China is pledging 5 billion yuan (US$818 million) to address the serious air pollution in north China (“China offers 5 billion yuan reward to fight air pollution,” October 15, Shanghai Daily).

On the face of it, that’s a lot of money.

But that’s because we are generally more sensitive to the value of dirty air and water (which easily translate into glowing GDP and consumption growth figures) rather than the fresh air, clean water and quietude that were taken for granted 30 decades ago.

When dirty water and the smell from landfills are successfully sanitized from our perception (usually by the standard practice of dumping refuse on our neighbors), we can safely flatter ourselves on our level of development, progress and prosperity.

Generally the “out of sight, out of mind” strategy works well in dealing with nearly all forms of pollution, except the smog that is fast becoming a standing feature for all big cities. After talking airily about smog for so many years, the debate begins to pall, and at this juncture an impressive sum of money reifies it, sexing up the debate again.

But that 5 billion yuan may not go very far, considering that after spending tens of billions of yuan to clean up Dianchi Lake in Yunnan Province in recent decades, a recent assessment found that the lake water has today fallen to the worst category imaginable. It is not only unfit for human consumption, but also too dirty for industrial and agricultural use.

When the cleanup began in 1986, people could still swim in the lake.

Costly cleanup

Now experts are talking about the need to spend hundreds of billions yuan in cleaning up that lake. One problem with that plateau lake is fairly isolated, thus pollutants gathered there cannot be dispersed.

Another problem is that such is nature of the ecosystem of the plateau lake that it may cope with the now denigrated more measured pace of human life, but can ill-afford the frenetic growth and urbanization that have gripped the area.

For thousands of years, nature has safeguarded conditions favorable to human existence, but human awareness of this is now at a all-time low because nature has achieved this so effortlessly.

In his “What Has Nature Ever Done for Us? How Money Really Does Grow on Trees,” eco-warrior Tony Juniper travels the planet, tracking what’s gone wrong, what environmentally aware people are doing right, and determining society still must do to heal the natural world.

He reveals that nature does a lot more for you than you think, and yet more and more nations are striving to “improve” their people’s lives by taking away from them the benefits of clean air, water, and soil.

He observes that businesses and governments everywhere tend to overlook the planet’s no-cost services and their economic impact. Natural activities, from photosynthesis to the water cycles, create cost-free common public goods, but when humanity misuses them, they can produce negative consequences.

In these days of enlightenment, we tend to grow disdainful of the “primitive people” who still find mountain, forests, flowers, and rivers awe inspiring, and humbly prostrate themselves before the powerful natural forces: the sun, moon, and the earth.

We are more mesmerized by our own creativity, our ability to make powerful machines, powerful weapons, or powerful new species. We are extracting ever higher growth from the finite earth by consuming ever more energy. When that growth seems unsustainable, we sustain it by persuading more people to embrace the growth credo.

When we can easily plunder the energy locked up in form of fossil fuels, the solar energy trapped by plants tens of millions years ago, we become impatient, or ashamed, of the growth of a plant, even when hastened by liberal use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

We become persuaded that the short cut to prosperity is to pave the soil with concrete, and then turn it over to industrial use.

As a matter of fact, growth today has been achieved most splendidly in a region proverbially known as the land of fish and rice, the Chinese way of saying a land flowing with milk and honey.

Recently 70 percent of urban Yuyao City, in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, suffered historic high flooding. In an interview, the Party secretary of Yuyao, Mao Hongfang, complained the city had been deluged with the amount of water contained in 65 West Lakes in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.

Does he know, in the drive for prosperity, how many West Lakes have been eliminated in this region formerly known for its water towns?

Extensive pavement not only kills the fertility of the soil, but also prevents rainwater from seeping in, thus causing surface flooding. As the book observes, soil is central to the services provided by nature, as soil nourishes crops, stores carbon, and recycles decomposing plants and animals.

Ironically, today soil gets treated like dirt at best, often to be avoided at all costs. Five years ago, when my son first set foot on the soil in my native village in Jiangsu Province, he was caught unprepared, and didn’t know how to walk, because he has virtually no experience of walking on soil.

Human ingratitude

During his recent trip this year, he had little difficulty in walking around, for the enlightened peasants were doing their utmost to criss-cross the village with concrete roads, and build multistory buildings with paved courtyards.

“Beneath our feet, out of sight and often out of mind, soil is probably the least appreciated source of human welfare and security,” the book observes.

Near the Temple of Heaven Park in Beijing stands the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, where in former times emperors would intercede with heaven for good harvests.

If you study a piece of less-trod pavement in a neighborhood, you will find that some plants manage to defy the concrete and grow to a ripe old age from the narrowest of crevices. In your wonderment, you are probably unaware that you are experiencing a spontaneous overflow of deistic sentiments.

You need not be ashamed. As Juniper writes, “One tablespoon of fertile soil is thought to contain more life forms, ranging from fungi to bacteria, than there are people on the planet.”

Occasional deistic indulgences allow us to appreciate that nature moves in mysterious ways. It should inspire awe and humility, and, hopefully, moderate our superstition about human intelligence.

He sums up the value of soil with five essential F’s — food, fuel, fodder, fiber and fresh water, plus one C, in the form of carbon capture and storage.

We have been very unkind to this giver of life. While soil supports 90 percent of the planet’s food supply, soil fertility is falling.

A staggering 33 percent of the earth’s soil has depleted since the mid-20th century. Where the soil still exists, it is getting harder to extract from it livelihood.

As the book observes, in China the excessive use of pesticides contributed to alarming declines in beneficial pollinators, notably birds, bees, bats and beetles. In Maoxian County, Sichuan Province, workers manually pollinate plants because natural pollinators died out in the 1980s. Some 40,000 people “using brushes made of chicken feathers and cigarette filters ... hand-pollinate the blossoms” of apple and pear trees.

The message is that everything around us is more inter-connected than we have hitherto thought, and this connectedness has been damaged in such a degree that responsible behavior can only be exacted by threats of bans, injunctions, and penalties — against those big emission contributors, particularly motorists and big spenders.