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PER ARDUA AD ASTRA Finding Strength through Adversity Lights around the world flickered off last Saturday without the usual accompanying hubbub of governments and corporate spouting platitudes about sustainability and protection, yet the largely symbolic act wasn’t shunned by governments struggling with their own healthcare crises. As millions joined each other to turn off their lights, this is a reminder that sustainability remains a grassroots process, a force which can only be contended with the support of the collective. At the heart of this is the individual, the catalysts for the change that we all seek. Ours is a generation which begins to realise the damage we impart on the planet around us; the next step is to mobilise and unite our world to protect the planet.
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RESILIENCE
LEADERSHIP
Syllabus-related teaching resources continue to be developed under the strong leadership of students.
We take pride in pragmatism and our ability to continue advancing our cause of sustainable development.
CONSULTATION
RESPONSIVENESS
The commencement of lower year induction activities is a testament to our emphasis on the inclusion of different year groups to ensure a smooth transition next year.
Adaptability and flexibility amidst these challenging times is an imperative of maintaining constant levels of productivity finding the silver lining of every cloud, we progress!
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NOTICES
LEARNING RESOURCES in early March, the Education Department has been hard at work to B eginning create curricula and accompanying learning resources for seven major subject
groups that can be used at virtually any level of instruction. So far, detailed course objectives and accompanying research documents have been produced for all seven subjects and are now awaiting approval from the Executive Committee before moving into the next phase – transferring all content into multimedia format for use in the classroom.
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
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s we hole ourselves up in our homes, the Council tirelessly continues its incessant improvement on our relations with the public. Sustainability, as always, holds utmost importance for us; this time, it is the sustainability of our connections with our readers and the wider school community. The Council has begun development of a curriculum based around environmental awareness and knowledge for our students, with the Education department spearheading this initiative. Progress has been and will continue to be rapid and of exceptional quality. Additionally, our Chairperson Solomon Lam and IT director Bryson Lo are working on a new website for the Council, to replace the previous, rather antiquated one.
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Recent Environmental News Complied by: Florence Wong Coronavirus shutdowns have unintended climate benefits: cleaner air, clearer water. NBC News. March 20, 2020 In Venice, the often murky canals recently began to get clearer, with fish visible in the water below. Italy’s efforts to limit the coronavirus meant an absence of boat traffic on the city’s famous waterways. And the changes happened quickly. The outbreak has, at least in part, contributed to a noticeable drop in pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in some countries. Satellite observations have shown that the temporary measures have also driven significant decreases in harmful emissions.”Carbon dioxide is tied to industrial activity, electricity production and transportation, so anything that affects those sectors will impact greenhouse gases, as well,” said Christopher Jones, lead developer of the CoolClimate Network, an applied research consortium at the University of California, Berkeley. Industrial operations in the coronavirus hotspot ground to a halt, and travel restrictions within China meant that air, rail and road traffic were paused or scaled back across some regions. According to Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Finland, the restrictions contributed to a 25 percent drop in 4
China’s carbon dioxide emissions over four weeks beginning in late January, compared to the same time last year. Myllyvirta’s analysis also found that industrial operations were reduced by 15 percent to 40 percent in some sectors and that coal consumption at power plants fell by 36 percent.” This is the first time I have seen such a dramatic dropoff over such a wide area for a specific event,” Fei Liu, an air quality researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement this month.” As we move to restart these economies, we need to use this moment to think about what we value,” she said. “Do we want to go back to the status quo, or do we want to tackle these big structural problems and restructure our economy and reduce emissions and pollution?” East Africa’s huge locust outbreak spreads to Congo. NBC News. Feb 26, 2020 Kenya, Somalia and Uganda have been battling the swarms in the worst locust outbreak that parts of East Africa have seen in 70 years. The FAO said mature locusts, carried in part by the wind, arrived on the western shore of Lake Albert in eastern Congo on Friday near the town of Bunia. The country has not seen locusts for 75 years, it said.”Needless to say the potential impact of locusts on a country still grappling
Issue 3 | March 2020
with complex conflict, Ebola and measles outbreaks, high levels of displacement, and chronic food insecurity would be devastating,” the U.N. officials said in the joint statement. A changing climate has contributed to this outbreak as a warming Indian Ocean means more powerful tropical cyclones hitting the region. A cyclone late last year in Somalia brought heavy rains that fed fresh vegetation to fuel the locusts that were carried in by the wind from the Arabian Peninsula. Desert locusts have a reproduction cycle of three months, the U.N. officials said, and mature swarms are laying eggs in vast areas of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, “many of which are already hatching.” “In just a few weeks, the next generation of the pests will transition from their juvenile stage and take wing in a renewed frenzy of destructive swarm activity,” the joint statement said. This is a time when farmers’ crops begin to sprout, which could devastate East Africa’s most important crop of the year, the U.N. officials said. “But that doesn’t have to happen,” they said. “The window of opportunity is still open. The time to act is now.” African swine fever destroying small pig farms, as factory farming booms The Guardian. March 11, 2020
