Breathing Air with Heft: an Experiential Report on Environmental Law and Public Health in China
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RYAN Breathing Air with Heft: An Experiential Report on Environmental Law and Public Health in China —Erin Ryan* This article explores the gritty intersections of daily life and environmental law in modern China, an industrial powerhouse still struggling to reconcile economic opportunity with breathable air, clean water, healthy food, and safe products. With comparative perspective on analogous challenges in the United States, it reports on these critical domestic challenges for China at a pivotal moment in its reemergence as a dominant world power. China’s continued geopolitical rise may well hinge on its ability to respond successfully to the environmental causes of growing social unrest. In 2011, in the midst of this maelstrom, I brought my husband, young son, and elderly mother to spend a year living in China while I taught American law and studied Chinese environmental governance as a Fulbright Scholar. In our small two-bedroom apartment, we lived like a typical Chinese family—with three generations and an only child—and we struggled with the environmental challenges that nearly all Chinese families manage, from boiling tap water to breathing some of the most polluted air in human history. The experience of * Erin Ryan, Elizabeth C. & Clyde W. Atkinson Professor, Florida State University College of Law; J.D., Harvard Law School; M.A., Wesleyan University *ethnomusicology); B.A. Harvard University (East Asia-China). A project of this scope requires many thanks. I am grateful to the U.S.-China Fulbright program and the Chinese Ministry of Education for enabling my year in China, and to the students and faculty at the Ocean University of China for so openly sharing their world with me. I also thank the University of Chicago and Tsinghua University for bringing me back five years later. I thank Bob Percival, Alex Wang, Tseming Yang, Barbara Kaplan, and Ed Zilavy for their invaluable comments. Over the past five years, Yu Ming, Nathan Keltner, Laura Shoaps, Kimberly White LaDuca, Sara Blankenship, Sue Page, Travis Voyles, Mallory Neumann, Jill Bowen, Yuan Ye, and Xin Shuai all provided important research assistance in support of this project. The student editors of Environs deserve credit for their exhaustive work helping to prepare a piece of this scope for publication in their journal. I am also indebted to the Environmental Law Profs Blog for publishing the essays that became the inspiration for this article, and for allowing me to retain the copyright to that work for future uses like this one. Finally, I thank Sophie Shi for publishing translated excerpts of those essays on WeChat in China, and for allowing me to include translations of her responsive commentary in Part XI of this article. 193 RYAN 194 University of California, Davis [Vol. 41:2 teaching environmental law at the same time that we were experiencing the Chinese environment was alternatively wrenching and inspiring. Five years later, I returned to China to study the government’s new efforts to combat the environmental degradation that has accompanied China’s rapid industrial development, and to take stock of what had changed. The article synthesizes these insights with unfolding regulatory efforts into a full exposition of the environmental challenges that preoccupy modern China. Drawing from the rich reservoir of ordinary life infuses the research here with writing that is as experiential as it is academic—not just the legal particulars of monitoring fine particulate air pollution, but also how life changes when you are physically immersed in those particulates day after day. It chronicles the experiences of living within China’s increasingly polluted environment—without clean air, potable water, or faith that the products we encountered in the marketplace would not make us sick. It reflects on the ways that established environmental problems can foster newer ones, such as the paradoxical implications of poor water quality for the mounting waste management crisis. Yet it also describes environmental realms in which China regularly puts the United States to shame—such as its widespread investment in urban public transportation systems, its fuller-scale embrace of renewable energy, and the Chinese people’s less resource-intensive lifestyles. After this descriptive account, the article explores fundamental differences in American and Chinese environmental philosophy and evaluates the unique challenges each nation faces in moving toward sustainable governance. Finally, it balances my observations with parallel reflections from a Chinese lawyer about the environmental issues she encountered while living in the United States. Her observations remind us that while Americans can take pride in the innovations of environmental governance we once pioneered, we must also contend with ongoing legal and cultural hurdles to environmental protection and public health, including mounting indifference. I conclude with thoughts about what each nation can learn from the other, and the hope that sharing experiences like these will help bridge the cultural gaps we inevitably encounter in working together to resolve global environmental challenges. I.INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 196 II.CONTEXT: THE SETTING AND CAST OF CHARACTERS .................................... 199 A. From the U.S.: Me, Fulbright, and Family ................................... 199 B. In China: Qingdao and Ocean University ..................................... 202 C. At Home in the Neighborhood ...................................................... 204 D. Fitting In as a One-Child, Three-Generation Family .................... 206 E. Five Year Update: Transformative Development ......................... 209 F. On “De-Orientalizing” China ....................................................... 212 III.THE TALE OF THE FIVE-LEGGED FROGS ....................................................... 214 RYAN 2018] Breathing Air with Heft 195 A. Rocky Mountain Arsenal .............................................................. 214 B. Ignorance and Bliss ....................................................................... 215 C. The Burden of Environmental Education ..................................... 218 IV.WI-FI WITHOUT POTABLE WATER ............................................................... 220 A. Boiled, Bottled, or Bellyache ........................................................ 221 B. Our Renegotiated Relationship with Water .................................. 223 C. The Environmental Issue that Wasn’t ........................................... 225 D. The Challenge of Environmental Enforcement ............................ 227 E. Emerging Legal Reforms .............................................................. 232 F. Water Scarcity and Engineering ................................................... 237 V.BREATHING AIR WITH HEFT ......................................................................... 241 A. The Elephant in the Room ............................................................ 242 B. People Power and Airpocalypse in Beijing .................................. 246 C. Breathing Air With Heft ............................................................... 250 D. Darkest Before Dawn? .................................................................. 255 VI.FOOD CONTAMINATION, PRODUCT SAFETY, AND PUBLIC HEALTH .............. 259 A. Made in China ............................................................................... 259 B. Food and Milk Scandals ................................................................ 262 C. Regulating for Public Health and Safety ...................................... 269 D. Public Health and Chinese Culture ............................................... 274 VII.WASTE MANAGEMENT IN AN UNCLEAN WORLD ........................................ 275 A. Garbage as the New Environmental Issue .................................... 276 B. Conspicuous Consumption and Extreme Scarcity ........................ 280 C. Waste Management and Cultural Norms ...................................... 283 D. When the World is an Unclean Place ........................................... 285 E. No “Five-Second” Rule ................................................................ 286 VIII.ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS WITH NATURE ................................................................................................. 287 A. Concessions and Qualifications .................................................... 288 B. U.S. Traditions of Multiple Use, Sustained Yield, and Wildness ........................................................................................ 289 C. The Chinese Tradition of Dominion over Nature ......................... 292 D. Man-Made China .......................................................................... 296 E. Improving on Nature ..................................................................... 298 IX.SUSTAINABILITY AND STEWARDSHIP IN MODERN CHINA ............................ 301 A. Obstacles for Sustainability Governance in the U.S. .................... 302 B. Obstacles for Sustainability Governance in China ....................... 307 C. Stewardship and Ancient Chinese Philosophy ............................. 313 D. Environmental Stewardship as Cultural Change .......................... 318 X.POST SCRIPT: RETURNING FROM CHINA TO THE UNITED STATES .................. 320 A. The Long Journey Home .............................................................