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

by Alan Weisman

  Other researchers contend that something completely legal accounts for significant numbers of the missing girls: adoption. Domestic adoption, whether by infertile parents or by those wishing to legally have more than one child, is rising along with Chinese affluence. And the phenomenon of international adoption is impossible to miss in the beautiful sprinkling of Chinese girls appearing in recent generations of North Americans, Europeans, and Australians—girls adopted and adored by couples who can’t give birth, or who want their natural children to have siblings without risking another pregnancy or adding to the population.

  Reports surface of officials confiscating female babies to sell to orphanages that are really baby farms for the adoption market. But the fact that discrimination against girls in China has also brought happiness to thousands of childless families may prove useful in a world that one day concludes that human populations must be managed. Whatever a country’s family-planning policy or lack thereof, orphaned or abandoned children have never been a scare resource. In the event that humanity were to agree that on an overcrowded globe we have entered a time calling for reproductive restraint, adoption is an alternative for families that choose to embrace as many children as their households can hold.

  Demographers are sometimes called accountants without a sense of humor, since the ciphers they’re totaling aren’t mere shekels, but us. In China, creative evasions of the fertility police have made their work even harder. China reportedly now has between 24 and 50 million more males than females, more than half of them “bare branches”—men of marrying age who can’t find mates. Nobody really knows for sure how many. Few unequivocally trust the numbers, no matter how heroic the efforts of census takers. (China’s most recent census, 2011, put the population at 1.34 billion. The United Nations expected at least 1.4 billion—a difference of 60 million people, which sounds hard to hide, except most Chinese can’t name many of the biggest cities in their country, so dizzyingly fast do they materialize.)

  Whatever the actual total of surplus Chinese males, it creates a tension that nature ultimately won’t tolerate. So far, crimes of passion between jealous men fighting over the scarce supply of eligible females aren’t epidemic. But single Chinese men now make marriage junkets to Vietnam, where, for upward of US$5,000, they can choose a wife from a lineup of poor village girls sold to a bridal broker by their parents. Like immigrant laborers in Europe, the cyber-and-jet-age version of mail-order brides is another way wealth gets redistributed in an inequitable world.

  Sex-selective abortion following ultrasound became illegal in 1995, and many retired parents find that the most dependable single child to care for them—and up to four living grandparents—is a daughter. Infanticide may be rare, yet sensational press accounts still appear. Among the grisliest was a 2012 story from South Korea about seizures of thousands of smuggled capsules of an alleged health tonic. Citing the Korean Customs Service, the Associated Press reported that “the capsules were made in northeastern China from babies whose bodies were chopped into small pieces and dried on stoves before being turned into powder.” No explanation was given as to how they knew the capsules came from China, nor whether the contents came from newborns or fetuses. But no denials were issued, and Chinese officials reportedly ordered an investigation.

  If the value of an experiment is measured not only by whether it succeeds, but also by what it reveals, the Chinese one-child-per-family experiment, routinely denounced outside of China as horrific, has been eminently valuable. Without it, there would be hundreds of millions more Chinese today in a country where water, fish, and farmland are already growing scarce. But it has also revealed potential pitfalls of population control, such as the cruel and unexpected gender tilting of a generation that will take at least another generation to restore to equilibrium.

  During the coming decades, the number of Chinese in their twenties will drop by nearly half, while the number above retirement age will rise even faster. “Life expectancy is rising insistently,” says Jiang Zhenghua. “By the end of this century, in developed areas it could rise to ninety.” That prospect has delayed Jiang’s own retirement, as he was pressed into service to help his government devise plans for an elderly nation. Like Europe, China worries that there will be too few younger wage earners paying into pension funds to insure the social security of so many aged.

  “We are considering communes of retired people, with younger ones caring for those that can no longer care for themselves.” With fewer young people, some schools and campuses might house elderly enclaves. A pilot project already under way in some rural areas is known as the “old people’s bank”—a labor bank in which younger elderly donate hours or money to help older elderly, understanding that when they get old, they’ll be helped in return.

  More unpredicted challenges will emerge as this becomes China’s broad reality, Jiang knows. Yet he has no qualms about the decisions they made.

  “Our conclusion was that 1.6 billion people is the maximum size China can support. But that is not the optimum size. The optimum would be 700 million to no more than a billion, considering the pressure on resources, the limits of technology, and how much burden we can reasonably bear.”

  “What do you feel the optimum size is now, with our new understanding about climate?” Gretchen asks as they make ready to leave.

  He settles back in his chair, considering. “We should not take risks that harm the whole human race.” He studies his empty wineglass against the candlelight. “In ancient China, there was a philosophical argument about the nature of people at birth. One school said that people are born evil—that is our nature. The other said that we are born good and kind. My view is that both are incorrect. I think that people’s nature is always to want a better life. So from that, we should not expect human beings to behave for benefit of the rest of nature—of the environment. You can only expect people to help the environment out of their own interest.”

  “I can see that—”

  He lifts a hand, indicating there is more.

