The Growth Delusion: The Wealth and Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Author:David Pilling [Pilling, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2018-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

In March 2013 residents of Shanghai awoke to find the carcasses of thousands of pigs floating down a suburban river. A few years before, as China prepared to host the summer Olympics of 2008, mysterious algae began to spread – like the protagonist of some horror movie – off the coast, threatening the sailing events in the port city of Qingdao. By the time the authorities began to bring it under control, the algae had spread several hundred miles along the eastern seaboard. State media played it down, quoting scientists saying the outbreak was a natural phenomenon. Chinese environmentalists begged to differ, blaming the visitation on industrial pollutants and fish farming. ‘The natural ecosystem of the ocean has been destroyed, which is why strange events such as this can happen,’ said Wen Bo, coordinator of Save China’s Seas Network.11

Two-fifths of China’s river water is undrinkable and one-sixth is so polluted it is unfit for any use. The baiji, or Goddess of the Yangtze, one of only four types of exclusively freshwater dolphins, has been driven to extinction, ending its 20 million years on earth. Though air pollution has grabbed most of the headlines, soil erosion is just as catastrophic.12 Soil accounts for just a few inches – or at best a few feet – of the earth’s surface. Once eroded by over-cultivation, blown away or washed into the rivers and oceans, it is replaced only over geological time. According to one estimate, soil is eroding in China thirty to forty times faster than it can be replaced naturally. China is also scattered with ‘cancer villages’ such as Xinglong in Yunnan province, where a local chemical plant has dumped thousands of tonnes of waste chromium – a known carcinogen – into the nearby hills and river.

To be fair – something that people writing about the negative impacts of economic expansion not always are – China’s growth brings many benefits too. Air pollution may cause as many as 1.2 million premature deaths a year, but it is equally true that China’s remarkable economic progress has contributed to a leap in life expectancy, which has more than doubled from thirty-five in 1949 to seventy-five today. That outpaces gains in most other countries and reflects a dramatic rise in the standard of living of most people, bringing better food, better hospitals and better housing.

Whether or not China’s growth threatens the planet – as well as its own sustainability – is a matter of conjecture. Ever since Thomas Malthus, a cleric and scholar who wrote his famous An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, people have been predicting that the earth is reaching its natural limits. Malthus thought that population growth would always outpace improvements in agricultural production, ensuring that living standards would stall and eventually catastrophe would strike. Malthus has been much pilloried. Like a stock market analyst forever predicting a crash, his ghost has had to watch on as the world has forged ahead into bull market territory.13 Certainly, there have

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