The Independent (UK) regales us with Huge dust cloud threatens Asia:
Gigantic dust clouds swirling over China are threatening the world's most populous country with the first-ever "ecological meltdown", experts here warn.I hesitate to ask, but who's to blame?
The clouds - which stretch for thousands of miles over Asia and have even reached across the Pacific to North America - are rising from a rapidly growing dust bowl in northern China that far outstrips the notorious one in the United States in the 1930s.
It threatens to drive up the price of food and greatly increase starvation worldwide, and could lead to tens of millions of desperate Chinese environmental refugees.
"No country has ever faced a potential ecological catastrophe on the scale of the dust bowl now developing in China," says Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington. "Merely grasping its dimensions and consequences poses a serious analytical challenge."
The institute blames "over-cultivation, overgrazing, over-cutting and over-pumping" for the escalating catastrophe. Marginal land is being increasingly pressed into cultivation, but quickly turns to dust under the strain. The country's 290 million sheep and goats strip the vegetation off grazing lands. Cutting down forests removes the trees that bind soil to the ground. And excessive pumping of water from underground acquifers dramatically lowers water tables, drying out the earth.It wasn't my pickup truck! I'm so glad.
As the crisis continues, Mr Brown predicts, the world will soon feel the pinch. So far China has compensated for its falling harvests by eating stocks, but soon it will have to buy massive amounts of grain on world markets. He warns: "Grain prices could double - impoverishing more people in a shorter period of time than any event in history. It would create a world food economy dominated by scarcity rather than by surpluses, as has been the case over most of the last half a century."The tune seems familiar, but the words are slightly different.
