Look, I am aware that in the master list of complaints this is low indeed. As the Book of Common Prayer says, blessed be all those who work, or watch, or weep this night. But it’s human nature to dwell on what I don’t have (a bed, power, my family), rather than what I do (an iPhone with GPRS service, Civilization, and the news from Lake Woebegon, mediocre ice cream, my family.)

The roar from outdoors of a plane landing - the one before ours. Fifty minutes more to wait.

A colleague and I were headed to the airport, he back to Shanghai and I on the only flight to Ningbo, for a project meeting the next morning. As is normal, the client had provided a car to take us - even small companies in China usually have a car and driver. Our project site is a good hour and a half from Chongqing, and we both napped on the way, awaking to find ourselves headed into the tangle of hilly streets that is downtown Chongqing, around 5:30 in the afternoon - which is usually not necessary; there’s a highway leading to the airport. We had heard that the road to the airport was under construction, so we had left plenty of time, and we assumed that this was a necessary detour. But after quite a while of twisty streets, I was thinking, boy, if this guy hadn’t been provided by the client I’d be assuming we were being, well, taken for a ride. My colleague finally asked if the detour was necessary because of road construction. “No,” the driver responded, “I’m picking up a friend.” We were digesting this when, sure enough, a girl walked up and got in the passenger side seat, and on we went.

“Uh, is 45 minutes enough time?” I asked after several more red lights, because that was indeed how much time my colleague had. I had fifteen minutes more. “No problem!” the driver said cheerfully, and in retrospect that’s when I should have gotten scared. It was just then that we turned a corner to face a wall of traffic. Our driver was amazed, and in the back seat we were fidgeting. “Isn’t it pretty normal to have a lot of traffic at 6:00 pm?” I asked in a much less friendly tone. I was in fact furious.

I will spare the reader the next anxious 45 minutes. Suffice to say, we finally got on the highway to the airport, the driver stomped on the gas, and in another classic China moment, turned on a siren! Apparently the client, when purchasing the de rigeur black sedan, had shelled out more for the undercover cop package (they are not related in any way to law enforcement.) However, the siren did not magically solve our problem, as drivers in China typically view a siren as something like a super-horn - it kicks things up a notch, yes, but it doesn’t clear the road. We were finally saved by the fact that the airport is just not very far from downtown - my colleague missed his flight and had to take another one an hour later, and I did make mine. In the end, just another story.

I had just gotten a new pair of boots suited for the Shanghai winter, which is not particularly cold but has a penetrating damp. They cover the ankle and have heavier soles than shoes, but the point is that I can wear them all day, so they are not what I would call serious boots. And what do I do the first week after I buy them but climb a volcano in winter.

Changbaishan (“shan” means mountain) is a dormant volcano on the border between China and North Korea. It has a big caldera with a lake in it, and this lake is said to be the birthplace of the Korean people. It is the source for the three main rivers of northeast Asia: the Yalu, the Tumen and the Songjiang. The north flank of the mountain, where the Songjiang arises, is said to be the birthplace of the Manchu people, who ruled China as the Qing dynasty from the 1600s to the 1910 revolution. More importantly, Changbaishan was the destination of one of the first trips that HIHO Shanghai and I took together, and could be said to be the birthplace of our relationship.

But on the bus from the tourist center to the base of the mountain, which my colleagues and I were to climb (I do this kind of thing for my job,) I was in a rotten mood. Early March in Manchuria is still winter, and Changbaishan is 8000 feet high, well above the treeline and the highest peak for thousands of miles around. I have lived in northern places long enough to know that you do not fool around in such places; you prepare well or you do not go. But we were completely unprepared, and we were going anyway. We had thought that we would simply be doing competitive analysis (that is, visiting places like the one we are planning for) in the area of the mountain, looking at hotels and tourist attractions and such, and so my thick sweater, extra socks and lip gloss were back in the hotel. I had not brought an extra hat, sunglasses or real boots at all. But once at the tourist center, it seemed silly not to see the mountain, and the staff assured us (truthfully) that we could go up and come down in a few hours. I did not think we were going to die – this is a reasonably well established tourist location, and we were going to get bussed and then snowmobiled to practically the top of the mountain – but I did think it likely that we would get damned cold, and that it was not impossible that someone would get frostbitten. My colleagues are all from southern China; a snowbank is remarkable to them, and they had no preparation for the top of a mountain in winter.

