Rules for Radicals and John McCain

Senator John McCain wrote a letter to my father today. No, my dads not a big shot in politics - it was a mass mailing - he mailed all registered republicans. My father feels that voting in the republican primary for our state and national districts is more influential than the national presidential primaries, thus he gets republican mailings from time to time.

The short and well written letter was a call to action to support the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship and Innovation act. John McCain, the fairly well respected republican senator, is supporting US action on global warming. From the linked summary, the bill looks good. We'll see where it goes.

I just finished reading Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. It was great, a real handbook for getting large groups of people excited for change. I'd really recommend it. One comment that I'd like to make: Mr. Alinsky spent his life travelling from one issue to another. Civil rights to housing disputes to labor organization to anti-war protests to stopping pollution. He did it all, and he did it all very well and he never tied himself down with one issue. But in the closing remarks in his book he talks about the world he would like to see. That world is a world where the little guy has rights which are respected, where people who have power will always be held accountable for their actions and where the political will of the people is not manipulated in Washington.

Maybe I'm way too optimistic, but I'd like to think that if he lived 30 years later he would have taken a special interest in the issue of climate change. It seems that dealing with climate change will require many of the huge issues to be solved. The people who will suffer because of global warming are the Have-nots, as he would say. They need to convey their dissatisfaction with the wrongs inflicted on them to the Haves who make decisions. That is the only way the issue will ever be grappled with. But In order to do that, in order for the wronged masses wrongs to be righted, many things have to change. People say accountability is the biggest change that has to be made in our culture, because right now we have a society that specializes in displacing effects from actions. That is the nature of the global political-economy. So Mr. Alinsky, if your dream is to secure a better world for the little guys, the have-nots, then this is it. Global warming may only be one of many impending dooms awaiting the worlds poor, but it is unique among those possible dooms because its solution will a) benefit everyone, even businesses, and b) change the culture of exploitation into a culture of respect and balance.


A few other things: I spoke to the 11th and 12th graders of Keene Central School today about global warming. I wasn't the funniest or most animated speaker, but I did make an impression. The talks focused heavily on what students can do, and most important along those lines was forming a group (or using an existing one) to advocate and plan.

Second thing: I ran today, on the ski trails here. It was depressing. Running in shorts is not a correct way to spend the winter solstice in the Adirondacks.

Working on Outreach

Today I stopped by Keene Central School, my alma matter, to see a few teachers about global warming. I went with the intention of asking for class time this week to talk to students and help start some sort of climate action. I was surprised at how eager my teachers were to do it! My old English teacher and history teacher were all I needed to talk to, and in about 20 minutes I had class periods lined up with 10th, 11th and 12th graders, for either 45 minutes of 1 1/2 hours. Now its time to work on my powerpoint and look up a few facts about climate change in the north country and how it will affect hunting, fishing, snowmobiling and other 'local' activities.

Ephblog

I have just become an author of ephblog. For those of you who don't know, its a blog kept by an alumni, David Kane, and written by several alumni, professors and current students covering 'all things eph'. Its readership is decent and I plan on posting occaisionaly update on our activities and perhaps a few of my more thought-out opinions. Kane, the main contributor to the site, will probably be skeptical or outright opposed to much of what I have to say. This is fine, but I would appreciate comments from friendly readers like yourselves as well.

The Endowment

Is it possible to try and influence how the endowment as a whole is invested?
John Chandler, writing as president of Williams College, asserted that "As an investor Williams is in some measure responsible for the behavior of the companies in which it invests." link And "...the College through its Trustees has a right to expect companies in which it owns shares to follow business policies and practices in their foreign and domestic operations that are broadly consistent with the moral and social ideals of American society."

Of course we do have the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility which has student input on proxy voting and does research on companies, but it certainly isn't a tool for big change.

There is also a very small Williams Social Choice Fund which was met with mixed reviews by David Kane. The full story of that fund's creation can be found here.

As Mark Orlowski '04 says, "We seek to advance the alignment of shareholder practices with educational missions". link

Is this an area we could work for meaningful change, or is this a dead end of financial conservativeness?

Graduate Pledge Alliance

A few schools have started a simple program called the Graduate Pledge Alliance. From the Boston University student environmental website:

ESO has recently brought the Graduate Pledge Alliance (GPA) to BU! GPA is a non-binding pledge made by graduating seniors stating that they will take the environment into consideration in whatever job they take in the workforce. GPA seniors wear a green armband during graduation ceremonies in order to distinguish themselves. Their commitment means that no matter what field these seniors go into, they will work to make their organization more environment-friendly. BU is in good company on this initiative. MIT and Harvard's GPA movements are already in full swing. BU's students finally have the opportunity to show the administration and the rest of the academic community that we are committed to a sustainable future!

Other Schools include: Penn State, Tufts, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Harvard, Middlebury, U of Massachussets, U of Michigan, and more, totalling about 100. Visit www.graduatepledge.org for more.

This might be something Williams could do fairly easily, but then again we need to weigh it against other projects that we wish to bring up to the college.

CAC

From the Daily Messages:

CAC to make greenhouse gas emissions recommendations in January
Last spring, President Schapiro created the Climate Action Committee to recommend by the end of the calendar year a goal for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and ways to attain that goal. We estimate that it will take approximately one month longer than expected to complete our work.

Last spring, President Schapiro created the Climate Action Committee and charged its members to recommend by the end of the calendar year a goal for the reduction of College greenhouse gas emissions and ways to attain that goal. We have spent the past six months engaged in a study of the various aspects of this complex issue and are working on a final draft of the plan for internal review. Consequently, we now plan to release our recommendations by the end of January. The Committee is very grateful for your interest and patience. from Stephanie Boyd, Facilities

On a totally different note, vegetarians are smarter

Al Gore in Great Barrington

I saw Al Gore speak last night in Great Barrington. Prof. Singham got us two tickets to the press conference as well as the talk and I got to ask the first question: "What is your plan for the next 5 years? Are you going to keep being an educator or is there some program that you plan on pursuing to be even more effective?" He answered, "I don't have any special or different plans, I'm going to keep doing what I do because I think its working and its important. I will keep up my international activities of advising national governments and just trying to make changes where I can."

Yes, he was a little stiff in his movements even as he eagerly sat on the edge of his chair, but as he warmed up, the power of his oration overcame anything noticeable about his demeanor. I've never been so impressed with an orator. Its very rare to listen to someone talk and know that reading the same words just wouldn't have the same effect. The way he jumped from point to point, citing statistics and anecdotes, quotes and jokes led the audience with him on every point. He gave a short talk and then answered written questions from the audience, but even through his answers, which did answer the questions, the momentum and drive of his talk continued so that the climax to the talk came not at the end of the talk but in the answer to the last question.

Good Points

If we are going to solve the climate crisis we need to solve the democracy crisis first. American democracy came from the enlightenment when men believed facts and reason should rule. It was threatened this century by the ideologies of modernity - fascism and totalitarian-communism, and luckily we triumphed. But the enlightenment ideals are under attack again, not from ideology but from a regime of economic consumerism. It is based on the mindless, one-way nature of television (the primary source of America's information about the world). Big-money controlled television allows us to drown out facts and reason with inanity which leads decisions to be made on false opinion rather than reality. At the time congress voted to go to war in Iraq, 77% of the American public believed Saddam Hussein was the person most responsible for the 9-11 attacks. This is a false opinion which was supported by big money interests. Its not that big-money hasn't influence politics before, its that its influence far exceeds any historical precedent.

We cannot rely on nuclear power to get us out of this mess. Not because of dealing with waste and not because of the chance of a meltdown, although both are real. It is because our policies will be mimicked abroad, and any country that can build a nuclear reactor can also easily build a bomb. Increasing nuclear power will significantly decrease the security of the world. And in America there hasn't been a single new nuclear plant commissioned in 33 yrs for economic reasons - the investment is so great and the payoff so long that companies don't think its worth it.

Public opinion change, like climate change is non-linear. They both can seem unchanged for a long time and then suddenly spring to life to create radical change. We are nearing a tipping point in public opinion which will be based on grassroots initiatives but quickly overwhelm the obstacles that big-money has in place. It is not a long process but a short one, a matter of years. And it will happen before it is to late to act effectively on climate change.

Where to Next?

Possibly upstaging Gore, two high school students performed a rap that they composed about global warming. Gore invited them up and it was amazing. It should be on Youtube soon, and you can bet I'll post it. I found these kids after the talk and bombarded them with questions about what sorts of actions and organization they have going on at Great Barrington High School. They said not much but they're looking to get started. I said, 'great, Williams college can help you'.

We must keep up the hard work here at Williams, but there is no denying the huge strides that need to be made in schools that have no organization and no process of change underway. We have the experience and the type of events/programs which have worked well. We are students and yet we are almost as well informed as anyone that speaks about climate change. We must spark the neighboring schools to action. Looking on the maps for focus the nation and campus climate challenge it is painfully obvious that western MA is blank. We're not doing anything and we have the power and imperative to change that.

Steve Klass on Middlebury

These are some quick excerpts from an email I received from Steve Klass when I asked him how the Middlebury trip went.

