Thirty-eight Britain Movement BuilderYou are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.
—VANDANA SHIVA
I FIRST TRAVELED TO YUNNAN PROVINCE in the southwest of China in 1992, when I was backpacking there as a student. At the time, I loved the wild quality of the land, how pristine and undisturbed it all seemed. The Yunnan countryside is enchanting and beautiful, with steep gorges dropping into rivers that feed the Yangtze, snowy mountain ranges with perilous roads cut between them and climbing up their slopes, towering old-growth forest stretching to the horizon, and in the south there are rainforests harboring rich wild fauna and flora. Yunnan is known within China for being the “land of elephants and peacocks,” just two of the colorful inhabitants that make it easy to fall in love with the place.
Yunnan is just as diverse culturally and ethnically as it is geographically. The province borders on Tibet to the northwest and Burma to the south, so there are Tibetan people, Dai, and many other minorities living along the border and in the southern parts of the province. It's an unforgettable land—remote to get to, but hard to leave once you're there. When I was a child, the pictures of the rainforests in southern Yunnan caught my imagination. I had always wanted to be a rainforest researcher, studying its ecology and wildlife. The colorful wildlife and scenery seemed to have been dreamed up in a fairy tale.
But now, as I walked along a narrow road dug into the side of a cliff with thirty other students, our local tour guides, and the horses carrying our luggage, I knew better. This land was far from untouched: uncontrolled clear-cut logging of the old-growth forest had devastated many parts of the province, and wildlife habitats were being destroyed at an alarming rate. As I looked out to the horizon, jagged scars abruptly gouged the landscape every so often, a brutal reminder of the industrial machines that were chewing up the ground and the ancient forests that stood there. That's why I and my small group of students, activists, and journalists had come here—to see this destruction firsthand and try to alert the rest of the country to the destruction ravaging the landscape and its wildlife.
I was lost in thought as I walked, following behind one of the packhorses plodding slowly up the narrow path on the cliff. Wanting to get ahead, I tried to quickly pass the horse, but as I came into its view from behind, it startled, and, bucking and snorting, blundered into me. Hardly realizing the danger, I turned and saw I was staring one thousand feet (304.8 meters) straight down into the gorge and the rushing water below.
It took what seemed like a lifetime to regain my balance and scramble back from the edge—though of course, in reality, it was only a fraction of a second. But that brief moment I spent staring into the gorge, I felt a terrifying rush, the feeling that whatever the price of this endeavor, I was totally committed, even if it put my life at risk. There was something about that realization that scared me—but it also confirmed that I was doing exactly what I was meant to do.
We had come from Beijing to meet the local people, the provincial and local officials, the Tibetan lamas, and representatives of the logging companies that were working there. Ironically, though, it was not the fate of millions of acres of forest that had set this journey in motion; it was the fate of a few small monkeys.
One of the many rare species of primates in the province is the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey. These black-and-white monkeys, notable for the small black noses they're named for and distinctive red lips, live in the mountainous alpine forests found at high altitudes. By the time of our trip, in 1998, the logging in Yunnan had severely depleted much of their habitat, and they were in danger of vanishing forever.
I had first heard about the danger to the Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys from a retired editor of the Chinese-language Great Nature magazine, Tang Xiyang, while I was a student at the China School of Journalism. We had invited him to speak to our student group in Beijing, the China Green Student Forum, about conservation issues in China. He stalked the room as he talked, giving us a fiery speech about the thousands of years of natural history being wiped out by industrial logging. The scale of the loss was nearly too much to bear. It was an electric performance, and Tang's passion was infectious. Previously, we were nothing more than a small group of students who met every once in a while to talk about our interest in environmentalism and swap stories. But by the time Tang finished his presentation, we were much more—seized with a desire to not just talk about the environment any more, but also to take action.
We determined that it was time to act on what we knew and try to make a real difference on the ground. The situation in Yunnan presented an irresistible opportunity: we would travel to the area, meet with representatives from the many different constituencies there, and generate as much publicity as possible, hopefully pressuring the Chinese central government into acting, and finally stopping the logging scheme.
Starting from just a few individuals planning to go and do some volunteer work in Yunnan, it quickly grew to become a grand tour, with more than thirty students and conservationists traveling to northwest Yunnan for three weeks. With so many people involved, word got around quickly. Media interest grew, and soon we were bringing much-needed media attention to report on what we were observing. The China Green Times was the primary newspaper to cover the trip and sent timely reports back to Beijing on our little band of travelers and our adventures in Yunnan.
