Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

The Communist Party takes a utilitarian view of nature. Its leaders are aware that the limit of exploitation is creeping closer. Cadres are told they should do more to protect “natural resources necessary for production.” Western wildlife zoologists have also recognized that economic incentives are necessary for conservation, proposing the replacement of ineffective blanket bans with limited fee-generating hunting as a way for nature reserves to generate funds. 41International cash has come pouring in and conservation groups have grown both larger and more influential. But wildlife remains under ever-increasing pressure from climate change and economic development.

Until the baiji expedition, I had hoped that the threat to China’s wildlife could be averted by the use of money, intelligence, and technology. But after joining the world’s smartest, best-funded scientists in the search for the Yangtze dolphin, I realized there came a point when it was too late to do anything.

On my last day with the expedition, we set off on the Kekao 1 just after dawn. Sharp early morning sunlight cut through the mist and shattered into glittering shards on the water. On deck, Wang Ding, China’s leading baiji expert, and Brent Stewart from the Hubbs-Seaworld Research Institute in San Diego were peering through the giant binoculars. Down below, Tomonori Akamatsu from Japan was listening for an audio trace with hydrophone omnidirectional equipment.

The baiji too relied on sonar. They navigated and communicated using a high- and low-frequency acoustic system. This sensitivity to sound was a handicap in the modern age. The increasing noise from ships’ engines disrupted their perception of the world.

After the last of six captive baiji, Qi Qi, died in the Wuhan Institute of Hydrobiology in 2002, the only records of the animal left behind were photographs, skeletons, and a single “sound image” of the dolphin’s 5,000-hertz whistle. When Akamatsu played it back on the boat, I told him it sounded mournful.

“No,” he replied. “It sounds like an engine. That’s the problem. In calm, quiet water, a baiji can communicate with other dolphins up to a kilometer away. But the noise from traffic makes it hard for them to do that.”

Back on deck, I looked out at speedboats, giant container ships, fishing vessels, and barges heaped with coal, cement, and gravel. If there were any surviving baiji, they must find it difficult to locate one another amid the chugs and shrieks of the engines.

There was still life on the river. “Pied kingfisher off the starboard bow,” cried a spotter. A few minutes later, another reported a small pod of porpoises. The sight briefly raised hopes. But the veteran Yangtze watcher Wang shook his head. “There are little more than a dozen. Last time we saw more than a hundred in this area. This also used to be where we saw the most baiji too. But now there are none.”

We were passing along the stretch of the river where the baiji was formerly most plentiful. Everyone was on deck, peering through binoculars, eyes strained into a gray expanse. Blurred by the haze, the sky, mud banks, and river all merged into one. The loss of biodiversity and color appeared written on the landscape.

Near Chenglingji, acrid smoke billowed out of a coal-fired power plant, and a paper factory discharged an unceasing torrent of filthy water into the river. The smell was so pungent that the crew grimaced more than half a mile away. It marked the end of the stretch where hopes of finding a baiji alive were highest, but the world’s best spotters and advanced technology had failed to detect the telltale whistle or sight a single pale dorsal fin.

The mood on board darkened. Some began to ask angrily why mankind killed off the baiji. The rescue mission had become a whodunnit.

“Why does nobody pay attention to a species until there are almost none left? What’s wrong with human nature?” said Samuel Turvey, of the Zoological Society of London. The baiji, he said, was a mammal family that diverged twenty million years ago from other ancient types of dolphin. “Its loss would be a major blow to biological diversity. This isn’t a twig—it is a branch on the tree of life. To lose it would be so depressing. Yet nothing has been done for thirty years.”

There was to be no feel-good ending. The voyage that started out as a search ended as a farewell. Over 1,600 kilometers through the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze, all the way to Shanghai, they failed to spot a single baiji. Soon after the expedition ended, the species was declared functionally extinct. 42Man had wiped out its first dolphin. The conservation dream team was too late.

I look back on the baiji expedition as the biggest story of my journalistic career. More than tsunami, earthquakes, World Cup tournaments, or G8 summits, the end of a species after twenty million years felt terrifyingly momentous. This was not just a piece of news. It was even more than history. It was an event on a geological timescale with disturbing implications for our own species. What were we doing to our world? How could we assume our species was developing and becoming more civilized when an animal once worshipped had been wiped out by neglect, greed, and human filth?

Yet the story never made the front pages. Tragic as the news was, the baiji was just the latest species on the eco-scrap heap. Nobody felt affected. Nobody felt personally responsible. The West blamed China. China blamed illegal behavior. Everyone blamed economic development, but who wanted to sacrifice that for a dolphin with squinty eyes?

Growth, it seemed, had a price. Modernization was messy. The development model—pioneered in the UK, then Europe, North America, and Japan—was to get rich first, clean up later. Sometimes, as in the case of the baiji, the fix came too late, but the idea of progress was based on the assumption that humanity would eventually get it right. According to this view, the left-behind flag bearer was just an unfortunate casualty of development.

But I was no longer convinced by such reassurances. Progress no longer sounded quite so admirable. I would travel farther along the trajectory of modernization to look in more detail at where it was taking us, and why. The drivers of development could be found on the fast-evolving coast of the southeast. Perhaps at my next destination, Guangdong Province, I would discover how the export of blame, waste, and responsibility had become one of the dirtiest businesses of globalization. The rules and regulations intended to curb this weren’t working, but what did this have to do with the rest of us?

The children at Mai Middle School had probably never heard of Tesco and they could only imagine the luxuries offered by Britain’s biggest supermarket chain. But though their village was five thousand miles away from the nearest UK High Street, they could see, feel, and smell the consequences of globalized consumer culture.

On a tree near their classrooms, a snagged blue-and-white Tesco shopping bag fluttered in the warm semitropical breeze like the flag of a distant empire. The gates of a neighboring factory were decorated with huge plastic banners advertising a discount that would be worth a week’s wages in Mai: “£20 Off Tesco Mobile Phones If You Spend More Than £40 in the Store.” The stream beside their school was choked with carrier bags and plastic wrappers from the other side of the world. Staring up from the fetid water and filthy banks were logos for Tesco, Wal-Mart, Argos, and even Help the Aged. A bold mission statement on the charity shop’s green-and-white bag vowed to fight “Poverty, Isolation and Neglect.”