Comments (0)

By Katie Kish, October 27, 2011 1:45 pm

My graduate school topic has evolved quite a bit. I’ve gone from wanting to look at the Chinese Ghost cities as a way to relieve population pressures on mega-cities to urban health issues. My initial pull was to look at some of the most polluted cities in China, to talk to people working in the coal mines and to end up with quantitative data expressing the problem… however… it’s China, so nothing is that easy.

While looking for some information on Linfen (China’s most polluted city) I came across a VBS documentary called Toxic where the documentary makers go to Linfen to document the coal mines and people living there. Basically no one will talk to them, in fear of the government finding out that they’ve spoken poorly of the coal factories (that are all government owned/run). The documentarians are essentially kicked out of the city after a week for prying.

That didn’t give me very high hopes for what to expect being an academic wanting to go in and pull out data about what exactly the coal mines and factories are doing to the citizens of the city.

So I’ve had to change… again. My new proposal has me going to China for 6 weeks next month to do some unstructured interviews with people living in China. I will be using storytelling as a method for data collection where I will simply be asking citizens to tell me about their life. I want to know how their urban experience has changed in the past 30 years and their own personal stories about the economic development happening around them. I don’t plan on asking any pointed questions about the environment, I just want a plethora of case studies to look at which can then be turned into rich pictures and analyzed using soft systems methodologies. My hope is that I will gain some insights from listening to their stories and also do some work on post-normal science and the value of atypical or non-scientific knowledge. But I will write more about the analysis once I’m back. For now I’m just focusing on who I’m going to talk to and how I want to approach it. It’s difficult to be an academic who wants to look into China because the government doesn’t want anything done that will have them lose face… so I need to work around that culturally sensitivity and try not to step on any toes along the way.

Besides these issues I’m running into, grad school has been great. The hardest part has been learning Chinese… In regards to speaking I am picking it up very well. Also writing/reading in pinyin has been relatively easy. Memorizing the characters has been the tricky part. We’re supposed to know around 500 by the end of the course…and right now I’m learning the first batch of about 65 – 70 for my first written test. I can write simple sentences about introductory stuff to a person (hello my name is kai-lin…my phone number is…i have 5 people in my family..they are… etc) but I am a LONG ways off from writing my first Chinese academic paper (however, my school plan has me writing one at the end of next summer…ha). The nice thing about typing on the computer is that you just type in the pinyin and then it automatically comes up with some characters so then you just need to recognize it. I can write on the computer pretty quickly.

I also got my Chinese name: 凯麟 which is Kᾰi-Lín…and means triumphant female unicorn. yeah… pretty pleased with myself for that one.

Comments (1)

By Katie Kish, March 5, 2011 12:54 am

иконографияПравославни икониI am taking …um 1 class. …Which is super lame.

But it means I have time for volunteering. So next week I’m checking out 3 or 4 different opportunities to see what I want to spend my time doing. There is really less than a month left of school, so I can’t do something that needs to be long term.

For the summer I think I’m going to be back at Accu-Link. I contacted them – they didn’t really say yes, but they didn’t say no. They asked how long I’d want to stay this time, but then didn’t respond… but I’m sure it will be fine.

My summer goals are pretty solidified in my head:

• lose weight
• find a thesis topic

Losing weight should be pretty easy at my mom’s during the summer. There is an elliptical trainer that I really like going on, I can cut the grass, I’ll be walking around and they don’t have a lot of crappy food in their house. I mean – they eat really rich food… like cheese and real butter, but they don’t have a lot of things with sugar or salt. …Also, I’ll get yelled at if I buy chips or junk food.

About the thesis – …turns out my whole idea of studying these “ghost cities” of China may not pan out as planned. I don’t really think it’s as big a mystery as people make it out to be. …China needed to increase their GDP by 8% in a year… so each regional government was given the instruction to do so. The easiest way to do it was to build infrastructure. Not only would this falsely inflate the GDP by making it seem like more money was being spent but it would also employ more workers. As for why they stayed empty – investors bought out most of the housing and now are just holding onto it, waiting to sell. So what houses are left are actually really expensive. Also – no one wants to move there because there is currently no economy there. Is this all a problem? I dunno, it’s weird – but I think it’s going to play itself out in a few years. I’d rather work on something that really will help people when I get involved. …So I’ve been doing a shit ton of reading about coal mining in China and the effects on people’s health, the lack of environmental health education, the effects on live stock, farms and water… There are lots of issues with coal, it’s just not a horribly original topic. The ghost cities were original… oh well, such is life.

