The same is happening with increasing frequency up and down China’s 18,000-kilometer coastline.36 According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, China is the greatest polluter of the Pacific Ocean. Despite government controls, the domestic media frequently carries reports of sewage, fertilizer, and industrial waste being dumped into the sea with often dire consequences for the seabed. In many areas, heavy metals are accumulating in the mud and in the organs of fish.37
This highlights a blind spot in “Scientific Development”: it focuses on incremental improvements rather than overall limits. Instead of considering accumulated totals or ecological capacity, it sets periodic targets for production efficiency, energy intensity, pollution levels, and carbon emissions. This does not adequately factor in the finiteness of resources and the carrying capacity of the earth. It deals with acute symptoms of development but ignores chronic problems. Despite the government’s calls to create a sustainable, cyclical economy, the result has been an ever-greater depletion of resources and an ever-greater buildup of persistent pollutants.38
By the time an ecological wall is hit, it is often too late for remedial action. The long-term dangers of this approach can be seen from the pesticide DDT, which although banned in 1983, is even today found in harmful quantities in oysters, mussels, and squid, as are other persistent organic pollutants that were formerly discharged in large volumes in China, as elsewhere.39
Fish stocks are also being decimated by the failure to enforce limits on catches. Professor Dou Shuozeng, a young scholar at the institute, watched these trends with a mix of worry and fascination. In fluent American- accented English he told me there were too many fishermen and too many consumers. The yellow croaker, which was once China’s most important commercial fish, was now extremely difficult to find in the wild. Farther south, by the Yangtze, he said, the situation was even worse. “Almost the entire coastline is affected,” Dou explained. “Resources have decreased rapidly since the 1980s because of overfishing and pollution. These factors have led to the collapse of most commercial fisheries off the coast. Some have almost disappeared.”
The government has not been idle, but, as we saw in chapter 4, it has tended to focus on farming rather than conservation. Captive-bred shrimp, flatfish, and jellyfish were released into the oceans under a fish-stock enhancement program. This may have helped some stocks to recover, despite fears that the captive fish—raised on a diet of nitrates and antibiotics—could weaken the genetic stock of the natural population. The wild ocean, however, was of decreasing concern to China, which was the first country in the world in which fish-farm output exceeded the oceanic catch.40 Most of the flounder, sea bream, shrimp, and other marine products in the markets of Qingdao come from aquaculture, a growing source of the nitrates that algae thrive on.
Dou summarized the trend in terms of size. Large species were in trouble. Small ones were thriving. “The ocean ecology is not being destroyed, but it is changing. There are fewer big fish, more small fish. And there are more plankton, photoplankton, and mud dwellers.” On an emotional level, it sounded an awful lot like evolution in reverse gear.
Recent studies suggest we ignore plankton, algae, and the microorganisms present in feces and other waste at our peril. These species played a pivotal role in biogeochemical history. The subject remains contentious, but according to one theory, for the first 3 billion years of life on earth, all the organisms were single-celled and incapable of excreting. Then suddenly, about 600 million years ago, the first multicelled excreters arrived, laying the chemical foundation for one of the most spectacular bursts of evolution in the history of the planet. The feces- producing creatures ate and processed plankton, starving the bacteria in the depths and releasing a surplus of oxygen that allowed higher life-forms—including the first vertebrates—to come into being.41
While fecal waste may have created the conditions for higher life-forms, algae gunk tends to destroy it. Another theory claims mass extinctions, such as the one during the Cambrian era (about 500 million years ago), were preceded by eutrophication. With an overabundance of nutrients in the ocean, the fastest reproducers (such as plankton and algae) gobbled up everything, starving other species and leading to ecosystem collapse.42 Once this was completed, carbon started to reaccumulate, paving the way for a new ecosystem with new species to develop. If this is true, the connotations are worrying for humanity. The algae acted as a biological reset button for the planet. The increase of these fast-breeding organisms in recent years should be taken as a warning of dangerous imbalance.
