Leaon+dong

Human beings are a kind of species that depends on natural resources so much, because we can neither produce energy nor collect energy effectively by our hands. Therefore, our whole future relies on how long the environment of earth can be maintained. Nowadays, the modern world is developing at a dramatic rate. However, the faster we develop, the faster we consume. There are always conflicts between development and environment. Usually, the governments in developing countries prioritize economic development, because economy is everything, and the environment is not as important as the strengths. In China, we are developing at a rate of more than 8% per year. That is pretty fast compared to other developed countries and everyone is proud of that. But the cost is also higher than other countries, and we are paying for that now. As much as 25% of total land in China has already became desert because of high amount of water uncontrolledly used in human activities like industry and agriculture. Another twenty thousand square kilometers of land is experiencing desertification every year. There are several reasons. China has 20% of world population but only occupies 13% of world farmland, and we have to feed ourselves. The way that we solve this problem is deforestation. We take land from forest to get more farmland. It seems to be a good idea because forest is much less valuable than farmland. So we just do this all the time unlimitedly. For example, in north-east provinces, we cultivate soybean in acquired field and make lot money by exporting. On the other hand, the impact on environment from farming is so huge that is threatening our life. The percentage of forest cover has once been about 79%, but it is only 25% now with no original forest that existed for hundreds of years. Since the land lose trees as cover, water will flow away, and moisture soil will be blow up by wind. That is how desertification happens. We have to cut down increasing number of forests to replace the losses of farmland by desertification. The more we take, the more we lose. There will be neither farmland nor forest left in China someday. As well as desertification, other environmental disasters like water pollution, soil erosion, acid rain, wildlife extinction and global warming are also serious in China. We discharge effluent, waste gas and waste residue without treatment to reduce the cost. We allowed high-polluting foreign facilities to build on our land and consume our resources in order to get a little more foreign currency. We hunt endanger animals to satisfy our desire of wealth and social status. Everything we do is in the name of continued development. Is it really good for us to develop first and improve the environment later? The answer is NO. Most developed countries have experienced what we are doing now. They focused on economy and stored wealth as quickly as they could to win the competition between empires. The faster they developed, the worse their environment was. There are two turning points on the way of development in every country. The first one is the change from rural economy to industrial economy. After mechanization popularized, burning fossil fuel became so common and produced a great amount of air pollution. The environment would not stop getting worse as the economy develop until the second turning point. The second turning point is when the economy system changes from industry into high-technology third industry. Most of productive industry would be moved out to other countries to prevent pollutions in their own country. Only the third industry stay in main land on propose of getting more wealth. If there is no source of pollution any longer, the environment would improve a lot and may return to the original situation over time. This is described in Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). EKC is an economic model that shows the relationship between national income and cost on environmental issues. Basically, we can get the general environment conditions of a country at different developing interval. The environment gets worse first and recover at the end. That theory applies for all countries in the world. The developed countries have passed the second turning point, so that, they are well developed with both rich wealth and good environment. China as a developing country with large population, it is almost impossible for China to follow other countries. There is neither enough land nor resources for Chinese to consume freely. We just passed first turning point in late 20th century, but we may not have opportunity to get the second one before we use out everything. Besides, the environmental disasters are causing giant economic lost right now. We are developing in a rate of 8% per year, at the same time, more than 13% of GDP in China is lost on environmental events every year. We are losing what we just get. Environment is slowing down our development but not saving money as some people think. More specifically, in 2007, desertification caused direct and indirect lost about $700million in China. 1000million environmental refugees lost their home because of water shortage. Also dust storms engulf the whole northern China include Beijing every summer. We have to stop damaging the environment now. Otherwise, we will stop developing very soon. We can develop whenever and wherever we want, but there is only one earth that provides both food and habitant for human. Once we lost it, we are going to extinct. Someone believes that we can recover environment as good as before by using new technologies. That is a funny joke. We can produce cars, planes, ships, clothes, weapons and almost everything we can image. But we can never produce a living tree, bird or tiger. Though the clone technology will be strong enough to build any species in the future, it must be silly to spend a lot time and money on building a new tree after we clean off all of them now. We should not wait, because the future of earth and human are in our hands. Actually, there are not many choices for us. Thinking only of the present or following sustainable development, as we choose.
 * We should not develop our economy and society by sacrificing our environment **