News Forum Archives: August 2003
Urban Sprawl Makes Americans Fat, Study Finds
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – You drive to work, you drive your kids to school, you drive to the grocery store—no wonder you have put on a few pounds.
U.S. researchers said on Thursday they had quantified the price of living in sprawled-out American communities and weight gain leads the list—six pounds on average, to be precise.
Their findings, published in special issues of the American Journal of Public Health and the American Journal of Health Promotion, are aimed at urban planners, county and city councils and other groups involved in laying out communities.
“We found that U.S. adults living in sprawling counties weigh more, are more likely to be obese and are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure than are their counterparts in compact counties,” Reid Ewing of the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland told reporters.
He said two-thirds of the U.S. population lives in counties covered in his group’s survey.
Unlike people in old-fashioned urban centers who can walk to work, shops, and public transport, those in the spread-out communities cannot walk even if they wanted to because sidewalks and crossings are lacking and homes, schools and workplaces are far apart.
“For some people it is a ‘duh’ kind of issue, but it doesn’t seem to be for a lot of people in important positions,” Ewing said.
He said the research can be used to persuade policymakers to change zoning, funding and even lending laws to promote development that will encourage people to walk.
“If we go to a city council and say ‘allowing this sprawling development … is maybe going to hurt people’s health through obesity’, they are going to say ‘prove it’,” Ewing said.
LESS EXPENSIVE, CLEANER, MORE PLEASANT
More compact communities are less expensive—with sprawl bringing 10 percent greater annual public service deficits and 8 percent higher housing costs, the researchers said.
Dense communities also ease pollution and allow for better social interaction, they said.
The researchers looked at U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data on more than 200,000 people living in 448 U.S. counties in major metropolitan areas. They assessed sprawl in each county using U.S. Census Bureau and other federal data.
“The average adult would be expected to weigh about six pounds more living in the most sprawling county in our sample as opposed to an adult the same age living in the most compact county,” Ewing said.
The study found that people in far-flung communities walk less for leisure, but this factor did not account for all the weight difference.
“It may be as a result of the lower level of physical activity they get as part of their daily lives—driving to work, driving to school, driving to lunch, basically driving everywhere,” Ewing said.
People in such communities may drive for good reasons.
Another set of studies found that U.S. pedestrians and cyclists were much more likely to be killed or injured than Dutch and German pedestrians and cyclists.
Whether compared on a per-trip basis or by distance traveled, U.S. cyclists were three times more likely to be killed than German cyclists and six times more likely to die than Dutch cyclists, the study found.
Copyright Reuters 2002. All rights reserved.(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Continue Reading Urban Sprawl Makes Americans Fat, Study Finds
Wind Power’s New Current
Vestas turbine at Hull Municipal Lighting Plant, Hull, Massachusetts. This turbine provides enough electricity to power the street lights of Hull.
By Scott Kirsner
New York Times
Standing on top of a hill in central Massachusetts, Jonathan Fitch is surrounded by a grove of eight tall white windmills. He regards them like someone eager to trade in an old car.
The windmills were installed in 1984 so that the town of Princeton would receive at least a small fraction of its power from a nonpolluting source. But now three of the windmills are broken, a result of direct hits by lightning, and their manufacturer has gone out of business.
Mr. Fitch, general manager of the Princeton Municipal Light Department, is planning to upgrade his wind farm. The town-owned utility is overseeing a $4 million project to replace the eight older windmills with two gargantuan modern ones. The current system generates enough electricity for about 1 percent of the town’s 1,450 households; the new one, expected to be in place next year, is to satisfy roughly 40 percent of the town’s appetite for power.
The windmill replacement project in Princeton is being undertaken in part because of major advances in technology over the last 20 years. Today’s windmills – often called wind turbines – are quieter and more reliable, and they generate more power at a lower cost. Unlike the older windmills in Princeton, they are outfitted with dozens of sensors and connected to a network that allows them to be monitored remotely, from a PC or laptop.
“The efficiency of the turbines has gone up about 5 percent every year,” said Philipp Andres, a vice president for business development at Vestas American Wind Technology, a subsidiary of the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines. Referring to the rule of thumb for the steady doubling of the power of microchips, he added, “That’s not quite as dramatic an increase as Moore’s Law, but it is certainly significant.”
Perhaps most important, the new generation of wind turbines are bigger, a fact provoking controversy almost everywhere utilities have proposed to put them up – most notably off Cape Cod, where a developer called Cape Wind Associates hopes to build the nation’s first offshore wind farm, using turbines that will rise 426 feet from the water.
Utilities and independent developers are nonetheless moving ahead with plans to increase the generating capacity of older installations and establish new wind farms. Michael O’Sullivan, a senior vice president at FPL Energy, the biggest domestic operator of wind farms, said that 2003 “will probably be the second-biggest year in the industry’s history, in terms of adding capacity,” exceeded only by 2001.
As the country’s electrical demand continues to rise, adding capacity is of keen interest. And the power derived from wind is power that a town like Princeton does not need to buy from sources that rely on coal-burning generators or nuclear plants.
But the independence afforded by wind power is only partial. “You can’t rely on it every day,” Mr. Fitch said. “You have to have some backup contract in place.” Moreover, in avoiding large-scale blackouts like the one two weeks ago, wind power is not necessarily a solution, because the windmills themselves generally need a voltage supply to operate. While Mr. Fitch expects the more modern turbines to provide the town with modest savings in energy costs – perhaps $90,000 a year compared with other sources – the environmental considerations are the main attraction.
The power generated by Princeton’s aging wind turbines has actually cost more than electricity from other sources, Mr. Fitch said, but the new technology changes that equation. Unlike the old-fashioned rural windmills used to pump water, which whipped back and forth with every gust, today’s wind turbines rely on an electronic nervous system that allows them to predict the force and direction of the wind up to 24 hours in advance, and adjust the orientation of the rotor and even the pitch of each individual blade in order to wring the maximum energy out of a passing breeze.
Electricity is generated at the top of the windmills, in a boxlike structure called the nacelle, to which the rotors are attached. “The rotors can be as large as the wingspan of a 747,” said Jim Lyons, the advanced-technology leader for GE Wind Energy, the biggest domestic maker of turbines. At the bottom of the tower that supports the nacelle and rotor is a cylindrical space housing the computers that collect data from throughout the turbine. The collection of computers is known as a Scada system, for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition.
The Scada system can supply 200 or more pieces of data related to the turbine’s operation, Mr. Lyons said. Information about higher-than-normal vibration levels or oil temperature can alert a wind farm’s staff to problems before they happen. Typically, the wind turbines are connected by fiber-optic cable to a control center. Many problems can be solved remotely, but staff members must climb up through the tower to the nacelle on occasion.
Problems are increasingly rare, however. At FPL Energy, a spokesperson said that the company’s turbines were operating 96 percent of the time in 2002. And the Scada systems built into the new generation of turbines achieve a near-autonomous level of intelligence. In Hull, Mass., where the municipal light department installed a single 660-kilowatt turbine on the edge of Boston Harbor in 2001, the operations manager, John McLeod, said, “The only time I go out there is to give tours.”
One day last winter, the tiny cups on an anemometer that measures wind speed on the turbine began gathering ice. The ice caused the anemometer to spin abnormally slowly. The computer that governs the windmill’s operation was confused by the “slow” wind speed; it seemed as if the windmill was generating too much power for such a calm day. “So the turbine shut itself down,” said Mr. MacLeod, who runs the Hull Municipal Light Plant. “But the anemometer is heated, and eventually the ice melted,” and the turbine started again. He added, “It diagnosed the problem itself and sent me a fax letting me know what had happened.”
The wind turbine in Hull, just beyond the end zone of the town’s high school football field, replaced an older model that had been operating since 1985. (Windmills in Hull go back even further, to the 1830’s, when they were used to power a salt works on the peninsula.) The old turbine was capable of generating 40 kilowatts of electricity and was perched on an 80-foot tower; the new turbine, made by Vestas, can generate up to 660 kilowatts of power, and reaches 241 feet at the tip of its blades. It supplies power for the town’s traffic signals and streetlights, in addition to meeting the electrical demands of as many as 250 homes, depending on the day’s wind speed.
