A Traveller's Guide to Cultural and Environmental Education
Katie Lee
Environmentalist
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Avid Traveller
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MOOC TA
About Me
Hi everyone! My name is Katie Lee and I am currently a sophomore (rising junior) studying Environmental Science and Sustainability, concentrating in Marine Biology and Applied Ecology at Cornell University. I am also a MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) TA for the Climate Change Education and Urban Environmental Education courses facilitated by the Cornell Civic Ecology Lab. In this blog, I'm going to be talking about my own environment related experiences and how they have impacted the way I perceive, communicate and connect with climate change issues. Each article is a reminder that every individual associates themselves with a different cultural, religious, academic or occupational identity and these identities shape the way we learn about global issues.
Kobe, Japan
March 11th, 2011
Earthquake - Fukushima Nuclear Disaster
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It was March 11th, 2011, almost 7 years ago from today . I remember the day as the day I became fully aware of the complexity around issues of nuclear power and the ways in which the event has shaped the public's perception of energy production in relation to climate change mitigation efforts.
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I was in 7th grade at the time and was conducting an experiment for my chemistry lab. I remember the sudden dizziness I felt sitting at my desk as I witnessed a test tube gradually rolling off to the side, a water bottle slowly making its way to the floor before the alarm went off. I remember squatting underneath my desk before evacuating the building, all of the students and teachers standing outside on the field, waiting for someone to announce that it was a drill and that we could all go back inside. Little did we know that what we assumed with naivety to be the regular school drill was a magnitude 9 earthquake with repercussions that continue to stand the test of time.
News of the earthquake spread quickly and to this day, I remember with absolute clarity the emotions that ran through me as I rushed home with my sister to find my parents absolutely stunned at the extent of the natural catastrophe. At the time, we lived on the 34th floor of an apartment building. My father, who was in the elevator going home for lunch at the time of the earthquake, was fortunate enough that the elevator had opened up for him to exit. My mother, on the other hand, was home alone and knowing that my father was on his way home, had run down 34 flights of stairs to evacuate the building. Nobody knew that what felt like an event lasting minutes would continue to affect Japan and countries around the world 7 years later.
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This was not only a human tragedy, but a tragedy to Japan's climate change efforts. As a country that had originally replaced fossil fuels with less polluting nuclear power, Japan decided to make a 360 degree turn back to using coal and to close its nuclear power plants in fear of a similar event repeating itself in the future. Taiwan had decided to follow in Japan's footsteps and returned to coal combustion as its main source of energy production despite intensifying issues of pollution and smog in various cities.
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As a MOOC TA, I am reminded that our experiences shape the way we approach climate change issues and this event in particular continues to be an internal dilemma for me. The fear and pain of the aftermath of the earthquake is not something that I am yet to this day able to distinguish from the climate change challenges at hand. Despite arguments stating that the disaster was a technological malfunction and a regulatory failure as opposed to a nuclear energy problem at source, it is still to this day an internal conflict that I have yet been able to fully resolve.
Singapore
Gardens By The Bay
The first thing that pops into a lot of peoples' heads when they think of Singapore is urban. I sure did when I first moved to Singapore 6 years ago. Singapore is often known to be a global financial, economic hub, a place where expatriates come and go, where new high rises, malls and transportation links are constantly being implemented into the design of the city. Singapore in many ways is the city that never sleeps, where new infrastructure is constantly being built to meet the never-ending needs and wants of convenience and efficiency demanded by its residents. Singapore to me is very much a complex combination of contradictions - vibrant, yet regulated, diverse, yet segregated, environmentally conscious yet wasteful.
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Singapore's cultural diversity is undeniable, both nationality-wise and in terms of food, traditions, architecture and language. Hawker centres and street vendors contrasted with luxurious Michelin restaurants and hotels form the backdrop of vibrancy and passion characteristic of the city. However, many parts of Singapore are also very strictly regulated and controlled, with stiff barriers and constraints put into place to prevent informality and urban poverty in the city. In many ways, Singapore's natural environment, just like its built environment, is well 'packaged' - for all that we would consider part of the natural environment is very much controlled and shaped with detailed purpose and intent. Just like hidden sources of informality and poverty in the city, traces of human alteration of nature is similarly concealed from the everyday passerby. The 'packaging' of Singapore's natural environment, however, is considered by some as a form of urban environmental design, of a high level of environmental consciousness and effort to integrate the residents of the city into a natural environment of diverse flora and fauna. Others might disagree, saying that nature should be left on its own and that human intervention is a disruption to the natural course of the environment. Others might even say that Singapore's industrialised and consumerist society is only further fuelled by its use of artificially constructed displays of nature to drive tourism and the local economy.
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However, can nature ever really exist on its own without any trace of human 'contamination'? Is anthropogenic impact always disruptive or can it be used to improve the course of nature, to expand upon a biodiversity that very much epitomises what it means to be a healthy, thriving ecosystem?
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Taipei, Taiwan
Spring Break
March 31st, 2018
What used to scream "home" now screamed "smog" as I walked out of the airport with luggage in hand onto the streets of Taipei. Although Taipei has always been infamous for its motorcycle traffic, the overarching cloud of haze and unfamiliar smell of exhaust and smog immediately caught my attention. News reports were quick to blame recent return to coal burning for the pollution, claiming that the nuclear disaster in Japan had casted a dark shadow on Taiwan's efforts to maintain its nuclear power plants. A few days into the break, I realised after overhearing a couple of family members talking about the recent issue of smog that conditions were significantly more severe in the outskirts of the city where many industrial factories and coal fired power plants were situated. I was reminded of one of the MOOC Urban Ecology lectures on environmental injustice and the repercussions of unequal access to environmental services on ecological, but also social and economic issues in urban settings.
