Slang and its analogues past and present. A dictionary, historical and comparative of the heterodox speech of all classes of society for more than three ... in English, French, German, Italian, etc

China, for example, has only one-fifth as much water per capita as the United States. Furthermore, while southern China is relatively wet, the north, home to about half the country’s population, is an immense parched region that threatens to become the world’s largest desert. [487] The Chinese state, from the great canals of the Ming dynasty to the Three Gorges Dam of the present, has long viewed the environment as something that can be manipulated for, and subordinated to, human ends. [488] The level of environmental awareness, on the part of government and people alike, has been very low, though this is changing rapidly, especially in the main cities. The poorer a society, moreover, the greater the priority given to material change at the expense of virtually all other considerations, including the environment. It is much easier for a rich society to make the environment a priority than a poor society — and China remains a relatively poor society. By 2015 China will only have reached the same standard of living as most Western countries achieved in 1960 and the latter, able to draw either on their own natural resources or those of their colonies, enjoyed the luxury of being able to grow without any concern for environmental constraints until they were already rich. [489] In European terms, China has torn from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first century in little more than three decades, pursuing a similar resource-intensive strategy, with the environment never more than a footnote ...»