Mr. MacLeod said he was planning a second wind turbine, possibly an offshore model that would produce up to 3.6 megawatts.
To gauge where to erect wind turbines, developers put up meteorological towers to measure the average wind speed and assess whether it is high enough for electrical generation. In Princeton, two towers have been collecting data since 2000. The information is sent to a meteorological consultant under contract to the town, using the same network cellular phones use.
As part of the plans for a wind farm off Cape Cod, a 197-foot meteorological tower in Nantucket Sound takes readings of wind speed and direction every six minutes for the developer, Cape Wind Associates. Every 30 minutes, it captures information about wave height and water currents. The data is sent to an office on the mainland, where it is posted on a Web site (capewind.whgrp .com).
“It’s on the Web to provide a service to the maritime community – fishermen and recreational boaters,” as well as ferry operators, said Leonard Fagan, vice president of engineering for Cape Wind Associates. The Web site also tries to influence the public, by estimating how much “clean, local, renewable energy” the prospective wind farm would be producing at any given moment.
The Cape Wind project has prompted some of the fiercest resistance that any wind developer has encountered recently, although projects in other parts of the country have been halted by community opposition.
Even in Princeton, which has been home to eight wind turbines since 1984, some residents oppose the installation of the two larger machines. “The ones they’re proposing to put up there are massive,” said John Bomba, who since 1988 has owned a restaurant and banquet center that are within sight of the existing windmills. “It’s going to impact my business, which is mostly high-end weddings. It will change the atmosphere.”
Mr. Bomba, like the opponents of the Cape Wind Project, emphasized that he was “for renewable energy, but we think there are appropriate locations and sites for it.” The Princeton windmill farm is situated just outside a state nature reserve.
Despite the controversy, Mr. Fitch soon intends to dismantle and sell his old windmills and erect two new ones. “We realize that not everybody will like the look of it, but it’s better than the alternative, which is pollution,” he said. He jokes that he is competing with Mr. MacLeod to see whose town can generate more power from the wind. (Currently, Mr. MacLeod has the lead, but Mr. Fitch hopes to seize it next year when the two new turbines will be capable of generating three megawatts of power.)
Better technology has prompted utilities and developers to consider wind turbines, but another incentive is a federal tax credit for operators of wind farms. For every kilowatt hour of electricity generated, a wind farm operator can take 1.8 cents off its federal tax bill. In addition, 13 states have established a requirement called a renewable portfolio standard. It mandates that utilities generate a certain percentage of their power from renewable sources like wind.
In New Jersey, the standard requires that 6.5 percent of the state’s power come from renewable sources by 2012.
When wind projects were discussed 20 years ago, “you could safely say that they were science projects,” said Steve Zwolinski, president of GE Wind Energy. “They’ve come of age now, and they’re really a viable technology.”
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Continue Reading Wind Power’s New Current
Record Temperatures Shrinking World Grain Harvest
Monthly Drop Equal to One Half of U.S. Wheat Harvest
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update27.htm
Lester R. Brown
Earth Policy Institute
On August 12 at 8:30 a.m., the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its monthly estimate of the world grain harvest, reporting a 32-million-ton drop
from the July estimate. When grain futures markets opened later in the morning, prices of wheat, rice, and corn jumped.
This 32-million-ton drop, equal to half the U.S. wheat harvest, was concentrated in Europe where record-high temperatures have withered crops. The affected region stretched from the United Kingdom and France in the west through the Ukraine in the east. The searing heat damaged crops in virtually every country in Europe.
The soaring temperatures of the past several weeks rewrote the record book.
On August 10, the temperature in London reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38
degrees Celsius)—the first triple-digit reading on record in the United Kingdom. France had 11 consecutive days in August with temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit). In Italy, temperatures reached 41 degrees Celsius (105 degrees Fahrenheit).
