Hong Kong Babylon

electricity subsidy offered by Finance Minister John Tsang

2011-03-02T19:24:00.000-08:00

In the last budget speech, Finance Minister John Tsang promised to subsidise electricity bills again.

The logic of this HK$1,800 subsidy runs counter to common sense, especially when he insists that the government is "promoting the development of environmental industries and a green economy through multi-pronged policies and initiatives," which specifically include "enhancing building energy efficiency and promoting the use of energy-saving household appliances by legislation."

Does John Tsang really think that Hong Kong residents will be persuaded to save energy by making their electricity bills cheaper?

I for one will not be spending a cent on electricity, given that my annual expenditure on electricity is lower than his proposed subsidy. This makes me ashamed of living in Hong Kong. I will not be paying for the electricity I use, and yet my money will still end up in the pockets of utilities shareholders through the taxes I pay. Taxpayers’ money is effectively being used to subsidize energy waste, instead of providing much needed environmental protection programs or reducing emissions.

The electricity subsidy runs counter to all the empty slogans that the government is using in its public education campaigns. Unless virtuous behaviour is rewarded, and wasteful behavior actively discouraged we will not see any real changes.

Electricity should be subjected to higher taxation to reflect the true environmental cost of its production. Cheap electricity will only lead to waste. The government should stop using the excuse that this subsidy will help low-income families. Poverty cannot be alleviated by allowing low-income families to keep the TV on all day and setting their air-con on freezing temperatures. If the intention is to help low-income families, then measures should be targeted for their benefit alone.

Luča (Light)

2010-11-25T00:06:00.000-08:00

Some friends made a short film that i am happy to share with you. It may struck a chord with Hong Kong residents.

http://vimeo.com/videos/search:Lu%C4%8Da/df7f6434

A waste disposal tax is long overdue

2010-11-21T20:44:00.000-08:00

We are losing our country parks to landfills while the MTRC continue to expand the size of advertising space along station walls, on station floors, and train bodies. Such space is covered in self-adhesive vinyl (often dozens of meters long) that after a couple of weeks is removed and sent to landfills.

Using vinyl, which has a huge environmental impact, is totally irresponsible and if the government were serious about waste reduction, it would discourage this form of advertising by imposing a waste disposal tax. When will the real cost of advertising be calculated?

A waste disposal tax would force advertising agencies to switch to more creative and sustainable techniques. I don't see anything creative in destroying the planet while trying to make us buy one brand rather than another. A waste disposal tax would send a strong signal that the government is determined to reduce waste.

But just how determined is it? It hasn’t even managed to write a code of conduct for its own departments. The East Asian Games come to mind: the number of vinyl banners displayed in our city surpassed by far the number of spectators. Hardly a successful campaign. Undeterred, they continue to hang vinyl banners that add visual clutter to our streets, beaches and parks, and will inevitably end up in landfills. Surely there are better ways to increase public awareness of the risks of drink driving, drug abuse, dengue fever, encephalitis, rodent infestation, pickpockets, etc. than covering the city in huge banners that will only start to decompose in 50 years time.
Maybe these officials are unaware that vinyl PVC is a durable material that presents environmental concerns, both in its manufacture and disposal, and shouldn't be used as liberally as they do.

The URA, responsible for the recent makeover of Central Market, is just as oblivious to the necessity of reducing waste: a historic Bauhaus-style building which is far more environmentally-friendly in its design than most new buildings, was completely wrapped in green vinyl to create, listen, a “central oasis".
Has anybody ever seen an oasis made of plastic? A vertical garden would have been a better solution, and would have reduced pollution and indoor temperature instead of adding to it.

If nobody puts a stop to this vinyl fever, soon there will be no more green oasis to escape to, as our country parks make room for waste disposal facilities.

Household cleaning products are turning our rivers and oceans into a soup of dangerous chemicals

2010-07-10T22:37:00.000-07:00

On a typical cleaning day in a typical Hong Kong home, levels of chemicals in the indoor air can be hundreds, even thousands of times higher than the outdoor air in the most polluted parts of the city. Many chemicals contained in household cleaning products are the same as those used in industrial settings. Many scientists are now becoming concerned that long-term low-level exposure to chemicals may be just as dangerous as short-term high-dose exposures. They also worry that we do not understand the impact of exposure to the cocktail of chemicals found in household air and dust. Testing for human health effects is normally done on single chemicals. But in the real world, we are all exposed to a variety of chemicals every single day.

I do not use them, but i have to work in an environment where they are used routinely, and walk through indoor areas where i can often smell these products. The toilets i use in public places now discharge blue waste water because cleaning products are placed in the tank or in the bowl. Our obsession with hygiene is damaging not only the environment but our health as well.

Prior to WWII most household cleaning tasks were accomplished using relatively safe ingredients commonly found in most homes. With the proliferation of petroleum-based chemicals after the war, corporations began to manufacture ready-made cleaning products. Today, most people are accustomed to buying a wide range of products custom-designed for the many surfaces, materials and rooms in their homes. The price of these products doesn't reflect the damage they cause. Yesterday i spotted a huge bottle of bleach selling for HK$8. Certainly slapping a big tax on these products would encourage people to use less harmful alternatives, which are available but sell for a higher price.

Most cleaning chores can be easily handled without these toxic products. Everyday ingredients like baking soda, vinegar, salt, lemon juice, vegetable oil, soap, borax, hydrogen peroxide and washing soda can do the job as they did in olden days.

Someone might argue that this is the price of progress. What progress? If progress means living in a toxic environment, swimming in filthy rivers and oceans, destroying species and dying of cancer, i'd rather do without it.

Have you seen bats recently?

2010-07-10T21:38:00.000-07:00

I live in the countryside and used to see bats every summer - one even made its way into my flat a few years ago. This year i haven't spotted any and am very worried.

Bats capture insects such as flies, mosquitoes, and certain moths that are agricultural pests. Certain bat species can capture their own weight in insects each night and eat several hundred small insects in one hour.

No surprise that the absence of bats around my flat coincided with a dramatic increase in mosquitoes. This summer i can't sit on my terrace because of them, and they bite even during the day.

This increase in mosquitoes has prompted the FEHD (Food and Environmental Hygiene Department) to spray more toxic chemicals (they even sprayed my basil and rosmarin plants and i couldn't use the leaves for cooking). It's a vicious circle, the more they spray the more resistant the mosquitoes become, and the less birds and bats we see.

In Europe they use bats for mosquito control, and the Environmental Protection agencies encourage people to hang a small bat house outside their windows, why don't they do that in HK??? Why do we never learn from nature instead of relying on chemicals?
I bet it's because bats are free, chemicals cost money and a lot of people profit from manufacturing and selling them.

I would prefer my taxes were spent to benefit the environment instead of damaging it. Is it too much to ask?

Our beaches are covered in styrofoam, our landfills are full of it and soon you could be breathing toxic fumes if it ends up in incinerators

2010-06-24T00:38:00.000-07:00

Styrofoam is a substance that doesn't biodegrade and essentially has no expiration date. It resists compacting and, therefore, consumes more landfill space. More troubling is that Styrene, the basic building block of Styrofoam, is classified as a possible human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

A safer, bio-degradable alternative exists, it is made from bagasse, a natural, nontoxic material made out of discarded sugar cane stalks. And yet styrofoam boxes are still the food container of choice in our city. Everyday children consume meals served in styrofoam containers provided by schools, people too busy or lazy to cook rely on take away food that is placed in styrofoam containers, fish and vegetables are imported and sold in styrofoam boxes.
Supermarkets sell raw and cooked food in styrofoam trays.
Huge amounts of this material is unnecessarily used for packaging electronics and white goods, even when recycled cardboard could be used for this purpose.

Many cities in both Europe and America have banned this material. Why is Hong Kong still lagging behind?

If you are a parent, please write to the principal of the school attended by your children and demand action to switch to recyclable or bio-degradable lunch boxes. Both the health of your children and the environment will greatly benefit.

If you get a take away for lunch, bring your own lunch box and ask the restaurant to fill it instead of relying on their styrofoam boxes.

When you shop in supermarkets, choose items that are not packaged in this material.

Hong Kong is run like an experiment in extreme capitalism

2010-05-16T21:41:00.000-07:00

The way the majority of people live in Hong Kong would be regarded as insane in most other countries. Today i had this epiphany. We are all trapped in a laboratory where an experiment in extreme capitalism is being conducted. Someone is trying to figure out how hard they can screw people before they die, flee the city or start rioting.
Unfortunately HKers' passivity and tolerance of abuse has reached such a high threshold that the experiment cannot be repeated anywhere else.
(Try to put European workers through what HK workers experience everyday, and you end up with a general strike, barricades and petrol bombs.)

In this city people can be deprived of clean air, and if you get lung cancer, no big deal, there are million of desperate migrants ready to take your place and work for a pittance. Minimum wage? What minimum wage? Just work 12 hours a day, and you can afford to put food on the table (for one, other family members will have to earn their own food). 1 out of 9 residents lives below the poverty line. So much for Asia's world city!

People are expected to squeeze in the smallest apartments ever built in the developed world, with no natural ventilation, and no insulation, so that their hard-earned money is spent on air-conditioning (CLP and HK Electric shareholders rub their hands in glee). Such apartments feature no balconies, so people are forced to buy driers for their clothes (again, i can see a big smile on the faces of those shareholders). You might think such poorly designed and built flats come cheap. No way. As a matter of fact they can cost many times more than a nice flat in Paris, Madrid, Rome etc.

People can be deprived of political rights, such as universal suffrage. Who needs democracy when a few "well-intentioned" tycoons can make decisions for you?

Whatever little money you make in this "city lab" will be spent on surviving, and what is left will be spent on stuff that you don't even need, but that some marketeers convinced you to buy...so that your money is pumped back into the pockets of the capitalist system that holds you at ransom. You can't even take public transport without being herded through a shopping mall.

Extreme exploitation can only be contrasted by breaking the metaphorical "ball and chain" that holds you down.
Work less, a lot less. Barter more, buy less, a lot less. Sit and watch the GDP drop...breath in and wait for the biggest revelation....your life will start to improve, and so will the lives of million of people like you....the planet will be grateful too.

Though worshipped by legions of capitalists, the GDP is a poor measure of living standards. A badly managed city with a lot of unnecessary infrastructures will see its GDP grow. Destroy and build, and then destroy again and rebuild....this makes the GDP grow and creates misery for all those who don't partake of the wealth thus created. Produce substandard goods that will soon end up in a landfill, and that will also make the GDP grow. And when the landfill comes to the end of its life cycle, build an incinerator...that will make the GDP grow. People get sick as a result? No problem, sell them pharma drugs, and build new hospitals...that will make the GDP grow.

The ugliness of fashion

2010-02-10T21:51:00.000-08:00

Hong Kong is brand crazy.
Asia currently constitutes the largest market for Western luxury brands, and Hong Kong accounts for 12% of that market, according to a book by Radha Chadha and Paul Husband, “The Cult of the Luxury Brand” (2006).
This gives us the largest share of Asian consumption outside Japan – whom we nonetheless surpass at a per capita rate. And a 2005 report by the Federation of Swiss Watch Industry FH declared that Hong Kong boasts as many purchases of Swiss watches as the entire USA.
As if that weren’t enough, Hong Kong also contains more big-brand stores than Paris, London, Milan or New York.

According to the authors, the trend reflects the essential conviction in cities like ours that “the face you show to the world counts more than how you live.” Yet signifying status through fashion is hardly a new phenomenon, having been analyzed to death since Thorstein Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class” (1899).

What’s interesting about the preoccupation with brand names and logos in question is that it concerns itself with nothing less than full-on identity. “In today’s Asia you are what you wear,” say Chadha and Husband. “Your identity and self-worth are determined by the visible brands on your body.”
The claim fits into what the authors call the “luxe evolution model,” which traces out a trajectory followed by Asian cities like Hong Kong through different stages, with luxury brands serving different roles at each stage: early on as a means of merely showing off (as currently found in mainland China), later as a means of fitting in (Taiwan, South Korea), and eventually as an all-consuming way of life (Hong Kong, Japan). 

One interesting theory about the origins of our love affair with luxury brands comes from Gordon Matthews, associate professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Matthews puts it down to the lack of identity that Hong Kong has struggled with over the last three decades as it shifted between British and Chinese rule without aligning itself directly with either. “Over that time, identity in Hong Kong has been ambiguous,” he says. “Everything has been based on money because that’s the only thing many Hong Kong people felt they could trust. It’s been the only marker of identity, and it can be directly displayed through these names and symbols."

“There’s a strong following instinct at work here", says local psychologist Dr. Julian Von Will. This instinct has a large place in luxury brand promotion, critically emphasizing the inherent paradox of much “high” fashion: “Despite being elitist, it promotes a herd mentality and it works off people’s stupidity. It has to because it’s all based on an absurd, unsustainable logic.”

Another obvious promotional point for luxury brands in Hong Kong is the architectural layout of the city. The stores are so woven into the fabric of the city, so integrated into our everyday experience, it becomes impossible to walk home or to the office without being conscious of the latest designer products sitting in the windows.

Next time you covet an overpriced, fashionable and branded item, take a deep breath and repeat with me: "This will go out of fashion in less than an year, and make me look like a complete fool." Hold on to your money. Use it to pay for what you really need to be free. Fashion never set anybody free.

By spending less, you will need to work less, and can finally be in control of your life. Time is one of the few things you cannot buy with money.

Buildings do not age gracefully in Hong Kong

2010-02-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

Last Friday, just after lunchtime, a rundown housing block collapsed in Ma Tau Wai Road, in Hung Hom, killing four and injuring two. Had it happened at night, the number of victims would have been considerably higher, as the five-storey building had been partitioned into small cubicles and housed a large number of low-income families.

The walkup was built in the 1950s, and has been described by the local media and government officials as an "old" building.
OLD??? I wonder whether they would use the same adjective to describe a person of the same age, and call for the demise of anybody older than 50. Let's stick to the analogy of buildings and bodies, because it looks like this particular building caved under the weight of neglect and abuse, phenomena experienced by many other tenement houses in Hong Kong.
So, take a 50 year old person who has been subjected to all forms of abuse, the most common one being "work till you drop, breath toxic air and eat junk food", chances are s/he would be in a worse shape than someone who takes frequent holidays, lives in a more salubrious part of the world, and has enough money to eat a balanced diet.

In the developed world, only in Hong Kong buildings have a shorter life expectancy than people.

