The China Syndrome

WASHINGTON — The biggest environmental challenge in the world today is not global warming or ozone loss, as serious as those hazards are. Rather, it is poverty or, more precisely, the urge of billions of people around the world to escape poverty. No one can begrudge the poor a better life, but their aspirations raise a troubling question: Can the world's human majority ascend from poverty without overwhelming the ecosystems that make all life possible on this planet? The answer may determine humanity's fate in the 21st century. Nowhere is the challenge more urgent than in China, one of the world's fastest-growing economies, not to mention its single most ravaged environment.

Last summer, when floods roared through China's Yangtze and Songhua river valleys, they left an estimated 56 million people, nearly twice the population of California, at least temporarily homeless. Remarkably, China's central government soon acknowledged that its own environmentally damaging logging policies had greatly contributed to the floods' severity. Even more surprising, Beijing pledged to reverse those policies. But that promise is unlikely to be kept, mainly because China's continuing struggle against poverty ends up taking precedence over environmental reform.

China exhibits both the large, growing population typical of poverty--nearly one of every four humans on Earth lives in China--and the high-impact consumption patterns promoted by Western capitalism. This combustible mix makes China a sort of environmental superpower, capable of wreaking havoc on ecosystems the world over.

Like the United States, the other environmental superpower, China is responsible for such a large share of global pollution that any attempts to, say, reduce greenhouse-gas emissions cannot succeed without its cooperation. The United States casts its long environmental shadow largely through its extravagant consumption patterns; the average American consumes about 53 times more goods and services than a Chinese does, for example. China's environmental heft still derives largely from its population size; only a small minority of Chinese can afford even a pale imitation of American excess. But if incomes keep rising in China, the size of that minority will grow, and the environmental effects could be fearsome.