"End of Suburbia" Reflection

The film, "End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream", basically talks about how America had suburbs after WWII, which leads to a huge amount of use of resources later on. Creating suburbs was a good idea. It provides the soldiers to have quiet place to live, since suburbs are far away from the urban world. However, because of that, people living in suburbs have to drive in order to get nearly anything.

Unlike "Enron: Smartest Guys In The Room" this film doesn't really inspire people. It only does the job of reminding people the problem we are all facing. It is undeniable that transportation plays a huge role in most people's life. We need it to go to from place to place and, even for the ones that have markets right near by their homes, the markets, themselves, need transportation to get all the goods. In order to save time and so we can use spend more time doing something else, vehicles become a very helpful technology. Only problem here is that most them need oil, and oil is finite. To be more realistic, it "is" going to run out pretty soon.

What could help save the situation? A lot of scientists and engineers are now working on trying to find something else to replace oil. It would be good to have an infinite amount of replacement, such as solar power. While we are either still finding the solution or waiting for people to find one, there are things we can do to help at least save a little bit more resources for all of us to use in the future. Although it costs money, I always prefer to take public transportation. I mean, even if we drive ourselves, we will have to put money into the gas station anyway. So why not just use the public transportation that is always there running in the circle? A lot of people have been asking me why haven't I started practicing driving and get a license yet. Yes, I usually say it's because I'm lazy. but other than that, it's because I don't think it's a must. Look at me now, I can still get to go to many different places by walking, biking, or taking the public buses. When I'm in my internship up in Taipei, MRT really saves my life. Even if I need to go to somewhere that is not in Taipei, MRT doesn't go to, and has no bus stop, the worst case would be calling a cab.

We have tons of scooters here in Taiwan and those drinks oil like a beast. I guess most Taiwanese would prefer to buy a scooter is because of its price and it's easier to park a scooter. The problem with scooter is that it can not carry a lot of people. I have seen some Taiwanese can put 3 or even 4 passengers on one scooter but I'm pretty sure not everyone is able to achieve that. It is usually either one or two people on a scooter. Compare with cars, which usually have between two to four people in one vehicle, a scooter only has about half of a car's opacity while it could use more oil than some cars do.

The major problem here in Taiwan is that we don't have a very well designed public transportation yet, except for Taipei. Places like Tokyo doesn't have this kind of problem. Tokyo has an extremely well designed subway that decreases pollution and cleans up the roads. Better public transportation will help save more oil.


image: drew from a friend, Sarwar Z. Khan.

Organic. Organic? Organic!

After watching the film, The Smartest Guys In The Room, about Enron's fake and reading the chapter "Big Organic" from the book, written by Michael Pollan, called "The Omnivore's Dilemma" I start to find it difficult to believe in everything I from from advertisement and labels.

The name "organic" is a like a diamond ring word; it pretty much adds on a lot more value to a product when it's on its package. I am not the type of person that cares too much about eating "healthy food". I eat McDonald's even when I have already learned that it is "unhealthy" to human bodies. However, the name "organic" still stands out to me. As long as a product bares that name, it means that it got the reason to be more expensive than its competitors.

What does it mean when something is organic? There are many ways to address this term. I would put it as "when something is fresh, clean, and without any other chemicals." Now, the chapter of the book pointed out that when something says it is "organic" it probably doesn't really mean "it is organic" What it's saying is that the companies didn't "lie" to us. Instead, they hide the details from the consumers. I remember when Tina and I were working on the "green business presentation" Ms. Gruber once came and warned us that even when a company says it is a green business and it produces organic products doesn't necessary mean it is the type of "green" we are looking for. Come and think about it, if everything on the selves came from local farm without any pesticides, how would they menage to get that many farm? The process of making organic products is definitely industrialized. At least most of them.

This is pretty similar to Enron's case in some ways. Most of the "green business" out there would tell the consumer how green they are, but most of them wouldn't show the in depth details of how they do things. What's similar is that both Enron and the companies that have the title "organic" hide behind a name or numbers to attract more buyers. The difference would be that Enron just made up everything there. they even made up the numbers that they hid behind. As for most of the green business, they just only gave the broad idea of "organic" but specific details of how they menage to do it and get there.

image source: http://www.nextnature.net/?p=2012

Internship Monthly Blog 1

Above is a picture taken when I accidentally slept too much in High Speed Rail and ended up in Taichung when I planned to stop at Hsinchu.

I help do research for an Israel jewelry designer, Victor, for a collection book that he's working on. It's a book that will contain 100 world's top leader fashion brands in this world today. My main job is to help him research at least two brands' that are on the list. I need to find information about the founder(s), the brand's establishment, its philosophy, and its direction for the future.

My main job is to gather information, not to write it. I help him make sure all the dates and names are correct, there's no contradiction between different sources, the spelling of their original names, etc. There's a lot of reading for each brand. However, I could actually learn a lot from doing it every week. Because of this internship, I have no excuse for myself from not reading anymore. I never had a good habit of reading, and this is something that makes sure I will spend time reading every week. Also, I'm starting to began to catch up some tricks about gathering important and necessary information from reading long texts.

