ABSTRACT
Long before actually visiting China, the author had, in common with so many before himself, been fascinated by Chinese culture, history and religion. In 2008, apart from visiting China, the author was working on the Cambridge Top 50 Sustainability Books project. Elizabeth Economy, author of The River Runs Black, has studied China's environmental challenges and believes the crisis they face is deep and intractable. The facts she cited in the author's interview with her were sobering. Seven hundred and fifty thousand people die prematurely every year in China because of respiratory diseases related to air pollution. China is roughly one-quarter desert, and the desert is advancing somewhere between 1,300-1,900 square miles per year. In the United States we would say roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island is lost to desert every year in China. We could benefit from less male yang, and more female yin, in China and in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement.
