When a Billion Chinese Jump (70 page)

39.
Or so he claimed. Some historians doubt that he ever made it to Kublai Khan’s palace.

40.
His attempts to invade Japan and Vietnam ended in disaster. His open-minded view of philosophy closed when he turned against Taoism, ordering the burning of three-quarters of the sacred texts.

41.
John Man,
Xanadu
(Bantam Press, 2009).

42.
Nobody has ever offered a definitive interpretation of “Kubla Khan,” which might explain its enduring fascination. The wittiest comment on its inscrutability was offered by the Cambridge University lecturer George Watson, who noted that after millions of words of structural analysis, biographical investigation, and creative interpretation by the world’s leading scholars, “We now know almost everything about Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ except what the poem is about.” Coleridge himself dismissed the work as nonsense, a triumph of sound over sense.

43.
These are the opening lines. I have reluctantly omitted the rest due to space limitations.

44.
Coleridge was an opium addict. The addiction contributed to his death in 1834.

45.
Anthropological examinations of successive generations of Mayan skeletons showed declining levels of nourishment as population density grew to a level similar to that of modern China and then collapsed (Donald Hughes,
An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life
[Routledge, 2001], p. 46).

46.
Ibid., p. 64.

47.
Clive Ponting,
A New Green History of the World
(Penguin, 2007), pp. 3–6.

1.
The earth’s population is 6.8 billion, average life expectancy is sixty-five years, and humans use or occupy 83 percent of the world’s land. The “human footprint” has been defined as “human land uses, human access from roads, railways, or major rivers, electrical infrastructure (indicated by lights detected at night), or direct occupancy by human beings at densities above 1 person per sq. km” (“Last of the Wild Project,” Center for International Earth Science Information Network [CIESIN], Earth Institute at Columbia University).

2.
Evident during a 2009 visit to Beijing by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who refrained from repeating her previous outspoken criticism of China’s human rights record to emphasize that Beijing’s cooperation on climate change was vital.

3.
In researching this book, I came across many suggestions for improving mankind’s eco-footprint. The principle of making polluters pay could be expanded to consumers by surcharging goods produced using unsustainable materials. Energy and water should be metered and priced to reflect their pollution costs and scarcity. Conversely, there should be incentives in the form of subsidies and lower taxes for “living lightly.” Education should emphasize sustainability, and far more information should be made available about air, water, and soil quality (by adding an environment forecast to the daily weather forecast, for example). Environment insurance companies could be nurtured to offset risk and champion strong precautionary measures. In the political sphere, there should be tighter central government control over regional environmental issues and more rigorous implementation of environmental legislation. More ambitiously, systems of governance could be reshaped to include a politically neutral chamber that represented the long-term interests of the earth rather than the short-term concerns of the electorate.

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