Meltdown in Tibet: China's Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia

"This book is not quite as elegantly written as the other four, not as poetic, but it is incredibly important, covering an extremely relevant topic. Essentially it is a polemic, accusing modern-day China of committing ecocide at the sources of the five great rivers: the Indus, the Brahmaputra, which joins the Ganges lower down, the Irrawaddi, which goes into Myanmar, the Mekong and the Yangtze. Two billion people in Asia depend on these rivers, and China, which controls Tibet where they all rise, is doing a lot of damage . “These are the astonishingly grandiose mega-projects which could have a devastating effect on downstream states” I don’t think Buckley can be accused of exaggerating the risks. Only yesterday I was reading in a newspaper here in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post , that Chinese scientists plan to build a 1,000 kilometre long tunnel to take water from the Yarlung Tsangpo, which is what they call the Brahmaputra, and take it to Xinjiang, a very dry part of Western China. These are the sort of astonishingly grandiose mega-projects which could have a devastating effect on downstream states, which in the case of the Brahmaputra would be India and Bangladesh. Yes. The Ganges is partly immune, as it is only joined by the Brahmaputra very far down the river in what is now Bangladesh. But the Brahmaputra does run through Assam and so you have an issue there. There is a lot of tension on this very long unmarked border in the Himalayas between India and China. There’s also a related issue of climate change. The Tibetan Plateau is known as the third Pole, because it has so much ice locked into some 37,000 glaciers, which are all melting, or at least the lower ones are. If you go to the Himalayas, climate change is not theoretical, it is happening. In particular, the climate south of the Himalayas is already quite drastically affected by global warming, and according to some scientists the most drastic temperature changes in the planet will be there. I’m not so sure about the other rivers, but I imagine it’s the same. Traditionally what happens is that in the dry season a river has a certain flow that comes from melting ice. But if the ice is all melted already then you’re not going to get that melting ice in the summer, and the dry season flow disappears to almost nothing. That’s very damaging for humans but also for wildlife and for the environment as a whole. And we haven’t discussed the issue of ground water, which is very important, as you need a more even supply of water down the rivers throughout the year than you would have if the ice caps weren’t melting in Tibet. Obviously, China is not the only nation responsible for global warming, but they are in charge of Tibet and are damming a lot of these rivers. I try not to be too pessimistic. The Ganges is not dead yet, although some of its tributaries are dead in places. It is heavily polluted in places by industrial waste and by sewage, but it lives on and freshwater dolphins are found quite high upstream in the Ganges to this day. You also have surviving populations of the gharial, the very rare Gangetic crocodile, so all is not lost. The message I try to get across is that you can save rivers. It has been done with the Thames in London, and with the Rhine, as well as with American rivers like the Chicago River. These rivers were pretty filthy, certainly in the case of the Thames and the Chicago River, but they have been restored to more or less complete health, and certainly that’s the case in London. A lot of people, when you talk about cleaning a river, imagine scrubbing the river somehow and getting rid of the dirt. But it’s not like that. All you have to do to clean a river is stop polluting it and the river cleans itself. You might make a slight exception for the heavy metals that lie in the sediment beneath the river, but essentially if you stop polluting a river, the natural flow of the river will clean it and you will end up with a river that is more or less pristine. It’s not that hard, but it does cost money to build sewage plants and it does take political will. “All you have to do to clean a river is stop polluting it and the river cleans itself” My argument is that there are so many benefits to doing this, for example with the Ganges, if you clean the river, you save the lives of people who don’t die from unnecessary diseases caused by poor sanitation. That’s an immediate benefit. You also create thousands of jobs, which India is badly needed for its young unskilled people. There are economic benefits, social benefits, and you save the river for its spiritual purposes, for religious ceremonies and bathing. As Diana Eck, the Sanskrit scholar, says, India should be or is the country where saving rivers is most important because of the spiritual element. And in turn they will carry on giving us life, and great pleasure as well. One of the things that Eric Newby says very simply at the start of his book is, “I love rivers.” I think we all do. If you go to a new city, one of the nicest things to do is to walk along the river, wherever it is. Whether it’s the Potomac in Washington DC or the Seine in Paris, you feel you understand the city much better. It’s a great thing to walk past Notre Dame on the Île de la Cité in the middle of Paris and see the Seine flowing down towards the sea past this great cathedral, in the old centre of Paris. Or it’s the same with the Tower of London on the Thames. Our histories are founded on the banks of these great rivers. To have them as disgusting drains, which is what the Yamuna has become in Delhi, is deeply sad and quite damaging I think – socially, spiritually, as well as in terms of human health. Indeed."