Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
seriously seems particularly necessary. h e default position would be to fall
back on racialized tropes that see the rise of China and India through the
same interpretive lenses that framed Asian “population” growth in apoca-
lyptic terms in the 1950s and 1960s. h e larger political dimensions of Asian
American, Pacifi c Islander, immigrant, and refugee environmentalism in
the United States cannot be separated from global environmental discourses
and how they shape international power relations.
Put simply, I ask that these questions be discussed and considered when
framing environmental and sustainability projects: Does this project create
environmental benefi ts—and what kind? But also, does it create more justice
or less? Who (or, in the case of birds, what) benefi ts, how and why? We need
more fi ction, imagination, curiosity, humility, and wonder, not less of these
forces—and not only of a techno-utopian, engineering variety. I asked these
questions from the vantage point of someone curious about Dongtan, who
wanted to understand what the broader calls for ecological Shanghai meant
as an environmentalist, as a diasporic Shanghainese, and as an inhabitant of
a world in which what China does means a lot to the planet. As my colleague
Sheldon Lu writes, “In the heart and mind of a local Shanghainese or a dia-
sporic Shanghainese, the city may well transcend the myopic scope of the
nation-state and occupy a special place that is like no other in China or the
world.”
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It is from my own fractured place of nostalgia, memory, and dias-
pora that I examined this focus on the technological and the ecological in
the most hyperurban of cities.
In summation, although this topic is about Shanghai, it's also about the
United States. My perspective comes from a uniquely American vantage
point, the prototypical immigrant off spring. Growing up in the 1970s and
1980s, I, along with millions of other Americans, did not yet know how
much China was going to matter to American lives on the factory fl oor, in the
stuff we use in our houses, in the clothes we wear on our bodies, and in
the air we breathe. I wrote this topic as a grandchild of Shanghai and
