加载中…中国人地球日反省 Earth Day reflection for nation
(2010-04-19 22:53:47)
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杂谈 |
If China needs to import more to balance its foreign trade, oil,
raw materials, jumbo jets, luxury sedans and weapon technology
should never dominate its shopping list.
Instead, it should consider clean air, water and soil
first.
That is what I feel strongly about, after traveling at home and
abroad.
The above resources are in severe shortage in China now, and
more so every passing day.
It seems unnecessary to cite scary figures to remind 1.3 billion
compatriots of the scarcity of clean air, water and soil. Those who
do not feel that there is such a crisis have simply been numbed for
too long, by gulping polluted water, choking on foul air and eating
food grown on tainted farmland.
News media have been devoting enormous space and airtime to cover earthquakes, coal mine explosions and air crashes. Yet, the most underreported breaking news stories in China in the past decades are those on the environmental crisis.
About half of the waterways in China are severely polluted and
more than 300 million rural Chinese residents have no access to
safe drinking water. Water pollution has been blamed for partly
causing the country’s high death rates of liver and stomach
cancers.
On the other hand, more than half of 600 major cities are
suffering water shortages. Drought, which devastated Southwest
China in the past months, has been occurring more often.
Desertification, which already makes up 20 percent of Chinese
territory, is advancing fast. In the 1990s alone, some 10,400
square kilometers of desert, about two-thirds the size of Beijing,
were added onto China’s map. It is no longer considered paranoid to
talk about Beijing being encroached upon by desert in the next
decades, if we continue to turn a blind eye to the issue.
Despite China’s environmental efforts, pollution is still
serious. Many urban Chinese residents living under hazy skies have
forgotten what a blue one feels like. According to an OECD
(Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) report, air
pollution will afflict 20 million Chinese people each year with
respiratory diseases. The country’s blood-lead levels, which can
cause brain damage, have hit twice the world’s average.
All these are just a fraction of the grave environmental
challenges the nation is facing. While we pride ourselves on the
economic miracle we created in the last 30 years –- a rapid
modernization that took the West two centuries to accomplish, we
have also been destroying nature in unprecedented speed and
scale.
As Chinese people become wealthier, they are able to dine out
and travel more often. They also become increasingly worried about
the air they breathe, the food they eat and the water they
drink.
The skyrocketing property prices, economic recovery and the
Shanghai Expo are now in the media spotlight. But these are simply
infinitesimal compared with the air, water and soil pollution that
kill and sicken people by the tens of millions every
year.
It will be a worthwhile cause if we can redeem ourselves and
clean our air, water and soil by investing an amount equivalent to
two years or even 10 years of the country’s GDP.
It is much more important to leave our future generations with a
clean land than stacks of money and a few houses that many Chinese
people are planning to buy at the moment.
Our generation should not be remembered for torturing the Mother
Nature, turning beautiful, natural landscapes into uninhabitable
areas.
Earth Day, which falls on April 22 this year, should not be a one-day affair. It should become an Earth Year 2010 and an Earth Century 21.
By Lu Guang
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