On the other hand, there are still many serious issues in China: the hate
we have for the Japanese leads to the justified break-ins of several Japanese
cars and restaurants that are purchased or owned by local Chinese; nineteen
strangers passed by a bleeding baby girl on the street and chose to ignore
what they saw; there are still parts of the history that the government does
not want people to bring up—and people are okay with that..
Who are we?
I was struggling, because I could not see China clearly and define it in my
way. I started looking at other people’s perspectives. Many of the books I
read on China by foreign experts fascinate me because of their knowledge
and deep insights but, at the same time, I feel that there is something missing in their books. Their objectivity is their greatest strength but also their
greatest weakness. There is no sense of “I am hurt, I feel pain, and I care
about this deeply in my soul” in their opinions and analyses.
On a beautiful New York summer night in 2013, I started reading the book
China in Ten Words in my friend’s apartment. I was so absorbed in this book
that I could barely sense anything happening around me while I was reading.
Although the ten words about China are simple, the stories behind them are enriching and fascinating, and the characteristics in these stories still commonly
exist in modern Chinese society. Reading these stories is like looking at myself
and other Chinese people in a mirror. It is very easy for me to visualize how
these stories happened.
It is not a book with a lot of objective analysis, but it is full of genuineness
and good stories.
The two sides of innovation—
Overpopulation and the Vertical City
BY R ACH E L STA N L EY
The world is rapidly becoming overpopulated. Exponential growth over the past 100 years has led
to an explosion in population, a trend that is set to
continue. The UN forecasts that the global population will incre ase to 8.9 billion by 2050, a nearly
50% growth from 2000. When this is put together
with the growth and development of economies,
we realise that we are putting an increasingly unbearable strain on our Earth that can only worsen to
eventual catastrophe if nothing is done.
Overpopulation has a diverse negative impact on
our environment. It leads to increased food demand,
increased general resource demand, increased emissions, and increased land demand. To make it worse,
increased land use and over-farming lead to increased
degradation of land and ever diminishing amount and
quality of resources, leading to even more extreme and
damaging extraction techniques.. For instance, fertilizers help increase production but deplete the soil of its
nutrients, requiring even more fertilizers in the future to
keep up with required levels of production. If ever there
was a definition of a vicious cycle this is it, although
the term suicidal death spiral seems more appropriate.
Overpopulation has a number of causes, but at the
heart of them all is the ingenuity and innovation of
human kind. These innovations include huge advancements in food growth technologies and health care,
leading to near doubling of life expectancy. These are
remarkable achievements. If only they didn’t have
consequences.
(THE
V E RT IC A L
CITY
A RT ICL E
CONTINUES
IN THE
NEXT ISSUE)
So, in order to avert the catastrophe when we
have depleted the Earth beyond “easy” recovery, we
need to bring about a solution now. And the solution
to the root cause of overpopulation, through reducing
population growth via education on birth control and
family planning, is challenging to implement and will
take many years to truly change population growth. So,
given there’s no workable solution that stops population growth, the only option is to find a way to stop
this population growth being a problem...and, so, my
proposal: “The Vertical City”.
A P R I L 16 , 2 0 1 4
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