In the West, we have often nursed a romantic fascination with all things “Oriental.” We imagine the civlizations of the East to be older and wiser than our own. We mythologize them as paragons of ecological sustainability and grace. Indeed, there is as much to admire in Eastern cultures as in Western. Taoism can only be described as “ecological” in the emphasis it places on balanced forces, while Buddhism has as much to offer spiritually in its own way as Western Gnosticism. However, we have a tendency to take this much too far, and to gloss over the fact that these are still civilizations, and still bound by the same dynamics of constant growth as any Western civilization.

The Humanure Handbook, concerned with the recycling of human waste in compost, sees in China a model of sustainable cultivation.

It’s clear to me that Asians have been more advanced than the western world in this regard. And they should be, since they’ve been working on developing sustainable agriculture for four thousand years on the same land. For four thousand years those people have worked the same land with little or no chemical fertilizers and, in many cases, have produced greater crop yields than western farmers, who are quickly destroying the soils of their own countries through depletion and erosion.¹

Of course, four thousand years is hardly a grand achievement on evolutionary scales of time, but the basis for the Handbook’s praise is based on a deep misunderstanding of basic energy economics.

A fact largely ignored by people in western agriculture is that agricultural land must produce a greater output over time. The human population is constantly increasing; available agricultural land is not.²

What are humans made up of, if not food? The Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy creates trophic levels, because at each level, organisms absorb a certain amount of energy, and use a certain amount of energy for their own growth and life, such that when they are consumed by another organism, that organism is necessarily recieving less energy than the original organism did. So grass takes in a certain amount of energy from the sun, and uses some of that to grow, and some of that energy is still there for the cow to consume. The cow uses some of that energy to live before it is killed and eaten by a wolf. The wolf is at a higher trophic level: he’s more removed from the primary energy source (the sun), and thus recieves only a small fraction of the total solar energy involved in feeding all the grass that fed the cow that fed him. This relates to “humanure” as a fairly obvious and straightforward reason why it cannot make a system sustainable. While it can, and does, lighten the energy load of a human population (sometimes quite significantly), if humans were returning 100% of the energy they consumed, that would necessarily mean they were not keeping any of that energy for their own growth or maintenance—in other words, they’d all be starving. Humanure returns a fraction of the energy humans take from a given piece of land, but this doesn’t make it sustainable: it slows unsustainability, but it does not itself reverse it.

Just as important here is the idea that human population grows as an independent variable. We already know this is a common, but untrue, assumption. Human population grows as a function of food supply, at the most basic level simply because humans are made of food.

Despite its praise, The Humanure Handbook specifically discourages the “night soil” technique used in China. Even there, it was used primarily due to lack of animal manure.

The second way to deal with human excrement is to apply it raw to agricultural land. This is popular in Asia where “night soil,” or raw human excrement, is spread on fields. Although this keeps the soil enriched, it also acts as a vector, or route of transmission, for disease organisms. In the words of Dr. J. W. Scharff, former chief health officer in Singapore, “Though the vegetables thrive, the practice of putting human [manure] directly on the soil is dangerous to health. The heavy toll of sickness and death from various enteric diseases in China is well-known.” The World Health Organization adds, “Night soil is sometimes used as a fertilizer, in which case it presents great hazards by promoting the transmission of food-borne enteric [intestinal] disease, and hookworm.”³

The deeper question is, is Chinese agriculture as sustainable as The Humanure Handbook claims? We can see that the use of “night soil” will certainly slow an unsustainable cultivation practice (at the expense of human health), but does it make the process sustainable, or merely slow down an unsustainable process?

The incredible photography of Feng Jiang show what a beautiful land China can be—and, at the same time, the enormous devastation that Chinese civilization has visited upon it. The first agriculture in China was actually wheat from the Middle East in northern China; later, southern China developed rice agriculture. These two crops share a good deal in common with each other, but also several important differences.

Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.⁴

It is telling that after last year’s tsunami, rice yields increased dramatically.

Farming’s relationship to floodplains was even more pronounced in Asia with the domestication of rice, a form of agriculture that never quite lost its close tie to annual floods. The anthropologist Charles Higham writes, “The accumulated archaeological evidence is unanimous in supporting low-lying aquatic habitat as the most likely location for the transition to rice cultivation.” (Manning, 2005)

Rice agriculture is an incredibly labor-intensive form of farming. First, the rice paddy is flooded, then each rice plant must be planted by hand. Massive terracing projects obliterated whole mountain ranges, turning them into fields for rice farming. The flooding of rice paddies would create vast, flooded plains cut into plots and squares by narrow dry banks. Later in the season, the water would be drained for harvest. This pattern of flooding has apparently contributed to global warming for some time, supporting Ruddiman’s Early Anthropocene Hypothesis. When Chinese farmers began draining their fields earlier in the season to increase yield and reduce water costs in the 1980s, a NASA-funded study found a significant drop in methane emissions over the ensuing 20-year period.⁵

The most obvious toll of China’s form of agriculture has been its forests. Forested mountains were cut into terraces; forests in the valleys were cut down to flood rice paddies. In prehistory, some 43% of modern China was forested. In 1948, prior to the introduction of modern agricultural techniques, that number was reduced to just 9.1%.⁶