Instead of just pointing the finger at the age of these buildings, and calling for their immediate demolition, as the media and the URA have been doing, we should consider why buildings of this age are in such poor shape. We would then discover that their shape has been altered by illegal structures, balconies have been turned into extra rooms, small flats turned into even smaller flats, each one with its bathroom, kitchen and heavy appliances, adding a lot of extra weight to the structure, and that a family of four lives in less than 300 sf, while single people live in 100 sf cubicles.

Poverty and greedy property owners are the causes of this collapse, not the age of a building.

Unless people are paid a decent wage for their work, and a decent pension when they retire, unless the government forces property owners to maintain and repair their buildings, instead of letting them crumble in the hope of a generous pay-out from the URA, housing standards in HK will continue to be worse than what we see in shanty towns.

This collapse has given ammunition to the Urban Renewal Authority (URA) to tear down anything older than 50 years and allow developers to replace it with a 'podium and tower' 40-storey monster.

I would rather see nice old blocks given a new lease of life...because they have far more stories to tell than any sterile, unimaginative, excessively tall and expensive housing blocks that would otherwise replace them, blocking air flow, and driving low-income families to the fringes of our city.

Yet another white elephant

2010-01-21T21:03:00.000-08:00

The Hong Kong government likes to believe that it is in tune with an economy driven by economic liberalism and focus on return on capital. In reality it has become the tool of two types of vested interest.

One is the clutch of property development groups who buy the loyalty of civil servants through post-early retirement jobs and other perks. Maximizing the tycoons' return on capital takes precedence over the interest of the public and its revenue which government is supposed to represent. On the political side there is Beijing, leaning on a spineless chief executive, Donald Tsang, to speed up integration with the mainland and focus on capital spending regardless of rate of return.

Never were these twin tendencies better illustrated than by the government's pushing through a legislature dominated by business interests elected by small circles of voters of a project to spend more than HK$60 billion on a 26-km high-speed railway connecting Hong Kong to a line being built to link Guangdong to the border town of Shenzhen. It is not even very high-speed. Its design speed is 200 kph compared with the standard 350kph for China's high-speed trunk routes.

The prospect has aroused intense opposition from youthful protesters and from villagers who would be displaced by the line. The most telling arguments against the project are financial. The government has made barely any effort to justify the spending either in commercial or environmental terms for the very good reason that it is impossible. Instead the project is being hurried through on the basis of unsupported claims that Hong Kong would be marginalized if left out of China's high speed network.

The cost per kilometer would make this the world's most expensive railway, all to cover a distance which currently takes 20 minutes by car and roughly the same by the existing slow-speed railway.

The cost is exceptionally high largely because it is planned to take the line right into the middle of Kowloon, one of the world's most densely populated areas, tunneling both through reclaimed land and under high-rise buildings. Suggestions that the terminus be located in the New Territories, closer to the border and where construction costs would be far lower, have been dismissed. Why? Because the property giants which control so much of downtown Kowloon want it there. And they have Donald Tsang and his clutch of bureaucrats in their pocket. The same groups are also deeply involved in the construction industry, like their counterparts in Japan who influenced the long-ruling LDP into government funding of endless roads and bridges to nowhere but which generated handsome profits for the construction industry.

From Beijing's political viewpoint, the high-speed rail has significance for three reasons. First it is needed to show that Hong Kong really is part of China and follows Beijing's lead rather than deciding for itself how best to spend it resources. Second, it reflects Beijing's belief that all infrastructure building is a good thing, and should take precedence in government spending over the likes of health care, cleaning up the environment, or ensuring decent living conditions for the old and disadvantaged. Third, it must go ahead because many people object. Tsang must show that he is as arrogant as the central government and will not listen to rational arguments, let alone to student and peasant dissidents.

DuPont is killing us softly

2009-12-21T21:33:00.000-08:00

People seem to value convenience at the expense of their health. Walk into any shop that sells cookware and you will soon realise that the best selling saucepans and frying pans are Teflon-coated. Many consumers think that if food sticks to the pan, then there must be something wrong with the pan, and would never question their cooking skills.
One can only wonder how they would have managed if DuPont had never developed Teflon.

A non-stick pan that doesn't require any scrubbing after use?? It sounds too good to be true. But it IS true. So, you might want to ask, where is the catch? At high heat, Teflon breaks down into PFOA, a well-known carcinogen.

A scientific advisory panel to the US Environmental Protection Agency unanimously recommended that PFOA should be considered a likely human carcinogen. This classification means that there is evidence of cancer causing effects from both human and animal studies.

Leaked documents exposed that DuPont hid studies showing the risks of PFOA leaching into food.
DuPont was fined $10.25 million dollars by the EPA for withholding information about potential health and environmental hazards of PFOA. This is the largest fine ever assessed by the EPA. To put the fine in context, in 2004 alone, Teflon accounted for $1 billion dollars in sales for DuPont. That's why DuPont can effectively lobby governments around the world to minimize the risks posed by Teflon.

Teflon’s breakdown chemical is a serious concern for a number of reasons. In addition to evidence that it is a likely cause of cancer, it falls into the category of chemicals which are persistent and accumulative. This means that rather than breaking down into harmless substances over time, they remain as they and accumulate in the environment. This is why studies which found PFOA in new born infants and in polar bears are so significant. Since neither newborns or polar bears use teflon coated objects, the presence of PFOA in their bodies shows that the substance builds up in the body and that exposure comes from environmental buildup of the chemical.

Rolf Halden, a research in the John’s Hopkins study of Teflon in infants commented, “We make a lot of chemicals that are extremely persistent, and we mass-produce them, but we never consider the life cycles of these chemicals. It’s kind of a tragedy. In some instances, it take years or decades before we learn of their toxicity”

DuPont Co. says that to date PFOA has had no known health effects on humans. Yeah, right.

Lots more on teflon at http://www.ewg.org/issues/siteindex/issues.php?issueid=5014.

In the meantime, i will stick to copper pans because they conduct heat quickly, or cast iron pans. They pose no health problem and after they've been used a few times, they develop a natural slippery surface that's nearly as good as a non-stick pan.

In Copenhagen no deal would have been better than what we got

2009-12-20T19:44:00.000-08:00

The Copenhagen climate summit ended in a farce. The world was told that a 2 degrees Celsius increase is no big deal. Such an increase will wipe out entire communities, millions of people will be forced to leave their homes and join the ranks of climate refugees scrambling to make a living in developed countries. Furthermore, it will translate into a 3-3.5 degree increase in Africa.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu puts the stakes like this: "We are facing impending disaster on a monstrous scale.... A global goal of about 2 degrees C is to condemn Africa to incineration and no modern development."

So, i believe that no deal would have been better than this deal, which is not binding, and allows the most polluting countries to increase their emissions, just at a slower pace. China is a world super-power, but because millions of Chinese people are kept in a state of poverty by a lack of social and economic justice, it can claim the status of "developing country" and get the kind of concessions that underdeveloped countries got out of this criminal deal. The US is a developed country, but it would rather spend trillions of dollars funding war in Iraq and Afghanistan than help developing countries move from a carbon-intensive to a low-carbon economy.

At the end of the summit, John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK stated that "The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight ... It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen." According to him "there are too few politicians in this world capable of looking beyond the horizon of their own narrow self-interest". Nnimmo Bassey, of Friends of the Earth international called the conference "an abject failure". Tim Jones, climate policy officer from the World Development Movement said that leaders had "refused to lead and instead sought to bribe and bully developing nations to sign up to the equivalent of a death warrant."

The world leaders who met in Copenhagen have no moral authority and have shown a total lack of leadership in combating climate change. Only mass movements, direct action and civil disobedience can save the planet.
It's now down to all of us, as individuals and small communities, to change the way we live, and be the change that we want to see around us. The future of the next generations is in our hands.
Let's forget Copenhagen and start changing our lives.

A carbon tax on advertising is long overdue

2009-11-28T23:14:00.000-08:00

These pictures give you an example of JCDecaux approach to advertising in Hong Kong. They have the exclusive right to advertise in the MTR, no area excluded, from trains to corridors, platforms, pillars and even turnstiles and ticket machines. Busy MTR stations such as Central, Admiralty, Causeway Bay and Tsim Sha Tsui are completely covered in their vinyl sheets (often dozens of meters long). As campaigns are short-lived, the amount of waste they create is huge. If you think paper posters are not environmentally-friendly, just imagine the environmental impact of producing and disposing of vinyl stickers the size of a building.

We are losing our country parks to landfills while this advertising agency and the MTR Corporation make a huge profit by selling every inch of the space we move through and then covering it in vinyl.
Now, to ensure that their campaigns have an even greater carbon footprint, JCDecaux have added loud tv screens, so that when you walk through this womb-like advertising space, from which there is no escape, your ears are assaulted too. As if vinyl is not bad enough for the environment, now local power stations have to burn more coal to power these obtrusive tv screens.

When will the real cost of advertising be calculated?
A carbon tax would force advertising agencies to switch to more creative and sustainable techniques. I don't see anything creative in destroying the planet while trying to make us buy one brand rather than another. If anything, it shows a complete lack of creativity.

One thing is sure, i have made a point of not buying any product that is advertised in such a loud and unsustainable manner. I might be regarded as "captive audience" by JCDecaux, but when it comes to opening my wallet i am still free.

The sorry state of Hong Kong Park

2009-11-23T19:12:00.000-08:00

I used to enjoy walking through Hong Kong Park on my way to Admiralty MTR station. Not anymore. This walk now provides only more reasons to despair about the state of our public spaces once they are over-managed by incompetent government officials with a huge budget and a complete lack of common sense. The park is managed by the usual suspect, the LSCD, whose idea of landscape design seems to be borrowed from a bored housewife in the American midwest compulsively adding flower pots and white picket fences to her lawn. The result is tacky and artificial, and would make any landscape designer cringe. Either the LSCD does not regard urban landscaping as an important area requiring careful cultural and technical attention, or they have hired the wrong people to carry out this delicate task. Every tree now is tagged with the tree name, some are even accompanied by oversize stainless steel plaques. Trees are surrounded by potted flowers and plastic fences, the paths are lined with more plastic pots, encased in white plastic fences. Loud vinyl banners cover all the architectural features, and childish signs bearing flower names and nursery style drawings are added to rows of flower beds in clashing colours.
If you take a stroll in the park to get some respite from the visual assault of billboards and banners, you won't find it in this park, as the LCSD makes a point of competing with the private sector to get your attention. Everywhere you look you will see their giant logo, and their ubiquitous "it's forbidden to" signs.

Most countries, China included, have well-established landscape professions backed by knowledge of urban landscaping and mechanisms in place for prior consultation on such aspects as overall layout and local cultural characteristics. Hong Kong might be suffering from an identity crisis, as this city seems unable to develop any idea of beauty. Almost every attempt at "beautification" results in a tacky and crammed design, with too many features, in clashing colours and a totally artificial feel.
Plastic and stainless steel, combined with nursery colours, dominate Hong Kong urban parks.

I could point to examples of beautiful gardens in Europe, but as we are part of China, then why would the LCSD choose white picket fences and flower pots instead of adopting a Chinese aesthetic in the design of gardens?

The traditional Chinese Garden is a place for solitary or social contemplation of nature. There is no plastic. Chinese gardens provide a spiritual utopia for one to connect with nature, they are a spiritual shelter for people. They use plants as symbols. Bamboo was used in every traditional Chinese garden. This is because bamboo represents a strong but resilient character, banana trees are used for the sound they make in the breeze, because a garden should engage other senses besides the visual sense.
The design of a garden drew on such diverse fields as fengshui, botany, hydraulics, history, literature, and architecture. The task was considered so complex that only a scholar was capable of completing it, thus his garden was a measure of his knowledge. For the same reason poetry was a primary part of the garden design, as knowledge and composition of poetry served as an intelligence test for the scholar class. The garden served multiple functions as semi-public extension of the house and a place; of retreat, for festivity, for study of poetry, for romance. The social and cultural importance of the garden in Chinese culture cannot be underestimated.

In Hong Kong though, some incompetent civil servant who probably despises nature and is more at ease in an air-conditioned shopping mall is allowed to turn our oldest park into a complete mess.
Can someone send him on a field trip to Suzhou, Chengdu, Beijing, Nanjing, etc? Most parks in Shenzhen are better than what we have to suffer in HK!

Let's get moving???

2009-11-21T22:20:00.001-08:00

The Home Affairs Bureau has covered Hong Kong with these vinyl banners, they are virtually everywhere you look, in the MTR, on fences and railings, on walls, beaches, bridges, walkways, and even in country parks.
And yet, despite their ubiquity, i still don't understand what these banners mean and what i am supposed to do.

The banners read: "Get moving. Clean Hong Kong" and show three youngsters that in some pictures appear to be dancing like maniacs, while in other pictures they are standing with a broom in their hands.

Are young people expected to sweep HK streets instead of going to a disco? Are they invited to take part in a new broom dance contest?
Are Hong Kong taxpayers expected to sweep the streets themselves, after paying the salary of those idiots that conceived this campaign? Or is this government bureaut trying to boost the morale of underpaid street sweepers? Are they sending the message that young people who cannot find jobs should consider becoming happy, cheerful street sweepers?

One thing is sure though: these huge banners are adding waste to our landfills and clutter to our streets. If the Home Affairs Bureau is serious about cleaning our city, it should start by setting an example and remove these hideous banners (after they have figured out a way to recycle them).

Too much hygiene is bad for you!

2009-11-19T08:53:00.000-08:00

I have never been a big fan of chemical detergents and household cleaning products but i am surrounded by people who seem to be obsessed with hygiene...they disinfect and sanitize everything and are constantly at war with germs and bacteria. They carry sanitizing wipes, they squirt alcohol gel on their hands, would never drink from the same cup/bottle as someone else, and invariably are the first ones to get sick as soon as the flu season starts.

Since reading Kristin Ross' Fast Cars Clean Bodies a few years ago i have felt somewhat justified in my suspicion of those who feel civilised by virtue of showering more often than me and using Dettol and bleach in their homes...and think that cleanliness is just one step below holiness

Now it seems that i have even more ammunition than just common sense when i argue with them. It's called the 'hygiene hypothesis'. Medical researchers have found that exposure to dirt and germs early in life primes the immune system so it is prepared for any future threat and that our constant wiping and sterilising of everything from kitchen worktops to childrens toys may be undermining this important mechanism.

Just take a look at the amount spent by consumers on household cleaning products. And the result of all this cleaning? According to researchers, it is an exponential growth in allergies.

