
Pollution Rising, Chinese Fear for Soil and Food - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/world/asia/good-earth-no-more-soil-pollution-plagues-chinese-countryside.html?hp&pagewanted=all
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InclinedPlane
I find it sort of ironic, in a deeply tragic way, that a totalitarian state
such as China finds itself incapable of enacting the sort of sweeping
environmental regulations which were the linchpin for bringing about vastly
cleaner air, water, and soil in the liberal democracies during the mid-20th
century. Indeed, it wasn't so very long ago when a great many pundits were
crushing on the ruthless efficacy of China's absolutist government.

China is more than advanced enough and more than wealthy enough to solve these
problems. But perhaps the government is too corrupt and too disconnected from
the value of human life to do what needs to be done.

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ams6110
Private property ownership is essential for anybody to care about
environmental issues. If the government owns all the property, citizens don't
have any economic or personal ownership stake in protecting it from pollution.

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yequalsx
That is quite a bold claim there. Do have any evidence that it is true? Are
there studies you can cite or data that you can refer too?

Your claim is that absent an economic or a personal ownership stake then one
can not have an interest in protecting the land from pollution. This is a
false statement for me personally so on strict logical grounds the claim is
false but perhaps I'm an outlier.

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wehadfun
You want a study that says that someone cares about things they own?

If the farmers actually owned the land they hopefully would have complained
about near by factories, or stopped paying taxes on the land by now.

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Retric
Nobody owns the air but we all like to avoid lung disease and death.

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jinushaun
Talking with Americans that have lived in China, it sounds like the problem
isn't the govt, but culture. Like the anti-spitting campaign during the
Olympics, the Chinese govt need similar strong tactics to get its citizens to
care about the environment. I don't know how successful the anti-spitting
campaign worked out, but the West's current love affair with the environment
didn't happen over night either.

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pavlov
The West has a love affair with the environment? Maybe about 2-4% do, half of
them living in cities and the other half in the countryside (very different
lifestyles but similar goals of a minimum environmental impact).

Another 5-10% care enough about the environment to make daily conscious
choices for it, but most of those choices amount to lip service or marketing-
driven "greenwashing". Most of these people live in cities.

The rest just don't care, and will continue driving their cars and eating
>300g of meat per day until they die or become incapable of deciding for
themselves.

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jedrek
I think you underestimate the massive changes in attitude that have come about
due to the environmental movement. The very fact that your examples are eating
meat and driving, and not dumping waste into parks, throwing trash on the
ground, pouring used oil into streams, using lead paint, burning leaves and
grass, etc is a testament to the changes that have occurred. All the behaviors
I listed were commonplace in the 1950s, now they unthinkable and strongly
disapproved of.

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WalterBright
My father told me that highways used to be lined with trash thrown out of car
windows.

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snake_plissken
China's heavy metal pollution is staggering. The tap water in many areas
tastes like heavy metals, or how you might imagine heavy metals tasting. Stick
some aluminium in your mouth. Then put a 9-volt battery, with some zinc, in
there and gurgle it all with Listerine. It's difficult to describe unless
you've tasted it.

And if there is a country that could tackle an issue as immense and demanding
as this, it's China.

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dharmach
How China's pollution problem defers from that of US's or UK's, say 100 years
back?

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DanAndersen
There's probably little difference, but I'm not sure if that's a legitimate
excuse. Is a heavily polluting industrial phase necessary for countries to
become developed? I'm not sure if that's true or not; maybe it is and it's
acceptable for developing countries to make the same environmental missteps as
developed nations had in order to progress to the same levels of development.
I would hope, though, that with technological advances there would be a
greater ability to be industrial while mitigating some of the environmental
issues that plagued the US and the UK during their industrial revolutions.

I don't know if this is a valid analogy, but I sometimes think about what this
argument would sound like if it was about something like slavery instead of
environmental damage. There was much infrastructure and industry in parts of
the US built on the backs of slaves, but I think that if there were modern-day
countries with substantial slave industries, we wouldn't find it defensible to
say that the US also had slaves too in the past and that developing countries
should have a chance to do so as well as a temporary part of their
development.

Maybe pollution is a necessary evil for any society, and maybe it's not as bad
as slavery. It just seems like placing each society on separate 'tracks' of
development for them to go through the same troubles and dangers without
criticism both demeans developing societies as "oh, they're just 100 years
behind us" and also ignores the sort of "horizontal gene transfer" of
technology and social/philosophical/political concepts that can accelerate
developing countries' development.

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testrun
Part of the answer might be that environmental regulation will add costs and
regulatory complexity to Chinese manufacturing, and make them less
competitive.

Many western manufacturers moved production to China to reduce costs.