Small farmers across the globe are losing out in the aftermath of the African swine fever (ASF) outbreak that killed a quarter of the world’s pig population, argues a new report. Nowhere is this more evident than China, where swine fever has hit the country’s nearly 40 million small-scale pig farmers hardest, says the report by non-profit organisation Grain. China’s long tradition of small-scale pig farming seems to be coming to an end because of a lack of government support to compensate for culled or diseased pigs, to pay for veterinary costs or chemicals for limiting the spread of ASF, and other biosecurity measures in existing facilities, according to Grain. After the first notification of the ASF outbreak in China in August 2018, the illness spread rapidly throughout the industry and led to the slaughter of millions of pigs within months. Just a year later, however, the startling rise in pork prices meant that, despite their losses, many of the biggest industrial pig producers were achieving record profits. As the government’s focus has shifted towards supporting
larger-scale production, smaller operations continue to be squeezed into contract farming operations for larger companies. “It is the combination of these two changes that has created the conditions for the rise of new epidemics [like ASF and others] in Asia’s pork sector,” Kuyek told the Guardian. Despite the fact that it is supposed to be safer, the huge scale of the industrial pig farming industry has propelled the crisis to a global scale, argues the Grain report. “In our view, this is what explains the scale of the recent outbreak. It would not have taken on such massive proportions if it had not penetrated into the global, industrial pork system.” The report argues that global meat producers are “using the pandemic that they helped to propagate as a political weapon to consolidate their dominance”. But Brett Stuart, co-founder of Global AgriTrends, an agriculture consulting firm based in the US, disagrees. “I’m not sure that ASF can be shown as a tool of the big companies,” he said. “The incred-
ible profits now are fuelling small farmer margins as well as large.” Stuart said: “The problem is that complicated diseases like ASF ultimately benefit those with enough scale to pay on-farm vets and implement feed milling procedures, that help protect herds. So while small farmers face a much more uncertain future, that is not enough evidence in my opinion to indict large farmers.” Rozstalnyy said early detection and containment of ASF outbreaks challenges both small and largescale operators and both sectors need to be vigilant about any risky practices and aware of establishing more bio-secure practices. “It doesn’t matter if it is a smallscale backyard farmer or workers at a large scale commercial farm, feed supplier, butcher, hunter or international traveller. [They all] need to strictly follow rules and regulations defined by governments to address risks related to ASF.”
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Exploring Humanistic Urban Design A historical enquiry into expressionist organicity Yui Hang Cheng If you’re reading this whilst you’re outside or on your way to somewhere else (in the post-pandemic future, of course), look up from your device, whatever it is, and just breathe. Let your instinct and emotions guide you as you traverse unfamiliar landscapes. Inquire into whatever previously unnoticed attractions you might stumble upon, and if you feel an irresistible urge to run towards that weirdly coloured streetlamp, go for it! No, this isn’t mindfulness, this is the dérive: an integral strategy to psychogeography and a blissful escape from your hectic urban life. In other words, a categorical rejection of the Spectacle. “Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”. Thus spoke political theorist Guy Debord’s, whose insistence in this aphorism - first of a multitude of sayings momentous in influence towards the zeitgeist of mid-century French left-wing activism - forms the core of what we call the Situationist movement. A movement that sought a return to pre-industrial conditions, against commodity fetishism, false consciousness and the psychological degradation that inevitably accompanies it in this false ‘representation’ - the Spectacle, although certainly not to the extent which anarcho-primitivists sought. Instrumental to combatting a world in which we are trapped in a constant present of hoarding and producing commodities as a 6
goal in and of itself is the creation of eponymous Situations - that is, constructing moments of passion (as in the dérive), recontextualising our immediate milieu and ridiculing the status quo by editing/ defamiliarising tools of alienation, ranging from run-of-the-mill films to commercial billboards. After all, as another of those 1968 slogans goes, ‘boredom is counterrevolutionary’. In one famous example of this (Can Dialectics Break Bricks, 1973), a martial arts film that coincidentally happens to have been originally produced in Hong Kong, gets redubbed with new dialogue about a struggle between Stalinist bureaucrats and workers. Evidently satirising organised hierarchies when equating union leaders with the former, there’s an amusing scene near the film’s beginning (12:10) where a bureaucrat cites the Vichy French motto before threatening action by sending in his sociologists. He goes on: “...my urban planners! My architects! My Foucaults!” This particular disdain for these two occupations seems quite laughable at first sight, but rather understandable amidst the context of modernist uniformity advocated by the likes of Le Corbusier and their evident distaste for structuralists and forms of social organisation that incapacitate class struggle. We revisit the idea of the dérive, whence this was derived. The
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Situationist movement itself was a successor of an earlier association of artists, the Letterist International, which arguably had a greater emphasis on the arts than theory. This practice of ambulating an unfamiliar terrain and mapping it based on passion/emotions without the use of formalistic geographical devices became grouped under what the Letterists called Unitary Urbanism, its underlying principles. This, in turn, had one of its own seminal texts: Formulary for a New Urbanism, written by a then 19-year-old male student of Paris. In this piece of satire that simultaneously presented his own visionary aspirations for a new form of urban design, he sees architecture as something much bigger, “a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space”; “a means of knowledge and a means of action.” His ideal city would be divided into quarters based on emotions associated with particular urban sights (the Sinister Quarter, for example, would have wailing sirens and auto-mobiles), whilst all itinerant inhabitants would be engaged in the dérive, exploring unpredictable, chaotic scenes. In this way, architecture and life would be fused into one, not based on the modernists’ functionalism but in an artistic sense. Buildings would be modifiable by its inhabitants, to ultimately create a grassroots-led experimental movement of con-
stant change - deriving a sense of historicity and surprise, but most of all, a sense of identity to be toyed with. Surprisingly prophetic for the time of its writing (1953), modernism was precisely criticised for its rigidity, uniformity and lack of human scale, especially the trend of prioritising smooth vehicular movement over pedestrian walkability, which led to concrete flyovers that physically divided communities. Perhaps rightfully so, the satire’s author equated modernist designs with prisons, and the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe complex stands as a testament to this fact; inflexibility and alienation plagued these designs from their very outset. Therefore, the tendency for a set of guiding principles, an ideology to stagnate amidst the overpowering stench of effluent must be counteracted by a continuous flow of user-directed change. In other words, for those who concur with the Letterists, the moment at which we identify the idiosyncrasies of decentralised aesthetic modifications as art is when architecture returns to its rightful owners: the people.
know who your neighbours are? Have you ever appreciated the effort whoever put into building that road right next to where you live? And finally, are you alienated from your temporal surroundings? Remember to create Situations of your own; this is praxis! Ideology and unapplied theory is the effective dictatorship of illusion. With today’s emphasis on flexibility and community comes a plethora of new ideas: living in underground holes covered by landscaped gardens, recyclable pods that can be moved across a network of buildings, or perhaps, in the far future, becoming a modified version of the itinerants described by the Letterists, continuously moving, exploring and inhabiting a superabundance of vacant homes. New Urbanism, a broad term now used in another
sense to describe a return to the social fabric of pre-industrial towns, is currently on the rise, and I am fully confident that this time, we’ve finally found a more appropriate trajectory of urban development: one that is finally founded on the human instincts of free exploration and creativity. NOTE: Any stances delineated herein are the author’s own, completely independent of and unaffiliated with the Environmental Council. Sources: https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/comments-against-urbanism/ https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm https://www.e-flux.com/journal/06/61400/in-conversation-with-raoul-vaneigem/ http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm#2.
Local governments have attempted to make forays into developing a similar concept for farming: designating areas as public nurseries, a deviation from the passivity that dominated the period of tumultuous architectural developments over the 20th century. And half a century on, although this future of ours didn’t turn out to have emotionally-guided architecture, we’re finally seeing a return of human-centred design in certain parts of the world, whilst uniform blocks are being replaced with greener spaces and buildings with variegated designs. Yet, there’s quite a lot to improve on. Do you Environmental Council
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Coronavirus Impacts on the Environment Bob Wong Recently, the coronavirus, more commonly known by code name COVID 19, has swept through society, taking people off guard. As from the start of the outbreak until now, people have been panic buying rice and toilet paper, disregarding government reassurances that everything is under control. But throughout the duration of the coronavirus, it seems like the environment has taken a backseat. It seems like a decade ago when the youth movement led by Greta Thunberg took to the streets to protest for climate action. As of now, people are stockpiling on tons of food and hand sanitizer and masks, most of which will never see the light of day as recent developments mean that an industrial vaccine is on the way. The coronavirus has more unseen impacts than just human loss of life. The environment is going to suffer in the long term from this virus. Demand for toilet paper means that trees are being cut down at an increasingly alarming rate to meet the demand, and replanting efforts have been minimal. The surplus of food that people have been gathering is piling up quick and fast, and when it’s all said and done most of that food will end up in landfills Although side effects of the coronavirus will impact the coronavirus in the long term, there are many things we, as responsible citizens, can do. We can follow government instructions to only buy essentials, in order to ensure that food is not wasted. We can also reuse masks (only certain types).
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Issue 3 | March 2020
CREDITS Editorial Team: Florence Wong Bob Wong Yui Hang Cheng Passages: Yin Wai Kwong Riki Kobayashi Hay Wong Yui Hang Cheng Cover Design: Wai Kit Kong
Layout, Design, Typesetting and Publication: Yui Hang Cheng Reserve Newsletter Team: Hoi Man Ng Jaclyn Solomon Jeffrey Chan Image Credits: @heytowner on Unsplash
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