While the country’s rate of population increase has decreased, it is estimated as still around 1.6% per year.
More serious than the country’s growing population is its rapidly growing per-capita human impact. (By that term, which will recur in the remainder of this book, I mean the average resource consumption and waste production of one person: much higher for modern First World citizens than for modern Third World citizens or for any people in the past. A society’s total impact equals its per-capita impact multiplied by its number of people.) Overseas trips by Dominicans, visits to the country by tourists, and television make people well aware of the higher standard of living in Puerto Rico and the United States. Billboards advertising consumer products are everywhere, and I saw street vendors selling cell telephone equipment and CDs at any major intersection in the cities. The country is becoming increasingly dedicated to a consumerism that is not currently supported by the economy and resources of the Dominican Republic itself, and that depends partly on earnings sent home by Dominicans working overseas. All of those people acquiring large amounts of consumer products are putting out correspondingly large amounts of wastes that overwhelm municipal waste disposal systems. One can see the trash accumulating in the streams, along roads, along city streets, and in the countryside. As one Dominican said to me, “The apocalypse here will not take the form of an earthquake or hurricane, but of a world buried in garbage.”
The country’s natural reserve system of protected areas directly addresses all of these threats except for population growth and consumer impact. The system is a comprehensive one that consists of 74 reserves of various types (national parks, protected marine reserves, and so on) and covers a third of the country’s land area. That is an impressive achievement for a densely populated small and poor country whose per-capita income is only one-tenth that of the United States. Equally impressive is that that reserve system was not urged and designed by international environmental organizations but by Dominican NGOs. In my discussions at three of these Dominican organizations—the Academy of Sciences in Santo Domingo, the Fundación Moscoso Puello, and the Santo Domingo branch of The Nature Conservancy (the latter unique among my Dominican contacts in being affiliated with an international organization rather than purely local)—without exception every staff member whom I met was a Dominican. That situation contrasts with the situation to which I have become accustomed in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, and other developing countries, where scientists from overseas hold key positions and also serve as visiting consultants.
What about the future of the Dominican Republic? Will the reserve system survive under the pressures that it faces? Is there hope for the country?
On these questions I again encountered divergence of opinion among even my Dominican friends. Reasons for environmental pessimism begin with the fact that the reserve system is no longer backed by the iron fist of Joaquín Balaguer. It is underfunded, underpoliced, and has been only weakly supported by recent presidents, some of whom have tried to trim its area or even to sell it. The universities are staffed by few well-trained scientists, so that they in turn cannot educate a cadre of well-trained students. The government provides negligible support for scientific studies. Some of my friends were concerned that the Dominican reserves are turning into parks that exist more on paper than in reality.
On the other hand, a major reason for environmental optimism is the country’s growing, well-organized, bottom-up environmental movement that is almost unprecedented in the developing world. It is willing and able to challenge the government; some of my friends in the NGOs were sent to jail for those challenges but won their release and resumed their challenges. The Dominican environmental movement is as determined and effective as in any other country with which I am familiar. Thus, as elsewhere in the world, I see in the Dominican Republic what one friend described as “an exponentially accelerating horse race of unpredictable outcome” between destructive and constructive forces. Both the threats to the environment, and the environmental movement opposing those threats, are gathering strength in the Dominican Republic, and we cannot foresee which will eventually prevail.
Similarly, the prospects of the country’s economy and society arouse divergence of opinion. Five of my Dominican friends are now deeply pessimistic, virtually without hope. They feel especially discouraged by the weakness and corruptness of recent governments seemingly interested only in helping the ruling politicians and their friends, and by recent severe setbacks to the Dominican economy. Those setbacks include the virtually complete collapse of the formerly dominant sugar export market, the devaluation of the currency, increasing competition from other countries with lower labor costs for producing free trade zone export products, the collapses of two major banks, and government overborrowing and overspending. Consumerist aspirations are rampant and beyond levels that the country could support. In the opinion of my most pessimistic friends, the Dominican Republic is slipping downhill in the direction of Haiti’s grinding desperation, but it is slipping more rapidly than Haiti did: the descent into economic decline that stretched over a century and a half in Haiti will be accomplished within a few decades in the Dominican Republic. According to this view, the Republic’s capital city of Santo Domingo will come to rival the misery of Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince, where most of the population lives below the poverty level in slums lacking public services, while the rich elite sip their French wines in their separate suburb.
That’s the worst-case scenario. Others of my Dominican friends responded that they have seen governments come and go over the last 40 years. Yes, they said, the current government is especially weak and corrupt, but it will surely lose the next election, and all of the candidates to become the next president seem preferable to the current president. (In fact, the government did lose the election a few months after that conversation.) Fundamental facts about the Dominican Republic brightening its prospects are that it is a small country in which environmental problems become readily visible to everybody. It is also a “face-to-face society” where concerned and knowledgeable private individuals outside the government have ready access to government ministers, unlike the situation in the United States. Perhaps most important of all, one has to remember that the Dominican Republic is a resilient country that has survived a history of problems far more daunting than its present ones. It survived 22 years of Haitian occupation, then an almost uninterrupted succession of weak or corrupt presidents from 1844 until 1916 and again from 1924 to 1930, and American military occupations from 1916 to 1924 and from 1965 to 1966. It succeeded in rebuilding itself after 31 years under Rafael Trujillo, one of the most evil and destructive dictators in the world’s recent history. From the years 1900 to 2000, the Dominican Republic underwent more dramatic socioeconomic change than did almost any other country in the New World.
