Op-Ed | Karen in America

“History is a guide to navigate in perilous time. History is who we are and why we are the way we are. . . . To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn’t just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it’s an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.”

—David McCullough

Confucius once remarked that rulers need three resources: weapons, food and trust. The ruler who cannot have all three should give up weapons first, then food, but should hold on to trust at all costs. In the race with time to mitigate and adapt to climate change, I see what I learned from Chinese history illuminating. “自古皆有死，民無信不立。” (For readers that only understand pinyin: zi4 gu3 jie1 you2 si3, min2 wu2 xin4 bu4 li4) This quote from Confucius’ thought cannot be more timely and topical in 2022. This quote in English means “Death has always been with us since the beginning of time, but if the people have no faith in their rulers, there is no standing for the state.”

No matter how advanced medical technology will become that humans might be possible to extend our life expectancy through gene editing, or how controversial the subject on the dehumanization of technology continues, we are mortals. We are a highly social species with exceptional intelligence. Trust is the glue of society. Think, if you don’t trust your lover, will you still stick together with your loved one under the same roof? If you don’t trust your bank, will you still put money in that bank? If you don’t trust your government, will you still support the politicians that hold high office?

Time is fair for everyone. Time doesn’t wait for anyone. Time is our witness of trust building, peacemaking, redemption, reconciliation, history and legacy. But how trustworthy are you? If you have five minutes, a free self-assessment in John Baldoni’s 2008 article is a good starter to learn about the four characteristics of trust: credibility, reliability, intimacy and self-orientation.

Action speaks louder than words. Everyone is a history maker. Everyone’s act now is the history of tomorrow. You may say building trust is also an invaluable investment in ourselves and our future generations. However, if we set road blocks on the path of trust building, it is equivalent to when A slaps the face of B, pain is felt on both sides: A’s hand and B’s face. For instance, if humans continue to gobble up the Earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate, our shared home—the Earth—will become less habitable for us. And to make our Earth a habitable place for many years to come, building and repairing trust matter.            

1. The Unfavorable Inconsistency

I remember in my first graduate class in natural resources management, our professor asked us how hopeful we were to tackle wicked problems like air pollution, supply chain shocks resulting from natural hazards, and climate change. My class was comprised of passionate environmentalists, business professionals, civil servants and advocates in the field of sustainability. A response from my teammate left a mark on me. He said that we don’t run short of enthusiasm and solutions, we just don’t have a consistent political will.

Having lived through the four years in America during Trump’s presidency, I vividly remember how inconsistent public policies were. I don’t know since when is the U.S. president accustomed to dismantle policies signed by predecessors and roll back effective regulations. I also see a president of the opposing party overriding Congress and issuing executive orders. In short, in a layman’s term, if I plant a tree from seeds to saplings, by the fifth year when the tree is five years old, does the person who succeeds me to look after the tree have the right to uproot the plant? Why? Because this person shares a very different view about tree planting. He wants to start from scratch to plant a new tree. Or worse, not planting any trees.

Plant trees is what humans can do and should do. But can trees survive on their own due to unsteady environment? For instance, the trees that we plant on the coastal margins where land meets water are called mangroves. Mangroves provide a valuable buffer to coastal communities (where global citizens love to settle and travel) against storm surges. But according to a research published in Science magazine, the mangrove ecosystem will fail to survive if the sea level rises faster than about 7 millimeters per year. Sea levels are rising globally at an average rate of about 3.4 millimeters per year, according to a 2019 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Human-caused global warming causes sea levels rising at a faster rate. I’m not a science geek but I do know the rise and fall of Earth’s temperature is a non-uniform motion. And the history of Earth’s temperature records before 1880 is just as inconsistent as politicians’ climate agendas.

Aside from the existing unsteady and extreme weather conditions resulting from climate change, if our future heads of state, legislators and judges keep overturning their predecessors’ long-standing climate policies and environmental regulations, how long will it take for a tree to grow roots?

No one knows.

But a sapling can be toppled in mankind’s power struggle and self-vanity. The Earth is a self-regulating complex system like Person B, the abovementioned victim of A’s slap on the face. We are feeling the consequence of the misuse and mismanagement of the Earth.   

2. The Dangerous Mutation

I also remember that President Biden recounted his early state visit to Europe, saying American allies were skeptical of how long would America be back to international cooperation. Indeed. I’m skeptical, too. An old saying goes, “Don’t trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.” For instance, what on earth did an 82-year-old House speaker trouble troubles when she was advised and warned multiple times by American and Chinese top officials not to set foot on Taiwan as an active member of the U.S. Congress?

It’s worthy to say this so-called official visit was not on the official itinerary of Speaker Pelosi’s Asia trip. In other words, the U.S. taxpayers were not well-informed about how tax dollars were spent on unofficial trips by a high-ranked official. The Speaker does not represent my state; she represents the people of California. And yet, her official travel expenses are paid by all U.S. taxpayers.

Apparently, honesty as the best policy doesn’t apply to this policymaker.

According to a survey by Morning Consult, only one in three voters can find Taiwan on the map, so, I surmise a majority of taxpayers don’t even know where Taiwan is.

Taiwan like many big and small island territories and countries around the world, such as Japan, Hawaii, New Zealand, Jamaica, the Philippines, Indonesia and alike, are vulnerable not to hot wars imposed by great powers but to rising sea levels due to global warming.

Are the great powers ready to accept the climate refugees from the sinking land elsewhere? Are they ready to give up weapons to trust building?  

Any environmentally-conscious global citizen knows air travels contribute to human-induced global warming. A recent research shows that airplanes emit around 100 times more CO₂ per hour than a shared bus or train ride. Aviation contributes an estimated 2.4% of global annual CO₂ emissions, most of it from commercial travel.

Well, Speaker Pelosi took a three-hour detour to get to Taiwan. Her delegation (unfortunately no Republicans on board) did not take the commercial flight route. If a civilian aircraft burns about 3,600 gallons of fuel per hour, the Speaker’s three-hour detour in the air will burn at least 10,800 gallons of fuel, probably more since she took the more powerful military aircraft.

California is reputed to be an environmental savior in America. Shouldn’t Golden State’s House Rep lead by example to reduce carbon footprint by air travel? History is also written by hypocrites, isn’t it?

Moreover, the Speaker’s unwise political footprint has deepened the US-China strategic mistrust. The latest setback is China suspending climate talks with the United States. I was literally in tears when I saw our climate envoy, Secretary John Kerry, appearing together on a global stage with his Chinese counterpart Mr. Xie Zhenhua on climate cooperation. Both of their teams must have spent thousands of hours negotiating and drawing road maps for cooperation. Now, it’s truly one step forward, ten steps backward. I’m again in tears, but more for our future generations of both countries than for my contemporaries. How many hundreds of thousands of hours will our future generations of both countries take to repair and rebuild trust?

Politicians often claim they do good for their people. But sadly, the people’s trust in their government is fading, perhaps except in China, when Chinese people are more united than ever to protect China’s sovereignty.

Politicians also claim they need to sanction wrongdoers in the interest of their peoples. In fact, the people are hurting the most by any sanction because the privileged always can find their ways to escape punishment or reduce the pain on the face slapped by Person A, the slapper.

Look at the Taiwanese farmers who used to trade with mainland China and at the food crisis in some African countries. They’re the victims of sanctions by great powers, not the wrongdoers!

The U.S. economic sanctions have weakened the dominance of US dollar in global markets. More countries are looking for alternatives to shift away from the dollar as reserve currency. This July, Australian iron ore industry welcomed Chinese yuan as a new payment method. Even European gas buyers agree to make ruble payments to Russia despite U.S. sanctions on the Ukraine war crime perpetrators.

If foreign policy is a mirror of the domestic conditions of a given country, can I infer that trust building should start from within? We, the people. And yet, the people are divided. Politicians in this country are noted to be untrustworthy.     

How can we have a consistent political will if our politicians are untrustworthy?

We should acknowledge that it takes longer time to build and rebuild a structure than to demolish and destroy it. Build Back Better, sounds good and musical to a poet’s ear. Trust, in fact, is the foundation of building anything. Simply put, if love doesn’t strike twice, will you marry the same person twice? If you don’t trust a company, will you buy the products from that company?

Trust is harder to rebuild, that is “build back,” than buildings, let alone building back trust better than it was. Distrust is a dangerous mutation like the seemingly resilient coronavirus variants.      

Climate cooperation requires trust; a large scale of trust building is the key. Nonetheless, time is against us to do more to slow—and hopefully turn around—Earth’s declining health. A new research shows the Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979. It might even be worse because scientists say climate models systematically tend to underestimate the severity of effects caused by climate change.

I’m not a big fan of prediction algorithms. As Rotger Bregman wrote in his book Humankind: “If we want to tackle the greatest challenges of our times—from the climate crisis to our growing distrust of one another—then I think the place we need to start is our view of human nature.”        

3. Transparency fosters trust; human trust saves face and the Planet

The US-China relation is at rock bottom as a result of Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. By comparison, President Clinton’s visit to China’s Peking University twenty-four years ago is one of—if not the most—memorable highpoints of the US-China relation. I remember in his response in the Q&A session (click here for transcript) with Chinese students, he mentioned a phrase “ancient hatreds.” He said:   

“Now, let me say one expectation I have for the younger generation of Americans and Chinese that has nothing to do with economics. One of the biggest threats to your future is a world which is dominated not by modern problems but by ancient hatreds. […] And I hope young people in China and young people in America who have a good education will be a strong voice in the world against giving in to this sort of hating people or looking down on them simply because they’re different.”

Seeing the Ukraine war and Israeli-Palestinian conflict unfolding in 2022, I can’t agree more on the awful impact of ancient hatreds on future generations. With the help of social media, ancient hatred seems to be spreading faster and stronger. But social media might also do the opposite to improve transparency. The more people sharing fact-based information online, the harder for wrongdoers to hide evidence. As long as we are engaged in communication, it will only make us understood better, won’t it?

In closing, I have three best practices in turning waste into treasure. These countries and kind-hearted humans are doing their parts to protect our shared home, the Earth. It’s never too late to build trust and strengthen it day by day. Let’s do it.   

Here is one best practice. The UK’s Royal Mint expects to recover gold from the circuit boards of laptops and mobile phones. This initiative will retrieve hundreds of kilograms of gold per year to reuse in its coins, bars and other products. 

Here is another. Do you know the Sahara desert is full of plastic trash? In this video, you will see how a refugee camp is recycling it into new products.

And the third. A Haiti-based NGO, Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL), has pioneered sanitation solutions to fight poverty and protect the planet. SOIL is supporting local communities to transform human waste into resources. The organization hires local people to collect and process human waste. Once the waste is composted and becomes nutrient-rich soil, it’s sold to farmers at a cheap price. The organization recently introduced a new revenue-raising scheme — allowing the larvae of black soil flies to break down waste. When the larvae begin to crawl, but before they turn into flies, they’re culled and then sold as nutritious chicken feed.

