kudzu telegraph

"Did you like AVATAR?" my friends ask when I tell them I finally saw it, the blockbuster James Cameron 3-D film. How could I not? I'm "green" to the core, an environmentalist, and my favorite Bible story as a child was always Eden.

I'll have to admit that my ideas about change have been moved around a great deal, prompted by flying half-way around the world. What I saw in China created a dramatic contrast to my own backyard.

Four weeks ago in my first column about my trip to China I wrote how I hoped to encounter China's "cultural core," its Confucian "root," and experience it.

During my two weeks in China I did encounter what I might call China's ancient core a few times-in a ceremonial smudging outside a Buddhist temple and the timeless view across West Lake in Hangzhou, in the colorful ancestors' tombs on the hillsides on the way to Yiwu, and upon arriving in that city listening to an old singer chant an ancient song in an ancestors' temple.

A friend wrote today in an email and said "Save the Earth" at the end of her note. I'll admit I've thought about the problems of "saving the earth" a great deal since we touched down in Shanghai. The pressures on the planet here are seriously extreme already, and it's obvious they will mount in the next few decades. The scholars who have lectured us have said that the Chinese know they will not be able to establish a middle class like the West because there will simply not be enough resources.

This sets my personal record for distance learning. I'm half-way around the world in China's largest city, Shanghai. It's Day Three of the Wofford Milliken Faculty Development seminar.

I think it's yesterday where you are, or maybe it's yesterday here, and today there. Time is just the first of my concepts under renovation. This morning the only thing I know for sure is I'm not in Kansas (or Cowpens) anymore.

I'm headed to China for two weeks on a Wofford College faculty study trip. At first I wasn't very excited about going. I'm not a city boy, and our whole 14-day excursion would mostly take place in vast Shanghai, a coastal city of over 20 million people, China's New York, a pulsing vortex of trade, commerce and consumerism.

Most years on Dec. 21, on winter solstice, we've burned the previous year's Christmas greens.

Some years we get our act together and have a solstice party where I read William Carlos Williams' poem "Burning the Christmas Greens." We drink hot cider and mulled wine. We watch the first sun of the new season go down with our friends, and note the descent into the early winter woods like good neo-druids.

Last week Jack Temple Kirby died suddenly at 70 years old. Jack's death didn't make the local papers. Chances are you¹ve never heard his name, but with his passing one of the great Southern environmental historians was silenced.

Last week I was among those who received an email from a Spartanburg County government staffer, saying "your County Councilmember … suggested that you may have valuable input about potential improvements to the county's land development regulations."

Weather just isn't what it used to be. No, I'm not talking about climate change this time. I'm talking about how in the good old days when a big snow storm moved through the piedmont we were left to our own imaginations to figure out how to experience it.