It’s early morning, the sun is shining through  kitchen windows, aroma of coffee wafts pleasantly as toddlers squirm and squeal at your feet. The husband is off busying himself for the office, life could not be better. On the other side of the world, in a village in China, another person is preparing for his day at work. He, too, has a wife [...] Keep reading »

“In Guangxi we eat everything with 4 legs but tables and chairs, everything in the ocean but submarines, and anything in the sky but airplanes,” a giddy student told me when I asked about local dishes. It turned out that this was much closer to the truth than I had imagined at the time. In my four years here in China, I have been introd [...] Keep reading »

On Friday morning I was taking a group of foreign guests to visit sites around Nanjing when a heavy smog blanketed the city in a yellow stench. It seemed as if every family in the city of over 7 million had lit a pile of tires ablaze. Within 20 minutes of being outside I started feeling asthma like symptoms, meaning that it actually hurt to breathe [...] Keep reading »

A few weeks ago a shepherd in Inner Mongolia was run over by a trucker moving a load of coal. The result has been wide-spread protests over the past two weeks, causing dozens of news stories about Han-Mongol relations. Before we get too far into this story, we need to pause for a little background. Around 221 B.C. China became a unified nation unde [...] Keep reading »

Over the past few months I’ve showed that several of China’s environmental achievements have been little more than smoke and mirrors. So I’m very pleased to announce that Beijing is finally getting it right by creating the right incentives along with policies that are easy to enforce and hard to cheat. Their goal is 100,000 electric cars in t [...] Keep reading »

It’s no secret that China has environmental problems (my other posts about China’s environment), today even the Environment Minister acknowledged that “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today.” Also on Sunday Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said in an onli [...] Keep reading »

This week I’m bringing you something different in the story of the week. The Warriors of Qiugang (this is the full, free video) is a 40 minute, academy award nominated documentary that follows a village’s battle against a large, polluting factory. Stories like this are why I love the organizations I work with here in China that are work [...] Keep reading »

Yesterday we were looking at how cold it is outdoors and in here in China. Today I want to get to the meat of the problem that lies just beyond that thought. Is it possible for China (or any country) to develop without destroying the fragile environment? I’ll start with something I’m not so proud of; my wife and I are currently running 3 space [...] Keep reading »

Yesterday I wrote about the health effects of pollution on the general Chinese population. (from a Photo essay on pollution in China) Today I am going to look at the question: Where does all this pollution come from? Which has an easy answer – Coal burning power plants, coal heated homes, and coal roasted sweet potatoes. The coal roasted sweet po [...] Keep reading »