Earth day 2016. What’d all y’all do to make a difference? We didn’t do much. Just spent the afternoon picking garbage up off the Great Wall of China. No biggie.
I kid 🙂
(Well actually we really did do that! …just not quite with so much arrogance)
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle …Or Don’t Bother. Whatever.
I’m not going to try to say we should stop recycling our newspapers. Or reusing our plastic bags. Or reducing the amount of driving we do.
Or not doing most of the other things we make an effort to do to conserve things back at home.
But when I come to a place like China. That is, a place where 1.4 BILLION mostly-middle-class people live. And I see how things are here, I am overcome by a strong sense of hopelessness.
Even if things WERE done well here (And I’m not just talking about Chinese people putting their water bottles in the recycling bin instead of the garbage), it’s almost pointless that we make any effort at all at home.
Quite simply, the numbers here are just too big. China’s population is 40 TIMES the population of Canada. That’s 4000% of ours. And there’s little to no concept of environmentalism over here whatsoever*. Efforts made at home are nothing more than a drop in the bucket.
Ten years ago Beijing was a bicycle town. Now there are 7 million cars here. And you can only drive on days of the week that the numbers on your license plate allow. I’m actually writing this sitting in serious gridlock traffic in the back of a brand new car.
Who can blame the Chinese? They’ve been watching the West drive around like this for decades. Of course they want all this luxury now that they can afford it!
We were told 500,000 more McDonald’s restaurants are slated to be built in China. Yikes.
Much of the fruit we have seen for sale (and unfortunately bought) is actually sold in plastic wrapping. Why would you encase a banana or a grapefruit in plastic before selling it? Who knows.
But I know this: for every plastic bag people at home diligently bring with them for reuse to the supermarket when they shop, there are 40 Chinese people who don’t.
That’s a humongous problem.
You’ve probably seen the somewhat recent headlines about the smog in Beijing. Unfortunately they are very true (though there’s been a good wind here lately so we haven’t seen much after the first day when we arrived. Until today, that is.)
But also unfortunately, some of the smog is actually our fault. It is the Chinese burning coal to build our shitty shit for us back at home.
As an aside, do you know what a “Zero Emissions” electric car in Beijing runs on? Same with one in say, Ontario? Or Philadelphia? That’s right. Coal. Because coal is what we use in many, MANY parts of the world to make electricity. So much of our world is hidden behind a glossy veil of misconception. Or, we just choose to keep our heads in the sand. Either way, we are all in trouble.
I guess I’ve digressed. Sorry.
What if we include India into this dire discussion? And Indonesia? And the Philippines? Well, there’s easily 100 more people per one of us not bringing their plastic bags with them for reuse at the supermarket.
Unfortunately people don’t often have the ability to change their habits until a problem becomes immediate and obvious. Like you’ve become fat. Or you can no longer afford to pay the visa bill you’ve created. Or you can’t breath the air around you anymore.
Things need to get a fair bit worse before they will get better I think.
How Does This Get Fixed?
- Lead by example!
Nope. The Chinese don’t give a f#*k if you are reusing your plastic bags. They wouldn’t even notice.
- Teach the Chinese about reusing their plastic bags so they can spread the word!
Wrong again. The Chinese don’t like to stand out**. They wouldn’t spread the word even if they knew the word. That’s what their political system has taught them. If a nail is sticking out more than the rest, it will eventually get hammered down.
The Chinese believe the way to run a country is with strong leadership***. That is why they (mostly) still love Mao. Mao was a strong leader. The only way environmentalism will become a thing is if the leaders of China make it a thing. And for THAT to happen, Beijing’s air may need to be so thick, the turbo chargers in the Audis I’m currently surrounded by can’t run.
Trip update: Wild Wall Weekend on the Great Wall of China
Zoe pretty much hasn’t stopped talking on this trip, but she barely said a word on our walk back to town after our third and final hike to the Great Wall of China. THAT is how deep its grandness goes.
A few awesome bits of trivia: it isn’t one wall, it is actually sixteen walls. It started being built in 400BC and (with some breaks due to dynasty changeovers here and there) didn’t end until the 1600s (right after Genghis Khan’s time). It diverges and merges in many places. For example where we were standing, it splits into two walls and remerges again 400 kms later. (purpose being, a double barrier for the enemy)
There is actually (roughly) 23,000 kms of wall. That’s a stone wall over halfway around the 40,000 km circumference of the planet!
But in fact no one knows the exact length.
Most of the wall is falling back to nature of course, but a few bits have been reassembled for tourism. Of course those bits are very full of tourists. Like every tourist site in China.
So! We decided to splash out on a three day excursion to the untouristed part. The organization we went with is run by an Englishman named William Lindesay. He is one of the (if not THE) premier source of information on the Great Wall of China.
He came to China in 1987 to walk the length of it, which he did (around 2000 kms). He never moved back to England after that.
He has written about a half dozen books on the Great Wall, has appeared on documentaries and even hosted celebrities on tours to it (which is actually how we found out about him!)
He runs regular tours now called the Wild Wall Weekend which is what we did. For around 500 bucks each, we got picked up and dropped off at our hotel in Beijing. Two nights accommodations at William’s house with all the steamed dumplings you can eat and all the beer and water you can drink. And three hosted hikes up to the wall spread across three days. We could have even done four but we opted out of one of them! (so nice to get out of urban China for a bit and relax in the piece and quiet of nature)
What a great experience, I don’t think I could recommend it enough. Truly a highlight of this trip that will never be forgotten.
And it just so happened that Earth Day fell on our Wild Wall Weekend. William being the environmentalist that he is had organized a cleanup of the wall by some students and local villagers. And so of course we were happy to participate! They say gratitude and helping others is one of the keys to happiness.
In the end, one mile of the Great Wall was spic ‘n span clean, and somewhere around 150 bags of garbage was carried down the mountain.
And in the group’s endless pursuit to have the trip’s sites sorted from greatest to least (as well as the rest of the world’s, for that matter), we have made a slight divergence. I am fully in favour of the Great Wall taking top spot over the Terracotta Army. Surprisingly, Jen has joined me on the dark side. Zoe on the other hand is keeping the Army in top spot.
To use her words: “The Terracotta Warriors left me breathless, and the Wall made me cry.”
* Much on the topic of environmentalism in China was loosely pulled from discussions with William Lindesay who is an Englishman that has lived in Beijing for over thirty years
** Same as *
*** Same as *
SO COOL! What a thrill and a privilege.