Bitter to the taste, high in vitamin C, and fun to eat, pomelos have become of my favorite winter fruit in Shanghai and for the last few months that has meant picking one up a couple times a week. Until a couple weeks ago when I picked up this pomelo near my house, cracked it open, and saw the injection mark. As you can clearly see from the pictures below, there is an injection mark and ther…
Last year, I watched perhaps one of the more interesting Poptech videos. It was of Dan Gilbert, a Harvard professor in psychology, on why we as humans have failed to respond in any meaningful way in the face of Global Warming. At the time, I wrote a review for it on Crossroads that elicited some comments from a good friend (and GW skeptic) that made me think about a wider picture of Dan's c…
Recently, when looking to understand the issues of sustainability, I have been less concerned with mpg or SOX, but about populations. Specifically, the fact that in 1950 we were a mere 1.5 billion people.. and now we are 6.7billion. One of the more interesting, and concise documents, I found recently comes from the Population Media Center. Talking points on Population is a release from their me…
While attending the JUCCCE conference last year, I began to understand that when looking at clean technologies, or otherwise making the case for "sustainability", it was important to understand the health costs to remaining brown. That in the end, policy makers and agency officials would eventually connect the dots and begin making investments into sustainability as the costs of their health ca…
Jonathan Woetzle and his team and MGI have been doing a lot of work to research, analyze, and promote the way that China should urbanize. It is a report I read last year, and it is one I believe anyone who considers themselves as having a role in sustainability should read as it does a fair job of laying out the largest challendges and opportunities that China will face going forward. Where I th…
While the focus of sustainability is closely linked to "energy usage" and waste, the conversation on the role of design & designers has yet to take center stage. The recent article Design is an Avocado: The Layers of Green Design by Brian Dougherty (an excerpt from his recent book Green Graphic Design) though does a great job of introducing the role that designers can play: 1. Designer A…
A few weeks back, Inhabitat had a very interesting piece on green labels in the US entitled IS IT GREEN?: Eco-Labels and Certifications Shortly after that, Leigh at Crossroads made a trip to an organic conference in Shanghai with Julian at Green Leap Forward, and put together a report on the labels that they found there. A very interesting counterpiece to Inhabitat's, and clearly some import…
In the article Official warns environmental pollution no longer acceptable, I saw the strongest statement to date that officials and agencies are finally understanding the tradoff of full costs between economic growth and the environmnet: Yangzonghai Lake, famous for its springs, was found to contain arsenic in June in the Yuxi City section. A local company named Jinye Industry and Trade Co. Ltd.…
With dozens of cities in China urbanizing all at the same time, and at a pace matched at no time by anyone else, making sure cities are planned and built properly is a must. While the term "urban" can mean different things to different people, municipalities of all sizes are and always have been dynamic centers of activity. Cities offer jobs and prosperity, important social interaction, and…
Jennifer Turner has been the director of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson Center for 16 years where she creates meetings, exchanges and publications focusing on a variety of energy and environmental challenges facing China, particularly on water, energy and green civil society issues. She leads the Wilson Center’s Global Choke Point Initiative, which together with Circle of Blue,…
I just finished reading the 1997 re-release of Vance Packard's book The Hidden Pursuaders, a fascinating book about how through the addition of psychology and sociology, adverting firms were able to become more effective at placing products in the consumer minds. One section focused on how children soaked up advertising, and through this process, the children could become a huge force in the w…
