(W.E.Talk) Donald Worster: To Build Eco-civilization, China and the West Need Each Other(2)

CNS：According to your forthcoming book Planet Desire: Earth in the Time of Humans, a new vision of ecological civilization has developed more dramatically in China over the past 20 years than anywhere else, even though it has its roots in the west. What do you think about China's approach to protecting the environment and preserving China's unique civilization?

Donald Worster: China is doing some good things. For example, China is exploring sustainable agricultural development, as are the United States and other countries. Achieving sustainability requires experimentation.

Nowhere has the vision of a new ecological civilization become more prominent than in China over the past two decades. Although the imaginary is originally western in origin, China has intellectual resources of its own going back thousands of years, in philosophy, poetry, science, and technical skills, all of those assets promising to make the new imaginary a product of China.

Accept contradictions, the Chinese have always said, and then try to reconcile them. Protect China's environment, save its unique civilization from extinction, while at the same time pushing the cultural and material revolution to a higher level.Central to that heady mix of ideas has been those of "ecology" and added to the Chinese constitution, making China the only nation so far to commit itself to building an ecological civilization.

If China truly hopes to see an ecological civilization take root and grow, it should try to become more familiar with western philosophers and ethicists, who offered such penetrating diagnoses of the technological civilization. At the same time, we who live in the West should become more familiar with China's traditions of human responsibility. All of us need help, all the help we can get. 

CNS: Do you believe that the traditional lifestyle is good for build the eco-civilization?

Donald Worster: I'm not a traditionalist. We can't go back, we have to go forward, only go forward. We have to find something new, which means we design our cities differently.

I'd like to answer this question with the word "sustainable". Although nobody knows what it means—it's so broad that everybody has a definition. But that’s okay. We will have a conversation about how do we sustain a live, a good life, prosperous life for everybody. That’s really what and how do we do facing all those environmental crisis.

CNS: During the past 100 years, the environment has changes a lot. What are the roots of all those environmental crisis happened on our planet?

Donald Worster: In my book Planet of Desire, I basically make a conclusion that all of our environmental problems come from our own desires. There is no perfect time in world history when everything was beautiful and perfect—there’s always been a problem. But we certainly have made more problems in recent years, partly because we have so many more things we want.

These desires urges inside us and we cannot just deny them. But we have to learn how to control, regulate, and harmonize our desires with the outside world. If the harmony has to be within ourselves, our desires have to be control, moderated, balanced among each other. I like the phrase “moderate prosperity” created by Chinese people, which has the meaning of harmony.

Needless to say, it's a big difficult thing to do, but I'm confident of that. I hope that China can show the world how to do that.