A Memorial Day Movie and Song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqDVNEdFBL4&app=desktop

རྟིན་འབྱུང 

Trenjung: A Journal of Interconnections

Yet another old rejected essay!  This one though explains somewhat where the genesis for the Green China (Ecoharmonium of Taiwan Tibet and China) idea in the "Chronicles of a New Tibet" came from.

Green Star Over China?

By D. H. Garrett

            I am not a writer by trade.  Any poor reader who inadvertently stumbles into the accident of my thinking, realizes that at most after wading two or three sentences deep into the morass.   That said I was struck by the rejection of the original version of this essay (sans question mark and this preface) by multiple editors worldwide.  Was something more at work here than my simple clumsiness with words?  Nah, probably not. As one editor put it, “for us to publish a piece that argues, against the conventional wisdom, that China is a committed green economy, it would need to marshal a lot more in the way of evidence, data, etc. to support its case.”  So I did a quick Google and added four references.^1)2)3)4)   The first points out that since 2009 China has led all the G-20 countries in clean energy investment.  The second elucidates the fact that China’s State Council estimates it will spend $380 billion on conservation and emissions cuts through 2015, driven by a recognition that pollution is driving social unrest.  The third highlights data showing that China spends 1/6^th of what the U.S. spends on its military and invests twice as much in clean energy technology.  The fourth -on my favorite climate blogsite ( http://thinkprogress.org/climate/issue/  ) states that in 2012 for the first time Chinese wind power production increased more than Chinese coal power production. 

            So I thought I had laid that valid criticism to rest and went on to the next editor’s rejection which was basically that it was a “puff piece.”   Yes, some truth also to that.  I had gone to Shanghai to talk at the “Fifth World Forum on China Studies” as part of a panel called, “China’s Road: Ecological Civilization and Sustainable Development.”  My own presentation “Water in Extremis” was on the effects of climate change on the hydrological cycle, and basically I concluded from the widespread projections of widespread drought and the crazy effects that a warming Arctic was having on Rossby waves that we were headed for a period of societal collapse.  So I wasn’t exactly a Pollyanna.  I even, hoping to be helpful to my hosts, said that the beast that had hit NYC (Superstorm Sandy) was still out there and could strike almost anywhere, and so I hoped Shanghai was prepared.  But after following as best I could the simultaneous translation of the panel discussion through an ill-fitting-to-my-misshapen-ears plastic earpiece that was making me wish I could produce endorphins and enkaphalins at will, and after spending several days talking with leading Chinese scientists, academics and government officials, it was clear, even to a climate change alarmist like me (http://www.opendemocracy.net/daniel-h-garrett/letter-from-unapologetic-alarmist ) that they got it, and were going to do their best.  Yes, it’s true, China has its coal barons, its selfishly short-sighted industrialists and it’s party officials who still think that the old mantra of “pollute now, clean up later” as classically it was done in the destructive course of Western development, was what China also needed to do.   And yes, there remain many, too many, poor and desperate Chinese who would sell out their children and grandchildren’s health for a slim slice of the glimmering faux happiness implanted in them by the consumerist colonizers of the world minds, so yes, it was a puff piece which presented the aspirations of the best of China’s climate change and environmental degradation-aware leaders.  It was a puff piece in so far as it did not talk about what they were up against.  But we all know that, don’t we?

            And finally, though it wasn’t addressed personally to me in a rejection, one of my favorite political/strategic/moral writers made a statement about China on his blogsite ( http://www.tomdispatch.com )⁵ a few days after I had sent him a copy of my essay which, closet egomaniac that part of me no doubt is, I took as a slam-dunk rebuttal.  He said “Even if you set aside the man-made environmental disaster that is China (at a cost now estimated conservatively at $230 billion annually)…” and I thought about it and I thought about and agreed with him and yet I didn’t.  China -to a large extent because Western (and Japanese, and Korean) corporations find they can make more money by locating production there, and Western (and Japanese and Korean) consumers don't hold those companies accountable for the human and environmental misery they cause- has some of the most horrific environmental disasters on the planet, and yet, having traveled widely in China, there remain many areas of unearthly beauty.  And most importantly perhaps, and this was the main focus of my little essay, most Chinese, in their Chinese heart of hearts, have a sense of what an “Ecological Civilization” could be, and it is this sense, I believe, atavistic, futuristic though it may be in equal parts, which will drive China, as much as survival, to become Green China. And now, without further ado, I continue with the original essay.  If you are reading this, then well, the preface worked, if not, well there are better ways to spend one’s time.       

