It it hadn’t been for Go Daddy’s CEO, Bob Parsons, shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe and stirring up PETA, a Politically Correct group of animal lovers in the U.S., I might have never been curious to see if China had elephants too.
And I discovered that China offers a safer haven for elephants than most nations that still have pachyderms living in their natural environment.
Elephant Aid says, “Most people associate China and elephants with the demand for ivory but although China only has a small number of elephants it is one of the only range states where numbers are on the rise. China’s elephants can only be found in the extreme south of the Yunnan province bordering Burma and Laos. Their range includes Xishuangbanna (XSNB) and the Nangunhe Nature Reserves.”
BBC – Wild Elephants in China
“The elephant is a protected species in China,” Elephant Aid says, “and the government has taken steps to conserve areas of elephant habitat including moving people out of the reserves in a bid to minimize human-elephant conflict.
“Chinese official have reported that the population is growing through both reproduction and immigration of herds from Laos. This is attributed to the lack of a threat from poachers in China and the abundant availability of fodder.”
According to Elephant.se, there are about 450 captive elephants in the US and less than 4,000 captive elephants globally. China has about 30 captive elephants.
All About Wildlife.com says there are 40 to 50 thousand wild Asian elephants and between 470,000 and 690,000 wild African Elephants.
There are more than two hundred wild elephants that live in China.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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K. D. Koratsky’s book, Living with Evolution or Dying Without It, is a heavily researched, scholarly work that gathers what science has discovered since Darwin’s discoveries and fills in the gaps explaining why evolution has something to teach us if humanity is to survive.
The other choice is humanity going the way of the dinosaurs into extinction.
It took me two months to finish reading the 580 pages. The Flesch-Kincaid Readability level would probably show this book to be at a university graduate level leaving at last 90% of the population lost as to the importance of its message.
For months, it bothered me that so many in the United States do not have the literacy skills to understand an important work such as this (the average reader in the US reads at fifth grade level and millions are illiterate). This is certainly not a good foundation to learn how precarious life is if you do not understand how brutal the earth’s environment and evolution has been for billions of years.
For instance, did you now that 252 million years ago volcanic explosions and the CO2 caused by those eruptions resulted in an acid rain that was so intense it was like vinegar and it caused the worse extinction in the earth’s history—over 90 percent of all species on the planet were wiped out. – Smithsonian.com
As I finished reading Living With Evolution or Dying Without It, I realized that it would only take a few key people in positions of power to understand the warnings offered by Koratsky and bring about the needed changes in one or more countries so humanity would survive somewhere on the planet when the next great environmental crises strikes.
On page one, Koratsky starts 13.7 billion years ago with the big bang then in a few pages ten billion years later, he introduces the reader to how certain bacteria discovered a new way to access the energy required to sustain an existence.
By the time we reach humanity’s first religion on page 157, we’ve discovered what caused so many species to die out and gained a better understanding of what survival of the fittest means.
To survive means adapting to environmental challenges no matter if they are delivered by the impact of a monster asteroid to the earth’s surface, global warming (no matter what the reason) or by competition with other cultures or animals competing for the earth’s resources.
In fact, competition is vital to the survival of a species for it is only through competition that a species will adapt to survive.
The book is divided into two parts. The first 349 pages deals with where we have been and what we have learned, and the two hundred and eleven pages in Part Two deals with current ideas and policies from an evolutionary perspective.
I suspect that most devout Christians and Muslims would dismiss the warnings in this book out-of-hand since these people have invested their beliefs and the survival of humanity in books written millennia ago when humanity knew little to nothing about the laws of evolution and how important competition is to survival.
Koratsky is optimistic that the United States will eventually turn away from the political agenda of “Cultural Relativism” that has guided America since the 1960s toward total failure as a culture.
The popular term for “Cultural Relativism” in the US would be “Political Correctness”, which has spawned movements such as race-based quotas and entitlement programs that reward failure and punish success.
