Will China’s headlong growth irreversibly damage the world’s natural environment

American journalist Craig Simons starts his explosive book The Devouring Dragon (Awa Press, July 2013) in Trinidad, a small town in Colorado. Ten years earlier a mine in the town was mothballed. Now it is reopening and Simons wants to find out why.

The answer, as he expects, is the insatiable appetite for coal of the world’s fastest growing economy. When he asks a guard at the mine where the coal will be headed, the guard sums it up neatly: ‘China’s where the money is, so they say that’s where it’s going.’

New Zealanders will find much that’s familiar in this absorbing, often horrifying book about China’s unprecedented impact on land, forests, oceans, waterways, wildlife and air quality of virtually every country on Earth. The planned development of the Bathurst mine in pristine forest on the West Coast and the controversial growth of dairying to meet Chinese demand are reminders that this country is far from immune from what’s been called by China expert Peter Hessler ‘a massive transformation that threatens to throw the world out of balance’.

In an effort to find out on the ground what impact China’s headlong emulation of Western lifestyles is having on the world’s resources, Simons, who has lived in China for eight years, travelled extensively. In countries from Brazil to the Congo, he found vast forests being felled to meet China’s demand for hardwood, soybeans and palm oil. In New Guinea, home to some of the world’s rarest birds and most ancient rain forests, he found widespread illegal felling. In India he found tigers pushed to the verge of extinction to supply body parts for Chinese medicine. The same was happening with elephants in Africa. In Australia he found farms suffering endemic drought caused by climate change: China is now the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases, and emissions are growing by around seven percent a year.

Simons is at pains to point out that China is raising millions of its people out of poverty, an admirable achievement. The environmental cost, unfortunately, is unsustainable. The message: don’t just badger China to change its ways. All of us need to alter our patterns of consumption before it’s too late.

Published in New Zealand by Awa Press, The Devouring Dragon has been called the most important book about the environment in years. Its engaging personal style and stories of ferreting out the truth from sometimes unwilling subjects make it also a riveting read.

The Devouring Dragon: How China’s Rise Threatens the Natural World by Craig Simons
Release date: July 1, 2013. RRP: $36.