  “This is why policy makers must decide. Because people cannot see it until the danger is already upon them. In 1958, the highest level of China’s central government was already discussing the need to control population. But the discussion was useless. Mao Zedong said we don’t have the means, and other party leaders wanted more people, not less. So nothing happened. Only when the population reached 800 million did they finally see the problem. And they were shocked by its size.”

  iii. Sloping Land

  After a twisting two-hour drive, Gretchen Daily alights with relief from the gray Buick minivan to relish the Sichuan landscape for a few minutes before the last thirty kilometers to Baoxing County. Before her stretches a mosaic of fields rippling up and down hillsides, covered with rows of green and yellow beans, sweet potato, cabbage, and bamboo. Scattered among the patchwork are conical sheaves of dried cornstalks for mulching.

  “This is one of first times I’ve stood on actual soil in China,” she tells Ouyang Zhiyun, who heads the Research Center for Eco-environmental Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Wang Yukuan of the Academy’s Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment. All around her, white, blue, black, and orange butterflies swirl on the warm breeze. Four of the five major families, Gretchen notes, are present: Pieridae, Lycaenid, Nymphalid, and a lot of Papilionidae swallowtails. Huge bees bumble among the sweet potato blossoms.

  Fields, Baoxing County, Sichuan, China

  For much of the past week, she, Ouyang, Wang, and several colleagues have been inside buildings in Beijing and Xi’an, exchanging their latest research. The closest Gretchen got to nature was the grounds of Beijing’s Fragrant Hill Hotel, where she was grateful to encounter a healthy flock of sparrows. During the Great Leap Forward, Chairman Mao declared war on China’s ubiquitous Eurasian tree sparrow, because it ate grain. For four years, people hunted sparrows with slingshots, tore down their nests, and banged pots and pans whenever they alighted to scare them back into
the sky, until they finally fell dead from exhaustion. Only after millions were exterminated and the species reached the brink of extinction did anyone connect the swarms of locusts devouring the country’s rice to the missing sparrows. Eurasian tree sparrows, it turned out, were the locusts’ principal natural predator.

  The years in which the sparrows were absent from the Chinese ecosystem, not surprisingly, were also the years of the Great Famine that killed 30 to 40 million people. Gretchen hopes the sparrows she saw—descendants of the survivors of genocide perpetrated by human beings against a fellow species—were a good portent for the reason she is in China.

  She and her Chinese hosts are colleagues in the Natural Capital Project, an international collaboration to keep ecosystems and people whose lives depend on them—meaning everybody—in healthy equilibrium with each other. That means focusing on three areas that literally cover everything under the sun—land and sea use, climate stability, and human demographics and economics—to determine how we can make sure we lose nothing essential, like those sparrows, to keep the planet supporting human life. (Or, conversely, to ask how much human activity a land-or seascape can sustain before it is too exhausted to sustain any at all.)

  Since beginning in 2006, the Natural Capital team now operates on four continents and several archipelagos across the world’s oceans. They have developed powerful software available for free to anyone,2 to help people decide what to preserve or restore by calculating the potential return from services nature provides, such as water retention, pollination, and soil conservation. But the program’s strength depends on the depth of data available to plug into land-use scenarios. On this trip, Gretchen is awed by the vast raw knowledge her Chinese colleagues possess. Ouyang Zhiyun’s presentation was a boggling compendium of forests, wetlands, soils, nutrient cycles, erosion indexes, carbon storage, and above all, water resources: nobody anywhere else has such complete water data.

  China is the scene of the biggest interaction between people and the rest of nature in human history, with available manpower to accumulate a million data points to learn what touched off a flood a thousand miles downstream, or why there is a grain shortage someplace that someone had to hike for a day to see. Gretchen was trained by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren to consider what every little thing does, so she has her grad students sifting bat poop in coffee plantations and documenting the role of individual trees. But the ecosystem is immense and their readings are incomplete, so it’s often unclear how to interpret the flutter in gauge needles. Yet here is Ouyang with breathtaking quantities of information—to Gretchen it is like being in front of an entire instrument panel where you could plug in values, get answers, and see where to go. There might be only a few levers to pull, but the Chinese were willing to try pulling them if it seemed like a good thing—to ask, for example, an entire generation to make a sacrifice, if it seemed necessary.

  If some kind of workable equilibrium could be forged here, conceivably it could happen anywhere. The landscape where they stand is an example. Brushing back his wispy hair, Ouyang points to fuzzy mountain ridges beyond the gentle cultivated hills. “All that forest back there was farmland ten years ago. You’re looking at Grain to Green. Some trees were planted. Some came back naturally.”

  Grain to Green is part of the most ambitious—and expensive—environmental project any government has attempted: China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program. Thirty million people were paid annual subsidies averaging ¥8,000 (yuan)3 in cash or rice for ten years to leave their farms in the country’s most mountainous regions—wherever the land sloped more than twenty-five degrees—and relocate to new villages. All their land would be replanted in native trees and grasses, in hopes of reversing the calendar to 1950, when China was still covered with virgin forests.