The heat wave in Europe started in early summer when Switzerland, situated
in the heart of Europe, experienced the hottest June since recordkeeping
began 140 years ago. In July the heat wave spread across the rest of Europe.
Crops suffered the most in Eastern Europe, which is harvesting its smallest
wheat crop in 30 years. In the Ukraine, the wheat crop, already severely
damaged by winter kill, was reduced further by the heat, plummeting from 21
million tons last year to 5 million tons this year. As a result, the Ukraine, a leading wheat exporter last year, has been forced to import wheat as bread prices threaten to spiral out of control. Romania, which wasparticularly hard hit by heat and drought, is expecting to harvest the smallest wheat crop on record. The Czech Republic is expecting its poorest grain harvest in 25 years.
The prolonged heat wave, which persisted through mid August, also reduced the German grain harvest. The German Farmers Union reports that in southeastern Germany some farmers may lose half of their grain crop.
This reduced estimate of the world grain harvest will expand the world grain
shortfall this year to 82 million tons. With projected world grain consumption of 1,912 million tons exceeding production of 1,830 million tons by 4 percent, the world is engaged in a massive drawdown of grain stocks. (See data at http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update27_data.htm.) With this year’s drawdown, world grain stocks have dropped to the lowest level since the early 1970s. When world grain stocks dropped to a dangerously low level in 1973, world prices of wheat and rice doubled.
As atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels climb higher each year in an unbroken ascent, they are creating a greenhouse effect, raising the earth’s
temperature. Over the last quarter century the earth’s average temperature
has risen 0.7 degrees Celsius or more than 1 degree Fahrenheit.
As temperatures rise, crop-withering heat waves are becoming more and more
common. Last year the grain harvests in India and the United States were hit
hard by high temperatures and drought. This year Europe is bearing the
brunt.
During this life-threatening heat wave Europeans may have felt that the
temperature could not rise much higher, but the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), a group of some 1,500 of the world’s leading climate
scientists, is projecting a rise in average global temperature of somewhere
between 2.5 and 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit (1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius) during
this century if we continue with business-as-usual energy policies.
Even if the earth’s temperature increases only a few degrees, as in the low
end of the IPCC projections, we will likely see heat waves far more intense
than anything we can easily imagine. If rising temperatures shrink harvests
and drive up food prices, consumer pressure to reduce the use of fossil fuels will intensify. Indeed, rising food prices could be the first global economic indicator to signal the need for a fundamental shift in energy policy, one that would move the world toward renewable energy sources and away from climate-disrupting fossil fuels.
- # #
For more information on the effect of rising temperatures on crop yields,
see Chapter 1 of Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization
in Trouble, which is online for free downloading at
http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/index.htm. The book will be published on September 4, 2003, after which time the entire contents will be available online.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Continue Reading Record Temperatures Shrinking World Grain Harvest
Just a Speck of an Island, With a Power of Its Own
By Corey Kilgannon
New York Times
NYE, N.Y., Aug. 16 — Blackout? What blackout?
That was the little joke around the longtime summer bungalow community on Hen Island today, but for residents, it was the truth.
While the power grid failed on Thursday, throwing New York City and much of the metropolitan region into darkness, this obscure island in Milton Harbor just off the coast of Westchester County stayed lighted.
Hen Island has always been off the grid. Its 31 homes started as fishing shacks and bungalows. But in recent years, most have been fortified into well-appointed homes worthy of a shelter magazine. Most residents have running water from rainwater collected in their roof gutters and appliances powered by rooftop solar panels or windmills.
“Are you kidding? There’s never a blackout on Hen Island,” said Ray Tartaglione, who was watering his plants today with rainwater from a garden hose hooked up to a solar-powered electric pump.
Mr. Tartaglione, who owns a towing service in White Plains, keeps a miniature road sign that points in one direction toward “Hen Island” and the other toward “Reality.”
He turned a fishing shack into a stylish waterfront studio with high ceilings and a fluorescent Caribbean color scheme. He has a television, a stereo and a propane fireplace as well as an air-conditioner and a propane-powered refrigerator.
