China, Colonial America’s Silicon Valley, Consumerism and Exploitations

October 3, 2012
Hosted by Rob Moir

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Episode Description

Eric Jay Dolin talks with Rob about his newest book: When America First Met China, an exotic history of tea, drugs, and money in the age of sail. Colonial Americans were hooked on China’s high-tech instruments of leisure, including high-priced teas, silks, rhubarb, porcelains and lacquer-wear. To feed American consumerism, US traders went to the ends of the world, over-exploiting people & natural resources, especially seals, sea otters, sandalwood & sea cucumbers. Our voracious appetite for China-built goods drove tragedies of commons, the taking of public resources at a global scale. Dolin helps us to better understand our trading with China long ago and what informs China’s understanding of us today. Our relationship with China began in 1784, when the Empress of China set sail frm NY Harbor. The exploding demand for goods & rush for items to trade led a driven Stonington sealer to discover Antarctica in a very small boat. Foreign trade came with great benefits and bad detriments.

Moir’s Environmental Dialogues

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With the knowledge of Carson and the courage of Achilles, individuals are steadfastly going the distance to defend wildlife and ecosystems from assaults of environmental degradations and destructions. Join environmental studies scientist Dr. Rob Moir for lively dialogue and revealing narrative inquiry into how individuals are overcoming the obstacles turning forlorn hope into effective actions for oceans, rivers, watersheds, wildlife and ecosystems. Discover how listening to individuals, thinking locally, and acting in concert with other, you can act to save ecosystems. Got environmental stewardship? Become an Eco-steward. Act to bring about a greener and blue Planet Earth.

Rob Moir

Rob Moir is director and founder of the Ocean River Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Moir, an educator and scientist, has been a leader of citizen science and efforts to clean up Salem Sound and Boston Harbor, as founder of Salem Sound Harbor Monitors & Salem Sound 2000, later president of Save the Harbor/Save the Bay, and through his appointment by the Secretary of Interior to the Boston Harbor Islands Partnership. He was formerly Curator of Natural History at the Peabody Essex Museum, Curator of Education at the New England Aquarium and Executive Director of the Discovery Museums in Acton, MA. Dr. Moir was awarded a Switzer Environmental Fellowship from the Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation, and the James Centorino Award for Distinguished Performance in Marine Education by the National Marine Educators Association, which he later served as president. He was Sea Education Association’s first assistant scientist to work consecutive voyages of the R.V. Westward in 1979 and 1980, an advancement officer for his alma mater, Hampshire College and serves today on the boards of his alma mater, Cambridge School of Weston, Ocean Champions, and the Massachusetts League of Environmental Voters. Dr. Moir has a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies and a Masters of Science and Teaching from Antioch New England Graduate School in Keene, NH and certificate of studies from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole.



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