Rubble rubble everywhere....

As much as I love travelling through China and find it a mesmerizing place, there is one thing that I find really troubling. It is impossible (ok, very difficult) to find any place that has not been disturbed by humans in some manner. Rob and I first talked about this in terms of soil disturbance, and I thought it would be nearly impossible to find a truly well-developed natural soil profile, except in really remote areas. This doesn't apply to all parts of China, but there is a stunning lack of natural landscape. Even places set aside as parks or preserves tend to be groomed or landscaped, as Kate pointed out about the Stone Forest.

And it's not just the clearing or land that is disturbing. If the land isn't being farmed or is built upon, then it's generally covered in rubble. Rubble, rubble everywhere. Bricks, broken rocks, bits of scrap building material - everywhere. I went to a small village on the banks of the Yangtze a few years ago where at least they were growing watermelons amongst the rubble, but in most places it's just piled up waiting for who-knows-what.

China recycles!

One of the things that struck me in China was the level to which the country recycles. While we may do household recycling in North America, the Chinese take it one step further. Garbage bins in major cities have two sides to them, one for garbage and one for recyclables. Mind you, with the need to drink bottled water in China they must go through a huge number of plastic bottles annually. There is apparently a refund for them too, as in many places you see people collecting them from users, or pulling them out of the recycling bins.

I don't have a photo of the two-sided bins, but this one from Beijing is more interesting.

Another great internet resource

I came across this website that has links to lots of information concerning China's environment. It doesn't look to have been updated in a while, but still a great link.

Lijiang: Is it real?

Lijiang is becoming one of China's most favored tourist sites, but it wasn't always so. Tourism has boomed since the city was placed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1997. Quite the dramatic turnaround for the city, considering it was seriously damaged in a 1996 earthquake (and 309 of its county citizens killed).

But I really wonder how much of the old part of the city is real and how much has been reconstructed. Searching the internet, I found articles (here, here and here) that discuss the damage. Many reports and tour guides indicate that the older structures in the historic part of town withstood the earthquake quite well, while more modern construction suffered more damage. But looking at these articles it is obvious that damage was widespread, old and new, and a map (Figure 8 in this article) shows a significant number of deaths in the old part of town.

So how much has been rebuilt into the tourist draw that it is today? I saw sections at the periphery of the "old town" that were being constructed to look old. I also noticed that the canals running through the old town had large drains in their beds, like western manhole covers. Lijiang is called the "Little Venice of the Orient", but I'll bet Venice doesn't have drains in its canals. That to me points to a rather unnatural, yet very aesthetically pleasing, canal system, but also raises the question of authenticity. Certainly still worth a visit though!

Tiger Leaping Gorge: Another Megadam?

Rob's post below looks at the area around the megadam that everyone seems to know about - the Three Gorges Dam. Construction there started in 1994 and will only be completed in 2009, with the final rise in water level to 175m above sea level. That's a total rise of almost 80 m in sections close to the dam. That one's a done deal, with most of the construction and relocation already complete. But what the world doesn't really know about are the plans to dam the Yangtze 1500 km further upstream, in the famous Tiger Leaping Gorge of Yunnan Province. This dam would be purely for energy production, as the site is upstream of the traditional navigable Yangtze.

It's really hard to get accurate information about these dam plans. We heard several different versions from people we met, ranging from a huge single dam to a series of 8 smaller dams through the 25 km long gorge. Note that the Times Online has an article suggesting the single dam approach would yield a dam 278 m high and a reservoir almost 200 km long. An Asia Times article written also written in 2006 suggests the 8 dam plan is in the works.

Hiking through the gorge with the class gave me the opportunity to look at the area and roughly estimate it's suitability for such a dam and reservoir. As a geology professor and wannabe geotechnical engineer, it's the stuff I love to do.