You probably are familiar with the ubiquitous “Keep Calm and Carry On” phrase and its entire “Keep Calm and . . . ” (fill the blank) slogan family on merchandise and in media. But if you ask a non-English speaking traveler, she may have never seen this phrase before. Perhaps there is an Arabic equivalent of “Keep Calm and Carry On,” or a French movie title might be more expressive. Circulez, y a rien à voir! (Keep moving, nothing to see here.) In Chinese, I think of the expression “心靜自然涼,” pronounced xin1 jin4 zi4 ran2 liang2. My translation for the expression is when you have a still mind, you will feel cool naturally.” In other words, keep cool and stay cool, period.

As the Earth’s temperature is rising, we need more than to keep calm. We need to keep cool—keep the Blue Planet cool and keep ourselves cool. If you are a global citizen like me looking for an opportunity to sustain your livelihood while doing positive contribution to your environment, check out this e-book (free download), “Valuing Nature: The Roots of Transformation.”

Support the authors if you can afford the print copies and spread the word. I don’t know the authors but I’m moved by their giving the book free access for everyone. Most writers cannot make a living out of their meager royalties. And yet, I believe many writers write because the subject matters, and the more readers, the merrier. If reading a free book and a free article (like what you are reading now) can help you overcome an obstacle or make a life-changing decision, don’t forget to share with people in trouble and people you care about. This is why leaving no one behind is important.       

I find the book “Valuing Nature” sums up nicely how sustainable living is an opportunity rather than a controversy. Above all, as human beings, we cannot thrive without a healthy environment. This environment can be translated into your upbringing environment as a place, your parents, classmates, relatives and friends as influencers, your work place in which you spend at least one third of your daily hours, your dwelling—rental or owned, your community, your neighborhood, your vehicle and even your pets. Do they look cool to you? Are you cool with uncool situation and ambiguity? Will you become a catalyst for a heated confrontation with humans and non-humans?             

Keep Cool And Leave No One Behind

If you are a global citizen embrace the UN’s 2030 Agenda for sustainable development, leaving no one behind is the central promise to implementing the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I could have been left behind if it weren’t because of generous people along the way that provided me with resources to higher education, to odd jobs that sustain my basic needs for survival, and to discover my potentials in language, literature and literacy. There are about 7,000 languages spoken in the world. Half of the population in the world speaks 50 languages, and the other half of the population speaks the remaining 6,050 languages. By the end of this century, it is estimated that half of the 7,000 languages will fall into silence. Keep cool and stay alert about linguicide. And now I am in my deep dive into increasing my climate literacy.   

Yes, English is a widely spoken language. Even after Brexit, English remains the working language in the EU member states. English is also forging language barriers affecting non-native English speakers and hinders diversity in science, technology and mass media. For a long time, I wasn’t quite sure why oversea Indians fared much better than oversea Chinese in the English-speaking countries. And why Hollywood and English fiction often have a stereotype of the roles of a science lab geek or a computer whizz played by ethnic Indians and Chinese? Doesn’t the stereotype draw a parallel to Taiwanese Chinese who see themselves superior to mainland Chinese? Or, the Filipino maids who are more sought-after in Hong Kong than non-English speaking maids? Knowing English surely helps a global citizen regardless of nationality leap forward in self-actualization, leaving behind extreme poverty and hunger.        

My self-experimentation in sustainable living proves to me that I can fix a clock by hand. I spent only ten dollars on material and one hour in time. A clock could end in the landfill because there is no more clocksmith in our replace-it-instead-of-repair-it society. Where can the used-to-be admirable profession of clocksmith make a living? Becoming a Youtuber, perhaps.

I learned how to reassemble the parts of a battery-operated clock from an online video. I made a little innovative attempt—getting rid of the second hand. Voila! An old clock is given a second life. This is my way of showing you how I reduce e-waste. Leaving no one behind to me means do less harm to the environment. If the poor countries do not need to live on processing the imported e-waste and scraps any longer, their environments will be protected indirectly by us—the socially-conscious global citizens. Keep cool and you can do it.     

Keep Cool And Try (But Not Impose) To Get Your Voice Heard  

In my mindful living during the Covid-19 pandemic, I feel strongly about the argument that Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure made. That is, the words in a given language limit the expressive ability of individuals and shape their worldviews. If the world’s largest search engine is located in an English-speaking country, it is not difficult for me to assume all contents provided by this powerful search engine are English-reader friendly. Perhaps under the Almighty-like government mandate from the company’s place of origin, certain products and services will be banned from users for the reason of national security threats. My assumption is supported by factual incidents. A Hong Kong politician was banned to use a U.S.-based video sharing platform to launch his election campaign. It’s a known fact that many mobile applications are not available in China’s Apple Store. On the one hand, the U.S. wants to decouple from China; on the other hand, I find the U.S. federal government is over-generalizing the concept of national security, so is China.

According to a report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a Switzerland-based NGO, the world’s nine nuclear-armed countries have increased their nuclear spending by $6.5 billion in 2021 from the previous year. And the reason of it is more than security interests as the countries claim, it’s business. Well, this raises my question. Why the world’s powerful figures cannot make this nuclear business toward sustainable development? Why nuclear power generation remain a heavily regulated industry in the US? If you check out the official website of the U.S. foreign assistance data, you’ll see the U.S. spends the least foreign aid on environment ($413.6M) as opposed to the biggest sector in peace and security ($13.69B). Luckily, this is not a language problem that needs translation. As long as you have a calculator or a sharp mind with numbers, you’ll figure out the difference of $13,276,400,000. With this amount of funding, how many nature-based solutions and green infrastructure will be adding to the value of environmental foreign aid?

One day, a repairman in his seventies born in Pakistan came to my apartment. As we chatted about Pakistan, he told me educated people didn’t want to stay in the country. His remark reminded me of my impression of well-educated Indians who fare well in academia, banks and governments overseas. The great Indian brain drain is not news. And now, Sri Lanka sees its brain drain and labor losses as a result of the economic crisis, the pandemic and global warming combined.

What happens in Sri Lanka will happen more often around the world, especially starting from Global South. The Earth appears to be round. What goes around comes around. Monkeypox, a rare disease originated in Africa,  is now found in multiple wealthy countries. There are too many strange stories like this can disrupt our working and living regardless where we are.

When American officials warn about the danger of China setting its own global standards, I’m greatly concerned about how sincere are the two great powers on working out a more inclusive global standard. Ironically, a majority of countries adopt the metric system. The U.S. continues to adopt the Imperial system of measurement. Are we really Anglophiles or do we stubbornly resist change? For example, the Paris climate agreement sets 2-degree Celsius increase as the upper limit for global warming by the end of the century. (We could easily exceed this temperature limit if we falsely believe business as usual after we remove our masks in public.) What is 2-degree Celsius equal to in Fahrenheit? 3.6-degree Fahrenheit. In my English writing to American readers, I often come to this dilemma of conversion of measurements. Why can’t we all use the same system?

Our environments are changing. I’m told before not to take for granted when you are in good times. Four seasons changes will become unstable. Our mental health is a hidden area impacted by our exterior environments. I’ve learned my lesson about that. After eighteen months job search, I landed a job close to home with the hourly earning ten dollars less than what I used to make. And yet, I feel much happier because I am close to home and I have time to volunteer. I had a very serious talk with a financial professional. I argued that volunteering should be considered as employment. Money is only one way of measurement of my socioeconomic status. I didn’t make money out of my writing for my community, but I certainly make happiness for myself—perhaps even more rewarding than working for a tedious job—by contributing my time and expertise to my community for free. The financial professional concluded that my mind of value-based sustainable living had not reached mainstream.

Really? I’m flattered to be a forward-thinking, low-income, Blue-Planet-loving global citizen. During my time with my other low-income colleagues, I’m thankful to their generosity in coaching me to be a better communicator. When I can bring a smile on the face of a customer who has dyslexia and earn his compliment that I excel at my job, that sense of accomplishment is more than numbers in dollar sign can describe. When I receive advertisement mail in a brown, raw envelope on which printed “paper produced under a sustainable forest management program,” the mail certainly sends me a happy smile. Keep cool and amplify best practices in my way.        

Keep Cool And Stay Cool, Through And Through

When I’m writing amid the backdrop white noise of the air conditioning, an old English expression, as cool as a cucumber, comes to my mind. I’m fortunate, though. In the dog days of summer, people who work inside their offices and comfortable homes might not realize how hot outside is. Can you be as cool as a cucumber if you need to work outside for hours under the baking sun?

In Asia, I used to keeping the indoor air-conditioning temperature at 26-degree Celsius, that is equivalent to 78-degree Fahrenheit. But if you enter any government buildings in Washington DC or museums, galleries, malls, banks, restaurants, hotels, libraries, hospitals in America, you might feel cooler, and even colder than you want to be.

If you see people who work inside the air-conditioning buildings wear business suits and long-sleeve shirts, sweaters and even scarves (non-religious attire), you know that not only the building tenants do not save money for their electric bills but they are consuming more energy to keep themselves cool.

Perhaps only when you can afford certain level of comfortable living, being wasteful does not mean anything to you. I have this bias because I cannot afford a wasteful lifestyle. I used to tell my classmates in grad school that only when you can afford food and stay away from hunger will you begin to pay attention to eat healthy foods.

Obesity is common among low-income singles and families because they only can afford unhealthy foods with high energy. Fortunately, I’m a low-income sustainability professional with healthy diets. In the face of prolonged summer, the nexus of water and ag-food is a huge challenge to all mankind.  

I recall three months ago, India encountered a prolonged heatwave that broke the country’s 122-year record. Some parts of the capital, New Delhi, suffered high temperatures in May at 49.2C (120.5F). The neighboring country Pakistan cannot escape the South Asia heatwave, reaching 50C (122F) in some parts of the country. Extreme heat together with the Covid-19 pandemic have already triggered cascading disasters among impoverished communities around the world.

Scientists and the Dalai Lama warned long time ago about the Himalayan glaciers melting because of global warming. Quickly melting glaciers can swell lakes, which then burst their banks and unleash torrents of ice, rock and water in events known as glacial lake outburst floods. Facing extreme weather patterns disrupting our life and perhaps, taking our life in the blink of an eye, can we still be as cool as a cucumber before and after the loss of life, home, money and even hope?

No matter how much we disagree with one another, keeping our Blue Planet cool probably is our one and only shared goal in our lifetime. Keep cool and stay cool, through and through. This is what keeps me alive against all odds.

“The challenges posed by the environment require cooperation at a global level. Climate change is a clear example. In Tibet, which some environmentalists call the “Third Pole” because its glaciers are so important in the weather systems of Asia. [. . .] As the glaciers recede, all the areas downstream will become more vulnerable to drought. The will come in addition to the effects of deforestation, which is already taking its toll in greater levels of flooding. In the long run, deglaciation in Tibet could contribute to drastic climate change and severe water shortages and desertification in China, India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. This would be catastrophic for the whole world.”

