PROLOGUE

Modern humanity was born, so to speak, about ten thousand years ago with the invention of agriculture and the villages and political hierarchies that soon followed. Up to that point our species had perfected hunter technology enough to wipe out a large part of Earth’s largest mammals and birds—the megafauna—but it left most of the vegetated land surface and all of the oceans intact. The economic history that followed can be summarized very succinctly as follows: people used every means they could devise to convert the resources of Earth into wealth.

—EDWARD O. WILSON, FOREWORD TO COMMON WEALTH: ECONOMICS FOR A CROWDED PLANET BY JEFFREY SACHS

On a warm spring afternoon I left the Trail’s End Motel in Trinidad, Colorado, to search for signs of something I had come to think of as “China speed”—the countless ways that China’s rapid growth has raised our global metabolism, the ways its enormous appetite is reshaping the physical world. At first glance, Trinidad seemed like an odd place to look for ties to China. Sitting twenty miles north of New Mexico on a dry plain just east of the Rocky Mountains, it appeared insulated from global trends. Each morning locals gathered at the Savoy Café, a small restaurant that seemed frozen in the 1950s: Marilyn Monroe posters and pressed-metal Coca-Cola signs hung on the walls, Elvis crooned from a small radio, discussions tended toward cattle prices, weather, and high school sports. In the afternoon the students of Trinidad High School—home of the Mighty Miners—pulled their pickup trucks and rigged-out sports cars into the parking lots of fast-food restaurants. Older residents sometimes bragged that the town’s courthouse was floored with marble cut from a quarry that supplied the Lincoln Memorial.

But I knew what I was looking for. Several months earlier, halfway around the world in Beijing, I had come across a short newspaper story about a coal mine that had quietly reopened more than a decade after being mothballed. The mine was called New Elk and its owners planned to send much of its coal south to Texas and then by ship to Asia. According to a local paper, at least some of it was bound for China.

I suspected that China was more than a peripheral part of the story. In 2009, China had burned 3.5 billion tons of coal, almost half the world’s total. But it was China’s potential demand that was creating a global mining renaissance. In 1976, when Mao Zedong, the first leader of Communist China, died, the country had used only 550 million tons of coal each year, one-sixth of today’s total. By 1997, its demand had exceeded that of the United States, but it still used what now looks like a quaint number: 1.4 billion tons. Then—in the thirteen years from 1997 to 2009—China added over 2 billion tons of annual coal demand, the equivalent of two new nations as voracious as the United States, which—until China surpassed it—had been the world’s biggest coal consumer.1 And experts predicted that China’s growing energy appetite wouldn’t peak for many years.

The mine seemed like a perfect example of how China’s rapid growth—growth that since 1992 had multiplied the size of its economy sixfold—has raised the world’s metabolism in unexpected ways.2 But five weeks of emails to the company’s headquarters had gone unanswered. When I finally reached its CEO by tracking down his number and cold-calling, he said the mine was too busy for even a brief visit.

I suspected the reason was more complicated. China’s rising fortunes—almost all of it powered by fossil fuels—had pushed it past the United States as the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases in 2006. A group of environmental organisations had recently protested new coal ports planned along the West Coast partly because they viewed exporting U.S. coal to China as undermining decades of work to slow global warming. Together with other groups, the Sierra Club had petitioned Colorado’s Bureau of Land Management to delay reopening the New Elk mine. Among their chief arguments was that coal from the mine could add millions of tons of carbon dioxide—the chief gas responsible for global warming—to the atmosphere over its life.

So, even without permission, I had decided to go.

I drove west from the Trail’s End Motel—a reference to Trinidad’s place at the end of the Santa Fe Trail—down Main Street, itself a reminder of the fickle hand of fortune. Trinidad is one of America’s early success stories. Early settlers found thick coal seams in nearby hills and wealthy East Coast families invested in iron and steel mills. The city grew rich enough to build Colorado’s first public schools and hospitals.

