Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

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. 33China’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. 34The 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. 35

The same is happening with increasing frequency up and down China’s 18,000-kilometer coastline. 36According 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. 37

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. 40Most 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. 42Once 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.