Koratsky shows that the key to survival is competition that rewards merit at all levels of the culture (private and government).
He points out near the end of the book that this has been happening in China and is the reason for that country’s amazing growth and success the last thirty years.
In the 1980s, merit was reinstituted at the bottom and most who prosper in China today earned the right to be rewarded for success by being more competitive and adapting. Even China’s state owned industries were required to become profitable or perish.
It’s obvious that the earth’s environment does not care about equality or the relativists’ belief that everyone has a right to happiness.
This book covers the evolution of the universe, the planet, all life on the planet including the reasons why most life that lived on the earth for hundreds of millions of years before humanity is now gone; the beginnings of the human species; religion in all of its costumes; the growth of civilizations and the competitions that led to the destruction and collapse of so many civilizations such as the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty two millennia ago.
The environment and evolution says that all life on the planet is not equal and no one is born with a guaranteed right to success, happiness and fun. To survive means earning the right through competition and adaption. That doesn’t mean the losers have to suffer. After all, they do have the right to work, shelter and food—for instance, for the first time in more than two thousand years, no one is starving in China and most of the Chinese have shelter, because in the last thirty years China is responsible for 90% of the global reduction in poverty.
Of course, the Chinese achieved this poverty reduction—in part—by copying the lifestyles of the middle class in the United States.
If you don’t believe Koratsky’s warning, go talk to the dinosaurs and ask them why they’re gone or read that piece from the Smithsonian.com mentioned above.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
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China has its own brands of domestic cars. For instance, the Chery, a government owned corporation, (the pinyin transcription of its Chinese name is Qirui).
China’s Automobile Dealer Association reported that there were 25 Chinese sedan brands available in January, but they expect that number to eventually reach five domestic brands, because of government restrictions and increased costs of licenses for gas and diesel vehicles, in addition to competition from foreign automakers. The fact that China eliminated the 10% vehicle tax on Chinese electric vehicles might have also played an important part. – Fortune.com
It doesn’t help that Chinese cities are seriously restricting the number of new license plates for gas and diesel to reduce traffic and pollution. And that might explain why “China is now one of the largest electric car markets in the world.” While sales of traditional gas/diesel powered cars are dropping, sales of electric cars “appear to have more than tripled as compared to the previous year …” – Clean Technica
“(China’s) Government data shows that local-brand passenger vehicles accounted for 38% of China’s domestic market in 2014, down from 46% in 2010. For sedans, local brands’ share fell to 22% from 31%.” – The Wall Street Journal “But during the last four months of 2014, China’s electric vehicle sales skyrocketed, In December alone, monthly sales of passenger and commercial electric vehicles hit 27,000. … If this growth continues, China may surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest market for electric vehicles in 2015.” – Fortune.com
Look out, Tesla, the Chinese are coming, and they are serious. If you don’t believe me, visit China and breathe the air in most if not all of its major cities. After you stop gasping and wheezing, you will then be a believer of why the Chinese are going to go electric in a big way.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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I walked to town recently to see the film of a book I read several years ago. The theater I saw it in was huge and there were only three of us there. Wolf Totem was in Mandarin with English subtitles. Fortunately for the audience, there isn’t much dialogue so there isn’t that much to read if you don’t speak the language but the story—through the panoramic visuals—had a powerful message about mankind meddling with nature. In China, this film has earned more than $110 million U.S. I couldn’t find out how much it has earned in the U.S. where I saw it.
Consider the fact that pollution is not exclusive to China, and the United States, for instance, has more than 1,300 superfund sites—Superfund sites are polluted locations requiring a long-term response to clean up hazardous material contaminations. – epa.gov
In addition, the book and the film also offer another way to learn about China, it’s people and their humanity.
Jiang Rong is the pen name for Lu Jiamin, the author, a Chinese citizen. Set during the Cultural Revolution, Wolf Totem describes the education of an intellectual living with nomadic herders in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia.
The publisher of Wolf Totem said the novel was an epic Chinese tale and that’s true. Wolf Totem taught me a lot about this almost extinct culture. I learned about the fascinating connection between wolves and Mongolians and why this connection may have been the reason why Genghis Khan was so successful in his conquests.
I recommend the film more than the novel to anyone who wants to learn about the life of the Mongols and another perspective of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. If you can’t see the film, then the book is worth reading too.
However, the theme that runs through the novel of maintaining a balance with nature is a bit overdone—I didn’t get this impression from the film. In the novel, I got the message the first time the characters talked about it but then the topic comes up repeatedly—a bit too much but an insignificant criticism of a book worth reading and a film that I think is even more powerful.
I won’t give away the ending, but don’t expect it to be happy. Most Chinese novels don’t end with happy endings. The ending for the film was different than the novel, and I actually liked it better—a powerful and breathtakingly beautiful film.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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About 3000 BC, the northern Chinese used a form of cement in boat-building and in building the Great Wall. A key ingredient in the mortar used in the Great Wall was glutenous, sticky rice, and some of these structures have resisted even modern efforts at demolition. – The History of Concrete
As for steel, The first famous metallurgist in ancient China was Qiwu Huaiwen of the Northern Wei Dynasty (386－557 AD), who invented the process of using wrought iron and cast iron to make steel. – china.org.cn
Once steel is produced it becomes a permanent resource for society – as long as it is recovered at the end of each product life cycle – because it is 100% recyclable without loss of quality and has a potentially endless life cycle. Its combination of strength, recyclability, availability, versatility and affordability makes steel unique. – worldsteel.org
In 1980 when China first opened its doors to world trade, it produced 37.1 million metric tons of modern crude steel–5.17% of global production that year. For a comparison, the U.S. produced 101.4 million metric tons, Japan produced 111.4 million, and the European Union produced 208 million metric tons.
Thirty-four years later in 2014, China’s share of global crude steel product reached 49.1% or 822.698 million metric tons to the 88.174 million metric tons produced in the United States that year.
What caused this dramatic change? The answer is easy, the growth of China’s middle class. China has more than four times the population of the United States and almost twice the population of Europe.
And that’s why Business Insider says, “China’s rising middle class will create opportunism the world has never seen before.”
About 30 years ago, China started to modernize and in those thirty years, it has achieved what it took Europe and the North America more than two hundred years. China’s goal is to end up with the same urban to rural population ratio found in Europe and North America, and it is nearing that goal. Imagine compressing more than two hundred years of pollution from the West’s industrial revolution into thirty years in China.
To understand this spectacle, in 2004 the BBC News reported that, “The biggest mass migration in the history of the world is under way in China, and it is creating what some are calling the second industrial revolution.… A massive building boom unparalleled anywhere is taking place – last year, half the concrete used in construction around the world was poured into China’s cities.”
Concrete isn’t the only product China needs. Iron and steel are also necessary.
China hunger for iron has been epic. In 2009, India exported 106 million tons of iron to China. A July 2010 Reuters piece says, “Chinese steel producers are increasingly turning to Australia’s magnetite iron ore sector, pouring in funds to explore and develop mines once considered uneconomic…”
In 2006, China was the number one producer with 820 million metric tons of iron ore and still imported 52% from other countries like Australia (470 metric tons), India (150) and Brazil (250). Source: Wikipedia
Now that China is nearing its goal—in about 15 years China’s middle class will outnumber the entire population of the United States—it has an excess of steel and is exporting that excess at lower prices to other countries creating stiff competition across the globe. For instance, the ISSB reports that from 2013 to 2014 China increased its steel exports by 53% from 57.9 million to 88.6 million tonnes while the United States saw a 5% drop in its steel exports.
With the United States so obsessed to be #1 in everything—except for reducing the poverty rate—its capitalist oligarchs must be obsessively stressed out and worried that they are going to lose their Imperial crowns.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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