But slumping U.S. demand over the second half of the twentieth century—in Trinidad a product of new iron smelting technologies, stricter environment laws, and the end of the great American era of road, dam, and bridge building—bankrupted its mines, and as Trinidad’s fortunes withered, people drifted away. Halfway up Main Street, I passed the Trinidad Historical Society, where a pamphlet explained that the people of Trinidad “lived and worked among the tarnished splendor built by former wealth.” Just beyond the history museum was the old Opera House, built in 1883 but recently chained shut after its most recent renter—the owner of a clothing shop—had given up. Just down the road, the Buffalo Smokehouse Barbecue was for sale. The Mary Ann Apartments were boarded up. The most prosperous looking businesses were the Corral Pawn Trading Post and Shirley’s Thrift, where a handwritten window sign read, “$5 to fill a bag with any clothing or shoes.”

Beyond the Savoy Café and Trinidad High School, the city fell away into prairieland speckled with distant homes, pickup trucks, and cattle herds, and thirty minutes later I pulled off the road in front of the mine. It consisted largely of two huge concrete storage silos and a boxy building where machines washed newly extracted coal. The hills behind the structures were still dusted with the last remnants of the winter’s snow.

I walked to a tiny wooden guardhouse and talked with Lance Ross, a friendly man who said he couldn’t let me in but was happy to share what he knew. He pointed to a large pile of coal gleaming dully in the distance and said that, as far as he knew, it was the first coal mined in Trinidad since 1991. He echoed something other locals had already told me: the return of mining was Trinidad’s best news in years. “This is some of the best coal in the world,” Ross said. “We should be selling it. We know we need the jobs.”

When I asked how quickly the mine would expand, he said managers expected it would happen fast. The company, called Cline Mining, expected to dig up to 6 million tons of coal each year and ship it south by rail to Corpus Christi, Texas, where it would be packed into boats.3 When I asked where it would end its journey—where it would be burned—he pushed his chin sharply toward the snow-capped Rockies and said, “China’s where the money is, so they say that’s where it’s going.”

A week earlier I had seen another unanticipated impact of China’s rising demand. I was standing near the top of Mount Bachelor, a nine-thousand-foot peak in Oregon’s Cascade range, with Dan Jaffe, an atmospheric chemist from the University of Washington. Jaffe is one of the world’s top experts on long-range air pollution and he’d just pulled a metal tube from a pipe mounted atop a ski lift. He unscrewed the tube’s cover and we peered down at five perfectly round grey dots—dust and black carbon that had been carried on the jet stream from Asia, mostly from China, and dropped on a place that until only a decade or two earlier had recorded some of America’s cleanest air.

In a corner of a building used by the lift operators, an expensive stack of equipment measured various pollutants. One machine pulled in a puff of air every few minutes and then tested it for tiny particles of dust—in the language of science called particulate matter—that have been linked with heart disease and lung cancer. Another machine sniffed for traces of ozone—the chief component of smog, a gas formed when sunlight reacts with nitrous oxide. Still others looked for carbon monoxide and mercury, a potent neurotoxin.

All four pollutants are considered urban blights, the products of cars and power plants, and before Jaffe’s research few people thought that they could be carried across the Pacific Ocean in dangerous amounts. But the instruments were picking up both a steady flow and, occasionally, hazardous spikes of each. Less than a week before I visited, the machines had shown a higher concentration of ozone atop Mount Bachelor than in downtown Los Angeles. Measurements of airborne mercury suggested that Asia is responsible for nearly half of the global total, some of which is finding its way into American lakes and rivers, contributing to toxicity that has forced almost every U.S. state to issue warnings to fishermen.4 A decade earlier, equipment at the mountaintop laboratory had recorded one of the most significant “dust events” in American history: an Asian storm had dumped 110,000 tons of dust on the United States, an amount equivalent to everything picked up by the winds across the country on an average day. Atlanta issued a health alert as the particles settled earthward.

For Jaffe, the pollution was equally important as a metaphor. It was hard evidence of how interconnected the world has become: coal mined in Trinidad and countless other small communities is shipped to Chinese power plants. When it’s burned, it contributes to clouds of pollution that drift back into the United States. “People don’t really understand that we’re living in a world full of airborne pollutants,” he said. “If the world doesn’t make any progress on these pollutants and our economies keep growing, things could get very bad.”

