哈佛大学校长演讲英文原文无标记
吉祥鸟-国庆广告语
“Universities and the Challenge of Climate
Change,” Tsinghua
University, Beijing, March
17, 2015
Party Secretary Chen Xu, Assistant
President Shi Yigong, distinguished faculty,
students
and friends.
It is a privilege
to be back at Tsinghua, with an opportunity to
exchange ideas on the most
pressing challenges
of our time. One challenge that will shape this
century more than any
other is our changing
climate, and the effort to secure a sustainable
and habitable
world—as rising sea levels
threaten coastlines, increasing drought alters
ecosystems and
global carbon emissions
continue to rise.
There is a proverb that the
best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago—and the
second best
time is now. When I first visited
Tsinghua seven years ago, I planted a tree with
President
Gu in the Friendship Garden. Today,
I am glad to return to this beautiful campus,
founded on the site of one of Beijing‟s
historic gardens. I am glad the Tsinghua-Harvard
tree stands as a symbol of the many
relationships across our two universities, which
continue to grow and thrive. More than ever,
it is as a testament to the possibilities that,
by working together, we offer the world. That
is why I want to spend a few minutes
today
talking about the special role universities like
ours play in addressing climate
change.
Last November here in Beijing, President Xi
and President Obama made a joint
announcement
on climate change, pledging to limit the
greenhouse gas emissions of
China and the
United States over the next two decades. It is a
landmark accord, setting
ambitious goals for
the world‟s two largest carbon emitting countries
and establishing a
marker that presidents Xi
and Obama hope will inspire other countries to do
the same.
We could not have predicted such a
shared commitment seven, or even one year ago,
between these two leaders—both, in fact, our
alumni—one a Tsinghua graduate in
chemical
engineering and the humanities and the other a
graduate of Harvard Law
School. And yet our
two institutions had already sown its seeds
decades ago—by
educating leaders who can turn
months of discussion into an international
milestone, and
by collaborating for more than
20 years on the climate analyses that made it
possible. In
other words, by doing the things
universities are uniquely designed to do.
The U.S.-China joint announcement on climate
change represents a defining moment
between
our two countries and for the world, a moment
worthy of celebration. China
deserves great
credit for all it has done and is doing to address
a complex set of economic
and environmental
issues. While lifting 600 million people out of
poverty, you have built
the world‟s largest
capacity in wind power and second largest in solar
power. As one
Harvard climate expert put it,
China‟s “investments to decarbonize its energy
system have
dwarfed those of any other
nation.” And last year, China‟s emission indeed
did drop two
percent.
Yet, even as
we make real progress, the scale and complexity of
climate change require
humility and long-term
thinking. We have made a beginning. But it is only
a beginning.
The recent video, Under the Dome,
reminds us how much work is left to be done. The
commitments of governments can be carried out
only if every sector of society
contributes.
Industry, education, agriculture, business,
finance, individual
citizens—allare necessary
participants in what must become an energy and
environmental revolution, a new paradigm that
will improve public health, care for the
planet, and put both of our nations on the
path toward a prosperous, low-carbon
economy.
No one understands this better than the
students and faculty of Tsinghua, where these
subjects are research priorities and your
outgoing president Chen Jining, a graduate of
Tsinghua‟s department of environmental science
and engineering, has just been
appointed
Minister of Environmental Protection. He has been
called a bridge-builder, a
man of vision and
fresh ideas, and an inspiring leader.
The
promise of the 2014 joint climate pledge will
require those qualities of all of us. It will
call on each of us to do our part to transform
the energy systems on which we rely and
mitigate the harm they cause, to “Think
Different,” as Apple‟s Steve Jobs used to say—to
imagine new ways of seeing old problems and,
as he put it, to “honor the people who …
can
change the world for the better.” Universities are
especially good at “thinking
different.” That
is the point I want to emphasize today. To every
generation falls a
daunting task. This is our
task: to “think different” about how we inhabit
the earth.
Where better to meet this challenge
than in Boston and Beijing? How better to meet it
than by unlocking and harnessing new
knowledge, building political and cultural
understanding, promoting dialogue and sharing
solutions? Who better to meet it than
you, the
most extraordinary students, imaginative, curious,
daring. The challenge we face
demands three
great necessities.