Meet The Soule

Soule is a clothing designer that Sheilah knows. We had a Skype interview with her a while back during social sculpture course. Her main job is to help design theater actors' costumes. On her own time, she makes shirts that send positive messages such as being green.

We got a chance to see how she organizes her research and even some of the work that she had done and what she was still working on. It was interesting to see how she puts her research together. She printed off all the images that inspired her and pasted them all on a board. It looks like a collage. That way she gets to see all of the images at once.

Since that interview happened a while back so I don't have much clear memory of what exactly did she say. However, what I read from Tina's post, I recall she said something about how she first went to an art school for the passion of "beauty" but now she considers the "ideas" within an artwork more. I kind of disagree with that idea. I mean, how do you compare "ideas" and the "beauty"? What does a good idea mean? Does the idea of doing drugs mean a "bad idea"? What about "beauty" What is "beautiful? Most people would say anything that most people agree appeal to look nice would be something that is "beautiful" But doesn't the sense of beauty change from time to time or even from different culture to another? What is the true beauty then? The answer is both the level of the quality of "beauty" and "ideas" should depend on the audience as an individual. A "good idea" could be expressed in many many different ways. The job of an artist is to preform that idea she or he wants to send out, in the form that the artist wants the people to see.

The Smartest Guys in the Room

The movie, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is about how the big company, Enron's, falsity to the people in order to cheat for money and caused a lot of jobs loses. Enron chairman and chief executive, Kenneth Lay, died from heart attack. The CEO, Jeff Skilling, is still in prison today.

It's very similar to most of the stories we learned from Global Ethics class. It's all about human's greed. This movie is different, though. All the rest of the stories had left me thinking, "Don't they care about the other people?" but this movie provides a scientific "proof" It explains an old experiment that was testing on humans before. When a person is in charge of electrifying the person in the other room, he will later on become use to it. Eventually, even when he knows the voltage is high enough to kill someone, he has already lost the feeling of sympathy. That experiment can go to some stories we heard, such as Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart provides low cost to the customers by getting low cost labors. Even though Wal-Mart is in the States and most of the low cost labors are in China, I doubt that the heads of Wal-Mart have no idea about it. They definitely know what they paied to their worker is not enough for them to have three meals a day.

I'm not too sure about how ecomomy works, but if Enron had been lying and hiding about the numbers in their account, it should have influenced the whole economy. Enron's employees also had to suffer from losing their jobs just because the heads of their company wanted to earn extra money. To be fair here, Kenneth Lay and Jeff Skilling have got to be "the smartest guys in the room." Not a lot of people can create such a huge deception. However, too bad that they used it in the wrong way.

Blood, Sweat, and T-Shirt + Travels With T-Shirt In A Global Economy

The BBC document, Blood, Sweat, and T-Shirt, seems pretty much like the movie of the book, Travels With T-Shirt In A Global Economy. Both of them are about the process of discovering how T-shirts are made.
The book mainly focus on how shirts are printed where it is made, but never include where else it is involved. The shirts would have been flying back and fourth just to get the materials.
The movie is mostly about how shirts are made, or how the labors work. Most T-shirts don't cost much, but the hard work behind the process actually costs more than what the label says.

McDonough + Hawken

Both McDonough's Ted Talks and Hawken's list of principles for sustainability talk about the crises of using too much resources.

I like McDonough's Ted Talks better, because he actually gave out some possible solution there instead of naming whom we should blame to. His idea of planting on the roof tops is really interesting. Although "green roof" is not a new idea, he brought it one step beyond. Planting vegetables and plants on roof tops can help clean the air, it's a good use of the space, and we can also eat the vegetables.
Just imagine how many empty roof tops we have, around the world. It would be a "waste" if we don't have any good use of them. Some Asians, specially people from China and Taiwanese, hang their clothes on their roof tops, but by doing that doesn't really give anything back to the environment. Of course, they at least aren't "wasting" those roof tops, however, McDonough's idea can give out more to the community.

Hawken has the point that no matter how many little things we're doing at home to save energy, the big companies and corporation can still use all the resources faster than we can save them. We have been talking about how most corporation could harm the environment, but I still believe that we can't just go and blame on them and tell them to stop what they are doing. In a cold way of saying this, they are simply making a living. Mr. Sheu showed us a movie in his class, called "Thank You For Smoking", last week. It's a story about a cigarette company's going against the people that wanted to promote a non-smoking environment. From the movie, it shouws you that even the people working in the company already knew the facts about smoking too much, they still try their best to sell them out. Why? Because that is their job and they believe the costomers should be able to chose for themselves.
I would fight against the ones that purposly add other chemicals into their products to fool their costumers, but I would not blame most of the corporation for hurting the environment. Without them, a lot of us would not be having what we have right now.