1、哈佛大学校长在清华大学演讲稿（中英全文）-大学与气候变化带来的挑战2015 年 3 月 20 日 07:05 新浪博客Party Secretary Chen Xu, Assistant President Shi Yigong,distinguished faculty, students and friends. Itis a privilege to be back at Tsinghua, with an opportunity toexchange ideas on the most pressing challenges of ourtime. One challenge that
2、 will shape this centurymore than any other is our changing climate, and the effort tosecure a sustainable and habitable worldas rising sea levelsthreaten coastlines, increasing drought alters ecosystems andglobal carbon emissions continue to rise.There is a proverb that the best time to plant a tre
3、e is 20years agoand the second best time is now. When Ifirst visited Tsinghua seven years ago, I planted a tree withPresident Gu in the Friendship Garden. Today, Iam glad to return to this beautiful campus, founded on the site ofone of Beijings historic gardens. I am glad theTsinghua-Harvard tree st
4、ands as a symbol of the many relationshipsacross our two universities, which continue to grow andthrive. More than ever, it is a testament to thepossibilities that, by working together, we offer theworld. That is why I want to spend a few minutestoday talking about the special role universities like
5、 ours play inaddressing climate change.Last November here in Beijing, President Xi and President Obamamade a joint announcement on climate change, pledging to limit thegreenhouse gas emissions of China and the United States over thenext two decades. It is a landmark accord,setting ambitious goals fo
6、r the worlds two largest carbon emittingcountries and establishing a marker that Presidents Xi and Obamahope will inspire other countries to do the same. We could not have predicted such a shared commitment seven, or evenone year ago, between these two leadersboth, in fact, ouralumnione a Tsinghua g
7、raduate in chemical engineering and thehumanities and the other a graduate of Harvard LawSchool. And yet our two institutions had alreadysown its seeds decades agoby educating leaders who can turn monthsof discussion into an international milestone, and by collaboratingfor more than 20 years on the
8、climate analyses that made itpossible. In other words, by doing the thingsuniversities are uniquely designed todo. The U.S.-China joint announcement on climate change represents adefining moment between our two countries and for the world, amoment worthy of celebration. China deservesgreat credit fo
9、r all it has done and is doing to address a complexset of economic and environmental issues. While lifting 600 millionpeople out of poverty, you have built the worlds largest capacityin wind power and second largest in solar power. As one Harvard climate expert put it, Chinas “investments todecarbon
10、ize its energy system have dwarfed those of any othernation.” And last year, Chinas emission indeeddid drop two percent.Yet, even as we make real progress, the scale and complexity ofclimate change require humility and long-termthinking. We have made abeginning. But it is only a beginning. The recen
11、tvideo Under theDome reminds us how much work is left to bedone. The commitments of governments can becarried out only if every sector of societycontributes. Industry, education, agriculture,business, finance, individual citizensall are necessaryparticipants in what must become an energy and environ
12、mentalrevolution, a new paradigm that will improve public health, carefor the planet, and put both of our nations on the path toward aprosperous, low-carbon economy.No one understands this better than the students and faculty ofTsinghua, where these subjects are research priorities and youroutgoing
13、president Chen Jining, a graduate of Tsinghuas departmentof environmental science and engineering, has just been appointedMinister of Environmental Protection. He has beencalled a bridge-builder, a man of vision and fresh ideas, and aninspiring leader.The promise of the 2014 joint climate pledge wil
14、l require thosequalities of all of us. It will call on each ofus to do our part to transform the energy systems on which we relyand mitigate the harm they cause, to “Think Different,” as ApplesSteve Jobs used to sayto imagine new ways of seeing old problemsand, as he put it, to “honor the people who
15、 can change the worldfor the better.” Universities are especially goodat “thinking different.” That is the point I wantto emphasize today. To every generation falls a dauntingtask. This is our task: to “think different”about how we inhabit the Earth. Where better tomeet this challenge than in Boston
16、 and Beijing? How better to meet it than by unlocking and harnessing newknowledge, building political and cultural understanding, promotingdialogue and sharing solutions? Who better tomeet it than you, the most extraordinary students, imaginative,curious, daring. The challenge we face demandsthree g
17、reat necessities.The first necessity is partnership. Globalproblems require global partners. Climate change is a perfectexample. We breathe the sameair. We drink the same water. We share the planet. We cannot live in acocoon. The stakes are toohigh. In an essay widely reprinted in Chinese middle sch