Previously, researchers focused mainly on allergies, asthma and eczema. Numerous studies show that children raised on farms are less likely to get these diseases, either because they inhale all kinds of toxins or drink raw milk packed with bugs.
Youngsters raised with cats or dogs also seem to be protected.

But now scientists believe the hygiene hypothesis could also explain the rise in some cancers.
According to the hygiene hypothesis, repeated exposure to allergens, bacteria or certain toxins keeps the immune system on red alert, suppressing cancer cells in the earliest stages of development. Studies suggest that the more germs you get in your body, the less likely you are to get certain tumors.

So, if you stop using "body care" products (which are packed with chemicals and come in plastic containers), and stop cleaning your home obsessively, not only you will save some money and time, but you will also be protecting your health and the environment.

On many beaches in the Mediterranean using shampoo and liquid soap during a shower is strictly prohibited, as the untreated waste water ends up in the sea. I dream of the day when such rule will be applied in Hong Kong.

Plastic fences on traffic islands

2009-11-19T08:09:00.000-08:00

We all like trees and bushes on traffic islands, but wasting taxpayers' money on plastic fences?? Strangely enough, the same fences have appeared in most public parks and now surround every flower bed in town. Not only they look hideous, they are also very bad news for the environment. Somebody in China is polluting the environment, creating greenhouse gases that add to global warming so that any green space in Hong Kong can be fenced in. Wow, they might even call it "beautification".

The genius who made this decision should explain why plastic fences are necessary, given that these traffic islands are surrounded by roads. But i suspect that the ultimate reason lies in the fat envelope he got from some supplier in Guangdong.

What are public parks for??

2009-11-18T19:48:00.000-08:00

When you take a look at the list of activities that are banned in Hong Kong public parks you wonder what you can actually do there, besides walking and reading the paper on a bench. You certainly cannot lie on the grass, play with a ball, fly a kite, bring your skateboard, put your roller blades on, play the guitar, teach your child how to ride a bike, etc.

In 2008 such restrictions were finally questioned by a group of parents and educators who have since organised events called Freedom Ball.
The next one will be at Shatin Park on Sunday 22nd November from 11.30am to 2:30pm.

The organizers of Freedom Ball incursions challenge the rules and encourage the public to join in actively.

They call for a review of the way public spaces are managed, designed and controlled so that they can finally meet the needs of Hong Kong people. A worthwhile cause to support!
http://freedomball.blogspot.com/

Exposed pipes on Lamma

2009-11-11T20:49:00.000-08:00

This is a very popular trail, thousands of visitors come to Lamma every weekend and walk from Yeung Shue Wan to Sok Kwu Wan.
The island is actively promoted by the Tourism Board and the local economy mainly relies on visitors' spending.

You would expect the government to value the natural beauty of this island. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Take these pipes. In urban areas they would be underground, but on Lamma digging a trench for these pipes was not considered worthwhile. So here they are, in their full glory: alignment was not even attempted, and concrete was liberally used to support them every 2.5 metres.

The infantilization of public space

2009-11-05T21:52:00.000-08:00

Picture #1: Hong Kong Park
Do we need to be taught the name of these flowers? It seems that the Leisure and Cultural Services Department has embarked on a mission to educate the public about flowers and trees. Fair enough, but why was the tag designed by a kindergarten teacher? Everywhere i look, i see a liberal use of nursery colours, signs and banners designed for pre-schoolers!

Picture #2: Hong Kong Park
This drinking fountain looks pretty straightforward, and yet the same department has covered it in instructions, and one of the signs was probably designed by the same kindergarten teacher who likes bees and flowers.

Not only Hong Kong Park has become cluttered and tacky, when i go to country parks to escape this visual assault, i am forced to walk on concrete paths surrounded by railings and yet more loud banners warning that i should protect myself from heat stroke.

Can government officials ever accept the idea that the majority of HK residents are over 18 and should be treated like responsible adults despite the fact that they are not allowed to elect the next chief executive?

Manifesto for eco-conscious HK chicks

2009-10-25T20:49:00.000-07:00

Living in HK means that we can hardly escape the pressure of a multi-million advertising industry that is hell-bent on making people feel inadequate unless they buy the latest mobile phone or designer bag.
Unless we start to take pride in our alternative 'lifestyle choices', to borrow a marketeers' cliche, and use word of mouth and our influence in the media to spread it, we will never pose a challenge to the multinationals of planet destruction.

So i propose a manifesto for eco-conscious HK chicks and call for more entries to this list.

1. You love your old mobile phone, as it does exactly what a phone is supposed to do. Its no nonsense design can easily be described as "vintage", the simplicity of its menu mean that time can be spent engaging in more pleasant activities than studying functions and applications, its sturdiness means you don't need to worry about accidentally dropping or scratching it. When it finally breaks down, you can easily fix it or replace with a similar model, which you can buy second-hand for HK$200 (My Nokia is 5 years old and i have only changed the battery once)

2. You buy your clothes in second-hand and charity shops, alter them or re-style them yourself, you organize swap parties where friends and acquaintances can exchange loved items without ever opening your purse. Your style is unique and fashion designers will copy it, because they always take inspiration from what stands out in the street, but then put a silly price tag on it.

3. You travel by train and bicycle to reach places that other people will read about in travel magazines some time after you visited them. As you save money by spending less on consumer products, you need to work less, hence your holidays will be longer. You leave the "long-weekend" getaway places to mass tourists who are time-strapped and herded like cows into over-crowded resorts.

4. You make things. As you have more time for yourself, you learn how to make stuff that other people can only buy in expensive designer shops. You can make unique pottery, jewellery, photo-albums, knit jumpers and scarves, build your own furniture, make bags with discarded cloth and beads, there is virtually no limit to what you can make by hand.

5. You are a vegetarian. There is really no need to eat meat: the healthiest populations have always eaten little or no meat. You love animals and cannot bear the idea of eating parts of an animal that has been killed to feed you. You cook your lunch and dinner, put it in a re-usable container and carry it with you. In HK healthy food is expensive, but very affordable if you cook it yourself. Also, a quinoa and vegetables stew cannot be bought from a take-away, and the same applies to the most nutritious grains and pulses.

6. You never buy bottled water. It's terribly polluting for the environment, and also bad for your health: plastic releases carcinogenic particles into the water, especially when bottles are stored in high temperatures, as they are in HK. Instead, you carry a flask and refill it with tap water which is no worse than water you buy in bottles. At home you drink filtered or boiled tap water.

7. You carry your own bag when you go shopping. You only choose groceries without excessive packaging, as this saves space in your bag and creates less waste at home. You can use Marseilles soap to wash your laundry as it comes in a soap bar, instead of a plastic container. To clean kitchen and bathroom use a vinegar and water solution. Most cleaning products are unnecessary and very harmful for the environment.

8. You never buy cosmetics and body & hair care products. You don't need to because you can find everything you need to be beautiful...in your kitchen!
Natural beauty tips can be found on the Internet, and after trying natural ingredients, you will never go back to chemicals-laden creams and hair products. Besides, if you exercise daily, get plenty of sleep, live stress-free and eat healthy, your skin will never need a boost.

9. You often go the library. There you can read and borrow books, instead of buying them, and bring home CDs that you can listen to and even copy.

10. Your apartment feels much bigger than it is because you never clutter it with stuff you bought on impulse and don't really need. The less you own, the lighter you feel. Freedom can never be achieved by owning more. Material things are like a ball and chain that hinder your personal development and inner growth.

11. Your electricity bill is usually below HK$100 a month, you choose to live without a TV, because you'd rather socialize with friends than passively watch the box, you don't need air-conditioning in your flat because you keep your windows open and use a ceiling fan instead. As you avoid meat, your body temperature will naturally be lower. If you live alone, you don't need a washing machine either, as you can soak your clothes and bed linen in the washtub overnight, and rinse them in the morning.
You only need a small, energy-efficient fridge because in HK you are never too far from a grocery store or market.

12. You work to live, rather than live to work as many do in HK.
When you free yourself from the shackles of consumerism, you need to work fewer hours to support yourself. In the developed world we are facing over-capacity, over-production and over-consumption. If we all consumed less, then this unsustainable system would fold like a house of cards, and some sanity would be restored: the real quality of life would improve and the environment would benefit. People who live in developed countries are not happier than those who don't. That's a fact. And we should all ponder the irony of it.

13. You have no car. Nobody really needs one in HK. You can go anywhere you want by public transport, you also take any opportunity to walk, climb stairs and cycle, which keeps you fitter than going to the gym.

14. You are not defined by what you buy, but by what you treasure. Your rubbish bin fills up really slowly, as you recycle most of your waste. The less you buy, the more uses you will find for what you previously thought of as 'just waste'.

Menstrual cups finally available in Hong Kong

2009-09-28T18:04:00.000-07:00

This message is addressed to women. Every month you probably spend a lot of money buying menstrual pads or tampons. But money is not the only issue. These pads and tampons end up in landfills where they take decades to decompose.

Finally you have a cheap, reliable and environmentally-friendly alternative. Watson, the Hong Kong retailer, has agreed to stock menstrual cups made of silicon.
Though i won't buy one (I got mine online and have been using it for years) i highly recommend this product to all those women who still haven't tried it.

The menstrual cup is made of soft, non-latex, medical grade silicone. The cup is innovative, economical, comfortable, and environmentally-friendly.
It is designed to catch your menstrual flow rather than absorb it. Its bell shape allows the cup to fit snuggly and comfortably up against your vaginal walls, below but not touching your cervix. The cup should be emptied and rinsed at least every 8 to 12 hours, ideally in the privacy of your bathroom at home.

Menstrual cups can last up to 10 years. The initial cost for a cup is higher than for traditional hygiene device, but the cost is absorbed with each consecutive use.

De-grow or die

2009-09-25T19:57:00.000-07:00

Serge Latouche, professor emeritus of economic science at the University of Paris-Sud, is one of the main proponents of "the society of de-growth". I was recently engaged in an animated debate about the merits of his vision, which prompted me to translate some key passages of his books 'Le Pari de la Décroissance' (The Bet of De-Growth) and 'Petit Traité de la Décroissance Sereine" (Small Treaty of Peaceful De-Growth) published in 2006 and 2007. Here i will offer some of his arguments.

De-growth does not mean negative growth. Negative growth is a self-contradictory expression, which just proves the domination of the collective imagination by the idea of growth.

On the other hand, de-growth is not the alternative to growth, but rather, a matrix of alternatives which would open up the space for human creativity again, once the cast of economic totalitarianism is removed. The de-growth society would not be the same in Texas and in the Chiapas, in Senegal and in Portugal. De-growth would open up anew the human adventure to the plurality of its possible destinies.

Growth for growth's sake is an insane objective, with disastrous consequences for the environment. The need for a 'de-growth' society stems from the certainty that the earth's resources and natural cycles cannot sustain the economic growth which is the essence of capitalism.

In place of the current dominant system, a new society is possible, one of assumed sobriety, where we all work less in order to live better lives, we consume less products but of better quality, we produce less waste and recycle more.

The new society would mean recuperating a sense of measure and a sustainable ecological footprint, and finding happiness in living together with others rather than in the frantic accumulation of gadgets.

It is difficult to break out of this addiction to growth especially because it is in the interest of the "dealers" – the multinational corporations and the political powers serving them - to keep us enslaved.

Alternative experiences and dissident groups - such as cooperatives, syndicates, the associations for the preservation of peasant agriculture, certain NGOs, local exchange systems, networks for knowledge exchange - represent pedagogical laboratories for the creation of "the new human being" demanded by the new society. They represent popular universities which can foster resistance and help decolonise the imaginary.

We should start re- conceptualising what we understand by poverty, scarcity and development for instance; restructuring society and the economy; restoring non-industrial practices, especially in agriculture; redistributing; re-localising; reusing; recycling.

As regards poor countries, Latouche proposes the virtuous cycle of the eight “Rs”: RECONCEPTUALIZING (i.e., redefining the concepts of wealth and poverty, scarcity and abundance); RESTRUCTURING (adapting society and economy to degrowth); RESTORING (first and foremost, peasant agriculture); REDISTRIBUTING; RELOCATING; REDUCING (i.e., limiting the impact of human beings on the environment); REUSING; RECYCLING.

In his book "Petit traité de la décroissance sereine" he proposes a political program of sorts, which can be summarized in the following points:
1) working our way back to an ecological footprint that is equal or inferior to a planet;
2) including in transportation costs the damages caused by transportation;
3) relocating industrial and agricultural activities;
4) reviving peasant agriculture;
5) converting productivity increases into reduction of working time and job creation;
6) stimulating the production of “relational commodities” such as friendship and knowledge;
7) reducing energy waste;
8) strongly penalizing advertising expenses;
9) taxing stock transactions, the profits of multinational companies, carbon emissions, and nuclear waste.

Having travelled to places regarded as poor (because of their GDP) i have come to question Western definitions of poverty.
Who is poor? The farmer who produces, sells and eats his fresh products, works 4 hours a day and spends the rest of the time with his family, socializing with his friends, playing music, making handcrafts, breathing clean air, and going for a walk whenever he likes or the white-collar worker, trapped in his office for 8-10 hours a day, then trapped in traffic to go home, where he eats junk food in front of his high-definition TV, surrounded by consumer products that will make him more miserable as soon as they become outdated and need replacing with new, 'state-of-the-art' ones?
And if someone argues that the white-collar worker might actually be happy to be chained to his gadgets, then i would reply that the white-collar worker's lifestyle is threatening the health and well-being of those who are losing their land because of global warming, those who are forced to breath polluted air, drink polluted water, eat contaminated crops, whose children develop cancer or are born with congenital deformities. The disappearance of animal species, local cultures and languages, the trashing and degradation of the environment, the use of war to secure resources, famine wages, etc. this is the price developing countries are paying so that he can happily consume. Someone has to start putting a price tag on the ravages of global consumerism.

In the past capitalist accumulation relied on slavery, but then discovered a much more effective way of enslaving people, consumerism. Now millions of people work long hours to be able to afford goods they don't need, and shop till they drop to achieve 'status' because 'having' has replaced 'being'. A major shift is needed in our consciousness, otherwise we will all go down together, rich and poor.

Horror Vacui in Hong Kong

2009-09-23T20:10:00.000-07:00

HORROR VACUI (fear of emptiness in Latin), combined with a penchant for all things cute and pink, glossy surfaces, black leather sofas, neoclassical sculptures, gold paint and huge TV screens are de rigueur in HK. Unfortunately government officials have decided that the "kindergarten meets Las Vegas casino" aesthetics should not be limited to the interior of flats, residential blocks, office desks, shopping malls in the New Territories, etc. They want every corner of the city, including country parks and beaches, to be "beautified" in accordance to the dominant taste.

