Environmental Law Prof Blog

Living the Good Life in the Anthropocene: Essays from the Environmental Law Collaborative

The Environmental Law Collaborative (ELC) comprises a rotating group of law professors who assemble every other year to think, discuss, and write on an important and intriguing theme in environmental law. The goals of this meeting are both scholarly and practical, as ELC participants seek to use their disparate areas of scholarly expertise to study trends and important events in the law and ultimately to improve the environmental conditions of the world in which we live. 

Participants at the ELC’s most recent meeting in July 2023 were asked to consider what it means to live the good life in the Anthropocene. To frame the conversation, participants first considered the Stockholm Resilience Center’s concept of planetary boundaries. As the Anthropocene progresses, the Center has concluded that the number of planetary boundaries that we are crossing is steadily increasing, from three in 2009, when the Center’s researchers first introduced the concept, to six in 2023.

Planetary boundaries represent a safe operating space for humanity; crossing them, in turn, means that humans are changing basic attributes of planetary systems—such as biodiversity, climate change, freshwater use, and toxic loadings—to the point of risking the future of human civilization.

However, for the first time, in May 2023 in Nature, these researchers assessed not only the safe planetary boundaries but also the just ones. Considerations of equity and justice, the authors concluded, require that we re-think three of the planetary boundaries: nitrogen, which is critical for fertilizing crops but also creates water pollution, harmful algal blooms, and marine dead zones; aerosols; and climate change, which imposes disproportionate impacts on some populations.

The distinction between “safe” and “just” planetary boundaries raises several questions regarding how to conceptualize the “good life” in the Anthropocene. The ELC discussions in July 2023 and the essays that follow played with various conceptions of the “good”—from “enjoyable” to “moral”—as well as the various elements necessary to a good life in the Anthropocene, from choice to respect to requirements like fresh water to amenities like outdoor recreation.

 Authors and titles of the posts:

• Karen Bradshaw, What Makes the Good Life?
• Rebecca Bratspies, Baking in Inclusion
• Michele Okoh, Reflections on Beauty in the Anthropocene
• Danielle Stokes, Governing for the Good Life
• Amber Polk, The Tragedy of Living in the Anthropocene
• Melissa Powers, Consuming Our Way to Clean Energy
• Karrigan Bork & Keith Hirokawa, Reallocating Environmental Risk
• Shannon Roesler, What the Many Meanings of Shelter Share
• Cinnamon Carlarne & Keith Hirokawa, Imagining Climate Havens in a Boiling World
• J.B. Ruhl, Eating Cheetos in the Anthropocene: Governing the Good Life at a “Whole of Consumption” Scale 
• Robin Kundis Craig, Rationalizing Water Consumption in the United States: Hydrogeological Reality vs. The Constitutional Right to Travel  ​
• Sarah Fox, Consumption All the Way Down
• Ruhan Nagra, Green Colonialism
• Kevin Lynch, Breaking Our Consumption Addictions
• Jessica Owley, What Is the Good Life in the Anthropocene?
• Anastasia Teletsetsky, Inequity, Excess Commercialization, and Overconsumption in the Anthropocene: Two Very Modest Regulatory Proposals 
• Bruce Carpenter, Josh Galperin & Francis Hicks, Accessioning Joy

The Environmental Law Collaborative would also like to thank the USC Gould School of Law and the Vanderbilt Law School for their generous support of the July 2023 meeting!

--Robin Craig, Rebecca Bratspies, & J.B. Ruhl

A Couple of Takes on Climate Winners

Recently I have been reading Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, by the journalist McKenzie Funk. It is a fun and illuminating, if somewhat frightening, read. Funk takes to the road—in a trans-planetary sense—to report on the entrepreneurs, engineers, hedge funds, investment banks, corporations, nations and others who are angling to profit from climate change. The prose is accessible and engaging, the perspective deeply informed. The chapters would serve as excellent conversation generators in the classroom.

I mention this not only to share a good read, but also because the concept at the center of Funk’s book is closely related to an interdisciplinary study I am undertaking with the visual artist and landscape photographer Alex Heilner. Alex and I hope to explore the industrialization of the Arctic that will inevitably come with increased access to offshore oil and gas and to onshore mineral and carbon deposits, with the opening up of the Northern Sea Route and the Northwest Passage that makes transport of extracted resources more feasible, with easier cruising for tourist vessels, and with the re-focusing of the world’s attention on the Far North. The process, of course, is already underway. Last summer Alex and I embarked on our maiden voyage, a two-week road trip across North Norway. A selection of Alex’s photos is here. 

I am still working on sorting through my interview notes and observations to craft an intelligent story about what is going on up there, but, in short, what we found was an intriguing instance of interlocal competition on the Arctic frontier. Ports, municipalities and private investors are all looking for opportunities to build facilities that can serve the Arctic oil and gas and maritime shipping industries. Planners and economic development officials are dreaming big. Everyone in North Norway wants to be a climate “winner.” There is some resistance to increased Arctic drilling from the Green Party, but Norway is, as one interviewee told me, a “benevolent petrostate,” and for most people “oil and gas is king.” As a result, North Norway—long a land of cod fishing and reindeer herding and mining for iron ore, and a place absolutely devastated by WWII—is in growth mode. It is a microcosm of the broader changes Funk writes about, making the global phenomenon visible in development pressures and land use changes in a few of the small places at the top of the world. 

- Michael Burger

 

China Environmental Experiences: Table of Contents

Over the last year and a half, I contributed a series of essays about my environmental experiences while living in China as a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at Ocean University of China.  A few readers who had missed installments suggested that I create a single post with a roadmap of links to all nine essays.  That seemed like a good idea, so with apologies to regular readers for the redundancy, here it is (truly the last of the series):

New Series: Environmental Adventures in China.  “This first post provides some context for my series of through-the-looking-glass observations about what it’s like to plunge into China’s modern industrial revolution as an American environmental law professor....”

China Environmental Experiences #2: Rocky Mountain Arsenal.  “But as this blog speaks directly to environmental law professors, the first story is one that clutched at my heart while teaching Natural Resources Law in my first semester here….”

China Environmental Experiences #3: Breathing Air with Heft.  “…It’s easy to cite the mind-boggling statistics of how bad the air quality can get here. It’s hard to describe the actual experience of it. Harder still to endure it.…”

China Environmental Experiences #4: Wifi Without Potable Water.  “This month, I peek beneath one of the more surprising, seemingly contradictory stones in China’s path toward increasing prosperity and world power….” 

China Environmental Experiences # 5: Milk, Pesticides, and Product Safety.  “Friends joked that given how much of what we use in the United States is actually made in China, we probably didn’t have to bring anything—whatever we needed would be here! But after our arrival, we were surprised to discover how mistaken these assumptions were.…” 

CEE #6: Environmental Philosophy and Human Relationships with Nature.  “In these final musings from the field, I reflect on a topic that is admittedly delicate but equally important, and which has been simmering behind many of the substantive environmental issues that I’ve addressed to now: environmental philosophy…."

CEE #7: Environmental Philosophy - Conservation, Stewardship, and Scarcity.  “[Previously], I opened a discussion about how diverging Chinese and American environmental perspectives may be informed by different baselines in our cultural relationships with the natural world. But other differences in underlying environmental philosophy are also important to understand—and as always, some reflect our two nations’ different stages of economic development….”

CEE #8: Environmental Protection as an Act of Cultural Change.   “This essay concludes with parting thoughts about the philosophical roots of some of these differences, the Cultural Revolution and the processes of cultural change, and the significance of all this for environmental protection in China….”

CEE #9: Post Script: Returning from China to the U.S.   “This essay is about the experience of coming back to the United States from China, or perhaps more generally, returning to the developed world from that which is still developing. It mixes deep gratitude for the blessings of the American bounty with queasy culpability over the implications of that bounty for international and intergenerational equity….”

--Erin Ryan

China Environmental Experiences, Post Script: Returning from China to the U.S.

This is a post-script to my 2012 series about my environmental experiences living in China as a visiting American environmental law professor.  (For the full series background, see the introductory post, reflections on China and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, an account of air quality issues in China, an exploration of water quality issues, a review of Chinese food and consumer product safety, differing Chinese and American conceptions of the human relationship to nature, cultural approaches to conservation, stewardship, and scarcity, and parting musings about the philosophical roots of some of these differences and the processes of cultural change.) 

My family and I returned from Qingdao to Portland, Oregon months ago, but the experience remains vivid.  As the Year of the Snake begins, we find ourselves poignantly missing our friends and adopted family members across the Pacific.  Yet as news reports broadcast apocalyptic levels of air pollution in North China this winter, we are also grateful to be home.  This essay is about the experience of coming back to the United States from China, or perhaps more generally, returning to the developed world from that which is still developing.  It mixes deep gratitude for the blessings of the American bounty with queasy culpability over the implications of that bounty for international and intergenerational equity. 

(Note: To contextualize our experience returning to the U.S., I include photographs depicting our contrasting experiences in China.)

The Long Journey Home Begins.  In departing  Qingdao, we flew to Seoul, South Korea, then on to Los Angeles, and finally to Portland.  It was a long trip, but the transitioning away from China began immediately.  Seoul is barely an hour’s flight from Qingdao, but the airport was already worlds away—eerily foreign from that with which we’d become accustomed.  Surfaces were shiny and clean (and strangely well lit), as though everything had just been wiped down.  Airport shops sold unimaginably expensive perfumes, gadgets, and chachkis.  We devoured the best sandwiches we have ever had in our lives from a Quizno’s free-standing cart in the middle of the airport corridor.  We didn’t speak for the entire meal; we just savored the fresh lettuce, tomato, and avocado.

Indeed, when we got home, the first thing we did was ate.  And ate and ate and ate.  Especially fresh fruits and vegetables!  Strawberries.  Raw spinach.  Fresh-squeezed orange juice.  I have had a bowl of grape tomatoes on my kitchen counter every day since we got home, replenished like an open candy bowl.  Pesto, chevre, basil… flavors that have never been so missed.  Whole grains.  Sourdough.  Bread baked in my own oven, after a year in which nobody we knew even had one.  Tollhouse cookies, donuts...  my son has eaten a bagel every morning for months and they have not begun to lose their allure.  We knew that our Chinese friends return from the U.S. with exactly the same desperation for their own food culture, but that didn’t alter the joy of our own reunion.

And I should note that despite this overly indulgent reunion, I was intensely aware of no longer being the fattest person in every room that I occupy. 

On our second or day back, I went grocery shopping with my four-year old son.  I was mentally prepared for how psychologically fraught this might be.  I had often heard tell of the experience from the other side—what it was like for Chinese and other foreigners to walk into an American supermarket for the first time.  I knew it would be overwhelming, with fifteen brands of nearly identical peanut butter and every possible signal of over-consumption.  I believed that knowing this would steel me for the experience, but I was wrong. I walked in with my son and within seconds I felt dizzy and confused.  Everything was so sterilized, and there was just so much of it all.  No animals roaming around or strung up on a rack, but so much light and color and so many brands... So much electronic activity, so much everything. 

I dropped something, and I froze in my tracks like a crashing computer, because I couldn’t figure out whether to pick it up (the correct response in the U.S., to avoid littering) or leave it on the ground (the correct response in China, where things that have touched the ground should not be touched with clean hands).  It was all I could do to lead my baffled son back out the door and collect myself on a nearby bench.

I shut my eyes, centered my breathing, and considered how much we wanted those strawberries.  And then, after just a moment’s recovery, I weirdly just walked back inside and went shopping.  Like I had never left.  In fact, I knew exactly what to do.  I plucked a sani-wipe from the dispenser, cleaned the handle of a shopping cart, plopped my son in the front, and roamed the aisles collecting milk, toilet paper, and just the right brand of peanut butter.  Suddenly, it wasn’t so strange after all. 

Which became its own haunting experience: was all this excess really my personal norm??  So help me, it was.  This was my normal, and normal for everyone else now around me, auto-piloting through this most basic American chore.  But why didn’t they know how abnormal it really was?  Don’t they know what the rest of the world eats and where they find it?  That most people alive today (or at any time in history) could never imagine a place like this?  Why aren’t all these people moving distractedly around me more upset about the imbalance, the gluttony, the unfairness of it all?  Why are they just walking around like there’s nothing weird at all about any of this at all, when EVERYTHING about it is completely bizarre?

Strangers in Our Own Land.  Navigating the rest of our renewed American lives continued along the same strange lines of being simultaneously refreshing and disturbing. 

It was hard to get over how clean the world suddenly seemed.  Like a movie set, because it couldn’t really possibly be that clean.  The streets and houses are clean.  The air is brilliant; sweeter than I had imagined.  Colors seem brighter because the air is clean, without the billowing Chinese particulates that dull the visual edges of everything in sight.  We revel in immersing ourselves in a bathtub once again, and running the clothes dryer is a guilty pleasure.  Our clothes no longer smell like air pollution, inevitable as they hang to dry amidst those plumes of particulates.  But of course, running that American clothes dryer is probably adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in ways that rival particulate pollution.

There is not so much litter here in the U.S., and not so much dust.  We were amazed to discover that our house had less dust on its surfaces after having been left alone for an entire year than we experienced on a daily basis in China.  (No exaggeration: our East China home dusted in the morning was saturated again by evening.  But then again, we all know what dust is mostly made of—dead skin cells.  There are more than a billion people crowded along China’s East Coast; you can do the math.)  Nature in the U.S. is spectacular.  The grass really is greener; the sky improbably blue.  The moon is no rounder in America (as the Chinese sometimes joke it must be), but here you can find the man in it.  And yet we also have to remember not to look directly at the sun, as we so often could in China. 

This was a hard lesson for my son, who had become used to gazing openly upon that smoky, blazing orb in the sky.  But oh, how his eyes lit up to once again play in a public playground—that monument to the carefree, whimsical freedoms of childhood!  We never once found a children’s playground in China (at least one that wasn’t gated into the grounds of an expensive private school).  And in his own preschool yard, the children were required to follow a prescribed order of activities, one at a time, during outdoor play: up the rope ladder, down the red slide, and then back in line, single-file, to wait your turn for another chance. 

My son loved his Chinese teachers, who could not have been more loving or patient with him, and he gradually adjusted to the controlled style of Chinese schooling.  But back in Portland, we enrolled him in a local Montessori preschool, where learning activities were largely self-directed.  At first, the teachers didn’t know what to do with his hesitation to act independently.  “He asks permission to do everything!” one said, openly exasperated, “I’ve never seen anything like it!”  After I explained the up-the-rope-ladder, down-the-red-slide nature of his previous experience, she began to better appreciate the depth of his transition.  And perhaps more about the infinite cultural differences that follow from these deeply contrasting starting points.

Cultural Pride and Cultural Shame.  Public safety and sanitation is different here.  It took a while for us to trust that cars would truly stop for us in crosswalks and were not likely to pull up and park on the sidewalk we were walking along.  I’m happy to no longer scour medical offices for unclean surfaces and unsterilized needles, as I had learned (the hard way) to do in China.  I no longer worry about giving my child medicine when he is sick.  That said, after a year of regularly assuring our Chinese friends that not every American owns an assault rifle, we returned directly to the Clackamas Town Center mall shooting that took place just a few miles from our home, and then the unspeakable tragedy in Newtown.  I have never been more speechless, and so filled with national shame, trying to explain these events to some former Chinese students studying abroad here.

But there are also moments of immense cultural pride.  I cannot boast enough about American tap water, with which we are all hopelessly in love.  Drinking directly from the sink never gets old, and Oregon water is especially heavenly.  My husband’s workmates found him drawing a mug from the bathroom faucet and reminded him that there was a filtered cooler somewhere in the office—and he laughed until he almost cried.  We now understand that there is nothing in the world better than lukewarm, reliably running, municipally treated American tap water.  Nothing!  (And we need to do better to protect this hard-won feature of modern American life against backsliding regulation that would endanger it.)

Still, it has been confusing for me to wash dishes and water plants with this perfectly potable water.  It feels excessively wasteful.  It boggles my mind to see people using it to sprinkler lawns and wash cars.  “No, no,” I think, “are you crazy?  You could drink that!”  But here in the U.S., all water that flows from a municipally-linked faucet is treated to be drinkable—even what gets used at the carwash.  Which is obviously insane, especially in the arid West.  I hope Americans will come to understand how incredibly fortunate we are to have drinkable tap water, before we end up not having it anymore. 

At Home in America.  Our neighborhood is lovely with trees and grass and wildlife, but strange with people.  It’s weird the way we all drive to our individual houses, press the button on a garage door opener, and then drive into our homes without ever even getting out of the car.  If you don’t walk a dog, it’s easy to never see neighbors face to face.  In China, families take purposeful neighborhood walks after dinner, where they see friends and spontaneously mingle with strangers.   Public spaces are alive with community in China, but here, we are much more isolated.  We live close to our neighbors, but with little random interaction.  With Tivo and Pandora, we don’t even partake in the same real-time broadcasts—no longer united in this last vestige of shared experience. 

Americans are so alone, my visiting Chinese students tell me from their disbelieving vantages points.  Public spaces are so empty by comparison.  The country is so empty, with vast unpopulated tracts of land.  “And I am so lonely here,” they almost always say, anxious to return to the thick sense of community they left behind.  One student has his own room for the first time in his life—and he hates it.  There is nobody to talk to.  Nobody to care if you are even there or not.

While adjusting to being back in our own house—and as a reaction to how careful we were about not eating anything that had been in contact with anything that had been in contact with a floor—we became unreasonably nonchalant practitioners of the “five second rule,” to an indefensible extreme at first.  But after eating and breathing for a year in China, we returned with the impression that it didn’t really matter what we put in our bodies anymore.  A little dirt won’t hurt, we tell ourselves; how bad could that floor really be?  (There’s barely even any dust!)  And for that matter, why bother with organic?  Why sweat the preservatives?  After our year abroad, we have been fully absolved of the illusion that our bodies are temples. 

But our house—goodness gracious—is ridiculously, shamefully big.  I was deeply embarrassed when my Chinese students came to visit us in December.  I wanted so much to host them here, while they were alone in a strange land and unable to be with their own families as Americans celebrated unfamiliar holidays.  But at the same time, I cringed at the thought of showing them where I live.  I didn’t want them to think about what it represents, in terms of the differences in our lives that were invisible while I lived in the boxy Chinese apartment in which my own family members nearly killed each other for lack of personal space, and which was about twice the size of the apartments that my students lived in with their families their entire lives.  True enough, their eyes nearly left their heads when they arrived, and I somehow managed to never show them the master bathroom.

That said, I have never loved a material object more than I love my own oversized, coil-spring, pillow-top, all around over-the-top American bed now that I am back in it.  It is soft, and it doesn’t hurt my bones the way every Chinese bed I slept in did while we were gone.  I returned from China with bursitis in my hips because Chinese beds are so hard.  But it isn’t just my American bed that has me in thrall: here there are comfortable chairs, with back support and arm rests.  There is wall-to-wall carpeting, with padding beneath.  On my first day back, I sank into the family couch and realized with astonishment that it had been a full year since I’d been physically comfortable.  Embarrassingly, my body wilted into the cushions like a crying child to her mother.  My fallen arches stopped screaming about the constant concrete floor underfoot. 

Of course, this too is purely a matter of culture.  One of my visiting Chinese students confessed that he had been sleeping on the floor since his arrival in the US because American beds are all too soft.  Everything in the US is so unbearably soft, he complained—even the floors are soft!  “Why are Americans so soft?” he asked innocently, honestly unaware of the gravity of his question.

Freedoms for Granted.  The night before we left Qingdao, I stayed up past midnight with some of my favorite students talking about everything we could fit in before my departure, everything we hadn’t spoken about yet.  Tiananmen.  Terrorism.  When NATO accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Serbia during the Clinton administration.  What our parents tried to teach us about our roles in the world. 

My students told me that the number one message their parents had tried to impart to them was to stay out of trouble: keep your head down, don’t stand out, don’t call attention to yourself.  In the wake of Tiananmen, these were survival instructions.  They described how their parents lovingly prepared them for their world by teaching them to disappear as much as possible into the background.  Then they asked me what my parents taught me while I was growing up.  I answered hesitatingly that my parents had raised me to never be afraid, to believe it was my responsibility to speak out, to stand up for what was right, and to change the world if necessary.  We collectively stared at each other from across this enormous gulf of cultural experience, with both affection and amazement, as the significance penetrated.

In the air between Seoul and Los Angeles, while scribbling purposely vague notes about these conversations, it suddenly occurred to me that I no longer needed to be so vague.  I could write freely.  I didn’t have to be purposely ambiguous about connecting names with events or statements.  I could make full sentences rather than mnemonics.  For the first time in a year, I didn’t have to worry about my notes being found by uninvited visitors to my apartment, as I’d been warned to possibly expect at our orientation in Beijing.  I didn’t have to worry, as I had meticulously done all year, that the details I recorded would bring trouble for my friends.

I had the same experience during my first telephone conversation with my sister (a sibling—so un-Chinese!) on arriving home.  After a year’s worth of careful email and skype communication, always aware that what I had to say could be unintentionally interesting to someone other than my intended audience, I could suddenly speak freely.  My Chinese friends had warned me to assume that my phone calls in China were not private, and I experienced at least one clear instance of intercepted email.  But now, nothing I said could hurt anyone anymore.  I could relax!  But no, I couldn’t relax.  It took a long while for me to shed the feeling of carefulness that must be part of the fabric of communication for many Chinese.

Between Worlds.  So yes, the paradox of our homecoming has been this disjuncture between feeling so at once lost on return and like we never left.  Supermarkets aside, it was remarkably easy to rejoin American culture.  Just as one never forgets how to ride a bicycle, it turns out that I had no trouble at all remembering how to drive a car, even after my year as a passenger (in a culture with unrecognizable traffic rules).  I knew how to use a credit card, seek directions, and chat idly at the checkout line—at just the right level of detail, and for just the right amount of time.  I knew how to watch television, program the remote, read the news, operate a dishwasher, cook in an oven, and do all the other things I had not done for the full year away.  I knew how to operate American culture like an expert.  It was easy to return, seductively comfortable, and mercifully welcoming to one already on the inside. 

Yet reverse culture shock sneaks up on you.  A few weeks after we got back, I fell into what I can only describe as a brief but intense depression.  I had heard that culture shock on return could produce something like this, and I figure that’s what it was, because it seemed untethered to anything else I could point to.  I was delighted to be home in my soft bed and comfortable chair with my candy bowl of grape tomatoes, breathing fresh air and drinking tap water, using my clothes washer and dryer.  Reasonable expectations of privacy, food and drug inspection, pedestrian safety, political freedoms—hallelujah, we were home! 

But these were guilty pleasures, most, because of course life is nicer in the first world.  Back now to that dizzy place.  How to feel about all this?  What about those we left behind?  So strange to have worked so hard to find a way to fit in to this vastly different country—to penetrate the language, politics, and cultural traditions beneath the surface most tourists encounter—and then to just seemingly leave it all behind. 

Then again, I know I’m not really leaving it all behind.  Each of us will remain a bridge between the two cultures in our own ways—me as a teacher and scholar, my husband in his own career, my mother in her study of Chinese poetry, and my son as a child of two worlds now. 

Indeed, in the weeks after we returned, my son spoke Chinese fluently and frequently, confused when his efforts to engage strangers in Mandarin failed.  As time wears on, his moments of Mandarin are fewer and farther between, even though I take him to a Saturday afternoon class for children at the local community college.  As the Year of the Snake began, he proudly adorned the scarlet New Year’s suit that our Chinese friends had given him at Spring Festival last year.  He was so proud to be Chinese again, if only for the day.  The next day, he was happy to be an American again, romping freely around the neighborhood playground.  So yes, he is a clearly a child of two worlds now. 

And in some smaller way, I guess I am too.

 

--Erin Ryan

China Environmental Experiences #8: Environmental Protection as an Act of Cultural Change

This essay, the last in my series about the environmental experiences of an environmental law professor in China, concludes my three-part discussion about how different underlying environmental philosophies held by American and Chinese people can lead to different approaches in environmental governance.  The first part addressed differences in the human relationship to nature, and the second addressed differing approaches to conservation, stewardship, and scarcity.  This essay concludes with parting thoughts about the philosophical roots of some of these differences, the Cultural Revolution and the processes of cultural change, and the significance of all this for environmental protection in China. (For the full series background, see the introductory post, reflections on China and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, an account of air quality issues in China, an exploration of water quality issues, and a review of Chinese food and consumer product safety.) 

I began the previous two essays about environmental philosophy by acknowledging the delicacy of exploring the underlying cultural differences that correspond to some of the environmental experiences I’ve written about in this forum.  I noted how exquisitely careful one must be in discussing cultural differences, given the inherent shortfalls of any individual’s limited perspective and experience.  And before plunging once more into that fraught territory (and with apologies for the repetition), I’ll once more share the important qualification that:

My observations are inevitably, hopelessly entangled with my own cultural vantage point.  My Fulbright year did not make me an expert on the inner world of Chinese culture—nor, frankly, did my earlier Harvard degree in Chinese language, culture, and history.  My observations qualify as neither empirical scholarship nor serious ethnography, based as they are on casual research, personal experiences, anecdotes, and generalizations.  But in hope that they may be useful in illuminating the philosophical roots of some gaps between Chinese and U.S. approaches to environmental governance, I share them here. 

In the prior two essays, I discussed how diverging Chinese and American environmental perspectives may be informed by different baselines in our cultural relationships with the natural world, and expressed through our different approaches to managing conservation, stewardship, and scarcity.  This final piece, the most fraught and likely flawed of the three, considers the relationship between the Chinese approach and the Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian ideals that undergird Chinese culture.  It engages issues of gender roles, environmental protection, and cultural change in both China and the United States (with a shout-out to Vietnam).

But first, a brief note about the cultural baggage that I bring to the project.  Long before this seemed prudent to the average American college student, I majored in Chinese language, culture, and politics as an undergraduate in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  I had started out as a philosophy major but switched departments in order to study Eastern traditions that were not part of the standard Western philosophy curriculum.  I locked myself in the language lab to catch up on my Mandarin so that I could graduate on time, but it was worth it to peer into the incredible story of this unfamiliar nation.  I was riveted by the breadth of Chinese history, the expanse of Chinese philosophical traditions, and the cultural foundations—so contrasting my own—that enabled modern societal movements like the Cultural Revolution and One Child Policy.  I was curious about Confucianism and Buddhism and especially enchanted with the Naturalist School of Taoism, in which I saw an emphasis on harmony between the human and natural worlds that resonated with my own personal sensibilities.  From Taoism originates the philosophy conception of Yin and Yang (literally, “the shadow and the light”), emphasizing the surprising but inevitable ways that seemingly opposing forces are interdependent and interconnected within the world, suspended in an organic embrace of balance.

So I was very excited when the Fulbright program and Chinese Ministry of Education placed me in Shandong province, the historic home not only of Confucius but also to many renowned Taoist temples among the enchanting Laoshan mountains.  I knew that China faced daunting environmental challenges, but in some subconscious way, I hoped that home-grown Taoist principles would provide cultural support for resolving them.  But the Taoism I found in China held little in common with the stylized, “Tao-of-Pooh” version that I studied in college.  The Taoist temples that I visited appeared to emphasize faithful worship of colorful immortals over personal adherence to the Way (or “Tao”) of simple joy and interconnected balance.  On the surface, they seemed very similar to Buddhist temples, which I had expected to differentiate a contrasting path of detachment to avoid suffering within cycles of rebirth. 

Fully recognizing the interpretive limitations of my tourist perspective, I asked the students accompanying me to help me understand the differences between Taoism and Buddhism from their own vantage points, but I found that they were generally unable to articulate much about either tradition—nor were they terribly interested in doing so.  What they did describe was wholly unrelated to my own schooling, focusing on important historical moments rather than underlying ideas.  Granted, I’m sure I would have had a very different experiences talking with the actual Taoist or Buddhist monks in those temples, and I suspect that many echoes of these traditions continue to reverberate through Chinese culture in ways that neither I nor my students fully appreciate.  (I’m also sure that the sterilized versions I learned at Harvard never accurately reflected the full reality of Chinese experience.)  Either way, I discovered that the majority of mainland Chinese don’t pay all that much attention to these ancient traditions these days—many seeing them as quaint at best, and culturally backward at worst. 

I shouldn’t have been surprised, given how strongly (and often violently) ancient Chinese philosophies were discouraged during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.  In that second Chinese revolution, Chairman Mao set out to eradicate the traditional belief systems that he warned were holding the Chinese people back--and also, most likely, to consolidate his own weakening political power.  Women were liberated from centuries of repression and peasants at the bottom of the social order were exalted, but teachers were pilloried, libraries destroyed, and many monks and scholars persecuted to their deaths.  (Horrifying estimates suggest that somewhere between one and twenty million people were killed during the decade-long struggle.)  Four decades later, it was fascinating to see how the Cultural Revolution had succeeded in some of its ideological objectives, especially in eroding the overt roles that Taoism and Buddhism play in the philosophical world of most mainland Chinese.  For what it’s worth, though, the same routing of “old thinking” has also succeeded in fundamentally changing the status of women in society.  While women are hardly co-equal with men in modern China, their position in society has improved immeasurably since 1949, thanks in part to the relentless urging of the early communist party that “women hold up half the sky.” 

This example of purposeful cultural change yields an especially fascinating comparison with Vietnam, a neighboring socialist republic that is also the result of a political revolution, but this one uncoupled from a cultural revolution of the sort that rocked China.  In Vietnam, the rhetoric of the new political order stands on seemingly equal footing with ancient cultural and philosophical traditions.  Nearly every home, hotel, or restaurant that I visited included a little shrine, honoring a mix of immortals, ancestors, and other objects of traditional worship— unselfconsciously adjacent to political propaganda signs honoring heroes of the revolution or touting contemporary political objectives and loyalty.   The richness of traditional Vietnamese culture continues to suffuse people’s everyday lives, in contrast to modern China, where cultural traditions flourish around holidays but seem less entrenched at other times. (Indeed, several Chinese privately lamented to me that the nation had lost its ethical moorings after the decimation of the Cultural Revolution, perhaps explaining the hunger for spiritual entrepreneur movements like Falun Gong—which revives some elements of Buddhism and Taoism—and Christianity.) 

Yet in Vietnam, I also observed the inevitable flip-side of entrenched ancient traditions—a literal expression of the Yin and the Yang—epitomized by the plight of a remarkable woman I met while guest lecturing there, whom I’ll call Linh.  Linh is a twenty-something, overseas-educated, up-and-coming young professional with a plumb job working for the government who nevertheless fretted about her future, especially regarding marriage.  She feared getting married because, according to traditions once universal in China and still prevalent in northern Vietnam, marriage would require her to leave her family home and become a member of her husband’s family household, where she expected ill-treatment from her parents-in-law. 

She had a vivid picture of what that treatment might look like based on the experiences of her own sister-in-law, who lived together with her, her brother, their toddler, and Linh’s parents in her father’s home.  The sister-in-law had been unable to see her own family since the birth of her son, because Linh’s father had forbidden her from taking the child away from the family home for the two hour journey to her village. 
Linh summoned the courage to tell her father that he should be nicer to his daughter-in-law and allow her to see her parents.  After all, she reminded him, one day she would be someone’s daughter-in-law wanting to see him.  But he did not take well to being scolded by his daughter, and nothing changed as a result.  Linh seems resigned that she will someday have to get married, but she does not look forward to that day.

It broke my heart to hear—in 2012!—this age-old story of fear and sorrow from a well-educated professional woman at the pinnacle of Vietnamese society.  Aside from the foreign education and government job, her story is reminiscent of countless Chinese women over the thousands of years that young brides were forced to leave their parents’ households for their husbands’, often to be persecuted by an unhappy mother-in-law once forced to leave her own family.  I recall learning in college that the suicide rate among young Chinese women during this time was estimated to be the highest of any social group anywhere on earth at any time in human history, evidencing the misery that so many endured.  (Sadly, recent studies show that this trend continues in rural China, where traditional family structures remain entrenched.)  Fortunately, that time is long gone in the urbanizing parts of China that I visited, and the situation is much improved in Vietnam as well, given the social and economic power that comes to women like Linh from working outside the home.  So at least some of the “old thinking” extinguished by the Chinese Revolution should not be missed—even if many of the methods can never be condoned. 

Yet not every aspect of traditional Chinese culture was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.  Notwithstanding the dismantling of so many foundations, one critical cornerstone of traditional Chinese culture survived relatively intact: Confucianism.  Founded on the teachings of the ancient philosopher Confucius, the philosophy of Confucianism continues to provide a strong ethic of righteous living and rules of conduct in relationships that redounds throughout Chinese culture.  As a humanist delineator of right and wrong behavior, it focuses on the cultivation of personal virtue, respect for authority, and deference to proper roles within the community.  Among its principles, Confucianism emphasizes the importance of education, reverence for the ancestors, and the critical responsibilities of individuals within clearly articulated social hierarchies. 

Confucian ethics are among the proudest cultural traditions of China, and they form the backbone of many other Asian cultures, from Vietnam to Japan to Korea.  They infuse the flavor and texture of Chinese society, gracing it with respectful behavior, deep regard for the wisdom of elders, and societal support for teachers and education more generally.  It also emphasizes the proper role of individuals given their particular role within the social order.  Children should obey parents, wives should obey husbands, and husbands should obey local leaders, who should, in turn, obey national leaders.  This system of ordered relationships has provided needed social stability during times of great political upheaval, reaching back over thousands of years of territorial conquest and dynastic change that might have otherwise torn Chinese culture apart. 

So even after the Cultural Revolution successfully eradicated the already weakening traditions of Taoism and Buddhism from the Chinese popular consciousness, the Confucian bedrock of Chinese society continues to thrive—probably because the current political system is itself so well-aligned with Confucian principles.  The success of the Chinese Communist Party is inextricably intertwined with broad-based Confucian respect for the wisdom of national leadership, deference to authority, and Confucian-cultivated obedience within an explicit societal hierarchy.  Of course, in reinforcing these strict social hierarchies, Confucianism has also facilitated the long stability of arguably oppressive traditions like the practice of female foot-binding (eradicated by the mid-20th century), and the gender roles that continue to haunt women like Linh throughout Asia.  The Yin and the Yang.

How, then, does all this relate to environmental governance?  Possibly profoundly.  Even as the great tradition of Confucianism exhorts right behavior within the social order (and even setting aside the most contested areas of that social order), I cannot help but wonder about the relationship between Confucian principles and environmental ethics.  As I discussed in the previous essay, I found a less entrenched cultural tradition of environmental stewardship in China than I have seen in equally crowded nations, and I wondered why.  For example, I remarked on the striking way that most Chinese seem to differentiate between the care they take of the environment inside their own homes and the care they take of the environment beyond their front doors:

“Inside the home, Chinese people take immaculate care to maintain cleanliness and beauty.  Shoes are often left at the front door.  Walls and shelves are adorned with enchanting art and objects reflecting the majestic culmination of thousands of years of traditional Chinese culture….  But outside that front door, the duty of care appears to end. Common doors, hallways, and stairwells in Chinese apartment buildings receive little attention from residents; empty walls are often cracked with peeling paint and crumbling cement in seemingly abandoned hallways that open surprisingly into those beautifully maintained dwellings once you cross the inner threshold.  This may reflect other collective action problems relating to commonly-owned property, but it also reflects a widespread sense that what happens beyond the inner threshold is someone else’s responsibility.

“Crossing the outer threshold onto the street reveals an even more dramatic difference… Littering is a human cultural problem throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world, demonstrated by American smokers who continue to discard cigarette butts indiscriminately, long since cultural tolerance for this waned after the 1970s environmental movement.  But in China, cultural permission to discard waste in public places extends beyond water bottles and cigarette butts, complicating the environmentalist message... [discussing the tradition of allowing children to toilet-train on public streets and sidewalks].  With so much Chinese ground thus anointed, the outside environment is generally (and correctly) viewed as a terribly unclean place…. 

“Here’s the thing.  If you see the world outside your own home as a legitimate place to offload waste… how can this not extend to greater environmental management?  If it’s culturally permissible to drop litter (and worse) on the street or the beach, why wouldn’t it be okay to release manufacturing waste into the river, or pipe it into the air?  The potential implications for environmental law are obvious.  Because it’s not just an economic challenge for the government to convince industrialists not to pollute; in some important way, it’s also a cultural challenge.  Professional polluters aren’t just doing it because it’s cheaper than the alternative.  They are doing it because—at some level—it’s what they have always done, and without moral misgivings.”

Indeed, in China, moral misgivings are more likely to come from the violation of Confucian ethics than the violation of relatively new, state-mandated environmental laws.  And herein lies the great challenge for Chinese environmental law. 

Confucianism teaches the maintenance of social order through right behavior within strictly nested social hierarchies.  Chinese culture is permeated with Confucian ethics, which teach people to focus on their own sphere of responsibility and act obediently toward the sphere above them.  These ethics reinforce the power of the very political system now earnestly trying to generate meaningful environmental laws and nurture the “Recycling Economy” that I discussed in the previous essay.  But in teaching people to focus on their own sphere and not beyond, is it possible that these same ethics unwittingly support an underlying environmental tendency to think, perhaps, a little too locally and not enough globally?  Could Confucian ethics unintentionally encourage a duty of care that extends only to the corner of the world under one’s direct control—the inside of one’s home—leaving responsibility for the rest to others?  Could this help explain the comparatively weak tradition of environmental stewardship in China?

It certainly can’t be the only explanation, given the confluence of Confucian ethics and strong environmental stewardship traditions in neighboring Japan, another Asian nation founded on deeply Confucian traditions, coupled with a Shintoist reverence for nature.  Still, I can’t help but wonder whether there is some explanation lurking here to account for the remarkable way that the Chinese duty of care for the environment seems to coincide with Confucian circles of agency, responsibility, and authority.  Americans sport buttons and bumper stickers exalting us to “think globally, act locally.”  But most Chinese people seem to orient both their thinking and acting within the bounds of their most powerful culturally designated sphere of responsibility: the family home.

Confucian ideals remain steadfast in China, but cultural change is imminent—and on the rise, thanks to both top-down and bottom-up sources.  Operating through the Internet from the bottom up, a thriving economy of Chinese social media has dislodged young people from the strictly local sphere as they build communities of interest across the country (although not the world, thanks to the “Great Firewall” that blocks domestic access to social networks abroad).  And as I discussed in the previous essay, the Chinese government is working hard from the top-down—hopefully harnessing citizens’ Confucian respect for leadership—to inseminate a “Recycling Economy” within the new social order.   The Recycling or “Circular Economy” sustainability campaign exhorts citizens to see the relationship between their every-day behaviors and the health of the overall environment beyond their front doors, and to connect the health of the environment to overall human well-being. 

But there is no way around it: the environmental project in China is going to take an act of cultural change.  The Cultural Revolution represents one way of successfully implementing cultural change, but nobody inside or outside China would advocate the tragic human and cultural violence of that method today.  Instead, this is the time for a gentler variety or ideological entrepreneurship—best accomplished through the old-fashioned tools of community-based education and consciousness raising and the new-fangled platforms of mass and online social media.

Facebook and Weibo aside, it’s the same kind of cultural change that made recycling ideals an every-day part of American life.  I still remember when curbside recycling began in my childhood neighborhood and we were asked, for the first time, to rinse cans and bottles before putting them out for street-side collection in big blue bins.  My incensed father simply could not get past the idea that he was being asked to “wash garbage” (and then to pollute his pretty neighborhood with ugly blue bins).  “But it’s not garbage,” my sister and I insisted—“it’s recycling!” And the blue bins weren’t ugly to us, because we found beauty in the good they would do for our environment (similar to the philosophically-driven aesthetic I find in many of today’s modern wind farms).  This is what we had learned in school, though obviously not at home, and our family demonstrates the way that cultural learning can move through the generations backwards as well as forwards.  My father, now in his seventies, today dutifully washes the recycling and my mother maintains separate receptacles for paper, plastic, glass and aluminum, and trash.  This is what cultural change looks like.

Cultural change should come from within, not without, goes the very wise wisdom.  The good news is that the “Recycling Economy” and other efforts to increase public sustainability awareness show that Chinese leaders are taking steps toward environmental progress, and a series of unprecedented public protests over pollution show that the Chinese public is also beginning to engage serious environmental issues.  Just as China takes on issues of conservation and stewardship, so should Americans better grapple with our issues of overconsumption and waste.  Indeed, all human beings must learn to live more sustainably, but the world’s two largest economies bear special responsibility.  All of us must take care not only of our homes, but the hallways, streets, creeks, lakes, rivers, oceans, atmosphere, and biosphere that make up our shared environmental home.  And as we move forward together through separate acts of philosophical growth, economic development, and cultural change—it just might help us to understand a little bit about exactly where each of us is coming from. 

Which, in the end, has been the ultimate purpose of this series of essays.  Now that I am back in the U.S. and reintegrating into the strange traditions of my own culture, I conclude the year-long series with the sincere hope that they have contributed helpfully in some small way to our ongoing cultural dialog, conducted in hundreds of thousands of individual points of contact every day.  Indeed, U.S.-China relations have never been more important than they are right now, for both nations—and because of the collective environmental, economic, and political impacts beyond our own borders, to all the peoples of the world.  Together, with a little patience, humility, humor, and mutual respect, we can all continue building that bridge toward a brighter future, brick by individual brick. 

After all, it was the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu—the founder of Taoism—who intoned around 500 B.C. that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”  What do you think would happen if all 1.8 billion Chinese and Americans took that single step at the same time?

--Erin Ryan

China Environmental Experiences #7: Environmental Philosophy - Conservation, Stewardship, and Scarcity

This essay, the seventh in my series about the environmental experiences of an environmental law professor in China, continues the discussion I began last time about how different underlying environmental philosophies held by American and Chinese people can lead to different approaches in environmental governance.  (For the full background on this series, see February’s introductory post, March’s reflections on China and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, April’s account of air quality issues in China, May’s exploration of water quality issues, and June’s review of safety issues with Chinese food and consumer products.)  The previous essay addressed differences in the human relationship to nature, and this one addresses differing approaches to conservation, stewardship, and scarcity.  The final installation will conclude with thoughts about some ancient philosophical roots of these differences.

I began the previous essay by acknowledging the delicacy of exploring underlying cultural differences that correspond to some the environmental experiences I’ve written about in this series.  I noted how exquisitely careful one must be in discussing cultural differences, given the inherent shortfalls of any individual’s limited perspective and experience.  Yet these differences relate so directly to the challenges of international environmental governance and intercultural understanding generally that I thought it important to discuss them, notwithstanding the hazards.  So I offered the important qualification, which I share here once again, that:

My observations are inevitably, hopelessly entangled with my own cultural vantage point.  My Fulbright year did not make me an expert on the inner world of Chinese culture—nor, frankly, did my earlier Harvard degree in Chinese language, culture, and history.  My observations qualify as neither empirical scholarship nor serious ethnography, based as they are on casual research, personal experiences, anecdotes, and generalizations.  But in hope that they may be useful in illuminating the philosophical roots of some gaps between Chinese and U.S. approaches to environmental governance, I share them here. 

From there, I opened a discussion about how diverging Chinese and American environmental perspectives may be informed by different baselines in our cultural relationships with the natural world.  But other differences in underlying environmental philosophy are also important to understand—and as always, some reflect our two nations’ different stages of economic development. 

Conservation.  Take our shared goal of conserving natural resources.  Both countries are developing policies to discourage the waste of scarce natural resources, and on many fronts—such as its first steps toward nationally pricing carbon—China is outperforming the U.S.  (Then again, China also built a coal-fired power plant a week in recent years, or more.)  But behind good goal-setting, both countries face cultural-philosophical challenges at the level of policymaking and implementation. 

On the example of climate policy, the American challenge has been achieving a consensus for rational policy.  Part of the failure reflects an ideologically divided nation, but other parts reflect more widely shared American ideologies.  For example, American economists have long argued that a national carbon tax would be more economically efficient than the cap-and-trade proposals that have had more political traction (to the extent that any GHG regulation had traction in Congress). 

Yet even when climate policy was a hot topic in Washington, the carbon tax was considered a dead-letter given the popular resistance to taxes that reflects a libertarian streak in the American cultural consciousness.  The (relative) enthusiasm for emissions-trading schemes, wetland mitigation banking, and other market-based environmental reforms reflect widespread cultural regard for free market ideals—even when these ideals are more poetry than reality in operation.  (There hasn’t been enough consensus to have translated those ideals into actionable climate policy, nor are they universally shared in the U.S.—but they were circulating widely when Waxman-Markey passed the House in 2009.  [Photo courtesy of The Chicago Dope blog.])  Yet another cultural-philosophical hurdle for American climate policymaking—and one pointedly not shared in China—is the scientifically unexplainable skepticism with which increasing numbers of Americans seem to regard science itself (or, perhaps, scientists).

In China, where policymaking isn't usually the obstacle, challenges will likely have more to do with ground-level implementation.  In addition to ongoing competition with economic development priorities and the problem of translating centrally formulated mandates into locally implemented policies, there is also the problem of widespread public indifference--and not specifically to climate issues.  In present-day urban China (as was equally true in the U.S. a few decades earlier), you don’t see a lot of conservation-oriented behavior by average citizens—at least not without an immediate economic incentive or legal requirement.  Solar water heaters are popular, but mostly because they are relatively inexpensive (and in some cases, mandatory).  Buses, taxis and other municipal fleets increasingly run on publicly incentivized natural gas.  Public transportation is very well-developed in comparison to American cities, but mostly because people are only just beginning to afford cars (and unprecedented levels of traffic are developing as China’s emerging middle class gets behind their own wheels). 

Yet where the immediate incentives for conservation end, so in general does public compliance—and at least for now, without regard to the kinds of generational or educational dividing-lines that often accompany diverging conservation habits among Americans.  China does have a nascent recycling program for deposit bottles and cans, but it appears nearly entirely staffed by those on the poorest margin, who sort through others’ trash looking for recyclables on which there is a deposit.  Goodness knows we see the same phenomenon in American cities, but in addition to our homeless entrepreneurs, many Americans participate in curbside collection of non-deposit recyclables without sanctions or incentives.  From kindergarten forward, most American children are inculcated with recycling values as a societal good until it becomes part of their social conscience (whether or not they always follow it). 

In China, the government is attempting to do something similar, with an all-out public information campaign to usher China toward the "Circular" or “Recycling Economy”—the Chinese version of “reduce, re-use, and recycle” writ large.  The effort encourages all citizens to see the relationship between their everyday behaviors and environmental well-being, buttressed by a national law that exhorts sustainable practices by local government and the businesses community (though with few enforcement provisions).  In public places, the government frequently places signs reminding people that “environmental protection is everyone’s responsibility” (the accompanying one is from May Fourth Square in downtown Qingdao).  Even the Tsingtao (“Qingdao”) Beer Brewery & Museum includes a full exhibit on sustainability (including a full exposition of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring), notwithstanding its weak connection with the general subject-matter of the museum.

It’s good that Chinese leaders are beginning to take sustainability seriously, because there is much work to be done at the level of consciousness-raising.  Sustainability certainly goes beyond the simple act of recycling, but it is a good index of public attitudes.  And despite valiant attempts at public recycling cans conjoined to trash cans, most Chinese make no effort to differentiate between them, and both are routinely filled to capacity with identical mixes of trash.  There was no recycling program in my neighborhood or at my university, and no paper recycling of any kind (my students were completely baffled by my repeated efforts to find a place to recycle news and copy paper).  And as in the U.S., homes are often over-heated and under-insulated, engines are over-polluting and smokestacks are under-scrubbed, fertilizers and pesticides overused, products over-packaged, etc.  There are many miles before Americans should soundly sleep on these matters either, but on the whole, fewer Chinese consider them a problem. The sustainability movement has not yet taken hold among public attitudes--though it is beginning to with rising consciousness of the direct human health effects of egregiously widespread air and water pollution.

Stewardship.  Of course, it is perfectly understandable that many Chinese are still more pre-occupied with survival than sustainability, and that other development priorities still preclude advanced sustainability initiatives.  A lack of sophisticated curbside recycling should not be surprising in a country still wracked with abject rural poverty, and the government deserves praise for its efforts to promote the Recycling Economy alongside other development initiatives.  But here is where the effects of underlying, environmentally-relevant philosophies add a special challenge to the task of Chinese environmental governance.  It appears that there is a less entrenched cultural tradition of environmental stewardship here as there is in other crowded nations, like Japan or many in Europe.  Indeed, one feature of Chinese culture that often stands out to foreign visitors is the striking way that most Chinese differentiate between the care they take of the environment inside their own homes and the care they take of the environment beyond their front doors.  The contrast is stark, and suggests potentially significant implications for the challenges of environmental governance in general.

Inside the home, Chinese people take immaculate care to maintain cleanliness and beauty.  Shoes are often left at the front door.  Walls and shelves are adorned with enchanting art and objects reflecting the majestic culmination of thousands of years of traditional Chinese culture: calligraphy, porcelain, paper cuttings, shadow puppets, poetry, landscape paintings, and the like.  But outside that front door, the duty of care appears to end. Common doors, hallways, and stairwells in Chinese apartment buildings receive little attention from residents; empty walls are often cracked with peeling paint and crumbling cement in seemingly abandoned hallways that open surprisingly into those beautifully maintained dwellings once you cross the inner threshold.  This may reflect other collective action problems relating to commonly-owned property, but it also reflects a widespread sense that what happens beyond the inner threshold is someone else’s responsibility.

Crossing the outer threshold onto the street reveals an even more dramatic difference.  In many cities, trash can be found everywhere—heaped on the sides of buildings, and littering not only streets but mountain trails and otherwise beautiful beaches.  Problems with consumer-product and water quality that I have previously written about feed into the overall trash problem.  Easily-breakable products and legitimate fears of unclean re-usables compound the prevailing urban culture of disposability, leading to a stream of waste that is often unceremonially piled up around neighborhoods.  A broken toilet and shards of glass have been piled outside our building for months, and it is only one of many such piles. 

Here in Qingdao, our neighborhood market area is hosed down by a street cleaning truck every morning.  I was surprised to hear this, because I would not have guessed this daily cleaning from looking at them in the afternoon—until I saw what they looked like in the morning beforehand: strewn with fish guts, corn husks, banana peels, discarded vegetable parts, used cooking oil, and every other kind of refuse that you can imagine left behind after the daily rush of morning street vendors.  People discard these things on the street, knowing that the city will clean it up—and the city does a faithful job.  But the hose can’t get to everything, and a fair amount of refuse accumulates in gutters and potholes.  And there is no street-cleaner for the narrower village streets, forest parks, or beaches.

Just as in the U.S., some Chinese individuals admirably take it upon themselves to clean up after their fellow citizens.  Even as I am dismayed to see so much trash along the mountain trails behind my neighborhood, I am heartened to see the small signs left by members of private groups who occasionally clear the area of litter.  The China Daily reported movingly over the winter on the efforts of an elderly woman in Beijing who makes it her personal task to comb trash out of Tiananmen Square every day. 

Nevertheless, while some conscientiously pick up their own trash and even that of others, many others routinely drop trash without thinking much about it.  In many places, it’s a culturally permissible thing to do.  We ourselves are trying to re-educate our four year-old to do otherwise after we watched him proudly demonstrate that he had learned at school how to peel his own banana—and then dropped the peel on the ground, as though it had always belonged there.  Perhaps it came naturally to him to just drop it on the ground without thinking about it, because he sees this happening around him so often.  Some leave water bottles and other garbage behind in buses and taxis, too—which is also common in the U.S.  But what I haven’t seen outside China are the taxi drivers who clean up what passengers have left behind by simply scooping the trash out of their car and into the gutter of the street where they are parked.

Littering is a human cultural problem throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world, demonstrated by American smokers who continue to discard cigarette butts indiscriminately, long since cultural tolerance for this waned after the 1970s environmental movement.  But in China, cultural permission to discard waste in public places extends beyond water bottles and cigarette butts, complicating the environmentalist message.  Consider the entrenched Chinese tradition of encouraging children to use public streets while toilet-training.  Chinese toddlers are weaned from diapers early—a great environmental good, given the obvious environmental problems associated with disposable diapers.  In the U.S., for example, where the average baby goes through about 8,000 diapers, parents buy as many as 40 million disposable diapers a day (or more), most of which end up in landfills where they will hold their mummified loads for the next 500 years.  But in China, toddlers wear pants with a split bottom, enabling children to squat to poo or pee wherever they happen to be when the urge hits.  Which leads to different kinds of environmental problems. 

I should be used to it after nearly a year, but I am always still surprised to emerge from our apartment to find a parent helping a squatting child unload beside the front gate.  Small piles of poo on the sidewalk are commonplace, so we walk carefully, eyes cast down.  I’ve seen parents allow their children to relieve themselves into large potted plants at airports.   I once saw a child have an accident in the aisles of a big-box store, and while the child was immediately whisked away to be cleaned, the resulting pile was left behind for others to avoid.  It’s not uncommon to see men urinating along streets and sidewalks, notwithstanding nearby public toilets erected to accommodate neighborhoods without indoor plumbing.  A related tradition engaged in by both men and women is that of spitting on the streets and sidewalks, after expelling the product from deep within troubled-sounding lungs. 

With so much Chinese ground thus anointed, the outside environment is generally (and correctly) viewed as a terribly unclean place.  The American “five-second-rule” is humorously gross in the U.S., but unimaginable in China—because even indoor floors are trod upon by shoes that have walked through countless stages of decomposing goodness-knows-what.  A Chinese student, eyes wide with horror, once asked me whether it was true that American students sit or even recline on campus lawns between classes.  I laughed at the time, but months later would find myself cringing as a group of visiting American students sat to rest on the gracious exterior stairs of a provincial museum, and nothing I could say would dislodge them.  Similarly, Chinese friends would gasp when I instructed my toddler to hold stair handrails, worried about what hands had been there before him, and what those hands might have touched.  Their view—which I ultimately adopted—was that it was better for him to fall down the stairs than to allow whatever was on those railing onto his thumb, which inevitably drifts toward his mouth.  By necessity, Chinese parents wean thumb-suckers incredibly early (and by whatever means necessary).

Here’s the thing.  If you see the world outside your own home as a legitimate place to offload waste—even E. coli-laden human waste—how can this not extend to greater environmental management?  If it’s culturally permissible to drop litter (and worse) on the street or the beach, why wouldn’t it be okay to release manufacturing waste into the river, or pipe it into the air? 
The potential implications for environmental law are obvious.  Because it’s not just an economic challenge for the government to convince industrialists not to pollute; in some important way, it’s also a cultural challenge.  Professional polluters aren’t just doing it because it’s cheaper than the alternative.  They are doing it because—at some level—it’s what they have always done, and without any moral misgivings.

Scarcity.  The legacy of scarcity in an era of rapid economic development also factors in to environmental philosophy.  Indeed, a discussion of scarcity provides an especially poignant point of contrast between Chinese and American approaches that reflect their different stages of economic development. 

Let’s start by acknowledging the obvious: Americans are fortunate to have lived through a period in which most have not endured the scarcity regularly experienced by people in the developing world, and they should do better to remember that.  My family and I are often ashamed by the patterns of conspicuous consumption in the United States, where ever bigger cars, houses, and other forms of cultural bling are marketed to consumers who enjoy far more than their fair share of world resources.  Yet this year, we have also been perplexed by the contrasting patterns of consumption and waste that we have witnessed in China—from the trash piles of used disposables to the missing efforts to maintain buildings against the effects of weather and time.  Especially in a developing country, where resources are comparatively scarce, why not conserve and maintain? Why not fix old things, rather than just tossing them aside for a new ones? 

In puzzling over this question with some environmental faculty at Wuhan University, I learned how a nation’s developing status can also push in the opposite direction.  One spoke of an experience decades earlier, in the pre-PowerPoint era, when he was using an overhead projector with transparencies to accompany his lecture.  Something like a filament in the ancient projector blew, so everyone waited while the university repairman was called in.  Using tweezers and tiny metallic wire, he got it working again.  The man knew how to fix virtually anything—because he had to.  At the time, there was no alternative but to fix things, over and over again.  But now, in this age of emerging wealth, perhaps there is national pride in not having to fix things this way.  For some, he suggested, it is a sign of growing status to be able to toss out the old rather than fix and maintain it indefinitely. 

Similarly, several students once explained to me that their parents absolutely forbid them from licking their fingers when they ate—a good habit that they adhered to even at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken, a popular foreign restaurant chain in China.  At first, I assumed this was a matter of good hygiene, and I regretted the manners my own child displayed (after all, KFC’s American slogan is “finger-lickin’ good!”).  But I later learned the back-story: that these parents had come of age at a time where they sucked every last drop of grease from their fingers because there simply wasn’t enough food, and not a calorie could go to waste.  Now, when their own children licked a tasty finger over a full plate of food, these parents would passionately bat the sticky fingers away from little mouths, proudly reminding them that they would never have to lick their own fingers for nourishment.  They were not to do it, because doing it symbolized a desperation that the nation had triumphed over (at least in these urban areas) through economic development.

The cultural memory of extreme scarcity runs deep in China, and it is reflected in other curious cultural differences between China and the West.  One possible example that often confuses foreign visitors is the way that Chinese tend not to queue.  There is not a strong tradition of waiting in line for goods or services—so, for example, when the bus arrives, the crowd simply surges the door and people gradually push their way through, one by one.  There are something like lines at street food stalls, but rules are relaxed and there is no hard order to them; if someone wants it badly enough, they can just insert themselves close to the counter.  Even at the airport, as people wait to board the plane at the gate, many will queue, but others force their way through to the front as the group moves toward the plane.  My Western sensibilities were often jarred by this behavior, but my Chinese friends mostly tolerated this with either patience or indifference.  (Though I discovered how fully I had crossed over while escorting that delegation of American students through Beijing, frustrated by their halting efforts to politely advance through crowds while I soared through cracks and openings like a native…) 

Why no tradition of lining up?  One Chinese lawyer explained to me that this is just another response to the nation’s long history of extreme scarcity: in a world where there is never enough to go around, people long ago learned to grab for what they need.  This tradition is changing with new cultural developments and as problems of scarcity ease in China, but I have occasionally wondered whether it could lead to intercultural confusion in international affairs, such as negotiations over hotly contested resources in the Arctic or South and East China Seas.  That said, I am very self-consciously making these observation as an indirect beneficiary of the former American tradition of “manifest destiny”—our most spectacular example of not respecting a first-come, first-served ethic of access to natural resources.  So I suppose that both of our cultures—like all of them really—are on an ongoing path of philosophical development…

[To be continued in the final installment, in which I’ll conclude with some thoughts about the relevance of ancient philosophical traditions.]

--Erin Ryan

 

China Environmental Experiences #6: Environmental Philosophy and Human Relationships with Nature

       This is the sixth in my series of reports from the field about the environmental experiences of an environmental law professor in China. (For the full background on this series, see February’s introductory post, March’s reflections on China and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, April’s account of air quality issues in China, May’s exploration of water quality issues, and June’s review of safety issues with Chinese food and consumer products.  This more reflective essay, mostly written on my last day in China, grew so long that I have decided to publish it in several parts, beginning with today’s thoughts about the different relationships that average Americans and Chinese maintain with the natural world. 

      
     In these final musings from the field, I reflect on a topic that is admittedly delicate but equally important, and which has been simmering behind many of the substantive environmental issues that I’ve addressed to now: environmental philosophy.  With the help of so many patient teachers here (most of them my own students), I’ve come to understand some deep cultural differences corresponding to many of the environmental experiences that I’ve been writing about in this series.  At bottom, they reflect important underlying differences in environmental philosophy—differences, at least, between the average Chinese approach and that which underlies much environmental governance in the U.S. (and other like systems, but in drawing fraught comparisons, I’ll stick to what I know best).

       These issues are hard to talk about, because they go to the heart of the cultural differences that one must be exquisitely careful about describing, let alone evaluating.  Every culture has elements that are puzzling, even troubling to those outside it.  (To test this, ask virtually any non-American what they think about our Second Amendment—or for that matter, our First!)  Yet as dangerous as such discussions always threaten to be, I brave it because these cultural differences relate so directly to the challenges of international (and even domestic) environmental law that it seems critical to at least broach the subject. 

       Acknowledging these difficulties, I begin with the humble qualification that my observations are inevitably, hopelessly entangled with my own cultural vantage point.  My Fulbright year did not make me an expert on the inner world of Chinese culture—nor, frankly, did my earlier Harvard degree in Chinese language, culture, and history.  My observations qualify as neither empirical scholarship nor serious ethnography, based as they are on casual research, personal experiences, anecdotes, and generalizations.
      
       But in hope that they may be useful in illuminating the philosophical roots of some gaps between Chinese and U.S. approaches to environmental governance, I share them here.  They contrast environmental perspectives as revealed through our different relationships with nature, conservation and stewardship obligations, and scarcity—concluding with some thoughts about ancient Chinese philosophical traditions.  This first essay addresses the surprisingly different qualities of our respective relationships with nature (conceding with William Cronon that the very concept is something of a cultural construct), and how that might impact our respective visions of environmental law. 

       The average Chinese environmental perspective contrasts with American counterparts in so many ways, and at seemingly every level—whether comparing Chinese undergraduates with American college students, farmers with farmers, bureaucrats with bureaucrats, or grandmothers with grandmothers.  So it’s only natural that we’re not going to see things exactly the same way when it comes to nature itself.  We all like pandas, and we all agree that our children should not be poisoned by toxic chemicals carelessly released into the environment.  But beyond that—what are the contours of our ethical relationships with that environment, and to what extent might it inform natural resource management choices? 
      
       From the modern U.S. perspective, American natural resources laws mostly attempt to balance competing demands for scarce resources, including public land and water resources that are simultaneously valuable for extractive, recreational, aesthetic, and intrinsic reasons.  We came to this idea of balance after the first half of American history, during which our policies erred squarely on the side of extraction and reclamation. But today, this idea is the essence of our Multiple-Use-Sustained-Yield approaches in the National Forest and BLM lands, and it is even reflected in the tension between the occasionally competing mandates to provide for the enjoyment of our National Parks by both present recreationalists and future generations. 
      
       We seek balance, but that balance is constantly contested because Americans divide over when to err on the side of extraction or preservation, whether to proceed from an anthropocentric or biocentric management ethic, and when to prioritize present or future needs.  Today’s debate features environmentalists who favor preservation and lower-impact recreation versus “wise-use” advocates who favor freer extraction and recreation policies.  Yet the same conflicts have played out for at least the last 150 years of U.S. natural resources policy, since the early contests between John Muir, progenitor of the National Park Service’s preservation mandate, and Gifford Pinchot, architect of the U.S. Forest Service’s multiple use mandate. 

       Even so, while today’s John Muirs and Gifford Pinchots may disagree on the precise balance, most find common ground in the belief that we ought to protect at least some natural areas from as much human intervention as possible, in at least some circumstances.  They may come to this shared value for very different reasons, and they will often choose different ways of enjoying that wilderness.  But as a former U.S. Forest Service ranger east of Yosemite National Park, I never once met a Sierra Club hiker, four-wheeling rancher, Audubon Society birder, or Ducks Unlimited hunter who didn’t sing the praises of their respective pilgrimages to the backcountry, where they found communion with their respective ideal visions of the natural world. 

