existential struggles in greater China and southeast Asia
Need to hit the road soon, so can’t write much. The least I can do is give you some pictures from yesterday, when we visited the Xiaowan dam and hydropower plant, completed earlier this year on the Lancang River (better known as the mighty Mekong). At 292 meters, nearly the height of the Eiffel Tower (300 meters), it is the world’s tallest arch dam.
Here’s a picture from the reservoir side:
Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been traveling a bit and also preparing for an adventure that starts today. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to join a group of Chinese environmental journalists on an info-gathering mission through Yunnan and Sichuan. The focus of the Yunnan portion is the aftereffects of the recent drought, and the focus of the Sichuan portion is to check out the progress of hydroelectric dam construction on the wild western rivers of China.
I hope to explore further the actual implementation of environmental impact assessment (EIA)Â procedures in China and eventually develop some insight into how the EIA system can be improved.
Here’s a web page about this mission from a previous year. It’s all in Chinese but there are some cool photos.
…and Happy Thanksgiving!!! Pour out some gravy for me.
I visited Sichuan recently and was fortunate enough to spend a few days in a mountainous Tibetan region called Danba (丹巴), aka the Valley of Beauties (美人谷）. Good looking people of both sexes did appear at an unusual rate in this area. I think it has something to do with the clean water, clean air, abundant food resources, and generally positive outlook on life enjoyed by these people. But that’s just a gut feeling. I’m sure there are scientific and historical explanations.
I saw several different types of solar and wind power usage in Danba. The county seat, a typical (though relatively clean), uninteresting, modern little town with cars and paved roads, had some interesting light posts:
I haven’t brought it up on the blog before, but those of you who know me may have heard me rave about the live/indie music scene in Beijing. There are a number of venues that have live music performances on most nights, and a lot of artists worth seeing and following.
I don’t want to take up a lot of space defending my reasons for including a post about Taiwan in a blog discussing “Environmentalism in China.” Let’s just leave it at a fact that nobody can deny: Taiwan is the operational base of a political entity called ROC, aka the Republic of China.
I spent a bit of time in Taipei when I was a kid in the 80s and early 90s. I have vivid memories of how dirty t he place was, at least compared to where I grew up in the U.S. I remember being shocked when I came back to Taiwan as an adult in 2002, about eleven years after my previous visit. The skies were blue, the rivers and creeks were clear, the streets were free of dog poo (we used to call it 黄金 (huang jin, meaning yellow gold), and that distinctive Taipei smell (those of you who visited Taiwan in the 80s and 90s know exactly what I’m talking about – a mix of rotting plant matter and sewage) had all but disappeared.
Here’s a picture I took near one of my favorite bookstores in the world, the Eslite (èª å“書店，Chengpin shudian) in Xinyi district, Taipei. Visible in the picture is the Taipei 101 tower, the tallest skyscraper in the world for a few months before the Burj Khalifa in Dubai overtook it in 2004.
I marveled out loud at how blue the sky was, and my cousin and his friends, Taipei locals, told me that the air quality was not as good as usual because many people were making burnt offerings for ä¸åŽŸæ™®æ¸¡, a festival that’s celebrated in the seventh month of the lunar calendar to pay homage to wandering ghosts. I asked them if they remembered when the sky was always grey and looks of bewilderment shaded their faces. “No, the sky is always blue on sunny days, and usually even bluer than today!”
I turned to my cousin and asked him if he remembered when we were kids and, after playing outside all day, we would run our fingernails along our arms and scrape off a layer of black, like ink under our nails? Or how our boogers would always be black from the air pollution (kind of like what happens in Beijing now)? <Warning – the next picture is not for the faint of heart> Continue reading
