I haven’t made this space political–although I think it’s implicitely underwritten–but Drudge carried an article this morning that I will link to here. The Guardian carried this article,
“President ‘has four years to save Earth’“. NASA scientist Jim Hansen, urges “urgent action” by the United States, in leading this shift in direction.

crisis or opportunity?

I will try to have the trailer posted here before the end of the day, as in before midnight on the east coast of the U.S.

Until then, I’m preemptively responding to some concern about the thrust of this movie. I understand concern that my adviser raised about sounding too “boosterish”. Writes Dan, “I hope that you are very positive about China’s env’l situation–where appropriate–and honest about problems, where appropriate.  You don’t want to lose credibility by sounding too boosterish (I’m sure you know that, but I just want to make sure you do!).”

I’m not sure how to solve this problem, because the people we spoke with were doing positive work. I responded to Dan’s concern: “It is true that I set out to talk to the people who are doing really great conservation and EE work, so there’s is the story we’re telling. I pitched the project in this way, telling the good story about the environmental movement in China. I thought that, balanced with the negative coverage in the Western main stream media and the greenwashed media coverage in China, this makes a complete picture. BUT, you’re right that it de-legitimizes the film to be only singing China’s praises. We have a couple of folks who are working for sectors other than the IENGO sector who bring a little more realism to the picture, and we’ll introduce them later on. I think Ben thought that, overwhelmingly, this is a positive and hopeful story, so he didn’t bring the counter arguments into the trailer. In such a short representation, that would be misleading I think.”

Today Ben and I had a big day: We met with Greg Ingram, the President of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Greg formerly worked for the World Bank, and I’ve written about his work previously here, because it is impressive to me.

Additionally, Ben showed me what he had been working on over the holiday. Ben made a trailer for our film that is beautiful. I will embed it here when I either figure out how, or use my resources. Until then, youtube has kindly agreed to carry our trailer for me. I invite you to look at the film’s trailer here, courtesy of youtube:

Today I met with a candidate for the translating work. We have no film to translate yet, but I am thinking about who will do this work for us. preemptive.

Also more news about Chinese sensorship of the Internet on Drudge today. Yahoo Finance carried this article about how the recent internet crackdown in China, which formerly focused on pornography, expanded to include a site popular with activists, http://www.bullog.cn. The site was shut down, according to Luo Yonghao, of the Associated Press, for “harmful comments on current affairs”.

Jim Fallows mentions “the influential China Beat” in his Atlantic Monthly post on 30 December. I had never come across the China Beat. It “examines media coverage of China, providing context and criticism from China scholars and writers.” I will look more closely soon, but it will be interesting to see what The China Beat has to say about the Western media coverage of the Olympics in China.

In August, on the China Beat, Haiyan Lee writes: “So is not the motto for the Beijing Olympics, “One world, one dream,” a tad naive? It’s a beautiful ideal, but it ill prepares one for the inconvenient fact of human plurality and the inevitable clashes of desires and interests. Might not “Many dreams, a single planet” better serve China as well as the rest of the world?” This message also implicitly holds ideas about environmental sustainability and conservation, because if we have many dreams but only one planet, we each have to fit the dreams together seamlessly without too many conflicts.

The Media Watch column on the China Beat is of particular interest.

In the Beijing Delgation section of Policy Innovations, a publication of the Carnegie Council, it is suggested that democracy is about satisfaction. The satisfaction level of the citizenry is an interesting way to gauge democracy–actually, if democracy is a representative system of government, and citizens in theory vote in a way to encourage and increase happiness for themselves and their families, this doesn’t seem entirely implausible as a system for gauging democracy.

The first chapter of Forging Environmentalism is called “The Politics and Ethics of Going Green in China”. The forward is by Judith Shapiro and outlines the development of environmentalism in China, beginning BEFORE Mao’s death, with the country’s participation in the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm.