Desertification in China

In recent years, China got much more attention because of its magnificent development. However, at the same, in many ways China's environmental problems have already reached catastrophic levels. Among them, desertification is a significant issue.


Status Quo
According to the research, about 28 percent of China is covered by desert and that amount of desert in China is getting larger every year, just 7% of Chinese land feeds about a quarter of the world's population. Deserts are being created faster in China than anywhere else in the world, with old deserts expanding and new deserts being formed. By official reports from Ministry of Science and Technology, another 2,500 sq km turns to desert each year. A task force says that desertification costs China about $2-3 billion annually, an estimated 110 million people suffer firsthand from the impacts of desertification. It is an issue that not only belongs to the natural disaster, but also would affect millions of people.

“Already a migration on the scale of the Dust Bowl in the United States in the 1930 is taking place in China. The only problem is that in China there is no California to escape to.” (Hays, 2008) Desertification in China is causing millions of rural Chinese to abandon unproductive land in Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia Provinces and to move to the east. A study by the Asian Development Bank found that about 4,000 villages are at risk of being swallowed up by drifting sand.


Analysis
Take a look at the reasons of how it happened. The major causes of land desertification in China are climate change and human economic activities.

Human activities are a direct cause of land desertification. Deforestation and desertification as well as dust storm are the words that always show up together. As the land in the northwest China is not good for crops cultivation, people there can only choose other ways to survive. As a result, the lands are easily to get overgrazed, overplanted, and over plowed. Once an area is degraded people move onto a new area and degrade that while the old area takes decades to recover or never does. These problems in turn are result of population pressures on marginal land. Rapid population increases have lead to over utilization of land resources. Northwest China has the land that lack of natural resources and environmental protection as well as scientific management. At the same time, some environmentalist chased back to Mao era, saying that one of the main culprits of the desertification was Mao's plan to raise grain in areas where grain didn't grow well, such as Inner Mongolia. This deprived the land of grass which prevented soil being blown away by the fierce winds that ravage this region.

As for the reason of climate change, scientists in Qinghai have recorded higher temperatures, lower rainfall and stronger winds since the 1950s. Persistent drought robs the soil of moisture and makes it easer for the soil to be picked up and carried away by wind. Sandstorms demonstrate the harmful and destructive impact of climate change. In May 1993 a sandstorm attacked over ten counties in four provinces including Xinjiang and Gansu. Soil loss due to wind erosion was ten to 15 cm, and sand loss, 20 to 150 cm for a total economic damage of 560 million RMB yuan.(Z&G,2004)

As aforementioned, 110 million people suffer firsthand from the impacts of desertification. Besides that, the sand from the distant Gobi desert even threatens Beijing, the capital city. According to Gluckman, dunes forming just 70 km from the capital may be drifting south at 20-25 km a year. And despite massive spending on land reclamation and replanting, China is falling behind.


Research I did
I believe that everyone who has done some research on desertification in China will realize it is quite a severe issue right now in China. However, Chinese media seems have no interest to cover that as a hot topic.

I chose Xinhua and CCTV as my news outlet for this research since they’re regarded as “elite media” in China and Xinhua is the Chinese official news website. And I got surprised by the research result. I first went to the Xinhua website; the layout on Xinhua is a little bit unique when compared to CNN or New York Times, because they don’t only divide their columns according to topics, moreover, they have different channels for different provinces. After I could find nothing about the desertification on the front page, I went to the channel “Qinghai” and “Gansu”, which are the 2 provinces that suffering most severe desertification. However, I could find nothing about his topic either. Then I used the key word “desertification” to search the news during the past 2 months. In fact there were only three pieces of news really talked about the desertification issue, and after I viewed these three pieces of news. I found out that they were actually about the same one, which is about a new forestry program is going to start in NingXia province and why it could be on the news is because it is the first program that China get sponsored by Germany. And also, it is the biggest international forestry aid projects so far.
How about CCTV? I used the same method, typed in the keywords and got a list of news. The real relevant news was one that dated back to March, 10th, talking about NPC (National People’s Congress) number tried to raise new policy for the desertification control and improvement.

Frankly speaking I was surprised by the researching result, for the whole media neglect on this issue. In fact it’s not difficult if you try to find information such as good examples of how China combating desertification. There are plenty of examples on the internet. However it is so hard to find the media coverage of what things are going on, in other words, we can only get the result rather than the progress. Under this circumstance, we’ll never know if certain program doesn’t work well. We can only get what media want to show us. That’s a passive way for obtaining information.

