Weather: Sunny and cold
Location: SOE (School of Environment) , Tsinghua University
Today is the Lecture Day! We had a total of three lectures: Remaking Sustainability Science – New Context, New Challenges, Chinese History, and Salmon Conservation and the Endangered Species Act.
On our way to SOE Building on Tsinghua campus
Our first lecture was Remaking Sustainability Science – New Context, New Challenges, given by Xiaolin, Zhang. She came to Beijing from Hong Kong to give us this lecture. She is a professor from City University of Hong Kong, and is well know for her longstanding and interdisciplinary interest in sustainable urbanism as well as urban redevelopment featured in China. In her lecture, she introduced three points: the first was the global urban-rural gap, the second was the triple-bottom-line theory, and the third was about global urbanization. She points out that by 2050, 70% of the world will be urbanized from 29% in the 1950s. Urban land use will continue to increase in the foreseeable future in China, whilst the agricultural land will gradually decrease. Nevertheless, different policy scenarios will have different impacts on these land changes. Thus decision makers can adopt different policies to control the rate of land use change. One key takeaway challenge that Zhang pointed out was the displacement of a large number of rural migrants and exacerbated social inequality. When thinking about rural migrants and exacerbated social inequality, I immediately recall people who live at the edge of Beijing, where we went for solar panel and wind farm visit and saw a huge unorganized landfill. It is hard to imagine that immigrants from other cities who can't afford to live in Beijing are experiencing this sort of extreme environmental injustice and social inequity right outside of Beijing.
In front of SOE Building
The second lecture we had was Chinese History from Dr. Lu. He skipped part of his Bachelor degree and master degree, and got a PhD degree at Princeton. He used to stay at Princeton and teach, but now he's a professor at Peking University. His history class was one of my favorite Chinese history learning experiences I've ever had. Learning Chinese history through the city of Xi'an with a temporal perspective was a new methodology of history learning for me. It was also my first time going through Chinese history in such a comprehensive but detailed way, and I believe it was the best way to let students who have never learnt Chinese history before to quickly understand the broad picture and external value of it.
Before Lectures
The last lecture we had was Salmon Conservation and the Endangered Species Act from Kristi Straus, University of Washington. During her lecture, we finally got chance to corporate with our Tsinghua cohort. It was one of the most interactive lectures that we had through our trip and I really enjoyed the way we were participate with each other and our professor. Straus firstly brought out a discussion on how salmon values culturally, economically, and ecologically. Salmon is a big part of some native American's culture, while it is also important for the fishing industry as well as the food web in nature. She also identified the challenges that salmon population was facing as well as the Endangered Species Act. It was interesting to know some details on how it works, and how the Act is enforced at a national level instead of a state level.
TA Chen's birthday Party
After all three lectures, we had a sweet little birthday party for our Tsinghua's TA, Chen Shi, and we shared cakes. I think although all the lectures were a little bit short, it was an amazing day with a lot of wonderful learnings.
No comments:
Post a Comment