In the Western tradition, the term “wilderness” evokes an image of an idyllic and pristine landscape filled with lush plant life and an abundance of animal species. According to Vance Martin, president of the WILD Foundation, this conception of wilderness, even in conservation areas, leaves out a critical species: humans.

Spreading manure on crops recycles the nutrients, but as it decomposes it releases methane. And lots of it. Agriculture is the largest source of methane emissions globally. Each year, methane from livestock manure has the warming equivalent of 240 million tons of carbon dioxide, or the same as the annual emissions from 52 million cars.

On March 20, the lawsuit filed by the three organizations successfully blocked the construction of the Jiasajiang I Hydropower Station in Yunnan Province, meaning that at least for now, these long-legged endangered birds are safe. This environmental victory for China’s birds builds on the designation of some of China’s Migratory Bird Sanctuaries along the coast of the Yellow Sea-Bohai Gulf as UNESCO World Heritage sites in July 2019, with more planned in the next two to three years. However, these highpoints in avian protection do not negate the fact that nearly 40 percent of China’s endemic birds are listed as threatened and require greater protection.

I saw plastic greenhouses as far as the eye can see from the train as I traveled across Shandong Province to visit the Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Ninety percent of the world’s plastic greenhouses are in China, covering 3.3 million hectares, about the area of Maryland, with the majority in Shandong.

China is one of the “thirstiest” countries in the world with a per capita water availability a quarter of the United States. With population, pollution, and water shortages growing unabatedly, reclaimed water (e.g., treating wastewater to drinking water standards) could be the answer to China’s water insecurity. In China, extensive research in the 1980s into water reclamation and urban investments supporting infrastructure in the 2000s sparked production capacity in the country to rise from 63 billion gallons a day to 236 billion gallons per day between 2009 to 2015. Today, however, reclaimed water is a mere drop in the bucket meeting less than 1 percent of total urban water use. China could look to the tiny Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore to learn how it tapped reclaimed water to turn its water-scarce tiny island into a high-tech hydrohub. 

In 2017, the Green Volunteer League of Chongqing, an environmental NGO, filed a suit against China’s three biggest food delivery companies—Meituan, Baidu, and Ele.me—for damaging the environment by generating excessive waste. Specifically, these three e-commerce platforms provided consumers with single-use chopsticks that consumed 6,700 trees every day as well as massive amounts of plastic containers, bags, and utensils. Today, over 400 million Chinese are regular users of food delivery. Since summer 2019, daily app use for Meituan was over 30 million orders, generating 100 million plastic containers every day—enough to carpet 360 football fields.