I still need to talk to my advisor about all this – but I haven’t gotten into York yet, so I’m not going to bother him until I do.

Comments (6)

By Katie Kish, February 25, 2010 4:28 pm

I meant to write this post a loooong time ago, but I never got around to it. Emily wrote an opinion about global warming that I totally disagree with and is clearly just from lack of research on the topic. Actually, when I first read it …it was like I was reading a slightly edited version of one of the many kinds of creationists arguing against evolution. Luckily, in the mean time Ian Bushfield responded to it for me.

I am by no means a stereotypical environmentalist who knows global warming is a *serious* problem just because I want to get environmentalism into policy… But I’ve read a lot about global warming, listened to debates and done a lot of schooling around the topic … and it happens to be one of the very few areas of stereotypical environmentalism that I agree with. Here is Ian’s reply which was short, sweet and to the point.

Everything you say has been thoroughly debunked repeatedly before.

There IS a consensus among real climate scientists (notice how, like in the evolution/creation debate, engineers are the major opposition “scientists” to the established facts).

The 1970s global cooling myth is a result of a Newsweek article not a scientific journal or consensus among scientists. In fact, articles being published were 44-7 in favour of warming over cooling hypotheses.

Also, if you were concerned about the CRU hacked data, analysis of the emails results in no real “gotcha” moments, and does nothing to discredit the mountains of evidence that exist. At most the emails demonstrate that scientists remain human with all the associated flaws (jealousy, anger, frustration, etc.) that result from continued attack by self-proclaimed sceptics.

Finally, most of the “scepticism” movement is heavily funded by the oil industry similar to how the tobacco industry funded PR against the notion of cigarettes causing cancer or how evangelical religions fund PR against evolution.

2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record and despite what high school chemistry teachers believe (similar to under-trained biology teachers) we are very likely to have caused it. The greenhouse effect is real (or else the planet would be 30 C colder than it is), and putting more carbon into the atmosphere that is normally buried under ground is bound to have an effect.

Scientists do share some of the blame for bad PR and not communicating their findings properly, but nevertheless, the data is in, and it’s time for action. I really did like Jon’s piece at the National Post about why he thinks people are keen to be doubters of the science on this piece, give it a read if you haven’t yet.

There is a lot of really good and easy to understand literature out there about global warming and “Limits to Growth”… It makes economic, mathematical and logical sense that something like global warming is happening and that we need to respond to it so we can be more readily prepared for the future.

Claiming that the science is too hard to understand and therefore it is best to just be agnostic is intellectually lazy. Scientists have devoted their lives to this topic, and have come to the same consensus – global warming is happening. The scientists have done the science for you AND done a good job of framing it for people who aren’t scientists for those willing to put the effort into learning about it.

I understand that some people want to go against the grain and be a skeptic about stuff… but being a skeptic about global warming at this point…is like being a skeptic of evolution. Only skeptics of global warming are VERY dangerous and will result in a lot of possible death and suffering in the potentially near future.

Comments (2)

By Katie Kish, January 28, 2010 10:51 am

Yesterday for one of my classes we read a paper (Lawn, P. 2001. “Scale, prices, and biophysical assessments” Ecological Economics 38, 369–382) that said you can have sustainable development (whatever that means, now) while maintaining the same level of happiness in the current society. It makes me wonder if people would be happier if they had to start giving things up. …I got thinking about when I heard about the Ipad (which I just learned about yesterday from my mom…) and how it is essentially just… a really big Iphone. But everyone is going to want it. Would people be willing to not get an Ipad? Or the next Iplack? or Ibod? Im not sure that people are willing to start giving up what they have for a sustainable and less excessive future.

Then I came across this grist article that talks about a family who is giving up what they have to better the world. It’s a really wonderful thing and I hope that more people can start to live like this.

It makes me reflect on what I do… Yesterday I ordered a new MP3 player (not even an Ipod…a zone? zune?…i dont know) because my Ipod just flat out stopped working. But I’m not like that with everything. Phones, for example – I buy new phones all the time just because I like new gadgets. Laptops… I buy new laptops and mini laptops because it’s fun to have new things. Clothes… I am really horrible for buying clothes and never wearing them. Jewelry, shoes, stuff… and I’m someone who knows and cares about the earth and other people.