       This regard for (relatively) unmediated nature was the intuition behind the U.S. National Park system, by which we purposefully set aside remarkable natural areas like Yosemite and Yellowstone from further human modification.  Here, American public policy proceeds from a generally shared conviction that the best in nature is somehow at its best when it is left alone.  We admittedly transform nature for countless economic reasons elsewhere, but we value at least some left unchanged (a belief affirmed even more forcefully by the Wilderness Act of 1964).  Flawed though this conviction may be in modern times—when even Arctic ice is contaminated with the chemical residues of industrial development—it runs so deep in American cultural consciousness that our National Parks remain a centerpiece of family recreation, a visual representation of pride in country, and a psychological trope exploited for selling things as ironic as sport utility vehicles. 
      
       To be sure, most Americans are proud of such public works accomplishments as Hoover Dam, the Erie Canal, and interstate highway system.  They form the backbone of national infrastructure that enabled our own economic development to the point where many families can afford that iconic road-trip to visit the National Parks.  But as proud (and utterly dependent) as we are on the national highway system, hopelessly romantic Americans are generally even prouder of those treasures in our National Park System that seem to tell us something about who we are as a nation.  After all, there are roads all over the world!  But there is only one Grand Canyon.

 
      Most modern Chinese see the human relationship with nature very differently, and from the bottom up.  Traditional Chinese landscape paintings (of stunning natural vistas with tiny people in the periphery) seem to pay homage to a natural order in which in which human beings play a proportionately small role.  There may have been a time in Chinese history where that reflected cultural ideals, and there may be parts of rural China where this still feels true.  But today, in both government policy and popular consciousness, the balance appears reversed.  By mechanisms cultural and political, the traditional Chinese reverence for the integrity of natural systems has waned, ironically just as Americans were “finding religion” in nature.  Americans went from an early ethos of ruthlessly bending nature to our will—for example, taming mighty rivers and “reclaiming” the desert through massive dam and irrigation projects—to a modern turnaround in which we are now dismantling the very same dams to return ecological systems to a more natural state.  The Chinese, perhaps, have been on an opposite trajectory.
      
       Just as in the U.S., Chinese natural resources management policy seeks to balance many competing interests, and with perhaps even greater urgency, given the continuing crisis of rural poverty.  After all, the Three Gorges Dam, though environmentally controversial, was designed to bring electricity and flood relief to tens of millions of people, many without other means.  In contrast to U.S. policy, however, the consideration of John Muir-style preservation—whether for anthropocentric or biocentric reasons—ranks low, if at all, on the scales.  In fact, my Chinese Natural Resources Law students were baffled by the very idea of biocentric environmental ethics, in which nature is considered to have value independent of direct human needs.  To be sure, many Americans are equally utilitarian, but they tend to see the biocentric viewpoint as romantic or idealistic, even if wrongheaded.  For my Chinese students, it is simply incomprehensible—as in, hard to even grasp what that could possibly mean.  But even from the vantage point of anthropocentric, utilitarian values—the ideal that nature is valuable because people derive benefit from it—preservation ranks low in the national interest.
      
       Again, part of the reason for this doubtlessly comes from the pressure of managing such an immense population on such a comparatively small chunk of land.  After all, the vast majority of China’s 1.4 billion people live only on the eastern and central part of the nation’s overall land area, which is comparable to, say, the eastern half of the United States.  The Sichuan Basin, comparable in size to the state of Michigan, is home to some 100 million people.  The North China Plain, including the Shandong Peninsula where we have lived this past year, is about the size of Texas but home to more than the entire U.S. population.  This kind of population density understandably changes the calculus in allocating all scarce natural resources, including physical space.  Most Chinese would happily trade wild open space for new housing developments, and usually out of sheer necessity. 
      
       Still, China doesn’t exactly lack open space: the western mountains and deserts that constitute half of China’s territory are home to only 6% of the population.  And though more of China is more densely populated than the U.S., the population density of New York City ranks up there with Beijing, and many native New Yorkers (myself among them) still crave wilderness.  But by and large, most Chinese people don’t.  Even though there is a burgeoning domestic tourist industry to serve China’s burgeoning middle class, ecotourism of the American family-camping and river-rafting variety isn’t really part of it.  Development pressures aside, there’s something different in the human relationship with nature at the cultural level, reflected in recreational preferences as well as management policy. 

       Of course, the average American didn’t always love wilderness—for the first hundred or so years of American history, western settlers cursed the wilderness for threatening their very survival.  New Yorkers like me only developed our taste for wilderness when our safety within well-developed cities had become so secure that civilization itself grew boring and it was the wilderness—an increasingly scarce resource—that seemed novel.  Indigenous Americans have long enjoyed a very different relationship with nature, and later-comers have learned from their example over our last hundred years together.  But Chinese civilization had made its peace with the natural world for thousands of years before American settlers cursed and then longed for their wilderness.  It was just, in some regards, a different kind of peace.

       Chinese culture has long celebrated the natural world in achingly beautiful paintings, poetry, and the placement of simple pagodas from which to contemplate the splendor of the natural world.  But in contrast to modern American ideals, the Chinese have also long celebrated their extraordinary ability to manipulate nature as needed to suit human ends, both functional and aesthetic.  They take great cultural pride in their proven ability to remake the natural world in ways that have offered tangible benefits to their people over the eons.  The term for this pride that I learned while touring the mountains and deserts of the west roughly translates to “Man-Made China.”  In many cases, the Chinese have remade nature to survive and even thrive within the most challenging of natural environments.  As I described in an earlier installment, the native Xinjiangnese did this in creating thousands of kilometers of the Turpan Karez’s underground water channels over thousands of years, each dug by hand to keep mountain streams from evaporating before reaching cropland eeked out of the Takla Makan desert.  The fifty-year North-South Water Project and the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project in the world (with power generating capacity some eleven times that of the Hoover Dam), reflect similar modern-day ambitions.

       Another ancient example is the Dujiangyan Irrigation System west of Chengdu, one of the three great hydraulic engineering projects of ancient China.  More than two thousand years ago, civic engineers there calculated how to seasonally split the Minjiang River just so—in a way that provides both flood relief to the lands annually inundated by spring meltwater on one side and irrigation to the lands on the other side that would then become the breadbasket of China.  Now celebrated as a U.N. World Heritage Site, the project works flawlessly to this day, using “natural topographic and hydrological features to solve problems of diverting water for irrigation, draining sediment, flood control, and flow control without the use of dams,” leaving the channel open for commercially and strategically important navigation.  Americans and others have also learned to alter nature as needed for the purposes of human safety and economic development—but in China, projects like Dujiangyan hold a place of pride in the Chinese heart that roughly corresponds with the place the Grand Canyon occupies in the American psyche.

       Related to national pride in Man-Made China is the strong preference that most Chinese hold for managed nature over pristine wilderness.  You can see it in the stunningly beautiful Chinese gardens of sculpted trees, flower beds, carefully placed rocks (often imported from great distances), usually permeated by a carefully designed creek leading to a pond improbably stocked with huge, crimson koi.  These are the places where people go to enjoy nature, but like (a much better version of) an English Garden, they are enjoyed as a work of human-mediated art.  Just as nature-enthusiasts in the U.S. might go for a day hike to watch birds in the wild, Chinese nature enthusiasts go to a managed garden to “shang hua,” or appreciate the carefully groomed flowers.  Early American colonists and their Europeans forbearers shared a similar regard for pastoral version of nature, cultivated in farms and gardens.  But together with Thoreau and the Transcendentalists, Aldo Leopold and the land ethicists, and even through the crossfire between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, many Americans developed something of a “back to nature” idealism—reflected in our shared love of the National Parks—that most Chinese don’t share.

       In fact, the Chinese preference for heavily mediated nature extends even to their own national parks.  Even in magnificent natural areas that have been protected as parks, natural wonders are improved upon.  I learned this most poignantly while visiting Tian Shan Tianchi, or “Heavenly Lake of the Celestial Mountains”—a high alpine lake nestled among the Tian Shan mountains in northwest China.  I had first learned of the place on my first day teaching Natural Resources Law in Shandong, when I asked my students if there was a Chinese analog to the American Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—a famous but remote wilderness that all would know of but few would ever visit.  They described this place in Xinjiang Province, and I was thrilled to be able to visit it while later lecturing at a university in nearby Urumqi. 

       Like an American National Park, the site was protected from development in a region rich with extractable resources, and you could enter only in an approved guided tour-bus that crept up the mountains alongside the river draining the lake.  But unlike an American National Park, the once wild mountain river had been terraced into a series of flat concrete pools designed to spread the water out and slow it down as it comes down the mountainside.  It was lovely, in that Chinese garden way, though it had nothing to do with the mountain stream hydrology that I had expected to see.  (Though it is exactly what I should have expected, having seen similar things at many other Chinese parks.) 
      
       At the top, the lake itself was stunning—surrounded by snow-covered peaks and passes reminiscent of the Swiss Alps.  That is, except for the crackling speakers—poorly camouflaged as tree stumps and boulders—that lined the paved trail every few feet, piping in music to complete the experience.  And they were not playing a mountain flute, erhu, or some other kind of peaceful traditional Chinese music.  As I live and breathe, what I heard as I summited the Heavenly Lake of the Celestial Mountains was Michael Jackson.  “Bad,” I believe.  Followed by Abba.  (Which also shouldn’t have surprised me too much, as audio-enhancement is fairly common among nature parks here.)

       To enjoy the area in the absence of Abba, I asked the park guide where to find a hiking trail around the lake that I had read about online—but she looked at me blankly.  There is no trail around the lake, she insisted, and she’d been giving tours here for five years.  I would later confirm that the trail really did exist, but she probably didn’t know about it because most Chinese visitors never use it.  It’s just not part of what they want from their encounters with wilderness.  Perhaps reflecting this sentiment is the adjacent photograph of an elaborate, wood-carved sign posted conspicuously along the lakeshore: "Civilization is the Most Beautiful Scenery."  

       Of course, this is a generalization from which there countless exceptions, and I've been the fortunate beneficiary of wisdom and company from many Qingdaonese who have introduced me to remarkable features of the Lao Shan landscape.  But I've been surprised to discover the more general indifference to wilderness experiences again and again while traveling the country.  Most of the time, the only information I can find about local trails comes from foreign tourists and the website instructions they leave behind.  My family once roamed the southwestern-most part of the country bordering Myanmar (Burma) for days, despairing for a simple walk into the surrounding rainforest.  We were repeatedly told by our professional Chinese guides—hired through local contacts by a Chinese student who accompanied us—that what we were asking for was impossible, that there simply were no trails.  But on our last day, we met a young pair of traveling Germans who directed us to an expat coffeehouse run by a Frenchman, who showered us with maps of exquisite routes that it was now too late for us to attempt.
      
       Learning from that mistake, I later used the Internet to research a spectacular trail alongside a
majestic mountain pass in northern Yunnan Province, at around 9,000’ along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River near the border with Tibet.  Although I downloaded a hand-penned map of the trail, our local Chinese guide (seemingly genuinely) knew nothing about it.  I finally found a guesthouse whose operators knew of the nearby trail, though they warned that only sheepherders and Western tourists used it.  They were right, even though the incredible trail lay at the foot of the Snow Dragon Jade Mountain and within the Leaping Tiger Gorge of the Yangtze, some of China’s most heavily domestically-touristed areas.  As long as I live, I will never forget that hike.  But as far as I can tell, most visiting Chinese will never take it.
      
       I once took some environmental law students on a modest hike in a river canyon—the first time in their lives they had ever gone “hiking.”  Managing unsecure footing down a dirt trail turned out to be a challengingly unfamiliar physical skill, and even the word was confusing to translate.  The closest Chinese word would be “pa-shan,” which means to climb a mountain.  But in China, most mountains are climbed on paved trails and stone staircases.  In fact, it’s hard to find a mountain of repute that is not adorned with a stone staircase from base to summit.  When I first arrived in Qingdao, I was delighted to discover that the small mountain behind my neighborhood didn’t have one.  But in an effort to improve public enjoyment, local workers later began hauling concrete slabs up its steep flanks with tiny bulldozers, and by the time I left, it too could be summited in heels and flip-flops.  This saddened a few Western language teachers in the area, but our Chinese neighbors were mostly happy to see the progress.

       As an American in China, it’s been hard to separate myself from my own cultural bias in favor of unmediated wilderness.  I long for earthen trails, and not for piped-in music.  Still, it’s impossible to deny the accomplishment of the ancient parting of the Minjiang River at Dujiangyan, saving countless people from the misery of annual flooding while saving countless others from starvation.  Mountain staircases enable young and old Chinese to climb them in good health, without fear of breaking an ankle or a hip on a rugged trail.  And they often lead to spectacular temples and contemplative pagodas nestled among the hills, a classical and undeniably beautiful feature of traditional Chinese culture.  Nevertheless, I wonder how this cultural difference may bear on environmental public policy choices in a way that may be confusing to westerners unfamiliar with it.  For example, ambitious geo-engineering projects that might give pause to many Americans will seem like nothing more than the logical next step of civil engineering to most Chinese...

[To be continued in the next installment, in which I’ll engage further differences in our approaches to conservation, stewardship, and scarcity.]

--Erin Ryan

 

China Environmental Experiences # 5: Milk, Pesticides, and Product Safety

Today I discuss the curious contrast between China’s role as an international and domestic producer of consumer goods, and some of the implications for average Chinese people.  (This is the fifth in my series of reports from the field about the environmental experiences of an environmental law professor in China—for the full background on this series, see February’s introductory post, March’s reflections on China and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, April’s account of air quality issues in China, and May’s exploration of water quality issues.)

While preparing for our year in China, we wondered what we should bring with us from home.  Friends joked that given how much of what we use in the United States is actually made in China, we probably didn’t have to bring anything—whatever we needed would be here!  But after our arrival, we were surprised to discover how mistaken these assumptions were.  It’s true that China produces a lot of the manufactured goods now sold in the U.S. and throughout the world.  What’s not true is that they are available for purchase in China.  As it turns out, China has two separate manufacturing industries—the factories that produce for export, and those that produce for domestic consumption.  In fact, it’s illegal to sell goods produced for export on the domestic market.  And while Chinese exports are generally of decent quality, that’s not always the case for products sold in domestic Chinese markets.

Before I say more, it’s important to acknowledge the relationship of this problem to China’s stage of economic development, and the mind-boggling progress it has made over a very short period of time.  Just a few decades ago, China was still reeling from the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and the chaos of the Great Leap Forward and famine times preceding it.  Only after the Deng Xiaoping reforms in 1978 did national priorities shift toward full-speed-ahead economic development.  In the thirty years since, the nation’s progress in creating new industry and providing for basic human needs has been astonishing—especially in urban areas, and most markedly in the coastal areas like Shanghai  and Shenzhen, or the northern city of Qingdao, where we live.  But even though there are some 500 million Chinese now using the Internet, some 170 million of them—more than half the population of the U.S.—still live on only a dollar a day.

Of course, such rapid development has been accompanied by the environmental degradation that I’ve written about in previous posts, just as American industrialization did a century ago.  And indeed, when you’re trying to feed 700 million mouths in the underdeveloped countryside, it can be hard to focus on ground-level ozone.  Still, people living close to the margin are especially vulnerable to environmental harms from pollution and climate-related disasters.  Understanding this, the government has increasingly recognized that ongoing development efforts must be better partnered with effective environmental regulation, evidenced by a steady stream of reports about new environmental goals and sustainability initiatives.  As far as I can tell, these are mostly hortatory at the moment, but hey—every environmental movement has to start somewhere, and it’s usually with consciousness-raising.

This is all just to fairly contextualize my observations here that, in addition to better managing pollution, China faces an uphill challenge to better ensure the safety of the products its people come into contact with each day.  Product safety is like any other environmental regulation; both rely on state enforced rules to ensure that people are not harmed by toxins or hazards, especially when the harm is of the sort that most people couldn’t reliably identify on their own.  And at least generally speaking, the safety and quality of domestically marketed Chinese products leaves a lot to desire. 

Americans may recall how this problem reached the export market in 2007, when Chinese toys sold in the U.S. were found to have been produced with lead paint.  Teething children, those most vulnerable to neurotoxins, risked exposure when they inevitably gummed or sucked on these toys. 
As the parent of new baby at the time, I carefully pulled out all of his new toys that had been made in China, just in case.  But now imagine the same kind of problem here in China, in every kind of product line, and with only a fraction of the government regulators available to inspect products for health and safety.  You can’t just pull everything out, just in case.  There will be nothing left.

In China, the most troubling examples relate to food safety.  In recent years, there has been a parade of scandals in which chemical toxins have been found in local meats, vegetables, and other products.  The most tragic was the milk scandal of 2008, in which several Chinese babies died and hundreds of thousands were sickened by milk products purposefully contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical that raises the apparent protein content of watered-down dairy products (and also causes kidney failure).  Responsible parties were fired, jailed, and even executed in punishment—but two years later, it was discovered that 170 tons of contaminated formula that was supposed to be destroyed after the scandal was simply repackaged and resold on the domestic market. 

I know Chinese parents who will only give their child imported milk, even though it is by far the most expensive item in the family budget—in absolute terms, 400-500% more expensive than the average milk sold in the U.S. (and this purchased by families with a fraction of the average U.S. income.)  These frightened parents will carefully scan UHT milk products to make sure that the only Chinese characters appear on stick-on labels—not the original cartons—ensuring that no part of the production process took place here in China.  We were taught to do the same on our arrival, and imported milk soon became the most expensive part of our family budget as well.

Baby formula price differences are even more exaggerated—even one can of imported formula can cost as much as a week’s worth of groceries—which is obviously prohibitive for most Chinese families.  But this week, the China Daily reported that formula produced by one of China’s biggest dairy manufacturers was pulled from shelves after testing positive for elevated mercury levels.  The Yili Industrial Group recalled three series produced between November and May after inspectors discovered high mercury levels, presumed the result of air, water, and soil pollution from coal-fired power plants and industrial and mining projects.  Afterward, the government made an emergency announcement that it had tested 715 samples from all infant milk powders on the market, and none showed abnormal mercury content except Yili’s.  But note the use of the word “abnormal,” rather than illegal: perhaps the most chilling aspect of the story is that China doesn’t actually have an official safety standard for mercury in milk power.

(Writing on July 4th, it’s a good moment for me to pause and reflect on the many things I am grateful for in my own country.  And even with all of its flaws, I’ve never been more grateful for the FDA than I am right now.  Let this be yet another post-it to all my fellow-citizens who have come to take our own regulatory state so for granted that they have forgotten what life would actually look like without it.)

China’s regulatory apparatus is struggling to catch up with the herculean pace of its industrial sector, and the gap between them is exposed by these tragic examples in which local people are hurt by the very products they are racing to produce, ever more quickly and inexpensively.  The United States has been here before as well, and it may just be a necessary part of the process of economic development.  But China is at that stage where its people are beginning to decide that the health and safety of their children is just as important as other aspects of economic development.  The bottom line is that too little of what reaches the Chinese consumer is subject to reliable health and safety inspection based on sensible regulatory standards.  And we know Chinese producers can do better, because they meet all kinds of health and safety standards when making goods for export! 

Because milk is just the tip of this iceberg.  Chinese of means are willing to pay extraordinary amounts for all kinds of foreign products—not just food, but also clothing and electronics.  This puzzled me at first, until I lived here long enough to witness just how often the things I buy at the local market break, tear, or otherwise self-destruct.  From clocks to toothbrushes to ziplock bags—I don’t know how else to say it—the Chinese goods we buy here just here don’t work very well, or very long.  Even as I write, I am sweeping away from my son’s mouth the disintegrating pieces of the nice couch that was relatively new when we moved into our apartment last year (and worrying about what may be in it). 

I’m no economist, but I can’t help but relate this to the high tariffs the Chinese government adds to imports—the source of so much international tension with economic competitors like the U.S.  It’s no wonder the government favors these tariffs: if imports were not made artificially more expensive than they already are, Chinese consumers would prefer them even more strongly to local products.  I had a conversation about this once with a student complaining about how expensive American-made clothing was in China (the tariffs make it much more expensive than it would be at home, even in absolute terms).  I pointed out that from the perspective of his government, this was a way of accelerating the developing economy by harnessing the enormous purchasing power of China’s emerging consumer class.  He responded that, yes, if he were a Chinese official, he would probably do the same thing.  But as a Chinese consumer, all he really wanted were some quality shoes.

Of course, a lot of what I am describing is just the reality of life in a developing country, and I certainly don’t want to whine about that too much.  My purpose in sharing this is not to complain, but to help those from the developed world understand the full scope of the environmental and economic challenges on the other side.  If you were a government official trying to get 150+ million people out of abject poverty, wouldn’t you try to harness the purchasing power of your vast citizenry to do it, free trade notwithstanding?

Regulatory regard for individual health and safety here seems different from the west anyway, reflecting differences both economic and cultural.  In flying back to China after lecturing in Vietnam, I was astounded to be fumigated without warning by an aerosolized pesticide sprayed on me in my seat by the Chinese flight attendant.  I later learned that it was required by Chinese law, doubtlessly to prevent the spread of serious insect-borne diseases.  But my eyes, nose, and throat burned worryingly for the rest of the day, and I wondered how I’d have felt about it had I been pregnant or carrying an infant.  In an earlier post, I wrote about our harrowing experience trying to avoid domestic pesticides whose safety we could not ascertain, and I felt affirmed when it was later reported that the government was taking steps to ban twenty commonly used pesticides for reasons of human toxicity. 

