Yoo-Chong Wong On 5 Things We Must Do To Inspire The Next Generation About Sustainability And The Environment
It is critical for us to recognize that we are but one species among of innumerable sentient beings sharing a biosphere, and that we must not encroach on others or take more than our share of its resources.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure to interview Yoo-Chong Wong.
Born at the crescendo of the Chinese Civil War, Yoo-Chong Wong witnessed the immense suffering of his compatriots along with the steady disintegration of China’s millennia-old rural culture and the destruction of ancient thought, artifacts and structures. Wong has spent a quarter of a century studying the “Laozi” (also known as the “Dao de Jing”) enabling him to share his insights on the text alongside a new English translation. With the current environmental devastation, it’s his hope that the “Laozi” will provide guidance to readers and reawaken our sense of empathy and place within nature.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?
I grew up when the traditional values of Chinese culture were rapidly being replaced by those of modernity, which were heavily Western-influenced. Most importantly, I learned from my forebears the cardinal rule of never wasting what is edible and reusing everything as long as possible. We threw away as little as possible.
Just as importantly, I observed the social decorum of diffidence and deference, always letting others go first, especially our elders. Learning to have consideration for others, we waited for them to take the initiative before responding accordingly and yielding to their wishes. It is important to avoid confrontation, even among equals.
These two aspects lay in the heart of our tradition for countless generations, but they have been eroded by the more assertive and individualistic ethos of modernity.
Was there an “aha moment” or a specific trigger that made you decide you wanted to become a scientist or environmental leader? Can you share that story with us?
I can’t say there was such a moment for me. This project of relating the Laozi to modern humans evolved over my entire lifetime. Gradually, it crystallized over almost eight decades.
It all began in Canton, China, three years after its liberation from Japan, which occupied it for seven years of the World War during which 20 million Chinese perished. At that time, the Communist-led civil war was also raging. Sixteen months later, my family fled to Hong Kong to seek shelter under British rule, thus escaping the carnage that claimed millions.
Growing up, I could certainly feel our place as a colonized people under the British rule, but it provided us aegis from the oppression and starvation happening just miles away across the border. Modernizing was all the rage then, even while we still made toast by holding pieces of bread over hot coal, which we also used to cook and heat our water. There was no phone, air-conditioner, heating, or television for the first ten years we were there. In the winter we all bundled up and looked forward to our steaming dinners to fight the chill, but there were frequent ferries, buses, trains, trams, cable cars, and even rickshaws taking us anywhere we needed to go inside the tiny colony. As the city prospered and its Central district was “Manhattanizing” rapidly, I sought softer and slower living with my grandparents in Taiwan, while attending high school and learning Mandarin.
I found paradise in my grandparents’ Japanese style house in the rural south of the island surrounded be coconut, banana, papaya, and dragon-eye trees. The house featured tatami floors and sliding screens with almost no interior partition to maximize cross ventilation to escape the tropical heat. It was a legacy of the fifty years of Japanese occupation of the island, when many local young men were conscripted to fight on the Chinese mainland in the expanding Japanese empire during the war. We pumped water by hand the backyard. Electricity was used only for lightbulbs, and a nightsoil man visited us monthly to collect fertilizer for the fields. At that time, agriculture was entirely organic, with no fossil-fuel footprint, relying entirely on manual labor with help from water-buffalo, teams of which also provided transportation pulling loads of goods from town to town, making a mesmerizing rhythm with the little bells attached to their halters. There were few paved roads or motor vehicles in town, but goats, turkeys, chickens roamed freely through the streets. The entire town quieted down after lunchtime for a nap, before stirring back to life just before the afternoon showers descended.
On the island, I learned that the Laozi was regard as nothing but a laughing stock for teaching primitivity, while Buddhism with its idol worship was dismissed as superstition. Our education, however, concentrated on the moralistic teachings of Confucianism. At the age of seventeen, I made another move. This time, I crossed the Dateline and the great Pacific for college.