Because of globalization, what happens to the Dominican Republic affects not only Dominicans but also the rest of the world. It especially affects the United States lying only 600 miles away, and already home to a million Dominicans. New York City now supports the second largest Dominican population of any city in the world, second only to the Republic’s own capital of Santo Domingo. There are also large overseas Dominican populations in Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, and Venezuela. The U.S. has already experienced how events in the Caribbean country immediately west of Hispaniola, namely, Cuba, threatened our survival in 1962. Hence the U.S. has a lot at stake in whether the Dominican Republic succeeds in solving its problems.
What about the future of Haiti? Already the poorest and one of the most overcrowded countries in the New World, Haiti is nevertheless continuing to become even poorer and more crowded, with a population growth rate of nearly 3% per year. Haiti is so poor, and so deficient in natural resources and in trained or educated human resources, that it really is difficult to see what might bring about improvement. If one instead looks to the outside world to help through government foreign aid, NGO initiatives,
or private efforts, Haiti even lacks the capacity to utilize outside assistance effectively. For instance, the USAID program has put money into Haiti at seven times the rate at which it has put money into the Dominican Republic, but the results in Haiti have still been much more meager, because of the country’s deficiency in people and organizations of its own that could utilize the aid. Everyone familiar with Haiti whom I asked about its prospects used the words “no hope” in their answer. Most of them answered simply that they saw no hope. Those who did see hope began by acknowledging that they were in a minority and that most people saw no hope, but they themselves then went on to name some reason why they clung to hope, such as the possibilities of reforestation spreading out from Haiti’s existing small forest reserves, the existence of two agricultural areas in Haiti that do produce surplus food for internal export to the capital of Port-au-Prince and the tourist enclaves on the north coast, and Haiti’s remarkable achievement in abolishing its army without descending into a constant morass of secession movements and local militias.
Just as the Dominican Republic’s future affects others because of globalization, Haiti also affects others through globalization. Just as with Dominicans, that effect of globalization includes the effects of Haitians living overseas—in the United States, Cuba, Mexico, South America, Canada, the Bahamas, the Lesser Antilles, and France. Even more important, though, is the “globalization” of Haiti’s problems within the island of Hispaniola, through Haiti’s effects on the neighboring Dominican Republic. Near the Dominican border, Haitians commute from their homes to the Dominican side for jobs that at least provide them with meals, and for wood fuel to bring back to their deforested homes. Haitian squatters try to eke out a living as farmers on Dominican land near the border, even on poor-quality land that Dominican farmers scorn. More than a million people of Haitian background live and work in the Dominican Republic, mostly illegally, attracted by the better economic opportunities and greater availability of land in the Dominican Republic, even though the latter itself is a poor country. Hence the exodus of over a million Dominicans overseas has been matched by the arrival of as many Haitians, who now constitute about 12% of the population. Haitians take low-paying and hard jobs that few Dominicans currently want for themselves—especially in the construction industry, as agricultural workers, doing the back-breaking and painful work of cutting sugarcane, in the tourist industry, as watchmen, as domestic workers, and operating bicycle transport (pedaling bicycles while carrying and balancing huge quantities of goods for sale or delivery). The Dominican economy utilizes those Haitians as low-paid laborers, but Dominicans are reluctant in return to provide education, medical care, and housing when they are strapped for funds to provide those public services to themselves. Dominicans and Haitians in the Dominican Republic are divided not only economically but also culturally: they speak different languages, dress differently, eat different foods, and on the average look different (Haitians tending to be darker-skinned and more African in appearance).
As I listened to my Dominican friends describing the situation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, I became astonished by the close parallels with the situation of illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries in the United States. I heard those sentences about “jobs that Dominicans don’t want,” “low-paying jobs but still better than what’s available for them at home,” “those Haitians bring AIDS, TB, and malaria,” “they speak a different language and look darker-skinned,” and “we have no obligation and can’t afford to provide medical care, education, and housing to illegal immigrants.” In those sentences, all I had to do was to replace the words “Haitians” and “Dominicans” with “Latin American immigrants” and “American citizens,” and the result would be a typical expression of American attitudes towards Latin American immigrants.
At the present rate at which Dominicans are leaving the Dominican Republic for the U.S. and Puerto Rico while Haitians are leaving Haiti for the Dominican Republic, the Republic is becoming a nation with an increasing Haitian minority, just as many parts of the United States are becoming increasingly “Hispanic” (i.e., Latin American). That makes it in the vital interests of the Dominican Republic for Haiti to solve its problems, just as it is in the vital interests of the United States for Latin America to solve its own problems. The Dominican Republic is affected more by Haiti than by any other country in the world.
