The Water Autobiography as a Pedagogical Aide to Enhancing Environmental Consciousness

Introduction

Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party of the People's Republic of China (PRC) has made enormous strides in lifting much of its population of 1.4 billion from poverty to an elevated standard of living, from a peasant life in rural countryside to an improved, increasingly middle-class work life in its teeming cities. These dramatic changes, however, have not been without a heavy toll to public health and environmental quality.

During summer 2013, I was one of 35 University of Kentucky (UK) faculty members chosen to teach a short course in Shanghai University's International Affairs program. Classes had on average 30 first-year native Chinese students (overwhelmingly male) who had enrolled in courses from a variety of disciplines ranging from poetry, jewelry making, and journalism reporting to global trade and commerce, changing world demographic trends, and geographic shifts in religions. The summer schedule also included a few scientific topics. Mine was focused on urban and water sustainability and featured five videos, focusing on China's major water problems (flooding of the Yellow River, silting behind the Three Gorges Dam, and the South-to-North Water Transfer megaproject).

That the PRC continues to struggle with water, land, and air pollution is no secret to environmentalists around the world or to its native population who must deal with its latent risks and invisible dangers. Highlighted in this discussion is a pedagogical assignment I developed and presented in my short course to foster greater environmental consciousness among these students at Shanghai University and later in American classrooms at my university. Growing up in a nation that has undergone mammoth environmental changes—especially in its waterways—from rapid industrial and prodigious technology development in the economic sphere—I believe, has fostered an interesting perspective.

The Course and Its Scope and Content

The course was formally titled, Exploring the Twin Challenges of Mass Urbanization and Water Pollution in China: Toward Sustainability Solutions. Its scope and content were outlined as follows:

This 10-hour/1-credit course will explore the complex issues facing China as it pursues sustainable development in its existing and new cities by drawing upon advances in the latest technology and drawing upon Indigenous economic, political, and cultural traditions. The course will also highlight the challenges of and possible solutions for overcoming China's water crisis posed by rapid economic growth and the need for providing potable water to the teeming hundreds of millions inhabiting its urban landscape. These twin course foci and central objectives will encourage native Chinese students to imagine their country's own pathway as an emerging 21st-century superpower and exemplar of urban and water sustainability for the globe's community of nations.

Key themes addressed included: learning and unlearning the lessons of Western urbanization and economic development; exploring population strategies for reconciling Chinese urbanization imperatives and rural sustainability needs; examining the range of foreign and Indigenous policy solutions to China's water problems; and instituting innovative sustainability-oriented means for successfully tackling China's formidable water challenges. Built into the course was highlighting the role of Chinese citizen-action groups in promoting policy change to improve water quality and water body remediation (Chen, 1998; Mertha, 2008; Needham, 1971; Polluck & Chen, 1986).

The Assignment

Water pollution is a pervasive problem in China and has been one for thousands of years. Noted Western historians of China's environment (Bilsky, 1980; Dogen, 2001; Economy, 2010; Edmonds, 1994; Elvin, 2006; Marks, 2017; Shapiro, 2001; Smil, 1984) have reached back to antiquity to uncover the many social, geographical, agricultural, industrial, political, and even technological sources of deterioration of China's waterways taking the form of pollution, flooding, silting, overuse, and evaporation. Less than a month before the course commenced, Shanghai's Huangpu River, which bisects old Shanghai or Puxi (the city's historic center) from new Shanghai or Pudong (the city's new finance, trade, and commercial center), became polluted with thousands of diseased pig carcasses that had been dumped upstream by farmers in neighboring Zhejian Province (Buckley & Piao, 2016; Wong, 2013).

Because I learned at the first class that many of the students lived with their families in rural villages and towns in agricultural regions experiencing urban-industrial changes, I decided to gauge student awareness of the salience of water in their young lives and of those changes coming to agricultural communities. So, during the second half of the course, I assigned them the task of putting together a PowerPoint presentation over the long weekend of the summer semester. Their presentations could be light on text and more heavily weighted with photos from family and community lives. (Chinese college students, I was told by the associate director of my university's teaching and learning center who hosted sophomore-level Chinese students for a two-week workshop, were strong on visual literacy, less so on English literacy.) The presentations only needed to include 10 PowerPoint slides, but were required to convey in words and visuals how water (streams, lakes, rivers) affected their growth and consciousness over their 18 or so years of life and what caused any changes in those waterways.