"I think their greatest achievement has been in institutionalizing the multidimensional principles of sustainability in a very complete and natural way, i.e., it's neither simply top-down (which isn't completely effective in higher ed anyway), nor is it simply a special interest/politically-charged issue...it's something that's a part of their daily lives, a part of every one's shared vocabulary, and a part of everyday decision-making, whether that's business decisions or simple daily behavior choices.

This, in a nutshell, is what I refer to when I talk about making sustainability a guiding principle of the institution. So, they are further down that road than we are and it's provided them with momentum to make decisions about co-generation, composting, engineering, etc. that require substantial resource commitments. When we're ready to make that kind of institutionalized commitment, I predict that we'll build similar momentum and other things will begin to fall into place for us over time.

The other area where they are ahead of us is in the maturity of their narrative. They've done a good job of pulling together all of the actions that they take along
these lines into a single, compelling story. I think that once we look at all the strands of activity that we have going on, we'll have a really nice initial story to tell as well. This makes me think that we're not light years behind them, and that we're positioned to be more successful over time."

Climate/environmental action on campus is as much about concerted effort as it is about presenting that effort in a prominent public way. Writing and talking about our actions is as important as doing them. (What happened to those pictures of the EARTH sculpture?!!)

Articles for today:
NYtimes Business: Why coal companies want us to take action to limit carbon
NYTimes Travel: Buying Carbon credits to offset travel impact

Today's Links

Holiday Energy Police
Christmas and global warming: we can't have one if we have the other. So turn off christmas tree lights of your neighbors and tell them they're ruining christmas.

Buying Solar Power Pays! Finally!

home owners can get a solar system installed on their house with no system purchase, no installation cost, no maintenance fees, no permit hassles, no performance worries, no rate increases, no security deposits for those who commit before the end of the year, and no risk.

Climate Action Week
Adopt a Senator and make the first week of the new congress the biggest week of climate action ever!

Burning Tires and Turning Turbines
Why can't an entire state oppose a test of burning tires as fuel (yuck!) and yet a few people can oppose testing renewable energy projects?

Harvard Commits to Reduction Goals

HARVARD STUDENTS PASS GREENHOUSE GAS REDUCTION REFERENDUM: 88.3% VOTE YES

Thursday night, the Harvard Election Commission announced the results of Harvard's Undergraduate Council presidential elections, which included a referendum entitled A Greener Harvard: Title II asking Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The referendum passed with 88.3% of the vote. Authored by the Environmental Action Committee (EAC), it read, I call on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to a level 11% below total emissions in 1990 by the year 2020. I pledge to do my part to realize these reductions while I am at Harvard."

This referendum is an overwhelming student mandate for Harvard to make a tangible commitment to a sustainable future by reducing its own contribution to global climate change. With this strong student directive, the EAC will ask FAS to setup a task force with student representation to work towards the 11% reduction. link

Prospect Ski Area

Quick News brief:

Prospect Ski Area, the cross country trail system near Bennington VT where the Williams-college, Mt. Anthony and Greylock Highschool teams ski is looking into ways to drastically cut back emissions and energy use.

Owner and operator Steve said he hopes to run his snow cats entirely off of bio-diesel by next year as well as looking into forms of wind power for his lodge. Sugaloaf and Sunday River Ski areas already run snow cats on bio-diesel and purchase wind power. Also the Middlebury snow bowl has gone carbon neutral by purchasing renewable energy and carbon credits for the vehicles.

note on Middlebury post

Please see the relevant wso discussion about the Middlebury post.

Middlebury Field Trip

This past weekend two vans of administrators took a trip north to tour the environmental programs of Middlebury College. The trip was initiated by Dave Dethier in Geosciences. His comments on the trip are as follows:

They saw what I wanted Middlebury to show us and heard that it was ok to experiment, calculate building paybacks for long-term, use LEED even if they didn't believe in the "medallion" cuz it was an easy target for fundraising, think about the total built area of the campus, etc...and on a budget far less than ours. We saw architecturally beautiful, high-tech buildings of all sorts and scales and heard that each one built on the learning that came with the previous building, etc. We talked at length to the wood-chip plant VP--it is still a work in progress--and were amazed at their recycling system (loses $) and composting (gains the bucks back). Most of all, I was again impressed with the top-down commitment to sustainability and to helping the local economy.

A quick talk with Bob Volpi, director of Dining Services, today also confirmed that the composting there is very impressive and they are interested here in learning from it.

Another report through the grapevine from Stephen Klass, VP of operations at Williams, was a general observation that Middlebury isn't nearly as far 'ahead' of us as we had been thinking and possibly a year of concentrated effort could bring the Williams campus up to the level of environmental action as them. As an addendum to that, Williams should be much more vocal about the things that we do do and get more credit instead of being so subtle.

Memes

Are memes real? Do you want to find out what they actually do, and if there's anything behind the hype? Then make a quick post with this link in your blog.

Visit with Mitchell Thomashow

Mitchell Thomashow was at Williams yesterday talking about inspiring a sense of wonder in the world around us and how that makes people start to care about the environment and climate change. His book is called Bringing the Biosphere Home.

From his talk, a few things were brought home to me. Our education does not teach kids about space and time. We don't learn what a million means, when the ice ages were compared to the dinosaurs, and how to conceive of how many people and species there are on earth. In part this is because these concepts are culturally very new. It was only 150 years ago that people began to think of evolution, think that the earth was more than 6000 years old, and some people still don't think that way. That change in thinking hasn't come down to the basic levels of education.

Just as we don't learn how to think of very large numbers, we also learn nothing about the immediate world. How many people know off the top of their heads what species live in their nearby woods, which birds migrate through, when the next full moon is, where our water comes from or what the place looked like before European settlement? If we are not aware of what is around us, how can we possibly be concerned when these things change?

But people live indoor lives and for some it is not feasible to get outside enough to really learn about it. But indoors are also unique environments which we know little about. There is just as much to learn about buildings as backyards. Where does our electricity come from? Our heat? Our disposable products? Where does it all go? How much head escapes through leaky windows as opposed to constantly opening doors as opposed to too little insulation in the ceiling? Again, if we are not aware of these things, then how can we care about what happens to them?

We can make that information part of how we build buildings. They should be accessible to learning in such ways that casual users can know how they work. Maybe it's just a plaque near the front door with some basic numbers, or maybe its glass doors around the mechanical rooms, or maybe manual controls for ventilation and instructions on how much ventilation is needed for certain numbers of occupants. In many ways we are talking about putting the controls in the hands of people, and it is possible that it can lead to wasteful practices like leaving everything on. But there is no shortage of waste in the way it currently works. What there is a shortage of is wonder and awareness of what is going on in front of our eyes.

Status Report

We're feeling very successful lately here at Williams, although we're definitely still playing catch-up with Middlebury. This Monday the Climate Action Committee presented a complete plan to the senior staff outlining how to bring Williams down to 10% below 1991 levels by 2020. Its not the ambitious goal I was hoping for, but at the same time it is a commitment of millions of dollars and institutional focus for an important and achievable goal.

We're also in the process of changing out every incandescent light on campus, a few dorms a night and today there was a large ice sculpture in front of the science library which spelled out the word E-A-R-T-H which melted slowly for all to see.

My personal work has mostly been (and will continue to be) on focus the nation and energizing a large group of climate action heroes and concerned students. For instance we have a winter study course this year dedicated to organizing that event.

It seems Middlebury is committed to becoming carbon neutral and I think that's a phenomenal goal. I know the Williams senior staff is taking a trip up there this weekend to see how it works.

What I would really like to see is something really worth doing that could be coordinated between a few schools in a way that got more than just the environmentalists involved. Maybe something revolving around a sports match or something.

But all in all its been a good week and its really nice to see hard work pay off. Now if only the Record would publish my op-ed.

Williams College Should be Carbon Neutral

I was doing some reading this week, browsing around between the NYtimes and the DrudgeReport, looking for something suitable for a few minutes of healthy procrastination, when I happened to find the Stern report. And no, before you ask, I'm not talking about Howard Stern. I'd heard the report talked about a few times by people here and in some blogs, so I figured it would be worth a closer look.

A year ago the British government, after hearing a sub-par climate report full of fluffy data, commissioned Nicholas Stern to give them the real, scientific and economic deal. According Her Majesty's Treasury website, Sir Nicholas Stern is the Head of the Government Economics Service and was delighted to present his report to the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Economics of Climate Change. Now that sounded like a rather impressive resume, and surely not the idealistic environmentalist type, more like a hard headed economist, so maybe he was going to talk about the other side of climate change, the one we don't see in this liberal bubble of New England.

What does the former chief economist from the world bank advise the world to do? Cut emissions of climate changing gases by 80% by the year 2050. Globally. Not 10% below 1990 levels,which is a 'reasonable' number thrown around by liberal leaning administrations. 80% is a huge number and it might as well be 100% because we know that whatever plan we make, some things will go wrong, and as a citizen, I'd like to err on the side of caution for once.

These are the two most important things I have to say. The cost of doing nothing will be far, far higher than the cost of acting now. And, this task is not hopeless.