Back in 1966, just a year after I landed in Ann Arbor, a Japanese student, Syukuro Manabe, who worked at the Weather Bureau in Washington D.C., discovered the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, where its concentration had already risen to about 300 parts per million (ppm) from the preindustrial level of 280 ppm. Following the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, environmentalism gained momentum during my architectural training, heightening my awareness of what humanity was doing to our planet, a concern that also coincided with my curiosity about the causes of escalating conflicts.
In my early twenties a Chinese philosophy class finally introduced me to the Laozi, one of the three pillars of the Chinese culture. I immediately felt a deep resonance and connection with it that has stayed with me ever since.
In the autumn of 1972, after I had completed graduate school, the Yom Kippur War broke out, and an Arab oil embargo ensued. Long lines of cars formed as people queued for petrol, while shortages prompted runs on staples and toilet paper around the world. That was the last time our leaders encouraged us to conserve. Ever since, no one has spoken of conserving energy or anything else, as though conservation has become a dirty word.
In my architectural practice, I observed the Laozi’s principles of simplicity and circuitous flows, while continuing to reflect on its poems and witnessing the degradation of the environment, the unraveling of the social fabric, and increasing turmoil worldwide over the years. These developments have all seemed to me to result from modern people’s insatiable needs, their insistence on more conveniences and luxuries, their desire to dominate, and their worship of their intelligence and technology at the expense of inner peace. Finally, two decades ago, I felt the time had come for me to study the Laozi full-time, trying to decipher its poetically ambiguous language and ancient phonology, while using its insights to understand how we are running roughshod over our planet.
Today, the CO2 level has reached 427 ppm, and global temperatures have risen about 1.4° above preindustrial levels, as Manabe had warned. There are endless discussions about curtailing greenhouse gases, but little action. Some demagogues continue to deny the fact of the climate crisis and promote the use of fossil fuels and logging. It is striking to watch today’s techno-oligarchs doing everything that the Laozi admonishes us against, while we, too, ignore much of its counsel. This has compelled me to undertake the task of translating and annotating the Laozi to reintroduce it to humanity and offer a way out of the morass of the Anthropocene.
Is there a lesson you can take out of your own story that can exemplify what can inspire a young person to become an environmental leader?
It would be helpful for us to look beneath the surface of things and understand the interwovenness of our existence as a species to see how we are so intertwined not only with each other as Homo sapiens, but also with all creatures and even seemingly inanimate objects, such as a grain of sand with its innumerable microorganisms. This gives us an awe-inspiring sense of how insignificant humans are in the grand scheme of things, much as looking up at a night sky and seeing the Milky Way and other constellations stretching across heavens, lightyears away toward the edge of space.
Can you tell our readers about the initiatives that you or your company are taking to address climate change or sustainability? Can you give an example for each?
- Pay attention to our feelings and sensations, rather than reaching for mobile devices searching for thrills in games, reels, news, or social media, so as to reduce the temptations to want or consume more.
- Reuse whatever we can for as long as possible and refrain from throwing things away. Likewise, be mindful of the energy we use with each purchase or click.
- Renounce as much automation as we can, knowing that it demands energy, which we can ill afford at this critical stage of our existence on this planet. Step up to a cashier instead of using a self-checkout for a chance to talk to someone and make genuine contact, no matter how brief. Sharing is the first step toward working together to reverse our current trend toward climate and biospheric collapse.
- Notice Homo sapiens can be far healthier and happier connecting within a flourishing ecosystem.
Can you share 3 lifestyle tweaks that the general public can do to be more sustainable or help address the climate change challenge?
- Do as much as we can each day without electronic devices, even when it takes more effort and time. Avoid engaging in social media altogether to escape its addictive pull, which draws us further away from ourselves and sense of wellbeing.
- Spend every moment paying attention to the task at hand; never multitask.
- Infect strangers with a smile every chance we get, sharing our joy and excitement of meeting another human being or fellow creatures sharing our time and space, knowing that each smile invites goodness in others. Such is an effortless countermeasure to much of the pervasive alienation, resentment, and divisiveness among us in the modern world.
The youth-led climate strikes of September 2019 showed an impressive degree of activism and initiative by young people on behalf of climate change. This was great, and there is still plenty that needs to be done. In your opinion, what are 5 things parents should do to inspire the next generation to become engaged in sustainability and the environmental movement? Please give a story or an example for each.
1. Make conscientious efforts to minimize our carbon footprint by using as little energy and as few materials as possible, as well as minimizing the waste we produce.
2. Spend time regularly in forests and other wild areas to become acquainted with plants and animals and observe their interdependence in their daily lives.
3. Appreciate the value of all plants for their oxygen-giving and carbon-sequestering values, not to mention their beauty. Plant more trees and promote their growth, protect them from development and loggers, because they are homes to our avian, insect, lichen, and microbial friends.
4. Develop reverence for all seemingly lifeless objects such as soil, home to innumerable microbiomes, even when we cannot see them. Learn to recognize the sacred value of land and think twice before disturbing it by mining for precious metals and rare earth, or even building more structures, or damming rivers.
5. Respect all creatures and try to not consume them regularly, especially those who produce methane. In doing so, we can lead healthier lives while enjoying a more diverse vegetarian diet.
How would you articulate how a business can become more profitable by being more sustainable and more environmentally conscious? Can you share a story or example?
The Laozi would advise humanity in the Anthropocene to stop grasping for more riches, power and wealth. It stresses the importance of egalitarianism saying disparity of all kinds is against the natural order, therefore doomed to failure as its extremism goes beyond natural limits. Rather than grasping, we should attune to the rhythms of nature, be gentle, receptive, and respectful of all things on earth, inanimate as well as sentient. The Laozi reminds us that whatever we create and fabricate diminishes the natural world. Since it is a zero sum game, we must be very deliberate and judicious with our actions to minimize our impact on the environment. For a business, these principles may seem impossible to adhere to, but it’s imperative that an effort is made.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
It is only after spending decades with my wife that I have slowly managed to capture and distill the ineffable meanings of the Laozi into words. While trying to make sense of all the insolvable dialectics of the text, I feel my grandparents’ gentle presence and values, for it was they who first planted the seeds of the Laozi in me.
You are a person of great influence and doing some great things for the world! If you could inspire a movement that would bring the greatest amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
It is critical for us to recognize that we are but one species among of innumerable sentient beings sharing a biosphere, and that we must not encroach on others or take more than our share of its resources. We must be humble, knowing that our hubris is what brought us to this precarious state in the first place. That means deferring to others and respecting the vast web of life.
Do you have a favorite life lesson quote? Can you tell us how that was relevant to you in your own life?
The Suqwamish and Duwamish Chief, Si’ah’sl’s statement: “All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of Earth.” Seems to be resoundingly similar to the Laozi’s: “The wise embrace the One as a model for the world.” (Verse 22.2)
One is the unknowable cosmic order, which the Laozi calls the Dao. Our alienation from the land or our past causes us to chase after things like hungry ghosts to fill our emptiness in search of meaning. Our rootlessness, in turn, makes the center of our societies unable to hold, splintering us into cultural warfare fueled by grievances and self-victimization, which spirals into more hostility, cruelty, and sadism, while destroying our home and making it uninhabitable. To pick up the pieces, we must reconnect with our inner selves and nature, giving thanks to all creatures, remembering our ancestors and what they imparted on us, so that we can bequeath something valuable to our offspring.
What is the best way for people to continue to follow your work online?
I’m always happy to hear from readers. They can connect through my website: https://wongyoochong.com.
This was so inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Yoo-Chong Wong On 5 Things We Must Do To Inspire The Next Generation About Sustainability And The… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.