I discovered after announcing the assignment that there was some confusion over how to structure the water autobiography. As a result, I developed an example of my own water autobiography. For a senior American professor in political science, the observations and results of my reading and evaluation of these student PowerPoints were both informative and to some extent surprising in comparison with my experience and knowledge of environmental awareness of American and Canadian students that I had taught over 40 years in North American classrooms.

The Students' Water Autobiographies: Observations and Findings

I was uncertain, but hopeful, that the water autobiographies would yield some interesting observations and noteworthy findings. After all, water has played such a significant part in China's environmental history since antiquity (Elvin, 2006; Marks, 2017), and water has been a revered part of China's three major religions (Grumbine, 2010; Miller, 2017). After reviewing and assessing the assignments, I discovered that the pedagogical intent of the class assignment—assessing their ability to articulate their environmental consciousness and uncovering their intellectual growth or continuing ignorance of causes of China's water pollution—was largely achieved by most of the students.

Among the major observations were these:

A strong attachment to the land and water bodies near family property or the surrounding area. Because so many of the students' families lived in small rural villages, they often expressed deep regard for agricultural land and the waterways in the vicinity. With frequently lovely photographs, many of the students highlighted the farmland and critical importance water played in their parents' or grandparents' livelihoods.

In addition to these observations, my review and appraisal of the student PowerPoint presentations revealed two surprising findings:

This student's commentary aligns with the theories propounded by Western development experts (e.g., prominent 1960s economist, Walt Rostow, and his stages of economic growth) (Rostow, 1960), although the development literature has shifted significantly since the sixties and presently encompasses sustainability. Further, while some see Chinese communism as assimilating the utopian illusions and Promethean myths growing out of the Western Enlightenment (Li & Shapiro, 2020), others (Bergman, 2021; Pan, 2015) see the CCP drive to advance modern science and technology as stemming from a massive effort to refound Chinese Communist ideology and socioeconomic development upon a more sure footing in the latest innovations in cutting-edge science (e.g., artificial intelligence (AI), quantum information, integrated circuits, life and health, brain science, bioengineered breeding, aerospace technology, deep earth and deep sea exploration).

The Pedagogical Uses of Water/Environmental Autobiographies

For me, the teaching value of the water autobiography in my Shanghai University summer course is compelling—and replicable. For one thing, it demonstrated the merits of mobilizing Chinese students' strong visual literacy skills while maintaining due modesty with respect to the command of English by these first-year college students. Having come to the study of Chinese environmentalism and sustainability late in my career, I have no real Chinese language facility and, as an English-speaking teacher, I must acknowledge the implicit demands I easily placed upon these young Chinese students. Moreover, when I taught a similar course at Shantou University to predominantly fourth-year students, I found their English language proficiency quite high, allowing for more engaged classroom discussion and greater use of active learning techniques.

Second, the assignment also had the effect of taking course themes and topics to the personal and interpersonal level, encouraging these budding college students to connect to their life experiences and kindle greater and more meaningful on-the-ground and in-the-water environmental consciousness—one of the major course goals. Thirdly, it served as a springboard for enlarging the pedagogical technique to frame the environmental autobiography as a stimulus in other courses I regularly taught at the University of Kentucky's College of Arts and Sciences Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program. Here there were strikingly different results, perhaps attributable to the United States' more deeply rooted environmental and conservationist movements, greater number of membership-driven environmental groups operating in civil society, and more extensive environmental regulations and laws populating federal and state governments (Sternfeld, 2017).

I daresay that the water or environmental autobiography as a teaching tool could be incorporated into a host of courses in undergraduate education in the United States and in other countries by American faculty or Indigenous scholar-teachers. The outcomes and virtues of its use will likely differ, but I believe it could serve as a valuable aid to evoking latent to overt consciousness about the connections between humankind and nature.

Faculty in philosophy, political science, psychology, agricultural science, architecture, and ecological economics could all differentially benefit in employing this technique in ways that deepen and widen their disciplines' treatment of environmentalism and elevate student mindfulness about nature and environment, our earthly host and benefactor. From conversations among members of the UK Environmental and Sustainability Studies major program since 2013, I garnered three general strategies for applying the environmental autobiography to courses and curricula in various academic departments and programs: 1.) adapt this technique to particular courses to assay the character of environmental consciousness among students; 2.) convert this technique into a series of questions about factors shaping levels of student awareness regarding the impact of the environment upon their lives, and using this instrument as part of college or major entrance and exit interviews to evaluate changes over the course of their college years or major; and 3.) utilize the technique for students to construct water/environmental biographies of celebrated personages within specific disciplines whose environmental consciousness has developed during their careers.