                Largely unknown to the rest of the world, which think mostly of its factories, and pollution, and its exploding class of new consumers, China has begun the greatest revolution in its long history. It is a revolution the likes and scale of which has never been tried before, and -unlike the Communist Revolution which struck terror in the hearts of many in the West and in its Cultural Revolution phase devoured its own children, Chinese and Tibetan alike- this revolution, if successful, may well save the world from the ravages wrought upon it by our machine-and-profit-above-all culture: the ravages of climate change which has us teetering on the brink of our own demise; resource depletion which will leave us little better than packs of starving dogs fighting over the last bone; and species extinction which will leave us, if there are any of us left, alone and sheltering having killed most of our fellow planetary sojourners with nary an attempt at coexistence.

            China has decided to become Green China.  In looking for a worthy dream to strive for over the coming generations -a dream perhaps to compete with the American Dream (which it's most wealthy and powerful beneficiaries have so horribly besmirched)- in looking for that dream -one whose beauty drew one to it, one whose wise necessity would inspire in equal parts courage ingenuity and joy- in looking within themselves for this dream, they found themselves.  They found that they did not want to be robots in some European metaphysical schema.  They did not want to be empty numbers in the equations of mad economists who had forgotten the human in human striving.  No, they looked within themselves, discovered that they were Chinese, and that as Chinese they had an innate sense of beauty which above all placed them as happiest when part of a vibrant, a verdant, a healthy, a growing and flowering multi-seasoned natural world. 

            They looked within themselves and realized that what they most deeply admired, and what they considered to be a civilization worthy of the name “Civilization” was in fact, an Ecocivilization, and this is what they have decided to become.  You might ask, how through the horrors of the Beijing smog, were they able to see this?  How in the foul chemical-cursed and pig corpse corrupted rivers were they able to see down to a blue-pure soul where fish frolicked in sparkling shallows?   Amidst all of the horrors, ecological and human, that the world, and China had inflicted upon itself in order to become the prime makers of all things material, every Chinese still had within his or herself a memory, even if buried under sewage, of blue skies where the occasional dragon frolicked, of streams and rivers so clean and clear the fish could be ink-brushed in every scale of silver-golden detail, and of mountains where their other half, the free Taoist complement to their Confucian discipline, could caress with the winds themselves endless slopes of bamboo ecstasy.  They looked within themselves, at the edge of the abyss of the death of the natural world, and said, no, this must stop.   

            It is true that the cleanup itself will be a monumental task.  It is true that a rapid transition to sustainable energy and non-polluting systems of transport and manufacture will be a monumentally monumental task.  And who will deny that reaching the Chomolungma heights of an Ecocivilization -in which all human technologies in the highest of high-tech bio-mimicry ways are seamlessly, harmoniously, wedded to the complexity of complexities that is the efflorescence of natural systems and their wondrous living technologies- who will doubt that it will require the best of the human spirit and mind if it is to arch itself up into realms of possibilities beyond what it had thought previously possible. Who will deny that reaching those eternally soaring but most down-to-earth of heights, will require much from all of us, but in particular because of their centrality and number, it will require the creative genius of every naturally-creative creative genius of a Chinese child for many generations to come.  But no one manages quick transformations like the Qigong masters of time, the Chinese, so maybe, hopefully, in the transformation to Green China they will also, -presto chango- surprise us.  For this is not just about beauty and hope, this is also about survival, ours as well as theirs. 

            There is a green star rising over China. We need it to succeed.  If it does not we will all tumble into the dead rabbit hole of abrupt climate change and ecosystem collapse, and getting out -if we even can- will not be easy.  But if they succeed, and succeed they must, for their own sake, for our own sake, then they will have earned, gratefully, their place, as the Middle Kingdom, as the deservedly admired and courted center of a saved-in-the-nick-of-time Kuan Yin, of a Chinese Gaia world.  One that is verdant, resplendent, a blue pearl of a magic water planet, the true magic pill of immortality, a life lived harmoniously with all life on earth, a living planet sailing serenely, almost forever, through the shimmering shoals of the stars.