After I visited Mount Bachelor, I travelled to Boulder, Colorado—two hundred miles north of Trinidad—to learn about a more lethal gas spewing into the atmosphere as China burns through billions of tons of coal. I had arranged to meet with Jim Butler, the director of an office at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tasked with monitoring everything that might impact the world’s climate. (The full name of the group is the Earth System Research Laboratory, Global Monitoring Division.) According to NOAA’s website, Butler’s job was to oversee “the nation’s continuing measurements of atmospheric constituents that affect the world’s climate, including greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases, aerosols, and surface radiation.”

On a sunny afternoon, I met Butler and his colleague, Pieter Tans, in Butler’s office, a room filled with plants and books and thick binders bearing titles like “Carbon Cycle Initiative 2008”. Huge windows looked out toward beautiful, jagged peaks that Coloradans call the Rockies’ Front Range. A bottle sitting on a shelf was labelled with a pretty picture of a hummingbird and the words “Humboldt Hemp Ale”.

The two men, obviously friends, made an interesting pair. Butler looked like a scientist who could just as easily address a room of senators as he could a conference of physicists. He wore a tan button-down shirt and silver-rimmed glasses. His tightly cropped beard was flecked with grey. When he spoke, he chose his words carefully. Tans, a Dutchman who moved to the United States in 1978 as a postdoctoral physicist, struck me as more of a prophet: he spoke fast and passionately and emphasised key points by swinging his hands through the air like a conductor.

I started our conversation with my biggest, broadest questions—What should Americans know about China’s rise and global warming? How does China’s growth change the picture?—and Butler replied with a brief history of climate change: “As you watch carbon dioxide’s increase since about 1800”—the beginning of the Industrial Revolution—“its growth rate has doubled about three times per century,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “When you think about that, it’s pretty incredible. It’s a factor of eight by the end of the first century and a factor of sixty-four by the end of the second century. That can’t continue to happen, but we haven’t seen it stopping yet. The emissions from the United States have not increased at all over the last ten years. In Europe it’s the same. They may even have decreased.

“So when you think about it, it really points toward the China-and-India theatre as what’s driving the growth. In the early 1800s it was land use—cutting down forests and putting in farms and burning fields and all that stuff. In the 1900s it began to be driven by oil and the U.S. and Europe. But now it’s sliding over to China and India and coal.”

Tans put things more simply: China’s carbon dioxide emissions had more than doubled between 2000 and 2008 and, given China’s growing demands, if the world doesn’t wake up to the science of global warming and find the political willpower to do something about it, “we’ll all be in deep shit.5 Climate change is upon us,” Tans said, staring at me with steely blue eyes. “The observations show that it’s happening. The temperature is rising, but a lot of other things are happening too.”

“Glaciers are melting like crazy,” Butler said.

“That’s a big feedback,” Tans said, “because there’s a reduced albedo,” the amount of energy reflected from Earth, which is high for things that are light-coloured or white, like snow, and low for everything dark, like open water.

Butler and Tans had recently calculated that since 1990, roughly when Americans began to pay attention to China’s economic growth, the world’s rising greenhouse gas emissions had locked in almost another degree Fahrenheit in temperature increase.6 “It looked like the growth of fossil fuel emissions was levelling off until, say, the twenty-first century, when China really started to take off,” Tans said. “Now they’re already dominating the total emissions and their emissions are increasing at a clip of maybe 7 percent a year. For the Chinese to use as much as we do per capita, we’re going to hit a wall.”

Like Jaffe, the University of Washington chemist, Tans was also concerned about all the other ways China’s growth is rearranging the atmosphere. “Mankind is starting to dominate the global metabolism and the Earth is trying to cope with all of it,” he said.

Butler laughed quietly, as if Tans had just told a good, dark joke. “In 1960, the human population was three billion,” Butler said. “Now we’re almost at seven billion. It’s like we’ve played a game of low-stakes poker but somebody’s been raising the stakes as we go along.

“Now, every hand will take a huge slice out of everything that you’ve worked so hard to earn. It could just go in one hand. The stakes are going up, absolutely.”