Since desertification news belongs to the environmental news, which usually doesn’t get much attention because people are in the entertainment news explosion and they tend to be less and less patient to such news, negative, far from where they live, not actually will influence their own lives. Those elements as we talked in the class. The second reason is that there always has even worse news such as earthquake in Yushu, or the good enough news like coming Shanghai Expo that distracts audiences’ attention. News like desertification in China has been and will be existed for the following years. It is a issue that takes time to deal with and get improved. One the one hand, it’s understandable that media have no interest to prefer reporting such news than covering more interesting ones. On the other hand, it is a severe issue that cannot be ignored. Audiences as we students cannot passively accept the news that media covered, for the reason that they’re usually “good results”, not the truth.

Environmental issues are always complicated, luckily, people now begin to realize them and try to fix them before the real disaster happens. I still hold the belief that human beings would live a better life if they maintain a good relationship with nature.



References:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/w7539e/w7539e03.htm
http://www.greenfacts.org/en/desertification/index.htm

Wenjuan, Z., & Jixi, G. (2004). Problems of Ecological Environment in Western China. Chinese Education & Society, 37(3), 15-20. Retrieved from ERIC database.

Knabe, F. (1999). Learning about Desertification. Green Teacher, (57), 12-14.

United Nations Environment Programme, N. (1987). Sands of Change: Why Land Becomes Desert and What Can Be Done about It. UNEP Environment Brief No. 2.

Green ad analysis

What does ad sell? Products, services and ideas.
I want to talk about an advertisement today which tries to sell a “green” idea: “CO2 is not a pollutant”.


The concept of “greenwashing”
As Kuntz raised the concept of “greenwashing” strategy used in advertisements in her article, which means big corporations usually use ads to persuade audiences to believe their products are environmental friendly, but actually they’re not.

It is an interesting topic for me, because once corporations do that, they’re not only using the persuade strategies to sell their product, moreover, they are selling their “green ideas” to the potential consumers. To achieve this , they use the public trust on brand product; try to make audiences to believe the idea that they should do something good to the nature and they can simply achieve this by choosing their product.


Analysis of the ad design
In contrast to printed advertisement, video ads have more abilities to attract the viewer. They can persuade especially through sound and images. And whereas advertising via radio has to rely on vocal attraction, television or internet are the mass mediums which can combine those three factors, image, sound and text, in order to persuade the audience as much as they could.

After watch this video ad, we may discover that there is no specific target audience, for the reason that it is selling an idea rather than certain products, as a result, they may have more wide coverage of audience. The general ambience of this advertisement is mild and nice, trying to avoid creating a tension atmosphere in order to make audience better accept their ideas. They have their immobile logo at the upper left corner, and the changing images of beautiful natural sceneries, with the background voice which sounds trustful. However, if we watch the video more closely, we would find that there is no direct image shows its connection with CO2, instead, we get the idea directly from the text, saying that there is no scientific evidence to prove CO2 is a pollutant; in fact, higher CO2 helps the earth’s ecosystem and support more plant and animal life. In other words, the pictorial elements and written material don’t match perfectly. If we only see the pictures without those texts, we would not get the right idea.

As for the design, I believe this ad is one of those simplest ads. No specific plot, no figures, only animals and plants as well as natural sceneries. The idea it tries to sell is “CO2 is green” but in fact those pictures can’t show the theme successfully.


Persuade strategies
In this ad, the most significant information they try to persuade people is in the first sentence, “Congress is considering the law that would classify CO2 as pollution. This will cost us jobs.” At this moment, audiences change their position as a “third person” immediately to the people who may get affected directly if this law passed.

The function of advertisements is clearly that they are supposed to influence us to buy the promoted product. People will get the strong psychological suggestion after they get imposed to particular ad for several times, which says, “This sounds not bad.” And “Maybe I need this.” It works the same here, after the ad keeps saying that there is no scientific evidence to say CO2 is a pollutant, in fact higher CO2 helps the earth ecosystem, and help more animals and plants. Some of the audiences will get to begin to think about this idea to some extent.

They use the logo with two small leaves on the words CO2 as their symbol. The color green strengthens their Environmental friendly idea for sure. Besides, they offer a website at last, for further information. However, it is a .COM website, which obviously means it is not for academic purpose at all.


Truth and reaction form audiences
I was surprised by this ad when I saw it for the first time, because the information about CO2 we get so far doesn’t like what it claims in this ad. There already have scientific evidences to prove that CO2 is the main course of global warming.

So I did some research, and soon found out the reason. The ad was generated by a veteran oil industry executive and a Houston-based of coal owner resources as part of a campaign to undermine the EPA’s (Environmental Protection Agency) ruling that CO2 should be classified as a pollutant. Their claims “CO2 is Green”, which backed up this dubious claim with statements like “higher CO2 levels than we have today would actually help the Earth’s ecosystems.” It may just be the most ridiculous example of greenwashed propaganda, and obviously, no one else could possibly be responsible but oil & coal interests.