Might the Dominican Republic play a constructive role in Haiti’s future? At first glance, the Republic looks like a very unlikely source of solutions to Haiti’s problems. The Republic is poor and has enough problems helping its own citizens. The two countries are separated by that cultural gulf that includes different languages and different self-images. There is a long, deeply rooted tradition of antagonism on both sides, with many Dominicans viewing Haiti as part of Africa and looking down on Haitians, and with many Haitians in turn suspicious of foreign meddling. Haitians and Dominicans cannot forget the history of cruelties that each country inflicted on the other. Dominicans remember Haiti’s invasions of the Dominican Republic in the 19th century, including the 22-year occupation (forgetting that occupation’s positive aspects, such as its abolition of slavery). Haitians remember Trujillo’s worst single atrocity, his ordering the slaughter (by machete) of all 20,000 Haitians living in the northwestern Dominican Republic and parts of the Cibao Valley between October 2 and October 8, 1937. Today, there is little collaboration between the two governments, which tend to view each other warily or with hostility.
But none of these considerations changes two fundamental facts: that the Dominican environment merges continuously into the Haitian environment, and that Haiti is the country with the strongest effect upon the Dominican Republic. Some signs of collaboration between the two are starting to emerge. For example, while I was in the Dominican Republic, for the first time a group of Dominican scientists was about to travel to Haiti for joint meetings with Haitian scientists, and a return visit of the Haitian scientists to Santo Domingo was already scheduled. If the lot of Haiti is to improve at all, I don’t see how that could happen without more involvement on the part of the Dominican Republic, even though that is undesired and almost unthinkable to most Dominicans today. Ultimately, though, for the Republic not to be involved with Haiti is even more unthinkable. While the Republic’s own resources are scarce, at minimum it could assume a larger role as a bridge, in ways to be explored, between the outside world and Haiti.
Will Dominicans come to share those views? In the past, the Dominican people have accomplished feats much more difficult than becoming constructively engaged with Haiti. Among the many unknowns hanging over the futures of my Dominican friends, I see that as the biggest one.
CHAPTER 12
China, Lurching Giant
China’s significance ■ Background ■ Air, water, soil ■ Habitat, species, megaprojects ■ Consequences ■ Connections ■ The future ■
China is the world’s most populous country, with about 1,300,000,000 people, or one-fifth of the world’s total. In area it is the third largest country, and in plant species diversity the third richest. Its economy, already huge, is growing at the fastest rate of any major country: nearly 10% per year, which is four times the growth rate of First World economies. It has the world’s highest production rate of steel, cement, aquacultured food, and television sets; both the highest production and the highest consumption of coal, fertilizers, and tobacco; it stands near the top in production of electricity and (soon) motor vehicles, and in consumption of timber; and it is now building the world’s largest dam and largest water-diversion project.
Marring these superlatives and achievements, China’s environmental problems are among the most severe of any major country, and are getting worse. The long list ranges from air pollution, biodiversity losses, cropland losses, desertification, disappearing wetlands, grassland degradation, and increasing scale and frequency of human-induced natural disasters, to invasive species, overgrazing, river
flow cessation, salinization, soil erosion, trash accumulation, and water pollution and shortages. These and other environmental problems are causing enormous economic losses, social conflicts, and health problems within China. All these considerations alone would suffice to make the impact of China’s environmental problems on just the Chinese people a subject of major concern.
But China’s large population, economy, and area also guarantee that its environmental problems will not remain a domestic issue but will spill over to the rest of the world, which is increasingly affected through sharing the same planet, oceans, and atmosphere with China, and which in turn affects China’s environment through globalization. China’s recent entry into the World Trade Organization will expand those exchanges with other countries. For instance, China is already the largest contributor of sulfur oxides, chlorofluorocarbons, other ozone-depleting substances, and (soon) carbon dioxide to the atmosphere; its dust and aerial pollutants are transported eastwards in the atmosphere to neighboring countries and even to North America; and it is one of the two leading importers of tropical rainforest timber, making it a driving force behind tropical deforestation.
Even more important than all those other impacts will be the proportionate increase in total human impact on the world’s environments if China, with its large population, succeeds in its goal of achieving First World living standards—which also means catching up to the First World’s per-capita environmental impact. As we shall see in this chapter and again in Chapter 16, those differences between First and Third World living standards, and the efforts of China and other developing countries to close that gap, have big consequences that unfortunately are usually ignored. China will also illustrate other themes of this book: the dozen groups of environmental problems facing the modern world, to be detailed in Chapter 16, and all of them serious or extreme in China; the effects of modern globalization on environmental problems; the importance of environmental issues for even the biggest of all modern societies, and not just for the small societies selected as illustrations in most of my book’s other chapters; and realistic grounds for hope, despite a barrage of depressing statistics. After setting out some brief background information about China, I shall discuss the types of Chinese environmental impacts, their consequences for the Chinese people and for the rest of the world, and China’s responses and future prognosis.
Collapse Page 47