This is a book about how China’s rise is changing the physical planet. For many readers the facts about how quickly China has grown since the late 1970s and what that means for the global economy and geopolitics will be familiar, even if we don’t always keep all the facts straight. Many will have heard that China is not only the world’s fastest-growing large economy but that it is the only large economy that has ever sustained such a high growth rate—roughly 10 percent each year for three decades, enough that it has moved from being the world’s tenth-largest economy (in 1979 wedged between the Netherlands and Spain) to its second-largest today.7 Only the United States earns more each year, and much of that is derived from investments and outsourcing, not from actually making anything. Most economists predict that the Middle Kingdom—the direct translation of the Chinese zhongguo—will surpass the United States as the world’s top economy sometime during the next two decades.

We know that with 1.3 billion people (in mid-2011), China is the world’s most populous nation. Before it peaks, its population is expected to reach somewhere between 1.4 and 1.5 billion.

And it takes only a glance at our closets to see China’s manufacturing prowess: the Made-in-China label has become history’s most successful. Largely because of China, we have 99-cent T-shirts and $2.99 action figures and electronics cheap enough that when they break we can simply throw them away and buy new ones. In 2004, Businessweek reported that Chinese manufacturers could generally produce goods for 30 to 50 percent less than American factories, “a big factor in the loss of 2.7 million manufacturing jobs since 2000.”8

It is a testament to China’s rising power that we keep reminding ourselves of these facts.

What we are only beginning to grasp, however, are the great environmental costs of China’s manufacturing success. The problems that are obvious across China—millions of pollution-related deaths, plunging water tables, the eradication of wildlife—are beginning to stretch far beyond its borders to reshape the physical planet: the air we breathe, the health of the oceans and last remaining tracts of untouched forests, the diversity of plants and animals, the climates that shape where and how we live—the very metabolism of our rapidly crowding world.

Consider, for example, China’s growing demand for timber. Until the late 1990s China was largely self-sufficient in timber. Then, in the summer of 1998, heavy rains flooded the Yangtze River, killing more than three thousand people and causing billions of dollars in damages. China’s leaders realised that widespread logging had caused massive erosion and increased runoff, damaging the natural buffers to heavy storms. With the power wielded only by single-party states, Beijing banned logging across most of the nation.

Like squeezing a balloon, that decision forced demand outward and forests began to fall across Asia. Today, most of the natural forests of Southeast Asia are gone. Russia’s—the world’s largest remaining tract of temperate forest—are falling at record speed. China takes growing quantities of African hardwoods: 90 percent of Mozambique’s log exports; 70 percent of exports from Gabon and Cameroon.9 In total, nearly half of all the tropical logs and pulp made from tropical logs, which is traded for use in paper, passes through a Chinese port.10

For most of the last decade, much of that wood—particularly the expensive tropical hardwoods—was churned into furniture and floorboards and exported to richer nations. But now China is beginning to hit its own consumer stride: one recent report found that nine-tenths of wood entering China now ends up in Chinese living rooms or bedrooms or in any of the other places that citizens would rather see wood than concrete or tile.11

Or look at China’s impact on the species that share our planet. With its millennia-old beliefs in natural cures ranging from grasses and leaves to bones and horns, its growing legions of millionaires seeking reminders of the now distant wilderness, and a widespread desire to eat wild animals—itself an outgrowth of traditional beliefs—China has become the world’s biggest and fastest-growing market for illegally traded wildlife.

As with the smuggling of drugs or people, the global wildlife trade is shadowy, but it has pushed many species to the brink of extinction. China, for example, is now the world’s largest market for illegal ivory, rhino horn, and tiger parts.12 Because of demand for an expensive soup, millions of sharks are hunted each year—fishermen cut off their fins and then drop the sharks into the sea to drown. China is also the major consumer of scores of lower-profile species, animals like the pangolin, a loping anteater whose scales some Chinese believe can—after the scales are fried with sand, soaked in water, and ground into paste—be eaten to reduce pain and improve circulation.

How China’s rise has accelerated climate change is more widely known, but amid the steady drumbeat of warnings and political jockeying, we seldom step back to look at the big picture. When experts do, they generally agree that without a stronger Chinese commitment, limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)—the goal of recent international climate accords—will be impossible.