Williams college is not the world, although we try and be rather worldly in our aspirations. But we are a community of 3400 (total students, faculty and staff) living, breathing and lucky citizens who care very much.

We might not get involved in every issue we are aware of or not invest ourselves in justice when there's too much homework, but I believe we do care very much. We don't just care about the big picture, we care about buildings designed with as much efficiency as flashiness. We care about the status of Williams college and our coveted number one status, but not just because we do things by the book. We pride ourselves in being number one because we are the ones innovative enough to be a leader in academics, in sports, in dining and in arts. If we are given the chance to succeed and the will to commit, just as in our other fields of success, we will soon come to be leading innovators in environmental sustainability.

Why should Williams commit to being carbon neutral? Why should we invest more in the initial costs of buildings to achieve vastly lower operating costs in the future? Why should we commit ourselves even more to a local food supply? Why should we be installing solar and wind power, recovering heat from building ventilation and renovating our most energy inefficient buildings? Because we are a conservative financial institution.

We are conservative and we don't take risks with the big money. Part of not taking risks is looking at and planning for possibilities that other people might not think to look at. We need to get our geology professors into the board room to tell us what the price of oil will be in 50 years. Will it be $200 a barrel or more? Is that a possibility? Are we prepared for that, or are we going to be caught off guard just because we thought a finite resource was infinite?

Williams needs to use less energy. Our administration knows this and the ball is rolling. Its still rolling pretty slowly, but then again administrators are busy people who do an amazing job of keeping it all together. And because of that, they need congratulations and encouragement. Congratulations on being good listeners and encouragement to do things better. I wouldn't use the cliche, except the long mailing list of alumni, which we'll all be on soon enough and who pay for most of college, hear this all the time. I'm going to throw it right back at the people who make decisions, whether it be in student groups or Hopkins hall. Aim for the stars.

Panel on Green Architecture - (Notes)

Green building Panel discussion 11/11/2006. I know this is long, but a lot of it is just good ideas and data. For the most inspiring remarks, please skip to the end.

Introduction by Stephen Klass who did a reading from Morty's earth day letter to the campus who asks, What does it mean to become with a leader in sustainability?

The panel consists of Bruce Harley who works with mostly private homes with retrofits and new construction. He also trains builders and tradespeople, does design consulting and wrote Insulate and Weatherize which was selected by US green building council. Todd Holland is a sustainability coordinator for Smith, Holyoke and Amherst colleges. Joan Kelsh '85, coordinates green buildings for Arlington, VA. She encourage private businesses in Greater DC area to build green office buildings not because they have to but because its a huge benefit. She holds degrees from Williams in geology and environmental science and a masters from Yale forestry/envi studies. Marc Rosenbaum works on integrated systems design approach – finding the best solution for each project and client. He holds a BS and MS from MIT in engineering.

Harley (who was sporting a sweet MULLET)
Harley has a background in electrical engineering but he wanted to get into some more interesting stuff so he got into energy efficiency through working on mostly smaller, residential buildings. His company, Conservation Services Group (CSG), designs, develops and delivers energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. Most clients are gas and electricity suppliers as well as government policy makers and private homes. He installs solar, sells renewable energy credits, educates builders and contractors. He also worked on making the ENERGY STAR home building guidelines. Most important point? Look at building as a system not as individual parts.

Efficiency and durability before are more important than renewables. This is doubly effective because we can save money in the long run and save money when it comes to buying more expensive renewables. For this, early planning is key. Also essential is health and safety, in other words, the buildings must enhance livability. But thats easy because when principles of durability and efficiency you make big strides towards a healthy building. Another aspect is building with Integrated Design. It is hard to get people to know what to do because there are so many ways to build buildings 'green' yet poorly. “Green” equipment or features do not equal performance. On the ground verification is essential because the label often promises more than is delivered. Energy code inspections are federal programs in 9 states that test the major aspects of a buildings efficient design. Fault Tolderatne details: we shouldn't expect herculean effort from builders and tradespeople. Painting a building green doesn't make it a green building!

Todd is the energy manager for the five colleges. His main points are Energy efficiency and conservation (conservation is tentative because its hard to sell to people), Green and Clean and Energy efficiency is a fifth fuel. The greenest energy is energy not used. Some statistics on computers: according to the Williams website, the average desktop uses 96 watts when idle and 1.8 watts when off while a laptop uses 28 watts idle and .07 watts off. EPA and LNBL say average PC idle 58% during day but only 36% of users power down at night. For more information see www.treehugger.com for a movie on electrical vampires.

Amherst, Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges organized largest voter turnout in college history to vote to power 90% of student power from green sources. That was turned down by the college, but the they did do the three college challenge which pitted the colleges against each other, sort of a Do It In the Dark for colleges. It was led by student groups and saved 961,000 kwh. In conjunction with this the colleges bought 1,000,000 kwh. But the conservation drive was more efficient than the green energy drive! Some problems in buying green energy is people don't understand how you buy it. See http://www.green-e.org/what_is/dictionary/trc.html for more info on that.
Another project was to evaluate the 200 cold drink vending machines in 3 colleges (why so many? UVM has only 82!). those use $75,000 in electricity to run, which equaled exactly the amount of money made from sales. They removed some machines (24) which didn't make any money and installed 144 Vending Misers which save $15,000 per year. Its important because conventional large, de-centralized power statoins waste 70% of their energy as heat. It can be more efficient to generate heat and power all in one place (co-gen) even if just the heat or just the electricity is less effective.
Sources of electricity in new england: 48% natural gas, 10% nuke, 23% coal, 15% petroleum, 10% other. There is a brand new building in Holyoke (3 years old, LEED certified) which has no recovery of heat on lab building which circulates all the air every 10 minutes. They are installing heat recovery for intake/outtake and will save $46,000, 400 tons of CO2.
Problems with LEED are that commissioning is not enough, changes have to be checked. Also, LEED allows “point shopping” to avoid energy saving points.
New Paradigm means financial plus environmental stewardship = energy conservation. Sustainability paradigm: financial plus environmental stewardship plus social responsibility.

Joan (jkelsch@arlingtonva.us) works with people who are forced to do LEED and tries to help them use it as a good thing. What is Green? It means site planning for sustainability, safeguarding water and water efficiency, energy efficiency and renewable energy, conservation of materials and resources, indoor environmental quality because we spend most of our lives indoors, we need to build things that are good for us.

Environmental impact of buildings is 65% of total US consumption. Furthermore, buildings have a big impact on resources like the grid and sewer. Daylit buildings are better for people students have been shown to do better on tests, worker productivity is higher, patients in hospitals recover faster, etc. People like daylight.

LEED means Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. The Green Building Council is a national group. You pay $750 membership, project registration $450, certification based on size - $0.35/sq ft. This gets you a certification. Arlington has a requirement for certain level of Green certification: Joan tries to convince them to do this for the right reasons, even though they have to.

Marc Rosembaum spoke again, without prepared remarks but just what was on his mind. Here's the rough paraphrase.

What is the task in front of us? We aren't doing enough. We aren't doing what we need to do at the rate we need to do it. We are fighting the battle against global warming and we are losing. Heroically, but we are losing. Some people say we don't like to think about it too much because its depressing. But the truth lies in seeing things as they are, and this is very very hard. Because it is so hard, our whole culture is based on ways of avoiding the truth. But maybe beneath the surface all of us know that things are deeply off-kilter, and we know it. There are massive changes in store and they are not techinical. The hurdles are in values.

www.passivhous.de is the standard, the ideal. They build houses that use 80% of normal homes in Germany (this means even bigger savings here) Building a passivhous in Germany costs 10% more. In America if we ask a builder to add 1% to the capital costs of a project they have a heart failure. This is the value shift. Its not a technical problem.

Build the things that we don't need because there are impressive and we have been told that we should want them. The colleges in this country are the worst because they are in an arms race. It is an arms race to attract students. “How do you build to love all the children of all species for all time” Bill McDonough. Another hero of his is Joanna Macey who works on feedback systems which are large and complex. How do we grapple with problems on the largest scales? “Act your age” - we are made up of the stuff of stars and we are as old as the universe.

Some great points I thought I'd share:
Alumni hear about DO IT IN THE DARK etc from newsletter with socially responsible investment fund
One great idea was to put Energyguide poster in every building to show how the building compares to campus, what the numbers are to help make it more real.

How to Make a Green Building

These are the notes I took at the talk tonight by Marc Rosembaum, P.E. - Energysmiths – Meriden, NH. I think this makes the most sense as a sort of checklist to be asking administrators and architects as the college plans new building or renovation projects.

