Santa Cruz Green Watch: Mission & Background

Mission:
This very local blog is an attempt to provide simple, direct, useful information about  very complex issues related to the environment, sustainability and the political process in Santa Cruz, California.


Background:
Occasionally, you will see posts/comments about China, where I lived for the past 5 years.

Daily life is so different that I don't think I can explain any of it:

• Sidewalks for cars, streets for people; 
• grown children returning from far-away cities to buy a brand new apartments for parents, cash on the table; 
• a culture of do, but don't speak; 
• vomiting in the street; spitting on the floor
  
• endless hard bargaining; 
• train stations the size of football fields, but more packed; 
• discuss the future, never, ever the past; 
• red envelopes; 
• 20 minutes to select a watermelon; 
• a land of 1.3 billion people all quite "clever", who just want "a good life."

Yet there are things we can learn from the Chinese; and things they can learn from us.

When an old building or even an entire city block comes down in China - a frequent event - a group of poorer, usually migrant, workers suddenly appears to salvage, sort, clean anything of possible value, by hand:    bricks. old pipes, toilets, wire, plastic.    They seem to work 24/7, light or dark, rain or shine - it is a business.  It is the same in a village.  Reuse has been a part of Chinese culture for ages.

On the other hand, when I asked a local government official,  fluent in English and a visitor to over 80 countries in his official position,  about the quality of new buildings, he said: "As soon as we finish one building, we have to build another one.  We have to build quickly.    The need is urgent.  We are behind and we must catch up."  Albeit, he omitted mention of the self-interest that many officials have. 

I returned to the US to be simultaneously shocked by parts of our own culture, yet energized by the challenges we as a people and species face.... "We are behind and we must catch up."  Wake up.

The writer has BS in physics (MIT), MS physics (U. Chicago) and MBA (U. Chicago).