Drudge carried this China rejects computer spy claims as “ghost of Cold War” and it made me think of something a contact at Brandeis said to me in a meeting prior to filming. I think the Cold War is much more prevalent than I expect, because I’m too young to have felt its impact maybe.

The Chinese spying noticed by the Canadian government has not been linked to the Chinese government. Why are we so quick to say it’s probably the Chinese government? There are people in the U.S. who are hacking hacking all the time. It’s a minority that exists in any population.

“Nowadays the problem is that there are some people abroad avidly concocting rumors about China’s so-called Internet espionage,” said a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry. And he links it back to a “ghost abroad called the Cold War”.

Russia, China cooperate on new currency proposals has interesting implications and is possibly the cause for some of the Western anxiousness. Coupled with Cold War sentiment residue–which I’m excited to better understand–makes it difficult to be really understanding. I wonder where this anti-Sino sentiment comes from in my generation, though.

or maybe I’m wrong.

Most of this Fight Against Climate Change on the Xinhua site is old, but there’s a mention specifically of the Olympics as part of the Chinese efforts to mitigate global warming. The “Backgrounder” information is interesting as an effort to make up for historically weak environmental education in China.

This has been a tab open in my browser for days and I hadn’t looked at it yet, but today I’m going to contact the Green Dragon Media Project because I like their work. It’s focused on the building industry, but the attitude of the project extends beyond the construction industry.  On the site: “[China's green building movement, valued at] 4 million square meters of green building construction (not including sustainable development), is a story worth telling… and for reference, the U.S. now has 12.5 million square meters after 30 years of a green building movement.”

Charles McElwee, an Environmental lawyer in Shanghai, talks about changing attitudes within the Central Government in China. McElwee, like a few others that we’ve connected with, chooses to focus on the “opportunities that have been created by China’s environmental situation” rather than the challenges. There are two sides to every problem. All of McElwee’s interviews are interesting.

David Zhou, an architect in Beijing, mentions that driving the environmental movement in China is environmental education–which is what we saw as well, and will be highlighted in our film–and that people in China are acting now with a consideration of how their kids are going to live in the future.

Intellectual property is an issue in China that has hindered innovation, and several Green Dragon interviewees mention this. The issue is that if an innovation saves energy and decreases pollution, many feel that it should be a public good, and that there should be a public fund provided by governments to provide an incentive to innovate in these ways. I think that in China the tendency to consider public goods is still much stronger than it is in the West.

Yesterday I had scheduled an interview with Bill Moomaw of the Fletcher School’s Center for International Environmental and Resource Policy at Tufts. I lost sleep the night beforehand because I was excited and nervous! When I left for the meeting, I forgot part of the camera–the part that connects the microphone and the camera I think. I shouldn’t be trusted with these things–and so we rescheduled for next week at the same time. Jeff and I talked previously about how it’s important to be warmed up to the person you’re interviewing, and so I took the opportunity to talk to Professor Moomaw a little bit. It helped to make me more comfortable, anyway. Bill Moomaw is a big name.

Also, I got to meet Ben, the video editor. This is exciting for me, as it is the next person with whom I will work on this project. I told Ben I was a little bit nervous about this. It will be great, and I’m happy to have some fresh input because this was getting a little bit stale for me.

I’m happy for the dry run on the Moomaw interview.  Ben helped to remind me what was productive about this meeting, which I’m happy for. This is the role that Jeff filled in China. good deal.

This afternoon I was watching the interview we shot yesterday because Jeff had to take the tapes back to Amherst to make copies of them, and as I was transcribing the interviews something Hongyan said prompted me to make a really cool connection that kind of legitimizes this whole thing to me. It is an idea that connects my affinity for environmental education and my trust in economics as The Problem Solver.

The thing that Hongyan said to us yesterday was about the environmental movement in China: “We can say that it will get stronger and stronger.” She said this in the context of talking to us about Chinese demand for a cleaner environment. She also made the connection between the Olympic-inspired “blue sky days” and a greater demand in the public for cleaner air. Bingo!

The Environmental Kuznets Curve describes the relationship between pollution and economic development in an inverse U-shape, with the amount of pollution decreasing as income increases. It seems like there is a lot of controversy about whether this U-relationship is as clear as some say, but I think this idea generally makes sense to me.  The controversy has been about using this Kuznets curve to prescribe policy. It’s general idea makes sense to me: valuing the environment is a good that is only demanded once basic needs are met.

But, the connection that I made is that the tipping point on the Environmental Kuznets Curve is dependant on environmental education. People need to first realize that the environment is bad and could be better, then also need to know how to take steps to make this happen. This is only possible if there is a base line level of environmental knowledge, and connects to Ma Jun’s China’s Water Pollution Map, and the importance of the collection and the dissemination of environmental information is highlighted. Information needs to first be collected, and then also be accessible. Ma’s Water Pollution Map disseminates information that is collected by the Chinese government about the environmental issues in China and makes it accessible through the Internet. The Water Pollution Map is also used to submit reports about pollution, but I don’t know about it’s efficacy as a reporting mechanism when so many don’t have Internet access.

I’ve been thinking more directly about the connections between this project and a card that my adviser wrote to me last year. He said that I had a deep caring that was tied to the people and things of this world–I’m probably paraphrasing badly, but that was the gist. At the time, I thought that I’m happy that this is the way I presented myself to him, but I didn’t feel that way about myself. But after thinking a little more about it (for like a year), I think he may be right. I’ve been thinking about where this caring for the people and things of this world comes from, and I think it is tied to being connected. Being connected is just another way to talk about love. In this case, the love connects a person to a place. But how to teach this connection to place? It doesn’t seem possible.

But then I was looking at the Tufts Nutrition Program magazine and there was a piece about gardens in public schools. My friend Gwen is getting her teaching degree in Scotland right now, and she wants to come backand plant a garden in our elementary school eventually. Having a garden in a school fosters awareness of where your food is coming from (potentially mitigating the environmental costs of transporting food all over the world), encourages a sense of community within the school, and also instills this connection to place that I think is so important.

Reading this book about sustainability, and much of it resonates with what I know of the environmental movement in China (all of which is subject to change from what we see when we make “Beijing’s Olympic-inspired Greening” in August).

From page 11, “The difference between many random initiatives that add up to something and a revolution that can transform society boils down to a shift in thinking.” But I will argue that “a shift in thinking” is a scape goat. I would argue that Senge’s “shift in thinking” is actually increased interconnections and information sharing. Maybe it is the framework that I’m looking at the problem from–my training is in International and Global Studies–but I think that increasing the flow of information and the strength of the interconnections between the information can cause everyone to grow in a stronger and healthier way.

Peter Senge goes on to list the basic premises for creating in a more sustainable way, and I think that we should focus on these premises when Jeff and I are shooting our film. The three core premises that Senge outlines are: seeing systems, collaborating across boundaries, and creating versus problem solving. I think I need to think more about Senge’s third premise more carefully. What does it mean to create versus to just problem solve? I can understand that problem solving doesn’t change the system that gave rise to these problems, and maybe that’s the point of creating instead. It’s an idea that I haven’t fully adopted yet, because maybe it’s the most difficult to implement.