We are ruled by our fears as much as our dreams. "Sure enough," young Jonathan Watts' uncle would tell him, "if everyone in China jumped at the same time, the world would spin off its axis, into oblivion." Each night Jonathan would pray at his bedside, for his family, for his dog, and for the Chinese not to take that synchronized leap of doom.  Today, he is the Guardian's man in Beijing. His book, "When a Billion Chinese Jump", paints a truly scary picture of China, one ecologically devastated by its will to economic power, yet softened by the hope of innovation ushering in a dreamy green new People's Republic.

Green, always green on the tongues of progressives, and the palettes of government planners. On the canvas? Sear and sandy brown. Watts shows you birds-eye scenes of landscapes cracked and ruined for lack of water, "a stretch of particularly nasty desert" you think. Not deserts, these are lakebeds, recently dried not by the Three Gorges Dam but a thousand other steps on the dead-thirsty road to a rich, modern new country.

Watts hammers the macro threat into our monkey brains with micro stories. We have Nan Hua, a red-cheeked nomad woman who a decade ago joined the economic revolution, pooling meager resources with her clan and painstakingly creating a lakeside resort on the Inner Mongolia/Hebei border. That lake is a distant memory now, made bitter by the dust in its place, blowing away like the clan's dream of modern self-sufficiency, its younger members all blown off to the city, "ecological refugees" as Watts calls them.

No need to fear the Chinese are too hell-bent on riches and glory to have code green (and wet) at the top of the national agenda. Heck, they were engineering massive ecological reform back when the only green Al Gore cared about was rolled up in funny cigarettes. And for each Guo Kai, the military commander who determined the quantity of nukes necessary to blast a two-kilometer corridor through the Himalayas and vent in that moist, warm Indian air, there was a Jiang Jiwen, "Mother Poplar", whose fast-growing hybrids 107 & 108 today blanket the North China plains.

So yes, Watts admits, most of us can't imagine the true extent of China's environmental problems, yet we are similarly ignorant of all that is being done about them. Every week in China, another coal-fired power plant roars to life, but every day a new wind turbine starts turning.  And the country still has vast reserves of ecological wealth, forests in Sichuan and Qinghai alone larger than all in North America.

Thus did the New York Times' Thomas Friedman tell us to forget our fear of Red China, and start chewing our nails over Green China, a nation as eco-advanced as it is populous, leaving the rest of us to a fate equal parts Road Warrior and The Day After Tomorrow. A novel scare tactic, even for a Pulitzer establishment journo, yet one Watts assures us is premature. Before China can leave us gnashing our teeth west of Eden, it must find an apple of knowledge heretofore unplucked by any industrializing nation.

It's a question of timing as much as scale. For those who deem the dirty phase a rite of passage on the way to first world status, and read aloud Dickens passages of sooty London, a Kuznets Curve used to serve, a graph with "Dirty" on the y-axis and "Rich" on the x. A country's parabola reached its height somewhere between five and eight thousand dollars per year, per capita, after which education, technology, and bulging government coffers combined forces to defeat evil pollution.

Watts points out that more instructive than Kuznet's Curve proves the ratio of technology to "outsourcing" in a nation's clean-up plan. Quotes on "outsourcing" because it's a euphemism for dumping your problems on a poorer nation. In the days of England's Industrial Revolution it was feasible, if morally egregious, to pass the misery on to the darker corners of Britannia. But this late in the game, who does China outsource to? Instead, it "insources", East to forsaken West: Tibet, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia, currently China's # 1 coal region, soon to be out-stripped, literally, by Xinjiang.

Of course, scale plays its role in the first act of this disaster movie hopefully not to come. "The jaws of humanity are growing wider," says Watts, individual consumption and energy use exploding as the East begins sticking billions of thumbs in the West's unsustainable pie. "You've all got cars, and ACs, and clothes driers, and front lawns; why can't we?" Who's going to convince the people of China, let alone India and a billion others tucked between them, hey, it was nice for us while we could get away with it, but sorry kids, the show's over? No one at the Copenhagen Climate Summit, apparently.

Maybe no one needs to, as the ecological wall China's about to slam into makes a much simpler argument. Pollution-related protests break out like heat rashes in summer, and much uglier, most recently in Zhejiang against yet another poison-spewing chemical factory. The cancer villages such factories spawn lie not just in the hinterlands but in the very sight of luxury Beijing apartment towers, were the view not so veiled by 300-count particulate.

The crash is no foregone conclusion, at least not in Watts' estimable opinion, for no one in the driver's seat is throwing up his hands. Shucks, there's a hydraulic-engineer president at the wheel, and a geologist premier riding shotgun. China already leads the world in wind turbine and solar panel production. Coal is being liquefied for cleaner burn. Algae is being developed that can gorge on CO2 and in turn make a meal for pigs and cows. A massive north-south water diversion tunnel will test the skills of a people who once built the world's longest canals.

But these are supply-side solutions. And Watts tells us that the Chinese must ease up on the demand side: keep riding those bicycles, eat meat once a week, turn off the AC and use a hand-fan. As long as we're role models, and consumption defines happiness, hope is lost. Yet a times China can be more cohesive than an acrobat troupe. Should a billion people decide to jump to sustainability, they might just set the world spinning right again.

Buy "When a Billion Chinese Jump".