Recovering from a Beating by Mother Nature – Part 1/4

June 24, 2011

Man has little power to stop the damage and loss of property and life caused by the power of blizzards, earthquakes, floods, forest fires, hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and volcanic eruptions such as the famous one from Mount St. Helens in 1980 that blew down or scorched 230 square miles of forest or the dangers of Mount Rainier, which could kill thousands and cause billions in damage in less than an hour if it erupted as it has many times in the past.

However, governments from countries such as the US and China, the two largest economies on the planet, do have an ability to recover faster from the damage caused by one of these devastating blows from nature than many countries do.

On March 11, 2011, much of the world witnessed the horrible tragedy in Japan as an undersea earthquake caused the Tsunami that hit Japan resulting in much death and destruction.

Then in May 2011, Americans witnessed on the news or experienced how powerful nature is as more than a thousand tornadoes roared through the Midwest flattening American towns and cities while causing much destruction and more loss of life.

In this series, I will write about the recovery efforts in Sichuan, China, where a devastating 8.0 earthquake struck in May 2008 and about the thousands that lost their lives while millions were made homeless. I will compare China’s recovery to New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, which hit the US Gulf Coast in August 2005, and Haiti’s recovery from its devastating January 2010 earthquake that killed about 300,000.

In fact, I spent hours hunting for the information I was interested in, which was a comparison of the recovery efforts from the 2005 Hurricane Katrina and the Sichuan earthquake of 2008.

What I learned may surprise some people that pay too much attention to Western Media sources such as FOX, CNN or The New York Times. Sometimes what we don’t learn is more revealing than what is reported.

Continued on June 25, 2011 in  Recovering from a Beating by Mother Nature – Part 2

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

1 Comment | America, China, environment, government, media, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The “Vanishing” Street Art of Chinese Calligraphy

June 19, 2011

Chinese calligraphy is not vanishing. What I’m talking about is demonstrated in the videos included with this post. In China, many artists use sidewalks as a canvas and a brush with water to paint the beauty of calligraphy. As the water evaporates, the art vanishes.

In fact, calligraphy is more popular than ever. After the Cultural Revolution, many people turned to calligraphy in the hope of finding solace in the calm repetition of its exercises. Then, in 1981, the authorities took the lead in setting up a Chinese Calligraphers’ Association, the first such nationwide body ever to be established in the country. Source: Fathom.com, The British Museum

Both a language and an art, Chinese calligraphy has been traced back more than 4,000 years to the crude form called “Jia Gu Wen” found on turtle shells from the Shang Dynasty.

Calligraphy first bloomed as an art during the Han Dynasty but by the time of the Tang Dynasty, it had declined as an art. Source: Chinese Calligraphy History

It would be difficult to talk about Chinese art without understanding Chinese calligraphy and its artistic inspiration. A painting has to convey an object, but a well-written character conveys only its beauty through line and structure.

In Shanghai on sidewalks, or Beijing at The Summer Palace, I’ve watched men with long handled brushes, as seen in the first video, using water for ink and concrete for paper. With grace, they exhibit the skills of a Rembrandt breathing life into the characters.

America’s so called street artists should copy the Chinese that practice calligraphy and trade in their cans of spray paint for brushes and water, which would save US taxpayers much money.

Lin Yutang writes in My Country and My People that Western art is more sensual, more passionate, fuller of the artist’s ego, while the Chinese artist and art-lover contemplates a dragonfly, a frog, a grasshopper or a piece of jagged rock—more in harmony with nature.

Owing to the use of writing calligraphy with a brush, which is more subtle and more responsive than the pen, calligraphy as art is equal to Chinese painting.

Through calligraphy, the scholar is trained to appreciate, as regards line, qualities like force, suppleness, reserved strength, exquisite tenderness, swiftness, neatness, massiveness, ruggedness, and restraint or freedom.

Maybe this helps explain why the Chinese are not as warlike as Christian and Islamic cultures.

This revised and edited post first appeared on July 3, 2010 as Caressing Nature with Chinese Calligraphy

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

Leave a Comment » | China, Chinese arts and music, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Christianity, cultural differences, environment, history, Islam | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Natural Gas, Biogas – Let’s all have Gas “Naturally!”

June 4, 2011

Recently, a friend sent me a link to news that warned of new US government regulations on hydraulic fracturing that could stop shale exploration.  If this happened, what the consumer would lose is access to the natural gas produced from shale. Source: Natural Gas for America

Earlier this week, the White House said the natural gas industry should support “common sense” regulation to ease public worry about potential water contamination from fracturing, a drilling practice vital to the U.S. shale gas boom.