Worse, the scenery was lovely, and I had lugged my trusty camera from Shanghai only to discover in the hotel that its battery was still in the charger back home. So I was highy annoyed with myself, and then further annoyed at the realization that I am becoming one of those people who, if they can not photograph a beautiful scene, can no longer fully enjoy it.

Finally, I was travelling back to a significant spot in my romance with my wife without her – in fact, while she was at home angry with me. I had made a dumb mistake (no, do not think Tiger Woods, but a mistake) and so she was at home taking care of HIHO XX, also resentful because daddy was away, by herself while I was out traveling. In such circumstances it is difficult to explain that spending the day in breathtaking scenery taking pictures is work.

So there I was, inadequate boots and hat, cellphone for camera, and with wife and son making common cause against me at home. I am fairly sure one of the Greek heroes was in exactly the same situation, but I forget which one. As it turns out, of course, while it was indeed cold on the peak (and even colder on the snowmobile) overall it was a magnificent experience. The snow was hard and pure white, the sky was a deep blue, the exposed peaks of the caldera were charcoal black. When the wind died down it was intensely quiet. As I climbed the last few steps up to the ledge overlooking the frozen lake, I stood in awe at the tremendous scene – until the cellphone of the girl in the other consultant team behind me rang with a dippy pop song and she answered in a heavy local accent: “Wei? Hi, Teacher Zhao, I’m on Changbaishan, you called at just the right time!” – a classic China moment. I could easily have slaughtered her.

Anyway, since then I have come back, and gone and returned again. I am made up with the wife and child, and have showed them my inadequate cellphone pictures (and cellphone video – one advantage over the good camera.) But I realized how much I miss the north country – the squeak of the snow, the burn of the wind, the bare white birch trees against the blue sky and black pines.

It was cold, about 15 to 20 degrees F, and there was snow on the ground, which filled me with satisfaction. I walked quickly to get warm, and the bite of the air on my chin and the squeak of the snow under my boots was all welcome. It was dark, and there were few people or cars on the streets. As I walked, ordinary scenery would suddenly click into place as a view I had seen hundreds of times before but did not consciously remember came into conjunction, and then fade away. It was as if a camera lens had come into focus. Everything around me seemed very familiar, but different. I know know what the word “dreamlike” really means.

The overriding sensation of living in China is the constant state of construction and reconstruction, and the University had been in the process of moving to a new campus in the south of the city even while I was teaching there, so it was with some surprise that I found the No. 1 Foreign Teachers and Students Residence looking exactly as it had the day I left, except with a new coat of paint. Apparently it still serves the same function, as the plaque has not changed. I retraced my old route to the students’ dormitory where HIHO Shanghai used to live, and the surprise grew, because everything looked precisely the same - the gate leading into the campus (although with no guard), the little shop across from the dormitory, and the dormitory itself - still with thin bedsheets across the windows, still apparently a student dormitory. Crossing Comrade Street looked different - there was a fashionable clothes shop on the corner - but the rest of my quiet street seemed not to have changed since the days the two of us walked up and down it every moment we could find to do so.

I continued through the campus to the square in front of the Geology Palace in a kind of daze, having been transported back almost two decades. Of course, we are all time travelers, but rarely in everyday life do you get to see so far across that particular dimension. It’s fun - I was thrilled to see again these landscapes that shaped my life so deeply - but it’s also an unsettling disjunction. I felt like I was shifting in and out of phase in a science fiction movie.

On my long way back (I had never really realized before the heroic scale that Changchun was built at; my walk, which covered the few blocks of my previous everyday life, clocks in on Google Earth at almost two and a half miles) I passed what had been the main gate of the university and realized why it had not been redeveloped; it was now the campus of the Jilin University Associated Middle School (what Americans would call high school.) So it’s still there and still full of smart kids, and that was the most pleasing discovery of all.

