the entire coastline is affected,” Dou explained. “Resources have decreased rapidly since the 1980s because of overfishing and pollution. These factors have led to the collapse of most commercial fisheries off the coast. Some have almost disappeared.”

The government has not been idle, but, as we saw in
chapter 4
, it has
tended to focus on farming rather than conservation. Captive-bred shrimp, flatfish, and jellyfish were released into the oceans under a fish-stock enhancement program. This may have helped some stocks to recover, despite fears that the captive fish—raised on a diet of nitrates and antibiotics—could weaken the genetic stock of the natural population. The wild ocean, however, was of decreasing concern to China, which was the first country in the world in which fish-farm output exceeded the oceanic catch.
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Most of the flounder, sea bream, shrimp, and other marine products in the markets of Qingdao come from aquaculture, a growing source of the nitrates that algae thrive on.

Dou summarized the trend in terms of size. Large species were in trouble. Small ones were thriving. “The ocean ecology is not being destroyed, but it is changing. There are fewer big fish, more small fish. And there are more plankton, photoplankton, and mud dwellers.” On an emotional level, it sounded an awful lot like evolution in reverse gear.

Recent studies suggest we ignore plankton, algae, and the microorganisms present in feces and other waste at our peril. These species played a pivotal role in biogeochemical history. The subject remains contentious, but according to one theory, for the first 3 billion years of life on earth, all the organisms were single-celled and incapable of excreting. Then suddenly, about 600 million years ago, the first multicelled excreters arrived, laying the chemical foundation for one of the most spectacular bursts of evolution in the history of the planet. The feces-producing creatures ate and processed plankton, starving the bacteria in the depths and releasing a surplus of oxygen that allowed higher life-forms—including the first vertebrates—to come into being.
⁴¹

While fecal waste may have created the conditions for higher life-forms, algae gunk tends to destroy it. Another theory claims mass extinctions, such as the one during the Cambrian era (about 500 million years ago), were preceded by eutrophication. With an overabundance of nutrients in the ocean, the fastest reproducers (such as plankton and algae) gobbled up everything, starving other species and leading to ecosystem collapse.
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Once this was completed, carbon started to reaccumulate, paving the way for a new ecosystem with new species to develop. If this is true, the connotations are worrying for humanity. The algae acted as a biological reset button for the planet. The increase of these fast-breeding organisms in recent years should be taken as a warning of dangerous imbalance.

*

On my last day in Qingdao, I asked a fisherman at the quayside market to take me out in his skiff to fish for lobster. Tan Changhu was glad of the extra income, though his small, single-engine boat was barely up to the task of carrying more than one person. We chugged slowly into deeper waters, pulling farther away from the jagged Qingdao skyline of tower blocks and construction cranes silhouetted in the haze.

Smoking a cigarette and sitting in the bow of his skiff, Tan navigated the still waters, pausing every ten minutes to pour more coolant into the boat’s overheating outboard motor. Shouting over the noisy spluttering of his engine, the fisherman told me he was the youngest of five siblings and made the most money. Fishing, crabbing, and shrimping brought in 6,000 yuan a month, more than most white-collar jobs in China. But in recent years catches had declined as more people harvested the seas for a living. He said yapian and snakehead fish were becoming hard to find. The big money was made through aquaculture, the fastest-growing local business.

The vast offshore farms sat a couple of kilometers from the shore, where the surface of the water was pebbled with circular buoys. In 2008, it had been carpeted in blue-green slime. Green tides of algae had been increasing in frequency in these waters for several years due to the extra nitrates flowing in from the shoreline. But this outbreak was exceptional. The first blooms appeared soon after the May Day holiday when the water temperature was unusually warm. Within a month, the blooms grew with astonishing speed to cover an area of 13,000 square kilometers, several times the size of London.
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The twenty-eight-year-old said he had never seen anything like it.

“I don’t know what caused it or where it came from. It was just there all of a sudden, all over the place,” he recalled. For him, the slime was only an eyesore. For the local government, then preparing to host the Olympic sailing competition, it was a huge embarrassment. A layer of garish
Enteromorpha/Ulva
slime was not what the authorities had in mind when they coined the term “Green Olympics.”
⁴⁴

An Ocean Cleaning Command Center was hurriedly established. Tan was recruited with the promise of 280 yuan per day and dispatched to help the clear-up of a beachfront area. He set out at five o’clock in the morning from Qingdao to join a flotilla of more than a thousand boats: skiffs, yachts,
trawlers, and speedboats. The vessels came from as far away as Weihai and Jiaodong. He worked twelve hours a day, scooping up the algae with a net until his small skiff was full, then dumping it on the beach for collection. Every day he collected about a ton of the slime. Unlike the red algae, it was relatively harmless, so it could even be sold as feed to pig farmers. Under a summer sun it was hot, hard work, but Tan’s efforts were a drop in a bucket. The campaign lasted weeks. Some fishermen fell sick from the effort, but they never completely cleared up the estimated 170,000 tons of algae. Instead, the authorities stretched nets and a barrage across the coastal waters to prevent the gunk from invading the coastline. It did the job. The problem was pushed out of sight. Tan went back to fishing.

Listening to his story, I could imagine a time in the near future when algae would be hybridized, farmed on the ocean, and used as biomass fuel or fertilizer.
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Replacing the degraded land, the seascape would be divided up into fields of plankton, seaweed, and microphytes. Bigger marine species, now little more than algae-munching vermin or interesting curiosities, would be either wiped out or exiled to aquariums. Algae would be marketed as a health food. Our diets would consist of processed gunk …

My fantasy was interrupted by a tinny Chinese pop song. Tan’s mobile phone was ringing. Forty minutes from the port, the impressive range of the China Mobile signal was matched by the intrusive reach of officialdom. The call was from the police. “I’ve been ordered to bring you back to shore,” Tan said apologetically. “They say we are not allowed to take foreigners out to sea. You might be trying to leave illegally. I’m sorry.” It was absurd. We could never reach the nearest country, South Korea, on a boat that could barely make it to the nearest fishing ground. But we turned around and spluttered slowly back toward the haze-shrouded city. As we chugged along, I considered how desperate someone would need to be to try to escape on such a slow boat from China.

We had lost the chance to fish for lobster, but Tan shrugged, lit another cigarette, and steered his craft back toward port. The fisherman was an optimist. Like the farmers of Linyi, like almost everyone I met in China, he believed life was getting better.

But at what point would “getting better” become too good? Even with fertilizers and intensive farming, food prices were creeping up around the world. Despite aquaculture, fish stocks were in steep decline. Governments in China, Japan, and South Korea were so concerned about shortages
they were buying up extra farmland in Africa. The Amazon rain forest and Brazilian savanna were being cleared for soy cultivation.
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Looming over all forecasts was climate change, which was likely to play havoc with agriculture and cut food production by as much as 40 percent by the second half of the century.
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Incremental efficiency gains alone will not prevent the depletion of resources if the number of mouths and the size of appetites continue to grow at current rates. China, and humanity, will soon have to reduce demand to avoid a crisis. “Consume less!” is an extremely difficult message to sell to the public, particularly in Western democracies where electorates are used to being bought off with promises of ever-higher living standards. On the face of it, authoritarian China appears better placed to impose tough political decisions. Might autocratic leadership, mass mobilization, and draconian prohibitions succeed where elected governments seem doomed to failure? I traveled next to the freezing north to consider whether dictatorship could prove to be an environmental asset.