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Patterns of environmental injustice are common and can exist on local, national and global levels. One of the most prominent and well-known examples of environmental injustice is the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. The water crisis is a result of poor communities in Flint that, due to a lack of government and municipal attention and allocation of resources, have become victims of lead contamination in drinking water. Their calls for improved water treatment and replacement of lead pipes have been put aside by government representatives, with better health and sanitation systems being implemented in wealthier towns and neighbourhoods. A similar situation can be seen in Singapore where residents of public housing are often exposed to lower quality built environments than those of condominiums or bungalow houses due to poorer facilities and maintenance services as compared to those of more expensive housing options or residential areas. The placing of coal fired power plants in more rural, industrial outskirts of Taipei city characterised by cheaper housing and lower standards of living than those of city centers therefore mirrors similar patterns of environmental injustice.
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The city is renowned for its establishment of and success in community U-Bikes, for its globally renowned recycling system, and for its urgent ban on plastic bags. However, poorer communities within the city nevertheless continue to face pressing issues of environmental inequality and barriers to access certain environmental resources or in this case, to better air and water quality.
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I was reading through the examples of environmental injustice posted by course participants online and was deeply reminded that environmental inequality, whether explicit or hidden, continues to exist even in the most developed and technologically progressive of countries. Environmental injustice is therefore a global issue rooted in politics and economic inequality, but also in history and culture, in which unfair barriers to access continue to affect our sense of place and belonging in the city.
Ithaca, New York
Since I first moved here to study at Cornell University, I have always considered Ithaca to be a living representation of the natural sublime: the gorges, mountains, and forests create a never-ending corridor of greenery and biodiversity. Recently, however, student and local community groups have come together to discuss how the natural elements of the community could be better utilised by students and locals to integrate with nature whilst minimising human detriment to the environment. One of the ways that has been proposed is to create more seating areas along the gorges to make it more 'visitor-friendly' and to encourage more people to come take a hike or to enjoy the natural scenery. I found this to be a very interesting discussion. I have always envisioned nature in the Ithaca community to be what it was because it was 'natural' - a product of evolutionary history and ecological processes. But in fact, nature, in all its different forms, is meaningful to us only because we shape it in a way that provides it with a function that gives human value. We modify, build, and innovate to heighten the anthropogenic value of nature. Cornell University's Beebe Dam Bridge, for instance, is an example of engineering being done to extract resources for human benefit from Beebe Lake, but does that make the lake suddenly 'un-natural' and therefore, 'artificial'? The definition of nature is ambiguous and can change depending on context, but it affects the types of management and regulations that we choose to implement in our communities. It made me think whether letting nature grow in its 'natural' course is always the most efficient, both from a social, economic, and ecological standpoint. It also made me think whether defining 'artificial' as any form of human intervention would by definition make all green spaces 'unnatural' despite still performing critical ecological services.
The real question that interests me is therefore, how do we weigh the costs and benefits associated with intervention over non-intervention and what makes a 'healthy' balance based on our assumption of what 'natural' signifies?
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As a MOOC TA, I am intrigued by the diversity of conceptual ideas to which we identify with the word "environment" and "climate change," but at the same time, also how globally uniform it is. Our perception of these ideas are shaped by our own stories, experiences, and the sheer built environment in which we live, but perhaps even more significantly, by our community on a local level and by the media on an almost universal level.
Beijing Summer Olympics
2008
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There were few things more exciting for a 5th grader than going to Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympics. I remember getting off the plane and running to the immigration gate, eager to finally watch in person what I had anticipated watching every summer and winter. But what I remember most clearly was the smog. In my head, I had imagined clear skies, welcoming rays of sunshine to match the celebratory cheers and ear-deafening applauses at the opening ceremony. Instead, I was met with a grey, hazy sky, the smell of diesel and smoke clogging the air as we stepped out of the airport. As we searched for a cab to drop off our luggage at the hotel, I remember thinking that only when standing in the midst of the issue did I feel accountable to it and affected by what I had naively assumed to be a local threat, an issue that would never affect me personally. For the full two weeks that we were there, we would wake up to the sight of haze. When we went outside to go sightseeing, we would see children with their masks on, running around the Beijing National Stadium where the Olympics was to be held. It bothered me, even at a young age, that children were falling victim to a world they didn't create nor understand. Despite the tremendous improvement made by President Xi in recent years to eliminate the haze by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, smog is still an ongoing problem that continues to threaten both human and environmental health, violating the rights of children to grow and play in a safe, protected environment. This is not only an environmental issue, but is also an undeniable social hazard and continues to affect the livelihoods of people of all social classes. Air pollution has continued to threaten the national economy and, an increasing number of wealthier families have chosen to move away from Beijing in search of cleaner cities to work in and for their children to attend school.
As a MOOC TA, one of my largest take-aways from interacting with individuals around the world was learning that all environmental issues are also societal and economic ones. In a world where all of these factors co-exist, the only way to effectively approach an issue is to embrace its complexity in an integrated, multi-faceted system. It is important to realise that at the core of any system are the different stakeholders with varying beliefs and values that define this complexity. Air pollution is a global problem, but it is very easy to put blame on someone else and declare that it is simply "their" problem.
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For example, it is easy to place the blame on other countries, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, that are indeed some of the world's largest palm oil producers, for the incoming haze into Singapore. But it is also important to recognise that as a developed country, we are equally a contributor to this environmental threat. It is important to realise the power of inequality and environmental injustice. Many palm oil farmers continue to be vulnerable to exploitation, poverty, and poor access to core services. Hence, it is critical when addressing the issue to recognise the effects that an unequal power structure has had and continues to have on global stakeholders.