Thus unobtrusive railings are painted pink and white, the Leisure, Culture and Sports Department logo is repeated ad nauseam, stainless steel notice boards are erected even in the tiniest park, so that people can be reminded to 'wash their hands', huge vinyl banners in primary colours promote even the most obscure event organised by this or that department, or simply scream 'Drugs kill'.

Every public space must be packed with ads and warning signs, every festival becomes an excuse to 'decorate' the city with giant pink figurines, garish lights, flower pots etc. The shopping mall has become the golden standard for public spaces. Whereas in shopping malls brands have to pay to advertise their goods, government departments can freely promote themselves and their ill-conceived campaigns.

Let's just take one of these campaigns as an example. "Get Moving. Clean Hong Kong" reads one huge banner featuring three young people posing with a broom. Is this a contest? Or a new form of exercise involving broom sticks? Are we encouraged to become street sweepers because of the recession? After counting hundreds of these banners, i still don't know what the message is. Certainly taxpayers money would be better spent in increasing cleaners wages rather than producing these banners.

In parks and beaches more activities are banned than permitted. And of course huge signs and banners are there to remind us that we shouldn't skate, play with balls, burn wax, fly kites, lie on benches, walk dogs, listen to music, cycle, smoke, etc. As i look at this garish clutter of signs, my head starts spinning, i feel nauseous. Is throwing up permitted??
I don't see any sign mentioning vomit, but plenty of signs warn me to watch my property, lock doors and windows before leaving home, prevent gum disease by brushing my teeth (!) and even advise me to love my family members. WTF??

One wonders how we managed to safely use these places for decades before government departments started shouting their DO's and DON'Ts.

Officials who suffer from HORROR VACUI syndrome believe that streets and parks are too empty. They must have more banners, signs, public art or distinctive street furniture. Trees are too empty. They must be hung with Christmas lights or signs identifying their species. And let's not forget that trees are 'dangerous', they must be secured to the ground with ropes and cables, or enclosed in metal cages.

The horror...the horror!

This is The Age of Stupid

2009-09-22T22:06:00.000-07:00

"Either we seriously tackle climate change or we wipe out most life on Earth. So it's not a tricky decision" (Franny Armstrong, director of The Age of Stupid)

Last night i was invited to watch the premiere of 'The Age of Stupid' at UA cinema in Times Square. Due to my late working hours, i missed the presentation, but managed to watch the movie. I really hope that this movie will be released in HK, though i think that those who should watch this movie will never buy a ticket to see it. It should be compulsory viewing for government officials, and should be screened in all schools to sensitize young viewers about the problems that their generation will face, unless something is done, NOW, by our generation.

The story is told in the voice of an ageing archivist - played by Pete Postlethwaite - looking back from the year 2055 on a world devastated by climate catastrophe.

Ensconced in a sea-bound tower harbouring a complete digital record of human history, the sadder and wiser archivist pulls up image files that tell the story of real people profiled by the filmmaker, Franny Armstrong.

"We could have saved ourselves, but we didn't. It's amazing. What state of mind were we in, to face extinction and simply shrug it off?", Postlethwaite's character says with a flash of anger.

Gazing back to our time, he details the lives of people whose stories intersect with global warming in different ways: a poor, aspiring medical student from Nigeria's oil rich Niger Delta; a young business scion starting up India's third "low cost" airline; a pair of child refugees from the war in Iraq; Piers Guy, struggling vainly against the opposition to a windfarm that could power several thousand households; an old French mountain guide who has watched Alpine glaciers retreat dozens of metres over his long career; and a retired oil company scientist in New Orleans, whose life was devastated by hurricane Kathrina, thinking out loud as to how future generations might look back our era if we fail to reign in global warming.

The movie is definitely worth seeing. If you cannot catch it in the theatre, watch it on DVD (you can buy it from www.ageofstupid.net) and then lend it to as many people as possible. If you are a teacher, arrange a public screening in your school.

There have been so many wake-up calls, and yet we keep ignoring them, while we sleepwalk into the abyss.
Unless we all stop abusing natural resources, stop mindless consumerism, stop jetting around the globe, and stop eating meat, this planet will never be able to sustain its ballooning population. The war to secure water, oil, and food has already started, it can only turn much much uglier. The collapse of civilization as we know it looms very close. We can't keep dragging our feet.

Irresponsible use of vinyl banners

2009-09-17T22:30:00.000-07:00

Vinyl banners have taken over Hong Kong.
Every building site, storefront and restaurant seems to be sporting a banner. As if this wasn't bad enough for the environment, government departments have jumped on the bandwagon and now use these banners for their public awareness campaigns. "Keep Hong Kong clean", "Don't drink and drive", "Drugs kill", "Prevent Japanese Encephalitis. Remove stagnant water", "Eliminate rodent nuisance", "Wash your hands" and even use them to promote temporary events such as museum exhibitions, concerts and festivals.

The effectiveness of these public campaigns has been questioned by many advertising experts who think that the public has grown tired of being addressed like a pre-schooler and that pedestrians and motorists are already bombarded with so many messages that they are too distracted to pay any notice. Besides, other channels such as radio, tv and the internet can be more effective, reducing the ecological impact of these campaigns.

As to choosing a strong, durable material to promote sport and cultural events that last for less than a month, this is by far the most absurd and irresponsible use.

Almost all banners are made of Vinyl PVC, a material that presents environmental concerns, both in its manufacture and its disposal.

It might be hard to curb their use in the private sector, but when taxpayers money is actually used to generate more waste for our overflowing landfills, one cannot help but doubt the sanity of our civil servants.

Plastic is NOT fantastic

2009-09-16T19:23:00.000-07:00

The main problem with plastic - besides there being so much of it - is that it doesn't biodegrade. No natural process can break it down. Experts point out that the durability that makes plastic so useful to humans also makes it quite harmful to nature. Instead, plastic photodegrades. A plastic container cast out to sea will fragment into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic without breaking into simpler compounds, which scientists estimate could take hundreds of years. The small bits of plastic produced by photodegradation can get sucked up by filter feeders and damage their bodies. Other marine animals eat the plastic, which can poison them or lead to deadly blockages. Plastic threatens the entire food chain, especially when eaten by filter feeders that are then consumed by large creatures.

You have probably heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135° to 155°W and 35° to 42°N and estimated to be twice the size of Texas. The patch is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of suspended plastic and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre.

Plastic chokes rivers, lakes, and oceans. It litters even the most remote areas of the planet. When burnt or incinerated it pollutes the air we breath. And let's not forget that the production of plastic is just as polluting and harmful to the environment as it is its disposal.

This is the legacy we are leaving to the next generations.
Despite that fact that plastic is not biodegradable our civilization is using it to produce billions of single-use, disposable items. Our throw-away culture hasn't been able to switch to natural materials simply because it's 'cheaper' to use plastic. An environmental tax on all plastic products is long overdue and would discourage the abuse of this material. It's time the environmental cost of plastic production and disposal is factored in so that other materials can become competitive, and people rethink their addiction to plastic.

What can the consumers do?
First of all, reuse and refill containers instead of throwing them away, drink filtered tap water instead of bottled water, if you have to eat and drink on the go, pack your own lunch box, always carry a flask, so that you can avoid disposable cups, when shopping choose products that leave no unwanted packaging behind, such as soap bars instead of liquid soap, buy fresh produce that is not pre-packaged, bring your own shopping bags, buy wooden toys instead of plastic ones, buy clothes made of natural fibers, and what is most important, reduce consumption. Buy only what you really really need. Buying more will not make you feel good, but it will certainly make you poorer and damage the environment.

Heung Yee Kuk seeks to legalize dumping on farmland

2009-09-09T21:54:00.000-07:00

The mask is off. The Heung Yee Kuk’s latest bid to get a permission to operate landfills on land zoned for agriculture comes as no surprise to those who struggle to protect the green lungs of our city.

The Kuk is asking for a license to turn fishponds and farmland into a dump for excavation material, which will inevitably turn into a collection point for all kind of waste, including toxic waste.

Dumping on farmland is something that private landowners have been doing illegally for decades, causing irreversible damage to the ecosystem and defacing the countryside.

Legalizing such activity would only accelerate the ongoing destruction of green areas.

The Kuk represents the interests of thousands of native villagers, many of whom don’t even reside in Hong Kong, at the expense of the interests of millions of Hong Kong residents who seek an escape from the concrete.

We are losing green areas at an alarming pace. Future generations will ask what kind of people allowed this to happen. Today’s gain for a few will turn into tomorrow’s loss for many.

The government has the duty to develop a comprehensive strategy for the conservation of Hong Kong's natural assets which are fast disappearing due to irrational development. The Baptist University’s study commissioned by the Kuk would only produce the results that the Kuk expects. It cannot be regarded as an independent study because environmental and residents’ associations have no say in it.

So far government departments have been unable to take effective action against illegal dumping.
Lamma residents who have been fighting one such case know all too well that neither the EPD nor the DSD could stop a private landowner dumping construction and other waste on land zoned for agricultural use in the Yung Shue Long valley, despite the fact that his actions blocked a stream and caused flooding.
The dumping has now completely buried a lily pond, destroyed a breeding ground for the protected Romer’s tree frog, partially obstructed a stream and blocked drainage from the neighbouring fields, which are farmed to produce vegetables sold locally. This eyesore is endured by those who live nearby and property prices have been affected.

Prior to this dumping activity, the Drainage Services Department carried out significant drainage works, a multi-million project that was designed to alleviate flooding in the valley and is now just a concrete monument to the squandering of public finances.

Mongkok makeover will kill street life as we know it

2009-09-09T21:46:00.000-07:00

I am horrified by the URA’s project to turn five streets in Mongkok into a 'theme park' for tourists (ref.SCMP. 1-09-09)

Does the Urban Renewal Authority truly know what tourists want to see? I can only speak for my visitors from Europe, and I would say that what draws them to Mongkok is the chance to see local people's way of life under conditions of extreme density: the crowds, sounds, smells and sights that are fast disappearing from other parts of Hong Kong.
What they are not interested in is a sterile and over-regulated environment, paved with blue tiles and dotted with giant goldfish and seashells.
They certainly welcome the idea of walking in a pedestrian friendly zone and get some respite from traffic fumes, but feel that repaving the streets with glossy tiles would make them less authentic.

Giant themed sculptures would only accelerate the lamentable disneyfication of public space. Those who like Disney aesthetics are already catered for, the rest of us have the right to enjoy streets that are not over-themed, over-designed and banalised.

Childish and tacky sculptures may be fit for shopping malls but shouldn’t blight our public space.

Liquid soap bottles. What a waste!

2009-07-06T10:08:00.000-07:00

Why do so many households have these squirty soap bottles? Whatever happened to old good soap bars?

All these plastic bottles of liquid soap do is contribute to landfill. So not only is their waste something we have to think about, but what about the production of these bottles? All you have to do is take apart the pump dispenser and you will see how complex it is. What a waste to the environment.

I only buy soap bars and it is increasingly difficult to find them in local supermarkets. When i do, they are usually stacked on the bottom shelves, because of course, they are cheaper and last longer ... something that retailers don't like.

Too lazy to shake your umbrella? Disposable plastic sheaths are the ultimate folly

2009-07-06T05:57:00.000-07:00

First the dispensers of disposable plastic sheaths appeared in shopping malls and office towers, now even facilities directly managed by government departments, such as museums and libraries proudly display them.

Before the appearance of these condoms for dripping umbrellas, people used to shake their brollies, or put them in the nylon sheath that comes with any umbrella you buy. Not anymore. If you are too lazy to shake it, you can slip it into a disposable plastic cover every time you enter a building. Multiply this action several time, and imagine millions of people doing the same, and you have a mountain of plastic waste to dispose of in a landfill. Not to mention the environmental impact of producing all those plastic sheaths.

Environmentally-irresponsible decisions are made everyday by people who don't think about the consequences of their actions.
It's even more annoying to see that taxpayers' money is used to pay the salaries of people who should know better.

Do trees kill people?

2009-06-21T19:07:00.000-07:00

According to the latest statistics available, on average, there were 41 road traffic accidents each day in Hong Kong in 2006, involving 52 casualties and 61 vehicles. (http://www.censtatd.gov.hk/products_and_services/products/publications/statistical_report/feature_articles/transport/index_cd_B70707FB_dt_detail.jsp)

In 2009 one person was killed by the falling branch of a tree, a regrettable death that could have been avoided if said tree had been properly cared for.

And yet despite the fact that it was a freak accident, and far from common, the Hong Kong government has decided that mature trees are dangerous and should be surrounded by cages, their branches secured by unsightly cables attached to concrete poles.

These statistics beg one question. Given the deadly toll of traffic accidents in Hong Kong, why is the government so worried about the danger posed by trees? Instead of extending pedestrian areas and planning the city around pedestrians (the majority of residents don't drive!) more roads have been planned, and in the meantime our officials are busy chopping down trees or building unsightly cages around them.

The most bizarre decision was to build a high fence on a concrete support around a majestic banyan tree at the end of Battery Walk, near St. John's Cathedral. Not only they built an enclosure fit for a wild animal, but they covered part of the fence with plastic foliage (!) Inside the enclosure one can see a tall concrete pole on an over-scaled concrete box. The tree is now attached to this unsightly pole by several metal ropes. I have no idea how much taxpayers' money was wasted on this project, but certainly a tree expert would have pruned the dangerous branches, and left the tree alone!

Now instead of a beautiful tree that everybody can admire we have a concrete and metal monster, from the top of which a few branches jut out.

Above is a picture taken on Lamma, in Yung Shue Wan Main street. According to the Island District Office, they just wanted to "protect" the tree from people and dogs urinating (!?). As a result, this banyan tree is now enclosed in a stainless steel cage, adding more clutter to the already cluttered street. I guess it makes little difference to those who allegedly used the tree as a urinal. Now they simply have a stainless steel structure to urinate on. Progress, isn't it?

Gasping for air

2009-06-01T02:54:00.000-07:00

At 11am, 1 June 2009, the air quality in Hong Kong is threatening all citizens, according to Greenpeace's Real Air Pollution Index.
All air quality monitoring stations recorded at least 2 kinds of air pollutants exceeding the World Health Organisation standards. Roadside station in Central even has 3 air pollutants.

After spending 4 hours in Central, gasping for air and suffering from extreme shortness of breath, i cancelled a couple of appointments and returned to Lamma, where i can finally breathe.