In another example, my husband—the grandson of a lifelong Milwaukie firefighter—was dismayed that our apartment has barred-in windows and no fire escape, for which I chided him as an over-privileged westerner until I saw ordinary people exploding fireworks just feet from neighboring homes and businesses.  The displays are spectacular, but they also cost fingers, lives, and some famously devastating fires.  Similarly costly are the traffic-related mortalities that are unfortunately common here.  Still, most don’t wear helmets on their motorbikes, and seat belts are purposefully dismantled in most cars because people consider them a nuisance.  (In one of our more hilarious cross-cultural moments, we lugged a child car-seat here all the way from the U.S., knowing we’d never find one in China—only to discover it useless because there are no seatbelts to secure it in place!)  Traffic lights to help pedestrians cross the street are rare, and even those that exist are of limited value: “don’t walk” means that you will surely be killed if you cross; “walk” means it is now somewhat less likely that you will be killed.

Yet this is only part of the story.  Notwithstanding the lack of health and safety standards, there are so many other elements of Chinese culture that are much more committed to human health than western cultures—and especially American culture.  Americans may be good at regulating for health and safety, but our lifestyles certainly don’t do much to advance the goal—as documented by our famously expanding waistlines.  Healthful living is a huge and important part of Chinese culture, and among its most admirable.  Chinese people eat dried fruits and nuts instead of cheese doodles.  They rest regularly and sleep well at night.  Chinese medicine emphasizes the maintenance of wellness over the post-hoc treatment of disease. Most of all, healthy exercise is a foundation of everyday life. 

I don’t just mean that Chinese people are in better shape because fewer have cars and must walk where Americans usually drive, although that’s also true.  Here, exercise is a ritual part of daily life—and especially community life—in a way that would be wholly unfamiliar to most Americans.  In the morning, people gather for morning exercise in public parks, courtyards, and parking lots, often doing tai chi.  Seeing a hundred people spontaneously join in perfect, soundless unity this way is truly one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.  After dinner, families take a ritual “digestive” walk around the neighborhood together.  Then begins evening exercise, when people again gather in public areas for a variety of activities.  Children play openly while men play team sports.  Women regularly gather for a Chinese cultural version of line-dancing, in which they collectively perform a repeating, multi-sided sequence to accompanying music.  We were sad to discover very few playgrounds for children—but in perhaps a wiser use of scarce resources, every neighborhood has an exercise parks for adults, with metal equipment to keep people fit and limber, especially as they age.  They are frequently used, especially after work, by young and old alike.

So I end this essay where I began, acknowledging the developmental and cultural differences that make my observations here admittedly fraught.  Nations struggling to feed rural populations have to be more concerned with crop yields than genetically modified organisms, more concerned with child malnutrition than child obesity rates.  Chinese culture protects health in other ways, and it’s understandable that regulatory priorities have focused elsewhere than health and safety to this point—although perhaps the time has come for change.  But where American regulations offer models for China, Chinese culture offers lessons for Americans, in exactly those realms we need them most. 

--Erin Ryan

 

China Environmental Experiences #4: Wifi Without Potable Water

This is the fourth in my series of reports from the field about the environmental experiences of an environmental law professor in China. (For the full background on this series, see February’s introductory post, March’s reflections on China and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, and April’s account of air quality issues in China.) 

This month, I peek beneath one of the more surprising, seemingly contradictory stones in China’s path toward increasing prosperity and world power.  China is the world’s fastest-growing major economy—the second largest economy of all nations, the largest exporter, and the second-largest importer in the world.  It is a nation with 500 million Internet users, 100 million cars, and the world’s largest standing army.  It is the third nation on earth to independently launch a successful manned space mission, with plans to send astronauts to the moon in the coming years.  At least in urban areas, China is a thoroughly modern, explosively developing place—with department stores selling Prada, goofy reality TV, and wifi at the local tea house... but you still can’t drink the water.

Visitors to China are carefully warned that the water is not potable and must be boiled thoroughly before consumption.  Every hotel room has a small water boiler for this purpose, and the more expensive ones provide a nightly bottle of safe drinking water by the bedside.  Water quality problems are traditionally associated with the continuing use of “night soil” (human and animal waste) to fertilize crops—an effective and inexpensive alternative with an inexhaustible supply.  Yet the problem continues even as farmers embrace more modern chemical fertilizers (perhaps too heartily, at the alarming expense of soil health), and as other contaminants enter the water supply.  While visiting the old city of Lijiang in Yunnan Province, for example, I rose for an early morning walk to find cooks cleaning the carcasses of recently killed animals, intestines and all, directly into the Venice-like canals from which others draw their drinking water.

Shortly before our arrival, we were warned by a vaccination nurse familiar with the most dangerous waterborne diseases to only sponge-bathe our 3-year-old, rather than risk his inadvertent exposure to waterborne parasites through his open eyes or mouth in a shower.  Once here, we quickly decided that this level of precaution was unnecessary, at least in urban areas where the municipal water supply receives some level of filtration or disinfection before reaching the tap (especially true in Beijing).  Still, we have learned well the rules of life here in China: drink only boiled or bottled water, no ice that can’t be sourced to boiled or bottled water, no fruits or vegetables that haven’t been cooked or peeled, and brush teeth with tap water at your own risk.  (Some friends do; others, including me, don’t.)  You should also ensure that bottled water is truly factory-sealed, as scandals have occasionally revealed empty bottles refilled with tap water being resold as new.

Without a doubt, adapting to life without potable water was the biggest cultural adjustments for us when we arrived last summer.  The first consequence was minor physical dehydration: without easily accessible clean water to drink, we drank less, and soon found ourselves more easily exhausted, ornery, and sick.  (Indeed, nothing confirms the critical nature of this life-sustaining resource more effectively than losing the taken-for-granted tap.)  Every journey away from our apartment involves water planning, as we take careful stock of how many are traveling, what will be needed, and how best to transport it.  I seem to drink more than my Chinese friends, but I still seem to be always thirsty. 

And there were other puzzling features of our new world.  For example, we struggled to understand at exactly what point our dishes were clean enough to eat off after washing them in tap water.  Were the still damp chopsticks safe to use, or the recently-washed cup still bearing that fine sheen?  And when dealing with my son’s inevitable scraped knees and elbows, was it better to wash with soap and water to disinfect, or was the water itself a source of potential harm?  (For the record, we have decided that dishes must be completely dry to be safe, and that cuts should be washed with soap and water until the dirt is out, but subsequently sterilized with disinfectant whenever possible.)

Chinese culture adapted long ago to the perils of non-potable water.  Chinese people boil all their water before drinking it, but it doesn’t seem like a burden, because they prefer to drink their water hot.  They range from amused to amazed when foreigners request cold water, which to them is as distasteful as drinking plain hot water is those foreigners.  When I invite my students to ask questions of cultural exchange—anything they want to know about American culture, politics, or lifestyle—the most frequent question is always “Why do Americans like to drink cold water? (Yuck!)”  Perhaps as a result, there is no groundswell of popular sentiment to “do something” about the water situation.  From the perspective of most Chinese, there is no problem with the water.  Everything is as it should be.

Yet China is suffering from increasingly serious water pollution problems that can’t just be boiled away.  Chemical pollutants entering the water supply from industry and agriculture are getting worse, involving toxins oblivious to disinfectants.  The World Health Organization has identified 2221 different pollutants in waters worldwide, and 765 of them in drinking water—but current drinking water standards test for only 35 indicators, and new criteria that will go into effect on July 1st will regulate only 106 pollutants.  (Source: Dr. Yu Ming, water pollution researcher at Ocean University of China.)  Chinese lawmakers and the Ministry of the Environment are struggling to cope with these problems through the PRC Law to Prevent and Control Water Pollution, but the even greater hurdle for environmental law is that of implementation. 

Even where China’s environmental laws are comprehensive, their goals are imperiled by under-enforcement.  Illegal discharging is reportedly very common, because there simply aren’t enough agency personnel to monitor them.  And even when violations are discovered, they may or may not be prosecuted by the relevant government agency—depending, perhaps, on the economic importance of the violators, or their political influence.  When the government fails to act, it can be hard for citizens and NGOs to take up the slack, because most Chinese courts don’t recognize standing for public-interest citizen suits.  And even if traditional standing were established by a directly injured party, the court may or may not decide to hear the case (for my money, one of the most surprising features of the Chinese legal system).  For these reasons and others, enforcement is usually seen as the major weakness in China’s environmental law regime.  Perhaps China’s new experimentation with a handful of specialty environmental courts will help redress these important problems.

In the meanwhile, water quality problems intersect with and exacerbate other environmental problems.  For example, one unfortunate consequence of unreliable tap water is the resulting prevalence of disposables: single-use bottled water, disposable plates and bowls, even the single-use toothbrushes that hotels at every level routinely provide.  I spent the last year spearheading a university sustainability initiative that sought personal pledges to avoid bottled water and other disposables as much as possible, so it was particularly jarring for me to adjust to this new norm—where we are happy to eat at a restaurant that provides disposable bowls, plates, and chopsticks, because we know they won’t make us sick that evening.  (And I was happy to note that, at least at our favorite local restaurant, the plasticware is marked as biodegradable.)  By contrast, at restaurants that provide the reusables I normally seek out at home, we nervously try to sterilize them with hot tea before using them, because they have likely been rinsed in the too-thoroughly recycled dirty dishwater that compounds the problems already coming out of the tap.

So, after religiously toting my reusable aluminum bottle to my every American class last year, I now carry plastic bottles of water everywhere.  And though I reuse the small bottles as long as possible rather than discarding them after a single use, they are usually filled with water that I get at home from the water-cooler bottle that many Chinese families use.  On any given day, you can spot a handful of strong men riding motor-scooters with an improbably number of these strapped to the back, exchanging filled ones for empties at private homes and businesses.  I’m happy to report that at least these large bottles are faithfully recycled.  But I’m unhappy to say that smaller plastic bottles litter the streets, parks, mountains, landfills, beaches, and accordingly, rivers and oceans.

Neither is the important relationship between water quality and water quantity lost on China, which has one of the lowest per capita rates of fresh water in the world.  Northern China is arid and especially lacking sufficient water, marked by some of the world’s great deserts, like the Gobi and the Taklimakan.  But it rains plentifully in the south and along much of the coasts.  As a result, China has erected the most massive water-delivery infrastructure in world history to shift enormous quantities from south to north, a project already underway for fifty years and scheduled for completion in another forty.  Linking China’s four main rivers together in a network of diversions, it will eventually move almost 50 billion cubic meters of water annually.  Although the project has already caused its fair share of negative environmental consequences and human displacement, most of the Chinese I have spoken to—even those from regions in which water is taken—are comfortable with the need for extreme inter-basin transfers to support northern population centers like Beijing.  And they are proud of the ingenuity and engineering that underwites this aspect of "man-made China."

Like nearly everything else in China, its history of mind-boggling human interventions with water began thousands of years ago.  I had the opportunity to explore a classic example last week while visiting the Turpan Depression near Urumqi in Xinjiang.  Turpan is the lowest and hottest place in China, at 150 meters below sea level and in the middle of China’s most arid province.  And yet there in the desert was a blooming oasis of vineyards, agriculture, and Uighur community.  How was it possible?  It is because 2,000 years earlier, the people who still live there dug 5,272 kilometers of underground canals with 172,367 vertical well shafts to collect and redistribute the groundwater accumulating from melting snow on the nearby mountains.  At its height, the “Turpan Karez” channeled 858 million cubic meters of water into 1,784 lines to distribute it to all parts of the region.  (You can’t even imagine what this looks like—best to see it, so try this aerial photo and this diagram).  It is a staggering feat of civilization—a celebration of creativity, environmentally sustainable terrascaping, and the human ability to thrive against all odds.

Modern-day Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang, relies on similarly creative water technology.  During my visit, I saw acres of recently planted, spindly young trees in the desert outskirts of the city, lined up like toothpicks piercing the mostly barren earth.  I would often ask my hosts, “How will these trees take root?  With what water?”, and I was always told, “Oh, there is enough water here in Urumqi.”  I knew that the trees had been planted for environmentally sound reasons—to help stabilize the soil, moderate ground temperature, and trap airborne dust—but I still couldn’t understand how they would survive in such arid ground, only occasionally studded with dwarflike sagebrush scrub.  In my broken Chinese, I would persist, “but if there were really enough water to grow trees, wouldn’t there already be trees here?”  And they would quietly insist, “no, no—there will be enough water,” though I could never understand from them why. 

Then on my last day, I visited a popular public park in the middle of the city, where the temperature was ten degrees cooler thanks to the canopy of the many mature trees that ringed its central hill and the banks of the creek flowing around it.  I followed my idle curiosity to the crown of the hill, where I was astonished to find a complex terrascaping system for just this park.  There was a small, swimming-pool like reservoir at the top, supplied by a large pipe snaking up the hill (it wasn’t clear to me from where), and a network of canals extending radially outward down the hill in all directions.  Indeed, the park’s oasis was created in the same manner as the Turpan Karez: decades earlier, the now lush trees had been planted in rings around the hill, and the reservoir fed them a steady supply of water through the canals at their base.  I was awed by the success of the project, and the clear joy it gave the city residents who collected there en masse to enjoy its peace and beauty.  And I suddenly understood what mechanisms were likely helping those new trees take root in the desert surrounding the city.

With such scarcity at hand, China is trying harder and harder to avoid squandering its precious water resources with regulatory efforts targeting both quantity and quality.  Wherever there are flush-toilets, they are almost always low-flush toilets, with separate levers for the two types of waste they will encounter (one of which needs a stronger flush than the other).  Solar-powered water heaters effectively reduce consumption by limiting hot water to what can be stored on the roof at any given time (although the more expensive ones have a gas or electric backup).  Greater efforts are being made to reduce use and recycle water wherever possible.  Hopefully, China will find a way to enact and enforce more effective water pollution laws to avoid further industrial and agricultural degradation of its water resources. 

But for what it’s worth, I’m told there are no great plans on the horizon to achieve potability from the tap, because potability is just not a cultural priority in China.  So the mantra will continue: boiled or bottled, cooked or peeled, rinse at your own risk…

 



--Erin Ryan

China Environmental Experiences #3: Breathing Air with Heft

This is the third in my series of reports from the field about the environmental experiences of an environmental law professor in China. (For the full background on this series, see my introductory post and last month’s reflections on China and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.) It has been a busy month since my last post, during which I’ve had the pleasure of traveling the country widely. Today I actually write from Japan, where I am visiting Nagoya University to discuss the role of the common law public trust doctrine in balancing economic development and environmental protection.

It is a lecture that I have given frequently in both the U.S. and China, and before arriving, I had carefully considered the differences I could expect in sharing the same ideas with a Japanese audience. In the U.S., law students are fascinated by the role of legal institutions in mediating the conflict, especially demonstrated in the Mono Lake litigation around which I build the presentation. In China, students are more interested the factual content of the story—and dumbstruck by the idea that protecting birds, fish, and wilderness could possibly compete with the water needs of a large metropolis. What would I find here in Japan, a nation with relatively thorough pollution controls but comparatively scarce natural resources?

As it turned out, I needed no academic encounter to see where the Shintoist-inflected Japanese approach would differ from China’s. All the evidence I needed—evidence that nearly knocked me off my feet from the moment I first stepped outside—was in the air. The clean, fresh, sweet-smelling, healthy-feeling air. After eight months of breathing in China, the air was so beautiful that I almost cried. There was no haze, no taste, no grit. You could see the world crisply and clearly ahead of you for miles—even better than I could recall from home in the U.S. I realized in that moment how much I had forced myself to forget what this could be like, in order to just get on with daily life in China. But like an elephant, the lungs never forget. So I guess it’s time to confront the great elephant in the room of Chinese environmental issues and talk about the experience of living with China’s notorious air quality problems.

Everyone knows that air pollution is a serious problem in China. The World Health Organization reports that some 700,000 Chinese people die each year from air-pollution related respiratory diseases. Many of the world’s most polluted cities are in China, and we took serious account of this reality in contemplating our Fulbright voyage. In Beijing, particulate pollution levels regularly exceed the scale that the U.S. government normally uses to monitor it (such that air quality problems are quite literally “off the scale”). Shanghai air is a little better, but still far worse than the worst air quality days in the worst air quality years of Los Angeles’ experience. A friend at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing reports the common wisdom there that a bad day in Los Angeles can get as high as 90 on the PM 2.5 particulate pollution scale, while a bad day in Beijing can exceed 400 (and occasionally even tops 500). He says "if it's less than 150, I'm usually happy, because then I can see the sun." (For full comparison's sake, in 2009, the average PM 2.5 particulate pollution level for the entire U.S. was just under 10, and the average in Los Angeles was just under 15.) The State Department actually pays the American embassy staff in Beijing “hardship compensation”—extra pay for enduring hazardous working conditions, just by virtue of breathing there.  [For a good-day/bad day photo comparison, see this follow-up post.]

And foreigners aren’t the only ones concerned. In recent months, the people of Beijing witnessed an important demonstration of their own political power when public unrest ultimately persuaded the Chinese government to change its air quality monitoring norms. For years, China had monitored only airborne particulates measuring at least 10 microns across, even though it is the much smaller particles that can do the most damage—passing through the alveoli in the lungs directly into the blood stream. The U.S. embassy in Beijing monitors particulate matter as small as 2.5 microns (PM 2.5) on an hourly basis, and had been making the data available to the public over the Internet. So the Chinese air quality reports made air quality problems look a lot less serious than the American reports.

But this winter was worse than usual—much worse. The U.S. Embassy data showed sustained levels of seriously hazardous pollution—the kind that could harm any healthy person, not just the especially sensitive young, old, or sick. Air filter sales surged in Beijing, and residents donned surgical masks in (mostly futile) efforts to reduce their inhalation of choking auto exhaust, coal-fired power plant and manufacturing emissions, and dust from the ubiquitous construction projects and nearby Gobi desert. A New York Times report that managed to jump the Great Firewall told of some Party officials who had retrofitted their homes with equipment to cleanse the toxic air, infuriating the 99% who had to breathe it without recourse.

As public agitation mounted, the Chinese government reportedly requested that the U.S. Embassy stop publishing its PM 2.5 monitoring data (likening it to inappropriate meddling in domestic affairs). Beijing residents were enraged by these purported efforts to keep them in the dark about genuine threats to public health. In the Twitter-like microblogs that dominate the Chinese blogosphere, one after another vented their outrage—mothers wanting to keep young children inside when the air was most hazardous, sons wanting to keep aging mothers at home on the days of elevated stroke risk. In a stunning victory for transparency in Chinese governance—and an important signal of how seriously average Chinese people are taking air quality—the government reversed itself and finally began monitoring at the PM 2.5 level.

In fact, I had been graciously offered connections to some of the nation’s leading universities in Beijing when my Fulbright placement was being set. But given Beijing’s air problems (and with memories of my son’s respiratory complications from swine flu still fresh in mind), we pursued a placement in the coastal city of Qingdao instead, as much for the city’s famously clean air as for Ocean University’s vibrant environmental law program. And indeed, when we arrived in August, the wisdom of our choice seemed confirmed. Our introductory week in Beijing—while culturally thrilling—was environmentally chilling. None of my ample armchair research into Beijing’s air quality problems prepared me for the experience of actually breathing air with physical heft. Air with taste and texture. Air that we knew—our bodies as physically as our minds did intellectually—would eventually make us sick. We were elated to finally get to Qingdao, where indeed, the summer air was comparatively pristine. 

But even in Qingdao, everything changed in late November, when the heat went on in northern China. In China, the heat (like most else!) is centrally coordinated. So the heat for the entire northern part of the country goes online around November 15th, bringing to life the countless coal-fired power plants that freckle every city landscape, some large but many quite small. One such sleeper turned out to be directly across from my son’s preschool. Its curiously squat smokestack was coupled with a more slender companion, both raised just above the higher floors of the surrounding residential apartments. They seemed old and apparently unused in the fall, so we had assumed it was an old factory abandoned after residential infill. Once we realized that it was really an eye-level conduit for mercury-laden, throat-choking coal dust, we panicked considered our alternatives. But the truth is that these little generators are everywhere. So many, so little, that installing appropriate scrubbers would require the kind of massive financial commitment currently beyond reach for most developing economies.

It’s easy to cite the mind-boggling statistics of how bad the air quality can get here. It’s hard to describe the actual experience of it. Harder still to endure it. There is a kind of low-level panic that sets in when the air begins to go bad. You hope against hope that this time will not last as long as the last time, and you unconcsciously start to breathe more shallowly. Then you assume a bunker mentality and try to keep the bad air out of your home as much as possible. You close all the windows and become extremely careful about closing the doors as fast as possible when you come and go from the apartment. You have to give up the charade when you leave for work, but eventually it doesn't matter because the bad air eventually finds a way into every room. In large enclosed spaces like airports, the haze can even obstruct your view of the far interior wall. At this point, you just have to submit to the situation and try not to think about what's actually in the air. There is nowhere to go, nothing you can do to avoid it. But you still try not to breathe too deeply.