18、ool textbookscalled “The Geese Return,” naturalist Aldo Leopold describes aneducated woman, an outstanding college student, who, and I quote,“had never heard or seen the geese that twice a year fly aboveher well-insulated roof.” Could this womansvaunted “education,” he asks, be no more than, in his
19、words,“trading awareness for things of lesser worth?”adding that thegoose who “trades his awareness is soon a pile offeathers.” We all risk becoming a proverbial“pile of feathers” unless we cultivate awareness of each other andour common environmental crisis, and then work together to solveit. We ha
20、ve seen the power of partnerships. Formore than a century, Harvard and China in particular havebenefitted from partnerships with histories that inspire us:John King Fairbank in 1933, who caught the silver and blue busto Tsinghua before dawn to teach his first students theperspectives of Chinese scho
21、larship he had absorbed from ProfessorJiang Tingfu, one of Chinas most eminent historians and the Chairof Tsinghuas History Department. Thoseexperiences changed Fairbanks life. And theychanged Harvard, where the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studiestransformed the field, and where the study of East As
22、ia nowencompasses more than 370 courses from history and literature togovernment and plant biology.Ernest Henry Wilson in 1908, who navigated the Yangtze Riverwith a team of Chinese plant collectors, documenting cultures withphotographs and collecting thousands of plant specimens forHarvards Arnold
23、Arboretum. Wilsons long-term collaborationthesubject of a forthcoming CCTV special (and exhibit at the HarvardCenter Shanghai)established one of our deepest connections,celebrating the extraordinary beauty and diversity of Chinasnatural world.Zhu Kezhen in 1918, who received his Ph.D. from Harvard a
24、fterpassing a scholarship exam at the school that would becomeTsinghua. He became the father of Chinesemeteorology, pioneering 5,000 years of Chinese climate data, and asa university president and Vice President of the Chinese Academy ofSciences, shaped Chinese education by “cultivating scientists,”
25、 ashe put it, and I quote, in “the scientific spirit the pursuitfor the truth.”That spirit defines the Harvard China Project, founded in 1993as an interdisciplinary program to study Chinas atmosphericenvironment, energy system and economy, and the role of environmentin U.S.-China relations. Based at
26、 HarvardsSchool of Engineering and Applied Sciences, its collaborators havespanned more than half of Harvards Schools and more than a dozenChinese institutions, including some seven different departments atTsinghua. When the program began, before climatechange made daily headlines, even its founders
27、Professor MichaelMcElroy and project director Chris Nielsen, soon joined by Tsinghuaprofessor collaboratorscould not fully imagine itsimpact. It has been a model partnership and anengine of broad environmental knowledge that has influenced policyin both countries, and improved the lives of our citiz
28、ens.Let me give you one example: the case of two young women at thestart of their professional training, Cao Jing studying economicsand public policy at Harvards Kennedy School and Wang Yuxuan, aTsinghua graduate getting her Harvard Ph.D. in atmosphericchemistry. Both are now Tsinghua faculty member
29、s. Driven by common questions, they came together asmembers of a team studying Chinese carbon emissions. Over severalyears they worked across disciplines, in both countries, withenvironmental engineers and health scientists to assess costs andbenefits of emission control policy options and their eff
30、ect onhuman health. The teams findings weregroundbreaking, demonstrating for policy makers that they could infact achieve enormous environmental benefits at little cost toeconomic growth. Such collaborations with Tsinghua continue toshape Chinas clean energy future with new ideas, from linking windf
31、arms with electrified space heating to evaluatingthe effects of a changing climate on renewableenergy sources.Our collaborations in the field of design are powerful as well,shaping the responses to urbanization and environmental change inboth countries. What might an ecologicallyconceived city look
32、like? How can a village growinto one? Harvards new Center for GreenBuildings and Cities is working with Tsinghuas Evergrande ResearchInstitute to measure energy use for different building types inChina, a key to creating more efficient buildings andcities. A new collaboration with PekingUniversity a
33、dvances more socially and ecologically inclusive urbandesign. Partnerships like these, betweenHarvards Graduate School of Design and Chinese institutions, aregenerating innovations in urban planning, green building andsustainable development that will change how welive. For example, walk along the r
