Consuming / Sustaining Asia: Elemental Concerns - Earth/Fire

Given the enormity of global environmental changes affecting the Asia-Pacific Region, PBI's lecture and film series for the next two academic years will focus on the elemental aspects of sustainability and consumption.  The rapid growth in populations, economies, and regional powers in the region will have tremendous consequences for the global ecosystem.  Our series will focus on the five elements identified in Asia over 5000 years ago as basic to this process: Earth, Fire, Water, Wood, and Metal

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Lecture by Peter Hays Gries:
University of Oklahoma
“Consuming China: Measuring U.S. and Chinese Responses to the Olympics”

Thursday, September 25 at 4:15-5:30
Followed by Reception
Hahn 101
The Chinese communist party invested over $40 billion in stadiums and infrastructure for the Beijing Olympics, and lost billions more by shutting down factories in the hopes of curbing Beijing's notorious pollution.  Did the investment pay off?  What impact did increased exposure to China during the Olympics have on American attitudes towards China? A pair of surveys provides a few clues towards an answer.

Peters Hays Gries is the Harold J. & Ruth Newman Chair and Director of the Institute for US-China issues at the University of Oklahoma.  His is author of China's New Nationalism, co-editor of State and Society in the 21st Century China.  His work focues on nationalism, the political psychology of international affairs, and China's domestic politics and foreign policy.

Lecture by Susan Whitfield:
The British Library
“Earth and Fire: Sustaining Life and Art on the Silk Road”

Wednesday, October 15 at 4:15 - 5:30 (followed by reception)
Hahn 101
The yellow earth in China's historical heart is a potent symbol for the country.  Long a source of life and art during the 1980s it was, however, portrayed as indicative of China's backwardness in the documentary series 'Heshbang' and, more ambivalently, in Zhang Yimou's 'Yellow Earth'.  Dividing the people of the plains with their abundant yellow earth from the peoples of the steppes with their sparse black earth it also symbolizes a boundary between the settled and the nomad.  In this illustrated talk, Susan Whitfield will question these boundaries and consider an alternative story, where peoples, their culture and their art migrate and mix, just like the earth around them.

Susan Whitfield is an historian of the Silk Road and China.  Director of the International Dunhuang Project (http:/idp.bl.uk) at the British Library, she has traveled and written widely on the Silk Road, its history, histiography and art.

Lecture by Phung Tuu Boi,
Nature Conservation and Community Development Center, Vietnam
“The Consequences of Agent Orange / Dioxin on Natural Resources and the Environment in South Viet Nam”

Wednesday, November 5 at 4:15-5:30 (followed by reception)
Hahn 101
Phiung Tuu Boi, Director of the Nature Conservation and Community Development Center in Hanoi, Vietnam, and member of the Vietnamese Forest Inventory and Planning Institute, will focus his lecture on the effects on forests of herbicides and defoliants used from 1961 to 1971 in the Vietnam War, a topic that Phung Boi has studied for the past three decades.