April 4, 2011
By: James Miller
[caption id="attachment_446" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Image from National Geographic"][/caption] It's been three weeks since the devastating tsunami in Japan, and I am still haunted by the familiar phrase from Daode jing ch. 8: Best to be like water, Which benefits the...
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February 7, 2011
By: James Miller
[caption id="attachment_422" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Consumptionomics by Chandran Nair"][/caption] Last year I wrote an article for atlantic-community.org on China's quest for ecological sustainability. The basic point that I tried to make was that China has to create its own model for...
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January 6, 2011
By: James Miller
http://www.youtube.com/v/YlOA_eO8IsQ&rel=0&fs=1 As the trailer for this new documentary from Mandarin Films makes clear, the global environmental crisis will be solved in China, not in America, for the simple reason that China has no other option. As I noted recently in...
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December 19, 2010
By: James Miller
In a fascinating article on metaphors for progressive politics, George Lakoff summarizes succinctly the message that progressives need to be communicating as regards the issue of sustainability: The economic crisis and the ecological crisis are the same crisis. It has...
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November 19, 2010
By: James Miller
[caption id="attachment_400" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Delegates at the Sino-US Forum on Ecological Civilization and Sustainable Development"][/caption]I was in Beijing and Tianjin recently for a week of conferences related to "ecological civilization" (shengtai wenming 生态文明) an important new buzzword, the precise meaning...
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July 19, 2010
By: James Miller
[caption id="attachment_370" align="alignright" width="150" caption="A solar-powered light on the road to Maoshan, Jiangsu, China."][/caption] In Sunday's New York Times, Wayne Arnold published a column on the perennial topic "rethinking the measure of growth." The story concerns attempts by Asian economists...
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June 25, 2010
By: James Miller
[caption id="attachment_534" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Photograph taken during the liturgy at the Templo da Transparência Sublime, Rio de Janeiro, December 2009."][/caption] In a Wall Street Journal blog today, Christopher Carothers asks, "Is Daoism is losing its way?" He writes: Today, Buddhism...
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June 8, 2010
By: James Miller
I was in LA last weekend to attend the Sixth Annual Conference on Daoist Studies which was organized by my former teacher, Livia Kohn, and LMU Professor Robin Wang. The conference drew the usual mix of academics and practitioners (which...
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February 2, 2010
By: James Miller
What do you do, as a Chinese film board, when the Hollywood science fiction film Avatar smashes Chinese box office records in its first three weeks in theaters, when online chat sites are buzzing about the uncanny parallels between the...
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October 14, 2009
By: James Miller
This week I'm at a conference on eco-aesthetics at Shu Yen University in Hong Kong. Today we heard the opening speech from Prof. ZENG Fangren, the former president of Shandong University. He runs a research institute on aesthetics, and is...
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