The situation is critical and yet the government is not even considering implementing traffic reduction measures on days of high pollution such as today. If Beijing does it, banning vehicles on alternate days according to their registration plates, why can't HK? It's obviously a patch and not a solution, but at least people would not be forced to cancel their engagements and run for cover!

Dymocks' disregard for the environment

2009-03-10T21:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday i walked into a Wanchai bookstore, one of the many Dymock bookstores that have mushroomed in HK. Though not a big fan of their selection, i went in to browse titles and kill time between classes. To my dismay all books were wrapped in a plastic film, to ensure that nobody would leaf through them. I am one of those people who don't judge a book by its cover, and always read the first page of a novel before buying it, as the writing style to me is just as important as the content. Most readers leaf through the pages before deciding what to buy....the way most people shopping for clothes or shoes try them on.

Wrapping each individual book in plastic certainly achieves the desired result of stopping people like me from browsing, but what are the other, unintended consequences of this ill-conceived decision? Bad news for the environment. A pile of discarded plastic wraps that end up in our full-to-the-brim landfills...not to mention the emissions caused by the production of those wraps.

Dymocks bookstores in Hong Kong are franchised, so it's hard to tell whether the Australian Group that owns the Franchise System is aware of this practise in one of his shops in HK. I have lodged a complaint and will tell you what their reply is.

Off to the library now...where books can be browsed and enjoyed at no cost for the reader and the environment.

the real crisis

2008-12-03T08:09:00.000-08:00

For the last two months the media and the government have been obsessively informing us that we are in a 'state of crisis'. The 'crisis' they talk about is created by excessive spending, over- production, and a lot of toxic financial products. They call it a crisis, but it would be better to look at it as the inevitable outcome of an economic system based on greed and exploitation, exploitation of labour and natural resources.

What I think we are seeing is a clear example of the shock doctrine (an expression coined by Naomi Klein) in the way governments are using the economic crisis to push through an agenda without the chance of any real, sober and rational debate.

Worldwide, the taxpayers are footing the bill to save the same system that got us into this mess.

The capitalist system has solved previous crises by expanding and colonizing places and spheres of life that were once external to it. (See Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism).

Lenin observed that capitalist nations had avoided this crisis by expanding the pool of workers they exploited. Capitalism, he argued, "had escaped its three laws of motion through overseas imperialism. The acquisition of colonies had enabled the capitalist economies to dispose of their unconsumed goods, to acquire cheap resources, and to vent their surplus capital."

If you replace 'colonies' with 'global markets', you have a pretty good description of globalisation. Now this model has started to show its cracks. Capitalism has expanded to every corner of the world, and though production can still be moved to places where labour is cheaper, overproduction has become a problem. Not all sacked factory workers in the West can be turned into low-paid workers in the service industry. Low wages mean that these workers' purchasing power has dropped, and easy credit can only patch things up for a short period of time, until the financial markets collapese, as they did, and people become so impoverished they cannot even keep a roof on their head, let alone spend on useless consumer goods.

The only way the failures of this system can be corrected would be through redistribution of wealth, by which i mean higher wages for workers, both in developed and developing countries, and shorter working hours. This is of course anathema to capitalists, as it would erode their profit margins.

Redistribution would also be good for the environment, because production would only meet real demand, instead of boosting it artificially through marketing, advertising, and 'easy credit'.

Shortening working hours could create more jobs, and though less people would be making millions more people would earn a decent wage. Yes, luxury goods would go unsold, but do we really care if yachts, private jets, Hermes bags and Bentleys go unsold? I'd rather see millions of people around the globe be lifted out of poverty and gaining access to clean water, nutritious food, and education than pandering to the whims of the super-rich, the only ones who have benefitted from unfettered capitalism. The 'trickle-down' theory obviously doesn't work, as the widening gap between rich and poor clearly shows. Let's call it 'trick the poor' theory.

So, the geniuses who got us to this point, want to cure the disease by administering more of the same poison, i.e. boosting consumer spending, cutting jobs, lowering wages, while devising even more sophisticated Ponzi schemes.

In Hong Kong developers worry about low birth rates, factory owners worry about the rising cost of labour and falling demand. The government echos their concerns. No wonder. THe government represents their minority interests, rather than our interests. Hong Kong people deserve space to breathe, not more residential and office towers. And if the population shrinks, we can all enjoy a better quality of life, and less competition for jobs, i.e. more bargainingl power for workers. A view which is obviously not shared by developers and retailers. But they have to wake up and realise that the current rate of growth is unsustainable. Their blind greed will become our doom.

The world population has ballooned to an unsustainable level, but putting a cap on births is still regarded as too controversial in most countries (with the laudable exception of China)

If we want to give the human race a chance, we all need to minimize our carbon footprint, and that means acting NOW to curb consumption. All kind of material consumption.

Global warming, the collapse of eco-systems, widespread pollution, the depletion of natural resources, over-consumption and mountains of waste... these are the real emergencies. Not terrorism, not the financial crisis.

hair dye allergic reaction

2008-10-06T00:02:00.000-07:00

Above is a picture of my neck...two weeks after colouring my hair with a light brown hair dye manufactured by L'Oreal.

For about 6 months i have suffered from a 'mysterious' allergy. After spending a fortune on tests, allergy specialists and dermatologists who diagnosed "eczema", "contact dermatitis" and prescribed hydro-cortison creams, steroids, anti-histamine pills etc. I finally discovered that the culprit wasn't stress or any food I eat but the hair dye that i had used on and off for many years.

My symptoms started six months ago, a couple of days after colouring my hair. Very mild at first: just a rash on my neck, shoulders and arms. Then, a couple of months later, after another application, red and itchy eyelids, blisters along my hairline, and several eczema patches on my neck, and temples.
It took me six months, and a more severe allergic reaction (my scalp was covered in painful scabs, lymph nodes in my neck became swollen like a ping pong ball, and the neck eczema got much worse) to figure out the real cause.

PPD, para-phenylenediamine, a substance banned in some European countries, but still widely used in hair dye products manufactured and sold in Asia and the US!
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) an American agency, stated that you should "prevent
skin contact" with PPD in order to avoid the "symptoms: Irritation, pharynx, larynx; bronchial asthma; sensitization dermatitis" (NIOSH,www.cdc.gov/niosh/npg/npgd0495.html ). Recently, PPD received bad press when it was used to darken henna tattoos and caused numerous disfiguring scars. The FDA states "So-called "black henna" may contain p-phenylenediamine, also known as PPD. The only legal use of PPD in cosmetics is as a hair dye. It is not approved for direct application to the skin. However,
when most hair dye is applied it does come in direct contact with the scalp and quite often touches the skin on the forehead and ears. Hair dye is in direct contact with the skin for sometimes up to 30 minutes.

Many phenylenediamines are demonstrated to be mutagenic and carcinogenic. At its most innocent, PPD might inflict a person with a nasty welt-like reaction that itches and burns. At its most malignant, PPD has been associated with death.

Life threatening occurrences are rare. But judging from the stories i read in magazines, and on the Internet, sensitization and allergic reactions are much more common.

Some marketers and “appliers” prefer to tell clients that mild reactions are common and no big deal. They recommend an anti-itch cream, but blow it off as no big deal. They fail to mention the sensitization issues. This is ignoble and serves to prove the point that the use of PPD is purely to market something with no respect for the people who use it nor any care for what might happen to them. Though not an uncommon viewpoint in the capitalist mindset, it isn’t something that people in the know are going to let slide.

This issue is not about cosmetic and technical grades- it is about a substance that does more harm than good and the public should be informed as to the extent of the harm. L'Oreal's defense is that some people are even allergic to food, therefore there is no reason to ban a substance that causes an allergic reaction in some people. Well, they don't mention the fact that food is not toxic, while PPD is neither promoted for use on the skin nor legal to use on the skin in many countries!
Even DuPont, makers of PPD, warn against using it on the skin.
Articles in the British Journal of Dermatology emphasise the inherent dangers of para-Phenylenediamine.

There seems to be a small misconception that you will react immediately to PPD, so if it doesn’t burn/sting or otherwise present an effect immediately, one is safe from any reaction. This is not true and it’s a dangerous myth! PPD is known for its short sensitization period- that means you might not get or see an immediate reaction, but the next time you come in contact with PPD you could have an extremely bad reaction.
The toxins slowly build up in your body, but it's not until you cross an unspecified threshold that you run the risk of a reaction which, as has been reported, can be very severe indeed.

I am concerned that there is no requirement in Hong Kong for manufacturers to declare quantities of chemicals they have in a particular product, and this needs to change. With so many hair dyes being sold over the counter, we need monitoring of types and quantities of chemicals in these products.

I wasn't allergic for years, but the build-up of PPD in my body eventually caused a severe reaction. As a result, my health has been very poor for 6 months, i am constantly tired, my skin is a mess, always itchy and inflamed, scabs don't heal properly, and my lymph nodes are still swollen and painful.

Toxic shoes

2008-09-28T21:34:00.000-07:00

1.7 million leather shoes manufactured in Italy by Chinese companies were found to contain toxic levels of chromium hexavalent. It's not clear whether the chromium (Cr +6) was used in the tanning process in China, or in Italy. But investigators suspect that the toxic leather was imported illegally from China and then used by Chinese manufacturers based in Italy.

In order to take advantage of the added value provided by the "Made in Italy" origin of their products, since a few years Chinese producers of leather goods have set up dozens of sweatshops in the Prato area, in Tuscany, exploiting Chinese immigrants. This investigation revealed that not only working conditions in such sweatshops are appalling, but also the quality of their products would never meet the standards set by the leather industry in Italy.

It has been well documented that chromium in the oxidation state six is an established human carcinogen, associated with lung cancers. It causes mutations of the DNA chain, and people who come into direct contact with leather containing chromiun hexavalent can develop severe eczema.

Now, if toxic Chinese leather found its way into Italy, one can only wonder how safe are the leather goods sold in Hong Kong, given that most of them are imported directly from China.

Financial crisis...is it good news for people and the environment?

2008-09-16T22:00:00.000-07:00

This is a very, very serious crisis of capitalism: it has been the build-up of private borrowing that has kept the system going, and it's coming unstuck. The whole system is unwinding; the other day we saw the biggest nationalisation in the history of humanity (Freddie and Fanny) today it's AIG, and that still isn't enough.

A great financial economist and historian called Michael Hudson talks about how the US economy is basically fictitious, based on pretend earnings and pretend values. This will only genuinely become a crisis of capitalism if people generally become aware that much of the growth and prosperity produced by capitalism is a fiction, and if the consensus about where the real global value lies shifts radically. In other words, if people stop believing that apparently wealthy countries actually are producing wealth (see also http://michael-hudson.com)

We will see a shift in power away from the US, and towards the developing world - to countries such as Brazil and the Gulf states that have commodities to sell, and to China, where the savings ratio is high. We are going to see a new world order. America as a driver of the global economy is finished.

In the late 19th century and also in the 1930s, the impact of depression made people begin to question whether the free market and a completely unfettered form of capitalism was the best form of organising society. In both periods it encouraged on the left the idea of a complete social transformation through revolution, and also encouraged people to devise various schemes for social reform. The problem now - unlike in the 1880s, when people discovered the ideas of socialism, and in the 1930s, when it seemed that communism was the solution - is that the left doesn't have a coherent alternative vision. But this might change.
Some people, faced with recession, tend to hunker down, but others confront the government and demand a better deal, and that gives the left hope.

Like it or not, Capitalism is not dead: like a phoenix it seems to be able to rise from its ashes, and take new, different forms. To defend itself from the dangers posed by fast spreading Communist ideals in many Western countries, in the 30s it embraced the Keynesian solution: Roosevelt's New Deal could deliver many of the things that the left is calling for - more public spending, more training and education.

Maybe now, after realising that the era of financial gambling, unfettered consumerism, real estate speculation and growth supported by fraudulent credit tools is over, capitalism might resort to jumping on the green bandwagon, and starting a green new deal, which would employ large numbers of people to insulate homes, retrofit power plants, develop greener technologies, and carry out major environmental works.

Or it might become nastier, exploiting people and planet even more...but going down this route will be its death knell!

John Tsang, after subsidising our wasteful habits, what next?

2008-08-18T22:07:00.000-07:00

In other countries the increasing price of oil has led many to reduce their energy and fuel consumption. Which is great news for our planet, though some may argue it's too little, too late.

In Hong Kong, the land of paradox, instead we lost a great opportunity to reverse wasteful habits in matters of energy consumption. In the last budget, Finance Minister John Tsang promised to subsidise electricity bills, so that everybody, low-income families included, could keep their air-con/tv/computer/lights on all day and all night without breaking the bank.

I know that bad habits are hard to kick, and Hong Kong is addicted to low-cost energy. It seems that our government really has the best interest of its addicts at heart, so i would like to make a modest proposal.

John, can we also get some subsidised coke/heroin/ice/ectasy/ketamine next year?

Advertising makes you sick

2008-05-22T20:32:00.000-07:00

The advertising industry is still one of the most irresponsible, reckless, unethical sectors of our capitalist society.

I am not only referring to its MESSAGE (consume what you don't need) but to the MEDIUM too. Not only the advertised products are often totally unnecessary, the medium used to advertise them is fast becoming even more harmful than the products themselves.

If you think that large billboards are a form of visual pollution, that's nothing compared to the environmental pollution caused by the new generation of plastic billboards and adhesive PVC. These huge adhesive prints stick to vehicles (buses, trams, MTR trains), and can be wrapped around buildings. No size is too big, with adhesive vinyl you can cover a football pitch, if needed. No surface can escape the invasion of these sticky 2-D monsters. As you might have noticed, banks, airlines, and developers are engaged in a billboard size war, the escalation has now resulted in MTR stations being covered from floor to ceiling with huge vinyl prints.

You can ignore them, if you like, but after the advertising campaign is over, somebody will remove these vinyl wraps from the walls, and chuck them into our landfills.

If you ever felt guilty about using too many plastic bags, and have switched to a canvas bag for your grocery shopping, you will probably feel that your little effort is tantamount to rearranging chairs on the sinking Titanic.

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is present in countless household products like shower curtains, bags and toys, not to mention piping and automobile interiors. Sadly, PVC is among the most eco-unfriendly plastics and some varieties can release brain-damaing lead and hormone-disrupting phthalates. Its disposal is particularly problematic given that, if incinerated, it will release carcinogenic dioxin and other contaminants into the environment.

