The first time I watched Al Gore’s "An Inconvenient Truth" I remember feeling shivers down my spine. It was the only time I felt such a visceral reaction to a documentary. I remember watching projected ocean waters flood over my birthplace in China and over some of the most densely populated cities in Asia. I remember the off-the-charts projections of global warming and polar ice cap disintegration. I remember being shocked at the fact that so little of what was necessary was being done—and even more shocked that the classmates I was supposedly watching all of this with were texting and chatting nonchalantly amongst themselves.
When I first heard about Chai Jing’s "Under the Dome"—the recently viral “Inconvenient Truth-like” documentary about pollution in China—I was almost afraid to watch it. I feared that most of the issues Gore outlined almost a decade earlier were still unresolved, and that I would be told so, yet again.
I wasn’t wrong. While it was much less ambitious in scope than Gore’s piece—understandable given the political environment under which it was to be released and its primarily domestic Chinese audience—it hammered home the same message: our current economic system is unsustainable, and we need to make drastic changes to mitigate potentially disastrous consequences. Chai did an excellent job of bringing the issues close to home, of making cold, incomprehensible statistics into tangible realities. For me, what made her message so digestible and powerful was that she came into this not as an environmentalist, but as a concerned mother. Pollution and climate change are no longer issues solely for the environmental activist. They are for the common man.
For those within the circle of Chinese internationals and ardent China watchers at Duke and beyond, Chai’s film was highly significant. Finally, a Chinese citizen has brought into the mainstream consciousness a somewhat CCP-approved message of what environmentalists have been saying for decades. China, the world’s biggest polluter, had spoken.
While we wait for the ultimate impact of the film and its related efforts to unfold, it seems that for now we are faced with the same inconvenient truth. The harsh reality that we were first made aware of not by Gore, but by the nascent environmental awakening of the 50s.
The inconvenient truth is that deep down we do care—as Chai said, “everyone wants clean air”—but that as individuals we don’t think we can do anything about it. We are often thrown environmental statistics that sound something like “if everyone did this, we would save x tonnes of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere”. As anyone who has ever taken an intro economics or public policy class would know, everyone—or even a critical mass—doing something like that hardly ever happens, we will almost always fall to collective action failure, etcetera, etcetera. At the end of the day, it’s much easier to just go on with our every day lives hoping things will resolve themselves.
Frankly there really is little point of making that extra trip to the recycling bin when the garbage can is readily available. I felt that way when Chai began outlining the small steps for her audience to take to help the cause, and even she openly admitted to the fact that none of those steps will make any difference in the large scale of things.
Yet at the same time, she reminded me of why I do make that extra trip to the recycling bin despite knowing that it does absolutely nothing.
I do it because it’s the moral thing to do and because it is the only thing I can do to bring into life that sleeping social consensus that we need to take immediate action. Every time we take that little, insignificant step, we influence the perception of those around us, and send a message to those in charge that we need to stop acting with impunity.
The success of the civil rights movement can’t be attributed solely to MLK and his generation. It was the accumulation of centuries of activism that acculturated Americans to the idea that equality was for all. History was shaped by the few revolutionaries who emboldened the general populace—but only if it was ready.
So let’s be ready—ready to accept the inconvenient truths that we’ve been so eloquently told.
It’s the least we can do, and the least of what we owe to future generations.
Bochen Han is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every other Monday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.