Yangtze River lethal in five years
It’s the longest river in Asia and the third longest in the world at 3,859 miles long. It supplies water to almost 200 cities along its banks, through some of China’s most concentrated populations. It’s the Yangtze River, and just on the other side of this decade, it will be a dead river.
According to China’s state media, billions of tons of waste and sewage will obliterate the river’s remaining plant and wildlife species. This news follows the terminal pollution of the Yellow River last year. It is estimated that 300 million people in China live without safe drinking water.
So first the Three Gorges Dam is installed in order to supply power and prevent floods, and now pollution will render the water unsafe. Hydrate by candlelight or die under fluorescent bulbs…
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Yikes! That’s bad news.
Guess it might go some way towards explaining the functional extinction of the baiji. At the China environment website I work for, http://www.chinadialogue.net, we carried a piece by a leading Chinese environmental campaigner http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/673-Farewell-to-the-baiji
Now more bad news comes from the Yangtze. The finless porpoise is under threat. An optimistic estimate puts these Yangtze river dwellers’ numbers as low as 14000 - not yet facing imminent extinction but falling at 7.5 per cent a year. Sand dredging and heavy shipping traffic have been blamed. http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/673-Farewell-to-the-baiji
It’s a sad tale - let’s hope it’s not a repeat of the baiji story.