Blue and Green

One thing that hit us as a bit of a shock coming to Singapore (and returning to China as well) was the color of the landscape. The sky was blue and leaves were green! This was in opposition to our area of China, where the sky is usually grey and the leaves are greenish grey. Part of the greyness is due to geography - Sichuan lies in a natural basin bordered by the foothills of the Himalayas, and clouds and fog tend to form as the warm humid air from the basin meets the cooler air coming down from the mountains.

Most of the grey, however, comes from other sources. For example, here is a picture of the tree right outside the entrance to our apartment:



As you can see, everything outside is usually covered by a layer of brownish grit. (The green stripe on the center leaf is where I rubbed off the dirt for comparison.) Cars are gritty, windows are gritty, busses are gritty, even stray cats are gritty. Our plastic clothes hangars upon which we hang our clean clothes to dry - on a pole with a loop on the end outside our back window - get gritty, as Jane discovered, much to her dismay in November. Imagine our “clean” clothes. Everything that stays outside for any length of time gets covered with a thin film of pollution.

As we were traveling and told other Westerners whom we met about our observations of Chinese pollution, most people’s reaction was something along the lines of “and exactly why do people live in such a polluted country?” Indeed, there are times that we ask ourselves the same question. It’s very easy living here as an American to be more than a bit smug about how (relatively) clean the air is back home. Even in the relatively polluted West Side of Chicago, where we lived for a couple of years, if you hang a white sheet outside to dry for a couple of days, chances are that it will remain white.

But to simply hack and cough and bash China for the pollution it creates misses the point. Those of you in America right now - take a minute to find any small plastic household item worth less than $50 nearby. Really, go ahead. I’ll wait. (Yes, I’m doing an incredible web based remote mind reading trick here.) Now, take a minute to focus on that item, and look for a label. Keep the label in your mind, counting slowly to ten and focusing on your browser window. Did that label happen to say, ummmmmm, lets see... Made In China? Am I good, or what?

Seriously, are you still holding on to that doohickey? If you are, you’re looking at an example of an item with externalized costs. Because if you make something that you can ship across the Pacific Ocean and sell it for less than fifty bucks and still make money on it, I can almost guarantee you that you’re doing some serious polluting while making that item, and most of that pollution is staying in China. And my guess is that China, because it has 1.3 billion people who all would rather live with severe pollution than the severe poverty of the last couple of generations, is willing to keep our pollution around for a little bit longer...