After the winter heat went on, the blue skies of Qingdao disappeared behind a grainy haze of automobile fumes and coal plant smoke. On the worst days the weather report is simply “smoke,” and breathing is like inhaling in the wake of buffed chalkboard erasers that have been tainted with some kind of chemical. We use packing tape to try and seal the faulty window frames and the gaps around our doors. Surfaces in our home are perpetually coated with once airborne dust and particulates. We are no longer so keen to take walks to the lovely mountain behind the university (which we very often can’t even see, as in the prior photo). We avoid strenuous exercise—even running to catch the bus—because deep breathing hurts. On days when we can only hazily see the building fifteen meters from our own (and the others beyond disappear fully into the smoke, as in the photo below), we try to not even leave the apartment.

In the early days of winter, the stress of adjusting to the air pollution was oppressive. We felt sick most of the time, and were always anxious. Eventually, we adapted to the circumstances and we were once again able to find joy and fascination in our new world. But even now, we finish most days by lying down in bed to cough the day's residue out of our lungs. And on many mornings, I wrestle with the decision to send my son to preschool, which requires both him and my mother to troop a half-mile up a steep hill directly toward the belching power plant.

In fact, when the EPA announced the new mercury rule that it finally promulgated in late 2011 after twenty years of trying, I metaphorically jumped for joy and then literally wept with grief when it forced me to connect the primary source of U.S. mercury—coal-fired power plant emissions—with our own experience here. I thought of all the environmental risks to which we are subjecting my little boy, who turned four here this winter. So ironic, after all our fastidious caretaking in his first three years (organic milk, physician-approved sunscreen, no cigarette or pesticide exposure, etc.)! What was the point, when we are now subjecting him to more hazard than he may experience for the rest of his life? Almost every day in January, I questioned whether I did the right thing bringing him here. About every other day, I was pretty sure that I didn’t.

Then again, we take the objectives of our cultural diplomacy here very seriously. Raising a child here has enabled us to access a depth of Chinese culture that most visitors never come close to understanding. We understand China in a way we never could have imagined before now, and we have shared our American ideals just as profoundly. At the moment, my son is a living bridge between our cultures, in a way that fills our neighborhood with joy and hope for the future of our nations’ friendship. So I tell myself that the air pollution is really very temporary for us, and that we will come home in just a few more months. (And then I wrestle with the guilt of knowing that all the people I’ve come to love here will not have the same luxury.)

Seriously folks—I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—every American bellyaching about the costs of environmental regulation in the United States really needs to spend a year living in China. Especially from this vantage point, the proposition that Americans no longer need so much environmental law because our environment is so clean (thanks, of course, to environmental law…) makes me want to break something. I try to muster some empathy for those making this argument, because they obviously have no perspective on what the lack of meaningful environmental regulation would actually mean for their daily lives. Which is why they should come to China for a while—preferably with their small children and aging parents. (Then we’ll see how much they miss the EPA!)

Here in Qingdao, without the benefit of enforced environmental regulations, we have learned simply to pray for cold weather. The northerly winds from Siberia blow the smoke out to sea and provide a day or two of respite, so bitter cold is our new favorite forecast. In fact, Qingdao’s famously clean air is probably a result of this standard winter weather pattern—but the weather patterns here shifted this year, as they have been doing all over the globe. Whether for reasons of climate change or unknown factors, the winds that once regularly purged Qingdao’s smog barely blew this winter, and air quality plummeted accordingly. In just the first three months, bad air quality days already exceeded the previous year’s by 400%. Qingdao residents have complained bitterly about the problem, even prompting some new local regulations. But as one of my students wryly observed, “would they rather their homes have no heat?”

In fact, northern Chinese winters get very cold, and most of our Chinese friends easily prefer the heat with all of its downsides. But we should also give credit where it is due for the many ways that Chinese people avoid making the problem even worse—by not living the way that most Americans do. For example, the roofs of all Chinese buildings are barnacled with rows and rows of solar water heaters, avoiding the need for yet more coal-fired electricity. The taxi fleets all run exclusively on natural gas, and city public transportation is exceptional—cheap, easy to use, and everywhere. Almost nobody here has an electric clothes dryer, among the most notorious energy hogs in the American household. Some fear this may change for the environmentally worse as 1.4 billion Chinese get richer and more interested in exotic appliances—but Japan has a fully developed economy, and line-drying remains the norm there as well. Finally, China appears to have made a serious national commitment to reducing greenhouse gas production in its Twelfth Five Year Plan, now beginning implementation in the seven largest metropolitan areas. (Perhaps in the meanwhile, they can work on small coal-plant scrubbers.)

Anyway, we are now counting down the days until the heat finally goes off on April 15th. What seemed unendurable in the first few months eventually became routine, such that the days we once barricaded ourselves inside are now days that I will (if reluctantly) take my son outside to play. We say things like, “the air is bad today, but at least the chalk dust doesn’t have too much chemical in it.” For better or worse, we have adjusted to our new environment—fully appreciating that it is still better than most Chinese enjoy. After November 15th, I alternated between horrified, angry, and desperate that I had submerged my family in the very sort of environment that I had pledged my professional career to avoid. I still have all of these feelings at times, but the desperation has mostly given way to determination. What environmentalists do is important. (Indeed, even the Tsingtao Beer Museum includes a display about environmental protection efforts tracing to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.) What environmental scientists and lawyers do is important. What environmental law professors do is important. Keep doing it, everyone.

--Erin Ryan

China Environmental Experiences #2: Rocky Mountain Arsenal

As I explained in a previous post, this year I am blogging about my environmental experiences in China, where I am spending the year as a Fulbright Scholar at Ocean University in Qingdao. In this series, I’ll describe what it’s like to live in a rapidly developing society without effective environmental regulation of air, water, and product safety—but also those environmental realms in which the Chinese surpass American efforts, including public transportation, overall consumption levels, and the national commitment to encouraging cultural change toward a “recycling economy” (while Americans argue about teaching climate science in schools). (For the full background on this series, see my introductory post.)

But as this blog speaks directly to environmental law professors, the first story is one that clutched at my heart while teaching Natural Resources Law in my first semester here. Teaching environmental law and policy here is, as you would imagine, endlessly enlightening. Environmental decision-making in the U.S. proceeds from very different underlying assumptions than those most prevalent in China. So it was fascinating to begin class the way I usually do, probing the conflicting assumptions about the goals of natural resources management that make the enterprise so challenging in any context.

As many of you probably do as well, I especially like to raise these issues through the Rocky Mountain Arsenal discussion problem posed by environmental historian Bill Cronon (in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature) and nicely excerpted in the Rasband, Salzman, and Squillace NRL textbook. (Attached photo by Oborseth, with Creative Commons license.) This compound outside of Denver was left so toxic after decades of manufacturing mustard gas, napalm, and other chemical weapons that it was completely sealed off from human contact for years after its closure in 1992—a respite from human intervention during which it evolved into the nation’s “most ironic” wildlife refuge. Wildlife driven out of the developing Colorado front-country was finally able to establish undisturbed habitat in the arsenal, notwithstanding its toxic soils and contaminated waters. If the frogs had five legs, at least those frogs had wetlands to live in.

After sharing the story with my Chinese students, we debated the questions posed by Cronon and the textbook authors—how would you best manage these lands in accordance with nature? Would you initiate the massive disruption required to decontaminate the very earth underfoot, even though it would likely displace (and kill) a lot of wildlife? Or should you leave the five-legged frogs alone to live out their happy if shunted lives, peacefully unaware of the toxic soup in which they live? This began a lively conversation with the class that continued pleasantly and provocatively for months.

But over those same months, several of these students also became involved in my family’s experience of navigating the environmental challenges of our new life in China.

A few were there on the day that we arrived in Qingdao, helping us move into our new apartment. There were huge flakes of paint peeling from every wall, window, and doorway, collecting in piles on the floor no matter how often swept, beckoning my three-year-old like so many giant, lightly-sweetened corn-flakes. My very first question to the student in charge, an environmental law major with impeccable English, was whether I should worry about lead in the paint. “Why?” he asked. But even translating the problem into Chinese (and noting the established problem of lead paint in some Chinese toys) didn’t quite convey my concern. He assured me that children all over China grow up without incident in identical apartments with the same kind of paint, whatever it was. (Between this and the fact that the bathroom drain piped dirty water directly into the kitchen tap, we did not last there long.)

Several students traveled with me on congested area highways on days when I was overcome with the fumes of auto-emissions to which they were so accustomed that they didn’t even notice. Many times, on days thick with foul-smelling cloudy air, they assured me that Qingdao is a coastal city, and that this was just fog. Having lived in coastal cities most of my life, I am quite familiar with the difference between fog and smog. Fog is wet, I would say, and it doesn’t sting your eyes or your throat. “You feel this in your eyes?” they would ask, incredulously. I would later discuss EPA’s new Mercury Rule with a group over lunch, touching on its significance for coal-fired power plants. None had ever heard of the relationship between coal-fired plants and mercury, even though we could see three belching furiously into the air just from where we were sitting. Chinese coal doesn’t have any mercury, one assured me.

Others were on hand when our (second) apartment became infested with insects that ravaged us at night until my son looked like a smallpox patient for all his sores. The bites were so intense that bitten fingers would swell and go numb for hours at a time, preventing us from sleeping at all. After two weeks, we were so obviously exhausted and haggard that even my students were anxiously trying to help resolve the problem. And the solution was so obvious to them: just douse the apartment with successive rounds of pesticides as hard and thoroughly as possible until whatever was preying on us was gone. They contacted the building manager to explore options for beginning the process immediately, and secured a promise to do so. The solution was so simple that they were astonished by our polite but strident refusal to allow it.

Although we were desperate to be rid of the pests, we were even more concerned about the potential poisons used to eradicate them. Indeed, one of the hazards of being an environmental law professor is knowing a little too much about the hazards environmental laws are designed to prevent—such as the neurological consequences of organophosphate exposure. We had already puzzled everyone by declining to use the standard pesticide aerators that most Chinese use to kill mosquitoes, opting for minor suffering over the unknown consequences of an inhaled pesticide that we couldn’t research in English. We knew about some very dangerous Chinese chalk pesticides that are especially harmful to children, but we couldn’t evaluate the safety of those being offered to us now. After my son experienced some unusual neurological symptoms as an infant, we had avoided even American pesticides regulated for consumer safety, and this just didn’t seem like the time to shed precautions. But how to explain this to our kind hosts, for whom pesticides are a regular, widespread, and unquestioned part of life?

I finally just had to acknowledge that our behavior probably seemed completely unreasonable to most Chinese people, who would easily opt to fumigate and forget. I said a little bit about my son’s special medical history and explained that we were probably even more cautious than the average Americans. But I also noted the concerns raised by public health advocates around the world about the negative consequences of introduced chemicals in the environment, especially on young children. I explained the care that many American parents increasingly take in limiting the early exposure of their children to potentially dangerous substances in pesticides, cleaning products, and even plastic baby bottles.

In the end, with a little creativity and help from our friends, we were able to find some non-toxic solutions to our pest problem. But a few days later, one of my favorite students came up to me before class to say that he had continued to ponder the pesticide situation—and the eye-stinging air, and the peeling paint. This was the same student who had assured me not to worry about lead paint in the first apartment, and one of the many who regularly assured me that the cloudy air was coastal fog. “I cannot stop thinking this,” he said. And then in hushed but earnest tones: “China is the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, isn’t it?”

My jaw slowly dropped as I tried and failed to form words. He looked at me steadily, with an intense but quiet pain behind his eyes. I hated the comparison between China and a toxic dump. I especially hated it from this brilliant student, so proud of his country’s accomplishments and protective of the many ways that it differs from mine. But he persisted: “Not perfect comparison, I know, but really, the same basic situation, right? Environment is fouled, and we are like those frogs. We don’t even know it, do we? That we live in a toxic world?”

Still speechless, I nodded gently, to acknowledge the part of the comparison that tragically held some truth. Then I mumbled something semi-coherent about the same problem happening worldwide, and I politely turned away to ready my notes for class (but mostly so that he would not see me brush away the wetness from the corners of my eyes).

The pain behind his broke my heart. He was right, of course (and to some extent, his observation holds true for all of us). But in that moment, the last thing I wanted was for my teaching to make him feel ashamed of his country, or betrayed by his government, or panicked about the future—or, really, anything other than just a little more educated than he had been the day before.

But he is that much more educated, and this I did come to do. I am here to teach American environmental law, and in so doing, I find myself surprisingly torn. In sharing with my students some of the ways that I see the world, I necessarily force them to see theirs a bit differently, and it is not always for the best. To be sure, our educational exchange works in both directions, and that student reminded me that all of us are living in the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in varying degrees. But the Chinese students with whom I spend the most time no longer believe that the cloudy air is fog, and I am sad for them that they will now worry for their children in a way that their neighbors won’t. They will worry about mercury poisoning and lung cancer, and worse—they will feel powerless to change it, at least for now. Without genuine levers of participation in governance, there really is some bliss to be had in ignorance.

Their lost environmental innocence is cause for grief, especially when it brings pain without obvious remedy. As midwife for this loss, I share in that grief. But I also cherish the hope that it will one day be a reason for celebration, when—thanks to their generation’s rising consciousness—the air no longer stings. If nothing else, I hope that my students will have that much more fire in their bellies, as their bellies are increasingly well-fed, to protect the next generation more effectively. And on that front, knowing even this small sample of Chinese young people fills me with confidence.

--Erin Ryan

Two Great E.L. Opportunities in China: Visiting Professorships and (Free!) Graduate Degrees at Ocean University



As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I’m teaching at Ocean University of China this year as a Fulbright Scholar. Ocean University is one of the nation’s key comprehensive universities with a special expertise in marine sciences and coastal zone management. It also has a strong School of Law and Political Science--and unlike most Chinese universities, a serious environmental law program. It is also in one of the most beautiful cities in China--the ocean resort town of Qingdao, girded by the tallest coastal mountains in all of China.  In short, an excellent place to spend some quality time!

I’m writing this additional post to share news of two great opportunities there for environmental law students and faculty from beyond China: (1) the chance to learn about Chinese environmental law from the inside through a funded master's degree in environmental law, and (2) the opportunity to do the same by teaching a short course as a Visiting Professor. I hope that you will encourage potentially interested students to consider the degree program, and I seriously urge each of you to consider visiting Ocean University yourselves. Here's the 411:

1. Fully Funded Graduate Degrees in Environmental Law: As part of its mission to internationalize the program, Ocean University has received a national grant to host a series of international students for (free!!) graduate education in Environmental and Natural Resources Law. It’s an amazing opportunity for students interested in international/Asian environmental law—basically, a fully-funded 2- or 3-year graduate degree. The grant covers tuition, housing, insurance, living expenses, and domestic travel expenses, so the only cost to applicants is international airfare.

The program was recently established, but the application deadline is March 31. So far, there are still some openings, but applicants should act fast. You can find the official description with more information on how to apply here (scroll down for the English translation).

2. Call for Applications for Visiting Environmental Law Professors: The School of Law and Political Science is also inviting applications for visiting professors in the field of Environmental Law for Fall 2012. Visitors will teach one 2-credit course (30-32 credit hours) and offer at least one open lecture in their field of expertise during at least one month spent on campus. The university will cover the costs of international transportation and health insurance, provide a free apartment on campus, assistance with the visa process, and a monthly stipend of 4000 RMB (@ $700 U.S.) to cover in-country living expenses.

You can find more information about the program and specific application instructions here. Selections for the fall semester will be made before the end of May.

Finally, as yet another reminder of the tragic loss of our dear friend Svitlana Kravchenko this month, there is a new opening available during the Spring 2012 semester (which begins next week and extends through July).  New applications are welcome.

--Erin Ryan

ABA's 41st Annual Conference on Environmental Law

The ABA Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources (SEER) will host its 41st Annual Conference on Environmental Law this March 22-24 in Salt Lake City.  If you have not been before, this is one of, if not the, premier environmental law conferences in the nation.  (If the weather turns right, there could also be really great skiing.)  The conference used to be known as the "Keystone Conference."

As usual, there is a fantastic line-up.  Just a few samples include:

• Environmental Protection on the Chopping Block? How Environmental Law and Enforcement Will Respond to Funding Cuts and Other Restrictions


• Hydraulic Fracturing on Trial: Possibilities, Pollution, and Preemption


• Federal Air Regulation of the Energy Sector: What to Expect for Oil, Natural Gas, and Coal


• Time and Scale: Emerging Challenges to NEPA and the ESA Getting Real About “Growing Communities”—How New Laws and Regulations Are Changing the Game of Urban Expansion

Of particular note, this year's conference has a number of opportunities for students, including panels designed to help acclimate students to emerging issues in the field and scholarships for students to attend (deadline: February 14, 2012).

To register, go to the conference website.

-Lincoln Davies

Into the Wild

Every summer, it seems, I am reminded of something I always think I will never forget.

For the past several years, I have made a point every summer of visiting a national park.  Living in Utah, which is blessed with five of these most beautiful and amazing places, this is a relatively easy task.

Last year, I spent several days with my sons hiking and camping in what has become one of my favorite parks:  Capitol Reef.  Not only does Capitol Reef sport some of the most breathtaking canyons I have ever seen, but it is, at least from my perspective, a relatively less used park.  Sometimes solitude is nice.  In Capitol Reef, I have found myself on many hikes, for hours, with no one but those in my party.  Add to this the chance to see ancient rock art, find desert creatures like snakes and lizards, and partake of a searing summer heat, and I can think of few places that make a nicer getaway for a few days from the city.  (It also doesn't hurt that the nearby town of Torrey also features some amazing food.) 

  This past week, I camped with my sons as part of my wife's family reunion in Yellowstone.  It has been almost two decades since I was there last, in a frigid winter to snowmobile.  Two things immediately overtook me as we drove in through West Yellowstone in a misting rain turning to dusk.  I was reminded of just how gorgeous the place is; there is a reason why it was the first national park.  And I realized how each of these parks has their own personality, their own story to tell.  Capitol Reef and Yellowstone could not be much more different, but I love them both.

Toward the end of the trip, as I looked into the brilliant turquoise and coral pools at Mammoth Hot Springs, I contemplated this.  I recalled Prof. Daniels' comment from earlier this year about why he got into environmental law in the first place, and how each of us has our own back-story about why we did too.  For me, I realized, much of it is bound up in my childhood, and part of that was a trip I took when I was about the age of one of my sons to this same park.  I recall standing face to face with a bison; I remember hiking into the aspen with my father; I see clearly in my mind the awe I felt then, that I feel now.

Each of us decided to study environmental law, to teach it, for a reason.  Each summer, it seems, I am reminded of why I did -- and I am glad I take the time to pause and reflect.

As we drove out of the park, having just hiked Geyser Hill near Old Faithful, we came into a valley.  We were on our way out, and on its way in was a lone gray wolf, undisturbed, traversing the greens, following the Gibbon River to the trees.

Once again, I was reminded.  I was so glad I was.

-Lincoln Davies

 

 

Swine Flu spreads worldwide -- at least 32 nations have suspected cases, 11 nations have 257 (+ at least 13 not yet reported) confirmed cases with 8 confirmed deaths

Swine Flu World Map

Thursday, April 30th regular AM Update

WHO Update 6 added the Netherlands to the list of countries, with one confirmed case.  The cases from Costa Rica and Peru have not yet been reported to WHO.  The additional New Zealand cases have not yet been reported to WHO.  WHO's Canadian count has jumped from 13 to 19.  WHO's UK count has increased from 5 to 8.  The total count of confirmed cases reported to WHO is now 257.

Thursday, April 30th early AM Update

There's so much to take in that the PM update has become an early AM update.

WHO has not published another update on international reported, confirmed cases. Based on news reports, confirmed cases include  Austria (1), Canada (13), Germany (3), Israel (2), New Zealand (14), Spain (10), the United Kingdom (5), Costa Rica (2) and Peru(1).  In both New Zealand and Spain, there are large numbers of suspected cases that have not yet been confirmed. 

Wednesday, April 29th AM Update

WHO has announced reported confirmed cases in 9 nations; a total of 148 reported confirmed cases; in addition to US and Mexico, confirmed cases include  Austria (1), Canada (13), Germany (3), Israel (2), New Zealand (3), Spain (4) and the United Kingdom (5). The US has reported 91 confirmed cases and 1 death, currently providing a case/fatality ratio of just over 1%.  Mexico has reported 26 confirmed cases and seven deaths.   That would be a case/fatality ratio over 25%, however, the vast bulk of Mexican cases and deaths have not yet been reported and confirmed.  Assuming the number of suspected cases (2517 with 159 suspected deaths) turn out to be accurately identified, this provides a case/fatality ratio of 6+%.  That is about 3 times as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed 20- 40 million people.  Fortunately, we have large quantities of anti-viral drugs and have been planning for this event for several years now, so deaths should be extremely limited.

Tuesday April 28th update (PM):

According to AP, the confirmed Canadian cases now number 13, rather than six. AP report Both Spain and Israel now have 2 confirmed cases according to WHO, with WHO reporting 2 confirmed New Zealand cases and 2 confirmed UK cases, rather than the 3 NZ cases previously reported..