The advertising and marketing industry is raking in millions, and nobody is holding it accountable for the pollution it causes. Where is the much trumpeted "Polluters pay" principle? If it was applied, this industry would be forced to clean up its act and find a different way to reach people.

Those who work in that industry consider themselves "creative", if they really are so creative, they can come up with a better idea than sticking PVC on any available surface.

in the phallus we trust

2008-03-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago Calvin Klein launched its biggest outdoor campaign in the world, a 27-story billboard across the former Ritz Carlton Hotel in Central, ear-marked for demolition just 15 years after opening. This huge billboard will be taken down on April 15, and rest in peace in one of our landfills. The environmental cost of printing such a billboard, and then throwing it away a couple of months later, is mind-blowing, but in a city where new skyscapers are demolished to make room for taller ones, Calvin Klein's marketing executives must have thought "what the heck.... a phallic skyscraper + our well-endowed black model wearing white briefs equals a super-phallic message...and we are in the business of dressing dicks."

After the Hilton, demolished immediately after completion and the Furama hotel, another skycraper will become rubble and be replaced by a taller office tower. Disposing of construction waste is cheap, despite the fact that Hong Kong landfills are nearly full. Somebody must have realised there is money to be made in incineration, and shortening the life of landfills makes "business sense".
Welcome to "premature ejaculation capital of the world"...where concrete erections disappear at the blink of an eye...leaving a big mess behind.

The 2008-09 budget is an invitation to waste more energy

2008-03-12T21:08:00.000-07:00

Financial Secretary John Tsang has shown how much the government cares about the environment. With the excuse of improving people's livelihood and supporting disadvantaged groups his budget allocates HK$4.3 billion to subside domestic electricity accounts. The 2008-09 budget grants each residential electricity account a subsidy of $1,800. At present, about 15 per cent of households in Hong Kong pay an average of not more than $150 a month for electricity charges. Incidentally I pay less than that, mainly because i live on Lamma island, and can keep my windows open instead of relying on air-con.
Instead of rewarding households that save energy, the subsidy will enable even low income households to turn up their air-con, boosting the revenue of electricity companies. The real winners are the shareholders of HK Electric and China Light & Power, the loser is obviously the environment. So much for sustainability.

Chinese copycats invent the hybrid super-brand

2008-02-21T18:36:00.000-08:00

Chinese counterfeiters are possibly the most creative in the world. They take counterfeiting to new heights. Let's not forget that these are the guys who brought us the fake egg - the egg' s shell is made from calcium carbonate while the fake yolk is made from a mixture of gelatine, starch and other chemicals.
Now they have found a great solution to the problem of copying the ever-increasing number of western brands that have taken their country by storm. When only LV and Gucci bags were in demand, they had it easy, but their customers have become more and more demanding, every month a new brand hits the shelves of Chinese stores and keeping up with them has proved difficult. Moreover, these brands churn out new designs every season. Our resourceful copycats never despair and...voila'...they have just come up with the perfect solution. Let's stitch that old Gucci logo onto the leftover LV fabric, add the Prada logo to the Coach design, assemble Burberry's and Fendi's prints, and you reach the fans of two brands with just one product. Lévi-Strauss defined the operation of a mind moving from primitive to modern, scientific thought as 'bricolage': the 'bricoleur' performs his tasks with materials and tools that are at hand, from 'odds and ends.' He draws from the already existent while the modern scientist, according to Levi-Strauss, seeks to exceed the existing boundaries.
The bricoleur deals in signs, whereas the scientist deals in concepts. Concepts open possibilities while signs recycle previously available meanings.

Fashion brands are not "inventing" anything, they just slap their logos on mass-produced goods of dubious quality and through marketing and advertising create the impression of uniqueness and luxury. In fact these branded products are manufactured cheaply in factories where low-paid workers endure sweatshop conditions and then are sold at extravagant prices in swanky boutiques.

By mixing logos Chinese counterfeiters create a hybrid product that reveals the absurdity of people's appetite for brands rather than quality. If there is nothing behind the brand, the logo becomes an unhinged signifier, a free-floating signifier that means nothing beside itself and therefore can be manipulated at will.
I have also good reasons to suspect that the bits and pieces that the counterfeiters assemble, are coming out of the same factories that manufacture them for the big brand in the usual 'Chinese box' system of contractors and sub-contractors.

As Ackbar Abbas argued, the fake has a unique diagnostic value, largely because the question of the fake never involves just the fake alone; it forces us to re-assess all the objects and processes around it, including the global market and media technology. By definition a suspect object, the fake makes us take a suspicious or critical attitude to objects. Through a kind of maniacal imitation, the fake catches the global icon off-guard and reveals something about it that might otherwise be indiscernible.

The hybrid super-brand created by Chinese counterfeiters reveals the misery of the brand...it possesses no intrinsic value. A rag is a rag is a rag.

beaches and parks will become an office extension. Electromagnetic pollution in Hong Kong

2008-01-10T07:40:00.000-08:00

Do you fancy the idea of writing email on the beach? Or receiving email notifications while hiking in a country park or walking your dog on the waterfront? If you do, you probably need to have your head checked. Well, PCCW have just unveiled a plan to turn this idiotic fancy into a scary reality. They intend to install Wi-Fi masts in parks, beaches, and all along the waterfront.

In many countries Wi-Fi has been banned, or dismantled if already installed, from public schools, libraries and hospitals after lab tests found that Wi-Fi radiation affects animals.
In Paris, many library clerks where Wi-Fi access points were installed last summer (in the Paris Ville Numerique - Paris, digital town) - reported different symptoms like headaches, sore eyes or muscles, dizziness or vertigo. Since December, Wi-Fi access has been turned off in French public libraries.
Citing the possibility of health risks associated with the usage of WiFi networks, a Canadian university refused to sign off on their campus-wide installation, noting a California Public Utilities Commission study which mentions the possible risk of tumors and other diseases due to exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs).

So, if even places of study such as libraries, schools and universities prefer wired to wireless access in order to play safe, one wonders why on earth HK residents should be exposed to electro-magnetic fields even when they are out of the office, out of school, taking a stroll in a park.

Could it be that our health is sacrificed yet and again on the altar of profit? Whose profit? PCCW, that will get a generous handout from the government (taxpayers' money!) to ensure that no spot will be left uncovered in this territory-wide Wi-Fi galore. Who is PCCW chairman? Richard Li, the son of tycoon Li Ka-shing (ranks 9 in world's billionaires) whose stooges sit in the unelected government, thanks not only to his economic power, but also to his powerful connections in Beijing.
If you ever wondered why HK tycoons seem to be getting richer and richer, while ordinary HK citizens get poorer and poorer, this cosy deal provides further evidence of business and government collusion. If you get cancer because of electro-magnetic pollution, don't worry, the faculty of medicine, University of Hong Kong is now called Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine. You can bet that no researchers there will receive grants to study the link between EMF and cancer!

Get me out of this gas chamber!

2007-12-18T21:43:00.000-08:00

Pollution is a crime against humanity...no, wait, it's worse: it affects all living species...but, you know, they can't complain.

Pollution is a silent killer... toxic substances are administered everyday, and though not strong enough to cause an immediate death, they certainly accelerate it. Of course, our cause of death will be dismissed as cancer, and not murder. Our killers will never be put on trial.

If you are diagnosed with cancer, doctors routinely ask you if you ever smoked, worked or lived with smokers. They certainly don't record pollution levels at your home, or work.
One could argue that if you lived in the Swiss Alps you would still be smoking a pack a day at age 90!
Tobacco companies have become the perfect scapegoat...While polluters get away with murder!
Why isn't anybody bringing a class action lawsuit against car manufacturers, polluting factories, or governments that refuse to control toxic emissions?

In HK we choke on severely polluted air every day and yet 'our' unelected government is doing absolutely nothing to tackle the problem. Its inaction is criminal.

This government banned smoking in offices, bars, restaurants, karaoke clubs, night clubs, parks and beaches, instead of letting patrons choose smoke-free establishments and areas. So, no allowances are made for smokers, and yet idle engines can freely spew toxic fumes, power companies can keep burning coal without any emission caps (filters? what filters?), developers can turn our streets into canyons where car fumes are trapped for us all to breathe, building managers are free to set air-cons on freezing temperatures (are they all China Power & Light shareholders?), and i could go on and on.

There is nowhere to run. No pollution-free areas. The fact that walking and breathing at street level feels just as bad as clubbing all night in a smoke-filled club (but is much less fun!) should make all the rabid anti-smoking campaigners organize sit-ins in our busy road junctions...where are they? Still celebrating the fact that their clothes no longer smell of tobacco??

I don't care much for Christmas, but i have a Christmas wish to make: I wish i could see Donald Tsang and most Exco members kept in a cage in Gloucester Road, right next to the Cross-Harbour tunnel, or maybe Hennessy Road, for at least 12 hours. Let them sit there at street level, where we mortals walk everyday. Maybe once they share our fate they will start to see the light...through what they insist calling "haze".

Fashion...and its victims

2007-12-16T19:47:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday i went shopping for a new pair of jeans. I don't particularly enjoy shopping, but when my last pair of jeans fell apart after ten years, i knew i had no choice but to replace them.
I tend to get emotionally attached to my clothes - each item is the equivalent of a Proustian madeleine that triggers rich memories - that's why i am so reluctant to throw them away. The idea that clothes are disposable and should be replaced before the end of their natural life never crossed my mind. I seem to love my clothes more than fashion trends.

Well, replacing my beloved and trusted jeans proved more difficult than I thought. And i am not talking about the grieving process.
Shops that sell casual wear are stocked with overpriced "designer" jeans that look worse than my old ones: worn-out, rotten, thread-bare or dirty.

If this is what we are supposed to be wearing this season, why would anybody pay
HK$ 2,000 to buy a pair of jeans that have been stone-washed, sand-blasted, bleached, stained, ripped and...branded? They are already falling apart, and look as if they won't last more than one season, that is, if they don't go out of fashion before (wait a couple of months and some fashion "guru" will inform us that they are "so last year" and that we are supposed to chuck them in the bin before we are arrested and stoned to death for committing such a crime against fashion)

If wearing dirty jeans with holes makes you feel and look better, that's fine. I am not an arbiter of taste. But i know that the look can be easily reproduced by wearing your jeans for a few seasons, owning only one pair, or shopping in a second-hand store.

Now the question is:

Why can't these fashion designers buy second-hand jeans and restyle them for the fashion victims instead of using chemicals to make new denim look old? Just imagine how much energy and resources would be saved if they re-stitched old denim.

Unfortunately "sustainable clothing" is still an oxymoron in a world where fashions change every few months and consumers spend more than $1 trillion a year on clothing and textiles, an estimated one-third of that in Western Europe, another third in North America, and about a quarter in Asia. In many places, cheap, readily disposable clothes have displaced durable, good quality clothes that used to last for years.

The environmental impact of fast-food is well known, but only a few critics have dared to talk about the impact of fast-clothes: cheap, fashionable, low-quality rags that last only for a few months...they are not meant to last, as fashion trends change every season.

The environmental impact of this madness is huge. The victims of fashion are not only the shopaholics that go into debt to buy the latest fashion "must-have" (i have little sympathy for them) but the rest of us who see landfills encroach on parks, factories discharge chemicals in our rivers, cotton fields destroy eco-systems, etc. The production, packaging and transportation of the clothes adds to the huge carbon footprint of the fast-fashion industry.

Cheap clothes also mean sweatshop conditions for millions of workers in developing countries. Behind all the hype that surrounds fashion, the reality is very grim. Behind the label is an exploited worker, out of sight, out of mind.

Hong Kong Air Pollution Index

2007-12-08T06:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the highest roadside API [Air Pollution Index] was 151, which is also the highest this year, followed by 147 on October 7. This level translates as 'very high" on the scale provided to the general public by the EPD (Dept. of Environmental Protection) and the HK Weather Observatory

As a general rule of thumb, a "high" API reading rates as a health hazard under the European Union or World Health Organisation standards. Immediate measures would be taken to reduce the number of cars allowed on the road on days where the index is "high" or "very high". Not in HK. Here smog has been renamed "haze". So when the weather forecasts inform us of "hazy days ahead" we should blame the monsoons, leave the camera at home, and keep jogging in Bowen Road.

The Greenpeace API - it takes the figures from the EPD air monitoring stations, and convert them in a calculation based on the World Health Organization Air Quality Objectives (AQO) - is staggeringly higher. For instance, in Causeway Bay, when the official API reads 85, "high", the Greenpeace Index reads 299! Hence, roadside pollution is HK is constantly well above levels regarded as hazardous by the WHO.

The HK government not only refuses to acknowledge the serious health threat posed by such pollution levels, it holds on to outdated air quality objectives, arguing that countries such as Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam etc. have set the same objectives.

And yet when it comes to selling us white elephants like the WKCD, 'our' governemt claims that HK is a 'world city', and needs state-of-the-art cultural facilities.

We are either a first world city or a third world one. But we are told to leave logic aside and go with the spin. First world one day, third world the next.

As to the thousands of people who die of lung cancer every year despite the fact they never smoked a cigarette, let's blame "passive smoking", surely one of their co-workers, distant cousin, or neighbour must have been a smoker.

Just another type of plastic bags...Hong Kong retailers' answer to criticism

2007-12-04T19:57:00.000-08:00

Hong Kong retailers have long been criticised for handing out too many plastic bags to their customers. And Hong Kong shoppers are notorious for putting their convenience above anything else. Environmental concerns are dismissed with a shrug. So far the government has failed to come up with legislation to reduce the overuse of plastic bags - a plastic tax would easily solve the problem, but goes against the neo-liberist ethos that ensures the interests of a minority overrule those of the majority. In this depressing context local retailers have come up with a solution that is worse than the problem.

Now they hand out non-woven, polypropylene tote bags... for free. These bags are worse than plastic bags as they can't even be recycled as bin liners. They just end up in landfills, as customers have no incentive to re-use them....they are free!

Making the customer pay for biodegradable plastic bags that can be re-used as bin-liners is the only way to reduce their number. Consumers would start bringing their own bags once they had enough bags for their bins. All non-biodegradable shopping bags should be banned. Easy. But apparently this solution doesn't please the lobby of plastic bags manufacturers, nor retailers who treat their customers like children who must be spoilt.