  The combined losses of foodstuffs and lumber come to billions of dollars, and the program itself will cost upward of US$40 billion. But the Sloping Land Conversion Program should save China from much greater losses. China has learned the hard way that these were lands that humans should never have colonized. The lesson began in 1997, with droughts that might never have turned so disastrous had trees been left in place so that their roots could hold water in the soil. Instead, the lower Yellow River dried up for 267 days, imperiling water supplies throughout northern China. The next year brought the opposite problem when the Yangtze in central China overflowed its basin, where one of every ten humans on Earth lives, inundating forty thousand square miles and carrying off 2 billion tons of topsoil. Thousands died, and millions of houses and the yuan equivalent of billions of dollars were lost. For both the drought and floods, deforested slopes were the main culprits.

  The Qingyi River, a Yangtze tributary that the Natural Capital scientists have been following south from Sichuan’s capital, Chengdu, has some of the steepest, and therefore most intact, stretches remaining in the watershed. The forests rising above the river valley are why southwestern China’s mountains form one of the world’s twenty-five greatest biodiversity hot spots, with more endemic temperate flora than anywhere, according to Conservation International. Sichuan has fir, spruce, cypress, pine, larch, bamboo, and broadleaf sassafras and maples that turn the slopes gold and crimson in autumn: many endemic only to western China. Because these heights are among the Earth’s landmasses that have gone longest in geologic history without being inundated by inland seas, these are some of our planet’s most ancient forests. Here grow cathayas, the Earth’s oldest fir species, whose fossils account for much of Europe’s brown coal; metasequoia redwoods that haven’t changed in 65 million years; and wild ginkgo biloba, a living fossil dating to the early Jurassic when it covered much of the world, but now confined to this one small spot in China.

  As China’s population climbed toward a billion and beyond, people began invading and clearing even its most inaccessible terrain. Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, Sichuan has lost an estimated two-thirds of its original forests, habitat to snow and clouded leopards, but best known for the largest surviving population of giant pandas.

  Of about eighteen hundred pandas left in the wild, a thousand are here. The only ones Gretchen will see on this trip are at a Chengdu breeding center, where wildlife biologists are trying to coax ninety-seven captive pandas to reproduce. Reintroducing pandas born in captivity to nature has proved challenging; after the first ones were killed by their wild cousins, researchers began wearing panda suits and spraying themselves with animal scent to dehabituate the human-bred pandas.

  Along with jungle smarts, the pandas need habitat to survive; the Sloping Land Conversion Program hopes to provide that by planting giant sponges called forests. But moving 30 million people off their farms into urban occupations means somehow growing—or buying—food elsewhere to feed them. “These lands where the slope is not great are intensely cultivated now,” says Ouyang, pointing around him. “The population is very dense.”

  “We can’t support all the people,” says Wang Yukuan, turning away from a black and white nymphalid the size of a small bat. “We have to import to feed our country.”

  China’s strategy has been to follow industrialized Japan and South Korea, favoring factories over fields and buying more food from the rest of the world. But so great are the numbers it must feed that it isn’t merely purchasing commodities on the world market, but buying up chunks of the world itself—investing in agricultural satellite lands in Africa, Brazil, and the Philippines—all which also must feed their own people.

  The second goal of Sloping Land Conversion was to lift the peasantry from poverty. Some whose farms were returned to forest were allowed to start orchards or grow spices where level land was available. But most, China hoped, would go to cities, get jobs, and send money to their families in their new relocation villages. They would join an immense contingent: 99 percent of China’s construction workers are internal migrants. Combined with factory, domestic, and custodial workers, their numbers nearly equal the population of the United Stat
es. That is like taking an agrarian nation the size of the world’s third-biggest country out of food production and transplanting it to cities that its population then must build. Small wonder that China wants all the raw building materials the world can provide.

  Amid such tectonic demographic shifting, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection have been trying to shore up the nation’s sagging ecosystem, by creating EFCAs: Ecosystem Function Conservation Areas. Spanning nearly a quarter of China’s land area, “the EFCAs,” explains Ouyang back in the minivan, “are designed to secure biodiversity, soils, and water, to store carbon, and to prevent sandstorms.” All the landscape on this increasingly sinuous drive into an ever-tightening valley is an EFCA. Eventually, Ouyang says, they hope to preserve 60 percent of China, and to help alleviate poverty in the remaining 40 percent.

  This combination—conservation of nature and humanity—is why Gretchen Daily has hooked up with these Chinese scientists. The connection was Li Shuzhou, the protégé of missile engineer-turned-demographer Jiang Zhenghua and director of population studies at Xi’an Jiaotong University, whom she met through a Stanford colleague. On Gretchen’s first trip to China, Li took her for a four-hour massage administered by three migrant workers retrained as massage therapists: one at her feet, another on her back and shoulders, and the third delicately cleaning her ears with bamboo swabs. For Gretchen, it was an irresistible beginning to a professional relationship.