Why do we bother making environmentally friendly buildings?
1) Climate Change and 2) Future energy supply
We can begin by asking what the effects of our actions are on other people and the world. Its easy to forget how much we depend on the reliable natural cycles for our lives. We are really good at displacing the effects of our actions and industry is particularly good at it. For more on this theme check out www.minorheresies.com

We begin by mentioning Mathew Simmons. A lifelong republican and not a treehugger, he is an investment banker who began reading the Society of Oil Engineers publications to figure out what was going on. He found that five Saudi fields produce 90% of their supply, these are running out and require lots of new technology to continue to draw on their depleting fields. Furthermore, they have a strong incentive to say there is more oil than there actually is. Based on this, he predicts oil will be $200 a barrel by 2010 and he's so sure that he made a $5000 bet on it

Buildings are a third of our CO2 emissions in the US and residential homes almost half of that, and that figure is higher than most countries, even higher if we take transportation of people and goods to residential buildings

Reducing Commerical Energy Use – What can we do when we build buildings to make them very efficient and easy to maintain?
Envelope – super-insulate and make it airtight (and test it)- foam not thick enough and usually put in by masons who don't have as high standards. Commercial/institutional buildings leak more than residential buildings because the design is different for every one.
Daylighting – design buildings that don't need lights in the daytime
Lighting – make it efficient – don't put it where we don't need it
Cooling – load avoidance – shade glass, reduce internal gains like heat emitting appliances such as fridges.
Ventilation – enthalpy recovery ventilation – recover heat and moisture from waste air (summer and winter). Building code for ventilation in renovations has changed up and down since '70s energy crisis and it is a political issue, not a scientific one. We shouldn't look at the code to determine how much to ventilate (at least not any more than we have to, but instead look at long-term costs)
demand control – sense how many people are there to determine ventilation.
occupancy controlled – make a switch like the lights to turn on the ventilation.
ventilation wheeling – make the ventilation vary over the course of the day based on expected occupancy.
Mechanical distribution – hydronic (circulate water to control temperature instead of circulating and heating air) get the air into the building with the least impact. Reduction in building mechanical system pays for envelope (insulation) upgrades
Economizer buildings – operable windows, night flushing (open building at night to cool it down)
Identify key loads not common in normal buildings – exhaust hoods, dishwashers, refrigeration, etc and recover heat from unusual appliances light dishwashers.

Dartmouth case study – What have we learned from the projects Marc has taken on there?
The question is how much equipment we need in the building: we want about 20 cubic feet of air per person per minute and we find installed capacity at 80-100. This is overkill, but how do we avoid it?
We can recover heat from shower water. Students there use 50 gallons of water per day per student so lets re-use that heat from waste water.
Valence Convectors separate ventilation from heating/cooling. We shouldn't ask the ventilated air to do the work of the heating. These convectors should be separate because if we turn the thermostat up it increases ventilation, but we don't want more ventilation, just more heat/cool, so separate the two
Use radiant heating which has a low gain so it can't fluctuate much and be prone to human over-adjustment and it works very well the low yield profiles of geothermal heat pumps.
Membrane seal the roof – wrap the membrane around eaves and into walls. Then overlap the three layers of insulation and then test the airtightness. You can use a fog machine to test the seal so that its very obvious what you did or didn't do. This holds the builders obviously accountable to following the plans.

Renovations – Fixing what we already own
New, large, complex buildings are a very small percentage of national building stock so we need to figure out how to fix the stuff that we have. Easy things to change include insulation that can be added; replacing windows with more efficient ones; install GSHP (ground source heat pumps) which are not so complicated that they can't be added to a completed building. Inside mechanical renovations include ceiling mounted valence convectors which are pipes along edge of ceiling which can circulate hot or cold water. This creates a convection current for both hot or cold air. The system was tested in Dartmouth in dorms and the students haven't had any complaints

Lessons Learned
Show up - if you want things to go as you specify you need to show up and look. There has been a serious decrease in the skill of the workers because the trades are more complicated and the education culture among workers is weaker than it used to be. They have a harder job than they used to and less support for doing it.
Commission everything. A separate authority can make sure that the things that the builders say they have done were actually done. Some things are very easy to check
Match system complexity to owners ability to manage. Not every group of management can handle the complexity that top-notch buildings need. Smaller institutions don't have the staff time or staff expertise
The education happens at the client level. When you teach an institution what it wants in a building, they will learn to value that and stand up for themselves in the future. That is the most important aspect. From that point, you need to establish a system of engineers and firms who can share the risk of new designs and systems.

Cooperation between architects and engineers!
Look at building in a whole! Don't compartmentalize these individual issues!


Good projects don't happen by accident – it takes really good people to make it happen! The richest institutions in the world will talk about this and talk about this and talk about it, but where is the action? Why do these institutions reject offers to make hugely effective, money-saving changes? The decision making process is coming from the top down in determining what the priorities are! One person can make a huge change, but they make a change by finding the right people to do the job right. There's nothing in our way except the will of people do do things!

Semi-Open letter to Morty Schapiro

Hi. Thanks for the link. Out of town on Friday.

At 07:17 PM 11/5/2006 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi Morty,
>I'm sure that you've already heard a lot about the Stern report, but I
>couldn't
>help sending you the link, just in case. Since you are someone who tends to
>make decisions based on hard evidence and planning, I thought this new
>critique
>of present efforts to curb climate change by such a renowned economist
>might be
>interesting.
>
>Stern Report
>
>As always, my concern is what Williams can do in the purple valley. I'm very
>curious to see what the final report of the Climate Action Comittee is,
>although I fear it won't contain the commitment or daring goals we're hoping
>for.
>
>Most directly, since heating (and cooling) our buildings is our largest source
>of emissions, I'm distressed to see four current or recently completed
>projects ('62 center, Paresky, Daycare and Stetson-Sawyer) all lacking much of the
>energy saving technology that could have been used. Because of this, I was
>wondering if you would be able to make it to the talk this Friday night on
>building green.
>
>Thank you for your time, as always,
>-morgan-

Directing Energy

I came accross a video that I've been thinking about a lot recently. I would suggest watching it since its very short. Basically they are asking, why don't college environmentalists take on intellectual activities on campus instead of doing more logistical and foot-soldierish stuff?

http://www.arnoldcreekproductions.com/ShellNord_paradigm.mov

See what you think. Don't be silent.

Inspiration

As far as weeks go, this has been one of the busiest ones. I don't want to go through the laundry list of reasons why. Rather, I want to talk about the amazing power of an idea to make it all flow easily.

I've had several conversations recently with people who feel that something in our country has changed recently. They now feel it is possible to act against global warming. There is a growing gap between apathy and fatalism, and that gap is being filled with people from the most unexpected corners who now see that global warming is something we can do something about.

The week started with a meeting of concerned students and faculty to formally sign the college up for Focus the Nation. You can see our flag on the national map. The turnout wasn't huge, but the people that were there are committed to this and willing to put in the hours necessary over the next year to see it through. Then on Thursday night Justin Bates and I started the Williams Thursday night group. We had some beers and chatted about the myths, realities and solutions to global change in the American social and political landscape and then there was an outpouring of ideas on what we can do.

But more important than discussions or ideas, the people that came said it was inspiring. They were excited merely by the idea of meeting like minded and passionate people who have tantalizing ideas and viewpoints. That inspiration is what I feel so strongly right now and that is what I am seeking to make others feel.

I believe a small group of inspired people can do anything.

Why do we DO IT IN THE DARK?

Hopefully all of you at Williams knows what the DO IT IN THE DARK competition is. I apologize for the overwhelmingly attention grabbing chalkings; I'm sorry if we interrupted your day for a few seconds. I also apologize for wasting paper putting up posters. If there's a better way to let everyone know then I'd love to hear it. And I'm sorry for the dark hallways because your friends turned the lights out. I promise you, there is a reason we go to all the work to put this competition on. As much as we really just want to give a dorm puppies to play with, there's a lot more to it.
Last year Greensense took some real strides in the direction of changing school policy regarding energy use. Last fall we held the first ever energy saving competition during the month of October, reducing the total energy use of the dorms by 3% for that month. During the month of December the Williams Climate Initiative was signed by over 1000 students and over 100 faculty members urging the college administration to set a target of reducing the school's total CO2 emissions to 10% below 2000 levels by 2010 and hiring an part-time position to look into how to best do that and monitor progress towards that goal. In the spring, during the month of April, was the second DO IT IN THE DARK competition. During that month, partly due to a more informed and motivated student body and partly due to upgrades made by Facilities such as replacing numerous incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, the month saw a huge 13% decrease in energy use in dorms. The savings translated to 1,351 tons of CO2 not being released into the atmosphere.
That release of CO2 was not emitted by lights left on, and it doesn't come out of the backs of the little fridges in dorm rooms. Those all use electricity, which is very clean. But that electricity comes from America's power plants that burn mostly coal and gas. Because burning these things is unpleasant for a number of reasons, we build power plants a long ways away from where we live. Therefore we do not see the effects of the electricity we use.
The biggest effect of burning fossil fuels, and therefore our electricity use, is the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. That gas is the driving force between of the greenhouse effect which warms the earth. For 400,000 years, through several ice ages, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has ranged between 180 and 280 parts per million. 280 ppm when the earth is very hot (like now), and 180 ppm when the earth is very cold. The current level of CO2 is 380 ppm and there is nothing we can do to keep that number from rising to at least 480 ppm in the next 10-15 years. (data courtesy of NASA). That means that changes of ice-age magnitude are possible, not in the next couple years and not in tens of thousands of years, but in ways that could be catastrophic to our lives and our grand-children's.
I do not see working on the issue of climate change as a past time or as a issue that environmentalists should tackle. I see it as something that responsible citizens, educators, parents and consumers should be aware of, and let that awareness be shown in daily habits, consumer choices and political elections. I know there are many different issues that people fight hard for every day, but if climate change gets worse (even with the most conservative of scientific estimates), then problems like the AIDS, global poverty, loss of species habitats, catastrophic hurricanes and warfare are going to get worse. It needs to be an issue that is encompassed in all of these.
Now in another reminder of how last year ended, there was vibrant debate over the existence of global warming. As you might have guessed by now, I am of the opinion that global warming is a very real threat and we should act while we can to try and correct it, and I will not argue that here because I'm going to assume the large majority of you agree with me. I would rather point out that reducing the CO2 emissions that contribute to global warming is only one of many possible reasons for increasing energy efficiency at Williams.
DO IT IN THE DARK does two things. It reduces the energy that the campus uses, which reduces the number of tons of CO2 that are released. It also raises awareness, it lets every single one of you take an active role in grappling with the greatest problem human civilization has ever faced.

Movement? or not

Yesterday a speaker came to williams, Eban Goodstien, who spoke about an event called Focus the Nation, which is slated to take place over 16 months from now. It would be a day of speaking about, learning about, debating and making political voices known through a day of sort of official teach-ins. The topic? Global climate change and what the US isn't doing about it. The event is scheduled to occur nationally at over 1000 college campuses as well as other institutions, involving community groups, civic groups and businesses. Focus the Nation

He came to Williams to make a presentation, but his express purpose was to gain the commitment of the Williams community in taking a leadership role in organizing this far-off event. Once we (Justin and Alison and I) expressed some interest, his first question to us was this: is this type of mass movement possible at Williams?

Today I went into the archives to look up the background on the student protest of 1970 which culminated in a all-school meeting from 10pm till 1am in which the students voted to strike for two days. The next day the faculty voted to suspend classes for the remaining two weeks of the semester to allow Williams students to take the lead nationally in organizing college campuses and Washington rallies. According to a senior history thesis, for a short while Williams was the leader of the national college protest. This normally apolitical, status quo institution was transformed into a radical center of a political movement.

What allowed this to happen? First was the students returning from a rally in Yale to protest the recent actions of Nixon to promote the war. At a similar protest that same weekend, half-way accross the country, several students were shot and killed at Kent State. The experience of Yale and the catalyst of Kent allowed the student body to be swept up by this spontaneous strike movement, diving blindly into an adventure of opposing authority and political power.

The movement was organized overnight, lasted a few weeks, and by the end had deteriorated back to kids doing what they would anyway if they were stuck at school for weeks with no class - drinking, smoking, music, relaxing in the sun. And maybe we've learned something from this - that spontaneous mass movements aren't really the powerful and effective things they seemed at the time. Maybe this has to do with why the nation currently has such a dearth of visible and exciting protests. We're more cynical now, or at least we are led to believe that people in general are too cynical for that sort of thing.

So my question is this: can we organize a protest, a movement, a feeling even approaching that level in response to an issue, which if you take it seriously is more catastrophic than anything they imagined in 1970, an issue thatvirtually all the science says we must act now in order to avoid the worst? Is it possible to jolt, scare, cajole or beg people out of their lives for a moment for some constructive and mutually agreed upon goal? And can that all happen without it then turning into a cynical or fatalistic pursuit? Or has the ever stregthening forces of market-consumerism dulled us of the prospect of mass movements sparking ideological change? (the kind of change that cannot be marketed as trendy, the kind of change that needs more commitment than a checkbook.)

Its so easy to be pessimistic. Its so easy to say that this is unlikely, that there is no reason why this should be my job or your job or Williams' job. And there is no reason to say that it would have any meaningful effect even if it was to succeed.

But it just seems so much more boring to be pessimistic.

Poverty

So Professor Crane's recent post and my anthropology class came together in my mind on this rainy day. He writes about the incredibly low status of the migrant worker in China who sweats and bleeds (literally) for China's globalization. uselesstree.typepad.com

The income inequality of China is 5 times that of the US, which in itself is very high. And that inequality is increasing in China as the country becomes more and more modernized. In fact, it seems the inequality is actually a driving force behind the development of the worlds most populus country. It is certainly not a reason for fast growth, since many other countries have inequality and no growth, but in China the inequality is exploited both by private industry and a government keen on growth and national stature.

In anthropology we find that in the earliest neolithic villages, many people's quality of life actually deteriorated. Statures became shorter and more cavities were found due to a more limited diet. Live expectancy decreased. Women had more babies, closer together, and were forced to work far more than before. In short, it was a less desirable way to live, even if the elites that quickley emerged were much better off.

As far as we know, from the neolithic revolution to globalization, poverty has always been an important part of human culture. Not a very happy picture to paint.

Followup to Dai Haijing Riots

The videos that first appeared to have been removed from websites have reappeared, showing the violence in the city of Dai Haijing recently. Facebook readers, please follow the links to http://mogmaar.blogspot.com to watch.





and here: youtube.com

Dai haijing uprising - I can't ignore this

I don't have anything new to add to the ESWN commentary, except to echo it and post these photo and video. There has been almost no commentary on this outside of the ESWN blog so I thought I would pass it along.



Here is another photo of a man being beaten by police.



And finally, here is the only remaining video of the event. Others, takeny on cell phones, were posted but quickly deleted from Chinese video sharing sites.


I hope maybe a few of you are interested enough to read the long report and pass it on to a few people.

China Marks 9-11

"How has US anti-terror strategy lead to more terrorism?" is the headline that graces the top of the page on the people's daily. The Chinese language portal of xinhua.cn has a similar headline citing experts in their criticism of US foreign policy. The English version says "U.S. fails to nab chief culprits as 9/11 attacks commemorated" and the pages are filled with similar sentiments.

Is it ironic that China, a country which has a fairly bad record of treating its own people well and is not at all shy to violently suppress all types of uprisings, is criticizing the US for its violent strategy in Iraq.

But of course China is not critizicing the human rights violations, nor the number of deaths, nor even the waste of resources. They're just saying we're doing a bad job of the goals we set. The Chinese government is very clear about its stance on foreign policy and the control of violence. It must be effective and it must maintain stability. Namely, their criticism of our policy is that we have not reduced the amount of terror in the world. This is much more important to them than our meddling with democracy, handling of sectarian violence, our political manipulations at home. These things are in a different class for Chinese leaders, where the credibility of following through with stated goals and maintaining a constant, stable policy are the most important.

By this measure, as the headlines show, the Chinese are clearly not happy with US foreign policy, and more importantly, they are not being hypocritical in their criticism. Good job guys.

Facebook Uproar

People often don't know what kind of power they have until they exercise it. In fact, one could say that exercising power is in fact the creation of power. I think this has proven especially true in the recent uproar over the facebook feeds.

For those of you who might not know, the feed allowed information which was previously available but only if you knew where to look - which friends were now dating, which parties were being thrown without you, which people had added photos or updated their profile, etc - much easier by compiling it in a list on the login page. The privacy level was technically the same as before, but at the same time facebook.com became more public.

Initially I thought the changes were fun and interesting, but then again I am a very public person. The large majority of facebook users seem to have made a very big deal of this. One group currently has over 700,000 members in the course of 3 days. That means 10% of facebook users are members, and if all similar groups were included that number would be much higher.

In a reply by Mark Zuckerberg to the facebook.com community, he apologized and insisted positive changes would be made. Perhaps most surprising to me, and the reason for this post, are the reactions to this letter. People seem to be genuinely surprised and happy that Mark is responsive to their concerns, and empowered by their success (despite and because of acting as only one person in a huge majority) in effecting change. In a time when what it means to be a citizen, an activist and a consumer of information is changing rapidly, events like these serve to unite and set precedents for the future of this generations web presense.

In many ways this is similar to the massive and frequent online manhunts which have become a hot topic on the Chinese mainland. Eastsouthwestnorth does an amazing job of chronicalling these events. Clearly the parallels between large numbers of people acting in unison and feeling empowered are large. But it also points out that, like the facebook feed, these issues are outside the daily political and social life. Chinese protests of this nature have shyed away from criticizing any central authority, and many other protest groups of government policy on facebook.com fail to garner near this much interest. We are becoming empowered to act in a world different from the one in which we live.

administrative note

The blog has been fully moved back to blogger. I'm hoping post to it occaisionally, but not often.

Email to share

This is a long email that a recent friend from the summer program sent. I enjoyed reading it enough to feel it was worth posting here. It's a bit long, so don't feel bad if you skip a few sections, but I feel it captures a lot of what's really great and interesting about China that I forget sometimes. Enjoy,

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Hi everyone - greetings from Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan
Province. Right now I am in an internet cafe that smells like smoke and is
filled with chinese guys playing video games. Lord knows how long they've
already been here or how long they'll stay. The stacks of red bull, nescafe
and instant noodles for sale at the front desk imply a very very long
time... Speaking of things long, this is going to be a novel because I still
havent gotten my lazy ass around to starting a blog, and want to have some
of this stuff written down electronically in case disaster strikes and I
lose my notebook. So if you have better things to do than read stream of
consciousness ramblings on China, yeeah you probably ought to go do them.
Otherwise enjoy, and don't say I didn't warn you :)

The summer term in Harbin ended last weekend - the final week of the
program our language pledge toppled and fell as we realized it was our last
opportunity to have real conversations with each other. Many late nights of
talking in ENGLISH gasp and general silliness ensued, which led to me being
pretty tired and a bit hung over the day of the Big Scram. Much like I was
the day I left Germany for China, hmm trend anyone?... Fortunately our train
didn't leave til evening so I slept through the night as we trained to
Beijing.

Most people were headed home to the US; I spent the day relaxing with them,
then took the night train to Shanghai, where I met up with a friend from the
Harbin program (she'd flown) for a few days. Shanghai is nuts but after two
months in Harbin - loud, dirty, gritty, occasionally-smells-like-piss yet
you love it anyway Harbin - the western comforts were, well, comforting.
Sit-down toilets, international restaurants (first night we went Middle
Eastern, I hadn't realized how much I miss hummus), people not gawking at
you because you're foreign. Shanghai is very modern, spots of old European
architecture lining boulevards along the river/in major financial areas, and
ramshackle, dilapidated old woodshingle two-story dwellings with laundry
hanging out the windows to dry fill in the spaces between and below
skyscrapers. Bells in the steeples of the older European buildings tolled
the hour - it was such a familiar, rich, friendly sound and I hadn't heard
it in a while, my ears were happy. Yet despite its quasi-European exterior
Shanghai is still very much Chinese. People on the street still coming up to
you with 'Hello lady hello! Buy my (fake designer) bag/watch/shoes!' They
got kind of annoying actually, and as they speak some english weren't
deterred with no thanks. To make them go away I thus took to naming German
menu items at them. A forceful exclamation of 'spargelcremesuppe!!' (cream
of asparagus soup) was particularly effective.

The next day we went to a wonderful art museum - ground floor had a photo
exhibit from Xinjiang Autonomous Region, the mountainous and deserty home to
disgruntled Muslims of Uigher extraction, northwesternmost area of China.
Upper floors had old traditional through cultural revolution through today's
art, I really enjoyed it. Otherwise bummeled the main drags, window shopped,
stopped in a coffee shop or two to escape the humidity, rode the subway, ate
delicious traditional Shanghai dumplings, went out to a club that was
ridiculously, gleefully uebertrendy (or as my friend said, 'typical
Shanghai'). Ha that was fun. My friend is gay and lived in Shanghai before,
has traveled all over the country, but at that club for the first timeshe
met out Chinese lesbians. Or rather they met us. We were dancing together
which I guess made them think we were gay (ok they were half right), so
before long there's this Chinese girl behind me taking decidedly unwarranted
liberties with my ass. I was like, hoookay this one's for you chica and
swung her to my friend. Buggered out, lost my friend for a while and got
thoroughly drunk at the open bar (50RMB, about $6, all you can drink) with
some Europeans and a Swiss-Chinese girl. Hooray for someone who understands
my drunken Germandarinfrenchlish. Afterwards found friend again; her lesbian
buddies had basically passed out on each other in a heap in one of the
club's side rooms. oh Asian alcohol tolerance... Still it was really
refreshing and encouraging to meet Chinese gays who were comfortable and
open about being gay, and had straight friends who were cool with it too.
Definately hadn't seen that in Harbin - most Chinese and the govt
think homosexuals are diseased/disturbed, hmm kind of like in the US. No
wonder people say Shanghai is China's best face to the world.

The last night we had dinner at a posh Shanghainese restaurant with my
friend's old host family. They were very welcoming and gracious - almost
overly hospitable, typical Chinesisch. Next day my friend flew home so I had
the day to myself to poke around a couple markets, walk along the Bund
(strip of treelined sidewalk running along the Yangtze opposite the famous
skyline view), finish reading Lolita, write postcards and buy provisions for
the 40 hour train ride to Chengdu. Fri morning up early, grabbed my stuff
and found myself on the train.

Until this weekend the longest I ever spent in transit was maybe 36 hours
getting from Tehran to Tufts in dear old Somerville, Mass. Thus it was odd
to realize that I would spend 40hrs in a train just to stay within the same
country. But taking a Chinese train is its own journey. In a way a
destination in and of itself. You have four options - hard seat, soft seat,
hard sleeper, soft sleeper. The seats are very cheap but for 40 hrs very
uncomfortable - crammed into hard (or not as hard, if you go soft seat)
bench-like rows of seats in groups of 4 or 6 around a table covered in
everyone's instant noodle packages, bags of fruit bought from streetside
vendors, tea thermoses, plastic-wrapped chicken feet (a chinese traveler's
staple) and other various snacks; everyone's luggage stuffed under seats,
precariousy hanging out of overhead racks, in heaps blocking the aisles; the
air increasingly stuffy and smelly. Apologies, but I'm not that hardcore. I
took the hard sleeper, giving me the top bunk in a small room with six beds,
three to a side on each wall. Luggage rack up top, giving me easy access to
my bag. A TV in each room would sporadically turn on to some kung fu movie
or obnoxiously shrill Chinese comedy routine (apparently the louder and
higher-pitched Chinese comedians screech at their costars, the funnier they
are. By this rubric our guys were freaking hilarious, but alas my Chinese
lacked the subtlety to appreciate it). The narrow hallway outside the
doorless doorways of each room lined with seats and small writing tables
along the window. I spent most of my time there reading, writing, listening
to music, talking to people with my newfound functional chinese, and
watching countryside from the window.

If you drive 1658km/1030miles across the US (the distance from
Shanghai-Chengdu) you'll spend hours watching empty countryside roll past,
with the occasional farmer's homestead or gas station breaking your view of
the land. Not so in China. The landscape never quite became landscape.
Though there were places with fewer buildings and roads it always remained a
'humanscape' of sorts - the flat river valleys and plains west of Shanghai
became tall hills and small mountains, steep cliffs rose up from polluted
brown rivers. Amahoro-mates if you thought I was flipping out over the dirty
water in Rwanda you should've seen me yesterday. Right, anyway. There were
always little towns, surrounded by tightly packed fields of cornrows
grown on even the smallest, most irregularly shaped scraps of land or
corners of hillside. If it could be cultivated, it was. And the
electrical/telephone wires never ceased. They covered the country in a
10m-high net. A few times we passed towns with huge industrial plants in
their center, where otherwise all around were just crops growing. Mmm
healthy. One stands out in my mind - Jiang You, massive power plant in the
middle, smoke and steam billowing out from the complex. For several miles
preceding and following Jiang You the sky was hazy grey, and I could look
straight at the sun without squinting. It glowed unnaturally, but
beautifully red through the smog. The oxen and cows grazing in the fields
below didn't seem to mind. Or notice they glowed in the dark and had extra
legs growing out their ears. Ok not really.

Talking with people on the train was a blast, though after a while tiring
(prolonged involved chinese still an effort for me). On several occasions
younger people approached me to practice English. As many Chinese have no
great love for America I often said I was German, when I got a good vibe
from a person I was American, or both. All the people I spoke with shared
certain traits: they were very curious about me, appraising my bag, pen,
jewelry, clothes, notebook, everything with their eyes; verbally shy
sometimes to the point of caution, and openly puzzled by the fact that I, a
woman, was traveling alone. Got hit on several times - let's just say I have
yet to meet a smooth Chinese guy. Told them I had a boyfriend when they
started getting weird. Yes, he's very handsome. No, he's not Chinese. Topic
over. At one point to stretch my legs I walked the whole length of the train
- which in the seat sections was not so much walking as climbing what with
all the luggage/people in the aisles - and think I may have been the only
foreigner on board. Sometimes heard people talk about me as I passed - have
firmly established that to Chinese I look Xinjiangese (province from the
photo exhibit, borders Kazakhstan). Heard a lot of 'ooh, is that a
xiaoshuminzu (ethnic minority)? Yes, she looks like a Xinjiangren. But her
clothes?...' Pretty funny sometimes. Reminded me of Iran, where they thought
I was Persian or Tajik. Thank you mama and papa for these ambiguously ethnic
genes.

A lot of people also felt obligated to offer me advice (this is very
Chinese). When asked where I was headed, I said, to Chengdu for a couple
days, then I'll go to the Tibetan border regions of Sichuan to hike a week
or two. To which they would say, best not go there. It's underdeveloped, and
the Xizangren (Tibetans) are not the greatest. You know what you should do!
Join a tour group in Chengdu and go see the giant panda zoo - if you buy the
right ticket you can even touch one! My cousin touched one once, he took a
picture! And they were visibly delighted to be able to offer this lone,
young, clearly lost foreigner some sound advice and spare her the misery
awaiting in the mountains. For which I would thank them graciously and say,
I look forward to the clean air of the mountains, being away from the city a
while, and away from tourists and crowds of people. But I'll certainly keep
that panda in mind.