Nespresso, another wave of yuppie shite hits HK

2007-11-26T07:55:00.000-08:00

A few days ago i walked past the Nespresso shop in the IFC mall, and it took me a while to realise that the brightly coloured pods, artfully piled in the shop window, were not complimentary chocolates given away with overpriced coffee machines but something far more sinister. Apparently Nestle' has devised a new way to maximise landfill waste, and energy consumption. These geniuses have come up with yet again another ridiculous product: a huge, expensive, unwieldy power-hungry machine that requires individual plastic pods to make coffee. For each espresso you drink, one plastic pod ends up in the bin, and your electricity meter turns faster.

We have a perfectly good drink you can make at any time with the assistance of some hot water and a caffettiera. So what do the marketeers do? Package the stuff in individual plastic containers and then call it a lifestyle choice.

Have Nestle secretly decided to completely bugger up the planet, one pathetic little "coffee" pisspot at a time?

RTHK "civic education"

2007-10-22T21:20:00.000-07:00

RTHK, the Hong Kong publicly-funded brodcaster, has been "entertaining" us with civic education campaigns for as long as i can remember. Topics range from oral hygiene (brush your teeth, fight gum disease), to travel insurance (HK is probably the only country in the world where buying travel insurance is regarded as a civic duty!) to pest control (the infamous "rodent nuisance" campaign) to family love (love your family, help your wife with housework, tell your children you love them) to Japanese encephalitis (stirring up anti-Japanese sentiments is always a good way to promote national pride, even when all evidence points to the Mainland as the hotbed for this type of encephalitis). Now the latest campaign suggests that "we all need culture", and urges the public to support the West Kowloon Cultural District.
So, now, be a good citizen, forfeit your right to clean air and green spaces, wear a gas mask and start practising how to be cultured.

More on WKCD. Laissez-faire...HK style

2007-10-12T22:37:00.000-07:00

Hong Kong was known as a place thriving on laissez-faire principles. Though I doubt this was ever fully true, the Hong Kong Government to a large extent facilitates big business and grants privileges to powerful lobbies, while adopting a truly laissez-faire approach on issues such as environmental protection, the minimum wage and the very unequal distribution of wealth.
The WKCD seems to arise from the same philosophy, with government conceiving a large project the realization of which will mainly benefit developers and vested interests.
In a city where arthouse cinemas had to close down because of poor attendance, concert halls are half empty, and museums are not doing much better, one can only question the agenda of those who support the WKCD. If they defend the government intervention on cultural matters, how can they stick to neo-liberalist, laissez-faire policies on welfare and environmental matters without falling into contradiction?

According to government plans for the WKCD, its 'crown jewel' will be a huge M+ art museum (the size of the Tate Gallery in London) that will mainly show modern and contemporary art. While there is little doubt that artworks have become a commodity - they are traded, bought and sold by collectors and speculators, and the value of such works rise according to where they are shown, which collections they are part of, etc.- one wonders why HK taxpayers should foot the bill. If the market system is so perfect, can't we just wait until galleries, collectors, and other art aficionados reach deep into their pockets and set up a private museum? From what i can tell, public and private museums show exactly the same artists.

Let art collectors open their collections to the public, if they wish to do so, but build a museum for them? Let artists showcase art works in their studios. Let galleries do their job of selling art, but i hate the idea that my money is spent to facilitate them rather than being used to build and staff hospitals, improve the quality of education by paying teachers a decent salary, help the elderly and the unemployed live with dignity, protect the environment, improve public transport. In short, benefit the community as a whole, not a particular group.

The government is not building churches, and rightly so. Christians make donations to build their places of worship, and so do Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. Museums are places for art worshippers. But not everyone worships the same kind of art. What i regard as art, another person might regard as rubbish, and viceversa. There is no canon for contemporary art, its measurable value is determined by market forces...as to its intrinsic value, well... that is just a matter of taste. Truly subjective, like religion.

HK taxpayers are asked to contribute to a sector of the economy that generates huge profits for a minority of wealthy investors. What next? A public museum where local tycoons can show off their old Bentleys and Rolls Royces? Some might argue that cars too are cultural artefacts. And following this logic, why not a museum where fashion designers can show their collections? Where do we draw the line?

Fashion designers, artists, designers etc. are professionals who have embraced the market economy the same way dentists, lawyers, fortune tellers, architects, etc. have. So, why should taxpayers' money be spent on them? They certainly don't need more venues to showcase their work....they have art fairs and galleries. Art lovers can walk into a gallery if they like to see original works, or browse the Internet, art books and magazines for images. As to the few artists who have turned their back to the market economy, and have a genuine political and social agenda, they can install their works in public spaces and reach a much wider audience by doing so. Site-specific art doesn't need museums. If anything, it has always been very critical of this institution and looked for alternative spaces. This is the art i like, and don't expect to find it in a museum.

How can a museum showcasing the commodified works of millionaire artists (and shrewd businessmen) contribute to the cultural development of HK residents and visitors? How do we define culture?

WKCD deconstructed

2007-10-10T09:40:00.000-07:00

Hong Kong legislator Emily Lau can spot a white elephant from miles away!

Here she speaks in support to Alan Leong's motion and uses hard data to counter the fluff we have become so accustomed to.

"Mr Deputy, as far as I can observe, and as mentioned by some Members already, the utilization rates and patronage of most existing cultural facilities have been on a general decline in recent years. For example, the number of visitors to the Hong Kong Heritage Museum has dropped from some 800 000 in 2001-02 to just 460 000 in 2003-04. In the case of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, there used to be 250 000 visitors a year, but now there are just 220 000. As for the Hong Kong Film Archive, the number has dropped from 120 000 to 85 000. When it comes to performance venues, the number of visitors to the City Hall has, for example, dropped from 400 000 in 2001 to 370 000 at present. The utilization rates of the Ko Shan Theatre, Ngau Chi Wan Civic Centre, Sai Wan Ho Civic Centre, Sheung Wan Civic Centre, Hong Kong Coliseum and the sports complexes in Tsuen Wan, Tuen Mun, the North District, Tai Po, Sha Tin, Kwai Tsing and Yuen Long have all been declining. The only exception is the Queen Elizabeth Stadium. When the utilization rates of these facilities are all declining, how can we be so confident that all the new facilities in the WKCD development will not become white elephants?"

To read the rest of her speech, check out Emily Lau's website:
www.emilylau.org.hk

No minimum wage in HK

2007-10-09T21:16:00.000-07:00

While the government is planning to spend HK$ 19 billions on the WKCD white elephant, poverty among workers in wealthy Hong Kong has almost doubled to more than 418,000 people over the past decade. The rich-poor divide is widening as the Hong Kong's economy improves. More than twice as many people in the city of 6.9 million earn 3,000 Hong Kong dollars (385 US dollars) or less than a decade ago.
A recent study by the Hong Kong Council for Social Services found that more than 20 percent of Hong Kong families - 1.33 million people - now live on monthly incomes of less than $900 for a two-person household and $1,500 for a four-person household.

Welfare and labour groups in Hong Kong have long campaigned for increased workers' rights and a minimum wage.
However, the government has repeatedly resisted the demands.

The infamous French queen Marie-Antoinette suggested that workers who couldn't afford to buy bread, should eat croissants instead, our unelected government (similarly out of touch with its subjects) seems to think that those who can't pay rent, buy food, or afford a bus ticket, should appreciate art and shut up.

Art at the service of real-estate speculation

2007-10-09T20:33:00.000-07:00

Hong Kong used to be a city with a vibrant street culture. When life in the streets was so exciting, who needed museums?
So, first they had to kill all expressions of collective creativity in order to create the need for institutional and commodified forms of creativity (the museum, the concert hall) Organic, spontaneous life forms had to be replaced by their anaemic copies.

The artist becomes the high priest of this commodified society of the spectacle. In a society without "malaise"one might expect to see that "the artist is not a special kind of person, but each person is a special kind of artist."

Where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

The spectacle in general is the concrete inversion of life.

West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD). Another white elephant?

2007-10-09T19:06:00.000-07:00

Before the current proposals, the site had been earmarked for a WATERFRONT PARK. In 1998, then chief executive Tung Chee-hwa announced a "state-of- the-art performance venue" for the site. The government admits that this project was not "demand-led" but "supply-led". That is, HK people don't need another white elephant (we already have Cyberport!)
Concept plans were submitted in 2001 followed by invitations to developers for preliminary plans in 2003.

A couple of years later, the government buckled under pressure and announced a scaled-down proposal for the development of the 40-hectare harborfront site at the southern tip of the West Kowloon reclamation into what it calls a "world- class cultural district."

The new proposal sought to allay fears that the government colluded with big developers by limiting the land open to a single developer to 20 hectares and opening up the other half to multiple developers.

Under the revised proposal, one of the three short-listed bidders will win sole-development rights to at least half of the residential and commercial land, with the remaining land put up for open tender.

The large Waterfront Park this city misses so much is traded for a mix of residential towers, shopping malls, and cultural facilities. The collusion between the unelected government and big business means that yet another huge plot of land is stolen from the people and handed over to developers who will capitalise on it.

An opinion poll conducted by HK alternatives revealed that:

1. 81% prefer cultural plus leisure facilities including a large green park;
2. When given full information on the cost and visual impact, 77% oppose a canopy;
3. 90% of the respondents support planning and development by an Authority or quasi-Government agencies – only 6% opted for management by private developers;
4. 65% believe that harbour reclamation was excessive;
5. 72% objected to commercial and residential development on the west Kowloon Cultural District ;
6. 62% believe Hong Kong does not have sufficient open space and green parks;
7. 64% believe Hong Kong lags behind international cities in terms of open space and parks;
8. 90% liked the idea of developing Hong Kong into an environmentally friendly city.

The results are very different from what government surveys claim. In the consultation process, the public was invited to choose one of three different proposals submitted by developers, the alternative option of having a park dotted with some small cultural venues was never included in the government surveys.

As a long-term resident, educator and cultural critic i firmly oppose rushing through the WKCD against the real needs
of the community.
If a lesson is to be learned from Cyberport - a huge white elephant, with very low occupancy that totally failed to become the regional hub for high-tech research we were promised by its supporters - the government should consider investing on education before planning any expansion of existing cultural facilities.

Hong Kong has a large number of empty industrial buildings and a few heritage buildings that can be converted into
cultural facilities. Private galleries and artists have already rented space in districts such as Kwun Tong, Fo Tan etc. to meet their needs. The art sector here is so small, that supply far exceeds demand.
On the other hand, in such a polluted and congested city, everybody needs green open space. Hong Kong people still work ridiculous long hours, and can't even find the time to play with their children, let alone visit museum exhibitions. HK schools don't put enough resources and emphasis on art education, a pre-condition for art appreciation and production.

Furthermore, why should art be exhibited in purposedly-built museums? Art installations can be placed anywhere! And, after killing all cultural life in old districts, removing street markets (and street life) by making room for yet more shopping malls, they are trying to make us pay a museum ticket to enjoy a bad copy, a sanitised version of it in a white cube.
It's a bit like killing the remaining wildlife and building a zoo!

Nobody reads on the MTR

2007-09-19T22:32:00.000-07:00

why oh why?
In other cities the sight of readers is less uncommon than here in HK. People are either playing videogames on their mobile phone/gameboy, or sleeping. I often have the feeling that this is a city deprived of sleep!
And if someone is reading, you can be sure it's a celebrity magazine, a computer manual or a comic book. Whatever happened to readers??
And where are the working class intellectuals of former times?

One of the good things about growing up in the 60s is that my family had no idea what college was about. Nobody in my family had ever been to college or even cared to finish high school in most cases. So years later as an adult when I got a chance to study, I was still under the illusion that I was supposed to improve my mind and understanding of life. I studied what I wanted to and pursued a rather eccentric, off-again, on-again non-program according to whatever personal pull I felt toward various subjects and ideas. I don’t think vocation or future employment even crossed my mind once in the process.

Working at odd jobs during the day, taking long sabbaticals from work to go out with friends, reading and writing at night. The point being that I was having a helluva good time, was absolutely exhilarated with learning and with escaping the intellectual darkness of my family Anyway, that spun me off into an orbit and an intellectual trajectory that I consider uniquely mine, one I feel that I really own, one that fits me like a good pair of shoes. I don’t know if that is even possible today. Do you? The only people I am meeting who have grown their own consciousness and intellectual lives to their own specifications did it while studying in prison. Do you have to go to prison these days to get a real education?
Most of my friends back then were not college graduates, but had read extensively and we could discuss ANYTHING, Marx, Freud, or Adorno. They read stuff that today college students can't even access, unless they are doing a Ph.D on that subject.

In any event, I read the whole time, and so did my mates. Extra money went to books.. If we had no money we went to libraries. One could have some pretty fascinating conversations there with old dope fiends, unemployed factory workers…and yeah, ex cons. So what is it today? Why do I meet so few young people who have this curiosity? It’s a strange generation-one so afflicted with technology. Addicted to gadgets, which is so passive in a way. Afraid of nature, of the night, of different kinds of people. Of course education couldn’t be worse, even at junior high level. Nothing is taught. Studying for a degree that teaches people how to become good slaves to the system.

Buy less...live better

2007-09-19T21:42:00.000-07:00

Ownership can be a burden. Once you buy something, you have to carry it around, fix it, remember where you put it, and keep it clean. "He who owns little is little owned" (Henry David Thoreau)

How to stop buying and reduce your ecological footprint on the planet?
It's actually not difficult!

1)
Practice reverse snobbery. Express contempt for people who mindlessly buy things. This has two benefits: It raises the act of not buying things to a lofty moral height, from which you can denigrate others, and you get to enjoy the irony of simultaneously being a snob while making fun of other snobs.

2)
Go to shopping malls and department stores and briefly let your materialistic impulses loose. Try on a bunch of sweaters and choose three or four. Add a few ties or scarves. Walk around for a few minutes enjoying your stack of loot. Then put it back on the shelf and walk out. Think about how unnecessary that stuff is. You probably already have something just like it. What a relief to not have more junk around the house.

3)
Get satisfaction from money saved, not money spent. You will be able to work less and still live comfortably.

4)
Become a scrounger. Old bicycles, furniture, building materials, vehicles, books and clothing are everywhere, once you start looking. Become skilled at resurrecting old stuff and finding uses for it. Take pride in being an eccentric recycler.

5)
Look for barter opportunities. Swap.

6)
Consider having a "buy nothing Christmas" this year. You can find details at BuyNothingChristmas.org.

Plastic bags levy

2007-09-19T19:59:00.000-07:00

HK lawmakers are closer to passing an environmental levy to cut plastic bag use in Hong Kong. “No Plastic Bag Day” campaigns may become permanent. According to a report released recently by Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department, Hong Kong throws out over 8 billion plastic shopping bags every year (that’s more than 3 bags per person a day).