And, of course, China is hitting its stride at a time when the world is already reeling from environmental problems. The Chinese often argue that they are only doing what Western nations have done and, in many cases, continue to do. And behind China, scores of other nations are also growing rich as their people seek the material comforts taken for granted in the West.

Those overlapping layers of history and trade complicate the story and my own journey to realisation was slow. When I first moved to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996, I knew little about the country. I remembered a few history lessons mentioning Mao Zedong and the televised coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. But, largely, China had been a hole in my education. Only its scale impressed me: I sensed that China might play an important role in the twenty-first century and wanted to learn more.

For two years I lived in Pengzhou, a small city in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province that felt isolated from the world. I taught English at a college that trained future high school instructors and, because the classrooms had no heat, my students showed up for winter classes in hats, gloves, and heavy coats.

Like almost everyone in the city, I walked and bicycled everywhere. If I needed to go farther, I flagged down a three-wheeled pedicab that charged a flat rate of 35 cents.13 Internet cafes had yet to open, and I kept in touch with friends by writing letters that took weeks to cross the Pacific. The tallest building in town was a slightly leaning Buddhist pagoda.

Then, in 2003, I moved to Beijing and settled into magazine writing. As I travelled I was often astonished by the changes I saw. China began its era of road building—between 1998 and 2009 more than tripling the length of its highway system—and cars followed. Pengzhou installed its first traffic light just before I left in 1998. When I returned in 2004, its downtown was clogged with traffic.

In Beijing, the changes were more profound. The quiet alleys around the Forbidden City, the old imperial palace at the city’s centre, were torn down at a dizzying pace. Construction workers ripped up bicycle lanes to make room for parking. Changes came so fast that I sometimes got lost. Returning to my apartment from reporting trips, I found whole buildings gone, roads closed, businesses that had ceased to exist or changed owners in a span of days: I would go to a favourite restaurant after a week’s absence and in its place find a hair salon or grocery or toy store.

After a while I grew to expect such transformations. It became more jarring to return to my parents’ home in Massachusetts, where I grew up. On each trip it looked like nothing had changed. The same four-storey plastic cactus still advertised the Hilltop Steakhouse; the sign for the Fern Motel still flickered forlornly along Route 1. It looked as if the United States was standing still while China rushed forward.

As in any monumental change, however, there were costs to China’s rise. Chinese inequality grew to record levels, by some accounts surpassing that of the United States. Conditions in China’s factories and mines might have shocked even Charles Dickens: according to official government statistics, a quarter of a million Chinese have died in coal mines since 1949, a number experts believe greatly underreports the real toll.14 Chinese moving to cities from rural areas were happy to find jobs, but many were also underpaid, overworked, and generally exploited, and I reported on dozens of private tragedies: urban residents forced off their property by corrupt officials, farmers infected with HIV when they sold their blood, activists jailed for demanding greater political freedom.

Among the problems, China’s domestic pollution crisis quickly became the clearest example of the heavy toll the nation is paying for its breakneck growth. Even in the late 1990s, the environmental costs of China’s rise were obvious. As a Peace Corps volunteer I often read on the balcony of my fifth-floor apartment. When the wind blew toward me, it carried so much soot from a nearby factory that particles rolled down each page, leaving thin grey trails. A stream near my apartment was choked with trash and smelled like sewage. After my Chinese improved, I translated the sign on a factory where thick red liquid poured into the channel and learned that it produced thermometers using mercury, a potent neurotoxin that interferes with the brain and nervous system.