More specific ways that this pedagogical technique could be integrated into a variety of disciplines include:

Finally, the writings of journalists like Elizabeth Kolbert (2015a, 2015b, 2021), scientists like James Hansen (2009), eco-humanists like Bill McKibben (2010), and even science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson (2020) would be fair game for using a variation on this technique in a variety of social sciences, humanities, and even natural sciences. Once pondered creatively and duly recontextualized, the possibilities for application from high school to graduate school are many—and should be pedagogically rewarding.

Conclusion

The breakneck pace of double-digit economic growth by the PRC has led to a new normal of 6 to 9 percent annual growth in the last ten years (Mirzayev, 2020). This “new normal” period has prompted a focus on sustainable development highlighted by the building of eco-cities and a turn toward environmental mitigation and repair (Deng & Cheshmehzangi, 2018; Fu & Zhang, 2021; Liu et al., 2017; Williams, 2017). Expressive of its campaign to go green has been a series of national policy moves that embedded the goal of ecological responsibility into the national constitution (Li & Shapiro, 2020; Pan, 2015; Yanarella & Levine, 2020).

Although China's concept of ecological civilization can be traced back 2,500 years in the philosophy of Daoism, its formal enunciation and political acceptance by Chinese high-level leaders came in 2007 at the 17th Congress of the Communist Party of China. There, Hu Jintao (2007) charged China in a report to construct an ecological civilization designed to bring about “an energy and resource efficient, environmentally friendly structure of industries, pattern of growth, and mode of consumption” (cited in Pan, 2015, p. 35). Then, at the 18th Congress, five years later, President Hu Jintao took the further step of calling the national party congress to write into the party's constitution the national goal of “ecological civilization construction” (Pan, 2015, p. 35). Two years later, its new president, Xi Jinping (cited in Lent, 2018) reinforced his predecessor's commitment to building an ecological civilization upon the foundations of a new development paradigm as a responsibility of the party–state to succeeding generations, sustainability, economic prosperity, and nature.

On the international and domestic fronts, China has also seized a global leadership position in solar energy and green transportation while generating a quarter of the world's hydropower, becoming a leader in solar panel production, and moving aggressively to forge ahead in the construction of electric vehicles (Fitzgerald, 2020, pp. 171-172, 179-180). Using mercantilist policies and technological vigor, China has severely undercut the United States' fledgling programs to make strides in solar, wind, and other greenovating policy arenas by a host of illegal economic and trade policies (Fitzgerald, 2020, p. 168). Similarly, some of its advances have also disrupted or stymied European nations' goals in building national industries, advancing innovative pilot projects, and generating green jobs to tackle climate change (Fitzgerald, 2020, p. 171).

Meanwhile, the pursuit of neoliberal policies by successive presidential administrations in the United States and the tightening grip of big money in politics abetted by rising wealth and income inequality has hobbled earlier strides in environmental protection despite America's more deeply entrenched environmental organizations traced back to the turn of the 20th century (Merchant, 2011; Warren, 2003). With its policies of rampant exploitation of the country's natural resources, continued urban sprawl in the face of smart growth, and the halt in construction of America's already feeble sustainable city programs, the Trump administration's tight hold on the Republican party effectively ceded to the People's Republic of China a clear path to challenging the United States' hegemonic position in the world and leading the world community in confronting the climate crisis (Thompson & Wong, 2020, ch. 4).

What these comparative trends will mean for the objective of raising environmental consciousness envisaged by the pedagogy of the environmental autobiography as a motivation for concerted political and social action is unknown In a post-pandemic world, China's commitment to renewing its ambition to model its urban development on strong and vibrant eco-cities and transforming itself into a truly ecological civilization is a massive undertaking whose success depends on generating mass enthusiasm, support, and participation of its 1.4 billion inhabitants—including new generations of its high school and college students.

The party–state's commitment to institutional security and longevity will likely mean persistent monitoring and control of bottom-up initiatives to protect the environment since they might threaten one-party rule and social stability. No less, in the era beyond the coronavirus epidemic, the United States, too, must renew its century-old legacies of environmental conservation and preservation and, despite national economic weaknesses and pandemic-led unemployment, mobilize the power and wherewithal to reassert its dedication to a sustainable future and deepen its fealty to racial and environmental justice. As historical sociologist Barrington Moore Jr. (1966) has argued, genuine revolution of the type needed to achieve a sustainable world and to quell the climate crisis can only come from fusion of top-down and bottom-up forces.