Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  Although his mentor was a co-architect of the one-child policy, Li Shuzhou was among a contingent of social scientists arguing that it be relaxed, or even scrapped. It had once seemed sensible for a poor country growing faster than its economy, he explained: decrease the numbers, and you increase wealth per capita. But the alarming sex-ratio imbalance meant structural trouble for Chinese society: “That and our aging population. By 2040, China will have more than 100 million eighty-year-olds.”

  Besides, he said, population would have come down regardless.

  “We have four control areas where the one-child policy wasn’t implemented, totaling about eight million people in four provinces. Since the mid-1980s, they were allowed two children. In each, population growth is under control, aging is controlled, and the sex ratio is normal.”

  Gretchen was amazed at a country big enough and willing to experiment with an 8-million-person sample. “Just to say, okay, we’ll take four provinces and try this: The United States would never do that.”

  In Li’s surveys, most Chinese couples want only one child, even if permitted another. “So I think a universal two-child policy would be better.”

  Italy, Spain, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Japan, and Taiwan all have fertility rates lower than China’s, and none has a one-child policy. Nevertheless, even though it was intended to last only thirty years to get China over a demographic hump so the economy could catch up, leaders have announced that it will continue. Unlike those other countries, China still has many rural poor, and fears a spontaneous birth spurt if the one-child policy were suddenly rescinded. Another reason is that with a half-million employees, the National Population and Family Planning Commission is too powerful a bureaucracy to dismantle. Yet when the government recently merged the commission with the Ministry of Health, it was interpreted by many not as a streamlining measure, but as a cue that the policy might finally change. Whether that happens may depend on who is loudest: government economists who predict labor shortages if it doesn’t, or government scientists who warn of food and water shortages and more death by air pollution if it does.

  For the Natural Capital Project, Li Shuzhou has been assessing how people fare as their ecosystem is patched back together. On this trip are two women economists from his team. So far, findings from their house-to-house surveys are mixed. Due to the one-child policy, the country is aging and labor is getting tight. But having four grandparents available to care for one child frees up parents to migrate from resettlement villages to the cities for work, easing the labor shortage.

  One thing is certain: the need to migrate to earn a living is making people think hard about having children.

  The landscape turns schizophrenic, as farmland abruptly gives way to rows of residential high-rises along the winding highway—which just as suddenly drops into a stunning canyon filled with a bamboo forest. Although giant pandas are omnivores, bamboo is their favorite food; this forest, Wang says, contains forty different species of the giant grass, and pandas eat them all. Baoxing County is also home to the seldom-glimpsed red panda—which is actually not a bear, but related to raccoons—as well as wild boars, black bears, wild yak, the endangered golden snub-nosed monkey, and the Chinese monal, a spectacular iridescent pheasant whose numbers are declining.

  The canyon tightens further, buildings resume, and they arrive in the town of Ling’guan. Except for the white powder that coats windows, cars, and the leaves of trees lining the river, this could be Switzerland, with the Jiajin Mountains rising vertically on all sides. The powder isn’t snow, but dust that emanates from more than a hundred marble-cutting factories: directly behind Ling’guan is one of China’s most unique natural resources, an entire mountain of white marble.

  The scientists spend an hour at a state-of-the-art plant, where a machine slices ten-ton marble blocks into slabs as though they were loaves of bread. This factory captures its dust with water, drying the resulting slurry to a paste that can be used for wall plaster, plaster bandages, or in cosmetics. They hope to convince all the smaller factories belching clouds of marble dust to consolidate, says Wang Yukuan, so that they can afford similar equipment. “This is an ecologically important, beautiful area. It can be perfect for tourism if we can keep it clean.”

  A small forest park on the edge of town, accessed through a wooden archway carved with the motto “Place Where God Comes to Play,” is an initial attempt at that. The scientists take a walk that ascends above the dust layer into an aromatic stand of long-needled, endemic Sikang pines. No other visitors are around: Baoxing’s most famed natural attraction, the giant panda, is a furtive, camera-shy creature that doesn’t lend itself to tourism. They return to the minivan and start to climb. The driver honks on every curve, as from the opposite direction stake-bed cargo trucks stacked with ten-ton blocks of white marble come hurtling toward them. After a half-hour, the road levels as they reach a plateau, and Gretchen relaxes her grip on the safety handle.

  A cluster of red-tiled rooftops appears on a promontory: a Tibetan monastery. A little farther, past peach, pear, and apple orchards, they arrive at Qiaoqi, a village below a snowcapped limestone uplift called Jiajinshan Mountain. Sichuan is where China’s Han majority begins to give way to ethnic Tibetans. Five thousand live here, in white houses with ornately trimmed windows and elaborate wooden balconies connected by strings of colored prayer flags. Wearing brilliant fabrics with elaborate embroidery and beribboned headwear, bearing trays of yak milk and cups of honey wine, the Tibetans greet the visitors.

  Since 2008, explains a blue-robed village elder named An Lixing, they are no longer allowed to cut timber or graze cattle. Instead, the government sent him to learn about ecotourism. They have trained men as guides to explain the scenery and the area’s heritage—Tibetan culture; the Long March of Chairman Mao’s Red Army, which passed through here in 1935—and to take people to see golden monkeys, deer, and wild oxen. Depending on the season, they might even spot a giant panda, although that’s more likely right here in the village, where pandas steal drying corn and sausages.

  He preempts Gretchen’s question. “We don’t believe in the Dalai Lama. He doesn’t support us; the Chinese government does. We believe in the Communist Party.” They are happy to be Chinese, An says, and to speak Sichuanese Mandarin, not the Tibetan dialect. “As an ethnic minority, we Tibetans are allowed to practice Buddhism, and to have three children.” As a result, Tibet has the fastest-growing population in China.

  Two days earlier, the scientists had visited Feng Qian, a sloping land resettlement village outside Xi’an in Shaanxi province, near where China’s massive South-North Water Transfer Project was being constructed. To reach it, they’d driven a new multilane highway that passed through the longest tunnel in Asia. It had taken engineers just two years to bore eighteen kilometers through the Qinling Mountains, testament to China’s ability to tunnel under the Yellow River to bring Yangtze water to the new cities encircling Beijing.

  Feng Qian was more typical of where the 30 million displaced peasants had landed: About three hundred households were ensconced in stuccoed multifamily dwellings just off the new highway. Nobody complained, however, about trading mud huts in the forest for brick dwellings with electricity, TV, and toilets, and getting a subsidy as well. More than two hundred men and women were off working in eastern China factories or construction, earning ¥10,0004 annually, returning home once a year. Yet many still resisted giving up farming. Most of them, overwhelmingly male and single, now tended mulberry trees for silkworm food.

  Throughout China are troubling messes born of the one-child policy: single men in factory cities, squandering their hard-earned yuan on prostitutes. Vietnamese women running away when they realize they married a guy who saved for ten years to buy a bride but who now can’t afford a house—practically obligatory now for Chinese men to attract a wife. Single women abandoning rural life for cities where men with money compete for wives. Kidnapping rings stealing wives from one province—or from North Korea
, or Myanmar—and selling them to women-starved men in the next. Rising divorce rates as marriages last mere weeks, because of spoiled single children who quit before compromising.

  Even on this trip, one of the economists casually mentions doing her doctoral work in Japan so she could have two extra children without penalty. Do people inevitably violate a draconian, unnatural law? Would China indeed have been better off without its one-child mandate?

  “Without it we’d be heading over 2 billion,” says Ouyang as they drive back to Chengdu. “Good-bye food and water, good-bye ecosystem.” He has five brothers and sisters. “My wife’s family is even bigger. Her father was one of ten. She has 53 cousins. My son is one of 57 grandchildren.”

  Had his son been born into the same arithmetic expansion, rather than post-one-child policy, he would have been one of at least 270 in his generation. Most Chinese, Ouyang says, see the need for the policy. It would be hard to find a Chinese ecologist who disagreed. “In 1979,” Ouyang says, “in my hometown in Hunan province there was a tiger. A farmer shot him. I ate a piece of the meat, my first and last time. Since then, tigers have disappeared.”

  Wang winces. “You know how people always ask us what difference will it make to our lives if there are no pandas someday? Or no tigers?”

  Ouyang and Gretchen nod in unison.

  “I tell them that without pandas, then without tigers, next it will be fish that disappear. Then crops. Then everything. Then people.”

  On the final day, the scientists take Gretchen to China’s smallest and southernmost province. About the size of Taiwan, Hainan Island sits nineteen miles off the mainland in the South China Sea. As the only part of China that dips into the tropics, over the past two decades Hainan has been discovered by luxury hotel chains and developers, who are converting its southern shore into China’s Oahu, with Manhattan prices.

  Their destination is the central highlands, where the number of rubber plantations has doubled due to China’s explosive growth of automobile ownership and demand for tires, threatening the rainforests of one of Asia’s biologically richest islands. With much of the lowlands in rice, cassava, sugarcane, and pepper plantations, the forests are not only Hainan’s last stand of biodiversity, but also its bulwark against flooding and soil loss.

  They drive to Five Finger Mountain in the center of the island, passing thousands of pepper tree vines tended by men in straw coolie hats, each vine supported by poles hand-hewn from granite that won’t decay in the rain, but which cost unimaginable numbers of man-hours to fashion. Several cloudbursts slow their journey, and they pause at a restaurant beside a small pond filled with Muscovy ducks, which are featured on the menu. As usual, they count the number of species on the plates, and look for locally endemic spices and vegetables. Besides the rice and soy, which could be from anywhere, they count nineteen, including sautéed mountain ferns. Nothing on this trip has topped the vegetarian banquet in a Chengdu Buddhist temple two nights before, with at least thirty.

  They reach the slopes of the third of the mountain’s five peaks. In a hardening drizzle, they tramp around a steep rubber plantation with Chen Haizhong, a square-faced farmer in plastic thongs and calf-length khakis. Like most farmers here, he used his sloping land conversion subsidy to plant rubber trees, which was permitted because these latex-producing crops, native to the Amazon, are good at holding water and soil. Chen has also intercropped a medicinal herb for stomach ailments, and betel nuts. The polyculture is mutually beneficial, but rubber depends on synthetic fertilizer and pesticide protection. Ouyang’s resident Hainan Island team hopes to encourage a shift to more sustainable native trees by proposing that sloping land subsidies for rubber be eliminated.

  “It’s a perfect opportunity,” he tells Gretchen, “to use the InVEST software to assess if Sloping Land Conversion has caused more damage than benefit here by treating rubber as if it were a natural forest. We can use an alternative economic scenario to change people’s behavior.” With the simple graphical interface, he says, they can show policy makers what will happen if they do A or B instead of C, and let them make the obvious sensible choice.

  Assuming policy makers ever did things that way. “Can you really get your government to listen to you?” she asks Ouyang.

  “We try. We tell them that native forests and plants are strategic reserves for the future. When the high-yield rice was developed in China, it used genetic material from native Hainan Island rice. That got the government’s attention. It helped to make them believe.”

  The drizzle has turned to squalls, and the horn blares on every curve as they press on over new concrete highways choked with motorized rickshaws, cars, and taxis. They stop at a forest preserve on the north face of Five Finger Mountain’s first peak. Fifty years earlier, the 230-foot parashorea trees here were filled with an abundant endemic primate, the Hainan black-crested gibbon. It is now the world’s rarest ape. Only twenty remain.

