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968Le journaliste Johann Hari, de The Independent, publie un article (ce 24 janvier 2011) sur la situation environnementale de la Chine, à partir du livre de Jonathan Watts, When A Billion Chinese Jump. La description est apocalyptique, en mettant en avant l’aspect quantitatif écrasant de l’évolution en cours, son caractère inéluctable, en même temps qu’elle situe les responsabilités fondamentales qui tiennent évidemment au système général de l’“idéal de puissance” qu’a développé la civilisation occidentale, – essentiellement depuis ce que nous nommons “le déchaînement de la matière”, depuis la fin du XVIIIème siècle.
«The world is watching China’s economic surge with understandable awe – while politely and passively ignoring the country’s ecological disintegration.
»When the journalist Jonathan Watts was a child, he was told, like so many of us: “If everyone in China jumps at exactly the same time, it will shake the earth off its axis and kill us all.” Three decades later, he stood in the grey sickly smog of Beijing, wheezing and hacking uncontrollably after a short run, and thought – the Chinese jump has begun. He had travelled 100,000 miles criss-crossing China, from the rooftop of Tibet to the deserts of Inner Mongolia and everywhere, he discovered that the Chinese state was embarked on a massive program of environmental destruction. It has turned whole rivers poisonous to the touch, rendered entire areas cancer-ridden, transformed a fertile area twice the size of Britain into desert – and probably even triggered the worst earthquake in living memory.
» “The planet’s environmental problems were not made in China, but they are sliding past the point of no return there,” Watts argues in his new book When A Billion Chinese Jump – the essential starting-point for this conversation. The uber-capitalist Communists now have the highest emissions of global warming gases in the world (although the average Chinese person still emits a tenth of the average American). We are all trapped in a greenhouse together: environmental destruction in China becomes environmental destruction where you live. This story will become your story… […]
»…There’s some justice in these responses. Your contribution to global warming (and mine) vastly exceeds the average Chinese person’s. Every successful environmental treaty in history began with the biggest polluters cutting back first. Yet we are refusing to do it, and far from urging China to go green, our governments are doing the opposite. It wasn’t mentioned in the industrial quantities of journalistic hot air that accompanied Hu Jintao’s trip to Washington D.C., but the Obama administration is currently suing the Chinese government at the World Trade Organization to stop them from subsidizing wind farms, saying it represents ‘unfair competition.’ A seventy-a-day smoker riddled with lung cancer isn’t really in a position to lecture a younger man to stop smoking, especially if he’s trying to steal his nicotine patches.
»But if this debate dissolves into a game of mutual finger-pointing – you’re the worst! No, you are! – then we will be trapped in a spiral of mutual environmental destruction…»
Conclusion de l’article, après diverses descriptions et observations, terminant sur l’hypothèse que les grands travaux du barrage Zigingpu ont conduit au déclenchement artificiel de tremblements de terre : «This compresses all the fears about China’s current ecology-trashing binge into one single event, like a dark metaphor. What if you take on nature, and lose? What if your progress today is triggering a catastrophe tomorrow that will leave you worse off than you were in the first place? Yes, a billion Chinese have jumped. If they jump towards renewable energy sources – as their bravest and smartest citizens advocate – they will show humanity how to save itself, and be lauded by future generations as heroes. But at the moment, they are jumping off a cliff.»
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