Meltdown in Tibet
China's Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia
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- ¥1,400
発行者による作品情報
Tibetans have experienced waves of genocide since the 1950s. Now they are facing ecocide. The Himalayan snowcaps are in meltdown mode, due to climate change—accelerated by a rain of black soot from massive burning of coal and other fuels in both China and India. The mighty rivers of Tibet are being dammed by Chinese engineering consortiums to feed the mainland's thirst for power, and the land is being relentlessly mined in search of minerals to feed China's industrial complex. On the drawing board are plans for a massive engineering project to divert water from Eastern Tibet to water-starved Northern China. Ruthless Chinese repression leaves Tibetans powerless to stop the reckless destruction of their sacred land, but they are not the only victims of this campaign: the nations downstream from Tibet rely heavily on rivers sourced in Tibet for water supply, and for rich silt used in agriculture. This destruction of the region's environment has been happening with little scrutiny until now. In Meltdown in Tibet, Michael Buckley turns the spotlight on the darkest side of China's emergence as a global super power.
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Reports of worldwide environmental degradation rarely mention the remote Tibetan plateau, but journalist and travel writer Buckley rectifies this omission with his detailed, dismal account of the damage there. For decades after its 1950 invasion of the region, China concentrated on suppressing traditional Tibetan culture, social structure, and religion (most visibly by destroying temples). But during the country's market revolution in the 1980s, the Chinese turned their focus to the area's material resources. Although the sources of most great Asian waterways are found in Tibet, Chinese-built mega-dams have caused rivers to dry up and deltas to shrink, while extensive mining operations have polluted other channels. The Chinese government banned logging virgin forest around the Yangtze's Tibetan headwaters after "massive soil erosion" produced a disastrous flood in 1998. Observers praised China for simultaneously designating an astounding 33% of the Tibetan region as nature reserves, though Buckley demonstrates that such actions have proven to be entirely for show; the creation of these nature reserves is a legal fiction that allows authorities to displace native Tibetans so that mining, logging, and dam building can proceed. Objections from the United Nations, other international organizations, and even Chinese citizens have had little effect, and Buckley's obligatory solution in the concluding chapter will encourage only the most optimistic reader.