Newspapers and reports were also full of dismal facts: only one percent of China’s 560 million urban residents breathed air considered safe by the European Union; a World Bank study found that sixteen of the world’s twenty most polluted cities were Chinese; half of China’s rivers were so polluted that their water could not be used without prohibitively expensive treatment; rain falling in southeastern China had the same acidity as vinegar; China’s groundwater supplies were quickly drying up; every year, deserts were spreading over an area the size of Connecticut.15

The details often were more frightening. Scientists looking at the Songhua River, a waterway stretching across an industrial section of north-eastern China, found mercury levels five times higher than the 1960s concentrations in Japan’s Minamata Bay, where thousands of people were poisoned by mercury pollution.16 During a reporting trip to a small village in central China I talked with farmers who blamed toxic runoff for a surge in cancer deaths—twenty-five people had died over a year and a half, the youngest of them seventeen. The director of the United Nations Development Program’s China office told Chinese officials that the “negative health effects of China’s air pollution and water contamination annually cost China over four hundred thousand lives” and 9 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.17

The statistics were sobering but—as it did with my Chinese friends—the degraded environment became my new normal. The problems were more a curiosity than a concern to the American audience I wrote for, and I learned to live with the pollution. I stayed off my bike when the sky was the colour of wet concrete. I gave up eating fish and swam only in indoor pools.

Then, in 2005, I took a job covering Asia for a chain of newspapers and began to travel across the continent. In country after country I heard how China’s environmental crisis had reached beyond its borders. A college friend in Seoul told me how South Koreans had been forced indoors by a days-long sandstorm that blew in from China. An environmentalist in Phnom Penh worried that Chinese dams were killing Cambodia’s fishing industry. The director of an orangutan orphanage in Indonesian Borneo worried that Chinese demand for lumber could drive wild orangutans to extinction. The United Nations had warned that most of Indonesia’s original forests could be gone by 2022, with lowland jungles falling sooner. Many, possibly most, of those logs were shipped to China.18

I sought out reports about how Chinese demand was driving the poaching and wild collection of everything from elephants and rhinoceros to seahorses and mushrooms, and when a friend forwarded a letter written by Robert Pitman, an ecologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it resonated. Pitman argued that the extinction of a dolphin unique to the Yangtze River was the first case of a large animal ever killed off “merely as an indirect consequence of human activity: a victim of market forces and our collective lifestyle.”19

The loss, Pitman wrote, “is perhaps a view of the future for much of the rest of the world and an indication that the predicted mass extinction is arriving on schedule.” I printed the letter and pinned it to my bookshelf.

As the stories accumulated, I began to see the individual shocks as preludes to larger changes and decided to explore how China’s rise has reconfigured environments around the world. Besides specific impacts, I wanted to find places that provided a glimpse of a future where not only China but also India, Brazil, Russia, and scores of other nations strive for the rich material lives of the West. China—the world’s most populous and fastest-growing nation—seemed like the front edge of a much larger wave of environmental change, and I wanted to understand what its reach says about how we will live on an increasingly crowded, busy planet.

As I began to report, I realised that to answer the central question of journalism—“So what?”—I had to look at how humanity had already rearranged the environment. If China is changing the planet, how healthy was that world to begin with? What was the baseline?

I began to study the history of global environmental change and was reminded that scientists have warned for centuries that we—the now 7-plus billion people of Earth—are approaching physical limits to our exuberant demands. One of the first warnings came from Thomas Robert Malthus, a British scholar who argued in 1798 that the “power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”20

Over the last century, warnings have come more frequently. In 1968, Garrett Hardin, a biologist at the University of California, took Malthus’s argument a step further by popularising a dilemma he called the “tragedy of the commons”. Hardin’s achievement was to recognise that because many of the world’s resources—our atmosphere and oceans are good examples—are shared “commons”, economic logic dictates that people, companies, and nations will relentlessly plunder their wealth. “Therein is the tragedy,” Hardin wrote. “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase . . . without limits—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interests in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”21

A few months after Hardin’s paper was published, the Club of Rome, a group comprising academics, business leaders, and civil servants, met in the Italian capital to kick-start an undertaking they called Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Among other things, the group commissioned scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to model “five basic factors that determine, and therefore, ultimately limit, growth on this planet—population, agricultural production, natural resources, industrial production, and pollution.”