—The Dalai Lama, author of “Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World”

Thank you for your patience. This is what our instant society needs. In my previous essay, I wrote the first disappointing incident that taught me effective communication in my sustainability retreat. Another incident that disappoints me is my county in northern Virginia used to provide Chinese-language lessons to adult language classes. This spring semester Polish and Turkish are added to the world language program. No Chinese classes any more. As a US citizen who was told by my government and top officials such as President Obama and Secretary Albright that this country welcomes legal immigrants and international visitors, may I ask my fellow citizens and the Commander-in-Chief of the country: does distancing ourselves from China, Chinese people, Chinese food, Chinese culture, Chinese language and perhaps boycotting all Made-in-China products and services make us more inclusive and invincible?

I feel powerless to the increasing anti-Chinese sentiments globally and the anti-American sentiments in China. I also feel the pain of the US-China trade war. A few months ago I wanted to buy several Chinese language books from an e-merchant in China. My friends in China told me that it would take much longer time than usual for the books to be shipped to the US. She told me citing her postmaster that the shipping containers to North America had been stalled at the port for more than three months. She said if I would want to receive the books faster she could send them by air which cost me more. This is how the pandemic together with the rising US-China trade tensions have impacted ordinary life. Do you remember in the first essay of this reflection series, I mentioned that if we look at our economic life as a contract, as a consumer, we’re always Party B in this contract? And the contract is written in a language that ordinary people without legal training are doomed to be victims. My experience exemplifies that.

Learning to live with my inner self in harmony is a profound lesson in my sustainable retreat. After I watched the latest movie adaptation of a renowned play, “Cyrano de Bergerac,” I was inspired to write what it now becomes a six-part article series. In the 2021 film “Cyrano,” the protagonist Cyrano had a line that resonated with me. He said he was a poet and his words would go to waste unless they were spoken. I’m a mindful global citizen. I care about public policies that matter to ordinary people and to the planet that I love.  It’s my civic duty to give voice to the voiceless. Ordinary Chinese people are as innocent as an American farmer in Ohio or a Chinese-American scientist in Yale. Their ordinary lives somehow are impacted in the damaged US-China relationship.

Applying for colleges in the US used to be something proud to do for young Chinese. Not today any more. More Chinese students prefer staying at home for further education or applying for high-paying college degrees elsewhere that is not so hostile to Chinese nationals. The US-China trade war starting before the pandemic, the Covid-19 pandemic itself, and the US-China diplomatic clashes seem to have gone out of control. I see the toxic legacy of the 45^th President of the United States—the long-term pain of alternative facts, binary thinking and hostility toward marginalized groups and creatures—across the States and the Pacific. What’s worse, the national-level toxicity has seeped into civilian life like the long-term complication of the Covid-19 virus. I haven’t lived in the era of Cold War but I feel stressful to introduce myself to my prospective employers as a US citizen with Chinese ethnicity. Binary thinking prevails! I surrender. We have to live with it despite our differences. A sustainable retreat might be a safe bet to put down the fire in great power politics.  

Two forces are tearing apart my country: young people who are pushing for a systemic change and older people and their kin who are worshiping the legacy of the Gilded Age. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed and enlarged the vices and virtues of humanity that I read about in classic literature. I come to realize that maintaining the status quo is crucial to the well-to-do individuals, businesses and industries. The negative impact of the climate crisis is well understood by these people and groups with full access to up-to-date information and good education. But how they react to world scientists’ warning is a different story. Some climate deniers are elected officials and business leaders. Big Oil crowd out competitors in the renewable energy transition, compressing margins for solar and wind developers.   

As mentioned in my previous essay of the series, in the climate race against time, we don’t have an energy crisis. We have an energy transition crisis. Adding to the energy transition crisis, an obstacle appears to me is how technology can help distribute wealth and income in a global scale more equitably. In India, for instance, the discrepancy between the haves and have-nots in the country is widening in terms of accessing modern technology and vaccination. Tech-savvy Indians write code to secure COVID-19 vaccination whereas millions of others don’t even have access to smartphones or the internet. As for wealth inequality in the US, you may refer to the powerful search engine. There’s so much to read on this topic.

The most advanced technology is usually in the hand of a government or in the hand of the few wealthiest people. My student life in Pittsburgh allows me to learn closely about American philanthropy led by Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Henry Frick and alike in the late 19^th century. Comparing to these millionaire industrialists, my impression is today’s billionaires’ philanthropic work in America is less known to the public. Bill Gates perhaps is the most known philanthropist in the Information Age. That’s why I have this concern about technology only can make a few people more powerful and prosperous. Perhaps amassing wealth is what technology can do better than redistributing it more equitably, unless an intervention is in place in this reinforcing loop. In my systems thinking, I often look for the leverage points.

Adapting to change should be, and will be, an undertaking that my generation and younger global citizens must take in our lifetime. Changing our lifestyle is easy for some but difficult for many. If your community has not yet responded to the global call of climate action, why not start from yourself? Everyone can become self leader. You might influence others to join you. If the change for eco-friendly-and-socially-equitable best practices is easy to do, more people will follow. I notice that living in a small place I shop less. If you’re interested in Japanese minimalism, I’d recommend to read “Danshari (断捨離)” by Shin Katazukejutsu. Less is more.

Online shopping is a double-edged sword. It brings convenience but also pollution problems. Responsible consumers usually shop sensibly with reduce-reuse-recycle principle in mind. With online shopping, a click under our fingertips brings us a sense of satisfaction faster than the traditional in-store shopping experience. For disabled individuals and single seniors, online shopping could be a life-saver.

Nonetheless, online shopping can be developed into an addiction if we cannot keep track of our shopping behavior. You’re giving your money and personal information to the online merchants in exchange for goods and services. This give-and-receive status quo is exactly what e-merchants are happy to maintain. Of course, this is my perspective as a responsible consumer. If I’m an eco-friendly online merchant, I’ll pay more attention to my selection of suppliers, packaging materials and shipping methods. Why is the phenomenon of demand higher than supply? Online shopping frenzy adds to the supply chain hiccups. I also want to remind you that the quicker we change our phones, computerized cars and internet-of-things like we change socks, the faster we will deplete the Earth’s finite natural resources. I have so much to explore in my sustainable retreat, one of them is how to make reusing easier and cheaper than buying something new.   

Lastly, I’d like to point out that our cognitive world is heavily polluted by overconsumption of graphics, numbers, and human-centered soundbites. A walk in the woods will bring you a fresh perspective. I attended several workshops about writing resumes. As a lifelong language student, I take every workshop and webinar seriously. What can be more fun than learning communication skills and composition from other professionals? I gathered a similar piece of advice. That was, it’s best to quantify your career achievements in the resume. Instead of saying you’re an efficient salesperson, for instance, if you sell ten cars a month, you might write something like you “exceeded retail sales goals by an average of X% every quarter in year XYZ.” I find this language and expression fascinating and mind-boggling, too.

There is a joke in the Chinese workplace. You can make fun of your supervisor but never the HR colleagues. I consider HR professionals as judges that determine others’ career life. I wonder if the algorithm-oriented recruitment process makes these career judges stiffer or tenderer. In other words, if I don’t follow the writing tips to write my resume, will my application be most likely disqualified? After all, resumes won’t be read by humans for more than three seconds. Is this really how we should value human capital? If human-to-human communication is becoming so difficult, how can attention-deficient humans pay attention to natural capital and conservation? In our instant society, don’t we fall victim more easily to the attention deficit disorder symptoms?

Like letter writing vs. texting, technology may improve efficiency and accuracy. But when it comes to administration, hiring and resolving interpersonal conflicts, every individual in a workplace is like a book, including decision makers of all management levels. Recruiters are mystery books whereas job seekers are biographies. How can you read a book in three seconds after computer screening and say you understand the book thoroughly? As a deep reader, I can’t say I remember the details in a book even though I read it three times cover to cover. If only I had the skills of the HR professionals to read a person in three seconds.

In Asia, it’s common that job applicants affix their ID photos to the resumes as well. In America, the trend of photo identification goes upward at an exponential speed like the advancement of exponential technologies. In the pre-pandemic days, I didn’t know what my plumber looked like until he showed up at my door. A few days ago, the plumbing company immediately sent a photo ID of my plumber to my phone upon my request for a plumbing job. If you’re a writer, you write well is no longer enough. You must look good in photograph too. Have you seen any book festivals, article bylines or online social events without posting a headshot of the speaker/writer? Aren’t we all, willy-nilly, becoming the same judging-the-book-by-its-cover-sort of species? I call for a sustainable retreat.

“Our sensations of wonder and pleasure, our capacity for conscious thought and speculation, our restless curiosity and drive are hers to share. This new interrelationship of Gaia with man is by no means fully established; we are not yet a truly collective species, corralled and tamed as an integral part of the biosphere, as we are as individual creatures. It may be that the destiny of mankind is to become tamed, so that the fierce, destructive, and greedy forces of tribalism and nationalism are fused into a compulsive urge to belong to the commonwealth of all creatures which constitutes Gaia. It might seem to be a surrender, but I suspect that the rewards, in the form of an increased sense of wellbeing and fulfilment, in knowing ourselves to be a dynamic part of a far greater entity, would be worth the loss of tribal freedom.”    

—James Lovelock, author of “Gaia: A New Look At Life on Earth“

(The End)

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• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 1 of 6)

• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 2 of 6)

• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 3 of 6)

• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 4 of 6)

• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 5 of 6)

When I wrote my book proposal for my memoir, Golden Orchid, I couldn’t think of a more powerful sentence than describing my book as a personal account about “an extraordinary life of an ordinary one-child family in contemporary China.” Ordinary life always motivates me to ponder, to listen, to sob, to smile, to write, to remember, to love, and to help them when help is needed. Ordinary life greets me from the window of my home office every morning. Ordinary life keeps me going against all odds and also keeps me up at night. As I wrote in my first essay of this series, as a sustainability professional, I’m aware of ordinary life of both human and non-human. Two recent incidents that have an impact on ordinary people have disappointed me. I find them good case studies to pinpoint the importance of effective communication in my sustainable retreat. So, I’m about to share some insights in the following two essays.  

The first incident is that a Washington-based science organization provides non-governmental groups with its open source database in a partnership program to monitor China’s oversea coal-fired power plants. I find it upsetting not because the data is being used for promoting government accountability. It’s because the science organization claims to be apolitical. The organization’s affiliated partners, however, are critical of, and even demonize China’s pledge to stop building coal-fired power plants beyond its borders.

I’ve written it in my previous essay that we only pay so much attention to the visible physical world. Data itself has no meaning. We give meaning to the data based on how we want to use the data. If you believe you’re an objective educational source of climate change or an objective source of citizen journalism, do you notice that in comparison with climate action efforts between China and India—both are developing big countries in terms of land and population—China seems to bear the brunt of the name and shame approach in the Western politics, media and now academia? India and, as a matter of fact, the entire South Asia is much lesser discussed or mildly criticized by the same group of self-claimed independent think tanks, organizations and media outlets.

