HKU Bulletin October 2008 (Vol. 10 No. 1)

3 NEWS ROUND-UP Greening the Community A new environmental centre will educate the public and promote research T he opening of the Lung Fu Shan Environmental Education Centre is a unique partnership between the University and the Environmental Protection Department (EPD) of the Government that provides both a community service and a venue for ecological research. The centre, located on the leafy southern edge of the campus and within walking distance of a number of historic buildings, offers the public guided tours and workshops that focus on the area’s local ecology and built heritage. Its displays are based on input from University academics on such subjects as climate change, local herbs and plants, and the area’s wild animals. The centre was official ly opened by the Secretary for the Environment, Edward Yau, and HKU’s Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor Lap-Chee Tsui. “The new centre will help develop the public’s sense of responsibility to protect natural habitats and combat environmental problems like climate change,” Mr Yau said. Funding for the centre is shared by the EPD, which is paying for the capital costs, and HKU, which has committed $1 million per year for the next five years to the management of the centre. The centre is housed in three historical buildings that were built between 1914 and 1919. There is also an eco-pond with a variety of freshwater fish and plants, a courtyard with abundant vegetation to attract birds and butterflies and solar panels to generate electricity. Dr Winnie Law has helped to develop the project, which is managed under the new Kadoorie Institute (www.hku.hk/kadinst ), where she is a Teaching Consultant. It is a work in progress, as programmes are in development to bring HKU students in as volunteers and collaborate with The Kadoorie Institute’s Shek Kong office on a one-day educational tour to both sites, among other initiatives. “We also want to use the location to do more first-hand research and share that with the public. We’re now working on setting up camera- traps so we can take photos of animals in the wild for primary research,” she said. The centre is the latest community-based environmental initiative supported by HKU. The University supported the opening of the Lung Fu Shan hiking trail next to the campus in July 2007. It is also designing the new Centennial Campus to provide a direct link for the public from the urban Western district streets to Lung Fu Shan Country Park. NEWS ROUND-UP 2 Writing and the Cult of Celebrity B ooker Prize Winner, Anne Enright, del ivered this year’s Man Distinguished Lecture, hosted by the Hong Kong Literary Festival and the School of English at the Rayson Huang Theatre. In an often amusing and delightful talk the author of The Gathering referred to the week she was short listed for the prize as “one of the happiest of my writing life.” “ The Gathering had been published in the States and I felt that, for once, the right factors had come together; the book, the timing, the extra push from the prize. I felt lucky and justified in my luck, and I mourned a little the other books I had published,” she said. “But I felt the validation awarded me by being short listed for the Man Booker was enough. To win would be something else again, something not quite real because the winner becomes, for a few moments, or even a whole day, the winner becomes slightly unreal. They become a symbol, of their profession perhaps, of the whole huge and historical endeavour that is the novel. “Despite the fact that this Man Booker business was no use to me as a writer it did cheer me up no end, and although I knew the dangers of being vaguely or fleetingly symbolic, I also knew that this was never going to happen to me.” However, as the rank outsider, she surprised not just herself by winning and the prize, which raised new problems for her as a writer. “Success and failure are the enemies of talent. Failure will kill a writer, but slowly. Success can do the job much quicker,” she said, and she talked of her gathering aggression towards the media and the way her book was reduced, by journalists, to the word ‘bleak.’ “I had the sense that being a writer is the opposite of being a celebrity; I was living a contradiction between the silence of the work and the babble of the media, and of our modern celebrity culture. My fear is that the cult of celebrity is about making things simple, what we like about writers is that they let things be as complex and as nuanced and ambiguous as they have to be, the cult of celebrity turns life into gossip, cartoons, melodrama, all of these narrative forms remove a sense of meaning from the story, whereas writing is all about finding meaning, sometimes in unexpected places. “The magic of celebrity comes from the same infantile place as folklore does, but what the celebrity business resembles most is gossip, it’s often hilarious and gleeful and full of spite, it has the need to elevate and to shame conspicuous individuals, if possible at the same time. “The magic of books on the other hand still involves ideas of truth, the real, the necessary, sometimes even the spiritual, whether it’s written in posh or popular prose. Above all celebrity-type gossip is a communal thing – it’s made of many minds, it’s one of the methods by which the group keeps the individual in its place. Writing is not about staying in your place. Writing is about setting the individual free,” she said.