On my last day in Qingdao, I asked a fisherman at the quayside market to take me out in his skiff to fish for lobster. Tan Changhu was glad of the extra income, though his small, single-engine boat was barely up to the task of carrying more than one person. We chugged slowly into deeper waters, pulling farther away from the jagged Qingdao skyline of tower blocks and construction cranes silhouetted in the haze.
Smoking a cigarette and sitting in the bow of his skiff, Tan navigated the still waters, pausing every ten minutes to pour more coolant into the boat’s overheating outboard motor. Shouting over the noisy spluttering of his engine, the fisherman told me he was the youngest of five siblings and made the most money. Fishing, crabbing, and shrimping brought in 6,000 yuan a month, more than most white-collar jobs in China. But in recent years catches had declined as more people harvested the seas for a living. He said yapian and snakehead fish were becoming hard to find. The big money was made through aquaculture, the fastest-growing local business.
The vast offshore farms sat a couple of kilometers from the shore, where the surface of the water was pebbled with circular buoys. In 2008, it had been carpeted in blue-green slime. Green tides of algae had been increasing in frequency in these waters for several years due to the extra nitrates flowing in from the shoreline. But this outbreak was exceptional. The first blooms appeared soon after the May Day holiday when the water temperature was unusually warm. Within a month, the blooms grew with astonishing speed to cover an area of 13,000 square kilometers, several times the size of London.43 The twenty-eight-year-old said he had never seen anything like it.
“I don’t know what caused it or where it came from. It was just there all of a sudden, all over the place,” he recalled. For him, the slime was only an eyesore. For the local government, then preparing to host the Olympic sailing competition, it was a huge embarrassment. A layer of garish
An Ocean Cleaning Command Center was hurriedly established. Tan was recruited with the promise of 280 yuan per day and dispatched to help the clear-up of a beachfront area. He set out at five o’clock in the morning from Qingdao to join a flotilla of more than a thousand boats: skiffs, yachts, trawlers, and speedboats. The vessels came from as far away as Weihai and Jiaodong. He worked twelve hours a day, scooping up the algae with a net until his small skiff was full, then dumping it on the beach for collection. Every day he collected about a ton of the slime. Unlike the red algae, it was relatively harmless, so it could even be sold as feed to pig farmers. Under a summer sun it was hot, hard work, but Tan’s efforts were a drop in a bucket. The campaign lasted weeks. Some fishermen fell sick from the effort, but they never completely cleared up the estimated 170,000 tons of algae. Instead, the authorities stretched nets and a barrage across the coastal waters to prevent the gunk from invading the coastline. It did the job. The problem was pushed out of sight. Tan went back to fishing.
Listening to his story, I could imagine a time in the near future when algae would be hybridized, farmed on the ocean, and used as biomass fuel or fertilizer.45 Replacing the degraded land, the seascape would be divided up into fields of plankton, seaweed, and microphytes. Bigger marine species, now little more than algae-munching vermin or interesting curiosities, would be either wiped out or exiled to aquariums. Algae would be marketed as a health food. Our diets would consist of processed gunk …
My fantasy was interrupted by a tinny Chinese pop song. Tan’s mobile phone was ringing. Forty minutes from the port, the impressive range of the China Mobile signal was matched by the intrusive reach of officialdom. The call was from the police. “I’ve been ordered to bring you back to shore,” Tan said apologetically. “They say we are not allowed to take foreigners out to sea. You might be trying to leave illegally. I’m sorry.” It was absurd. We could never reach the nearest country, South Korea, on a boat that could barely make it to the nearest fishing ground. But we turned around and spluttered slowly back toward the haze-shrouded city. As we chugged along, I considered how desperate someone would need to be to try to escape on such a slow boat from China.
We had lost the chance to fish for lobster, but Tan shrugged, lit another cigarette, and steered his craft back toward port. The fisherman was an optimist. Like the farmers of Linyi, like almost everyone I met in China, he believed life was getting better.
But at what point would “getting better” become too good? Even with fertilizers and intensive farming, food prices were creeping up around the world. Despite aquaculture, fish stocks were in steep decline. Governments in China, Japan, and South Korea were so concerned about shortages they were buying up extra farmland in Africa.
