recycling and related thoughts

Check out this video from China's Green Beat, which I recently discovered via TreeHugger:



Of course, I started seeing bicycles like this immediately after arriving in China -- I remember that one of the things that surprised me the most when I arrived jetlagged in Beijing 2.5 years ago on my scholar garden trip was the sheer quantity of things that could fit on one bicycle -- but I didn't realize right away how comprehensively all the trash is sorted. I asked Ma Jing awhile back if there was anywhere I could take my recycling, since the hotel maids just took everything with the trash. She said I didn't need to worry about it, that all the trash would get sorted and recycled. And now I know how.

I have mixed feelings about China's relationship to the environment. On one hand, China is burning massive amounts of coal and has surpassed U.S. carbon emissions (of course, it also has more than four times the population, and the U.S. is largely implicated in creating and perpetuating the pollution problem by relying on cheap consumer goods made in China). On the other hand, people in China use much less and re-use much more (see Kitty's blog for an example of re-use taken too far). It isn't about the environment as much as it is about what is viable in a highly populated developing country. And I worry about that word developing, because so many of the ways in which China is environmentally superior to the U.S. (smaller apartments in high-density mixed-use urban areas, lots of public transit and bicycles, fewer private cars, more repair and reuse of damaged goods rather than discarding and repurchasing, etc.) seem to be at odds with the consumer culture, dare I say the "American dream," that so much of the world aspires to, a culture and dream that have historically disregarded environmental protection in pursuit of economic growth.

I've been reading and thinking a lot about this lately. I've been following the news about the UN conference in Bali, where the Bush administration wouldn't agree to set targets for greenhouse gas reductions and doesn't want to agree to anything if China and India won't agree to limit their emissions as well. I don't think that economic growth and environmentalism must necessarily be at odds (in the long run, they certainly aren't), but I don't see how we can expect China to develop in the most environmental way possible if we aren't willing to make amends for the fact that we didn't.

And it doesn't matter whether or not you believe that global warming is happening and is caused by humans (though I certainly do) -- in any case, I don't think that we are entitled to consume so much more than our fair share of resources, and I don't think we should rely on energy sources that create so much pollution when there are other potential options, and I don't think that having so much stuff makes us any happier.

So I'm trying to stop being a hypocrite and start doing my part in being kinder to our planet and the other people who are living on it. I drinking boiled tap water stored in reused bottles instead of buying bottled water. I am taking the stairs. I am only washing my clothes when they really need it, and don't have a dryer. I am wearing more layers instead of turning up the heat. I am being vigilant about lightswitches. I am not taking showers when I don't need them. I am walking and taking the bus whenever possible instead of taking a taxi. I am saving and reusing whatever I can -- bottles, bags, papers that my students have written notes to me on one side of. I spent three weeks in class talking with my students -- future airplane designers, weapons designers, members of the communist party -- about environmental issues, about what we can do as individuals, about what China can do as a country, and about the relationship between the environment and the economy. I am not buying things I won't fully use. I am trying to keep educating myself and keep getting better, though I have a lot further to go and sometimes feel limited by my circumstances, especially when language barriers keep me from making more-informed choices.

Whew! That turned into a much longer post than the "check out this video" I was intending, but I guess there is a lot to say.