existential struggles in greater China and southeast Asia
I’m doing OK. A little diarrhea this morning but otherwise no problems. We’ve seen a few interesting things on this trip so far, and I will write more later. Internet access is not easy to come by most days.
The picture below is the famed first bend of Nujiang (怒江), the last hope for river conservationists in China. Its main course remains free of dams, unbridled and wild.
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.
Here’s an update on this story: U.S. Embassy Creates New Air Quality Description for Beijing: Crazy Bad
According to the U.S. Embassy’s air quality monitor in Beijing, Beijing’s Air Quality Index as of 1:00AM on November 18, 2010 is 464.
From: http://iphone.bjair.info/
This is the worst AQI I’ve seen.  Ironically, I was having lunch with a friend yesterday and we were both pretty happy about how good the air in Beijing had been the last few weeks, clear enough to see quite a few stars at night. I’m in Hong Kong now, glad to be out of the toxic air and the cold weather.
I passed by this solar water heater this morning at about 11 AM. At first I thought, this is pretty cool, it makes good use of space and doubles as a shade for the window. But on second glance I decided that it was one of the worst installations I have seen. Unfortunately, the picture doesn’t show everything, but you should be able to pick out some strangeness:
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:
