Compare and contrast:
Pajamas Media -- a collection of rightwing bloggers that promises nothing less than a full-fledged alternative to the dread mainstream media -- is announced amidst a flurry of hype, having rustled up $3.5 million in venture capital. It is a fiasco from the word go, featuring discredited NYT reporter Judy Miller as its keynote speaker, pissing off its friends, changing its name to Open Source Media and then, under threat of lawsuit, changing it back. The resulting site is, to put it charitably, underwhelming, still bizarrely located at the domain osm.org and sporting a comically self-parodying logo.
Back at the grown-ups' table:
The progressive magazine TruthDig.com launched -- quietly -- about a week ago. Its design is top notch, its goals well-articulated, its content rich and sophisticated. And I kinda doubt it has $3.5 million behind it.
Draw whatever lessons you see fit.
Anyhoo.
I bring all this up because there's a must-read piece on truthdig right now called "China: Boom or Boomerang?" by UC-Berkley Journo Graduate School dean Orville Schell. It's as clear, cogent, and comprehensive a presentation of the paradoxical phenomenon of modern China as you're likely to find. It covers a lot of ground, but it's clear that the environment is foremost of Schell's concerns:
In 2004, China overtook the U.S. as the globe's largest consumer of industrial and agricultural goods, and the consequences have been catastrophic for the country's environment. Whether sufficient costly technology can be brought to bear quickly enough to both allow the high rates of economic growth to continue and to begin to compensate for all the environmental degradation that has already taken place is one of the most important questions China faces.
While there is an increasing awareness of China's environmental problem, and while impressive strides have been made to understand the situation, the added increments of environmental degradation brought about by the growing population, increased consumer demand, the expanding industrial base, growing dependency on an export economy, greater human mobility and the consequence of ever larger resource use have so far meant that the desecration of the environment, as has just been so painfully made evident along the Songhua River, continues to far outpace any remedial action.
China now faces:
- Having one of the fastest-growing but least efficient energy systems in the world.
- Acid rain falling over one-third of its land mass.
- 75% of its lakes and rivers seriously contaminated and half of the water in its seven major rivers being unusable even for agriculture or industry.
- Having 16 out of the world's 20 most polluted cities.
- Very serious deforestation, especially in the foothills of the Himalayas.
- Advancing desertification.
- Precipitously dropping groundwater tables all over the dry North China Plain.
Schell also has a blog post, responding to comments on the piece, that's worth reading.
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Biodiversivist Posted 4:04 am
04 Dec 2005
I wonder where he got those numbers? Here is what I typically found:
at birth: 1.12 male(s)/female
under 15 years: 1.13 male(s)/female
15-64 years: 1.06 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 0.91 male(s)/female
total population: 1.06 male(s)/female (2005 est.)
(http://www.indexmundi.com/china/sex_ratio.html)
The one-child policy gets blamed for this when in reality the Chinese have been using infanticide since the third millennia BC to favor boys over girls. The practice of infanticide continued into the early twentieth century and has merely been replaced and somewhat exacerbated by the illegal combination of ultrasound and abortion. When infanticide was made illegal, some families got bigger simply because they kept having babies until they finally had a boy. The one-child policy was not the problem; the devaluation of women in Chinese society is the problem. The same thing continues to happen in India as well.
China's success in reducing hunger inside its borders by 60 million in the 1990s was in stark contrast to India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Sudan where the number of hungry increased by 60 million. This success was through the combination of social reform and family planning. Is it wise to apply our cultural standards to a country that is the same size as the United States, but has almost five times more people and 25 percent less arable land? Keep in mind that this is China, 30 million starved to death there in 1960 because of bungled government policy and they are still adding about 12 million people to their population every year.
His timing also seems to be off. China's ecosystems and rivers were destroyed long before their economy started to improve. The rate of destruction may even be slowing down. Urbanization is a good thing. New Yorkers have less environmental impact than just about anyone else.
A business executive who is impressed with the endless new high-rise buildings, neon billboards, shopping malls, luxury hotels and new ring-roads and fly-overs in cities like Beijing, Canton and Shanghai may see an economic miracle whose high growth rates are destined to impel this most dynamic and catalytic agent in the global marketplace forward almost indefinitely.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Help acquire and protect ecological hotspots, give to a conservation organization: http://www.saveourbiodiversity.com
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jdhlax Posted 2:23 am
05 Dec 2005
Jeff Hoffman
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