Residents spend their summers or weekends here just off the craggy coastline of suburban Westchester, a bit south of Rye Playland and 15 minutes from the Bronx. They like to say that, besides them, only sailors and sea gulls can find Hen Island. Even most longtime Rye locals know nothing about it.
It comprises 26 acres at high tide, and 10 more at low. There are no cars or roads, only footpaths. No phone lines, electricity or water supply. Residents reach the island on their own motorboats.
Once you step on Hen Island, residents say, the outside world is an afterthought, a thin ring of lights along the watery horizon. The Manhattan skyline and the Throgs Neck and Bronx-Whitestone Bridges are Christmas lights, as are the lights along the north shore of Long Island and at Rye’s yacht clubs and marinas.
When the lights went out Thursday on Lori Junggren, 49, and her husband, Peter, 52, at their home in Rye, there was really no question but to come out to civilization, Ms. Junggren said.
The Junggrens have a high-powered solar panel that can power their entire island home, including a large refrigerator. A neighbor teased them and bought them a sign outside that says, “Electricity for Sale.” On Thursday, their two sons, Peter, 22, and Andrew, 16, brought their DVD’s and laptops to the island and plugged in.
“First thing I did when I got to the island was turn on the radio and the ceiling fan,” Ms. Junggren said today, in her modern kitchen overlooking Long Island Sound. “The blackout didn’t even affect us. Only that nothing was lit up. It was weird not seeing the city or the bridges.”
Larry Kreutzer, a 25-year Hen Islander who owns an auto salvage business in the Bronx, sat on his shaded deck overlooking the Sound today.
“When the lights went out, I lit a candle in sympathy for the mainlanders,” he said. “I’m just kidding. I actually flipped on two lights instead of one, just for fun.”
Mr. Kreutzer, 74, said he followed the news on his small black-and-white television set powered by a car battery.
Two other residents, Ben and Susan Minard, said a neighbor stopped by on Thursday evening and mentioned that the Northeast was blacked out.
“It certainly looked normal around here,” said Mr. Minard, 58, who has spent all his summers on the island. “It reminded me of the 1950’s when things weren’t built up, didn’t have the lights you have now.”
Mr. Minard, a financial planner, and his wife live near Syracuse and drive five hours each way to spend summer weekends on the island. Their son, a lawyer in Manhattan, called on Thursday night from the city.
“He always teases us about our rustic conditions out here,” said Ms. Minard, 53, an accountant. “So on Thursday we told him, `Yeah, well at least we can turn on our lights.’ ”
Doug Austrian, 45, a builder from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., said, “No blackouts here. No electric bills either.”
He and his wife, Juana, 22, and their 4-month-old son, Joshua, live on the island much of the summer. Solar panels power their sleek flat-screen television and booming Bose stereo system. Their hot and cold running water comes from rainwater off the roof, and their refrigerator is powered by propane.
Peter Barotz, a 20-year island resident, said that he and his wife were on the mainland when they heard how widespread the blackout was.
“That’s when we realized there’s only one place that has power,” he recalled. “We said, `Let’s go to the island.’ ”
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Continue Reading Just a Speck of an Island, With a Power of Its Own
Campaign seeks forest canopy’s secrets
By Alex Kirby BBC News Online environment correspondent
One of the Earth’s richest zones, the tropical forest canopy, is the target of a new scientific initiative.
The organisers plan a network of treetop observatories to provide unrivalled insight into life high above the forest floor.
They say this will hugely increase their knowledge of forest life and climate change.
But they fear the canopy is being destroyed faster than any other habitat.
The Global Canopy Programme (GCP) is launching its campaign, A 20:20 Vision For Canopy Science, on 11 July at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK.
It aims to combine research, conservation, education and fundraising, and to work to improve the lives of people dependent on the forests.
The GCP hopes to obtain several million pounds a year over the next 10 years to build and operate a network of observatories using cranes, balloons and walkways.