As De Mooij raises in his book, there has five steps for persuading. They’re attraction, persuasion/argumentation, justification for the purchase, satisfaction and eventually trustfulness towards the brand and repetitive purchases. In this ad, they attract people’s attention by raising the totally opposite idea as people always know. Then comes to the major point--the way of argumentation. Green advertisement arguments with the assertion that the particular product is supposed to be environmentally and ecologically friendly. In this ad, oil and coal interests don’t show it directly, instead, they assert that CO2 is not a pollutant. Thus, people would convince themselves not to feel too much guilty when they use oil or coal if they accept the justification from the ad. In other words, they get satisfaction.

Does this ad works finally? I don’t think so. After checking the comments right after the video, I can find people still hold the belief that CO2 is a pollutant. As one comments, “Can't people understand that just because small amounts of something is okay, that doesn't mean that large amounts are fine. For example, we all need water to live, but too much water and we all drown. Obviously a certain concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is natural and healthy but too much can be a big problem”. Ads are always ads, no matter they are selling a product or an idea. The things we should pay attention is that not to trust whatever they say, instead, we should have our own critical thinking.


References:
C.f. De Mooij, Marike (2005). Global Marketing and Advertising. Understanding Cultural Paradoxes.(2nd ed). California: Sage Publications, p. 150.

New analysis

U.N. Rejects Export Ban on Atlantic Bluefin Tuna

The article “U.N. Rejects Export Ban on Atlantic Bluefin Tuna” talks about the details on rejection of bluefin tuna and protect of Polar bears, with statistics and the “experts’ opinions”. It is one of the typical environmental issue articles. With basic truths, and won’t grab much attention from readers.

Before taking a close look at the article, let’s just think one basic question: What is the news values showed in this article? Prominence?—not really. Proximity—maybe, it depends. It may make Canadian people take more attention when talking about polar bears. Continuity? Yes—but at the same time it will made the article less interesting and will make fewer people pay enough attention to it.. People nowadays prefer “popular news” rather than serious news with lack of novelty in it. Negativity?—yes it is. However it also made itself less interesting, for the reason that people are easier to get fed up with such not good news.

When looking at the headline, it shows the topic in an objective tone, and we can obtain the information that this article is going to talk about rejecting exportation of tuna. But the truth is not. The article in fact was not only talk about the tuna but also polar bear, as we can see in the lead. In addition, it even talked about the sharks and elephants at the bottom of the article, tries to show the effect of “news package” as we talked about in the class. In my opinion, on one hand, it is the typical pyramid model for news. The least important information is at the bottom of the article; on the other hand, the article doesn’t do well in having a clear topic in one piece of news. Readers, who concern on this specific issue, cannot get much useful information as they wish to.

The lead is good and precise, it has “what, where, who” and “when”. Readers can get basic ideas soon enough after they read the lead. However, when I read the following context, I found that the following context doesn’t strongly support the lead. For me, it is more like the combination of two separate news stories. I guess that’s another problem for environmental issue articles. The newspaper needs the article to fill in the space, but usually the reporters cannot find the real “experts” to give strong evidence, for the lack of enough time or money. Even if they find some real experts, it will only cost them more time to simplify the words and opinions the experts gave them. So they just write the story in a very plain way, with basic facts and few strong evidences. They do it because they know such articles will not grab as much attention as those “hard news”, not mention the “popular news”.

Take a look at the sources, the Statement and Slant. The reporter offers two pictures which contain relatively high levels of “conflict”, the conflict between human desire and animals. The sources are “a spokesman for the United Nations organization”, “American officials” and “assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife and parks”. Basically they could tell nothing but their own opinions. When the “American officials” tries to give his “official opinions” on both tuna and polar bear issues, they can just do it in a very vague way, such as “expressed disappointment in the vote, but said they would keep trying in various international forums to protect the tuna and the bears.” which really didn’t make much sense here. And the passage also showed a little bias on Japanese here in some way. Such as when they described the rejection, it used the phrase like “a clear victory for the Japanese government”. There is only one source with his name and title, which it “Masanori Miyahara, chief counselor of the Fisheries Agency of Japan”, but later I found out that it is not a first-hand source. As the reporter for this article simply used the sources from AP, as he claimed “the AP reported” before quotation.

The ending of the story is even a little sloppy. They began to talk about another topic, elephants and sharks. And I don’t really see the connection with the previous information they gave about the tuna and polar bear. There have four animals in one passage, with weak connection, which sounds a little ridiculous. I chose New York Times as my news outlet because at least it belonged to the “Elite media”. But sometimes, especially on environmental issues, it seems elite media doesn’t do it in a good enough way as well.

link of the passage:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/science/earth/19species.html?ref=earth