Director of sustainability gains new perspective on environmental issues in China

In his second trip to China in less than two years, Wright State University Director of Sustainability and Senior Lecturer Hunt Brown got a firsthand look at how the Chinese are tackling environmental issues in their own country.

As part of Wright State’s Title VIA grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Brown spent 11 days in China this past summer, teaching at Dalian Jiatong University and visiting various environmental sites, including a new water treatment facility in a rapidly expanding economic development zone near Dalian and an experimental greenhouse in Shandong Province. His goal was to bring back the knowledge he gained and share it with students in his environmental classes.

Brown said the trip enhanced his understanding of environmental issues in China and how they affect the rest of the world. “What China does matters in all kinds of ways—environmentally, socially, politically and economically,” he explained.

Brown previously traveled to China in the spring of 2009 with Andrew Lai’s Insights into China tour. Lai, who retired earlier this year, directed Wright State’s Chinese Executive MBA program. Branching off from the tour, Brown met with the director of the Shandong Provincial Environmental Protection Bureau, International Cooperation Department, and following the tour, he stayed on to visit a coal mine in coal-rich Shanxi Province and to meet with faculty and students at Dalian Jiatong’s Information Engineering Institute. “It was a great combination of cultural and environmental learning,” said Brown.

A former student, Chen Tao, from the Chinese Executive MBA program working in Taian, hosted Brown for part of his return trip to China in summer 2010. During this second trip, he toured various locations in Shandong Province, south of Beijing, including the city of Qingdao and nearby protected coastal areas. Returning to Taian, he also visited a spectacular underground river known as China’s “underground Grand Canyon.”

While in Taian, Brown visited with the director of the district agricultural bureau, who showed him how the Chinese are experimenting with new techniques to enhance plant growth in a greenhouse environment. He also toured one of the largest dairy processing facilities in China.

“The Chinese are becoming more and more concerned about their environment,” said Brown. “China developed so quickly, very often using old technologies, that a great deal of pollution has resulted there. The difficulty is that all of this new economic activity gives jobs to millions of Chinese, which is a good thing. The bad news is that all of this activity also has brought horrific air pollution, water pollution, deforestation and land degradation.”

Fortunately, both the government and the Chinese people recognize the environment has paid too high a price for their nation’s explosive growth. “My feeling is that conditions will improve in China as a result of both the government wanting to do it and the people increasingly pressing them to do it,” said Brown.