First off, the rock is fairly fractured schist in the middle gorge, and fractured marble at the gorge exit where the dam would be. Not the most stable rock to be building on. I managed to find a tunnel near Walnut Grove that researchers had obviously excavated in order to look at fracturing in the marble. There are a lot of other obvious signs that geotechnical testing is underway. As I see it, one of the biggest challenges for the dam builders would be the issue of landslides. Landslide debris is found throughout the gorge, and the only road through the gorge is currently blocked by three large slides. The entire village of Walnut Grove is situated on an old landslide perhaps 2 km wide. Saturating the banks of the gorge when the water level is raised further weakens the strength of the rock, so if this many landslides are happening now, it doesn't bode well for the post-dam gorge.

So why should we care about landslides in the area, especially if they plan to move most of the people out of there? Check out the Vajont disaster that killed 1,450 people in Italy when a landslide triggered a huge wave that overtopped the dam and inundated the town below. The largest waves in the world have all been triggered by landslides into open water. If they build this dam, I wouldn't think it safe to keep any people in the valley, even if your house and land are above the new water level.

Oh yeah, the epicenter of the 1996 magnitude 7.2 Lijiang earthquake was actually in Tiger Leaping Gorge. Not good.

Life on the Yangtze

(Cross posted at Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk, where I've been posting general travelogue stuff, rather than philosophical reflections.)

Like the St. Lawrence, the Yangtze is not really a river, but a "seaway," with all aspects of the river ecosystem pushed out by the needs of shipping. You don't see many people fishing on the river. This visit I only saw one fishing boat, although last time, when I spend more time and covered a longer stretch of the river I saw more. Mostly what you see is this:



Coal, the blood of the current Chinese economy. Small hoppers of coal line the banks of the Yangtze. Dump trucks bring the coal, typically from small, independently run mines with poor safety standards. The kind of mining disaster that makes national news for weeks if it happens in West Virginia happens every day in China.

Concrete reinforced banks add a lot to the sense that the Yangtze is a highway.



To deal with erosion after the flooding caused by the new dam, the government put nets over the steeper banks of the river and coated them with concrete. Most of this will be under water when the dam is fully operational. In case you forget how high the water will be by then, there are constant reminders



Officially, the flooding has forced the resettlement of 1.1 million people, including 13 major cities and about 25 thousand hectares of farmland. (This according to the handy yellow technical guide given to tourists by the government.) Most of these people are moved to brand new relocation cities built a little farther up the river bank. About 10% are moved to entirely new provinces. The consensus seems to be that those 10% are totally fucked.

The relocation cities are quite a sight. They all have built docks at 175 m. above sea level, but since the river isn't there yet, you see huge foundations of the docks.



This is the dock for Fengjie. For some reason water was gushing down the side.



Since the river hasn't reached the permanent dock, temporary docks were built and the current level. Generally there is no way to get from the dock to the city other than climbing a buttload of stairs.



Out student Kate was traveling with a broken leg, which made the steps loathsome. Fortunately for Kate the oversupply of labor in China sometimes meant that she had alternative ways to travel.

Stone Forest revisited

My second visit to the Stone Forest of Yunnan was markedly different from the first. In 2005 I visited the area while researching an article on geological parks in China. Our guide for that trip was a geologist, and we met with the park geology staff and several academics conducting research in the area. The article (in Focus on Geography: Winter 2006) described the park and its educational efforts in somewhat glowing terms. Yet, I think I really was seeing the park through the eyes of a geologist, not one of the masses of tourists.

Our group visit in May 2007 was as tourists. We gave no advance warning and there was no party of cadres ready at the gate to answer all of our questions. Hoards of tourists were milling about, all seemingly refusing to progress more than 200 m inside the park. They stayed on the paths and many were carted around in open-air buses. Typical Chinese tourism some might say, take photos where told and don't really experience the park, just tick it off your checklist to tell the folks back home. I had a feeling of depression, knowing that off the beaten path was a wonderfully strange geological site, yet none of the visitors seemed to grasp that. Nor were they interested.

Part of the mandate of World Geoparks is that they must promote geological heritage education. There certainly are informative signs scattered about the park. But, there are no guidebooks available to the general public, and the location of the museum remained a bit of a mystery (none of the guides knew of its existence). In 2005 the park officials were eager to mention a new geological museum was under construction, although we didn't see it. Apparently not many people do in 2007 either!

Once again it seems that mass tourism has trumped educational tourism. Or is it just that the culture of tourism differs in the east?