China’s New Silk Road

The New Silk Road project will offset, to some extent, the circuitous shipping route currently used to send Chinese manufactured goods to lucrative European markets. The current route takes between 30-60 days, the new rail and trucking route, by contrast, will take as few as 10 days. It will, by design, also link every country along the China-Europe corridor. In other words the project “spans more than 65 countries, which together account for 29 per cent of global GDP and 63 per cent of the world’s population.”*

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Kazakh counterpart, Nursultan Nazarbayev, June 2017 © Getty Image

Resource rich Kazakhstan, who stands to gain substantially by further integration of its economy with that of China, has been particularly eager to embrace this project’s potential. Kazakh officials reaffirm their support as recently as this past week. “The Kazakh government says the two countries have drafted 51 projects worth a total of $27 billion in the energy, mining, infrastructure and other sectors to be carried out by Chinese investors in Kazakhstan between 2016 and 2022.”^

The projected benefits to China are so substantial that Chinese banks have lined up fully behind the initiative. “China’s four major state-owned commercial banks have lent a combined $150 billion up to the end of 2016, over half of all current Belt and Road lending. Beijing has set up several financing vehicles, allocating $50 billion to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, $41 billion to the New Development Bank and $40 billion to the Silk Road Fund.”*

The New Silk Road project further solidifies China as a 21st Century economic super power. Their ability to negotiate a deal involving roughly a third of the countries on the planet also suggests that their diplomatic prowess is becoming more refined and well tuned with every passing year.

 

References:

*China’s Belt and Road Initiative now up and running by Peter Wong http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/Economy/30341970

^Linking China to the EU’s ‘gateway’ for exporters Naubet Bisenov and Stefanie Linhardt https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/International-Relations/Linking-China-to-the-EU-s-gateway-for-exporters

China: globalisation’s unlikely champion by Mark Beeson http://theconversation.com/china-globalisations-unlikely-champion-72101

Chris Williams on Population

For the presentations my group presented on social ecologist and author Chris Williams.

In a very poignant chapter “Is Population the Problem?” in his book Ecology and Socialism, Williams describes how the oft-blamed concept of over-population is not actually the linchpin of the ecological crisis as commonly believed.

Image source http://www.climateandcapitalism.com

Through a series of arguments Williams debunks numerous commonly held beliefs regarding human population as primary suspect in the ecological crisis. Almost all of the arguments which  he debunks in this chapter are rooted in Malthusian philosophy which we discussed in class earlier this semester.

Williams details how it is not overpopulation that is the problem, but rather our wasteful economic system with a completely demented allocation protocol. In the U.S. alone by simply allocating based on need we could eliminate enough waste to save water to meet the needs of half a billion people:

…at the various stages of production, transportation, retail and consumption, 50 percent of all food is wasted. As 70 percent of the fresh water used by humans goes to crop irrigation, this corresponds to wasting an enormous quantity of water. In the United States, up to 30 percent of food, worth $48.3 billion, is discarded. This is equivalent to pouring away 40 trillion litres of water; enough to meet the household needs of five hundred million people.*

Article Review: The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature

For this post I reviewed “The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature” (Environmental History, 2010) by Stephen Brain.

Early afforestation efforts in the Soviet Union were initiated in the 1920s but met with mixed success. “Both Lenin and Stalin called for aggressive afforestation at party conferences in the 1920s and as time went by, Stalin-era legislation creating protective areas and government agencies to oversee them encouraged ever more concerted empirically based efforts” (p675). Other government reports of the time discussed the benefits of using trees to create wind breaks in certain landscapes.

Image from article

To me the overarching theme of the article is that there was always a background motivation for enhancing or protecting nature for a utilitarian purpose (minimizing erosion, combat drought, creating wind breaks, reducing temperature variability, etc) rather than seeing nature as having an intrinsic value in and of itself. Because of a lack of buy in from rural people most of the planting schemes failed during initial attempts but eventually over time and with more trained planters garnered success.

Staling created a series of 5 year plans the afforestation plans being among them. Below is a video clip which answers the question: “What were Stalin’s five-year plans?”

As the program of planting gathered steam it eventually culminated in the ratification of The Great Stalin Plan on October 20th, 1948. The plan included moving from planting 1.5million to 5.7million hectares.

Some questions for consideration from this reading:

• Who was Trofim Denisovich Lynsenko and how did he influence the Great Stalin Plan?
• Was there any opposition to the Great Stalin Plan?

The politics of the environment… my perspective as a newbie to the academic field.

Hello Dr Bell and fellow students,

My first post is essentially my rambling thoughts but I’ve trimmed them down a bit… this is the abridged version.

I grew up in a family that was fairly well connected to nature; xcountry skiing, hiking and outdoor play were things I was exposed to regularly at a very young age.

I’m really glad that courses like this one are approved by dean’s more and more regularly. Courses related to, and connected with, the environment are becoming more and more common at TRU and other academic institutions which is a very important trend if we hope to have a livable world for generations that follow ours.

This is photo was taken at the 2017 Wild Salmon Caravan* – a march to support and increase awareness regarding species protection. Sadly, as I reflect on events like this I find myself pondering things such as…                                                                                      The device which captured this photo likely came as a result of significant environmental damage through it’s manufacturing and pre-purchase transportation. Having said that it is difficult to know whether or not the environmental outcome related to the smartphone would have been better or worse had the manufacturing occurred in a non-communist country. I look forward to gaining insight regarding this question (guess poll below) over the next few months. All for now.