Here is what Gates said: “…fortunately the Chinese efforts to censor the Internet have been very limited. You know, it is easy to go around it.” Here is a partial list of sites (i.e. ones I can think of off the top of my head) that are currently blocked by the Chinese government: Facebook, Twitter, several domestic Twitter clones, Youtube, Google video search, all Blogspot sites, Danwei and several other English-language China news sites. Here is a partial list of sites that have in the past been blocked: Google, The Guardian, the New York Times, Wikipedia (all of it, in English and Chinese,) Flickr.  All of these are general interest and basically non-political. In addition, Google and other search engines are monitored and will be selectively blocked for a limited time if you search for something bad.

If blocking Wikipedia, currently the closest thing we have to a compendium of all human knowledge, is “very limited” censorship, I’m curious as to what kind of censorship Gates would consider extensive, and I invite him to live without Wikipedia and the Times for a week and see if he wants to revisit his opinion. As for being “easy to go around,” it’s beside the point - the government’s goal is not to completely stop information, it’s to manage what enough people see that the population remains tractable. If the current measures stopped doing this to the government’s satisfaction, things would get much more serious immediately. And, of course, it’s a slippery slope - last week the government announced that it would now monitor and censor text messages between private parties in the name of decency, and that cell phone accounts of offending individuals would be frozen. Is that limited too?

I think there’s an argument for a company like Microsoft to be in the Chinese market and follow the rules. But to freely offer that’s that censorship is no big deal - apparently simply to curry favor at Google’s expense - is pathetic and shameful, and I think everybody should be angry about it. I am.

I know it’s a long trip when there’s a plane flight that does not involve Shanghai. To review, it’s Saturday night, but rather than being home I am in “rural” Henan province - meaning a city of 1 million that I had not heard of until this afternoon - a couple of hours north of Wuhan. Increasingly it seems that our clients are very urgent to get their projects underway, perhaps fearing rightfully that soon the government will pull back on the flood of stimulus money, and weekends are ignored.  Our presentation to the local officials is early tomorrow morning.

The reason I am involved in a presentation in a city I had not heard of before is a little complicated - no, scratch that, it’s pretty straightforward. The client specifically requested that our international firm present an international person, our boss (who fits the correct profile) has to attend another client function, so I was called in at the last minute to, you know, be white. This is not the first time this particular issue has arisen, and I am not happy about it. Aside from being distasteful on its own merits and insulting to our Chinese staff (although they seem to accept it as a fact of life and chalk it up to our uneducated clients) it is professionally dangerous to me; I don’t want even a whiff of an idea that my function is to hang around and be a caucasian frontman. Since I am hobbled at work by highly imperfect Chinese I am sensitive about this, and complained a lot when this trip came up. I was mollified by being brought into the project team, but if it comes up again I think there will be trouble.

Anyway, during the drive from the airport the rain got heavier and gradually turned to snow, and the driving conditions got quite hair-raising: as usual, there were a lot of trucks on the highway, and the client’s driver seemed to me to be going faster than conditions really permitted. As the oldest guy in the car (I think) and the only one with a young child, I suggested that we slow down a couple of times - the first time the others in the group grinned and said, “it’s all right,” but after the car gave a couple of little shivers and the snow continued to get heavier, the second time we slowed down. (I’m pretty sure I was also the only one in the car with extensive experience in winter driving.) In any event, we arrived without incident. My primary worry now is getting home tomorrow, but the snow has stopped and with any luck I will have several hours of weekend before Monday arrives again.

Well, it’s a brief snapshot of a rather atypical day, but there it is.

I was back in Hubei this weekend, ina small tourist city. We arrived around eight thirty on Friday night, and after checking in to the hotel I went for a little walk. The moon was out, and with a light breeze it was warm but comfortable walking around. There were people strolling, and groups of people eating on the sidewalk (on little wooden stools around plain tables, please don’t think of umbrellas). There was a small river, lined by willow trees, lit by colored spotlights, and spanned by a stone bridge. I walked along the river a short ways and found a night market, with more outdoor tables of people drinking beer and eating grilled mutton. People were laughing, kids were running around, and yet it was quiet, much quieter than Shanghai, because there was no traffic. There was an occasional car or scooter on the street, but mostly it was just people. The air was clean.

