As people who follow my blog site know by now, I am generally not inclined to comment on contemporary politics. It isn’t that I don’t follow global politics. I do try to keep up with the international news, and I also follow the news back in my home country, the USA. Still, having lived abroad in Australia and China over the past twenty years, I feel less connected to US politics than my compatriots back in the States. There are times when I feel that the US suffers from a grandiosity complex, believing the rest of the world revolves around it, when in fact the rest of the world goes on its own merry way.
I also have little to say about contemporary Chinese politics in my blogging and posting efforts. Not that I don’t care—again, I make an effort to follow the news both inside and outside China where I live. Yet living here in China does give one a different perspective about this country than viewing China from abroad.
I’ve always felt that news media is severely warped in both directions. In the USA, the view of the world is like that of the famous New Yorker Magazine cover, where US politics, values, and culture looms large and the rest of the world is peripheral if not inferior. Same here in China. This is the myopia that large, self-important countries suffer from inevitably. And so on my own website, I try to cover what I personally do know, see, think, feel, and experience, as accurately and honestly as possible. Occasionally I do post a broader essay about larger ideas, patterns and trends, but these are always based on my own limited perceptions of the world.
Moreover, as a historian, I find it far more interesting and compelling to discern longer term trends and patterns in the ebb and flow of contemporary affairs. As one of my professors at Dartmouth College, the US historian Jere Daniell once told us in class, “We are buffeted by the episodic” and we often neglect the longer picture in the process. It is way too easy to get lost in the trees and lose touch with the forest.
I leave it to our able news pundits to cover the broader picture of national and international politics. I do not claim to be a journalist in any way, shape or form, and my role here is that of an author, writer, historian, and blogger. That said, the clear message of 2019 to the world is this: The global climate and environment cannot continue to withstand the excesses of human intervention without catastrophic changes to our planetary ecological system.
Life on Earth is under extreme duress, and this pattern will continue unabated until humans come fully to terms with our responsibility to serve as enlightened stewards of the planet, not its rampant consumers.
My own personal habits are no exception. I rely far too much on my car for transportation, when I should be using more eco-friendly transport means. I consume too much and leave a trail of plastic waste wherever I go. I put way too heavy a carbon footprint on the world with my international flights. Sure, I can shrug this off as a necessity of my job and my location in the world, but those are the facts.
Only by pointing the finger at ourselves can we begin to come to terms with the magnitude of the disaster we are wreaking on this planet. Every other news story pales in comparison to this trend that is slapping us in the face on a daily basis.
The only solution I see is a radical readjustment of the global economy. We are far too reliant on petrochemicals and petroleum based products, including plastic which is now filling our oceans. We are also pouring concrete over the planet at an alarming rate, contributing further to ecological degradation and global warming. We live in a capitalist, consumption-driven world, seeking greater comforts and personal conveniences at the expense of the long-term stability of our global eco-system. And our warped global news media and social media are muddying the waters of truth, even as they are alerting us to the full magnitude of this crisis.
My one hope is that the young people of the world are awakening to these conditions and taking action. Unfortunately, what I see at the college level still tends to be self-centered thinking around job security and personal fulfillment. Not that there is anything wrong with either of these—these should indeed be goals—but not at the expense of the planet’s future.
At DKU, we are well aware of these conditions and we don’t have our heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich. We have an Environmental Science major and an Environment Policy graduate degree, with responsible, enlightened instructors. During our Global Learning Semester program, which ran for four years from 2014-2018, we taught courses that forced students to face these planetary problems directly, such as Duke Professor James Reynolds’ “Human Domination of Earth” course, and Professor John Tenhunen’s “Ecosystems” course, both of which were favorites of our students (and John and James were among my favorite profs too!) They made videos and public presentations predicting the dire future of the world and the growing ecological and resource crises we will face.
As painful as it may be, we need to face these issues and trends head on. My own daughters are now in their teen years and they and all their generation will be cleaning up the messes we are making today. Unfortunately, our tendency as human beings is to avoid these dark clouds on the horizon and focus instead on the baubles of immediacy.
Ok, so now I’m going to step off the pulpit. My own personal goals for 2020 in these regards will be simple:
Consume less, and produce more
Learn to garden and grow plants, and plant some trees
Take public transport when possible
Ride my bike more often
There, that’s it for the time being. Now, let’s see if I can put my money where my mouth is over the next year.