The slope below the Great Wall was cut with gullies, some of which were fifty feet deep. As far as the eye could see were gullies, gullies, gullies-a gashed and gutted countryside. The little stream that once ran past the city was now a wide waste of coarse sand and gravels which the hillside gullies were bringing down faster than the little stream had been able to carry them away. Hence, the whole valley, once good farmland, had become a desert of sand and gravel, alternately wet and dry, always fruitless. It was even more worthless than the hills. Its sole harvest now is dust; picked up by the bitter winds of winter that rips across its dry surface in this land of rainy summers and dry winters. (Smith, 1977)

The elimination of China’s forests have produced cascading ecological effects, including extinction, erosion, and flooding.

At one time nearly half of China was forested. The famous agricultural scholar, Georg Borgstrom estimates that 670 million acres of China were once covered. This forest, with its complex ecosystem was gone almost before written history. There is no doubt that it contained many species that became extinct and of which we will never know. One major consequence of the denudation of the vegetation of China is that its major rivers now carry more silt than any other river system in the world and the stories of the floods in China are as old as the Chinese empire. (Kötke, 1993)

This is not a recent consequence of modern techniques, either, but an ongoing effect of Chinese agriculture from its very beginnings.

During the former Empire, the forest cover was progressively destroyed and steps were rarely taken to restore it. Uplands were usually denuded. It is considered that, in historical times, 300 million hectares - 30 percent of the land area - were deforested. As shown later, continually increasing erosion still ravages over half of these lands today, denuding 160 million hectares.⁷

The cradle of Chinese civilization has always been the Yellow River. During the last ice age, a whole plateau of loess—rich, yellowish soil—was deposited by glaciers in the middle of the Yellow River valley, but agriculture and deforestation has led to such prodigous erosion that it turns the river yellow—hence the name.

“Whoever controls the Yellow River controls China,” said the Great Yu, who is credited with the first “taming” of the river around 2200 BC. Well he might: according to legend, his reward was to be made Emperor.

The Yellow River flows across a great blanket of loess, deposited by winds that blew out of the Siberian tundra during the Ice Age. The river erodes the loess easily, carrying along sixty times the sediment load of the Mississippi, until it reaches the plains of North China, still 1400 river km from the sea. The river carries more sediment than any other major river in the world when it reaches the North China Plain. Then the sediment is deposited as fine silt, building up the river bed until it is high above the surrounding plains. In flood times the river may burst its banks, turning the plain into a flood plain, and unable to return to its breached course as the flood recedes. The Yellow River now finds a new way to the sea, and the cycle begins again.

The changes of course have been spectacular, and the river mouth has sometimes changed catastrophically by hundreds of kilometers. It has had 26 major changes in course in the past 2000 years. The river is so treacherous that there was no permanent bridge across it until 1905.⁸

Its wild course changes and immense erosion has made the Yellow River itself unsustainable.⁹ To the north, agriculture and overgrazing has expanded the desert by 300km over the past 3,000 years.¹⁰

Two thousand years ago, the ancient Chinese called the Taklamakan desert the Moving Sands. And their secrets lie buried in its depths—around 300 ancient cities swallowed by this sea of sand.¹¹

This has only intensified in more recent years, creating a violent dust bowl that is consuming China’s arable land and ultimately threatens Beijing itself.^{12, 13, 14, 15}

Violent sandstorms from China’s expanding deserts have been battering Chinese cities, and their mustard-colored dust has begun reaching South Korea, Japan, and the west coast of North America.

“People dusting off their cars in California or Calgary often don’t realize the sand has come all the way from China,” said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., who was in Beijing recently. “There is a dustbowl developing in China that represents the largest conversion of productive land to desert of any place in the world … and it’s affecting the world.”¹⁶

Modern intensification of this crisis should not mislead us into thinking this is a recent problem for China. Though modern developments have greatly exacerbated the situation, as we have seen, these developments are not radical changes, but intensifications of existing trends. Most of China’s deforestation had already taken place before the end of the Ch’ing dynasty; the erosion of loess had already been so severe, for so long, as to give the Yellow River its name.

China’s soil problems start with being one of the world’s countries most severely damaged by erosion, now affecting 19% of its land area and resulting in soil loss at 5 billion tons per year. Erosion is especially devastating on the Loess Plateau (the middle stretch of the Yellow River, about 70% of the plateau eroded), and increasingly on the Yangtze River, whose sediment discharge from erosion exceeds the confined discharges of the Nile and Amazon, the world’s two longest rivers. By filling up China’s rivers (as well as its reservoirs and lakes), sediment has shortened China’s navigable river channels by 50% and restricted the size of ships that can use them. Soil quality and fertility as well as soil quantity has declined, partly because of long-term fertilizer use plus pesticide-related drastic declined in soil-renewing earthworms, thereby causing a 50% decrease in the area of cropland considered to be of high quality. Salinization … has affected 9% of China’s lands, mainly due to poor design and management of irrigation systems in dry areas. … Desertification, due to overgrazing and land reclamation for agriculture, has affected more than one-quarter of China, destroying about 15% of North China’s area remaining for agriculture and pastoralism within the last decade. (Diamond, 2005)

These problems have afflicted Chinese agriculture since its beginning, just like similar problems with wheat agriculture. However, where the Middle Eastern neolithic spread into Europe and eventually reached its limits against the Atlantic, stagnating in the Middle Ages before finally exploiting the New World, China has waxed and waned within a fairly set geographical region. How has China been able to deal with the ecological toll of agriculture without expansion?

Maps from Minneapolis Institute of Arts

For the last several thousand years, as the famine center has shifted around the world, waxed and waned, China has maintained a fairly steady course of starvation. Researchers have compiled documentary evidence of 1,828 famines in China between 2019 B.C. and A.D. 1911. They were concentrated in a famine belt between the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, which is to say that China’s hunger was concentrated in the same area as its agriculture. This history can be read in the numbers, but also in the language.

During China’s most recent famine, people began using an expression that means “swapping children, making food.” Hungry peasants traded children to avoid killing and eating their own. The practice was widespread. The specific phrase for this is about 2,200 years old and meant exactly then what it does now. As the Han Dynasty was founded, in 200 B.C., a single famine killed about half of China’s population. The emperor Gao Zu issued an edict permitting people to eat or sell their children as meat, thus lending legal sanction to a long-established practice. A written report from 2,600 years ago notes: “In the city, we are exchanging our children and eating them, and splitting up their bones for fuel.” (Manning, 2005)

Where Europeans expanded to keep their civilization going, China incorporated enormous mortality and starvation as a basic fact of life. This, like the use of “night soil,” slowed the inevitable, yet even so, China exhibits the same escalating sine curve of increasing complexity. To the right, you will see successive maps of China under various historical dynasties. There is a distinct wax and wane, but more importantly, each crest and trough is still larger than the last, so what we see is not a sine wave at all, but an unsteady, stop-and-go escalation.

Though not a subject of particular scrutiny in his work, Tainter still provides a basic account of China’s growth in terms of complexity and its diminishing marginal returns.

Chinese political thought (seconded to a great extent by current historical research) has long seen conflict and mismanagement as the sources of dynastic collapse (i.e., since at leastthe Warring States period and the Confucian era). All great dynasties began with initial prosperity and peace, as land was brought back into production. Palaces, roads, canals, and walls would be built, and costly defensive lines maintained. But as imperial relatives, nobility, and the bureaucracy increased in numbers and grew used to luxury, more resources were allocated to the ruling class, and less to administration. Because of increased expenditures, and often a slightly declining income, each dynasty experienced serious financial difficulties within a century of its founding. Official self-serving and corruption would worsen, administrative efficiency would decline, and there would be more factional quarrels at court. Potential rivals of the imperial family became more independent. Burdens on the peasantry were increased at the same time that dikes and canals were allowed to fall into disrepair. Famines that previously would have been met from government granaries now would lead to starvation, banditry, and peasant uprisings. Inadequately maintained fronteir defenses crumbled. Provincial officials and their armies began to defect. The resulting wars would clear the slate for a new dynasty. (Tainter, 1988)

As in the West, agriculture provided the impetus for constant growth, despite the fact that the ecological devastation wrought by agriculture would not always allow for such growth and often led to periods of contraction.

In this context, the success of the geographic expansion of the Chinese empire was at the same time a success in the growth of the Chinese agricultural sector. Firstly, regardless of its ten main soil types, the empire’s territory was converted to a huge farming zone. Secondly, the agricultural sector was by far the single most important source of employment for the majority Chinese. Thirdly, taxes from the agricultural sector made up the lion’s share of the state’s revenue.¹⁷

As in the West, agriculture led to private property, and reinforced a positive feedback loop of continual growth.

Private property rights over land also created incentives for the ordinary farmers to produce more and better. In doing so, the agricultural total factor productivity increased. Growth became intensive.¹⁸

The introduction of more industrial techniques has, of course, exacerbated the situation.

Rapid economic development and population growth in East Asia after World War II caused a dramatic increase in the rate of conversion of natural and agricultural areas to urban and industrial ones. China, for example, between 1957 and 1990, lost an area of cropland equal to all the cropland of France, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands combined.¹⁹

But this is a far cry from creating the situation. China today is already on the brink of total collapse—from water wars or its own growth—but it would be a mistake to think that industrialism created these problems. Chinese civilization deforested its land, salted its earth, eroded its soils, and plunged its people into despair, starvation, and even grisly cannibalism all on its own, millennia before the Industrial Revolution. While these trends may have been intensified by contact with a more complex competitor, China provides no model of sustainability. As admirable as techniques like “night soil” might be for slowing the process, there can be no doubt that the nature of that process is precisely the same in the East as it is in the West.

Works Cited

Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed . New York: Viking Penguin Books.

Kötke, W.H. (1993). The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. Portland: Arrow Point Press.

Manning, R. (2005). Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization. New York: North Point Press.

Smith, J.R. (1977). Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture. Old Greenwich: Devin-Adair Co.

Tainter, J.A. (1988). Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.