Kiss The Sky

The immediate and overwhelming reaction when I got back to southern California after two weeks in Shanghai was noticing how big and blue and beautiful is the sky. I missed blue sky more than I could have imagined. Two straight weeks of crushing grey skies that suffocates and smothers left me wanting to claw my way out of China.

The drive home from the airport, with hills visible from 20 miles away, was physically pleasurable. This vast expanse of blue left me feeling grateful to be home. The next thing I noticed was how clean everything is. The streets, buildings, sidewalks, roads, everything, everywhere I looked are so modern, clean and groomed. This country that we call America is an incredible and wondrous and wealthy place.

It is one of the benefits of travel. I know it's trite to say we live in a great country, and I know from past trips that I would feel this way when I returned, but this was even more so. Traveling to Europe and Japan is nothing at all like traveling to China. And returning home from these Westernized countries, is nothing at all like returning from a developing country. Now the air is sweeter the views are stunning and the appreciation massive in scale.

But all of this is tempered with something I read in a book on China. China is imitating the development and consumption of the United States of America, but without the regard for the environment that some people in this country have fought so hard for. Today they are far behind us in consumption, but they are racing forward. The frightening fact is that the planet just simply does not have the resources to support an additional 1.3 billion people acting and consuming as Americans. The planet, which is already in peril, does not contain enough clean water, wood, oil or coal for China to be another America.

My "take away" from the trip is a desire to do something towards a more green America; to be a better inhabitant of this planet. The world is watching me, and right now I am one of the monster consumers of this planets limited resources. I promise to do better.