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• Friday, January 5, 2007 07:31 PM

  The Great Deforestation

  At about the same time you are suggesting, the Chinese philosopher and essayist Liu Zongyuan wrote the following lines:

  The official guardian's axes have spread through a thousand hills,

  At the Works Department's orders hacking rafter-beams and billets.

  He was commenting on the people who had been charged with protecting the forests and natural resources, with the opposite - the campaign which essentially removed the vast old growth forests in China.

  So much lumber was removed then that the life blood of the mountains, the soil, flowed down the Yangzi and Yellow rivers out approximately 90 km. into the sea.

  The presently sinking Shanghai built on land formed from the silt deposited long ago from denuded forest mountains appears to re-affirm the shuffling of one economic consequence for another.

  Based on a third of the timeframe covered in the Nature report, Mark Elvin's recent book 'The Retreat of the Elephants: an environmental history of China', would seem to suggest that the hand of man may figure larger than you suggest in the report's climatic inventory.

  In his book, he discusses those ideas we all have in mind, how nature, climate, man, culture and the philosophical/economic system of a time come together, to form a lasting impact on the environment we call home.

  While relying on the work of one Chinese poet after another, Elvin neglects any mention of Yang Guifei when those forests fell.

  —rhenley Read rhenley's other letters
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