Taking off my blinders

I feel like I have a good balance with the amount of travel I do for my job. A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days in Cambodia and also in China. I visit factories to review their working conditions. I love this aspect of what I do because I feel like I get an insight into another part of a country that I would not see if I were only traveling as a tourist.
These workers in these factories are often considered the working poor, these jobs often pay just the minimum wage, or unfortunately often below minium wage and have long hours. Factory work is really hard and mundane and yet these people are the core of the global manufacturing industry which in turn produces all of the things we get to buy.
I find when I am in Asia I see the world a little differently than when I am at home. This is because culturally we are different and it gets magnified when you have a country that thinks slightly different about some things. And yet there are some things where we are all the same.
You get anyone talking about their friends or family people react the same - they all have eclectic stories, or when you see a child and smile at them, they smile back. And globally we think we can continue to develop and grow forever.
My role is to look at sustainability - how we can learn to live on this finite planet. I live in a country of 350million people and to find balance here is very tricky. But what happens when you have a country of 1.3 billion people who are trying to bring themselves out of a developing country lifestyle - how do you incorporate sustainability.
It feels overwhelming when you drive for hours and see nothing but sky rises and sky rises - knowing that people live and work here. And that they have a right to live and work there.
I am a big supporter of not throwing rocks while living in my glass house, so I don't want to focus on what China is or isn't. But rather focus on what this means for us. The idea of infinite of resources does not exist - and we are seeing that with increasing prices of global commodities. So how are we going to protect ourselves as the storm grows with a global sustainability crisis. The urgency grows when I leave the nice confines of grocery stores, heat and plumbing and see that the rest of the world lives very differently than we do. We have a lot father to fall.