The first necessity is
partnership. Global problems require global
partners. Climate
change is a perfect example.
We breathe the same air. We drink the same water.
We share
the planet. We cannot live in a
cocoon. The stakes are too high.
In an essay
widely reprinted in Chinese middle school
textbooks called “The Geese
Return,”
naturalist Aldo Leopold describes an educated
woman, an outstanding college
student, who,
and I quote, “…had never heard or seen the geese
that twice a year [fly
above] her well-
insulated roof.” Could this woman‟s vaunted
“education,” he asks, be no
more than, in his
words, “trading awareness for things of lesser
worth?”—adding that the
goose who “trades his
[awareness] is soon a pile of feathers.” We all
risk becoming a
proverbial “pile of feathers”
unless we cultivate awareness of each other and
our common
environmental crisis, and then work
together to solve it.
We have seen the power
of partnerships. For more than a century, Harvard
and China in
particular have benefited from
partnerships with histories that inspire us:
John King Fairbank in 1933, who
caught the silver and blue bus to Tsinghua
before dawn to teach his first students the
perspectives of Chinese scholarship
he had
absorbed from Professor Jiang Tingfu, one of
China‟s most eminent
historians and the Chair
of Tsinghua‟s History Department. Those
experiences
changed Fairbank‟s life. And they
changed Harvard, where the Fairbank Center
for
Chinese Studies transformed the field, and where
the study of East Asia
now encompasses more
than 370 courses from history and literature to
government and plant biology.
Ernest
Henry Wilson in 1908, who navigated the Yangtze
River with a team
of Chinese plant collectors,
documenting cultures with photographs and
collecting thousands of plant specimens for
Harvard‟s Arnold Arboretum.
Wilson‟s long-term
collaboration—the subject of a forthcoming CCTV
special
(and exhibit at the Harvard Center
Shanghai)—established one of our deepest
connections, celebrating the extraordinary
beauty and diversity of China‟s
natural world.
Zhu Kezhen in 1918, who received his
Ph.D. from Harvard after passing a
scholarship
exam at the school that would become Tsinghua. He
became the
father of Chinese meteorology,
pioneering 5,000 years of Chinese climate data,
and as a university president and Vice
President of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences,
shaped Chinese education by “cultivating
scientists,” as he put it, and
I quote, in
“the „scientific spirit‟ … the pursuit for the
truth.”
That spirit defines the Harvard China
Project, founded in 1993 as an interdisciplinary
program to study China‟s atmospheric
environment, energy system and economy, and the
role of environment in U.S.-China relations.
Based at Harvard‟s School of Engineering
and
Applied Sciences, its collaborators have spanned
more than half of Harvard‟s Schools
and more
than a dozen Chinese institutions, including some
seven different departments
at Tsinghua. When
the program began, before climate change made
daily headlines, even
its founders—Professor
Michael McElroy and project director Chris
Nielsen, soon joined
by Tsinghua professor
collaborators—could not fully imagine its impact.
It has been a
model partnership and an engine
of broad environmental knowledge that has
influenced
policy in both countries, and
improved the lives of our citizens.
Let me
give you one example: the case of two young women
at the start of their
professional training,
Cao Jing studying economics and public policy at
Harvard‟s
Kennedy School and Wang Yuxuan, a
Tsinghua graduate getting her Harvard Ph.D. in
atmospheric chemistry. Both are now Tsinghua
faculty members. Driven by common
questions,
they came together as members of a team studying
Chinese carbon emissions.
Over several years
they worked across disciplines, in both countries,
with environmental
engineers and health
scientists to assess costs and benefits of
emission control policy
options and their
effect on human health. The team‟s findings were
groundbreaking,
demonstrating for policy
makers that they could in fact achieve enormous
environmental
benefits at little cost
to economic growth. Such collaborations with
Tsinghua continue to
shape China‟s clean
energy future with new ideas, from linking wind
farms with
electrified space heating, to
evaluating the effects of a changing climate on
renewable
energy sources.