34、eed-linedriverbank park in Shanghai, as I have, where a constructed wetlandcleans polluted water from the Huangpu River and a promenade nowconnects the old city with the new. Its designer,Yu Kongjian, a farmers son trained at Harvards School of Designand founded Chinas first graduate school of lands
35、capearchitecture, a field he describes as, and I quote, “a tool forsocial justice and environmental stewardship.”Today, Harvard partnerships with Tsinghua and other Chineseinstitutions span nearly every department across all of Harvards13 Schools, involving some 200 faculty members and hundreds ofst
36、udents, and now including the Harvard Center Shanghai, onlinecourses through EdX, and three new research centers oncampus. These partnerships are bearing fruit:from last years Harvard-Tsinghua conference on market mechanismsfor a low-carbon future, to open access education reaching millionsworldwide
37、, to advances in human health and health-care policy thatwill improve and extend lives. Tsinghua is building upon a similar array of partnerships, inChina and around the world. Your new Collaborative InnovationCenter on Urbanization convenes every field around the problem ofintegrating urban and rur
38、al areas, and the Tsinghua-BerkeleyShenzhen Institute supports among other things the search for newand low-carbon energy technologies.I have said before that there is no one model for a universityssuccess, no abstract “global research university” to which we allshould aspire. Partnership benefits f
39、romdifferent contributions and varied perspectives. Our variety supports our strength. United, thereis little we cannot accomplish.The second necessity is research. A Chineseaphorism tells us that, “Learning has noboundaries.” Through research, universitiestranscend the boundaries of what anyone tho
40、ught was possible.Research without boundaries means exploring acrossdisciplines. Consider the goal of creatingsustainable cities. This is not just anengineering problem. It is a problem of ethicsand design; law and policy; business and economics; medicine andpublic health; religion and anthropology
41、and my own field ofhistory, which can tell us how humans and nature have interactedover time. For example, think of the new fieldof “ecological urbanism” that explores this goalas a design problem for how best to live. OrHarvards Center for the Environment that brings together 250faculty members fro
42、m every discipline. Research without boundaries means taking an open stance, whereevery question is legitimate and any path might yield ananswer. Knowledge emerges from debate, fromdisagreement, from questions, from doubtfrom recognizing thatevery path must be open because any path might yield anans
43、wer. Universities must be places where any andevery topic can be broached, where any and every question can beasked. Universities must nurture such debatebecause discovery comes from the intellectual freedom to explorethat rests at the heart of how we define our fundamental identityand values.You mi
44、ght find a treatment for malaria in a 2000-year-old silkscroll from a Han dynasty tomb, as Chinese researchers discoveredin the 1970s. Or follow your sense of smell, asCaltech chemist Arie Haagen-Smit did in the 1950s, to discover thata container of car exhaust exposed to sunlight produces thebleach
45、-like odor of smog. Almost everyone toldHaagen-Smit he was wrong, but he identified oxidized hydrocarbonsfrom automobiles, refineries and power plants as the source of themysterious air pollution that was choking Los Angeles, and launcheda revolution in American air quality. Some fortyyears later, s
46、howing the same ingenuity, Harvards own study of sixcities conclusively linked fine particle pollutionto premature death. Theresearchers invented fieldinstruments as they went alongdesigning airmonitors for people to wear at school and work and air qualitysensors for their homeslaying a foundation f
47、or air pollutionlegislation that has saved billions of dollars and hundreds ofthousands of lives a year. And research without boundaries means taking the longview. Seeing beyond the horizon has always beenhigher learnings special concern. Harvard is the oldestinstitution of higher learning in the Un
48、ited States, founded in theninth year of the reign of Emperor Chongzhen of the Mingdynasty. Cambridge University recently celebratedits 800th birthday. China has a deep tradition oflearning going back thousands of years. We arenot in this for one year, or ten, or even 100. Weare in it for millennia.
49、 Universities thrivebecause of an insatiable yearning to understand ourselves and theworld. We are compelledto search the universe,to map the brain, to step into anothersexperience. And I want to emphasize that thehumanities have a special role to play in fostering this ability tothink and imagine beyond ourselves and our own livesin enabling usthrough the study of literature, culture, history, and language todraw from other times, other places, other peoples as we seek tounderstand the present and chart a course for thefuture. We m
