Conquering the world and changing it, I do not think it can succeed.
The world is a sacred vessel that cannot be changed. He who changes it will destroy it. He who seizes it will lose it.
Never take over the world to tamper with it. Those who want to tamper with it are not fit to take over the world.
Years ago, in Kenya, we were told by locals that many villages had lost their dog and cat populations due to Chinese workers. Why? The roads we were driving on, too narrow and not very well built, had been built by the Chinese who were eating them. Hundreds of miles of roads. Roads which were being made all over the world by cheap labor. Roads which have increased globalization and commerce everywhere on Earth. Today in China, there has been a crackdown on dog meat consumption. The same needs to happen with all species all over the world. The recent news that Vietnam will ban the import of wildlife is a major victory for endangered species everywhere. It should be emulated by neighboring countries in Southeast Asia. Humanity’s consumer habits from our feed lots in the U.S., to wet markets in the Orient have had an immense impact ecologically and are exacerbating climate change the planet over.
China is doing what it can for improving industrial emissions with an “iron fist,” but its emissions were literally the main contribution to climate change over the last several decades. The coronavirus, which originated in China because of her wet markets, forced her emissions to decrease by about a quarter. But pollution will rise again perhaps even beyond where it was six months ago. China’s behemoth industrial growth has come at a tremendous cost to the planet. All the solar energy and renewable projects at China’s command will not reverse what is causing the coral die off on the Great Barrier Reef and the melting ice cap in the Arctic and now Antarctica.
Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, China has decided to ban the consumption of most wildlife, but this measure is very hard to verify. It is a $20 billion a year business. This measure adopted by the National People’s Congress a few months ago is late in coming but it is an urgent and most necessary one given the state of the environment. It is meant to revise regulations on wildlife trade, ban live markets, pass stricter penalties and better enforce laws and educate the public about wildlife. All this comes at a most needed time. In the past China has had a huge appetite for many species.
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The next pandemic may come from the jungles of Indonesia or the Amazon, but there are hints of another pandemic flu stirring among pigs in China right now. This one could be even more deadly. China seems to have had serious problems with animals, both the domestic edible kind which are raised in abominable conditions and wild animals across the world, some of which are on their last legs thanks to the Asian behemoth. China’s black market syndicates and illegal wildlife traders have endangered wildlife populations everywhere.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List contains 1,440 species of fish and 301 mammals at risk from extinction, including 168 primates, 73 hoofed animals, 27 bats and 12 carnivores.
As the South China Morning Post has emphasized, China has gone from being the world’s biggest producer to its biggest consumer. Its cultural yen for exotic animals has driven a good portion of the extinction crisis, especially when it comes to megafauna. But even birds as exquisite as the yellow-throated bunting could also be lost because people believe it can detoxify and boost sexual prowess.
Photo credit: Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson
During the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, according to Stuart Pimm at Duke, “damage to watersheds was massive.” Waterways and lakes and rivers were polluted beyond recognition. In fact, the first cetacean in our time to have probably disappeared forever is the freshwater dolphin species, the baiji, endemic to China in the Yangtze River. The white dolphin population has dropped to less than 50 individuals as of last year. The smallest cetacean on earth, only 3 feet long, the vaquita which numbered in the thousands in the Gulf of Mexico, may number no more than a few dozen (which the film “The Sea of Shadows” makes abundantly clear). The gene pool may very well be too low to save that most diminutive of all cetacean species on Earth. Their food, the totoaba, was relished for years by smuggling rings for their swim bladders, so prized, that the fish was called “aquatic cocaine.” Each bladder worth more than $45,000, is thought to treat fertility and circulatory problems. Now that the totoaba has been decimated, so too has the vaquita. Let us hope some measure of sanity at the last minute can stop the illegal trade and that the vaquita can be saved from extinction, although a genetically salvageable population may no longer be possible. All in the name of superstition and profit.
In 1989 China’s wildlife protection law indicated that wildlife was to be a resource for human use. In 2016 it was amended to underline that wildlife can be used specifically for medicine. But who qualifies animal products as being effective? And while most Chinese medicine contains no wildlife products, the conditions of its Asiatic black or moon bear farms are horrific. How many bears in bear farms have had to suffer in horrific caged conditions for the purposes of having their bile extracted and having a steel catheter stuck through the bears’s abdomen into their gallbladders, in cramped cages, for bile extraction?
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The great freshwater paddlefish, which used to grow to 7 meters may have gone extinct in the last few months. The Chinese penchant for shark fin soup, which has decimated entire populations of shark worldwide, has only recently been addressed, dropping 80 percent in the last decade but other countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia , Myanmar and Vietnam have made up for the wholesale slaughter once commandeered by the Chinese and which cause tens of millions of different shark species to be killed every year. The menace continues as sharks are consumed in Brazil, Uruguay, Britain, Italy and Spain where most consumers do not even know they are eating shark products. Although celebrity voices such as Jackie Chan and Yao Ming along with WildAid have been instrumental in changing attitudes towards the rampant destruction of sharks, other countries ought to shut down their markets as well. Now is the time to stop the market for shark fins while we still can. The entire immune system of the seas is at stake. Recently a boat just off the Galapagos was seized with 30 tons of fish, from an ecosystem already seriously impacted by tourism. The culprits? Chinese fishermen.