Our
collaborations in the field of design are powerful
as well, shaping the responses to
urbanization
and environmental change in both countries. What
might an ecologically
conceived city look
like? How can a village grow into one? Harvard‟s
new Center for
Green Buildings and Cities is
working with Tsinghua‟s Evergrande Research
Institute to
measure energy use for different
building types in China, a key to creating more
efficient
buildings and cities. A new
collaboration with Peking University advances more
socially
and ecologically inclusive urban
design. Partnerships like these, between Harvard‟s
Graduate School of Design and Chinese
institutions, are generating innovations in urban
planning, green building and sustainable
development that will change how we live. For
example, walk along the reed-lined riverbank
park in Shanghai, as I have, where a
constructed wetland cleans polluted water from
the Huangpu River and a promenade
now connects
the old city with the new. Its designer, Yu
Kongjian, a farmer‟s son trained
at Harvard‟s
School of Design and founded China‟s first
graduate school of landscape
architecture, a
field he describes as, and I quote, “a tool for
social justice and
environmental stewardship.”
Today, Harvard partnerships with Tsinghua and
other Chinese institutions span nearly
every
department across all of Harvard‟s 13 schools,
involving some 200 faculty members
and
hundreds of students, and now including the
Harvard Center Shanghai, online
courses
through EdX, and three new research centers on
campus. These partnerships are
bearing fruit:
from last year‟s Harvard-Tsinghua conference on
market mechanisms for a
low-carbon future, to
open access education reaching millions worldwide,
to advances in
human health and health-care
policy that will improve and extend lives.
Tsinghua is building upon a similar array of
partnerships, in China and around the world.
Your new Collaborative Innovation Center on
Urbanization convenes every field around
the
problem of integrating urban and rural areas, and
the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen
Institute
supports among other things the search for new and
low carbon energy
technologies.
I have
said before that there is no one model for a
university‟s success, no abstract “global
research university” to which we all should
aspire. Partnership benefits from different
contributions and varied perspectives. Our
variety supports our strength. United, there is
little we cannot accomplish.
The second
necessity is research. A Chinese aphorism tells us
that, “Learning has no
boundaries.” Through
research, universities transcend the boundaries of
what anyone
thought was possible.
Research without boundaries means
exploring across disciplines. Consider the goal of
creating sustainable cities. This is not just
an engineering problem. It is a problem of
ethics and design; law and policy; business
and economics; medicine and public health;
religion and anthropology and my own field of
history, which can tell us how humans and
nature have interacted over time. For example,
think of the new field of “ecological
urbanism,” that explores this goal as a design
problem for how best to live. Or Harvard‟s
Center for the Environment that brings
together 250 faculty members from every
discipline.
Research without
boundaries means taking an open stance, where
every question is
legitimate and any path
might yield an answer. Knowledge emerges from
debate, from
disagreement, from questions,
from doubt—from recognizing that every path must
be
open because any path might yield an
answer. Universities must be places where any and
every topic can be broached, where any and
every question can be asked. Universities
must
nurture such debate because discovery comes from
the intellectual freedom to
explore that rests
at the heart of how we define our fundamental
identity and values.
You might find a
treatment for malaria in a 2000-year-old silk
scroll from a Han dynasty
tomb, as Chinese
researchers discovered in the 1970s. Or follow
your sense of smell, as
Caltech chemist Arie
Haagen-Smit did in the 1950s, to discover that a
container of car
exhaust exposed to sunlight
produces the bleach-like odor of smog. Almost
everyone told
Haagen-Smit he was wrong, but he
identified oxidized hydrocarbons from automobiles,
refineries and power plants as the source of
the mysterious air pollution that was choking
Los Angeles, and launched a revolution in
American air quality. Some forty years later,
showing the same ingenuity, Harvard‟s own
study of six cities conclusively linked fine
particle pollution to premature death. The
researchers invented field instruments as they
went along—designing air monitors for people
to wear at school and work and air quality
sensors for their homes—laying a foundation
for air pollution legislation that has saved
billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands
of lives a year.
And research without
boundaries means taking the long view. Seeing
beyond the horizon
has always been higher
learning‟s special concern. Harvard is the oldest
institution of
higher learning in the United
States, founded in the ninth year of the reign of
Emperor
Chongzhen of the Ming dynasty.
Cambridge University recently celebrated its 800th
birthday. China has a deep tradition of
learning going back thousands of years. We are
not in this for one year, or ten, or even 100.
We are in it for millennia. Universities thrive
because of an insatiable yearning to
understand ourselves and the world. We are
compelled—to search the universe, to map the
brain, to step into another‟s experience.