In my view, quite a few non-Asian people, and even some second-or-third generation of the Asian diaspora, have little knowledge about the history and culture of pre-Communist-ruled China and pre-colonial ancient India. I have Chinese parents and was born and raised in China, but I still can’t be proudly say I know about China more than an American citizen knows about the US Founding Fathers and Mothers. When I was a graduate student studying writing in Pittsburgh, I learned that some of the great works of American literature that I knew were banned books in the school districts of my classmates in their home states. Preserving literature is what I can, and should, do.

Knowing your ignorance before you make your opinion about other’s wrongdoing is my way to coexist with differences and embrace inclusion. I do not want to disclose the name of this science organization. I’m not a name-and-shame divider. I believe when it comes to climate change communication among big countries, name-and-shame approach only widens misunderstanding, increase hostility and deepens mistrust.

During my job search and my lifelong study about mindful living, I’ve learned many lessons. The most important takeaway to me is how to communicate with others comfortably and effectively. Non-governmental organizations have done marvelous work to educate the public about natural science and also influence government officials to implement timely policies. And yet, I don’t rule out the possibility that some organizations are struggling between what is the right thing to do for a sustainable retreat and what their donors want the funds to be spent differently. My informational interviews helped me understand the not-so beautiful side of civil societies. The dilemma of making sponsors happy or not seems to have troubled career professionals not only in civil societies but also in private businesses and the public sector with their different stakeholders. In my view, no one can summarize the issue so poignantly as scientist and author, James Lovelock, does. Allow me to quote an excerpt from one of his works about the Gaia theory. He wrote:

“Even more than this, scientists today are hampered by their low social and economic status. Long gone is the respect and independence given to Lavoisier, Darwin, Faraday, Maxwell, Perkin, Curie and Einstein. Hardly any laboratory scientist anywhere is as free as a good writer can be. Indeed I suspect that the only scientists we know well are those who can write entertaining books; the real contributors to knowledge are mostly unknown. Younger scientists cannot freely express their opinions without risking their ability to apply for grants or publish papers. Much worse than this, few of them can now follow that strange and serendipitous path that leads to deep discovery. They are not constrained by political or theological tyrannies, but by the ever-clinging hands of the jobsworths that form the vast tribe of the qualified but hampering middle management and the safety officials that surround them.”

The science on the human contribution to global warming is crystal clear. But has anyone thought about minimizing human-caused miscommunication of climate change? Miscommunication leads to inaction of climate change. In my view, the consequence of miscommunication is worse than the consequence of data error in climate science. Data error is traceable and fixable within human’s knowledge and power. Information that is mistold for a self-interest purpose cannot be rectified. Scientific data that is used for political and financial gains is valuable but controversial. This is partly why I’m mesmerized by the power of language in the face of science and conscience. A piece of scientifically-proven fact sheet can be read differently by different people with different intentions. The example of a science organization and its partners was exactly what I see as hypocritical.

I’m about to put you into a situation to explore effective communication. You may part ways with me here if you believe being a Hawk can make world’s top greenhouse gas emitters do their due diligence in climate action. I wish you unsuccess and world peace.

Suppose you meet two apple sellers you don’t know. Seller A’s stand attracts quite a few people but most people only inquire and then leave. Seller A is anxious to sell her apples but she is getting annoyed when you ask her about the price of apples. She talks to you harshly as if holding a knife at your throat. You stop at Seller B’s stand for the same inquiry about her apples. Seller B is also anxious to sell her apples. She wants to go home early if her apples are sold out. Seller B has an eye for her prospective customers. You leave her an impression that you might have good appetite for apples. So she asks you nicely to sample her apple. Will you buy apples from Seller A or from Seller B? Generally speaking, do you prefer listening to someone that talks to you bitterly or someone that talks to you kindly?

I learn from my experience that oftentimes my pitch sells not because how much I care about the subject but what the subject matters to the person who buys my idea. In fact, it’s getting harder to maintain relationships in the era of attention scarcity, resulting from an overriding push by corporations and institutions to capture and mobilize attention. To some extent, the internet puts every user into a make-yourself-comfortable cocoon. It’s more difficult to leave a deep impression to a stranger on the internet than with a handshake or having a cup of coffee in person. Speaking of binary thinking and data-centric blind spot, teleconferencing can relieve some immediate communication hiccups. It cannot resolve interpersonal conflicts and handle misunderstanding as effective as constant in-person dialogues. 

Human activities are increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. Human activities including our thoughts and deeds also cause miscommunication and mistrust in climate action. When it comes to intergovernmental climate change communication, name and shame approach does not sit well with the violators, especially with great powers. A negotiable merit-based bilateral agreement may be worthwhile. A change of “gotcha” tone and an exchange of handshakes may help Seller A sell more apples and attract more customers. By studying the primates’ behavior, I bet a majority of human beings, like their cousins, prefer carrots to sticks.

Furthermore, speaking of global efforts in reducing carbon emissions, I don’t know aside from the big countries and the EU, where else in the world one can have the relatively might in finance, technology, market and government to experiment with carbon pricing policies? Carbon pricing policies are new to our fossil fuel-dependent world. They involve many stakeholders. But we’re running out of time to make an ideal mechanism before implementing them.

With respect to climate mitigation and adaptation, whether you’re a critic with good intentions or a troublemaker inciting US-China hatred, experimenting with new things and fine tuning them along the way might be better than finger pointing at the doers for wrongdoings, no? Wouldn’t it be more encouraging to spread the can-do spirits by comparing accomplishments and sharing successes? Instead of weaponizing data to shame a big country whose ordinary people are the most innocent in any war of ideas, will it be more constructive if environmental watchdogs publish regularly the fact-based progress of the big greenhouse gas emitters by self comparison in a given period?

My sustainable retreat widens my horizons. In my learning of non-governmental organizations and 503c organizations in America, I find these entities are fighting for their respective war of ideas as well. Whether you’re an individual or an organized groups in China or outside China, if you don’t like China, you are entitled to your opinion. If you don’t like the U.S, I also agree to disagree. At least I know these two great powers can determine the destiny of other small low-lying countries in the face of sea level rises. At least I know the pandemic has impacted the world’s human population. Together with ongoing rapid declines in biodiversity, time works against us to change course for a sustainable retreat. If you want to break down a big house, shouldn’t you have a plan about what you are going to do with that land before you demolish the property? Frankly, if big countries can listen to others, there won’t be an arms race, space race, tech race and history would have been rewritten.

If I have to find a scapegoat to blame, I blame our indifferent, human-imitation, internet-of-things. Their algorithms are full of 1’s and 0’s, ignoring uncertainty. No wonder ordinary people’s minds are polluted with binary thinking. The longer we spend our time on the smarter-than-us devices, the more likely we think alike. Aha. The phenomenon reminds me of the old saying, “Birds of the feather flock together.” Humans are emotional creatures. The stronger humans are attached to their devices, the deeper trust humans will develop into technology. Technology is a powerful tool. The adjective “powerful” is relative to my ignorance of technology. I’ve learned to embrace my ignorance to ask better questions in my sustainability retreat. Can technology do that? Without knowing the reference basis, an adjective means more to the speaker than to the listener. This is why I reiterate that the algorithms in our digital life may overlook the immense ocean of what we called the “gray area.” I still uphold my assumption.

(To be continued)

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• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 1 of 6)

• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 2 of 6)

• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 3 of 6)

• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 4 of 6)

During my deep dives in a sustainable retreat, I find it amusing that we have a rigid dichotomy between science and mysticism. But quantum physicists are enthusiastic to demonstrate the experiment of quantum entanglement. (I’ll leave the powerful search engine to explain for you what is quantum entanglement. It’s easier to understand the physical phenomenon if you watch the video experiment for beginners.) Some claim quantum physics may help us to explain spiritual phenomena. If spirituality can be scientifically proven, does it mean spirituality is no longer a myth?

In other words, may I argue that scientific fundamentalists are no different from religious fundamentalist? They both have unwavering beliefs that their doctrines are the ultimate truth. With the continued debate and counter-debate of quantum physics, how can we not appreciate that human beings are a unique species that can cross disciplinary boundaries to seek truth?

An interesting discovery delighted my ignorant mind. With the help of advanced technology in medicine, researchers have sequenced 64 human genomes which include individuals from around the world. The new reference data can be helpful to the development of personalized medicine, where the selection of therapies is tailored to a patient’s individual genetic background.

In ancient Chinese classics, a book called “Yijing (I-Ching),” 易經 in Chinese language, has been translated into many languages and played an influential role in Western understanding of Eastern thought. The Chinese classic work published in late 9^th century BC is also called “The Book of Changes,” in which the hexagrams are arranged in an order to provide guidance for moral decision making. There are 64 hexagrams of the “Yijing (I-Ching).” Chinese scholars noted that these 64 hexagrams were closely coherent with the 64 human genomes in sequence.

The book, Yijing (I-Ching), has greatly influenced many branches of Chinese knowledge, including Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), philosophy and astrology. It took a long time for the quantum theory to be established, accepted and become a popular field of study. Like the fate of quantum physics, TCM is not widely accepted until recent years. TCM is even harshly criticized by Western scientists, media and environmental watchdogs.

The row over the negative impact of TCM on endangered species will not cease until China demonstrates to the world the best practices of sustainable herb cultivation and legal wildlife trade. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), sustainable, legal and equitable wildlife trade can be a powerful nature-based solution for meeting the twin challenges of enhancing rural livelihoods and conserving biological diversity.

Throughout human history, China is not the only country that has a long history of herbal medicine practices. Indigenous and rural communities around the world also rely on traditional herbal medicines for healing and trade. Do you know the fast-growing cannabis farming not only threatens animals’ habitats but also consumes a massive amount of electricity for indoor cultivation? According to Smithsonian magazine, citing Bloomberg Environment, legal cannabis production in the U.S. consumes enough electricity annually to power 92,500 homes for a year. In your wildest guess with the help of your smart device, how much carbon footprint are there for the illegal marijuana sites? If you deem yourself an unbiased environmental watchdog or reporter, do you see the different attitude among critics toward TCM and cannabis farming?

Adding to the drama of anti-Chinese sentiments, the pro-independence Taiwanese lawmakers even proposed to rename TCM as “Taiwanese medicine.” Political-minded critics have demonized TCM as a threat to the lab-based Western medical research. The most common criticism that I read about is TCM cannot produce convincing clinical evidence. My layman’s observation about Western medicine is it’s a school of thought that has no tolerance of abstract thinking and uncertainty. No wonder that so many Chinese medical students prefer studying Western medicine to TCM. Who doesn’t like efficient treatment and quick investment returns? The western centrism also plays a role among TCM naysayers. It must be fearful for them to wear sunglasses in a dark room called echo chamber. Stay tuned for my next essay on the unsolvable problem of maintaining the status quo for the well-to-do individuals, businesses and industries.

I want to point out that “efficient” is different from “effective.” In the healthcare sector, the word “efficacy” is frequently used among medical professionals. As the demand for self-care increases, effective communication between healthcare provider and patients is paramount. You’ll learn more about my insight about TCM and palliative care in my memoir, “Golden Orchid“. The most effective medicine in my experience and also championed by Dr. Bernie Siegel is love.

How much you love others reveals how much you will be loved. There is no love drug to prescribe or sell over the counter. Love comes from within.

Socrates and Confucius never met. Both sages made a similar humble remark on their ignorance. I begin to think whether this is a balancing loop for human nature. The fewer tools (both tangible and non-tangible) a man has, the more adaptable to uncertainty he is. Whereas the more tools a man has, the less adaptable to changes he becomes. Today we have the smarter-than-us internet-of-things. We are addicted to certainty, which is exactly the opposite of what “Yijing (I-Ching)” calls for. The only permanent constant is the constancy of change. We’re spoiled by instant answers provided by the powerful search engine and mobile phone applications. What if the answers that we are seeking have no absolute answers? What if the answers reflect the constant flow of changes in our unknown world?

Unlike in the physical world, there is a formula to a chemical reaction and deductive reasoning for a hypothesis in science. In humanities studies, objectivity can only go so far. Of course, this is purely my opinion based on my knowledge, experience and personalities. My subjectivity determines how I perceive the physical world. No matter how objective we try to design and apply technological tools to understand the unknown world, we cannot remove our own subjectivity from everything we see and do. Not to mention that our invisible inner world changes. We only pay so much attention to the visible physical world.

Data itself has no meaning. We give meaning to the data based on how we want to use the data. To some extent, data analysis is a customized hype that boosts the human superstitions of certainty. Thus, as much as we emphasize data use, data can unite us but data also can divide us or make no impact.

We are so good at labeling. The digital of almost everything perhaps propels our labeling fallacy at an even higher speed. That’s why the more I dig into this rabbit hole of social phenomenon, the more determined I am to stay away from news outlets, institutions, civil society groups, individuals and ideas that have become the by-products of data hype syndrome. If you faithfully trust only numbers and algorithms, you’re akin to silicon being with binary thinking.   

Come to think of it, as Pope Francis famously says, “Who am I to judge?” Silicon being or not, this is the fun of living with uncertainty. I embrace science. I’m also aware of the gray area of our world that STEM disciplines cannot detect and explain. But our digitalized society will produce more STEM-based fundamentalists. It’s about time I learn to communicate with silicon beings in my sustainable retreat. When the speed of civilization development outpaces the Earth’s self-regulating system to repair and reinvigorate the conditions for life on the planet—that is the Gaia theory, humanity will have to adapt to a possible inhabitable condition to survive. The Covid-19 pandemic is a test run for our adaptability to uncertainty.  

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

—Socrates (c. 470–399 BC)

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” (「知之為知之，不知為不知，是知也。」)

—Confucius 孔子 (c. 551-479 BC)

(To be continued)

Learn more

• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 1 of 6)

• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 2 of 6)

• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 3 of 6)

Have you used a credit card? This is a silly question. But as my Associated Press friend advises me: Do not assume your reader knows less or more than you. Make sure a grandma from Iowa understands your story. So, simply put, a credit card allows the credit card holder to borrow money from the future to spend today. If the credit card holder can pay back what she borrows on time regularly, she has a good credit rating. In other words, she can borrow more money in the future because she is financially trustworthy. When I apply this concept to study the wicked problem of reducing carbon emissions and changing wasteful consumption behavior, I realize that human beings have long been borrowing fossil fuels and natural resources of the future to build their civilization today. For generations, we are obsessed with the superlative status—the biggest, the best, the fastest etc., our unlimited desire drives modernity and technological advancement.

We can’t pay back our debts that our ancestors owe. They didn’t have smarter-than-us internet-of-things. They didn’t even travel far enough to see how glaciers are melting and how blue our planet is from the window of a spacecraft. We can do better than our ancestors and even faster than our parents’ generations to leave less carbon debts for our future generations.   

We don’t have an energy crisis. We have an energy transition crisis.

My generation and global citizens who are younger than me are in deficit of fossil fuels and natural resources unless we have an alternative or multiple alternatives to a life in moderation.

To stabilize the equilibrium of Gaia, a self-regulating Earth, proposed by James Lovelock, it’s imperative to change our credit card mindset of consuming fossil fuel-made products and services. Instead, global citizens who volunteer to make contribution to a circular economy should be rewarded.  In my fiction, my characters will pay less, instead of more, for goods and services that are made from a clean energy source. Green premium, an additional cost of choosing a clean technology, will be exempt for individuals and businesses that take the non-fossil fuels route. Organic food and regenerative agriculture food products will be cheaper than conventionally grown food.

Responsible consumers and merchants will get a tax break for reusing and repairing electronic goods and services. If a car has a good maintenance record, it’ll have a higher value in resale. Why not modify this idea a little? If a car owner can keep an electric or hybrid car for a longer lifespan of the car, she will have a better credit rating as well? Yes, again, in my fiction, car dealers get more commissions if they can talk their clients into keeping the same car they sold longer. A circular economy enables products and services to be reused, repaired and remanufactured. I find the auto industry and its by-products sectors can do so much more from design to disposal toward a circular economy. For more about the circular economy, check out the website of Ellen MacArthur Foundation.           

Another leading industry that can have a closed-loop circular economy is agriculture and food, the most vulnerable industry to extreme weather patterns and warming climate. I’ve shared my insight in “A Forward-Thinking Foodie.” Check it out. Here are two more interesting examples of a food-related circular economy. A Jordanian food artist has designed a luxury handbag using orange peels. I’m hopeful that the fashion world will be filled with fruity colors and tastes in the near future. A Finnish company has created a waterproof sneaker made from coffee waste and recycled plastic bottles. Are you ready to wear the world’s first coffee sneaker?        

We’re born and live in a world of comparison. Without comparison, there won’t be competition, jealousy, desire, depression, hatred and love. These are the sentences with comparative adjectives: Do your parents love you more than they love your younger brother? Do you love your dog more than you love yourself? You’re depressed because your reality is fallen short of expectations. These are also themes in our literature and films. Poets and playwrights are never tied of exploring them. Even the best quantitative analysis needs humans to give meaning to it. Now I see why our digital life has transformed many human brains to follow the machine’s lead. We become less patient and more opinionated. When we are angry, sad or bored, online shopping seems to be a quick outlet to release these emotions. Images, images, sensational images, whether they are still pictures or short videos, we’re comparing what we have or have-nots with what’s available to see and even buy online.   

Do you like money? Do you like big money? Do you know the credit card mindset—borrowing money from the future to spend today—can explain why the U.S. federal government runs deficits years on end? I’m asking silly questions again. Bear with my ignorance. The last time the U.S. government had a surplus was in 2001, according to the datalab website of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

You may skip here if you mind a little overspill of my impression of the official website. The site is interactive and comprehensible for a dummy like me. The texts are big and clear. The numbers are astronomical ending with a letter “T.” T stands for trillion. One trillion has 12 zeros. The colorful graphs help me to understand some basic math in an accounting ledger. So, my administrator-cum-writer’s brain is at work. If we need to put a cap on a country’s annual spending budget, and a household spending also has its limit, isn’t it also pragmatic to have a debt ceiling for all fossil-fuels-based economic activities? The term, gross domestic product (GDP), cannot reflect the environmental aspect of a sustainable retreat. Why not try another indicator such as the green gross domestic product (Green GDP or GGDP)? The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI),  Gross National Happiness Index and alike might be other alternatives.

While we have an option to pay by credit card, I hope technology won’t phase out the old method of paying by cash or even checks. We all have our preferred payment methods. We all will come to a period in our life called senior life. Seniors do not pick up new technology as quickly as young people. In fact, it’s not uncommon that more and more seniors live alone. If they’re lucky, they may have young people and relatives to visit and teach them how to use new technology.

Unlike American people, Chinese people have a social obligation to look after their elder parents. During my volunteer time with seniors, I’ve learned that American seniors might be left alone by their grownup children and the passing of their spouses. A US official finding shows social isolation was associated with about a fifty percent increased risk of dementia. When it comes to an expression of love and care, nothing can compare with human-to-human contact. Perhaps delaying retirement is one way to keep a senior’s mind sharp. It’s not uncommon to see Americans continue working in their 70s and 80s, especially in some traditional sectors.       

If you look at the average working age in the IT industry worldwide, and then you compare that age with the average working age in HR, administration, higher education, banking, finance and laws. I just name a few professions that provide secure social and economic status in almost every secular society. The senior positions in our governments are often held by senior citizens who have long passed retirement age. This is not age discrimination. This is just my non-scientifically-proven observation. Could this be a sign of power obsession in broad brushstrokes?

When the young generation is pushing forward the climate movement around the world, our world leaders that take the bolder action usually are the younger ones. What if we conceptualize a sustainable retreat like a global effort of progress? I think carpooling, vanpooling and bundled shipping and alike have already taken a positive effect among conscious consumers. Companies that are making these efforts should be recognized with tax deductions and other government incentives for good practices.

In Hong Kong, some restaurants encourage customers to bring their own lunch boxes. Restaurants also offer rental lunch boxes for takeout. Customers who sign up for the initiative will not be charged for disposable lunch boxes. Indeed, customers are always happy to pay less for more. What if merchants see this “giving customers more” as an investment in the future in exchange for consistent returning customers? When people feel they are doing good deeds for the planet at a low-to-no cost, they will act more. Isn’t this a long-term business growth for sustainable retreat?     

(To be continued)

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• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 1 of 6)

• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 2 of 6)

As I walked around the new neighborhood, I noticed that many homeowners who had a garage did not park their car inside. A garage is the heaven of almost everything. A junkyard with a homey feel. I remember I once introduced the English buzzword “carbage” to my Chinese young readers. Carbage, a blended word of “car” and “garbage,” shows a phenomenon that some car owners dump the junk in their cars to a degree that the driver’s seat is almost buried under the trash. Have you seen the scene in films and TVs when the junk spills out as soon as the rider opens a car door? That is carbage. This is consumerism that is not environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable. It was more than twenty years ago when I first came across the word “carbage.” Now, we have “cloudage,” as I coin it. We store almost everything non-material in the cloud until the contents disappear in our fading memory.  

According to IBM’s cloud learn lab, cloud computing is on-demand access, via the internet, to computing resources—applications, servers, data storage, development tools, networking capabilities, and more. What this definition does not include is it will cost users money to store what it used to be free to store in our human brains or the local drives of a computer. If you find your photos taken with a cell phone are so big that they can be used for a magazine cover, that’s because the camera on the phone is preset for large pixel images. The default big size is a clever way, in my opinion, to stimulate cloud users to buy bigger cloud storage plans.

If internet data is as important to human life as fresh air is, why do the prices of mobile data in the US go up annually and biannually? Shouldn’t the more people use a product and service, the price of it goes down? Online data storage, if not managed well, will become like the upward trend of home values over time. It cost money to store digital assets. Can poor people afford it? The only way I try to make sense of it is the high price of US mobile data and phone bill could serve as a constant reminder of a use-less-save-more lifestyle. That’s what I mean by sustainable retreat.       

From “carbage” to a potential of “cloudage,” our personal junkyard changes from a car to cyberspace. This progress happens in my lifetime as quickly as the Earth’s warming temperature disrupts my livelihood. When carbage was a buzzword, I was an editor for an English-Chinese bilingual magazine in China. Reading letters from readers was what I cherished at work. Tens of thousands of enthusiastic English learners across China wrote to the magazine with feedbacks and inquiries. These letters, I mean, real snail mails with stamps on them, are equivalent to today’s comments on the social media platforms. Some letters are several pages long and written with well-crafted language and drawings. I responded to them selectively. Today’s editorial life I imagine is probably to engage with viewers—not readers any more as print journalism dies and stream media rises—on social media platforms. Like cleaning carbage, I’m clearing my mind as I go down my memory lane.

If you haven’t lived in the age of writing letters, it’s hard for you to imagine how people valued and maintained respectful communication on the page. Letter writing stimulates both the writer and the recipients’ minds and hearts. You may ask your older friends, parents and grandparents about how those days of letter writing were like. Perhaps you might find it as fascinating as I read the computer-generated poetry. It’s not necessary that the state-of-the-art technology outweighs the old-fashioned alternative. Improve what we have with the Earth’s warming temperature in mind is, in my opinion, better than digitalizing almost every facet of our life without weighing in how the change impacts on the Earth’s health. Today, even the Salvation Amy, Goodwill and alike are finicky about the description of used goods. Many used goods, some of which are new but old-fashioned, have to end up in the landfills because they are not accepted by charities or it’s not convenient for the owners to reuse and recycle them.

Take letter writing as an example, if we compare the lifespan of biodegradable pens and paper to an up-to-date computer program that can create effective and coherent letter writing, which one do you think consumes less energy and cost less from design to disposal? Texting is comparable to mass production of restrained conversations. Mass production kills individuality. Like letter writing, many crafty activities have become obsolete partly because they are falsely compared with efficiency and convenience. Today’s e-communication increases speed and quantity. As for quality and effectiveness, I have my reservation.

Reduce and reuse is more pragmatic than spending blindly on digital in response to green washing. Older folks that I met both in the US and China have this in common: When they were young, they reused and repaired many everyday items such as shoes, jackets and umbrellas. Today, we hardly can see a repair shop for cameras and furniture. I’m often told that some home appliances are cheaper to replace than repair them. Mobile phone manufacturers do not keep parts of old models after a few years. If old models of your electronics cannot be repaired and reused, the manufacturer is green washing. Whether it’s letter writing or tweeting, self-expression and communication are as necessary to mankind as water and air.

We’ve heard a lot of technocrats saying exponential technologies create many new jobs. Yes. They do. And no. These jobs might create more communication and administration problems. These problems occur long before AI enters in our daily life. I hope AI robots will not create more interpersonal conflicts as a result of miscommunication between humans and machines. This uncharted territory is uncertain. Similar arguments about creating jobs were made when fracking boomed in the mid-2000. Did oil and gas companies inform the public thoroughly that these jobs bring good money and bad health to humans and non-humans?

Technology is not to blame. Who uses the technology to achieve what goal is a gray area. We don’t have an energy crisis. We have an energy transition crisis. I’ll save this subject for next time to explore.   

Generally speaking, the best, top-notch technologies will be first applied in defense. Battles and wars are test grounds for these advanced technologies. So, it baffles me when American civilians are able to purchase and use firearms that are supposedly for military defense. At hearing the news that the American private company SpaceX provides satellite internet service to Ukraine, I wonder if this is the epitome of a surrogate warfare outside the territory of the U.S. As we’re bombarded with (true and false) news about the frontline in the Ukraine war, where can the public inquire about how much gains the big American fossil fuel producers have made from this geopolitical tragedy? Can the EU be energy-independent without the aid of the U.S.? Can this become a case study of American oligarchs shaping the 21^st century world order?   

This January when the world’s first pig-to-human heart transplant surgery was executed successfully, English-language news feeds flew everywhere like ticker tape over a parade. Two months later, the first pig organ receiver died. The sad news was treated much more coldly in the free press. If consuming too much negative news is doom scrolling, which could lead to low spirits, doesn’t the lopsided public reaction to a medical experiment reflect how typical the fear of failing is among us?

The Ukraine war has captured many eyeballs, images, and wars of words around the globe. But what we don’t know is a much quieter and hidden attack and counter-attack in cyber security among great powers. How can ordinary folks like me tell if the images, videos and word-of-mouth are not part of war propaganda? Unless you have a clear line drawn between you and your enemy, there is no right or wrong about war propaganda. Otherwise, the gray area of war propaganda wouldn’t have inspired the creation of many spy films and espionage thrillers.

Does a tech war promote binary thinking?

What if the weapon and propaganda in a tech war is humanity-centered design that embraces love, kindness, peace and decency?

Will the robots sacrifice their machine life to bring humanity together to finish the puzzle of a sustainable retreat? 

Do exponential technologies help us to cultivate the universal core values or diminish them?

War is horrible in whatever format and scale. I have my utmost respect for the two Associated Press reporters who had been the only international media present in a southern city of Ukraine to document the frontline chaos. 

Two years ago when I was in a graduate program of natural resources and global sustainability, I watched actor Joaquin Phoenix’s award-winning speech on the internet. He said in an unscripted speech, “. . . When we use love and compassion as our guiding principles, we can create, develop and implement systems of change that is beneficial to all human beings and to the environment.” At the end, he said, citing his brother’s lyrics, “Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow.” The speech struck a chord with me and my peers in the same graduate class. Two years later as I listened to the same speech again, it’s still resounding but with a bit of melancholy.

Has the world war of public health against Covid-19 that has lasted three years ever united humanity to tackle more health-related climate change challenges?

This world war of public health is a silent killer. No firearms are needed. But there are surely tears, screams, casualties and deaths. As of March 7, 2022, the pandemic has claimed more than 6 million lives. Nonetheless, many lives are unaccounted for due to lack of data in some countries and regions. This world war of public health has also driven gas prices on a roller-coaster ride and broken supply chains. This world war of public health has torn apart many families because of different stances on prevention measures. This world war of public health has deepened the abyss of income gaps and increased the number of mental health patients. An intense heat wave resulting from global climate change is another silent killer.  

This world war of public health is about how big countries manipulate the livelihoods and future generations of small countries. The destruction in war-torn Ukraine will take years to rebuild. How much do you know about Ukrainian wildlife? According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Ukraine is home to more than 100 species of mammals, including wolves, roe deer, elk, moose, bison and wild sheep, along with close to 350 species of birds. If we have a humanitarian corridor for the intelligent species called humans, should we call for a no-fire zone for wildlife to escape and for scientists to transplant local plants that cannot run for their lives?     

The Ukraine war somehow verifies my argument in my case study about Kiribati, a low-lying island country in the central Pacific Ocean. Kiribati is living in our unequipped future from climate change, and yet its people and natural resources will be swept away long before the big nations stop fighting for dominance in the name of peace and security. Author and reporter Joshua Keating wrote in his book, Invisible Countries, “Countries cannot be destroyed; they can only become other countries, the land they occupy now controlled by someone else. But what if there is no more land?” 

(To be continued)

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• Parting Ways For A Sustainable Retreat (Part 1 of 6)

Every morning on a work day, I’m greeted with an orange school bus through the window of my home office. A line of teenage schoolchildren get on the bus as if they are about to hit the road for an adventurous school trip. As the bus pulls out, the crowd of adults that had just accomplished their five-day-a-week ceremonial duty of guardianship dissipates. The temporary separation of the day between the adults and their young reminds me of the penguin migration in the Antarctica.  

I recall what I saw in the documentary film about the emperor penguin. In their world, parenting is a shared duty. The mother penguin is the food hunter while the father stays behind to keep the eggs warm. After the mother penguin returns to the breeding site with a belly full of food for her chicks, the father penguin leaves for the sea in search of food. I’m seeing the flowers of tomorrow—as the Chinese metaphor refers to the young generation—every morning from my new home. I’m also touched by the simplicity of human love by the ordinary life around me.

As long as you are observant and have a dose of curiosity, you won’t miss ordinary life around you. As a sustainability professional, I’m aware of ordinary life of both humans and non-humans, of both beautiful ones and those not so beautiful—although “ugly” is one of the antonyms of “beautiful,” I prefer not to use it to reinforce today’s dichotomous discourse that overlooks the immense ocean of what we called the “gray area.”

The digital computers use 1’s and 0’s to distinguish and analyze the information that human beings feed them. Algorithmically speaking, for example, if 1 is yes, 0 is no, should the answer for “neither yes nor no” be placed in between 1 and 0? There are an infinite number of numbers in between 1 and 0. Can I infer that the gray area is infinite (∞)?

If you are beautiful or you deem yourself beautiful, you may thank those who are not so beautiful make you stand out. I’m skeptical of some adjectives that reflect the speaker’s subjectivity to highlight distinction rather than relationships. We’re in an interconnected world. In English grammar, there are comparative and superlative adjectives. Without comparison, how could you tell you’re more beautiful or the most beautiful? But the not-so beautiful one is not necessarily an ugly one. Similar thought helps me understand some word choices in email subject lines, rejection letters, invitations, speeches, official sites and our attention-seeking promotional literature. For instance, busy people only read the subject lines and the one-line news. So the word “urgent,” “need your attention” etc. in the email subject lines often make my heart race. The task is urgent. It must be urgent to the speaker. It might be urgent to the situation that we are both involved in. But if I compare the task with what I consider is urgent, perhaps the task is not that urgent to me, because a dog just barks for my attention, my phone is ringing or the kettle on the stove is whistling now. I learn to calm myself to respond to our multitasking-demanding world. A sustainable retreat indeed.  

Beauty is in the eyes of beholder. There is truth in it. Don’t we have a well-known English saying, the lesser of two evils? Without comparison, we won’t know the difference. Without knowing the reference basis, an adjective means more to the speaker than to the listener. An ideal condition or an ideal candidate means to me is only a reference basis that the speaker identifies. It’s solely subjective. That’s the beauty of humanities, the gray area that STEM careers might overlook. In my pursuit of a sustainable retreat, I’m an engineer to design and define gray area. The gray area is a buffering zone, a middle ground for so many possibilities.