Denmark, Columbia, Czech Republic, Australia, and Russia have joined the list of countries with suspected cases.

Tuesday April 28th update (AM):

Israel and New Zealand have confirmed cases.  Switzerland added to suspected case list .Washington Post link  The Washington Post has a nice map, but it only tracks North American cases. WP map  The New York Times has a global map showing both confirmed and suspected cases.  NYT graphic  However, both of the maps are lagging behind -- the NYT didn't pick up the 3 confirmed New Zealand cases or the suspected cases in the EU.

Monday April 27th Update

New Zealand news link

There have been six lab-confirmed cases of mild swine flu in Canada and one in Spain, which became the first country in Europe to confirm a case after a man who returned from a trip to Mexico last week was found to have the virus. Spain has 26 suspected cases under observation and a New Zealand teacher and a dozen students who recently travelled to Mexico are being treated as likely mild cases  Countries including Australia, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Israel, Guatemala, Costa Rica and South Korea are all testing suspected cases of the flu. In the first confirmed cases in Britain, Scotland's health minister says two people tested positive for swine flu.

The Scottish cases bring the number of nations with confirmed cases to five and the number of nations with suspected cases to 14.

Swine Flu with Pandemic Potential Hits US and Mexico: Previous Study indicated that the only way to delay spread of an epidemic is to contain the local epidemics and to prevent international travel

WHO warned today that it may be too late to prevent the spread of the swine flu that has been reported in three places in Mexico as well as California and Texas.  WHO Swine Flu Home page WHO Swine flu fact sheet  Mexico is currently conducting health screening of international air travelers.  However, that precaution, according to the Caley study published on this blog two years ago with respect to the pandemic flu threat, will be ineffective at even delaying the spread of the flu. 

The most recent news from WHO on the Stage 3 pandemic alert is WHO link.

Experts at WHO and elsewhere believe that the world is now closer to another influenza pandemic than at any time since 1968, when the last of the previous century's three pandemics occurred. WHO uses a series of six phases of pandemic alert as a system for informing the world of the seriousness of the threat and of the need to launch progressively more intense preparedness activities.  The designation of phases, including decisions on when to move from one phase to another, is made by the Director-General of WHO.  Each phase of alert coincides with a series of recommended activities to be undertaken by WHO, the international community, governments, and industry. Changes from one phase to another are triggered by several factors, which include the epidemiological behaviour of the disease and the characteristics of circulating viruses.  The world is presently in phase 3: a new influenza virus subtype is causing disease in humans, but is not yet spreading efficiently and sustainably among humans.

WHO reported this after today's Emergency Committee meeting:  

In response to cases of swine influenza A(H1N1), reported in Mexico and the United States of America, the Director-General convened a meeting of the Emergency Committee to assess the situation and advise her on appropriate responses. The establishment of the Committee, which is composed of international experts in a variety of disciplines, is in compliance with the International Health Regulations (2005). The first meeting of the Emergency Committee was held on Saturday 25 April 2009.  After reviewing available data on the current situation, Committee members identified a number of gaps in knowledge about the clinical features, epidemiology, and virology of reported cases and the appropriate responses. The Committee advised that answers to several specific questions were needed to facilitate its work. The Committee nevertheless agreed that the current situation constitutes a public health emergency of international concern.  Based on this advice, the Director-General has determined that the current events constitute a public health emergency of international concern, under the Regulations.

Concerning public health measures, in line with the Regulations the Director-General is recommending, on the advice of the Committee, that all countries intensify surveillance for unusual outbreaks of influenza-like illness and severe pneumonia.  The Committee further agreed that more information is needed before a decision could be made concerning the appropriateness of the current phase 3.

WHO currently considers this phase 3 of a pandemic. You might want to read the Global Influenza Preparedness Plan to see what happens in phase 3 and look at phase 4 and 5, which is probably where we are heading.  WHO Global Influenza Plan

From my research, the only effective measure is to contain the local epidemic and prevent international travel, especally air travel.  The occurrence of the same flu in California and Texas suggests that the Mexico flu has already escaped to the US.  Now, internal travel restrictions  within the western US and Mexico as well as international travel probably need to be implemented.  To quote the conclusion of the Caley study:

The delay until an epidemic of pandemic strain influenza is imported into an at-risk country is largely determined by the course of the epidemic in the source region and the number of travelers attempting to enter the at-risk country, and is little affected by non-pharmaceutical interventions targeting these travelers. Short of preventing international travel altogether, eradicating a nascent pandemic in the source region appears to be the only reliable method of preventing country-to-country spread of a pandemic strain of influenza.

The US and Mexico have not even advised people not to travel to Mexico, California, and Texas, much less prevented travel:

CDC has NOT recommended that people avoid travel to Mexico at this time. If you are planning travel to Mexico, follow these recommendations to reduce your risk of infection and help you stay healthy. CDC travel recommendations

In my judgment, it is irresponsible to travel into or out of these areas at this time.  I also believe the governments need to respond more strongly to what is obviously a virulent strain of communicable flu.  But, if they're doing what they are supposed to in phase 3, I admit they are probably busy.

WHO press release yesterday:

24 April 2009 -- The United States Government has reported seven confirmed human cases of Swine Influenza A/H1N1 in the USA (five in California and two in Texas) and nine suspect cases. All seven confirmed cases had mild Influenza-Like Illness (ILI), with only one requiring brief hospitalization. No deaths have been reported. The Government of Mexico has reported three separate events. In the Federal District of Mexico, surveillance began picking up cases of ILI starting 18 March. The number of cases has risen steadily through April and as of 23 April there are now more than 854 cases of pneumonia from the capital. Of those, 59 have died. In San Luis Potosi, in central Mexico, 24 cases of ILI, with three deaths, have been reported. And from Mexicali, near the border with the United States, four cases of ILI, with no deaths, have been reported.Of the Mexican cases, 18 have been laboratory confirmed in Canada as Swine Influenza A/H1N1, while 12 of those are genetically identical to the Swine Influenza A/H1N1 viruses from California.The majority of these cases have occurred in otherwise healthy young adults. Influenza normally affects the very young and the very old, but these age groups have not been heavily affected in Mexico. Because there are human cases associated with an animal influenza virus, and because of the geographical spread of multiple community outbreaks, plus the somewhat unusual age groups affected, these events are of high concern. The Swine Influenza A/H1N1 viruses characterized in this outbreak have not been previously detected in pigs or humans. The viruses so far characterized have been sensitive to oseltamivir, but resistant to both amantadine and rimantadine.

The World Health Organization has been in constant contact with the health authorities in the United States, Mexico and Canada in order to better understand the risk which these ILI events pose. WHO (and PAHO) is sending missions of experts to Mexico to work with health authorities there. It is helping its Member States to increase field epidemiology activities, laboratory diagnosis and clinical management. Moreover, WHO's partners in the Global Alert and Response Network have been alerted and are ready to assist as requested by the Member States.  WHO acknowledges the United States and Mexico for their proactive reporting and their collaboration with WHO and will continue to work with Member States to further characterize the outbreak.

CDC Information: CDC link - Human Swine Influenza Investigation

April 25, 2009 1:00 p.m. ET

Human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) virus infection have been identified in the U.S. in San Diego County and Imperial County, California as well as in San Antonio, Texas. Internationally, human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) virus infection have been identified in Mexico.

U.S. Human Cases of Swine Flu Infection
State	# of laboratory confirmed cases
California	6 cases
Texas	2 cases
International Human Cases of Swine Flu Infection See: World Health Organization
As of April 25th, 2009 11:00 a.m. ET

Investigations are ongoing to determine the source of the infection and whether additional people have been infected with similar swine influenza viruses.

CDC is working very closely with state and local officials in California, Texas, as well as with health officials in Mexico, Canada and the World Health Organization. On April 24th, CDC deployed 7 epidemiologists to San Diego County, California and Imperial County, California and 1 senior medical officer to Texas to provide guidance and technical support for the ongoing epidemiologic field investigations. CDC has also deployed to Mexico 1 medical officer and 1 senior expert who are part of a global team that is responding to the outbreak of respiratory illnesses in Mexico.

Influenza is thought to spread mainly person-to-person through coughing or sneezing of infected people. There are many things you can to do preventing getting and spreading influenza:

There are everyday actions people can take to stay healthy.

• Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.
• Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hands cleaners are also effective.
• Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs spread that way.

Try to avoid close contact with sick people.

• Influenza is thought to spread mainly person-to-person through coughing or sneezing of infected people.
• If you get sick, CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.

Topics on this page:

• General Information
• Summary Guidance
• Guidance Documents
• Travel Notices
• Transcripts
• Reports & Publications
• Related Links
• Past Updates

General Information

Swine Flu and You
What is swine flu? Are there human infections with swine flu in the U.S.? …

Swine Flu Video Podcast
Dr. Joe Bresee, with the CDC Influenza Division, describes swine flu - its signs and symptoms, how it's transmitted, medicines to treat it, steps people can take to protect themselves from it, and what people should do if they become ill.

Key Facts about Swine Influenza (Swine Flu)
How does swine flu spread? Can people catch swine flu from eating pork? …

Swine Influenza in Pigs and People
Brochure

Information in Spanish
Datos importantes sobre la influenza porcina…

Summary Guidance

CDC has provided the following interim guidance for this investigation.

• Residents of California and Texas
• Clinicians
• State Public Health Laboratories
• Public Health/Animal Health

Residents of California and Texas

CDC has identified human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) virus infection in people in these areas. CDC is working with local and state health agencies to investigate these cases. We have determined that this virus is contagious and is spreading from human to human. However, at this time, we have not determined how easily the virus spreads between people. As with any infectious disease, we are recommending precautionary measures for people residing in these areas.

• Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.
• Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hands cleaners are also effective.
• Try to avoid close contact with sick people.
• If you get sick, CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.
• Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs spread that way.

There is no vaccine available at this time, so it is important for people living in these areas to take steps to prevent spreading the virus to others. If people are ill, they should attempt to stay at home and limit contact with others. Healthy residents living in these areas should take everyday preventive actions.

People who live in these areas who develop an illness with fever and respiratory symptoms, such as cough and runny nose, and possibly other symptoms, such as body aches, nausea, or vomiting or diarrhea, should contact their health care provider. Their health care provider will determine whether influenza testing is needed.

Clinicians

Clinicians should consider the possibility of swine influenza virus infections in patients presenting with febrile respiratory illness who:

1. Live in San Diego County or Imperial County, California or San Antonio, Texas or
2. Have traveled to San Diego and/or Imperial County, California or San Antonio, Texas or
3. Have been in contact with ill persons from these areas in the 7 days prior to their illness onset.

If swine flu is suspected, clinicians should obtain a respiratory swab for swine influenza testing and place it in a refrigerator (not a freezer). Once collected, the clinician should contact their state or local health department to facilitate transport and timely diagnosis at a state public health laboratory.

State Public Health Laboratories

Laboratories should send all unsubtypable influenza A specimens as soon as possible to the Viral Surveillance and Diagnostic Branch of the CDC’s Influenza Division for further diagnostic testing.

Public Health /Animal Health Officials

Officials should conduct thorough case and contact investigations to determine the source of the swine influenza virus, extent of community illness and the need for timely control measures.

Guidance Documents

Swine Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Biosafety Guidelines for Laboratory Workers Apr 24, 2009
This guidance is for laboratory workers who may be processing or performing diagnostic testing on clinical specimens from patients with suspected swine influenza A (H1N1) virus infection, or performing viral isolation.

Interim Guidance for Infection Control for Care of Patients with Confirmed or Suspected Swine Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infection in a Healthcare Setting Apr 24, 2009

Interim Guidance on Case Definitions for Swine Influenza A (H1N1) Human Case Investigations Apr 24, 2009
This document provides interim guidance for state and local health departments conducting investigations of human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) virus.  The following case definitions are for the purpose of investigations of suspected, probable, and confirmed cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) virus infection.

Travel Notices

Outbreak Notice: Swine Influenza in the United States
April 25, 2009 12 p.m. ET

Travel Health Precaution: Swine Influenza and Severe Cases of Respiratory Illness in Mexico
April 25, 2009 12 p.m. ET

Transcripts

Unedited Transcript of CDC Briefing on Public Health Investigation of Human Cases of Swine Influenza
April 24, 2009 2:30 p.m. ET

CDC Briefing on Public Health Investigation of Human Cases of Swine Influenza
April 23, 2009 press briefing…

Reports & Publications

Update: Swine Influenza A (H1N1) Infections --- California and Texas, April 2009
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) April 24, 2009 / Vol. 58 / Dispatch;1-3

Swine Influenza A (H1N1) Infection in Two Children – Southern California, March—April 2009
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) April 21, 2009 / Vol. 58 / Dispatch

Related Links

WHO - Influenza-Like Illness in the United States and Mexico

Past Updates

• April 24, 2009
• April 23, 2009

Caley study:

Bird Flu Blues: Source Country Suppression is the Only Viable Means to Prevent the International Transmission of Pandemic Strains

Peter Caley , Niels Becker, and David Philp of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia have modelled the impacts of various pandemic preparedness efforts on the timing of international spread of pandemic strains.  The bottom line is that "[s]hort of preventing international travel altogether, eradicating a nascent pandemic in the source region appears to be the only reliable method of preventing country-to-country spread of a pandemic strain of influenza."PLoSOne link The entire article is available courtesy of a Creative Commons license:

Background

The time delay between the start of an influenza pandemic and its subsequent initiation in other countries is highly relevant to preparedness planning. We quantify the distribution of this random time in terms of the separate components of this delay, and assess how the delay may be extended by non-pharmaceutical interventions.

Methods and Findings

The model constructed for this time delay accounts for: (i) epidemic growth in the source region, (ii) the delay until an infected individual from the source region seeks to travel to an at-risk country, (iii) the chance that infected travelers are detected by screening at exit and entry borders, (iv) the possibility of in-flight transmission, (v) the chance that an infected arrival might not initiate an epidemic, and (vi) the delay until infection in the at-risk country gathers momentum. Efforts that reduce the disease reproduction number in the source region below two and severe travel restrictions are most effective for delaying a local epidemic, and under favourable circumstances, could add several months to the delay. On the other hand, the model predicts that border screening for symptomatic infection, wearing a protective mask during travel, promoting early presentation of cases arising among arriving passengers and moderate reduction in travel volumes increase the delay only by a matter of days or weeks. Elevated in-flight transmission reduces the delay only minimally.

Conclusions

The delay until an epidemic of pandemic strain influenza is imported into an at-risk country is largely determined by the course of the epidemic in the source region and the number of travelers attempting to enter the at-risk country, and is little affected by non-pharmaceutical interventions targeting these travelers. Short of preventing international travel altogether, eradicating a nascent pandemic in the source region appears to be the only reliable method of preventing country-to-country spread of a pandemic strain of influenza.

Funding: Funding by Australian National Health & Medical Research Council grants (358425, 410224), an Australia Research Council grant (DP0558357) and the Australian Department of Health and Ageing is gratefully acknowledged.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Academic Editor: John Ioannidis,   University of Ioannina School of Medicine, Greece

Citation: Caley P, Becker NG, Philp DJ (2007) The Waiting Time for Inter-Country Spread of Pandemic Influenza. PLoS ONE 2(1): e143. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000143

Received: August 18, 2006; Accepted: December 9, 2006; Published: January 3, 2007

Copyright: © 2007 Caley et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected]             

Introduction

The emergence of a pandemic strain of influenza is considered inevitable [1]. Provided the emerged strain is not too virulent, it may be possible to eliminate a nascent influenza pandemic in the source region via various combinations of targeted antiviral prophylaxis, pre-vaccination, social distancing and quarantine [2], [3]. If early elimination in the source region is not achieved, then any delay in a local epidemic that a country can effect will be highly valued. To this end, countries may consider introducing non-pharmaceutical interventions such as border screening, promoting early presentation of cases among arriving passengers, requiring the use of personal protective equipment during travels (e.g. the wearing of masks), and reducing traveler numbers. While the case for believing that measures such as these can not stop the importation of an epidemic from overseas has been argued strongly, whether it be SARS or influenza [4]–[6], the extent to which such interventions delay a local epidemic is currently not well quantified, and hence of considerable interest.

In this paper we demonstrate how the delay to importation of an epidemic of pandemic strain influenza may be quantified in terms of the growing infection incidence in the source region, traveler volumes, border screening measures, travel duration, in-flight transmission and the delay until an infected arrival initiates a chain of transmission that gathers momentum. We also investigate how the delay is affected by the reproduction number of the emerged strain, early presentation of cases among arriving passengers, and reducing traveler numbers. As noted in previous simulation modeling [7], many aspects of this delay have a significant chance component, making the delay a random variable. Therefore, the way to quantify the delay is to specify its probability distribution, which we call the delay-distribution.

Some issues of the delay distribution, such as the natural delay arising in the absence of intervention and the effect that reducing traveler numbers has on this delay has been studied previously [6]–[8]. Specifically, if the originating source is not specified, and homogeneous mixing of the worlds population is assumed, then the most likely time to the initial cases arising in the United States is about 50 days assuming R             ₀ = 2.0 [7]. The additional delay arising from travel restrictions appears minimal until a>99% reduction in traveler numbers [6]–[8].

This paper adds to previous work [5]–[8] by simultaneously including a wider range of epidemiological factors and possible interventions, such as elevated in-flight transmission, flight duration, the effect of wearing of mask during flight, early presentation of cases among travelers, and quarantining all passengers from a flight with a detected case at arrival.

Methods

General

Consider a region in which a new pandemic strain of influenza has emerged, and a region currently free from the infection. We refer to these as the source region and the at-risk country, respectively. Travel between these countries is predominantly via commercial air travel and/or rapid transport which could potentially be subject to border screening and other interventions. We restrict our discussion to air travel. The aim is to assess the effects that a variety of non-pharmaceutical border control measures have, individually and in combination, on the time it takes before the epidemic takes off in the at-risk country. An epidemic is said to have “taken off” when it reaches 20 current infectious cases, after which its growth is highly predictable (i.e. nearly deterministic) and the probability of fade-out by chance is very low, if intervention is not enhanced. The source country of origin will undoubtedly have a large impact on the natural delay until importation of an epidemic, although this is difficult to quantify [7]. An alternative is to fix the originating city, for example a highly connected city such as Hong Kong [6], with the obvious effect that results are highly dependent on the choice. We adopt no specific source region, but assume that the number of international travelers originating from it is reasonably small (see Methods), suggestive of a rural or semi-rural source region [2]. It is further assumed that the current heightened surveillance for pandemic influenza is continued and that a nascent pandemic with human-to-human transmission is identified and the pandemic is declared when there are 10 concurrent cases in the source region.

For an epidemic to take off in an at-risk country, a series of events need to occur. First, the epidemic needs to get underway in the source region. Second, an intending traveler needs to be infected shortly before departure. Third, the infected traveler must actually travel and successfully disembark in the at-risk country. Fourth, the infected traveler, or fellow travelers infected during the flight, must initiate an epidemic in the at-risk country with the infectiousness that remains upon arrival. Finally, the epidemic needs to reach a sufficient number of cases to begin predictable exponential growth.

Infected travelers

International spread of the emerged pandemic strain of influenza may occur when a recently infected person travels. By ‘recently infected’ we mean that their travel is scheduled to occur within ten days of being infected. We assume that the number of individuals traveling from the source region to the at-risk country each day is known. The probability that a randomly selected traveler is a recently-infected person is taken to be equal to the prevalence of recently-infected people in the source region on that day. The incidence of infection in the source region is assumed to grow exponentially initially, with the rate of exponential growth determined by the disease reproduction number (the mean number of cases a single infective generates by direct contact) and the serial interval (the average interval from infection of one individual to when their contacts are infected) (Figure 1A).

Figure 1.  

The process through which a pandemic is imported. (A) The prevalence in the source region, which determines the probability that a randomly selected traveler is infected at scheduled departure. (B)–(D) Density functions of the time since infection during the early stages of the epidemic in the source region for infected travelers (B) before and (C) after departure screening, and (D) after arrival screening for clinical symptoms. In (B), the step illustrates the probabilistic removal of travelers who have completed their incubation period. In (D), the distribution of time since infection in (C) will have shifted to the right by an amount equal to the flight duration, and cases incubated in-flight may be detected by symptomatic screening, as will those symptomatic cases that were not detected previously. Screening sensitivity for this illustration is 60% on both departure and arrival. (E) Upon entering the community undetected, an infected traveler may initiate a minor (inconsequential) or major epidemic, depending on the characteristics of the disease and public health policy.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000143.g001

The time since infection of a recently-infected traveler is a key component of the calculations, because it affects the chance of positive border screening, the chance of in-flight transmission and the infectivity remaining upon arrival in the at-risk country. The time since infection at the time of scheduled departure is random and the dependence of its probability distribution on the exponential growth rate of infection is illustrated by Figure 1B (see also Supporting Information). The higher the epidemic growth rate in the source region, the greater the probability than an infected traveler will have been infected more recently.