And
I want to emphasize that the humanities have a
special role to play in fostering this
ability
to think and imagine beyond ourselves and our own
lives—in enabling us through
the study of
literature, culture, history, and language to draw
from other times, other
places, other peoples
as we seek to understand the present and chart a
course for the
future. We mold minds capable
of innovation because we are able to imagine a
world
different from the one we live
in—a world with “green” cities and adaptive
buildings with
skin-like membranes; a bionic
leaf that can generate liquid fuel and a metal-
free organic
battery, all long-range areas of
research.
A third necessity is training
students who will ask and answer the big
questions. Perhaps
the most important mission
of universities is the education of the world‟s
young people.
Today‟s students will lead the
world in a perilous time. How do we prepare them
for the
disruption of climate change? As one
of Harvard‟s leading climate scientists likes to
say,
“Knowing what to do is not easy.”
That is why universities play a critical role.
We attract and train the best students. Each
year I tell the incoming Harvard College
class
that they have ability not always measured by high
test scores and top grades—that
they are
chosen not for the magnitude of their achievements
but for their capacity to
invent, not for what
they know but for what they can imagine.
We
expose students to diverse points of view. This
January, Jahred Liddie studied
sustainable
cities on a Harvard undergraduate program in
Brazil, where he met students,
as he put it,
from “around the world as invested in these
problems as I am.” He saw how
diverse
backgrounds and perspectives are, in his words,
“key [to] formulating …
sustainable [urban]
development,” and how effective solutions and
innovations might
differ for different
cultures. We hope to establish a similar exchange
program with
Tsinghua.
Finally, we train
students across many disciplines, and allow the
youngest to work with
senior faculty. Each
learns from the other: the deepest knowledge
joins with the freshest
point of view. Harvard
created an Environmental Science and Public Policy
field for
undergraduates, to train students
capable of refined judgment, who understand the
scientific and technical side of complex
environmental problems as well as their
economic, political, legal, historical and
ethical dimensions.
Ethan Addicott, a recent
graduate pursuing a career in science policy, says
the program
gave him a broad education of the
natural world, and, in his words, “a deep
understanding of how to analyze and solve
problems surrounding our complex
interactions
with it.” Ethan did not need to wait until
graduate school to have access to
senior
faculty. He studied the Chinese energy economy
with Professor Michael McElroy,
head of
Harvard‟s China Project. Why this opportunity?
Because the world needs Ethan.
It needs the
students in Tsinghua‟s Science and Technology
Studies program, where
engineering and pre-
professional students work alongside future
sociologists and
historians, philosophers and
anthropologists, who can put research and policy
decisions
into a broad social and historical
context.
I should add, too, that
Harvard student interest in China, and in all of
Asia, has never
been higher. I ask you to look
around this room and imagine an audience almost
double
this size. That is the size of our
undergraduate course in Classical Chinese Ethical
and
Political Theory—more than 700 Harvard
College students packed into our largest lecture
hall. Only two courses—one in economics and
one in computer science—routinely draw a
larger enrollment. The professor, a senior
member of his department, Michael Puett, asks
simple questions, but fundamental ones: What
is the best way to live a fuller and more
ethical life?—and poses answers from the
Analects of Confucius, theMenciusand
the
Daodejing by thinkers who are among the most
powerful in human history. These are
the
courses that change students‟ lives. These are the
students that change the world.
I began by
talking about possibilities, for our universities
and for our planet. We are in a
struggle, not
with nature but with ourselves. A great human
struggle we can only resolve
together. As
someone put it recently, what we do this year
shapes the next twenty, and the
next twenty
shape the century. Next December, 195 countries
will meet in Paris at the
United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change. Like
Presidents Xi and
Obama, their leaders will
test humanity‟s commitment to a sustainable and
habitable
future for our children and our
children‟s children.
Last month, the venerated
father of modern Chinese architecture and urban
planning Wu
Liangyong, now 92, looked out his
window at a haze-shrouded sky. An exemplar of
“thinking different,” a founding spirit at
Tsinghua, he has described our collective
aspiration this way: “My dream about the
future is that we could live… in harmony with
nature. We could live like in the poems and
paintings.” Universities have the unique
capacity and a special responsibility to
fulfill the promise of that dream. Let us not
waste
a moment. It is already the second best
time to plant a tree.
Thank you.