BROADCASTS.com

b"Here is the audio from last week's podcast. I apologize for the delay, I was a bit ill and did not have quite the vocal stamina to maintain the podcast. As a result watch for another one later today, as I'll be recording an episode about Thanksgiving in China.\\n\\nIt's a bit of an injustice to talk about environmentalism or construction and infrastructure development in China without mentioning the Three Gorges Project, for which China has been widely criticized both internally (for a while) and to a much greater extent by international environmental and human rights organizations. The topic, however, is strictly off limits from public debate and at the risk of saying something that might get me deported, I'll leave it to you the listener to determine the environmental impact of this project. I will note that Peter Hessler's River Town contains an in-depth exploration of the subject told from his perspective during his two years in Fuling, a city on the Yangtze.\\n\\nA few weeks ago, the construction crews were tearing apart the paver-stone path that runs from the new dormitories to the campus. At first it was just a small square hole, barely wide enough to fit a person in, but each day it got longer. By the end of the week, the hole ran about thirty feet from the construction site at the top of the hill, down the path nearly approaching another, smaller, hole near the campus' entrance. The dirt dredged up from the hole probably a few feet deep, was piled onto the remaining pathway thus causing a significant disruption in the students' abilities to walk to class, bottlenecking traffic down to about eight feet of path space for two directions of traffic. The annoyance was easy to get past, but trying to figure out what exactly was going on in the hole was intriguing. Why was it getting bigger, and why was it being dug so deep?nbsp;\\n\\nAround wednesday this started to make more sense. The construction crew had some kind of runoff stream running through a series of stepped streams down the hill through this tunnel. The stream appears to be coming from the living quarters of the cosntruction site and it seems to be a steady stream. There aren't many reasons for this consistent of a stream running from a bunker like this, and given the smell surrounding the path, it seems appropriate to conclude it was sewage. There is a similar stream running down the other side of the hill where the sewage runs through a series of channels and tubes, eventually spilling into a pool at the bottom of a short cliff near three manholes and Block One of the dormitories. At the other end of the path there is another construction camp and, running parallel to the driveway leading from the road up to the dormitories, a similar stream running into a giant pool next to the road. The smell on this side of campus is overwhelming to the point where you often need to hold your breath or cover your nose as you walk by.nbsp;\\n\\nAll of this causes some curiosity about China's environmental policy which, as near as this reporter can tell, has very little regulation. A Gustavus student who was in Shanghai last spring wrote a paper regarding the topic and described it as a problem of enforcement, rather than of policy. According to him, China's policy has, historically been very strong, and often progressive, on environmental issues. It's first policy was implemented during the Xia Dynasty some four millennia ago, and modern environmental policy dates back to the 1930s, and since 1971 China has an active record of environmental protectionism, at least on a national level. The problems, however, come about when the implementation and enforcement of these policies is left to the local government agencies. The local agencies are usually dually interested in both upholding the policy and in not enforcing it at all. As a general rule, the municipal government owns, or has a good stake in the health of, the local businesses: and we're talking big businesses like factories..."