Thoughts on China and Sustainability

After being home from China for some weeks, I’ve thought quite a lot about what I saw, especially regarding sustainability. One thing that’s clear to me is that our perceptions of China’s place in all this are being managed pretty well by our mainstream media. It is true I suppose that China’s gross energy consumption is equal to or near ours. However, it is also true that there are something like 4.3 times more folks there.

China’s energy consumption is growing quickly and there’s not a reasonable way they’ll ever be able to get at enough hydrocarbons to equal our per capita consumption.

So, they are pushing things everyday that we don’t see much of. Everything that looks anything like a “house”, even 3-4 story flats, has active solar hot water. Student housing at the universities has serious negative incentives for electric usage in the residences – electric meters for the rooms! They pay as they go. After dusk, the residences were almost completely dark, and students were gathered in public places and classrooms in groups to study.

Green design is in the news constantly and new developments everywhere incorporate storm water into water features and set aside green space – even in the midst of developed Shanghai. Shanghai bought and cleared several square kilometers of land right in the midst of vast development and created Central Park to provide green space, water, an amphitheater, gardens, and miles of walking paths.

In the major cities I saw many construction sites where, to try to cut down on airborne particulates, builders used fabrics – sort of like our landscape matting, to cover the bare ground and cut down on wind blown construction dusts. At my host, Zhejiang Unversity, planners gave up on siting a major new building at the home campus in favor of setting up a beautiful natural park - again with water, trails, and plantings - to decompress the campus a bit and give humans a respite from hardscape and structure. These efforts are unbelievable committments - especially given the scarcity and price of land in the cities.

There’s no question that they have a lot to do but there's a lot of good. Traffic was no where near as bad as I was told to expect (and the roadways, especially in Hangzhou, were excellent). It was exciting to see the efforts that are in place and underway. I talked a lot about our own renewable energy work at St. Olaf, and that’s what my counterparts were most interested in.