The Chinese Dilema

You may have wondered why there are so many Chinese in the world today.  The answer is surprisingly simple.  Many many years ago some Chinese genius worked out that in order to have sustainable soils, you have to return every bit of organic material you can to the soil.  This includes animal waste, human waste and all the inedible parts of your crops.  You can also supplement this with material from the sea since you are sending huge amounts of nutrients down your rivers from the land.  It has worked a treat and despite  mongol hoards, palace revolutions and wars, the Chinese have grown and prospered.'

It helped that they had rich deep loes soils gratis of the continental glaciers that ground rock into fine powder to be carried and deposited by the wind but so did America and they have gone through meters of this 'god given' bounty in a few centuries.

In the mean time other empires have prospered and declined as they mined their soils and the area they occupied had to wait for the slow process of building new soils from the bottom up before significant numbers of people could once more occupy the areas where empires once existed.

Back to the Chinese, they are now coming into the 'modern world' and it doesn't auger well for them.  On the nutrient front, they now have flush toilets and will be sending massive amounts of nutrients to sewage plants to be detoxified, denitrified and what is left, sent down to the sea.

It doesn't have to be this way.  For instance, in Seattle, they now have a sewage plant that is turning their 'feed stock' into valuable fertilizer, the sale of which covers half their running costs.  If this becomes the norm instead of the exception, perhaps us westerners can also have a sustainable future.

The Chinese are sinning against sustainability in another way now.  In their rush to industrialize. they are polluting their air to an extreme extent. It is so bad that they are negatively affecting their agriculture.  Never mind. there is light on the horizon.  At the same time they are working as hard as they can to replace coal energy with wind and solar energy and petrol vehicles with electrics.  With their command economy, they will most likely succeed and rather rapidly at that.

In the mean time the Chinese are buying up land all over the world to be able to feed their people.  If they adopt the western model of flushing nutrients down to the sea, they will have to buy up a lot more.