It’s Getting Hot In Here

Xi’an, China - The ancient capital of China and the end of the silk road from Central Asia is serving this week as the site for the first ever national gathering of local and regional student environmental networks in this country - The College Environmental Group Cooperation Forum, sponsored by several Chinese environmental NGO’s. Over the past ten years, the Chinese environmental movement has grown dramatically as the government has recognized the seriousness of environmental problems here and allowed environmental NGO’s to blossom in tacit recognition of how they are crucial to solving these problems. There is still a long way to go, but I think that sudents are now poised to take a leading role at the grassroots level.

Students here are largely focused on taking groups to see natural areas threatened by development and then work for their protection. Industrial pollution now draws protests from peasants in rural areas whose farmland is degraded and have no other options, but students angling for a degree and a place in China’s new economy have more to lose by getting arrested. Nonetheless, interest is high in taking what students in the U.S. and Canada have done on the Campus Climate Challenge, which I had the chance to present on this morning, and adapting it to Chinese universities (Of which, by the way, there are more than 1,000, and which are exploding in size). The first LEEDS-certified “Green Building” in China is going up right now, and as these campuses expand, perhaps there will be soon be many more.
Yesterday a student leader described the environmental movement in China to me like this: “5 years ago, the student environmental movement was born. After 5 years, it is now a baby. In 5 more years, it will be grown up and will be able to do much more.” As much as we hear about China’s inexhaustible demand for energy, and the subsequent explosion in carbon emissions that this will likely cause over the coming decades, and despite the pollution that obscures the views of the new apartment buildings going up all around this city, there will hopefully soon be a vibrant student movement to counter this.