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THOUGH I LIVED IN AN APARTMENT, nature was abundant around me growing up: Trees, frogs, and butterflies were part of my childhood memories, and the starry night sky beckoned me to explore the unknown world outside. However, as the urbanization process picked up its pace, and China's economic boom required wider roads and more building, the natural environment around me gradually disappeared. The natural places that haunted my childhood memories were forever lost. That was the dawning of my environmental consciousness. I'd always enjoyed nature and the outdoors, but it wasn't until the day that a news report came on television about whaling and the dumping of toxic chemicals into the ocean that I began to seriously consider the natural world as something that needed consideration and protection.
The news report I saw was of Greenpeace activists harassing and blocking the activities of a whaling boat in the Pacific Ocean. The Chinese government was fond of these kinds of Greenpeace stories because it was an opportunity to highlight some distinctly Western problems, such as whaling and environmental degradation—this, of course, being around the time that China's own environmentally destructive industrialization was accelerating as never before. There was little to watch then on Chinese television, and the daily newscasts often featured such stories, translated from Western TV feeds. The slaughter of whales, and the actions of the activists to stop it, wrenched at my conscience. I decided that environmental action—the kind that Greenpeace took on a regular basis—was what I wanted to do. Starting Greenpeace in China was my new life goal.
Greenpeace was the first instance I had ever heard of in which citizens had organized to promote their cause independently. Each time I watched these news accounts of Greenpeace's bold action in the Pacific Ocean, individuals putting themselves in front of boats and in harm's way, my excitement grew. Every day around China Television news time, I would have been expecting a piece of news on Greenpeace. I must have been Greenpeace's number one fan in China by the middle of the 1980s. In 1986, when I was fourteen years old, I started my own unofficial Greenpeace group and started lecturing my friends and classmates about environmental issues.
But meeting that goal of starting an actual Greenpeace movement in China proved to be more difficult. For one thing, there was no Internet then and no practical way to get connected with the real Greenpeace. And given the lack of communication with the outside world, being a fan of Greenpeace was, at the time, a lonely thing to be in China.
When I graduated from my first university degree in Changsha, there was still no Greenpeace in China—or any environmental group, for that matter, that I could consider working for. So I decided to continue my studies at the China School of Journalism for my second degree. Having moved to Beijing for graduate school, I had more time and started to connect with other people interested in issues of ecology and conservation and introduced them to each other. Eventually, these other student leaders and I started the China Green Student Forum, a network for college students interested in environmental issues. We met to exchange ideas, tactics, and contacts.
That kind of student gathering could be dangerous in the years after the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989. In 1991, when I put up posters around university campuses in Changsha to tell people about Earth Day, I was taken in for questioning by Hunan Medical University police.
I remember the day clearly: just as I was putting up a poster promoting things students could do to celebrate Earth Day, a man in plainclothes watched me intently. Moments later, he asked me what I was doing, and I explained about Earth Day and why I wanted to tell people about it. I was about to leave, but he asked me to go with him, which is when it became clear that he was an undercover police officer. He questioned me, asking me who paid me to do this. I told him no one did—it was something I was doing on my own initiative.
He called my own university, and a group of people, including police officers from my university and faculty members from my department, soon arrived. They huddled over my poster in a separate room, looking for unacceptable political messages—and, naturally, couldn't find any. After being transferred to my university, I was taken to the police office at my campus, unable to leave. The officers continued to question me on my motivation and whether or not someone else was funding my activities. I gave them a lengthy talk about my past involvement in environmental efforts, from middle school to college. I enjoyed presenting my confession—I turned it into another energetic lecture on the need for urgent conservation efforts in China—and the police dutifully took notes.
Finally I was allowed to go back to sleep at my dorm the next morning, but I had to write a “self-criticism report.” Instead of criticizing myself for these actions, I wrote a report about the crucial need for environmental action by the government. They didn't like that very much, and so I gained a reputation for being a problematic student, one potentially having “dangerous links with the international community.”
These police investigations—there were others—never led anywhere, but I always treated it as an opportunity to talk with the government officials about the importance of conservation. And I knew from watching Greenpeace on TV that being arrested was an important part of the process. I wore those arrests like a badge of honor. I felt like I was already a part of Greenpeace, whether officially or not.
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IN YUNNAN, OUR ACTIVISM WASN'T DRAWING the attention of police, but of the national media. For several weeks, we rode in buses around the province meeting people. But northwest Yunnan, being rugged terrain, wasn't always the most hospitable place for a bus full of people. So from time to time, we would hike to remote villages to talk with the locals, or to Tibetan temples perched on mountaintops to meet with the lamas who lived there. Everywhere we went, the people were kind and warmhearted. We visited several villagers and were welcomed to dine and dance with them upon first meet.