  “People killed them for medicinal purposes,” says Ouyang. “Their powdered bones are supposed to make people strong.” He tilts his head to look up through the car window. “The gibbons normally never came down from the canopy. But hunters knew that if one died, the others would gather around to cry. So they would shoot one and wait until the rest came down.”

  “Is there any economic scenario we can use to change the desire for endangered species bones?” asks Gretchen.

  “For some things. People now know they can be healthy without tiger bones. With aphrodisiacs, it’s harder. Men and women will do anything if they think it will make them more virile and beautiful.”

  A waterfall and a river are cascading into a series of deep, transparent pools. It is raining hard, but nothing will stop Gretchen from seeing this old forest, so the rest follow her up the mountain trail. An hour later they are back, drenched but exhilarated. Even the tiny leeches they must pick out of each other’s hair can’t diminish the thrill of seeing so much crystalline water and smelling the world as if it were created yesterday.

  But as they exit the preserve and descend, pristine clarity vanishes. All the rivers are running bloodred with eroded soil. Sheets of mud pouring through the rubber and pepper plantations wash across the highway. When they finally reach the airport on the island’s northern shore, Hainan’s rivers have burst their banks and the South China Sea is filling with red silt. They’re able to fly out, but the following day, a typhoon that has already cost defoliated Vietnam millions of tons of topsoil hits Hainan full force. Before it passes, 135,000 people have to be evacuated.

  On Hainan Island, or anywhere else, for that matter, the three axes on which the InVest program turns—land and sea use, climate, and demography—may ultimately hinge on the third. Decisions can be made about how to manage land. Climate change is already under way and will have to be accommodated. But moving people from wherever their overwhelming presence threatens existence means they must go somewhere. In China, that somewhere is cities, more and more of them.

  But at a certain point, there will be no more room—or concrete, or pipes or asphalt—for more cities. Short of war to seize other lands, the remaining option may be some humane version of what China has attempted for the past thirty years.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 9

  The Sea

  i. Pamparegla

  Living in Malabon, the most crowded of sixteen towns composing one of the world’s most densely populated urban areas, metropolitan Manila, Roland1 doesn’t think much about nature, or even see it—except for the rain. Because flooding now regularly turns streets into canals, Malabon’s nickname is “Venice,” and Roland has grown resigned to wading to work. Rain is increasing, storms are strengthening, and supposedly their sinking town will one day slip beneath Manila Bay, preceded by Manila itself. The Dutch ambassador has already advised the Philippines to dike the bay, the finest harbor in Southeast Asia. But where will money come from for that?

  The typhoon that drowned China’s Hainan Island has moved east across the So
uth China Sea: weaker but still plenty wet, it’s overhead, soaking Luzon, the Philippines’ biggest island. Beneath Roland’s second-story window, the street is a swirling gray backwater. Beyond it, traffic in this megalopolis of 25.5 million2 flows imperceptibly, like a species of tropical glacier. Occasionally, chunks break free and surge forward, then jam into other chunks and stop in axle-high water.

  Roland, a slight, reserved man of thirty-nine, doesn’t dwell on the climatic chaos erupting outside, as he is preoccupied with a more immediate question:

  What is the carrying capacity of a woman?

  Every day, Roland meets women who have answered that question for themselves, an answer that would not please many powers-that-be in his country. They want two or less. Or no more than what they already have. So they come to him. What they seek might be easily arranged elsewhere without the intervention of someone like Roland. But not in the Philippines.

  Philippine history is sometimes described as three hundred years in a Spanish convent, followed by fifty years in Hollywood. Few Spaniards today care that the Philippines was a part of their long-vanquished empire. Few Americans even know that, after posing as a liberator during the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States decided to keep the Philippines for itself, as it did with Puerto Rico. That meant managing the archipelago’s affairs, coining its money, imposing English on the Philippines’ other 165 languages, and killing at least a quarter-million Filipinos who objected to becoming U.S. colonials. Only after World War II did the United States finally relinquish it.