Lectures day

Date: December 18th, 2017
Location: Tsinghua University

Today is the lecture day, which include three lectures: remaking sustainability science, Chinese history and salmon and conservation.

The first lecture was given by Xiaoling Zhang, a professor from Hong Kong City University. She talked about remaking sustainability sceience regarding the current situation of sustainable developments as well as the challenges for future developments. Listening to her lecture, I could feel that she is very experienced in the field of sustainable science and sustainable developments that I would like to know more than just one-hour lecture. Nevertheless, I am going to present some important and key points that she presented, following up with my own thought.

She talked about different social-human relationships along the history of China, and the main take out from this part is that sustainble science should consider different ideologies under different time periods that they were mainly influenced by social structure, economic as well as politics at that specific time. For example, at the very beginning of time when there was barely development of human society that most part of the Earth was not explored, people had to face the dangers and challenges of living in the wild environment. During that time, the nature was an unknown for human. Later when people started settling down and had the early agricultural culture in the society, they started to realize the resource from nature is abundant and innovative that they could rely on them to create things beyond the basic needs of living, such as art work using natural paints as well as caremics. Gradually, nature was modified by different needs for development of human society. Later, natural resources become the capital of economic developments, when nature was greatly changed during that time. When in the current society, nature is considered as a backbone of the society that human could not develop as quickly as they did in the past as resources are depleted and polluted. People begin to rethink the relationship between human the nature. The changes of different ideologies under different periods is important for us to think about the sustainable developments in the future because human needs are changing under different times that we need to satisfy their needs if we want the sustainable development being supported by majority of people. And understanding philosophy behinds the changes of ideologies is crucial for us to build up a better and flexible model for the application and integration of sustainability in the society. There are two examples coming up in China as well as in the world right now that sutainability science need to consider are large food packings from the prevailed food delivery in China and the development of Artifiial Intelligence. The white pollution brought by the prevailed food delivery is severe now that people need to think about the solutions of keeping people enjoying the convenient life style as well as not causing environment issues such as pollutions. Artificial Intelligence is developing and might become a great part of our society in the future. How to prevent the potential environmental issues associated with the development needs to think carefully.

The second lecture is given by professor Lu from Peking University. He introduced the history of Xi’an as it is a city that represents the majority of Chinese history. It is great to know more about China through the its history because it is a way of connecting people with a new place. The external value of the lecture is incredible.

The third lecture is given by professor Kristi from University of Washington that she mainly talked about salmon in the Puget Sound area as well as its conservations. As salmon is important in three perspectives: culture, economic and ecology, it is crucial for people to understand its importance before helping with its conservation. A lot of Native American Tribes depend on the salmon for their culture. Salmon as a species that is born and grow in the river and swim to the ocean for its life before spawn, which swim back to the river to reproduction, it’s important in the ecology because it serves as food for other species as well as bringing native derived nutrients. It also contributes to the economics that people make living of harvesting and selling them in the market. As for its conservation, we need to think from the three perspectives as well, which are social, economic, and environmental. Professor asked us to think some conversation plans which could cover all these perspectives. The plan that I support the most is the salmon tax. Another thing I want to talk about from the lecture is the farmed salmon, because a lot of animals are farmed now in order to satisfy the needs of human while conserving the wild species. However, diseases brought by these farmed animals as well as loss of genetic diversity are always under the hot debate from different people. How to conserve a species before it is under list of endangered species in the future? How to change the perspective of people toward the wild life from thinking of them as objects? Environmental philosophy might be helpful for me to think about these questions in the next step.