INNOVATE 2006

	Mark Gabriel Little Rice University, Ph.D. Earth Science Luce Scholar, Peking University, Environmental Science Department
	Website: Click Here

In the fall of 2005, I taught a course on the environmental impacts of population increases, technology proliferation, and integrated economies around the globe. The next semester, I was in Shanghai and Kyoto for the INNOVATE 2006 conference. During the conference, we visited a contract manufacturer in China and a Toyota plant in Japan; we met the chief architect of Shanghai and spoke with entrepreneurs from both nations. While traveling outside Shanghai, we saw people growing produce in fields practically irrigated with manufacturing effluent. This reality shared many parallels with a paper we had discussed in my class on the Pearl River region of China. The increasing energy demands of a growing Shanghai were evident in her skyline: dotted with cranes by day and resplendent with neon by night. These demands are driving the Three Gorges Dam project that we had also studied in the class. When we landed at the new, innovative Kansai airport in Japan, I was walking through yet another topic of the course—the race for an economic and technological hub in northern East Asia between Japan, China, and South Korea.

After my trip to Shanghai and Kyoto, I began to understand the unprecedented experiment taking place in East Asia as massive development and technological advancement have been set on fast forward. Governments, citizens, and businesses are attempting to achieve a "first world" standard of living for the majority within one generation. This kind of development has the promise of bringing millions from under the yoke of poverty but has the danger of placing millions more at risk for respiratory disease and cancer, of permanently damaging the land, and of encouraging global warming. For an environmental scientist like me, these changes are mesmerizing.

I believe that the INNOVATE conference is an invaluable opportunity for students at Rice University. Without INNOVATE I may have never had the opportunity to study these issues in an international context. I have recently been selected as a Luce Scholar to conduct research in the Environmental Science department of Peking University and I believe that what I learned during INNOVATE will be of direct benefit to me as I return to China in 2007.