In Deqin, a small town in the farthest northwest corner of Yunnan, right on the Tibetan border, we conducted social research on such issues as household income, child schooling, family structure, and so on. The encounters were eye-opening. Many villagers relied on collecting and selling pine mushrooms, which were being exported to Japan to earn extra income. It was a vivid example of how locals needed a healthy environment to sustain their own livelihood.
The local people lived largely in small villages, surrounded on every side by forest, and many had a deep knowledge of the land formed by decades of living there. They loved their forest and valued having it intact. But many people were also quite poor. Therefore, when local government advertised their logging schemes as a way to generate extra revenue for the local economy, it could be misleading. And for the government-owned logging companies, it was always an easy argument to turn publicly owned forests into resources that would feed their profits.
We saw clear-cut sites where logging companies had stripped everything from the ground, leaving acres of scarred land in their wake. Local officials explained their decisions to allow logging on these lands, and they consistently told us the same things the villagers had: there was every economic incentive to treat the forest as a resource to be exploited, and little economic incentive to treat it as either a source of sustainable livelihood or an environmental heritage to be preserved. Local governments needed money to provide services, and logging was one of the few activities that brought in the money.
We met Long Yongcheng, a researcher of the Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys who had lived and studied the animals in their natural habitat for eight years. As a group of mostly city-dwellers, we felt it was important to not just look at the logging and complain about it, but also to learn as much as possible about the whole situation from people who knew much more about it. Long, having studied the monkeys for years, was a wealth of information to our group. He knew the wildlife and the habitat extremely well, but he was also someone who actually lived in the area, who had friends and connections in the community. A group of outsiders who were leaving after their three-week trip can still have a role to play, as we learned, but it is citizens with deep links in the community and the environment that can achieve the most impressive and lasting results.
After nearly three weeks of riding down roads in our bus, hiking over newly deforested alpine slopes, and stumbling up and down mountainsides, we headed back to Beijing, armed with knowledge of the issues particular to Yunnan, and ready to propose real solutions that would protect the environment and the people as well. The question at that point was, would anyone care or listen?
As it turns out, our journey had been a sensation in Beijing, and the central government had taken note of our time on the road. Media reports of our exploration in Yunnan were widespread, provoking a long-overdue national conversation about balancing China's need for economic development with the need to protect natural environments.
Shortly after our trip, the central government offered ten million dollars to the local prefecture to invest in their efforts to reduce poverty and announced that they would halt logging of old-growth forests in Yunnan. The following year, in 1997, after severe flooding in the Yangtze River region, the late Prime Minister Zhu Rongji ordered the immediate ban on logging of all natural forests across China. The Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys—and thousands more species—would be protected from the logging that was devastating them, and local people would benefit economically and environmentally.
For me, the whole experience reshaped much of my thinking about environmentalism and ecological activism. Environmental problems are complex, and so are their solutions. Protecting a single species of wildlife is easy for people to understand, but ultimately, I decided the goal must be more than simply securing a piece of forest for a few endangered monkeys—it must be a comprehensive effort to protect whole ecosystems, ensure the human and social development of local communities, and integrate those two worlds in a way that improves both. Such solutions are never easy to find, but when they work, they are world changing.
Environmental activism, I concluded, is political activism. The two are inseparable. Political action is crucial to saving vibrant ecologies, because government is the one institution that can mediate the many different concerns of industry, citizens, and the land, the sea, and those that cannot speak for themselves—at least, not in our language. Activism, on the other hand, is knowing when to challenge governments. But the key is to know when to work hand in hand with both. Both techniques are necessary to successfully preserve fragile environments.
Today, as with the original Yunnan trip, my dream from the time I was a teenager still propels me. That unofficial Greenpeace office I started at fourteen years old finally, over a decade of work, became real when I helped establish the first Greenpeace office in Beijing and became the first Greenpeace staff person working in mainland China. The daring actions of those original Greenpeace activists all those years ago, which dazzled me as a child, still inspire me today. It shows how activism—committed, long-term, and fearless—can effect not just immediate change, but also transform the world for decades to come. I'm proud to be part of that change today, and hope that I can similarly inspire the next generation of Chinese environmental activists.
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Wen Bo is currently the China coordinator for Global Greengrants Fund. Time Magazine says his work to fuel an environmental movement in China has “lit sparks amid the darkness of public indifference.” He received a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation and is now investigating marine endangered species trade in East Asia, trying to save sea turtles, sharks, and coral species.
Thirty-eight Britain Movement Builder
PHOTO BY ANDY RIDLEY