When a Billion Chinese Jump

of crispy fried grasshoppers. “Just picked from outside,” the ebullient host smiled. “Won’t you try one?” For a brief moment, insect crunching became a spectator sport with all eyes on the foreigners. It was a consumption dare, like the endless rounds of baijiu. When it was my turn, I paused, took a look at my snack, wondered briefly if I had seen it jumping around earlier in the day, then crunched it between my teeth. It went very well with the organic rice. “Delicious. Can I have some more?”

Despite the taciturnity of the party secretary, Jiang was determined that we should all leave on a high. “Bring your chairs outside. The moon is very beautiful and you can see the stars. There’s no pollution here,” he said, beaming. “Let’s sing some songs.” The cadres seemed eager to leave, but there was no escaping Jiang’s enthusiasm. We sat. They stood. We sang. They loitered close to their car. Jiang had a fine tenor voice as he crooned “My Hometown Yimeng Mountain,” a heartfelt song of praise to the beautiful scenery of Linyi and its abundant crops. When he was done, the French students and I clapped enthusiastically. Even the cadres smiled. It was their excuse to head home.

Why should they be enthusiastic about organic methods? The long-term impact of chemical fertilizers on soil remains fiercely contested throughout the world, hardly surprising given its importance to global food supplies.²⁶ But there is strong evidence that the soil quality is declining.²⁷ Depleted of natural fertility and innate virility, the intercourse between humankind and the ecosystem has to be chemically assisted. Humanity relies more and more on artificial stimulants. Effectively we are pumping the land with agricultural Viagra.

Government officials insist they are not worried about food shortages, though Premier Wen Jiabao has privately asked senior former officials to search for new areas to cultivate.²⁸ There are other good reasons too for exploring alternatives to chemical fertilizers. They pollute waterways, add massively to greenhouse gas emissions, and rely heavily on oil, supplies of which will become increasingly unstable as the earth approaches the peak of supply.²⁹

Hydrocarbon inputs have been a crucial element of the Green Revolution that has ramped up agricultural production over the past sixty years. We might not actually eat coal as the Meng brothers did while trapped underground, but we all indirectly consume fossil fuels for food. Oil and coal provide the fuel for fertilizer factories, phosphate extraction equipment, tractors, and distribution networks. The Green Revolution has enabled farmland to produce trillions of extra calories in energy, but the surge in food prices in 2008 suggests the return on technology and chemical inputs may be diminishing. This was the expectation of the author of Who Will Feed China?, Earthwatch’s Lester Brown: “We are reaching the limits of what plants can do. Plants are not that different from people in this sense,” he says. “You can get gains up to a point and then it becomes much more difficult—I don’t know of any scientists who are predicting potential advances in grain yields that are comparable with those we saw in the last half century.”³⁰

Like the poplar, our species is in danger of becoming too successful. By boosting plant yields with nitrates and other fertilizers, human beings have siphoned off almost 40 percent of all land-based photosynthetic capability.³¹ Given how much of the planet’s energy we are hogging, it is inevitable that other species are declining. The same is true in water systems, where the balance of life is changing due to the runoff of fertility stimulants that mankind pumps into the earth.

My next port of call was the coast. Even the oceans are struggling to meet the demand for food and dilution of waste. The following morning we bade farewell to Jiang and headed off on a four-hour bus ride to Qingdao, a center for oceanic research, fisheries, and beer. This pleasant maritime city of 8 million people sits on the southeastern coast of Shandong. As we arrived, the legacy of the former German treaty port was evident in the Bavarian architecture, the Tsingtao brewery, and the annual beer festival. But the city was moving on with a massive seafront expansion of office blocks and residential towers. Cranes were as thick on the horizon here as anywhere.

Enjoying a crisp coastal breeze, I walked over to the Institute of Oceanology, China’s leading marine research organization. The boffins here are a friendly bunch with a worrying message: pollutants are building up in the oceans. More contaminants are coming from farms than factories. As a result, Professor Zhou Mingjiang, the former head of the institute, believes the main threat to China’s coastal waters is not from heavy metal but from featherlight algae.

Algae are an ancient friend and a new threat. These organisms date back far longer than humanity, almost to the beginning of life on earth. They appear naturally, particularly in the summer when the sea is warm, and could be a source of nutrition for fish and man. But growth patterns have changed. New forms of algae have evolved. Most worryingly, bright green and red blooms are breaking out like nasty rashes across a widening area of lakes and coastlines.

Scientists believe the algae have been stimulated by the sharp rise in nitrates and phosphates in coastal waters as a result of farm fertilizer runoff, untreated human waste, and the food used to stimulate the growth of fish and crabs in aquaculture. This has resulted in an alarming increase of red tides, a manifestation of toxic algae blooms that poison other marine life, choke oxygen from the water, and block the gills of fish.

This problem was almost unknown at the start of the decade, but of late the red tides have grown rapidly in both frequency and size.³² At first, they were only seen in the summer. But now in the warmer south, the red tides appear all through the year. In the worst areas, around the Yangtze and Pearl river estuaries, these harmful algae blooms create “dead zones” where the water is so starved of oxygen it is unable to sustain other forms of life.

Farms are the main source of this environmental stress. Fertilizer nitrates and phosphorus run off into streams and rivers, and eventually lakes and oceans. It is like pumping marine life with steroids or force-feeding growth stimulants. The primary benefactors are the organisms first in the food chain, such as algae and plankton. With the extra nutrition they grow quickly in the form of green slime on lakes or red tides in the sea, to their own benefit and their predators’ detriment. Some algae have become toxic, but most kill by suffocation, choking off oxygen and sunlight.

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 ??, signifying good or well, and ??o?? 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 1970.³³ China’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.³⁴ The 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