Last anecdote. One of the first people I met on the train was an older man
named Mr Zhu. He was a retired businessman from Shanghai, in the room next
to mine, and upon hearing my accent (it's a doozy believe me) came out of
his compartment to talk to me. Where you from? Good vibe: I'm
American-German. Ah, very good. Germany is very good, and I went to America
once, to Xiyatu. Seattle, really? I grew up there! Thus started a very long
conversation about our families, traveling, Shanghai, Chinese isolationism
and xenophobia, the Cultural Revolution (he was in his 30s at that time and
was brutally harassed for having Western friends), getting old, being young,
the fabulousness of Chinese food. At one point he took my left hand and
examined it, pressing a finger or muscle and tracing the lines on my palm.
Held my pinky against my ring finger and said, you have many friends, and
they're good people. He said my life line is strong. Squinted at another and
said approvingly, you will get smarter and smarter (hmm. methinks I'll leave
it to you 'good people' to be the judge of that). He also said I'm going to
have one child. let's see how these predictions pan out. If I get hit by a
rickshaw tomorrow we'll know Zhu Xiansheng, though a wonderful person is no
fortune teller.

Finally, last night around 9:30, arrived in Chengdu. Upon putting on my pack
the women around me were insisting I shouldn't carry it, it was too big for
me and they would help me find a porter, which I politely but futilely (is
that a word?) declined. Mr Zhu just said in his gruff grandfatherly
approving way, 'ta de shenti hen hao' - her body is strong/good. As the most
senior member of the luggage commentators and thus the most respected, his
was the last word. Made me smile. Walked out with Zhu and said goodbye,
fought through the crowds to get a cab and went to the hotel he had
recommended to me (right on the river, big clean 4person rooms for
30RMB/night = about $3.75). Realized I was starving, dumped my stuff, found
a teeny noodle restaurant nearby and blissfully chowed down. The waiter
said, oh are you from Xinjiang? Heh.

The last week or so in Harbin I'd gotten restless, stressed - a permanent
tiredness, the feeling I've been on the road too much the past few
yrs, crept up on me whenever I thought of packing and leaving again. It's
true I've been traveling too much, and need to slow it down next year, and I
will (I hear half of you saying yeah right Jessie). For now though, am so
happy to be here, without any agenda or set plans, here and alone, free to
go out and meet people or stick to myself when I feel like it, just to be
here in this confusing exasperating but wonderful country. Bought a cold
bottle of beer on the way back to the hotel, walked under trees along the
river past young couples making out and vendors selling fruit, shirtless
older guys hanging out smoking and laughing loudly. And I thought to myself,
I love this. Life is fucking amazing. Hope you're the same :)

Jessie

[Aug. 17th, 2006|11:50 pm]
Fying home, random walks through the backstreets of the Tokyo/Narita airport in search of the New USA, single serving friends, single serving Japanese culture, lack of sleep and feeling indignant that there was no seemless, wireless internet access in our hotel or airport. The laptop is being charged as we speak so the wireless internet can be utilized in flight.

The last several days have consisted of not much sleep and lots of people. The all-nighter in the internet bar was followed by our graduation ceremony. I won the photo contest and recieved $100. I don't think anyone else even applied, which I don't understand. I was one of three people who got prizes for following the language pledge so well – Posie and I both got 400yuan, or about $50 so I treated about 16 of us to dinner, spending a total of about 180yuan. HJ and I went to see our roommates dorms. 8 guys sleep in a room which only has space for 3 desks and small lockers squeezed inbetween the four double bunks. It was cramped, somewhat cozy but nightmares ran through my head of getting stuck with a really bad roommate. But it didn't look that bad, kind of like a summer camp. However, as we were getting ready to leave, HJ's roommate suddenly got fairly serious and said, 'you guys are going back to your single rooms in America, so you think this is cute and cozy. We're living here in this prison for the next two years and there's nothing we can do about it.' How much has living here with our roomates bridged the huge gap of income and opportun ity? How much has that even been the goal?

The farewell at the train platform was wrenching, but more because it was so prolonged. We all did our hugs, farewells, etc even though the train wasn't leaving yet, we got on just to avoid the awkwardness of continuing talking to someone you've already said your last goodbye to (maybe forever?). But when we got on the train there was only a thick, soundproof window between us and them, so we stood there for a good 10 minutes waving, smiling, making faces before an eternity had passed and the train started to move. We stayed up late talking, unwinding. Sunday Posie and I went up to ACC to see 张老师, my ACC professor, and Chris from last summer where we had a great 2 hour talk over a Peking Duck lunch. It seemed dinner wasn't far off, and we were soon back in a different restaraunt eating a second Peking Duck meal – hey, local characteristics are important in an internationalized city.

We went out to bars with Chris, first to the foreigners bar street of san-li-tuanr and then off to a street with 7 disco clubs back to back. The clubs were all brand new, less than a year old, but on a Sunday night they were packed. Not only were the clubs new, but the people in them were the New Beijing. They dressed much more like Americans, they were much more at home in the comfortable but sexy clothes. They danced differently than they had a year ago, again much more open and fun loving than I had remembered at all from last year.

I'm still amazed at how much Beijing has changed in a year. The taxi drivers want to speak English with you know. The street improvements have been made and there is less and less of the city that looks like a city of third world sidewalk and alley life; it has simply been erased fromt the map and bulldozed under the ground. I passed by Qianmen bus stop where there had been a tourist oriented set of little shops where the owners lived upstairs and behind the shops the alleys of a much older Beijing continued on in an endless maze. That was gone, a pile of rubble which was poorly concealed by several large red billboards carrying slogans of development and modernity. The one that struck me called on Chinese to respect their history and look towards a new cultural history. The accompanying picture was a canal that might have been in Venice or Beijing, bordered by a Chinese lion, a Starbucks shop and a Pizza hut sign. It was so blatant, even if I'm not quite sure what it was blatantly doing.

I'm going to wrap up this long and largely incoherent post and get some sleep.
-morgan-

musings

[Aug. 12th, 2006|05:14 am]
While the last post might have been about going to an internet bar, this post is being written from one. As the last night in Harbin, we decided to make it a long one, starting with a dinner and hanging out at a restaraunt. This was with my roommate, his two good friends from here, another roommate, chunwen (a malaysian girl who lives on our floor and speaks bubbly chinese) and Posie (brown college). We ate food and drank beer in modest amounts for a good hour before slacking off and then playing games. These games all consist of something simple like guessing a number of toothpicks and then the looser has to do what ever embarassing thing the rest decides. Its quite a test of social senses because the suggestions have to be embarassing but not too bad. We ended up playing that for a good three hours.
As we were leaving, my roommate's friend Cheng Haoyi gave me a present - some tea leaves wrapped in bamboo from his home in yunnan province. I was a little embarassed because this was the 4th or 5th present like this i've gotten from roommates and friends here and I only have so many American postcards and US Ski Team stickers to give out as feeble return presents.
Afterwards it was off to Yes Bar which features a moving dance floor, sort of like a large trampoline. While this summer I've been going to a lot less dance clubs this summer than previous trips to China (the third time tonight), everyone went and it was good energy. And of course very sweaty. We left the disco to come to this internet bar where we've been playing games and now just doing our own things for a while. At 5:20 am is already fairly light out, but the clever design of the internet bar keeps the sunlight from coming in too much and the gamers are still going at it.
This last week in China has felt a little anti-climactic. Because of finals, class work slacked off a bit, but I'm not one to study, especially when the tests aren't hard and the grades don't count, so I havn't been worknig as hard as the other 7 weeks. In addition I've been thinking a lot about what it means to really learn Chinese. I'm at a point where I can say just about anything I want to say and listen to someone tell me something they want to, but that often involves a bit of explaining vocabulary that I simply havn't encountered yet. So is that fluent? Sure, call it that if you want, but the reality is Chinese still has a long way to go but the only way that's going to happen is by living in China, with Chinese and working, taking classes, etc. But I feel I have a hard time committing to something like that without a larger goal or reason for learnin this language. And so I don't have any regrets about returning to America, (instead of deciding to stay here like some of my friends, and I admire them for it)
One other interesting bit I'd like to share is my final oral exam for my 1-on-1 class. I wrote a 2000 word paper, but the test consisted of about 8 minutes of delivering the paper and the class and then 8 minutes of answering questions by a panel of teachers. I was a little nervous, and I really think I was maybe not as courteous and not nearly as culturally sensitive as I should have been. My paper was on how consumer habits have changed in the last 20 years due to the influence of westernization, specifically english characters on clothing. I wanted to talk about the growing divide between rich and poor which is accentuated by a wastern, english savvy rich and a less than up with it poor which could possibly lead to culture wide questions of what it means to be 'Chinese' as opposed to westernized, and if that's a problem. What I think I ended coming accross as was criticizing Chinese consumers as a group as blatantly chasing the most expensive name brands they could find. I even went so far as to say Chinese consumers might not be as mature as American consumers because they might be more likely to succumb to namebrands, conspicous status symbols, etc. First of all, the American consumers I know are not at all representative, in my opinion, of 'america'. second, while I still think my view point has some weight, 8 minutes of answering questions isn't nearly long enough to clarify the finer points and back arguments of where I was coming from. Needless to say, I tried, and I think I came accross less than brilliant. Well see what they say at graduation in 5 hours. Enough on that.
Now its time to look forward, which means taking the train to Beijing tonight, seeing Mao's remains and then meeting Chris Bother (conn college, ACC) for a day and evening in the city. Then we fly to Toky where I'm going to try and spend an extra day simply walking around. Then I fly into NYC around midnight Tuesday night and am planning on taking the morning train upstate which means I might sleep in Penn station like the vagabond I am. Staying up all night might not be the best way to start 5 hard days of traveling/sightseeing, but that's just how it goes sometimes.
This might be the last 'China' post of this travelloge. However, I am going to continue writing occaisional posts here. Hopefully they will be regarding news articles that I read about China and whether or not I agree with their viewpoints, but I might stray. I also might move back to my blogger page which I think is a little better looking, but that depends on how motivated I feel. I hope you have enjoyed reading this for the summer.
-morgan-

A Cultural Revolution Restaraunt and an all-nighter in an Internet Bar

Our group activity for the week was going to a Cultural Revolution themed restaraunt. I had no idea what to expect. We walked into a place that looking like a Chinese version of TGIF or Ruby Tuesdays, filled to the brim with Chinese kitch and the hostessed at the door greeted us with a warm "为人民服务！" (serve the people!) Dinner was traditional north easter food, which isn't terribly exciting, but tasted good, but as we finished dinner the entertainment started.

