In 1998, the Yangtze River flooded killing more than 3000, demolishing five million homes and inundating 52 million acres of land. The economic losses have been estimated to be greater than $20 billion. There are two reasons for this catastrophe. The first and most obvious – two decades of unconstrained logging combined with destruction of wetlands. Without the basic ecological infrastructure required to manage the annual hydrological cycle, three thousand lives and more than $20 billion was lost overnight. The other reason, elusive in contemporary economic and political discourse, is the awareness of ecological systems as organs within a composite biosphere - a biosphere that possesses both the potential to preserve and expand wealth, as well as the capacity to annihilate it in seconds. Not only is this rather self evident truth marginalized generally, within China, total disregard for such considerations had been institutionalized as we will discover in the final pages of this essay.