Traveler screening at departure

It is assumed that individuals detected by departure screening are prevented from traveling. To be detected by screening an infected traveler must be symptomatic and positively screened. An individual is assumed to become symptomatic 48 hours after being infected (cf. [3] who use 1.9 days). The probability of being symptomatic when presenting for departure screening is computed from the curve in Figure 1B. The distribution of the time since infection immediately after departure screening, given that the infected traveler was not detected, is given by the curve in Figure 1C. It contains an adjustment for the probability of being detected at departure.

In-flight transmission

The instantaneous rate at which susceptible contacts are infected depends on the time since infection, and is described by an infectiousness function ([9], page 45). We use a peaked infectiousness function, motivated by viral shedding and household transmission data [2], which has a serial interval of 2.6 days. The basic reproduction number (R                ₀), namely the reproduction number when there is no intervention in place and every contacted individual is susceptible, is given by the area under the infectiousness function. However, our concern is with the effective reproduction number R that holds when various interventions are in place. We obtain any R by simply multiplying the infectiousness function by the appropriate constant (to make the area under the curve equal to R). This keeps the serial interval the same. In the absence of suitable data we assume for most scenarios that the aircrafts ventilation and filtration systems are functioning properly, and that infected travelers transmit the infection at the same rate during a flight as they would while mixing in the community. We examine the sensitivity of this assumption by increasing the in-flight transmission by as much as 10-fold (as could potentially happen if air-circulation and filtration systems malfunction, e.g. see [10]). The in-flight transmission rate is set to zero under the optimistic scenario that all travelers wear 100% effective masks during transit. In terms of a sensitivity analysis this illustrates what would be achievable in a best-case scenario. The number of offspring that an infected traveler infects during a flight is a random variable, taken to have a Poisson distribution with a mean equal to the area under the infectiousness function over to the flight duration.

Traveler screening at arrival

Travelers infected during flights of less than 12 hours duration are asymptomatic at arrival and will not be detected by screening. The probability that an arriving traveler who was infected in the source region is detected on arrival is computed from the distribution of the time since infection on arrival. This distribution is obtained from the curve in Figure 1C by shifting it to the right by an amount equal to the duration of the flight. The distribution of the time since infection for an individual infected in the source region, who passes through arrival screening undetected has a further adjustment for the chance of being detected at arrival (Figure 1D). This curve shows that an infected traveler who escapes detection at departure and arrival is highly likely to enter the at-risk country with most, or all, of their infectious period remaining.

Authorities are assumed to implement one of two control options when detecting an infected traveler by arrival screening. Under option one (individual-based removal), all passengers who test negative are released immediately and only passengers who test positive are isolated. Under the second option (flight-based quarantining), authorities prevent all passengers from dispersing into the community until the last person has been screened from that flight. Should any one passenger be detected as infected then all passengers will be quarantined, as previously recommended [5].

Transmission chains initiated by infected arrivals

Transmission chains can be initiated in the at-risk country by infected travelers who mix within the community upon arrival. Suppose now that a flight arrives with one, or more, infected passengers who mix within the community. We classify these infected arrivals into those who are ‘pre-symptomatic’ and those who are ‘symptomatic’ at entry. It is assumed that the ‘symptomatic’ infected arrivals do not recognize their symptoms as pandemic influenza and will not present to medical authorities. In other words, they spend the remainder of their infectious period mixing in the community. On the other hand, the ‘pre-symptomatic’ infected arrivals, including all individuals infected during flight, are assumed to mix freely in the community only from entry until they present to medical authorities after some delay following the onset of symptoms.

Probability that an undetected infected traveler initiates a major epidemic

Not all infected travelers entering the community initiate a ‘major’ epidemic, even when the reproduction number (R) exceeds one. Quite generally, the distribution of the size of an epidemic initiated by an infected arrival is bimodal, with distinct peaks corresponding to a major epidemic and a minor outbreak (Figure 1E). In the latter event the outbreak simply fades out by chance despite there being ample susceptibles in the population for ongoing transmission [11]. The number of cases in an outbreak that fades out is typically very small compared to an epidemic.

The probability that a typical infective generates a local epidemic is computed by using a branching process approximation [12] for the initial stages of the epidemic, and equating ‘epidemic’ with the event that the branching process does not become extinct. This calculation is well known (e.g. [13], page 473), but is modified here to allow for the fact that the process is initiated by a random number of infected arrivals and some of them have spent a random part of their infectious period before arriving in the at-risk country. The distribution for the random number of individuals infected by an infected individual when all their contacts are with susceptible individuals is needed for the calculation. The lack of data prevents a definitive conclusion for the most appropriate offspring distribution for influenza transmission [14], and we use a Poisson distribution with a mean equal to R, discounted for individuals who spent only some of their infectious period mixing in the at-risk country. A Poisson offspring distribution is appropriate when the area under the infectiousness function is non-random (i.e. all individuals have the same infection ‘potential’). We assume that R is the same in the source region and the at-risk country. For an undetected infected traveler and all their in-flight offspring to fail to initiate an epidemic on arrival, all of the chains of transmission they initiate must fail to become large epidemics (see Supporting Information).

The delay until an epidemic gathers momentum in the at-risk country

We calculate the probability distribution of D, the total delay until an epidemic gathers momentum by noting that it is given by D = D                ₁+D                ₂, where D                ₁ is the time until an epidemic is first initiated and D                ₂ is the time from initiation until the local epidemic gathers momentum. For an epidemic to be first initiated in the at-risk country on day d, it must have not been initiated on all previous days. Hence the probability distribution of the time delay (D                ₁) until the epidemic is first initiated in the at-risk country following identification in the source region is described by:

                                  

where p_d                 denotes the probability that the epidemic is initiated on day d , and                                    denotes the probability that the epidemic is not initiated on day d (see Supporting Information for calculation of p_d                ).

Once successfully initiated, an epidemic may initially hover around a handful of cases before reaching a sufficient number of cases for its growth to become essentially predictable. As mentioned, 20 concurrent cases is our criterion for an epidemic to have gathered momentum. We determine the distribution of D                ₂, the time to this occurrence, from 10,000 stochastic simulations and approximate this empirical distribution by a shifted gamma distribution. Our criterion of 20 concurrent cases is conservatively high, as results from the theory of branching processes shows that the probability of a minor epidemic (and hence no take-off) starting from 20 concurrent cases is about 3×10⁻⁸ when R = 1.5, and even smaller for higher values of R. Finally, the distribution of the total delay (D = D                ₁+D                ₂) from the pandemic being identified in the source region until 20 cases in the at-risk country was calculated by the convolution of the distributions of D                ₁ and D                ₂.

Parameter values

For the illustrative purposes, we chose values of 1.5, 2.5 and 3.5 for R, which encompass estimates proposed for previous pandemics [2], [3], [15]. The number of people within the infected source region was assumed reasonably small (5 million), and there was one flight per day traveling from the source region to the at-risk country carrying 400, 100 or 10 passengers. A higher number of travelers affects the delay only marginally, assuming the epidemic takes off in the source region (see Results). We assume a typical travel duration between attempted departure and possible arrival of 12 hours, but also examine the effect of varying this from 0–48 hours. The time to presentation following symptom onset is varied from ‘immediately’ to ‘never presenting’, with a time of 6 hours considered likely in the presence of an education campaign. The sensitivity of symptomatic screening is varied from 0–100%, with results presented for 0, 50 and 100% sensitivity.

Results

Evading traveler screening

The probability that a recently infected traveler evades screening is substantial even if screening reliably detects symptomatic travelers (Figure 2A), because the typical travel duration is shorter than the 2-day incubation period. In addition, during the early stages of the epidemic a high R in the source region acts to increase the probability that an infected traveler has been infected quite recently and hence will escape detection due to being asymptomatic during their travels (Figure 2A). For example, assuming 100% sensitivity for detecting symptomatic infection, we calculate that during the early stages of the epidemic the proportion of infected travelers that evade both departure and arrival screening after 12 hours of travel is 0.26, 0.45 and 0.59 for disease reproduction numbers 1.5, 2.5 and 3.5, respectively.

Figure 2.  

Effects of border screening and early presentation. (A) The effects of screening sensitivity andon the probability of escaping detection on both departure and arrival during a 12 hour transit. (B) The effects of screening sensitivity and travel duration on the probability than an infected traveler escapes detection during transit and initiates an epidemic after arrival (assuming no other symptomatic individuals on the same flight are identified). R = 3.5 with no early presentation. (C) The effects of R and the time from symptom onset to presentation on the probability that an infected traveler, having entered the wider community following arrival, will initiate an epidemic. There is no screening.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000143.g002

As the duration of travel approaches the disease incubation period, effective symptomatic screening substantially reduces the likelihood that a traveler evades screening and initiates an epidemic (Figure 2B). Reducing the time from the onset of symptoms to presentation (and subsequent isolation) for each infected arrival also reduces the probability that a major epidemic is initiated, however the best case scenario of infected travelers and all their in-flight offspring presenting immediately following the onset of symptoms still poses a substantial risk of epidemic initiation arising from pre-symptomatic transmission (Figure 1C).

The time until an epidemic gathers momentum in the at-risk country

The delay contains a fairly substantial natural component, primarily due to the time it takes to increase the number of infectives in the source region sufficiently to make the chance of a recently infected traveler appreciable (Figure 3A), and the time (D                ₂) it takes for a local epidemic in the at-risk country to gather momentum following successful seeding (Figure 4A). In the absence of any interventions, the number of infected individuals who successfully enter the community of the at-risk country initially increases exponentially (Figure 3A). With individual-based removal of infected travelers, the number of individuals entering the at-risk country undetected by screening is proportionately reduced over the course of the epidemic (Figure 3A). With flight-based quarantining, the number of infected individuals entering the at-risk country undetected is dramatically reduced over the course of the epidemic, even for relatively insensitive screening (Figure 3A). With flight-based quarantining, the number of infected passengers slipping through undetected is bimodal, with the first peak occurring when the number of infected travelers attempting to travel is still in single figures.

Figure 3.  

Components of delay until initiation and effects of border screening. (A) The number of infected people successfully arriving and entering the community of an at-risk country (K_A                      ) on each day following the identification of an outbreak of pandemic type strain influenza, assuming a source region population of 5 million, 400 intending travelers per day, R = 1.5, and three levels of symptomatic screening (solid line = nil, dashed line = 50% sensitivity with individual-based removal, dotted line = 50% sensitivity with flight-based quarantining). (B) Corresponding daily probability of initiation (p_d                      ) as a function of time since pandemic identified. (C) Distribution of the delay time until the initiation (D                      ₁) of an epidemic in an at-risk country by an infected traveler from a source region.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000143.g003

Figure 4.  

Components of the delay in at-risk country following initiation. (A) Results of 10,000 simulations (bars) and fitted shifted-Gamma distribution of delay time (D                      ₂) until 20 concurrent cases occur in the at-risk country, given that an epidemic has been initiated, andequals 1.5 with a serial interval of 2.6 days. (B) The total delay distribution until there are 20 concurrent cases in the at-risk country from when a pandemic type strain of influenza outbreak is identified in a source region with a population of 5 million, 400 intending travelers day⁻¹, an R of 1.5, and three levels of symptomatic screening (solid line = nil, dashed line = 50% sensitivity with individual removal, dotted line = 50% sensitivity with flight-based quarantining).

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000143.g004

Without screening, the daily probability that an epidemic is initiated (p_d                ) increases, and becomes near certain once the number of infected travelers arriving undetected exceeds about 10 (Figure 3B, solid line). With screening and individual-based removal of infected individuals, p_d                 follows a similar pattern only reduced somewhat. With screening in combination with flight-based quarantining, this probability is changed dramatically. After an initial rise it dips, to become essentially zero during the height of the epidemic in the source region (Figure 3B, dotted line). This arises because once a flight has several infected travelers, the probability that at least one is detected approaches one (even if screening is imperfect), and all passengers on such a flight are quarantined. Once the epidemic starts to wane in the source region (assuming the unlikely event of the pandemic strain is restricted to the source region), the probability of initiation rises once again. The corresponding distribution of D                ₁, the delay until the epidemic is first initiated in the at-risk country, is bi-modal in the presence of screening (Figure 3C).

Although flight-based quarantining is effective in preventing the entry of infected travelers during the height of the epidemic, a substantial cumulative risk of initiation has already occurred before this from the handful of infectives that have slipped through undetected (Figure 3B). Hence, whilst the effect of border screening, particularly in conjunction with flight-based quarantining, on the daily probability of initiation is dramatic, its effect on the delay to initiation is much less pronounced (Figure 3C). Border screening, even with perfect sensitivity for detecting symptomatic cases, tends to increase D                ₁, the time to an epidemic being initiated, by a matter of days to weeks. The time (D                ₂) from initiation (the arrival of the index case) to an epidemic reaching 20 concurrent cases within the at-risk country is adequately modeled using a shifted Gamma distribution (Figure 4A). The convolution of this right-skewed Gamma distribution with the left-skewed delay-distribution of D                ₁ (Figure 3C) yields the distribution for D, the total delay until the epidemic reaches 20 cases in the at-risk country (Figure 4B). The distribution of D is approximately symmetrical. The effect of border screening on the total delay D is quite modest, though sensitive to how screening is implemented. For example, with R = 1.5 and 400 travelers per day, 100% sensitive screening with individual-based removal increases the median delay from 57 to 60 days (Figure 4B). Flight-based quarantining would extend the median delay to 70 days. In general, the added delay arising from flight-based quarantining is about four-fold that arising from individual-based removal.

The natural component of the delay is highly sensitive to the disease reproduction number (Figure 5A). For example, with 400 passengers per day departing the source country and in the absence of any interventions, the median delay ranges from a low of 17 days for R = 3.5 to 57 days for R = 1.5 (Table 1). The delay is less sensitive to the number of intending travelers, with little appreciable increase in the median delay occurring until traveler numbers become very low (Figure 5B). For example, if R = 1.5, with no other border control measures, decreasing the number of intending travelers departing the source region from 400 to 100 per day increases the median total delay D from 57 to 66 days. A further decrease in the number of intending travelers to 10 per day increases the median delay to 83 days (Table 1).

Figure 5.  

Effects of interventions on the total delay D. (A) The effects of R on delay-distribution. (B) The effects of daily traveler number on the median delay for different values of R. (C) The effects of the time from symptom incubation until presentation and isolation (t_SP                      ) on the delay-distribution. (D) Additive effects of implementing 100% sensitive border screening (individual removal), the wearing of masks during transit, immediate presentation following symptom onset, and flight-based quarantining on the median delay, assuming 400 travelers per day attempting to depart the source region.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000143.g005

Table 1. Summary measures of the expected time until an epidemic of pandemic strain influenza in an at-risk country reaches 20 cases, for three values of R and three values for the number of intending travelers when the source region contains 5 million people.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000143.t001

The delay is quite insensitive to the rate of transmission in-flight. For example, with R = 1.5, a 12-hour flight, 400 travelers per day and no other interventions, preventing in-flight transmission altogether increases the median delay from 57 to 58 days. Conversely, doubling the rate of in-flight transmission reduces the median delay from 57 to 56 days. A 10-fold increase in the rate of transmission in-flight only decreases the median delay from 57 to 53 days. Encouraging the early presentation of cases among travelers following the onset of symptoms has a limited effect on the delay distribution (Figure 5C). For example, for R = 1.5, 400 intending travelers per day and no other interventions, reducing the time to presentation from ‘never presenting’ to 6 hours increases the median delay from 57 to 61 days. Immediate presentation at symptom onset only increases the median delay a further day in this scenario.

In general, the additional delay achieved by introducing non-pharmaceutical border control measures is generally small in comparison with the natural delay (Figure 5D). For the scenario with R = 1.5 and 400 intending travelers per day, a combination of 100% flight-based quarantining, 100% compliance with mask wearing during travel and immediate presentation at symptom onset extends the estimated median delay from 57 to 79 days (Figure 5D). This added delay diminishes in absolute terms as R increases. For example, if the same interventions are applied with R = 3.5, the median delay is extended from 17 to just 20 days (Figure 5D). The one exception to this generalisation is when travel numbers are reduced dramatically. The added delay achieved when a drastic reduction in travel numbers is combined with other border control measures appears to be greater than adding the delays each achieves on its own. For example, if R = 1.5, and we reduce the number of intending travelers from 400 to 10 per day, implement 100% flight-based quarantining, implement compulsory mask wearing during travel and presentation at 6 hours following symptom onset then there is a substantial probability (0.74) that the pandemic strain will never be imported (assuming the epidemic is confined to the source country). The estimated quartile delay (the median in this case is undefined) to the start of a major epidemic in an at-risk country is extended from 50 to 125 days. Again, the added delay decreases rapidly as R increases, and if the above interventions were applied with R = 3.5, the estimated median delay is extended from 17 to 26 days, and the importation of the epidemic is certain (Figure 5D).

Discussion

We have formulated a model of the importation of an infectious disease from a source region to an at-risk country that permits a comprehensive analysis of the effect of border control measures. Our results are most relevant to the early stage of a pandemic when most cases are contained within a single source region. Once the pandemic has spread to several countries, models with greater complexity and ability to more realistically model global mixing patterns [6]–[8] are required. Our model is developed with a pandemic-strain of influenza in mind, but could apply to any emerging infectious disease that is transmitted from person to person. We have assumed a Poisson distribution for the number of secondary infections, which a natural choice when each infected individual has the same infectivity profile. A distribution with a larger variance is appropriate when individuals vary substantially in their infectiousness. Our results are conservative in the sense that they give an upper bound for the probability that an infected traveler manages to initiate an epidemic, compared to an offspring distribution with a greater variance but the same reproduction number [14].

The nature of the next pandemic influenza virus, and particularly its reproduction number, is uncertain. If its reproduction number is low (R<2.0), our results indicate that at-risk countries receiving a reasonably small number of travelers (say 400 per day) from the infected source region can expect a natural delay until importing an epidemic of the order of 2 months. This is quite variable and under favourable conditions it could be 4 months. However, the natural delay decreases rapidly as R increases.

The additional delay from isolating individuals detected by border screening is merely a few days under most plausible scenarios, even if both departure and arrival screening is introduced and screening detects every symptomatic traveler. While the extra delay is more than quadrupled if flights with a detected case(s) are quarantined, the effect remains modest (weeks at most) and it is questionable whether the extra delay achieved warrants the disruption created by such a large number of quarantined passengers.

In-flight transmission is a commonly raised concern in discussions about the importation of an infection, so inclusion of in-flight transmission is an attractive feature of our model. Events of substantial in-flight transmission of influenza have been documented [10], [16] and modeling of indoor airborne infection risks in the absence of air filtration predicts that in-flight transmission risks are elevated [17]. However, it difficult to estimate the infectiousness of influenza in a confined cabin space, as there is undoubtedly substantial under-reporting of influenza cases who travel and fail to generate any offspring during flight. Provided the aircraft ventilation system (including filtration) is operational, it is considered that the actual risk of in-flight transmission is much lower than the perceived risk [18]. Our results indicate that the delay is relatively insensitive to the rate of in-flight transmission, making in-flight transmission less of an issue than commonly believed. A highly elevated transmission rate in-flight will hasten the importation of an epidemic only marginally. Consistent with this, eliminating in-flight transmission by wearing protective masks increases the delay only marginally.

Early presentation by infected arrivals not detected at the borders was found to add only a few days to the delay. To some extent this arises due to our assumption that pre-symptomatic transmission can occur, for which there is some evidence. In contrast, Ferguson et al. [2] assume that the incubation and latent periods are equal, with a mean of 1.5 days. In their model pre-symptomatic transmission is excluded and infectiousness is estimated to spike dramatically immediately following symptom onset and declining rapidly soon afterwards. Under their model assumptions, immediate presentation at onset of symptoms would reduce transmission effectively. However, as presentation occurs some time after onset of symptoms and the bulk of infectivity occurs immediately after onset of symptoms the results on the effect of early presentation of cases are likely, in practical terms, to be similar to those found here. Given the variable nature of influenza symptoms, there is likely to be a difference between the onset of the first symptoms as measured in a clinical trial (e.g. [19]) and the time that a person in the field first suspects that they may be infected with influenza virus. To fully resolve the issue of how effective very early presentation of infected travelers is in delaying a local epidemic we need better knowledge about the infectiousness of individuals before and just after the onset of symptoms.

Of the border control measures available, reducing traveler numbers has the biggest effect on the delay and even then it is necessary to get the number of travelers down to a very low number. An equivalent control measure is to quarantine all arriving passengers with near perfect compliance.

Our results indicate that short of virtually eliminating international travel, border control measures add little to avoiding, or delaying, a local epidemic if an influenza pandemic takes off in a source region. All forms of border control are eventually overwhelmed by the cumulative number of infected travelers that attempt to enter the country. The only way to prevent a local epidemic is to rapidly implement local control measures that bring the effective reproduction number in the local area down below 1, or to achieve rapid elimination in the source region, in agreement with other recent studies [6]–[8]. Preventing the exponential growth phase of an epidemic in the source region appears to be the only method able to prevent a nascent influenza pandemic reaching at-risk countries.

Supporting Information

Text S1.

Estimating the daily probability of epidemic initiation

(0.08 MB PDF)

Acknowledgments

We thank James Wood, Katie Glass and Belinda Barnes and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: NB PC. Performed the experiments: PC DP. Analyzed the data: NB PC DP. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: PC DP. Wrote the paper: NB PC.

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