First was the auction of paintings - a guy got up on stage and started talking very fast and excitedly about his traditional paintings, what was special about them and how much he was selling them for - 30-80 dollars. It wasn't an action though because there was no bidding. Some of them were sold for a fraction of the price asked, but you'd be incredibly naive to actually bid for these things because they were the same as the paintings you'd find in any painting stall in a market: tigers, bambo, horses, confucious and flower/bird scenese. And yet the guy kept talking in his precise and cutting voice, which when amplified through the PA system was an indescribably peircing sound. After the paintings the real show started.

Out came a couple girls dressed in mao outfits, mao hats and Red Guard arm bands who started singing Cultural revolution songs. In all there were 6 performers, plus a band of 4 really putting their hearts into it, belting out songs that all come down to loving Mao Zedong, upholding ideology and the eternal revolution. I was taken aback, not expecting such a celebration of a period which has such dark memories for so many Chinese, but they didn't care and neither did the audience. Reactions ranged from clapping and singing along (all the Chinese knew all the songs - it would be like America the beautiful, this land is your land, etc. in the U.S.) to walking up close to the performers and snapping pictures with cameras, cell phones and video cameras. Perhaps the biggest contrast was going straight from the blatant capitalism of a entrepenuer using his connections at the restaraunt as an opportunity to sell cheap reproductions of the great aspects of ancient Chinese culture. Blatant capitalism mixed blatant promotion of Chinese culture mixed with passionate upholders of the great communist cultural revolution. All I can do is shake my head.

But the awesomeness didn't end there. When we got back, the question was asked, 'do you want to go bao xiu?' That is a specific word which means an all nighter in an internet bar. It is something we'd talked about before, and something that almost all male college students, as well as far too many highschool students and some girls as well do from time to time. Its extremely cheap, our 10 hours of computering cost a grand total of $1 per person, and a whole culture has developed around it. Its exciting to go with a big group of people and play net games like Counter Strike, Warcraft, etc with them (everyone plays the same game, you talk to each other both through the game and accross the aisle.

We walked into the place and saw over 300 computers (the second floor of the place had the same number), over half occupied with people playing games, surfing or watching movies. At 6 in the morning only about 20% of those people had left. At 7:00am they shut off the computers, and the large crowd of young people filed contentedly out into the morning sun, and entered the gate of the university still more or less in a group, passing the fruit sellers setting up for the morning and the old grandma's doing their shopping.

But you have to admit, getting fired up to sit in front of a computer all night is a whole lot safer than a) drinking as much as you can b) drugs c) driving cars around recklessly d) trying pick up fast girls e) most other activities that you can think of the young and reckless typically engaging in. And on top of that, to be honest with you, I get bored dancing after 45 minutes. Even the best house party has moments when you wonder if you're better off going to bed, but playing fast paced games with friends for 10 hours was one of the most uninterrupted highs i've ever had. Not something I'll repeat anytime soon, but a really fun experience. Nerdy yes, but in China, nerdy is the new cool.
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朝鲜民族村子 A Korean Minority Town [Jul. 30th, 2006|01:24 am]
Our weekend activity was a trip to a nearby rural village to spend the night, interview some people and give a big performance where every class prepared a skit, etc.

The village we went to was split in two. The half we stayed in was entirely 朝鲜族, or Korean minorities. Under the Chinese system, these classifications are fairly rigid and define special treatment under tax law and governance. On the whole, these people were extremely well off. The house we stayed in was immaculately clean, had two bedrooms and a kitchen, a nice new computer, TV, stereo, etc. The kitchen was also more like American kitchens than most of the ones I've seen in the cities. I'll try and post some pictures because it was a really interesting place. We went to a few other houses that other people were staying in and they were very similar. My feeling was this was very immaculate and high quality, even if there weren't particularly many things.

We found out, after talking to a family, that every household had at least one person and in some cases several people go to South Korea for several years to work, blue collar jobs mostly, and send the money back home and eventually return home themselves for a comfortable lifestyle. This was the first time in China I've seen people living in the countryside who were not farmers, although they had been until 10 or 15 years before.

We wandered down the streets that really felt like a Chinese version of 'The Truman Show', crossed a field and entered another part of the town which was noticably more dirty. Not only were the streets here dirt instead of concrete, the houses weren't as upkept, there were farm animals wandering around and people were working in their front yards on tractors, or whatever. These were the 汉族, or Chinese Han majority people who don't get the special treatment under the laws, don't have opportunities to go to Korea because of the language barrier, and are much more representative of Chinese farmers at large. The contrast was striking, like walking through a nice part of a city and suddenly entering a getto. We talked about it for a while, but most people (chinese - our teachers and classmates) agreed that letting the Koreans protect their culture was more important than preventing tensions from rising between ethnic groups with different, state sponsored advantages.

Other interesting conversations included sitting down for a few minutes with 4 middle aged local Chinese guys, Han majority and drinking baijiu (hard alcohol) for lunch, and being asked after a minute or so what I thought the differences were between American's conception of human rights and the Chinese notion. I was taken aback, to be sure, but tried to explain what I think American's idea is. I didn't get to finish, or even really begin any discussion because our program director (chinese) came and said something about having to leave soon. I apologized to the 4 guys and left soon after, only to find that we had another half hour. I have no idea if our program director overheard and didn't approve or if it was a coincidence.

Lots more interesting conversations, observations and rasings of the language level (this post really feels like I'm struggling to write english good), but now I have to go write my final paper for my one-on-one class, regarding western influence here, probably mostly about clothing and politics. Until next time...
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Communists! [Jul. 30th, 2006|01:10 am]
Last week during my one-on-one class I found out that my teacher is a communist party member. We were discussing the contrast between party influence in private business as opposed to state run enterprises like universities, and how the party doesn't have any good way of 'controlling' businesses in the ideological, personal way it does in traditional work units. My teacher was explaining the structure in a university, and as she got down to the lower levels she kept saying 'we' and 'I', and finally I said 'oh, so you are a member' and she said 'yes' and that was that. I'm going to quote what I wrote when I got home after class.

"Today during one on one class a bomb went off inside my head. But i have no idea what kind of bomb, its one of those situations which merely because it is entirely unknown therefore becomes scary and exciting and huge. I found out my teacher is a member of the Chinese Communist Party. This is such a simple sentence and yet my heart has been beating fast for the last hour or so. ...its definitely an intellectual thing, that suddenly I'm realizing the communist party's relationship to the people is incredibly more complex than I could have previously imagined. In my class so far we've discussed a lot of pretty pressing issues in China, from the coverup of bird flu to internet mobs attacking government officials who acted in the wrong, to the kinds of democracy and the slowness of political reform in China. In a flash I'm suddenly going over all those conversations and anylyzing them for how she reacted to my questions, what here judgements were, whether I think her answers contained much of the party line. Maybe most of all was my previous premonition that occaisionally when discussing these kinds of problems she might be going to far, telling me too much and might get in trouble for it. Suddenly I realize that she was telling me the party line, the plain and simple party position against these sorts of problems."

I then asked my roommate over dinner if he had applied to the party, and he said he already was a member. To be accepted to have to pass a test as well as have interviews, background checks, etc. He didn't seem like he really wanted to talk about it, replying with 'now you know' and then asked me if I was a member of a political party, to which I replied no, but in America it doesn't mean much, you just check a box.

But my roommate is a good guy, doesn't drink much, extremely polite, I wasn't really surprised to find he was a party member, I just hadn't considered it. The next night though, having a conversation with another Chinese roommate who is definitely a quirky and fun kid, found out that he also is a party member and a much more willing to talk about it. He said he wasn't sure, but that probably the majority of our roommates are party members. This basically put things into the perspective that I'm currently holding, that being a party member is hardly a big commitment to an ideology, but more of an honor bestowed on bright and friendly young people. Like I said, this complicates but also enlightens my ever changing view of what China is like today.