Migrant Worker

I’m about a month behind in my email and in responding to comments here (sorry), but catching up fast… and in the backlog, I discovered this article on climate change from The Asian Reporter. Some choice bits are copied below.

Last year, last storm season, in several countries lining the far side of our moody Pacific, ferocious wind and rain, suddenly hungry rivers and streams, took away 700,000 Thai and Malay homes, destroyed 1.5 million Chinese dwellings, ruined 3 million Indian, Nepali, and Bangladeshi houses. And these losses represent only three of 2005’s record-breaking 73 storms in and around Asia. Those numbers are numbing. That’s more houses washed away than family homes standing in Oregon and Washington combined.

In fact, in a dozen more weather-sent calamities following the Leyte disaster, in other just as vulnerable areas of our aching earth, families sunk into misery even deeper than the poverty they endured before those storms. Poor people in poor countries got poorer still. The good news is In each instance also, we hasten to add, immigrant Americans responded immediately to their homeland’s suffering. Millions of U.S. dollars were sent or hand-carried back to where our hearts linger and our ancestral bones lie. It’s no secret that remittances from American Asians keep families back home, indeed keep entire developing countries, afloat. Foul weather on not.

The article goes on to ask whether immigrant communities can/ should take a larger role in changing US government climate policy formation, since disproportionately, it will be people in tropical coastal areas (and not Americans) who are affected by warming and related weather issues.

It seems like immigrants from coastal areas might have more at stake than the average American… but I don’t see coastal Texans leading the charge for progressive environment and energy policy while Minnesotans drag their heels. The larger problem is that no one wants to think about the implications of warming — not even those most likely to feel direct affects.

Similarly, I don’t see many Chinese Americans lobbying for increased public health projects that fight childhood diarrhea, one of the top killers of children across Asia — but I do see them sending money back for medical emergencies, and I also see them warning their immediate families not to eat the food or touch the water when they travel to China. Awareness of a problem does not necessarily beget a movement to solve it.

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Plastic Trash
Originally uploaded by Keith Tam.

This article on the German grocery superstore Metro charging for bags in Kunming from China Central Television (CCTV) floated across my radar today — it piqued my interest since I spent Tuesday trying to track down more information on trash bags in Northwest Yunnan.

I’ve always been vaguely aware of the ban on plastic bags in effect in Lijiang and Zhongdian (technically, all of Lijiang and Deqin prefectures) but never thought much about it until last August, when I travelled to Zhongdian with a friend who asked me what the deal was with the strange pseudo-cloth, pseudo-paper yellow bags we kept getting whenever we bought stuff. I mentioned that plastic was banned and guessed that this was some sort of biodegradable alternative material. We’ve been trying to figure out where these bags are coming from ever since, and it came to a head on Tuesday, when responsible travel company WildChina expressed interest in buying a few.

We’re not having a lot of luck tracking down the supplier of these bags in Northwest Yunnan — online research and some cursory asking around hasn’t even determined for sure if the bags are being distributed by a non-profit, for-profit, or local government. On the other hand, we have learned the following:

The ban on plastic bags seems to have been implemented in 2002. There is some interesting related information in this report from the Yunnan Environmental Protection Bureau, including the fact that .7 million plastic bags were confiscated. The whole report is worth a read if you are into that kind of thing. The backstory of the ban is explained in this article (Chinese) , and basically adds up to the local governments realizing that if millions of domestic and international tourists were going to show up each year and shop, they needed to do something about the pollution. No one wants to go to a world heritage site that has been buried by a waste dump.

In my hunt for more information on the ban on plastic bags (and possible biodegradable replacements) in Lijiang and Zhongdian, I turned up this article on the larger waste issue in Lijiang by Jo Kent, a new friend here in Beijing. She writes simply and honestly about the incredible trash problem here in China, particularly the “just throw it on the ground” culture that prevails everywhere from rural Yunnan to the big city (at a somewhat lesser degree).

Free Chinese Lesson! Biodegradability: 生物降解性 sheng wu jiang jie xing Biodegradable bag: 生物可降解袋 sheng wu ke jiang jie dai Sub in any Chinese noun in the blank to say that thing is biodegradable.

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