I’m parting ways from our overly analyzed, digital life that is programed for certain answers. May I ask you what do you see when snow is melted? If you say you see water, you’ll make chemistry teachers smile. If you see spring, Percy Shelley will spring to life in virtual reality to kiss you. The Covid pandemic is a catalyst of our integrated digital life, both for business and for private use. The more we depend on a tool that provides convenience, the harder we can quit using it.  

“If we can tell the difference of an apple from a pear, that’s only because an apple looks and tastes very differently from a pear. Recognizing differences allows us to cherish diversity and appreciate our individual uniqueness. And our fear-based thinking will likely to be reduced and our emotions and memory are happier because of our acceptance of kindness, gratitude and love.“

—Karen Zhang, author of “Golden Orchid“

Researchers recently have published a paper in Nature, the science journal, that the human brain deteriorates after infection from the Covid virus. Hong Kong researchers also shared views on post-Covid complications that more than 40 percent of Covid-19 survivors who participated in the research suffer from fatigue syndrome after one year.

I remember almost twenty years ago when SARS hit Guangdong, China, some patients revealed that they had long-term complications after recovery from SARS. Warmer temperature on the Earth could affect the spread of diseases as well as human behavior and personalities. A pandemic is like extreme weather patterns that approach us unannounced. I’m curious about how my personalities will be changing while I’m adapting to a condo lifestyle. I can’t change other’s lifestyle but I certainly can change mine by living simply and circularly. This is also climate adaptation that the school children I see from my window will learn in their lifetime.  

Warmer temperatures do bring us many variables. If you’re uncertain about your mood at ten o’clock tomorrow, would you be curious about it and pay more attention to your mood swings, or would you immediately consult your powerful search engine? How much can humans rely on the smarter-than-us computers to predict a future filled with uncertainty? How should we define the gray area of possibilities with the algorithmic language comprising of 1’s and 0’s?

The best scientists in the world ask good questions. The best poets and artists give meaning to their abstract ideas. The ideal humanity-centered design is good for human beings as well as do little pollution to the environment and other non-human species. It also requires fewer to no more extraction of natural resources. Yes, this ideal is my ideal. I own it. I believe many like-minded people are striving for the same ideal as mine.

How can I change myself to lead a more sustainable life for myself without doing more harm to the environment? I can’t agree more with James Lovelock’s view on “a sustainable retreat.” In Lovelock’s Gaia theory, the Earth is a self-regulating and complex system. This system maintains and perpetuates the conditions for life on the planet. But humanity has done harm to this system “too much too late for sustainable development” as Lovelock wrote. “What we need is a sustainable retreat.”

This year, I’ve retreated by downsizing from a townhouse to a condo. I ride a bike and walk more often. I give myself more unplugged hours from the internet of things. Keeping a diary is no different from having a mobile device to record everything you do. If you say your phone makes your life easier, I won’t argue. But if I trust my phone more than my memory, I must think twice when I hit a speed dial. Don’t put all the eggs in one basket. That one basket is what I dubbed a smarter-than-me phone. Use it or lose it. The basic principle of language learning helps me to take control of my non-digital life. I find joy in writing long hand in the Chinese language again.

Come to think of it, from the invention of word processing in computers to the speed dial in our mobile phones, it’s common for us to apologize for having typos and misspelt words or having short memory of small things such as your spouse’s phone number and your aunt’s birthday. What do you think is the cause of the problem? Humans make errors. A computer also makes errors. A computer’s errors are humans’ errors. A computer improves accuracy and precision. But a computer also corrects my invention of words. No wonder some writers turn off spell check in Word when they’re crafting their works. In the meantime, the vulnerability of humanity is exposed and misused by clever humans who design and modify languages that our computers understand. Sci-fi engineers are thrilled on this subject.    

Some Chinese characters evolved from pictures. They are pictographs such as the sun (日), the moon (月), mountain (山) and water (水), to name a few. These characters are related to the environment and nature. Our ancestors created a language starting from drawing, dancing and singing. The more I learn a new language, the more I find my sustainable retreat is a progressive self-development that has no limits. Is it possible that my smarter-than-me phone will make me dumber?

The invention and improvement of camera and photography further increased humans’ dependence on image communication. A picture is worth a thousand words. But I’d argue that a picture also deprives of my imagination. I notice when I read a novel I can let my imagination soar more freely than when I watch a movie. However, our eyes are drawn to images. Color images have an advantage. If only people of color have an advantage, too.

An old saying goes, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” This adage is not true in the information age. You may not remember a picture taken by someone else. You won’t forget someone who writes something about you or to you, especially those descriptive words like beautiful, ugly, urgent and alike. My sustainable retreat is fun and innovative. Writing Chinese characters sharpens my imagination. Practicing my handwriting is an artistic endeavor.       

Active listening is also the fun part in my sustainable retreat. Not all languages have sounds but meaningful sounds can become a language. Radio is a unique medium that invokes a listener’s imagination to fill in mental images around the broadcast sounds. That explains partly why podcasts have mushroomed in the last few years, becoming like a customized radio station in our electronic devices. If you can reuse an old radio, why do you give it to the landfill?

A radio doesn’t need Wi-Fi signal. Nor does it consume your data on the phone. Most importantly, you give a second life to a radio that works. By doing so, you’ll reduce the e-waste on this planet. The more intelligent and efficient our devices are, the more primitive are the skills humans can only do. We no longer write with a pen. We let the machine transcribe or translate our speeches. We forget more often. Thanks to our cloud computing technology that stores everything for us. The technology thrives but we, humans, are enslaved digitally. Are we now living backward?

“(. . . ) our freedom of choice is limited in many ways. Our fundamental finitude means that our insight and knowledge are always historically and culturally limited and we can only choose from a limited number of alternatives, the consequences of which, moreover, can never be completely calculated.”

—Jos de Mul, author of “Cyberspace Odyssey”

I told my family that mankind has an endless desire to claim with superlatives the ownership of everything. If the Flintstone’s two-legged car is not fast enough, humans invent a more powerful mode of transportation. The telecommunication industry is the super star. Remember I said earlier, the more we depend on a tool that provides convenience, the harder we can quit using it. We may quit driving for a few days or a month, but can we quit surfing the web more than once for months or even years? Is the fastest everything the best? Instant messaging helps us send a message from point A to point B with a blink of eyes. I doubt 99.9% of people would like be disturbed constantly during off-hours. And yet, work-related instant messages from your supervisor and colleagues at the wrong hours are some of the familiar prompts for storytelling. How fun my sustainable retreat is!    

When you’re big, you can’t escape criticism and scrutiny. Big countries are the same. I’ll save that subject for next time. If you look at Verizon’s commercials, all the big words won’t disappoint you. I’m a lifelong English learner who loves making fun of language. In the past months, I stood in line more than once at a Verizon’s retail store. During my waiting period, I had an ample opportunity to read everything English on the walls in the store and the promotional brochures. Now we’re in the “ultra-affix” 5G glossary as if the word “unlimited” is not enough. We can upgrade to “ultra-fast, ultra-powerful, ultra-wideband. . .” What about the speed of in-person customer service? Can we get 5G-speed human-to-human connectivity to resolve personal conflicts at work and at home?

I came across this image last year during my research on e-waste management. I’m not going to explain the three laws in digital technology here. A powerful search engine will do a better job than I do. I don’t want to waste your time and mine. I’m fascinated by how fast technology has advanced and how the fast-paced change of digital technology has aggravated today’s imbalance of demand and supply of goods and services. If you see empty shelves in the grocery stores or experience long wait time for ride-hailing services, and perhaps it will take a few more days for your online purchase to arrive, supply chain and logistics are adjusting to the higher demand of some goods and services from the internet. It takes time to manufacture, package, ship and deliver. The overall supply chain is a system much more complex than a touch on your electronic device to place an order. If we can’t shop wisely and patiently, we consume more fuels and materials in supply chain and logistics. Reduce, reuse and recycle is key to a sustainable retreat. When demand and supply are not in sync, if demand is higher than supply, prices of goods and services will go up. Vice versa. Customers bear the cost all the time.  

Now, to monitor the flows and ebbs of online shopping traffic, data analysts may give you a full rundown about what time of the day and what day of the week, what items have the most clicks online. That’s why there’s a hot debate about traceable online footprint and “you’re invisible online” make-beliefs. Remember what I wrote earlier about our smarter-than-us devices overlook the immense ocean of what we called the “gray area.” Are you sure an untraceable online presence is good for data governance? Do you really think browsing websites, asking the search engine questions and writing tweets do not leave digital footprints that are comprising of many 1’s and 0’s?

If we look at our economic life as a contract, as a consumer, we’re always Party B in this contract. In the merchant-consumer relationship, the contract is drafted by Part A, the goods and services provider. Enlighten me if you have seen a consumer-friendly contract on behalf of the consumer. How do you expect Part A will give up its interest in order to protect Part B’s interest? Instead, the contract is written in a language that ordinary people without legal training are doomed to be victims. This is how I pick up the phrase “lawyer up” in my language quest. The U.S. is a litigious nation like no other. Doesn’t that make some proud Americans happy that I just used a superlative sentence?

This is my disclaimer. I’m not a legal professional. I try to make my judgment as an impartial third-party observer. I’m not a data scientist. I can’t give you any quantitative evidence and proofs. But I’m interested in truth seeking and an open-minded debate about our fascinating world.      

(To be continued)

The SDGs, short for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, consist of 17 global goals that cover a broad range of integrated sustainability themes. These themes include ending poverty, improving human health and education, reducing inequality, combating climate change and promoting partnerships. The SDGs were set up in 2015 by the UN and are intended to be achieved by the year 2030. Can the SDGs be achieved in eight years as we are entering the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic?

In the last two years these 17 SDGs have been my lighthouse when I learn to become a better sustainability professional. By now, these 17 global goals are in my pea brain together with my restless curiosity about the world around me. If the year of 2020 was my boot camp of studying global sustainability in the ivory tower, the following year is my postdoc-like fierce research and writing. At the end of 2020, I wrote in “The End of the Beginning” with this opening: “Without suspense, the Year of the Pandemic will follow us into 2021.” Well, how about the Year of the Pandemic will follow us into 2022? This is a fact. Not a Groundhog Day in my dream. Are we ready for a more challenging third year of the pandemic?

The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters. Thanks to the naming system for the Covid-19 variants by using the letters of the Greek alphabet, I have the chance to be acquainted with an old language. Omicron is the 15^th letter of the Greek alphabet. It has the value of 70 in Greek numerals. As of this writing, there are at least 14 reported deaths from Omicron variant in the UK. Will we use up all the 24 letters in Greek alphabet to name new Covid variants before all global citizens can enjoy a normal life protected by an impeccable global public health system?