References

1. “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?” The Pew Charitable Trusts Energyhttp://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Global_warming/G-20%20Report.pdf

2. “China Vows to Curb Emissions as Pollution Fuels Social Unrest” Bloomberg News http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-15/china-vows-to-curb-emissions-as-pollution-fuels-social-unrest.html

3. “Military v climate spending: How China outguns the US on clean energy” The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/12/military-climate-spending-us-china

4. “China’s Wind Power Production Increased More Than Coal Power Did For First Time Ever In 2012” Climate Progress

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/20/1744741/chinas-wind-power-production-increased-more-than-coal-power-did-for-first-time-ever-in-2012/

5. “Tomgram: Steve Fraser, A Disaster for All Seasons” http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175678/tomgram%3A_steve_fraser,_a_disaster_for_all_seasons/

Authors Note: Daniel Garrett is a former U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Officer. These are his impressions after speaking on “Water In Extremis: Water and the Possibilities for a Green (Ecocatastrophe-Avoiding) Renaissance” as part of the “China’s Road: Ecological Civilization and Sustainable Development” panel at the Fifth World Forum on China Studies held in Shanghai China, March 23-24, 2013.  DISCLAIMER:  The views expressed herein are solely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. Government.

རྟིན་འབྱུང 

Trenjung: A Journal of Interconnections

When I was in the Foreign Service they moved everything for me. Had I a horse they would have shipped the horse. Had I a grand piano and a horse they would have sent both of them to where they were sending me (eg. Timbuktu). This spared me from making difficult decisions about what junk to throw out and what junk to keep. I no longer have that option and so am wading through the basement trying to determine if there is anything amongst my tangible memories actually worth keeping. I stumbled upon some old amateur recordings of songs I had written long ago and put some of them up on iTunes. This one seems to be the one people like the most. I am such a nostalgic person I would probably back-up the digital version of my crazy life for perpetuity, but fortunately for the universal storage space that would thus become crammed with melancholy trivia, costs are probably prohibitive.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/lady-liberty-single/id973148080

Yet another old essay I couldn't get published...

In Defense of (Just) Being

By D. H. Garrett

“We need to move beyond the Christian fantasy that we are a completely good and benign presence on the planet, that we are somehow God’s chosen species, with a free pass to do whatever we want, regardless of the consequences.  We should think about how we can be less ego-centric, and seek to balance our technological advances with tending to the well-being of the earth, other cultures, and one another. We should consider how to create more happiness and harmony in the world, and a little less profit.”

                                                                        Salvatore Folisi “Eros Over Logos”

            I am a poet because they are short (the poems that is: the stature of poets as they extend into the metaphysical and metaphorical realms, is no doubt, immeasurable).  Frankly, the only long form I have any enthusiasm for these days is making love, though my wife of course from time to time may beg to differ.   You might say that I, and my fellow artists, bohemians, whathaveyou and many of the downright impoverished (by a measurement we reject) who make up most of the world’s humanity, are all lost to the great engine-ing maws of capitalism and corporatism: the so-called marketplace, that abattoir of the natural, and human world.  Yes, we are lost: lost in being: lost to being.  As such, because life buzzes around us and within us and every form and misshapen lumpen proletariat fashion and passion has for us its own particular -no ticket required- beauty, being lost in being (which is what all that pursuit of happiness nonsense is really about) means we have no particular need of finding a way out.  I am not romanticising poverty: give us please our daily bread and a roof over our heads for the worst of storms.  But a leak from time to time, and a little candlelight, is not the end of the world, it can instead be the beginning of intimacy: and intimacy is what we crave, not Facebook, not Twitter, but touch and friendship. 

            In contradistinction to that, I offer up, the Lhasa Mall.  Despite it being a World Heritage site, certain Chinese businesspeople are tearing down what is left of a Civilization of the Heart and of the Mind, and replacing it with yet another gorgeous (no doubt) Cathedral of Consumerism.  http://highpeakspureearth.com/2013/our-lhasa-is-on-the-verge-of-destruction-please-save-lhasa-by-woeser/ I do not hate the Chinese for that. They are human.  They have drunk the kool-aide of the American Dream as portrayed to them by its merchants of illusion, and not stopped to ask, what the real price is.   As an American, even a green-spieling, mediocrely poetic, laid-off-for-honesty diplomat, and perpetually lapsing Tibetan Buddhist, I really have no right to tell them, or anyone, to stop.  Their military, political and economic power was built one Chinese-made cheap discount item at a time, all willingly bought by us, no thought of anything (like saving the planet or saving a civilization or preventing near to slave labor in far away factories) except saving money.  And we, defenders of liberty and freedom, have so conveniently forgotten that we took away our own continent’s natural resources and committed genocide on its peoples, all in following our 3 in 1 God of Economic Progress, American Exceptionalism, and that weirdly off-brand militaristic version of Constantinian Christianity that has proved so useful for the aggrandizement of state power everywhere.  So really, I have no right to say anything to the Chinese.  A quarter at least of their entire economy is export driven, and that’s mostly our junk they are making.  As such, Tibet’s ecological demise is quite significantly, also, American driven (question: which country has in terms of total accumulated levels spewed the most greenhouse gasses into the global commons of the atmosphere? And which country is it, that, its politicians bought and paid for by the worst polluters themselves, refuses to face up to climate reality and its responsibilities to solve the above?).   Could it be the land of the no free lunch and the home of the brave if armed to the teeth?

