Scooter or no scooter?

I have been living in Taiwan for two years and a half and I am a pitiful pedestrian. As a matter of fact, in Taipei, the pedestrian is not at all the ruler of the street. The true king of the streets (and the sidewalks) in Taipei is the scooter.
At first it could look practical to move about the city on two motorized wheels as a real urbanite! Scooters are fast, not that expensive in Taiwan and easy to park… Easy to park? Really? There are more or less one million scooters in Taipei for its more than 2,600,000 population which means that there is almost one scooter for every three persons in the city! I could verify this number on a smaller scale citing my Taiwanese relatives: my family of four members living in Taipei owns a total of three scooters and two cars!

Moreover, scooters in Taipei are also a notorious danger for pedestrians, bicycles and for themselves! At least half of the people I know have had an accident involving a scooter and it’s astonishing to see how much the radiography rooms are crowded in the hospitals. A friend of mine, a hard-practicing-scooterer, once told me that she has to frequently bypass the security driving rules because of other scooters! For example, Taipei streets have on the largest streets a special place designated on the ground where scooters can wait for the light to become green; according to my friend, there is always one scooter starting to cross while the light is still red, then all the other scooters have also to cross at once so half of the herd is already in the middle of the street and the other half is urging poor you in the middle to do the same… I can still point out that, although everyone shares the same instinct of survival, the herds’ ways of acting are perhaps not the best ones to preserve one’s life and, in this case, they especially do discourage any courtesy between the street users.

Also, in the motorized jungle of the city, the scooters and motorcycles have their own predators: cars, taxis, trucks and buses. A new trend of smoking completely the windshield of four-wheel drives so that the driver cannot be seen from outside just worsens the discrepancy between the hard world of the street person and the safe cocoon of the big car. Apart from the fact that the people outside have no idea if the driver has spotted them or not, it also appears to be a lousy way to drive and to interact with others. If “I” feel good, I do not need to worry about others’ feelings even less about their safety.

For your information: production and sales of cars doubled in 2007 on the Chinese market which is the second biggest in the world after the US.

China's Environmental Challenge

During one of these “café conversations”, when one is remodelling the world with friends, the topic turned to China's Environmental Challenge. In fact, China’s environmental problem is a concern for the world and not only Asia. Recently an article from Spiegel Online (China's Poison for the Planet 2 February 2007) pinpointed the fact that China was most of all “An export world champion -- in pollution!”

From a global perspective or an inside view, the question is also how much are the Chinese people aware of environmental protection’s necessity? And how do Chinese individuals perceive their natural environment? It would mean that it is not only a matter of policy decided by an upper governance because, maybe at the end, the decision to cut the last tree or to overexploit the resources is to be made by individuals. But most of the individuals have almost no influence on the policies made by institutions like the WTO or the UN. Still, in the Chinese context, it may be mandatory to start with a focus on education and with the reinterpretation of the Chinese tradition to achieve a better relationship between development and nature.

Today’s favourites
Climate Change: a Call for World Governance and China's Environmental Challenge
by Benoit Vermander, chief editor.

Mon père a dit....

Enfant, j’aimais me glisser auprès des adultes et écouter leurs conversations. Cela me fascinait, la manière dont certains s’emportaient ou s’exprimaient sur des sujets dont je ne comprenais pas vraiment l’ampleur mais qui me paraissaient tout de même importants car discutés par des adultes. Je me souviens aussi que je prenais tout pour comptant : lorsque l’on est enfant, la vérité sort de la bouche des grands…

Plus tard, j’ai fait moi-même l’expérience de ces conversations à bâtons rompus, où l’on parle de tout et de rien, où l’on développe aussi l’art de parler pour ne rien dire et de parler de ce que l’on ne sait pas (notamment des livres que l’on n’a pas lus1).

Je veux parler ici d’une phrase que j’ai entendue dans la bouche de mon père et qui m’a considérablement marquée car elle me revient parfois à l’esprit. Récemment, nous discutions entre amis des effets du développement économique en Chine et dans le monde : notre point de départ étaient les flashs animations de Sabrina sur l’air, l’eau et les forêts en Chine ainsi qu’un article publié sur Spiegel Online (China's Poison for the Planet 2 Février 2007). Soudain, je me suis souvenue d’avoir entendu un jour mon père dire : « En fait, Mao était un écolo, il a retardé de trente ans le développement économique de la Chine et donc aussi la pollution planétaire que cela engendre… »

Outre le cynisme et le mauvais goût de la plaisanterie, le point de vue reflète aussi l’opinion assez partagée que le développement économique s’accompagne forcément du saccage de la nature (cela ne va sûrement pas rehausser l’éclat de ces propos, mais je me dois d’ajouter que mon père est toujours sobre, c’est d’ailleurs le seul pilier de bar que je connaisse à ne commander que du coca ou du sarsi –le coca chinois-). Depuis l’époque de cette phrase, les mentalités ont changé, les gouvernements aussi. Tout du moins dans les pays qui se sont développés plus tôt. Néanmoins, l’idée d’un développement durable essentiel et non pas seulement accessoire doit continuer à faire son chemin, aussi bien au niveau individuel qu’au niveau national et mondial.

Suggestions du Jour
Climate Change: a Call for World Governance et China's Environmental Challenge
par Benoit Vermander.

1A ce propos, un psychanalyste, Pierre Bayard, a sorti un livre Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus, mais je ne peux pas en dire plus…car je ne l’ai pas lu !