Before leaving I had time when i stopped in Osaka to meet my old boss from Why Why Club in Tokyo.
Signs of the Olympics around every corner... this place has gone nuts and even printed
the five golden rings on nuts and nut packaging. (on the plane)
(Is this ecology or river pollution coming down from the Huangpu River?) - I think it is a good point as I believe we are made to think the entire country is an environmental disaster by media)
I did not know exactly what to expect when I got to China, but I imagined a giant smog cloud that was so thick you could not see across any city...that prediction turned out to be correct. But when I arrived in Shanghai I was surprised to see a lot of things were different than I had heard word of mouth and through reading. I got off of the airplane converted my money walked outside and found a train that went about 300 MPH to downtown... thought it would be fun to try so I did that for a couple extra dollars.
(This is a picture inside the rapid train, my prediction: high speed service to every provincial capital in China in 17 years-the have the number of people needed to support such a train system, and I believe that it will be electric powered by wind and solar.)
When I got to Shanghai on the first day I had a meeting when this man, Joseph Constatine, an entrepreneur in Shanghai that was coordinating an environmental business fair (Shanghai Eco-Biz 101 Forum) and was also going to screen clips of our film the 11th Hour. He was interested in screening the film and also getting involved with local industry clean up... he blasted me with tons of interesting information... I learned from him about the underclass in Shanghai that labor endlessly to recycle scrap construction and shipping in materials (boxes, Styrofoam, metal, glass and more)... about the amount the momentum of the Chinese economy, about the air pollution giving him asthma. He wanted to see China do something that was different when modernizing by converting to 100% renewable energy sources... I want to talk about this more later.
(This is the "Starbucks where I met Joseph, we bought drinks served in plastic cups that we threw away, I always feel guilty about this work not practicing what we preach)
(The lowerclass moving around trash and such for recycling to make their living, its not a matter of ethics or governmental subsidies, its straight forward business)
After this initial introduction to China I met up with three more reinforcements which I will introduce in the next blog... I went on to learn more about the trash situation there.
(Although we were making a short trip up to Mongolia to check out the local situation our ultimate goal for the trip would lie thousands of miles west in Xinjiang.)
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