点废成绿 Greening the Beige (GtB) is an eco-minded arts collective and not-for-profit community network dedicated to nurturing awareness of environmental issues. 点废成绿 GtB promotes and celebrates earth friendly artists and organizations in Beijing.
"Why are we being forced to choose between the economy and the environment? We tend to forget that without an environment we would not have an economy, as everything we consume and I mean everything comes from our environment."
~ Franke James (contemporary artist, photographer, writer)
Beijing's landfills are getting full fast! Reduce the "trash" you throw away by purchasing products with minimal packaging. Look for reusable, recyclable, and biodegrable items and remember to carry your reusable shopping bags!
I started out this rabbit year finally reading When a Billion Chinese Jump by Jonathan Watts. By that point the book had been such a prolific point of conversation and highly praised, I felt like I'd already read half of it just from excerpts alone.
Once I finally got around to it, I consumed that book. Full of facts and figures from compiling years of journalistic research, crafted together in a lifelike narrative, discussing a matter (of life and death) that I could all too well relate to -- I was soaking up all kinds of juicy details and new information that shed a whole new light on the state of China's environment and just how it came to be that way.
Page after page, I kept discovering thoughts, ideas, and quotes that would strike me like a thunderbolt. I copied down several, made careful notes, so I could refer back to them later and meditate on them in the meantime.
And so, the time has come, to share one of my favorites from Tang Xiyang, Leader of China's Green Movement:
"The problem is culture. We will never solve anything until we change the way we think." - chapter 16, 'Grassroots'
EUREKA!