Tropical alarm system
The “20:20” in the campaign title refers to the plan to have 20 observatories at work for two decades.
There are 10 already, in temperate forests: the plan is to build another 10 in “biodiversity hotspots”, areas rich in species in places like Brazil, Ecuador, West Africa and India.
The observatories would serve as an early warning system to monitor global change, besides investigating the species living in the treetops.
The GCP describes the forest canopy as “the richest, most threatened and least-known habitat” on the Earth’s surface.
It says there is evidence that 40% of all living species may be found in the canopy, many of them specialists adapted to life high above ground.
Helping the poor
It is seeking funding from industry, foundations, and the United Nations.
Dr Klaus Toepfer is executive director of the UN Environment Programme (Unep).
He said: “If we are to significantly reduce biodiversity loss by 2010, in line with commitments made at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, then we will need innovative investigations like the GCP.
“We need not only to tackle the science but also to understand better how biodiversity can provide benefits to local communities and help poverty alleviation.”
The director of the GCP is Andrew Mitchell, a British zoologist. He told BBC News Online: “What we’re planning wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago.
“We can do it thanks to technology - the new tool is canopy cranes.
“They’re static, and we’ll combine them with mobile balloons for maximum flexibility.
Blunt instrument
“In the old days all you could do was fire ropes up into the trees and build platforms or shaky walkways.
“The only way to find what lived there was to fog the trees with pesticide and see what came down. Often up to 80% of what fell to Earth was new to science.
“The canopy’s a terribly important source of activity - it’s the real engine-room of the forest.
“Apart from the species it harbours, and all the pollination that goes on there, it produces a huge amount of oxygen and takes up vast quantities of carbon.
“Yet it’s really being damaged by development, and climate change is a growing threat.
“In an experiment in Switzerland researchers pumped carbon dioxide into the treetops through 12 miles of thin tubing, raising the concentration to about 550 parts per million.
Cheap at the price
“That’s the sort of level we may expect globally by around 2050, on present trends.
“It caused changes to the composition of insect communities, which could alter disease patterns. It also affected hydrology and wood quality.
“This campaign will revolutionise our knowledge of life on Earth.
“It’ll cost about five times less than building a go-kart for Mars - and it’ll be a lot more use, at least in the short term.”
The Global Canopy Programme’s work is described in the journal Science.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)China Losing War with Advancing Deserts
Lester R. Brown
Earth Policy Institute
China is now at war. It is not invading armies that are claiming its territory, but expanding deserts. Old deserts are advancing and new ones are forming, like guerrilla forces striking unexpectedly, forcing Beijing to fight on several fronts. And worse, the growing deserts are gaining momentum, occupying an ever-larger piece of China’s territory each year.
Desert expansion has accelerated with each successive decade since 1950. China’s Environmental Protection Agency reports that the Gobi Desert expanded by 52,400 square kilometers (20,240 square miles) from 1994 to 1999, an area half the size of Pennsylvania. With the advancing Gobi now within 150 miles of Beijing, China’s leaders are beginning to sense the gravity of the situation.
Overplowing and overgrazing are converging to create a dust bowl of historic dimensions. With little vegetation remaining in parts of northern and western China, the strong winds of late winter and early spring can remove literally millions of tons of topsoil in a single day—soil that can take centuries to replace.
For the outside world, it is these dust storms that draw attention to the deserts that are forming in China. On April 12, 2002, for instance, South Korea was engulfed by a huge dust storm from China that left people in Seoul literally gasping for breath. Schools were closed, airline flights were cancelled, and clinics were overrun with patients having difficulty breathing. Retail sales fell. Koreans have come to dread the arrival of what they now call “the fifth season”—the dust storms of late winter and early spring. Japan also suffers from dust storms originating in China. Although not as directly exposed as Koreans are, the Japanese complain about the dust and the brown rain that streaks their windshields and windows.
Each year, residents of eastern Chinese cities such as Beijing and Tianjin hunker down as the dust storms begin. In addition to having problems with breathing and the dust that stings the eyes, people are constantly working to keep dust out of homes and to clean doorways and sidewalks of dust and sand. Farmers and herders, whose livelihoods are blowing away, are paying aneven heavier price.
A report by a U.S. embassy official in May 2001 after a visit to Xilingol Prefecture in Inner Mongolia (Nei Mongol) notes that although 97 percent of the region is officially classified as grasslands, a third of the terrain now appears to be desert. The report says the prefecture’s livestock population climbed from 2 million as recently as 1977 to 18 million in 2000. A Chinese scientist doing grassland research in the prefecture says that if recent desertification trends continue, Xilingol will be uninhabitable in 15 years.
A more recent U.S. embassy report entitled “Desert Mergers and Acquisitions” says satellite images show two deserts in north-central China expanding and merging to form a single, larger desert overlapping Inner Mongolia and Gansu provinces. To the west in Xinjiang Province, two even larger deserts-the Taklimakan and Kumtag-are also heading for a merger. Highways there are regularly inundated by sand dunes.
In the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the earth’s ecosystem, China is on the leading edge. A human population of 1.3 billion and a livestock population of just over 400 million are weighing heavily on the land. Huge flocks of sheep and goats in the northwest are stripping the land of its protective vegetation, creating a dust bowl on a scale not seen before. Northwestern China is on the verge of a massive ecological meltdown.
While overplowing is now being partly remedied by paying farmers to plant their grainland in trees, overgrazing continues largely unabated. China’s cattle, sheep, and goat population tripled from 1950 to 2002. The United States, a country with comparable grazing capacity, has 97 million cattle. China has 106 million. But for sheep and goats, the figures are 8 million versus 298 million. Concentrated in the western and northern provinces, sheep and goats are destroying the land’s protective vegetation. The wind then does the rest, removing the soil and converting productive rangeland into desert. (See data at http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update26_data.htm)
The fallout from the dust storms is social as well as economic. Millions of rural Chinese may be uprooted and forced to migrate eastward as the drifting sand covers their land. Expanding deserts are driving villagers from their homes in Gansu, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia provinces. An Asian Development Bank assessment of desertification in Gansu Province reports that 4,000 villages risk being overrun by drifting sands.
The U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930s forced some 2.5 million “Okies” and other refugees to leave the land, many of them heading from Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas to California. But the dust bowl forming in China is much larger, and during the 1930s the U.S. population was only 150 million-compared with 1.3 billion in China today. Whereas the U.S. migration was measured in the millions, China’s may eventually measure in the tens of millions. And as a U.S. embassy report entitled “The Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolia” noted, “unfortunately, China’s twenty-first century ‘Okies’ have no California to escape to-at least not in China.”
Planting marginal cropland in trees helps correct some of the mistakes of overplowing, but it does not deal with the overgrazing issue. Arresting desertification may depend more on grass than trees—on both permitting existing grasses to recover and planting grass in denuded areas.
Beijing is trying to arrest the spread of deserts by encouraging pastoralists to reduce their flocks of sheep and goats by 40 percent, but in communities where wealth is measured not in income but in the number of livestock owned and where most families are living under the poverty line, such cuts are not easy. Some local governments are requiring stall-feeding of livestock with forage gathered by hand, hoping that this confinement measure will permit grasslands to recover.
China is taking some of the right steps to halt the advancing desert, but it has a long way to go to reduce livestock numbers to a sustainable level. At this point, there is no plan in place or on the drawing board that will halt the advancing deserts.
The entire world has a stake in China’s winning the war with the advancing deserts given its economic leadership role. But winning will not be easy. Qu Geping, the Chairman of the Environment and Resources Committee of the National People’s Congress, estimates that the remediation of land in the areas where it is technically feasible would cost $28.3 billion. Halting the advancing deserts will require a massive commitment of financial and human resources, one that may force the government to make a hard choice: either build costly proposed south-north water diversion projects or battle the advancing deserts that are marching eastward and could eventually occupy Beijing.
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This Update is adapted from Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, being published September 10, 2003. Chapters 1 and 11 are online now for free downloading.
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