I’m an interdisciplinary thinker and writer. This is what today’s sustainability professionals should be. Learning the 17 SDGs enables me to think globally and act locally. In my view, access to water, healthcare and education will change lives in the face of a pandemic and climate crisis. Fewer people are aware of water pollution and scarcity as the Earth’s temperature rises. Water is required for nearly all production and conversion processes in the energy sector. Not to mention some recycling processes also consume a lot of water and energy. The UN’s world investment report 2021 shows global foreign direct investment flows plunged by 35% in 2020 and are expected to bottom out in 2021. The gap in funding SDGs around water, health and education is so great that the pandemic could wipe out the development gains in the past decade. So can we achieve the 17 SDGs by 2030? No doubt. We are racing with time. Each day counts, and each day the price tag for project delay goes up a little. This is common sense, isn’t it?

In the classic work “Leviathan” by Thomas Hobbes, the 17^th century English philosopher drew a very detailed table to expound the subjects of knowledge. He believed a philosopher was required to know science. Natural science includes natural history such as histories of metals, plants, animals, regions, and the like, and facts of nature, which in Hobbes’s words, “have no Dependence on Mans Will.” He wrote:

“The Registers of Science, are such Books as contain the Demonstrations of Consequences of one Affirmation, to another; and are commonly called Books of Philosophy.”

How much science do today’s philosophers know? And how much philosophy does today’s scientists care about? The history of philosophy is intertwined with the history of the natural sciences. I don’t know if we can achieve 17 SDGs by 2030 as moral disengagement is somewhat enlarged and encouraged by misinformation and mistrust. I do know if we make an effort to work together as well as do our own part toward the 17 SDGs, progress will be made. The study of natural philosophy deepens my knowledge of natural resources and global sustainability.

These days I’m interested in classical thoughts in ancient China, Taoism and India’s Buddhism. They have applied systems thinking to environmental sustainability a long time ago. As for how SDGs are integrated into local urban planning and development, I’m so proud of my birthplace, Guangzhou, China, has accepted NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio’s invitation to join the Voluntary Local Review Movement (VLR). Governments, development practitioners and policy makers around the world are volunteer to contribute SDGs knowledge, experience and best practices in the VLRs. This is sustainable global partnership that our plague-ridden world greatly needs. Earlier this year, I set a goal for myself for 2021. Listen, Learn, And Create. Next year’s resolution for me is to continue my momentum of self learning and serving others. I will share my findings periodically with you while spending more time offline to dedicate myself to Mother Nature. Never stop learning.     

Among the 17 SDGs, Goal 13 (climate action) is perhaps the most time-sensitive. To achieve at least one goal in eight years, Goal 13 could be a lever. After all, every day we are living, we are producing waste. Less than 20% of global waste is recycled each year. Municipal solid waste is the third-largest source of human-caused methane emissions in the US. If we hear often about supply chain shortages in 2021, think out of the box and reduce and recycle our municipal solid waste to create new supply chains from cradle to grave.    

All living things on the Planet Earth are impacted by climate change. Technically speaking, all living things should take action. The non-human species have done their part to migrate and/or die out as an alarm to humanity. If polar bears cannot find food and have to chase and eat their cubs, will food crisis be far behind for human beings?

If we say protecting wildlife is the right thing to do, Goal 14 (life below water), Goal 15 (life on land), Goal 4 (quality education) and Goal 6 (clean water and sanitation) must be considered and action taken holistically. All living things cannot live without water. Human beings need to know how to protect wildlife. So, let’s hope responsible global citizens can be educated. And let’s ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. I’ve been doing my part to offer informal eco-education here.

Climate justice is environmental justice. But who will preside over justice and with what codes and standards are there to comply? Can we look into what we can contribute to the international community instead of insisting on what we cannot do so because of the need of domestic development? Can we share more success stories with regions that need equal opportunities and resources to adapt to climate change?  

In 2021, we have seen on the news that space travel is commercialized and becoming more accessible by billionaires. A well-known Chinese saying goes, “If a problem can be solved by money, it is not a problem any longer.” But if the Earth becomes uninhabitable to human beings due to climate change, the consequence is irreversible. Money cannot bring lost lives (human and non-human) and time back. It is better for the few billionaires to think fast to build a habitable home in outer space. Scientists warn that private tours into space could be a giant leap for pollution. One rocket launch produces up to 300 tons of carbon dioxide into the upper atmosphere where it can remain for years. We can achieve SDGs by 2030. Let’s do less pollution to the Planet in the next eight years forward. This is mitigation. Let’s also do more to conserve natural resources and wildlife and seek inner growth to overcome adversity. This is adaptation. The 17 SDGs are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. Why not integrate them into our New Year’s resolution? Happy New Year of 2022!

“Information technology as such is neither good nor bad, but it is even less neutral. We should therefore neither accept it uncritically nor reject it unconditionally. What is crucial is to remain constantly alert both during the development of and in our dealings with these technologies, in order to understand what they do to us and what we can and want to do with them.“

—Jos de Mul, author of “Cyberspace Odyssey”

Early this month, I tuned into an online conference by accident. It was organized by the management of the Harvard Business Review Chinese Edition in Beijing. The event was called “New Growth Summit 2021.” I was pleased to hear ESG was mentioned at the event. The acronym ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance. China has a bad name for producing shoddy goods. Quantity outweighs quality. So, for me to hear ESG at an event that targeted Chinese entrepreneurs, investors and executives, I was delighted, especially since the organizer has affiliation with the top-notch management publication in the US. Isn’t this a positive example of “Monkey See, Monkey Do”?

China is one of the key playgrounds for the digitalization of manufacturing. This realm is a locomotive of business-to-business (B2B), that is, companies create products and services geared toward other businesses. Ordinary consumers are not familiar with these manufacturing companies and yet they are integral part of the complex global supply chains. If you are an open-minded and collaborative global citizen, artist, scientist, engineer and business professional, you might find the 1958 essay “I, Pencil” by Leonard Read illuminating. In the first person narrative, the pencil details the complexity of its own creation, listing its components and the numerous people involved. This is my understanding of the supply chain long before we entered the Digital Age. Today’s suppliers come from all over the world. They can compare, emulate, and exchange experience in cyberspace. Digital technology could be a game changer to increase transparency and accountability in Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) for a company’s operations.  

The application of ESG is not only limited to companies and investors. Governments and nonprofits have their roles to play as well. Monkey see, monkey do. If we support healthy and healthful competition, sharing experiences and incorporating success stories into feasible operations, they will scale up the positive impact of ESG. On the contrary, refusing to emulate and embellish best practices of ESG will reduce the competitiveness of the actor.

One of my biggest puzzles is why a majority of Americans do not favor efficient and affordable public transportation. They might be more willing to buy a futuristic self-driving car than having a licensed human driver drive them in a bus or a train. What’s the difference? None. The passenger is being driven to the destination in either option. If you agree that travel broadens the mind, which do you find more interesting to interact with on the journey—other human beings or multiple cameras and computers in the vehicle?

In my view, it’s not a bad idea to establish small-scale public transportation services in small towns and villages, too. Not everyone can afford expensive housing and benefit urban conveniences in cities, especially the poor and physically disadvantaged. Running a bus route on schedule and giving the bus regular maintenance, these are job opportunities to keep steady population in rural and suburban areas. As older Americans are one of the fastest-growing demographics in the country, medical appointment transportation in rural areas will be as necessary as school buses for schoolchildren. Obviously, the Smart City project that has been initiated in many American towns and cities focuses more on the technologies, including free WiFi and Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensor equipment than the building of mass transit services. If you look to the emerging markets in Asia and Africa, they may not have many good roads yet. But the roadmap of an affordable and safe mass transportation network is in their urban planning. If you are a video game player, you might be happy to see a new settlement that you build will attract more people if your city has high quality sustainable infrastructure, including a forward-thinking mass transit system that can handle future growing population. Time tells.

Monkey see, monkey do. What if the U.S. is a stubborn monkey to feel good about itself and refuse to learn from others?      

The pandemic has changed our way of transportation, partly resulting from the flexibility of working location at some jobs. But teleworking should not be a hindrance to building and expanding good quality roads, bridges and railways. Besides walking and biking, it is a no-brainer that mass transit and sharing rides are the eco-friendly way to get us from point A to point B. Many Asian countries are spending money on public transportation systems. By the end of 2020, the operational length of the high-speed rail in China reached just under 38,000 kilometers (24,000 miles) in total, close to the circumference of the Earth at the equator. In this regard, the cross-state and cross-municipality railroad systems in the U.S. are even poorer than countries like the United Kingdom and France.

In America, the more roads we build, the less enticed people are to give up driving. But the efficiency of highways fluctuates due to many factors. For example, as population grows in and near cities where jobs are, new roads will be jammed eventually. Not to mention how much carbon emissions are released during a gridlock on the highway. On the contrary, the more often and the more people use public transportation, the more profitable the bus and train companies will become. As a result, the better quality and services the systems have. This is a reinforcing feedback loop. If the Downs-Thomson Paradox is fully examined and considered by transportation authorities at local and federal level of governments, perhaps the multibillion-dollar road expansion project that is underway outside the national capital in Northern Virginia would be replaced by a sophisticated, well-integrated network of railroads and buses.

The Downs-Thomson Paradox states that improvements in the road network will not reduce traffic congestion. Improvements in the road network can make congestion worse if improvements make public transport more inconvenient or if it shifts investment. Generally speaking, during peak hours there are more cars—no matter whether they are electric vehicles or not—on the road. They will generate more carbon emissions in total than in the off peak hour. But more highway lanes encourage more cars on the road at any given time of the day. In other words, increasing highway capacity means increasing carbon emissions. If more companies in the region provide shuttle service for their employees, that might help improve their ESG performance.

As a consumer who is dumber than my gadgets, I cannot stop learning every day in order to figure out changes in my life. Monkey see, monkey do. As I said in the previous essay, while we are training artificial intelligence (AI) to conduct deep learning about humans, aren’t we also analyzing and unpacking AI’s smarter-than-me brainwork? I’m not surprised that in the near future I will be forced to replace my IoT to apply blockchain technology, an ambitious application to decentralize the heavily regulated power industry. In classical music, a computer with artificial intelligence completed Beethoven’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. Have you heard of organ-on-a-chip technology? The technology replicates human biology and predicts human response. This is a new model for drug research. Are you ready for AI-based algorithms to learn about your health problem?         

Monkey see, monkey do. If you are not satisfied with what has been reported in the mainstream media, you may want to look at your local news outlets and foreign press. While I read news releases about China from US organizations and government, I also seek a second opinion from non-US sources. We are in a fragmented world of information amplified by misinformation and mistrust. In the name of national security, any information could be a target to be censored and screened regardless of political ideology. If art and science, sports and Olympian spirits cannot unite the world, what else can? Everything is relative and interdependent. There is no absolute freedom, nor absolute power. Keep an open mind and an adventurous heart to learn from others, I say to myself. Am I learning to enhance my ESG performance as a responsible consumer? Yes. Swell! I am willing to be a curious monkey to do and see and learn from AI.