Tai Lake is the embodiment of China’s losing fight against pollution, environmental degradation and unsustainable life out of balance.
The vast lake is clearly dead.
The whole lake district is smelly like an abattoir.
The lake shore is caked over with toxic blue-green algae.
The stench is overpowering like an overwhelming toxic and deadly stench, like a chemistry lab make of cyanide, almonds and rotten fish eggs mixed with manure and burning tires.
If you go on a boat, where the algae is more diluted but equally fueled by pollution, it swirls with the currents, a vast network of green tendrils across the surface of Tai Lake. The signs of death are everywhere…
Anoxic water is all the lake has left now after the algae blooms…
Such pollution problems are now widespread in China after three decades of unbridled economic growth. But what’s surprising about Tai Lake is the money and attention that’s been spent on the problem and how little either has accomplished. Some of the country’s highest-ranking leaders, including Premier Wen Jiabao, have declared it a national priority.
Billions of dollars have been poured into the cleanup.
And yet, the lake is still dead.
A dead mess.
Money can’t fix all the problems as this lake proves again and again.
The water remains undrinkable, the fish gone, the fetid smell lingering over villages and the people are gone too now.
All across the mainland PRC that is the truth. Even the government said that, despite stricter rules, pollution is rising again across the country in key categories such as emissions of sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain. And just months before, the government had revealed that water pollution was more than twice as severe as previous official figures had shown.
At Tai Lake, part of the problem is that the same industrial factories poisoning the water also transformed the region into an economic powerhouse. Shutting them down, local leaders say, would destroy the economy overnight. In fact, many of the factories shut down during the 2007 scandal have since reopened under different names, yet in the same locations and with the same practices.
To prove a lake is dead, the best sign of all, is the fact that almost every city on said lake has been finding other sources of drinking water. The water supply projects, away from the lake are costly but seldom publicized, and indicate that even as local authorities devote billions to repairing the lake, few believe it will recover.
“The fear is that once these cities no longer depend on the lake for drinking water, the urgency will disappear,” said Ma Jun, director of the non-governmental Institute of Public and Environmental Policy.
Back in 2007, pollutants in the lake produced record amounts of toxic algae. Local authorities were forced to declare the lake undrinkable, leaving more than 2 million people without potable water. The price of bottled water shot up sixty-fold in a few days.
As Tai Lake became a national scandal, hundreds of industrial plants were shut down, local officials were dismissed, and billions of dollars were committed to clean it up. It became part of the new nationwide push to tackle air quality, forest preservation and water pollution. All in tandem. Yet the lake suffered further ignominies…
All though vast money was spend on doubtful cures, the lake’s health has deteriorated further. Progress since then, has proved really elusive. By some standards, the lake has improved in the face of it. The level of nitrogen and phosphorus – ingredients for algae growth – have decreased slightly. By others measures, such as overall water quality, the lake has gotten worse.
People treat it as a dead lake. That says something surely…
According to government statistics published this Summer, almost 85 percent of the lake was put in the worst possible category for water quality, unsuitable for drinking, irrigation or even recreation. Might as well have said it’s dead…. Yet they call it critical.
Across the country, modest environmental progress in recent years has seen similar signs of worsening as environmental concerns have taken a back seat in the recent the economic recovery.
Yours,
Pano
PS:
The story of Tai Lake is a story of high-level optimistic promises and all political levels forgetfulness.
A story of lower-level inaction and attachment to development over Life.
A story of the struggle between economic interests and environmental ones.
And it is an illustration of China’s awkward relationship with environment.
It’s a story of the winners and losers in the struggle.
A story of environmental activists, who challenge the government’s authority and practice active Civil disobedience at their personal cost, but are in reality the loudest force pushing
the government’s environmental priorities.
Pushing and agitating where it matters the most.
Right on the lake and at the local level.
This is the story of Tai lake.
The lake of the white swans is no more,
and that is it’s story…
At the end of the day it’s a story of Nature Mort