The result was a slim book called The Limits to Growth, which argued that because population was growing exponentially—in 1970 doubling every thirty-three years—and people lived increasingly rich material lives, humanity was due for a rapid reckoning: “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years,” the book warned. “The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”

Environmental optimists point out that such prophesies have not come true. But it is also clear that the speed of change has accelerated, and mainstream environmental institutions have issued increasingly urgent warnings. In 2000, the United Nations convened a four-year effort to take stock of the planet. To “check the accounts,” in their words, they spent $24 million bringing together more than thirteen hundred scientists. Their final report—the “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment”—identified twenty-five critical “ecosystem services” that ranged from the recreational and aesthetic benefits provided by the natural world to the basic health of the land, air, and rivers we rely on to grow and forage for food, collect natural resources, regulate the climate, and replenish drinking water. The experts studied tens of thousands of scientific papers and concluded that sixteen of the twenty-five services were being used at an unsustainable rate.22

The board of directors for the assessment summarised their findings with what they called a “stark warning”: “Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted. . . . In effect, the benefits reaped from our engineering of the planet have been achieved by running down natural capital assets.”

WWF, World Wide Fund for Nature (in the United States and Canada called World Wildlife Fund) issued a similar warning in its 2010 “Living Planet Report”. To measure “changes in the health of the planet’s ecosystems,” they tracked changes in 2,500 animal species. Compared with the 1960s, they recorded a 30 percent drop in the “health of species that are the foundation of the ecosystem services.”23

Another non-profit, the California-based Global Footprint Network, estimated that human demands on the planet’s resources are 50 percent greater than the “regenerative capacity” of those resources. If present growth continues until 2030, “humanity will need the capacity of two Earths to absorb carbon dioxide waste and keep up with natural resource consumption,” the group stated.24

Underpinning the reports is a growing body of research that shows that humanity is using natural resources unsustainably—in ways that deplete them faster than they can be replenished or their wastes safely dealt with. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for example, we have cleared more than one quarter of the world’s original forests and an even larger fraction of its wetlands and plains; set off the world’s sixth great era of extinctions—with losses occurring at a rate scientists consider between one hundred and one thousand times greater than before humans dominated Earth; pumped enough carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to heat the planet by more than one degree Fahrenheit; depleted the oceans to the point that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization classifies more than one-quarter of fish species as “overexploited” or “depleted”; and released billions of tons of toxic and hazardous materials into the air and water.25

According to Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard University biologist famous for his impassioned pleas to protect the natural world, half of the “great tropical forests” have been cleared and as much as half of the world’s plant and animal species may be gone by the end of this century.26

“An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium,” Wilson wrote in The Future of Life. “But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity. . . . The living world is dying; the natural economy is crumbling beneath our busy feet. We have been too self-absorbed to foresee the long-term consequences of our actions, and we will suffer a terrible loss unless we shake off our delusions and move quickly to a solution.”27

The more I read, the more I realised that China is hitting its stride just as the planet is reaching environmental tipping points. And the more I looked at estimates of China’s future growth, the more I came to believe that when historians look back at the twenty-first century, they will see China’s greatest impact not as economic or political but as environmental. They are likely to judge China’s history by how it has changed the physical world.

To get a sense of how much China’s demands will grow, it is important to remember that despite the nation’s rising riches, most of its people remain poor. In 2011, China’s average per capita earnings were less than $4,000, one-eleventh of the U.S. average.28 And, as in the United States, those earnings are unequally distributed: hundreds of millions of Chinese still lack the basic material goods taken for granted in the West—single-family apartments or homes, vehicles, televisions, washing machines, dishwashers, and all the other things that comfortable consumers enjoy.

To get a sense of how far China still has to go, it helps to compare an average Chinese citizen with a typical American. The average American is responsible for 13,647 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year—enough to run 136,470 one-hundred-watt lightbulbs simultaneously for one hour. He (or she) uses 933 gallons of crude oil and 2,156 cubic metres of natural gas. He is responsible for roughly 18 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions and eats 107 kilograms of meat. He almost certainly owns a car. Every day, he throws away two kilograms of trash.29

The average Chinese citizen, by comparison, looks as green as a Vermont wind farm. She (or he) uses just 18 percent of the American’s electricity demand, one-tenth of his oil demand, and less than 5 percent of his natural gas demand. She is responsible for less than one-third of the American’s carbon dioxide emissions and—even though Chinese demand has more than doubled in recent years—eats half as much meat as her American counterpart. China surpassed the United States as the world’s largest auto market in 2010, but odds are high that she does not own a car. (In 2008, only one in twenty-eight Chinese owned a motor vehicle.)30

The relatively eco-friendly lifestyle of Chinese citizens, however, is more a product of China’s economic stage than of green-minded choices and—for better and (mostly) worse—their lives will increasingly look like ours.

This, then, is not just a book about China. It is also about what it means that billions of people—the Chinese and, close behind them, Indians, Russians, Brazilians, and the rest of the people of the developing world—are beginning to achieve the rich material lifestyles enjoyed in Western nations. To write it I have had to grapple with several intellectual complexities. The first problem was how to fit China into a history of environmental change driven largely by the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia, and the rest of today’s wealthy countries. To deal with that issue, I chose to include history about how biodiversity, the world’s forests, and the climate fared over the twentieth century, background that provides context for China’s rise and reminds us that the environmental changes we are seeing now were created over generations.

A more difficult problem was that, in this globalised age, it is impossible to entirely disentangle China’s environmental reach. The Chinese, for example, buy most of the tiger pelts and bones funnelled by poachers from India. But tigers are also at risk because of increasing conflict with encroaching society: Indian farmers who clear forests don’t like wild cats stalking their livestock; hunters kill off many of the species that tigers feed on.

Likewise, China is the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases, but roughly a third of those emissions are created for the production of export goods.31 Since almost all of the money made in exporting the products goes to foreign companies that own the factories and stores and to middlemen who shuttle the goods around the globe, and since the products end up in the hands of foreigners, who benefit from their low prices, can we really say that China is responsible? Shouldn’t Western consumers share the blame?

Instead, I began to think of China as a combustive agent. Thrown into the already churning global stew, China has brought our combined productivity to a rapid boil and touched off countless unexpected reactions. I wanted to trace those distant, global combustions back to their internal sparks and began to think of the project as a planet-sized chemistry experiment: How will a growing Chinese economy force ever larger changes? Where will they happen? What will our world look like if and when they burn themselves out?

To make those connections, I travelled to places where China’s consumptive reach is clear, and found that in our globalised world it is possible to trace the impact of supply and demand, cause and effect. Along the way I began to ask questions that are harder to answer: Why would it matter if the last wild tiger is killed? Beyond storing carbon and protecting against floods, what is the value of an untouched forest? Since the world’s poor will suffer the worst impacts of climate change, what will make the rich care, given a history of neglect? Can we convince Chinese, Indians, Russians, and the people of other developing nations that they can’t take from the natural world the way Americans and Europeans have? Can we convince the world’s wealthy to scale back their demands because, in a finite world with finite resources, we are running out of margin? What is a fair balance?

In the end I was simply amazed at how much China has raised our global metabolism. Everywhere I went people said the same thing. There was the port worker on the north coast of Papua New Guinea who threw his arm toward the Pacific, as if casting a stone at China, to show where a huge pile of blood-red logs was headed. In Colorado, a shop owner smiled when I asked if she thought the community might have a second renaissance: “China’s going to need a lot more coal,” she said. In Copenhagen, an environmental activist was downbeat: “China is showing no leadership on climate change,” he said, “so we’re doomed.”

At the end of my journey I saw China’s domestic environmental crisis as a warning of what a world brimming with productive people might look like. We have managed to develop our global economy to great riches. People in rich nations live in ways people never dreamed about even a generation ago. We did those things, arguably, without tripping too many ecological barriers.

But China is the crest of a second, greater wave of demand that will play out—faster and faster—over the coming decades, and the fears expressed by generations of scientists may well be realised. Perhaps a few decades from now we will be struggling to survive on a hot, denuded, degraded planet. Or maybe we will address the problems before they grow too large. Beijing’s leaders are capable of swift political acts and, at least for climate change, it seems possible that they will bring us together to save what’s left.

Either way, it is time to confront arguably the century’s most important questions: Can we save our last old-growth forests? Can we protect the greater community of species? Is there a way to live in a crowded, busier world without pushing the thermostat past critical thresholds? What, even, is at stake?

To answer those questions we must first confront the elephant in the room—China. And to do that, we must start at the beginning.