I have come across this before - in some places, small town life in China seems so attractive. The pace of life is slow, there is lots of green, it’s peaceful and seemingly simple. I’m sure if you lived it it would get less simple, or you would realize that simple includes having to drive for an hour to get brewed coffee or cheese, but when you walk into it unexpectedly - because a lot of rural China is in fact loud and dirty - it’s tremendously seductive.

Back then, I wrote in response:

I don’t know if this is a worse idea from the theoretical or practical perspective. Let’s see:

Theoretical: I am an environmentalist, but it drives me crazy to see ostensibly smart and credentialed environmentalists focus so hard on one variable - in this case, land - while ignoring all the others. Sky farming would save on land and transport - at the cost of vastly increased energy and infrastructure costs. Are we really going to save the earth by replacing the sun with millions of grow lamps?

Practical: This proposal bends over backwards to optimize cheap inputs in favor of expensive inputs. Replace farm land with high rise construction, the sun with electrical energy, and throw in exceptionally complicated technological control and management. “Green” skyscrapers with integrated solar panels, cogeneration systems, black water reclaiming etc. are REALLY expensive. The idea of building an advanced green skyscraper in the middle of a city for the purpose of growing food is economically absurd. Not financially difficult as a result of weird pricing forces, like solar and wind power, green building, or other sensible things, but fundamentally economically absurd.

To solve the population/land production mismatch, why not just apply some of the professor’s strategies to farmland already in use to make it more productive and sustainable? Build more greenhouses, collect and recycle agricultural waste and runoff, reduce pesticides and non-organic fertilizers when you can? You can do all these things without building a skyscraper on the most expensive land you can find, for pete’s sake.

(How lucky for me that I always seem to come across the urban farming idea on slow work days…)

Since then the proposal seems to have taken some steps towards reality. Instead of new green skyscrapers, the proposal is now for a five story building on an eighth of a block, and it’s now called “urban farming” instead of “sky farming.”We’re getting closer to a concept known as “gardening” which I think makes a lot of sense.

But Despommier still claims that “the real money would flow once entrepreneurs and clean-tech investors realize how much profit there is to be made in urban farming.” This is highly nuts and doesn’t pass a first level in-your-head economic analysis. You can use the numbers the author provides in his op-ed: let’s start with land.

Production in an urban farm, he says, is 10 to 20 times a normal dirt farm. This would mean (I think) that the five story farm he proposes would produce as much as 100 acres of farmland. OK, this gets you close to parity in terms of urban land cost - although certainly not in Manhattan. But you’ve still got to build a building, and a building with intensive lighting, water, energy, waste removal etc. requirements (because, you know, you still have to artificially provide all the stuff you get for free when you grow plants in the ground outdoors - see where I’m going with this?) - perhaps comparable to a light industrial food processing plant. Despommier says he thinks he can build his five story prototype for $30 million. That would be a development cost of about $300 per square foot, in Manhattan, which means one of us is missing something. But even if he’s right, this is only the capital costs - we have not touched energy, maintenance, labor, or any of the other ongoing costs that are necessary to sustain such productivity. The thing does not look even close to covering costs to me - or to put it another way, since he spends a lot of time on how we are losing a lot of productive farmland, food costs would have to go to places none of us want to see for this to make any kind of sense.

I am not against urban farms. There are undoubtedly places in any big city where an urban farm would be great, and areas of the world in which intensive industrial agriculture could have a lot of advantages. I am also not against thinking outside the box, re-imagining how our society should work and our cities should look, and in general trying to avert the general catastrophe that global warming might be. What makes me spend way too much time writing about this is that this guy has spent a lot of his and his students’ time, and has gotten a lot of press and a certain amount of support, all on the basis of how great it would be, without ever having taken it to the logical next step of does it make sense? He addresses lots of details, but he seems to have never tried to put the thing together even in a rough way. I find this kind of loose thinking extremely annoying.

“When people ask me why the world still does not have a single vertical farm, I just raise my eyebrows and shrug my shoulders.” Well, yes. Exactly.