China is speeding into the future–or at least catching up to the present–by using methods of industrialization which created great wealth in the West but have compromised our ecology. Evan Osnos of the New Yorker has an excellent interview on the topic with Craig Simons, a journalist who spent most of the aughts reporting from China on that nation’s unbridled growth. An excerpt:

“Evan Osnos: 

The Times reported this month that Chinese protesters succeeded in delaying the I.P.O. of a company that specializes in extracting bile from captive bears for the production of folk remedies. What kinds of campaigns have impact, and what kinds don’t?

Craig Simons: 

N.G.O.s have had a limited ability to influence the decisions of average Chinese consumers. A group of advertisements by WildAid (including one where Yao Ming swears off shark-fin soup) have been successful and are important. But their benefits are offset by millions of Chinese just now becoming rich enough to buy exotic ingredients and medicines. The campaigns may ultimately prove more important by putting pressure on Beijing. The international community, for example, has successfully lobbied against Beijing legalizing the sale of bones from farmed tigers, a move many scientists argue would doom the world’s remaining wild tigers. In short, a government ban is more efficient than trying to get 1.3 billion people to change deep-rooted beliefs and traditions, but both are key in the long term.

Evan Osnos: 

You went to the four corners of the world for this. What was the moment that lingers most?

Craig Simons:

Strangely enough, the most vivid moment came when I was researching in Washington, D.C. I came across a request by environmental groups that Arkansas ban the collection of wild turtles, many of which were being shipped to China, as food. Their driving argument was that if officials didn’t stop the hunt, several species would be wiped out. The petition contained a few surprising figures: licensed collectors removed more than half a million turtles from Arkansas between 2004 and 2006; more than two hundred and fifty thousand ‘wild caught adult turtles’ were exported to Asia from a single airport over a span of four years. But it was the proximity that struck me. I’d expected to link Chinese demand to tiger poaching in India, logging in Papua New Guinea, and (renewed) mining in Colorado. But I’d never thought that decisions by Chinese diners could threaten Arkansas’s terrapins.”