So, what am I going to do about it…? (this sucks…) I’m going to stop accumulating things. No more makeup from Sephora, clothes from H&M, jewelry from Forever 21… etc.etc.etc. I will challenge myself with this for a year and see how it goes. Maybe I’ll save a bunch of money! That would be cool, too. I’ll (try) to keep track of what I don’t spend and will donate the full amount at the end of the year. I’ll keep you updated on it…

(What a year! dieting, not spending money, working my ass off at school… sounds fun =0.0=)

Comments (1)

By Katie Kish, March 30, 2009 2:06 am

I wrote this for a class, if I would have written it for just my blog it wouldn’t be in such …”nice” language…but i was going to write about it aaaaaanyway…:

If you drive a car or even have to take a bus in any sort of major city you know that traffic is a terrible thing. When I went to India I was shocked to see that the streets there are at least three times as packed as the streets of Toronto, not to mention they’re usually smaller streets too. People get into grid locks that are near to impossible to break out of. The last thing that needs to be on the street is more cars. It’s bad enough that somehow the Western countries have been convinced that “hybrids” and environmentally friendly cars are a smart choice. The dumbest bike is still smarter than the smartest car.

Yet still for some reason people are praising the new car that is to be released this July in India. Boasted as the “people’s car” The Nano is said to bring new opportunities for families in the lower income bracket of India. Costing only $2000/USD or apx 1 000 000 rupees because of its lack of airbags, radio, electric windows and other luxuries it is definitely something feasible for these families. Currently the only options for them are bicycles, scooters and walking. With this new “cheap” car nearly anyone will be able to afford a motorized vehicle. And people will buy it. Economists have speculated that this new car will boost India’s car sales by 65%.

Between the years 1980 and 1998 there was a 69% increase in motor vehicle traffic, 82% of this increase was from cars alone. The world can expect to see an additional 22% increase from the current levels of 321 billion cars by next year. A quarter of all car trips are for distances less than 2 miles, and just over half for less than 5 miles of travel. A single double-decker bus can hold the same amount of people as 20 fully occupied cars can. There are too many cars. Cars are one of the leading contributors to global warming, and it doesn’t look like they’re going anywhere, any time soon. What then is an environmentalist supposed to think of “The Nano”? I’ll tell you what this environmentalist thinks, this is a complete disaster.

On one hand there is a really reasonable argument. Here in the Northern “privileged” societies citizens have been able to use cars as much they want to. If people can’t afford it, they can take out a loan or lease a car. People can buy used cars, and even get junk cars and fix them up. If someone can’t afford a car then there is usually an option for carpooling or public transportation that is good enough to serve the majority of populations. What sort of injustice would it be for the Northern world to deny access to the same conveniences that has been happening here for generations?

Many people would argue that the North has no right to keep underdeveloped Southern countries from developing. The fact of the matter is if India, China and Africa all start living like the West there is going to be ecological disasters so huge that it will all be completely irreversible. The answer doesn’t lie is allowing India to develop the same as Canada, the United States and Europe. Instead the answer lies within a complete overhaul of the car as a status symbol. As with most environmental suggestions this unfortunately falls into the category of us needing a huge systemic change in the way that we view something that we’ve already grown so accustom to.

Not only does the North have the responsibility to have a change in transportation and cars, but also there lies onus on the wealthy countries to start putting money, energy and time into education underdeveloped countries. Education about the unequivocal dangers of development, huge numbers of cars on the road and increasing pollution need to be spread until people start to listen. Development doesn’t necessarily mean developing like the North. Development can be sustainable, and there are enough education individuals in the North who can teach this sustainable development to places like India.

Although Tata claims that the car pollutes 12% less than the average car, this still isn’t good enough. This is a time when people shouldn’t be encouraging the production of cars that are efficient. This is a time when people should be advocating for re-education of what transportation is and how we get around. There should be nothing glamorous about owning a car. Although this car opens up important social development for people in India, it is not good. The world doesn’t need more cars, it needs more bikes, buses and educated people about the pressure that motor vehicles put on our earth and that with more of them we could all be walking with masks on in short order. Start walking, taking the bus and carpooling to show developed countries that life without a car isn’t impossible. Write to Tata and tell them the social and environmentally irresponsible actions the company is participating in. Cars are not what should be held up on a pedestal in the world any longer.