            But I cry.  The loss of this beauty, this holiness, this simplicity, this right livelihood, to the global corporate agenda in its Chinese incarnation, is a tragedy, that I -dreamer of clear skies, and clean water, and of an earth abundant with fellow non-human but still our family, travellers- cannot help but grieve for.  But maybe this is the problem.  Who stands for us, who are content with birds and clouds, flowers and clean air?  We have no armies massed to defend us.  We have our songs and our bodies, our poetic pleas and the joy in our eyes which we would gladly share if anyone would listen.   Who speaks for the earth?  Where is the Earth’s Department of Homeland Security?  There is a village in Bhutan that has foregone electricity because they do not want to disturb the black-necked cranes that nest there in the Spring.  But we, we worship a different sort of crane, and have come to believe we are not part of the earth.  Even now, in the midst of committing the great ecocidal, terracidal, act that we now are perpetrating, and have been perpetrating in wave after wave for some time, we think somehow we will remain safe, cocooned before our TV screens or prostrating in our malls, from the consequences.   We have forgotten, that the forests, the mountains, the rivers the oceans, the prairies: these are our livers, our lymph nodes, our kidneys, our stomachs, our heart, and yes, if we would but listen, these are part of our own minds, our innermost sanctum of sanctums, or what is best of it.  

            We are now so deep into cannibalizing our own, -the earth system’s- organs of sustainability that earth system failure has begun.  Make no mistake about it, though the titans of industry may say, that we stand upon their giant shoulders, they in term stand upon the humble earth, and are crushing it.  The Chinese too will wake up one day to what they have done, and grieve.  What’s that Joni Mitchel song, “Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you’ve got till its gone…”   Well they’re tearing down (and we in lock-step with them) one of the mystic hearts of the planet, and are putting up a shopping mall. Perhaps it is time to do something radical, to undertake a Lysistrata movement against consumerism.  Let us shake the corporate colonizers of our minds to their core: let us get to know our neighbors, let’s walk in the park, take a day off from work and play with our children, share our jobs with someone, live on less but have more time, begin to reconnect with whatever animals and plants may be around us, forgo the binge shopping at Walmart and Costco.  Let us begin to dream about winning the Lottery of Love, aspire to be a Bill Gates of Friendship, try to win the Noble Prize in Economic Kindness.  Let us help to build a society in which the richest man or woman is the one who has the most real friends and has done the most good for the most people, and who has learned the best to live with the earth, and not at the earth’s expense, and at the expense of those of humanity least able to defend themselves, because they haven’t the money to buy the lawyers and politicians needed.  

            So I guess that brings us back to us, the poor, really only in so far as we are lacking the instruments that are destroying life on earth; the lazy, only in so far as me manage our time better, saving it as we can for more important things.  Yes, though we are down and out, and some of us even have gone to seed, we are not downcast: we have been cast up instead upon strange and lovely shores, where time itself is sipped, at a more leisurely pace, one might even say, it is better enjoyed that way.  We let instead each day tell its story at that day’s pace though it take all night. And if a moment should find cause to stay, why, we welcome it, understanding the need to pause from all the fury and the wars. Ask yourself if all your riches measure up even unto one whorl of hair on the head of a laughing child.  Being is mother’s milk.  It is not so much that I pity those who, having been unnecessarily weaned for some version of Nestlé’s fake milk scheme, then go reeling mindlessly from pixel-formed desire to pixelated pseudo-satiety, when all along Being is free for the taking.  It is that in the craven sickness of their reeling madly about for what they don't even know they have lost, they are killing our mother, and howling to make even more profit from her death.  Let us rise to protect our mother.  The GDP of real happiness has abundance enough to feed us all.

