As an experiment this weekend, I went through all 192 stories tagged “China” on a major eco website. More than 90 per cent of its posts were about at least bad, and often terrible, environmental news and developments.
It’s not that these grim stories stories were untrue, or unimportant. It’s just that their aggregate impact is disabling. One feels overwhelmed, as with so many aspects of the ecological crisis.
The negative slant is amplified by the fact that most of us in blog land rely on news feeds from wire services. Even if they had the inclination to do so, wire services’ offices are so lightly-staffed that locally-based journalists simply don’t have time to go out into the field looking for positive developments.
As a second experiment, therefore, I decided not to write about the latest grim report about the impact of industrial agriculture on the ozone layer, headlined Nitrous Oxide Fingered As Monster Ozone Slayer”.
I wondered: is anything positive happening in China to offset this latest nightmare?
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Classroom design competition – two winners announced
Our friends at Architecture for Humanity ask that we spread the word that the winners of its 2009 challenge have been announced – and we are happy to do that.
The accompanying press release quotes a World Bank estimate that “ten million new classrooms are needed” to reach its targets on education and that, in addition, “tens of millions of crumbling classrooms – including many in the United States – are in desperate need of upgrading”.
“Meeting this demand for better learning environments will constitute the largest building project the world has ever undertaken” says the Bank.
This assertion, while no doubt welcome to architects and builders, is tendentious in the extreme. There is no evidence that throwing money at building projects makes a vast difference to the education that happens within them.
On the contrary: money for hard infrastructure is too often invested at the expense of money spent on teachers – or on simply getting out more.
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