The proposed plan will work in phases—chain or large supermarkets will be among the first retailers required to charge HK 50 cents for each plastic bag. This alone is predicted to cut plastic bag use in Hong Kong by a billion in just one year.

Though i am in favour of this tax, i can't stop thinking that it comes short of hitting the nail on the head.
A more effective move would be to ban all non-bio-degradable bags, so that retailers would switch to the slightly more expensive bio-degradable ones, and charge consumers 50 cents to recoup the cost.
We would buy only the bags we need as bin-liners, and learn to bring our own bag.

One more note: why stop at plastic bags?? HK lawmakers should tax the even more common litter elements: styrofoam cups and lunch boxes (from every fast food outlet), and plastic bottles.
Such a tax would force fast-food outlets to opt for recycled cardboard boxes instead of styrofoam ones, or to give a discount to people who bring their own re-usable lunch box.
Most office workers have coffee in disposable cups from the same coffee shop everyday. If they were charged for the cup, they would certainly start bringing their own flask!

And if the government were serious about the environment, it would set clear guidelines for the import of goods, requiring producers to reduce excessive packaging. There is no reason why fruit should be individually wrapped in a styrofoam mesh, or consumer products come in fancy boxes twice as big as the product itself. As most goods are imported, it would not hurt the local economy (the usual excuse for inaction!)

Faking it

2007-06-27T07:48:00.000-07:00

The South China Morning Post recently published an article that decried the rapid spread of fake degrees and qualifications in Asia.

I believe that instead of focusing on the many obvious objections that could be made against fake degrees, it might be more instructive to ask what are the conditions that make the fake possible.

Ackbar Abbas defined the fake as a suspect object, one that makes us take a suspicious and critical attitude at the system of such objects, in this case the commodification of education, the transformation of education into a commercial relationship.

When education becomes essentially something with exchange value, something to be bought and sold, inevitably the 'sign' (that is the degree) starts to replace the 'thing'.

As an educator with 15 years experience in teaching at university level, I have become totally disillusioned about the sustainability of such a system. The universities I have worked for doled out MA degrees to students who can’t even write a short essay but had the money to pay for it. How many students actually fail to bring home the degree they pay for? Universities can’t be selective when their goal is customer’s satisfaction.

The current system fails motivated students, motivated educators and ultimately, and ironically, the market they bend backward to please. As there is no longer any correlation between knowledge and degrees, the difference between the original and the fake lies only in the latter’s cheaper price.

I have long stopped to be impressed by a string of academic qualifications after a person’s name. In my eyes they are fashion accessories, like the ubiquitous LV bag. You can’t buy taste, you can’t buy knowledge. I have more respect for people with a genuine thirst for knowledge, the bus conductor who reads a Chinese classic during his break, the domestic helper who reads a history book, while her employer with an MBA (must-buy-accessory) watches the Apprentice on DVD.

What the hell is a lifestyle brand???

2007-05-23T08:37:00.000-07:00

Never mind that in HK having a life and making a living is hard enough, the marketeers are now trying to sell us "lifestyle" brands and products.
The concept of "lifestyle" is so wacko even they can't define it.
Ok, let's just look at one example. Kosmo, a New York chain of cafes that is now going global. These cafes are popping up not only in HK, but in China too.
Their website, and brochures (forget the trees) claim " Kosmo is a wellness lifestyle brand. We are what we eat, what we think, what we drink, and what we do. Wellness is simply doing the things that keep you well. Eat well. Sleep well. Laugh well. Work well. Rest well. Think well. Wellness is not a new idea. But it's an idea whose time has come. The world is waking up to wellness."
Let's pause for a moment. Whose wellness are we talking about? Probably the chain's owner. Certainly not mine. How could a HK$ 30 fruit juice made of frozen fruit be better than a freshly squeezed one sold for HK$10 by a lady with a juicer working out of a stall? Not only the juices are made of frozen fruit, but they are sold in cafes pasted with slogans such as "Do good, feel good". Please spare me your corporate mission. It's bullshit and sounds Orwellian. I don't care if they donate 10 or 50 cents to charities. Why don't they pay their staff a decent wage first? The lower the wages, the more charitable all these corporations become. Workers deserve decent wages, not charity. Poverty is a by-product of skewed labour relations, not some kind of inevitable accident. Charities make poverty sound like a law of nature. You are poor, they feel sorry for you and hand you a crumb of their pie, for which you are supposed to be eternally grateful. This logic makes me sick.

You walk into any of these Kosmo cafes, pay through your nose for some crappy juice with a quirky name like "Berry Buzz", which comes ina disposable plastic cup and you are supposed to buy into their corporate mantra "Wellness is more than simply taking care of our stomach. It's about feeling good about ourselves, and this, we believe, can best be achieved by doing good things and good deeds, helping others, and caring for Mother Earth." Yeah, right.

Business with a soul, they call it. The religious overtones are just as sickening. Can anybody show me a religious text stating that businesses have a soul? If so, is it a collective or an individual soul? Would they need to confess and repent to go to heaven? Or maybe they believe in re-incarnation, or the transmigration of the soul? What religion did they buy into, apart from "In the almighty dollar we trust"?

2007-04-10T10:12:00.000-07:00

My favourite pink building in Wanchai. RIP

2007-04-10T10:10:00.000-07:00

Soon to be replaced by yet another glass and steel monstruosity

2007-04-10T10:04:00.000-07:00

Requiem for Lee Tung Street aka Wedding Card street

2007-04-10T09:55:00.000-07:00

The Urban Renewal Authority (read the Urban "Razing to the ground" Authority) has dealt another blow to HK street life.
Lee Tung street is dead. But its ghosts are hungry for blood

The day people took back the streets of Wanchai!

2007-04-08T23:54:00.000-07:00

Down with WTO! The Korean workers rock!!!

Class recomposition

2007-04-08T23:36:00.000-07:00

In the age of extreme individualism, the corollary to neo-liberalism, what hope is there for class recomposition?

How can class consciousness develop when people cannot identify with any historical definition of class, and define themselves through consumption rather than their position with respect to capital valorization?

Who am I???

2007-04-08T21:03:00.000-07:00

I realised that we lack a word to define those who Marx described as "proletarians". But this word has lost must of its descriptive power, given that it translates as "people who have nothing except their offsprings", and brings to mind ragged families with 10 children to feed (Proles meaning offsprings in Latin). It can't describe people like myself who have no children.
So given that capitalism is still around and well, profits are soaring, and if anything exploitation has increased proportionally and now reaches every corner of the globe, how do we call the exploited masses?? Working class? This term sounds a bit too vague, even the exploiters work, and some of the exploited now own the means of production, but are no less exploited because of that. Owning my own computer (which is my mean of production) doesn't make me less exploited.

According to Marxism, capitalism is a system based on the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie (the "capitalists", who own and control the means of production). This exploitation takes place as follows: the workers, who own no means of production of their own, must seek jobs in order to live. They get hired by a capitalist and work for him, producing some sort of goods or services. These goods or services then become the property of the capitalist, who sells them and gets a certain amount of money in exchange. One part of the wealth produced is used to pay the workers' wages, while the other part (surplus value) is split between the capitalist's private takings (profit), and the money used to pay rent, buy supplies and renew the forces of production. Thus the capitalist can earn money (profit) from the work of his employees without actually doing any work, or in excess of his own work. Marxists argue that new wealth is created through work; therefore, if someone gains wealth that he did not work for, then someone else works and does not receive the full wealth created by his work. In other words, that "someone else" is exploited. Capitalists make a profit by exploiting workers.

Not having a current word to describe members of the exploited class makes me think of George Orwell's 1984. This is 1984...just a few years later than he predicted.
The chapter on Newspeak. Certain words such as "exploitation" seems to have gone out of use, and when i do use it, people look at me as if i spoke an incomprehensible dialect. The world we live in has almost all the characteristics that Orwell described so well in his fiction.

"The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as " This dog is free from lice " or " This field is free from weeds ". It could not be used in its old sense of " politically free " or " intellectually free " since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum."

So, who am I ?

A disobedient, undisciplined teacher, an immigrant, an environmentalist, a disillusioned university lecturer, a lady who likes a riot, a bullshit spotter.

Excerpt from David Smith's article

2007-04-08T06:05:00.000-07:00

David Smith interviewed Jonathon Porritt for The Observer:

'Fascism. Communism. Democracy. Religion. But only one has achieved total supremacy. Its compulsive attractions rob its followers of reason and good sense. It has created unsustainable inequalities and threatened to tear apart the very fabric of our society. More powerful than any cause or even religion, it has reached into every corner of the globe. It is consumerism.

According to Porritt, we have become a generation of shopaholics. We are bombarded by advertising from every medium which persuades us that the more we consume, the better our lives will be. Shopping is equated with fun, fulfilment and self-identity. It is also, Porritt warns, killing the planet. He argues, in an interview with The Observer, that merely switching to 'ethical' shopping is not enough. We must shop less.

Last week 3,000 people stormed Primark's new flagship store on London's Oxford Street before the official opening time, putting two staff in hospital and earning the description by BBC2's Newsnight of 'a plague of locusts'. There are, however, a growing number of dissenting voices such as the so-called 'Froogles', individuals who use the internet to seek a simpler lifestyle, and organisations and websites which urge people to kick the retail habit.

Porritt, chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission, has concluded that consumerism is central to the threat facing the planet, cannibalising its natural resources and producing the carbon dioxide emissions which result in climate change.

In a film for Channel Five, he points out that Britons throw away their own body weight in rubbish every seven weeks, with 100 million tonnes of waste pouring into the country's 12,000 landfill sites every year. If all six billion people in the world were to consume at the same level, we would need two new Earths to supply all the energy, soil, water and raw materials required.

'I think capitalism is patently unable to go on growing the size of the consumer economy for any more people in the world today because levels of consumption are already undermining life support systems on which we depend - so if we do it for any more people, the planet will go pop,' Porritt told The Observer. 'So in a way we don't have a choice about this: we've got to rethink the basic premise behind capitalism to make it deliver the goods. In the long run, when you really look at what happens on a planet with nine billion people and really serious constraints on the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that we can emit, it's almost inevitable we will learn to have more elegant, satisfying lives, consuming less. I can't see any way out of that in the long run.'

'Shopping has become a recreational activity,' he continued. 'There's a lot of evidence that people really do see shopping now as an amenity pastime. We're well beyond the time where shopping was just a way of transacting what you needed in life. It's now all about identity and status and recreation and companionship, even about meaning in people's lives. There's always been a "keeping up with the Joneses" type thing, but it's now almost universalised and there is a sense of buying to be more like something or to get the image of somebody, particularly with clothes or branded goods, where there's very much that sense of, "If I buy something with this name on it, maybe a little bit of the magic of that name will rub off on me and I'll be a better person", whereas we all know you're exactly the same person just waiting to go out and make your next branded purchase.'

The Primark episode brings to mind what happened here when H&M opened their first HK store last month. Is there anything sadder than seeing hundreds of people queuing up for hours in order to walk into a shop and part with their hard-earned cash???

Sick picture in the D&G shop window

2007-04-08T05:29:00.000-07:00

Their new window display contains a huge picture of a woman held to the ground by a man, while other three other men watch. If this is not suggestive of gang rape, then what is?

Why do I have to put up with D&G's misogyny, violence and vulgarity? This ad was banned in Europe, but apparently they thought they could recycle it for the HK market.

They claim their advertising campaign is an act of "artistic transgression". Well, there is nothing transgressive about staging a gang rape for the camera.

Throwing a stone in their window...this would be my idea of transgression!

Bring back the opium dens

2007-04-07T22:30:00.000-07:00

Hong Kong has been malled to death...the mall saturation is such that you can walk half a mile and go through three malls that sell the same brands. There is virtually no escape. If you walk at street level you choke on traffic pollution, if you take a footbridge you are herded through a mall. The city is designed around her malls...and pedestrians can't avoid the visual pollution of wall-to-wall advertisements and consumer goods on display.

Consumerism is a devastating addiction. Marx called religion 'the opium of the people', if consumerism is the new religion, i wonder what the old fellow would compare it to.
Because in my opinion, opium seems a fairly benign substance, and processing poppies to extract a numbing substance produces little waste. I am no expert on the extraction process, but I would rather walk through a poppy field than by an oil refinery, or a river that has turned red because of toxic waste. As to those who smoke opium...well, they are probably so content that they can easily do without the latest mobile phone or Gucci bag.

No, consumerism is not the opium that paralyzes the masses, it's more like cancer.
I would say...bring back the opium dens...

An important contribution to the critique of consumer capitalism has been made by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler argues that capitalism today is governed not by production but by mass consumption, and that the techniques used to create consumer behavior amount to the destruction of psychic and collective individuation. The diversion of libidinal energy toward the consumption of consumer products, he argues, results in an addictive cycle, leading to hyperconsumption, the exhaustion of desire, and the reign of symbolic misery. Stiegler discusses consumer capitalism in his article "The Disaffected Individual".

Consumer capitalism has a more pernicious effect on the planet than any other stage of capitalism ever had. In this lies its weakness.
In the 60s,70s and early 80s the labour movement was well organised and successfully fought for better working conditions and higher salaries. But then capitalists exploited the opportunities offered by globalization, and simply transferred their production lines to poorer countries, where workers could be paid less, were less organised and had less bargaining power.
Now capitalism can only survive by exploting new markets, by cohercing people to absorb its over-production through reckless consumption. The ball is now in our corner again. Our class identity has been undermined, but some weapons are still in our hands. We have been turned into consumers, but this doesn't mean total subjugation to the diktats of consumer capitalism. As consumers we have a huge power, we can fight corporate capitalism more successfully by not buying than by demanding higher wages (we all know how impotent the unions are, and how difficult it is to achieve our goals as a working class) But we could work less, if we drastically reduced our demand for consumer goods. They make us work 8/10 hours a day to afford stuff we could do without. We could live more happily if we stopped working ourselves to death in order to satisfy a desire that has been manufactured and imposed on us.

If we stopped buying all the useless junk that fills shopping malls around the world, capitalism would enter in a state of crisis.
Yes, they can brainwash people in developing countries, but again, wages in those countries would have to be raised for them to afford the latest electronic product or designer bag. In the long run, the profits made by the fat cats would be seriously affected.

Stop buying...and put the fat cats on a diet!

Link to Bernard Stiegler's book The Disaffected Individual. You can read a translation of the third chapter here.
http://www.arsindustrialis.org/Members/pcrogan/disaffectedindividual