As most people know, the second largest species on Earth, the northern white rhino, could be lost any year now. The rhino horn trade was mostly fueled by China and Vietnam. The immense slaughter of the elephant last decade was instigated by China. One-third of the world’s population, more than 130,000 were destroyed by the hunger for ivory by the rising middle class of that country. Most Chinese interviewed insisted they did not know that elephants had to be murdered for their teeth. They thought their tusks simply fell off!
Photo credit: Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson
One of the 10 most endangered mammals on earth, the tiger, is probably gone in the wilds of China and is still being targeted in India and other Asian range countries by black marketeers, many from China. After pressure to save the tiger, China increased its tiger reserve size from 10,000 square kilometers to 40,000 square kilometers in its northern border with Russia. Lately the Chinese have shown interest in poaching three other predators that are increasingly being targeted — the jaguar, the leopard and the lion. An increase in jaguar poaching for its teeth is affecting both Central and South America. Leopards, which many thought one of the less vulnerable of the felines, are also being targeted for their bones. As many as several thousand every year are being shot. Poaching is also one of the greatest threats to the lion’s long term survival in Africa. Passing off lion bones as tiger bones for tiger wine in China, which takes years to create and which has a high alcoholic content, supposedly strengthens the blood and alleviates pain. This is a superstition, and a kind of fantasy the world can no longer tolerate. The greatest predator in Africa and its cousin in Asia cannot be lost for beliefs which belong to the Medieval Ages.
A platoon of smaller animals such as the Chinese pangolin, golden snub-nosed monkey, the black necked crane and dozens of others continue to be threatened by her animal markets and the illegal wildlife trade.
China could and should become a superpower for conservation. She has decided to protect 18 percent of her territory meeting targets for the Convention on Biological Diversity. The temporary ban on wet markets, which are spread throughout China, needs to become permanent. The world with this pandemic has been thrown into a tizzy by short sighted practices and a penchant for exotic animals like bats or pangolins coming from Africa which may have been the source animals for the pandemic. It is time development and so called progress took backseat to conservation because now even the health of China’s 1.4 billion citizens are very much at stake and not just the rest of the world. China has turned into an advocate for wild animals, but it is very late in the game. She needs to do as much for animals outside her borders as she wants to do now for the environment inside her boundaries.
While 97 percent of the Chinese population is supposedly against eating meat, a full 78 percent are also against using animal parts such as fur and body parts for medicine. When it comes to rare and endangered species, we have reached the time when cultural norms, tastes, and inclinations for a certain cuisine and palate, need to be transcended.
Even in terms of the affable and utterly innocent donkey, a domestic species used for chores by farmers all over Kenya, hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered, their skin made into a gelatinous mix, to meet China’s miracle elixir appetite. Not the kind of commercial venture one should be proud of. The miraculous find in 2017 of the Tapanuli Orangutan in northern Sumatra, was wondrous not only for Indonesia but for evolutionary history. But there are only about 800 left and their population will be seriously impacted by the dam the Chinese are building. Cutting their population in two means less resilience for the already small population of these incredible apes in the future.
Photo credit: Getty Images
The highest price ever paid for a whole polar bear trophy was $100,000. The buyer was Chinese. Besides the melting ice, trophy hunters including Americans, Canadians, Europeans and Chinese are threatening the future of the great ice bear of the Arctic. China needs to clamp down on illicit markets while these irreplaceable beings still walk the Earth. So many resources have gone to feed the largest country on Earth whether for actual food or vanity coming from animal parts. WildAid’s instrumental campaign, “No Trading, No Killing,” operational in China since 2006, has worked with ambassadors, actors, athletes and business leaders to increase nationwide awareness about endangered species. As the UN General Secretary Guterres has underscored, for humanity to recover from the coronavirus should be the decision to put nature where it belongs, “at the heart of our decision making.” China too can make “Environmental rights as a part of its Constitution” like Ecuador and India as Pimm exclaims, if it so chooses. Humanity must seriously downsize her consumption of nature. With her enormous appetite China has a huge role to play in how she regulates her environment and responds to the environmental crisis. She has made great strides inside her country and should help others do the same especially in forested areas whose wildlife could lead to zoonotically inspired diseases in the future.
A coal plant like the planned coal factory in the Sunderbans in Bangladesh is being paid largely by China. A UNESCO plan to give World Heritage status to this largest mangrove forest in the world with a population of several hundred very endangered tigers was denied. The Chair of the World Heritage Committee is China.
The recent violation by as many as 900 Chinese fishing vessels, “dark fleets,” that don’t appear on surveillance systems, in North Korean waters, have decimated the squid population, catching 160,000 metric tons, worth half a billion dollars over the last few years. This is not just an abrogation of maritime law but also endangering the marine ecosystem of North Korean waters.
It is time we made ecocide an international crime. China should use her enormous clout to continue to fight the illegal wildlife trade, preserve what is left of Nature, and increase her moral agency inside her country and especially worldwide in this most defining decade.
Learn more about Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson’s work at their website.
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