"China Inside Out" Chapter 5

I was only mildly shocked by how much resources China was going through. While the numbers are staggering, it is not easy to forget that China hosts a population of one billion residents, so it is not surprising that they tower over many other countries in resource consumption. What surprised me the most was the water troubles that China is having. According to Dodson, “China's cultural blind spot has historically been that water is, and always will be, abundant” (Dodson 100). While I can see where this view might come from, it was alarming to read that they are not coming up with permanent solutions for their new lacks of water. Water is the most basic element of life; without it, many people could die. I do not see anything that could necessarily be classified as an error in Dodson's reasoning, but I do think he has missed a possible outcome to the water crisis. He mentions that, eventually, the glacier in the Himalayas that creates some Chinese rivers is eventually going to not be able to have enough meltwater to feed the rivers anymore, and that after that, China will have serious water problems. However, an item in the news recently has been that there is an initiative to be able to create salt water into viable drinking water. If this process works, China could end up investing in it, and suddenly having massive amounts of useable water from the coast lines, which could eventually serve the entire country with the right piping systems. This could be the most important factor in the water crisis that China faces; the whole world water crisis will benefit from this. I think Dodson's reasoning in this chapter could also apply to the United States, because while we may not use the same amounts of resources, we are overusing several and will end up with shortages soon if we do not change our ways. Again, with water as an example: massive droughts in the U.S. have caused many towns to limit the water they use because there is simply not enough. It is slightly different, because the U.S. does not depend on one glacier, but if enough sources dry up, we could find ourselves in a similar boat as China- at the bottom of a very dry lake.