Authors Note: Daniel Garrett is a former U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Officer who has fallen from the heights of diplomacy into unemployment and in doing so has happily refound the earth.  DISCLAIMER:  The views expressed herein are solely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. Government.

རྟིན་འབྱུང 
Trenjung: A Journal of Interconnections

Now that I have rediscovered this blog I once started so long ago, it comes to me in a rush that I can publish essays rejected elsewhere!  What power!  What vanity! I can look in this self-indulgent mirror and see no imperfections whatsoever! Well, ok, maybe a few...

All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men

-Why Humpty Dumpty Can’t Be Put Back Together Again-

D. H. Garrett

The Asia Institute

“While there is no use crying over spilt milk, when the cow and the grass have also died, there might be some call for remorse.” DHG

         I have on clear nights taking to staring at the stars in vain. My, no doubt, pseudo-ponderous ponderings have led me into contemplation of what I call the “Planetary Civilization Germination Rate (PCGR).”  You see, in the Milky Way alone there are estimated to be about 100 billion earth-like planets.  And yet, we do seem to be very much alone. It is an interesting exercise to imagine reasons why that might be so, the apparent aloneness that is. For me -seeing the difficulty that we are having in finding a reasonable way for all of us to live together decently on this little planet- I wonder if in fact the PCGR is very low. 

         Maybe in fact, when a super-predator such as ourselves arises to the point it overwhelms all other life-forms on the planet and the planetary life-support systems themselves, it simply cannot find a way to live in peace, both with its other same-species members, and well, everything else which genetically, biologically, chemically, and geophysically is really its extended body. Nature, with all those planets to work with (and an estimated 50 sextillion in the universe) may not care that its odds of producing a species -that is powerful enough to take over a planet, and yet intelligent enough not to destroy itself and its planet- are so, well, astronomically low.

         And yet what is so frustrating about our situation here on Earth, is that we are so tantalizingly, -so reach out right in front of you- palpably close to being able to create a Golden Age of peace, justice, equality, and abundance for all, the likes of which humanity has never known, and the likes of which it has been searching for in its bosom since the time we shambled forth from the African savannahs so long ago.  We have the means, the technologies, and the resources to provide every child on the planet with a world-class education, world-class health care, and world-class dignity in terms of clean water, clean air, clean energy, a verdant living environment, and a safe, dignified, happy home.  Really, all it would take would be the level of “investment” that America makes in one or two of its failed wars.  All it would take would be a sustained –we’re all in this together- Great Transition for a decade or two at the most.

         We are so close, also, to another alternative. The hands of the doomsday clock of the Atomic Scientists have been moved to 3 minutes before midnight. I cannot say how many years that translates into, but I do know, in terms of climate change, we are within years, or a decade or two at the very most of falling off a cliff from which it will be exceedingly difficult to climb back up, those of us that is who have survived the fall. There are four recent papers that must give us pause: pause at the insanity of policy makers who think they are being reasonable when they are not; pause in our own daily actions when we think we can go on as we have been going on when we cannot. The first paper points out that we have only half the “carbon budget” we thought we had: Paris my friends, is out the window. The second indicates that multimeter sea level rise is very possible within 50 years: London, New York, Shanghai, etc., etc., are also out the window, too, with only their tops visible above the waves. The third paper points out that CO² emissions are at a pace where frankly there is no analogue: we simply don't know what is going to happen or how bad it’s going to get. The fourth’s sobering analysis is that most of the major proposed geoengineering schemes, are either too dangerous, or inadequate, or both: so forget that easy Promethean Hail Mary. 

         So what do we do? The best solution is a Great Transition.  We must go all out now for a fair-for-all version of a sustainable Earthly Paradise. Either that or what’s left of us after the fall will spend whatever time is left, tearing apart whoever else has also barely managed to survive.

“The seeds of the new world are all there: the seeds of justice, equality, health, and joyously free creativity.  The soil is all set and the conditions are just right. The problem is the boots of the rich and the powerful who seem to want a world where they continue to live off the corpses of what might have been.”

-DHG-

Author's Note: D. H. Garrett is a former U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Officer. He is currently a Senior Associate at the Asia Institute and author of “Chronicles of a New Tibet: Book 1: Entanglement.”

DISCLAIMER:  The views expressed herein are solely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. Government.