On China and its environmental push...

It's both sad and predictable, reading news about China's fight to keep alive the last two known Yangtze soft-shelled giant turtles, one male and one female.

It's nascent in the article, pointing out that a growing number of turtles being sold in China as food are from overseas. I remember some time back, one of my friends (himself Chinese) commented that, should the Chinese grow in affluence, half of the endangered species in the world could become extinct. At the time, it sounds outrageous, since China was still starting out in its economic ascent. But it almost sounds like on-the-money these days.

One might argue that other industrialized nations went through the same growth phase, with their own power structure with the environment in order to jostle nature to succumb to their will. But the callousness of the Chinese since the Mao era, in their dealings with the environment and all the eco-system that goes with it, simply are too great to ignore or dismiss. The Three Gorges Dam is a case in point.

There's an old Chinese saying, that Chinese would eat anything that has its back facing the sky. Given the Chinese growing appetite to anything exotic (shark fins are just nothing, compared to bear's paws, live monkey's brain, tiger's penis...), I'm really worried about the future of biodiversity in that country.