In fact, according the Natural Gas.org, the US has about 100 years of supply (if developed) at current rates of consumption, while Reason.com reports that the IEA says world natural gas supplies could last more than 250 years.

While development of natural gas from shale may come to a stop in the US due to environmental concerns, China is looking at the production and resources of shale gas in the United States and is learning from America.

China’s technically recoverable resources of shale gas are estimated to be about 50 percent higher than those in the United States.

EIA.DOE.gov says, “The outlook for unconventional natural gas production is more positive in China than in OECD Europe first and foremost because China’s geology suggests a greater unconventional resource potential than in Europe. Further, although natural gas production from conventional resources in China, as in Europe, cannot keep up with domestic demand, China’s government strongly supports unconventional gas development, and public resistance is likely to be less of an impediment in China than in OECD Europe and the US.”

While developing natural gas resources in China, there is also Biogas development in rural China, which the two embedded videos talk about. China is taking advantage of waste to produce energy, which results in higher standards of living for those involved.

Imagine the biogas from 1.3 billion people and the animals raised to feed those people.

Discover The One Party Advantage, Water – Two Countries Tell a Tale, Volting China into the 21st Century or Greenpeace China

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

2 Comments | America, business, China, economy, environment, science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

After Centuries of Neglect, China’s Forests Renewed

May 20, 2011

I was aware that China was planting trees but I had no idea how many until I read The Great Tree Survey in the May 2011 National Geographic Magazine, which said, “Huge tree-planting programs, especially in China, reduced the net loss of (global) forest even further.”

This triggered my curiosity so I did some “digging” [pun intended].

I already knew from posts I’ve written comparing China to India, China had reduced poverty more than any county on earth while poverty is increasing in countries such as the US and not changing much in India.

The Guardian in the UK reported, “China’s Great Green Wall was launched in 1978… The (Chinese) government has tightened logging restrictions and increased reforestation efforts, including aerial seeding of remote areas.


China planted about 60 billion trees in the last three decades.

 “If the plan is completed as scheduled in 2050, trees will cover over 400 million hectares (about one billion acres) or 42% of China’s landmass…”

By comparison, US forests cover about one-third of the nation, which is currently about 747 million acres down by 300 million acres since the mid-1600s. Source: National Atlas.gov

In 2009, Xinhua News Agency reported, “China would spend 60 billion yuan (8.77 billion US dollars) annually on its greening or tree planting campaigns….”

According to Worldwatch.org, “Nourishing China’s Forests is creating millions of Green jobs.”

New research from the Worldwatch Institute shows that over the next 10 years…planting forests (in China) where there were none could lead to the creation of more than 1 million “green jobs” in 2020 alone. If indirect employment opportunities in related sectors are also included, China’s investment in its forestry sector could generate as many as 2.5 million green jobs in 2020.

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

Leave a Comment » | China, environment | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China’s Elephants

May 13, 2011

I’ve written of China’s Giant Panda and Siberian Tigers in northeast China, but I had no idea that China also had elephants and not caged in zoos but living in their natural habitat.

It it hadn’t been for Go Daddy’s CEO, Bob Parsons, shooting an elephant in Zimbabwe and stirring up PETA, a Politically Correct gang of animal lovers in the US, I may have never been curious to see if China had elephants.

I discovered China may offer a safer haven for elephants than most nations that still have pachyderms living in their natural environment.


Wild Kingdom – China’s Wild Elephant Valley

Elephant Aid says, “Most people associate China and elephants with the demand for ivory but although China only has a small number of elephants it is one of the only range states where numbers are on the rise.

“China’s elephants can only be found in the extreme south of the Yunnan province bordering Burma and Laos. Their range includes Xishuangbanna (XSNB) and the Nangunhe Nature Reserves.”


BBC – Wild Elephants in China

“The elephant is a protected species in China,” Elephant Aid says, “and the government has taken steps to conserve areas of elephant habitat including moving people out of the reserves in a bid to minimize human-elephant conflict.

“Chinese official have reported that the population is growing through both reproduction and immigration of herds from Laos. This is attributed to the lack of a threat from poachers in China and the abundant availability of fodder.”

According to Elephant.se, there are about 450 captive elephants in the US and less than 4,000 captive elephants globally.  China has about 30 captive elephants.

All About Wildlife.com says there are 40 to 50 thousand wild Asian elephants and between 470,000 and 690,000 wild African Elephants.

Two hundred or more wild elephants live in China.

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

Leave a Comment » | China, environment, tourism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »