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Our future grub

John Vidal — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:15:00 +0000

By 2050 there will be 2.5 billion more people on earth. How can they be fed? Science’s answer, writes John Vidal, is a diet of algae, insects and meat grown in laboratories.

How can we feed the 2.5 billion more people – an extra China and India – likely to be alive in 2050? The United Nations says we will have to nearly double our food production and governments say we should adopt new technologies and avoid waste. But however you cut it: there are already one billion chronically hungry people; there’s little more virgin land to open up; climate change will only make farming harder to grow food in most places; the oceans are overfished; and much of the world faces growing water shortages.

Fifty years ago, when the world’s population was around half what it is now, the answer to looming famines was “the green revolution” – a massive increase in the use of hybrid seeds and chemical fertilisers. It worked, but at a great ecological price. We grow nearly twice as much food as we did just a generation ago, but we use three times as much water from rivers and underground supplies.

Food, farm and water technologists will have to find new ways to grow more crops in places that until now were hard or impossible to farm. It may need a total rethink over how we use land and water. So enter a new generation of radical farmers, novel foods and bright ideas.

Algae

How do you free up huge amounts of farmland to grow more food for humans? Easy – switch to commercial algae farms. Algae are simple, single-cell organisms that can grow very rapidly at sea, in polluted water and in places that would normally kill food crops. Major airlines and shipping companies are now investigating a switch to algae oil, and smart clean-tech money is pouring in to the nascent technology.

The prize is huge: scientists say that under optimum conditions, commercial algae farms can produce 5,000 to 10,000 gallons [roughly 22,730 to 45,460 litres] of oil per acre [nearly 4,050 square metres], compared to just 350 gallons [about 1,590 litres] of ethanol biofuel per acre grown with crops such as maize. In addition, algae could feed millions of animals and act as a fertiliser. Replacing all US ethanol (biofuel) production with algae oil would need around two million acres [just over 8,000 square kilometres] of desert, but, says Arizona State university professor Mark Edwards, it would potentially allow 40 million acres [about 162,000 square kilometres] of cropland to be planted with human food, and save billions of gallons of irrigation water a year.

Algae are at the bottom of the food chain but they are already eaten widely in Japan and China in the form of seaweeds, and are used as fertilisers, soil conditioners and animal feed. “They range from giant seaweeds and kelps to microscopic slimes; they are capable of fixing CO₂ in the atmosphere and providing fats, oils and sugars,” says Edwards. “They are eaten by everything from the tiniest shrimp to the great blue whales. They are the base of all life and must be the future.”

Artificial meat

It looks like meat, feels like meat and it is meat, although it’s never been near a living, breathing animal. Instead, artificial or “cultured” meat is grown from stem cells in giant vats.

Scientists say the hunt for meat substitutes is critical because western eating habits are now spreading to China and other rapidly emerging economies, putting intense pressure on governments and farmers to fell more forests and open up new farmland. Cattle now occupy nearly one quarter of all cultivable land, and growing crops for animal feed takes up another 25%. In the United States, nearly 70% of the grain and cereals grown are now fed to farmed animals.

Much of the research into artificial meat is being done in Europe, with scientists in Holland and Britain developing edible tissue grown from stem cells in laboratories. But while the first artificial hamburger could be developed next year, it might taste of nothing at all. Meat needs blood and fat to give it colour and taste, and while stem cells for blood and fat have been identified, this is slow, complex and expensive work.

Nevertheless, studies show that artificial meat wins hands down in the environmental stakes, using far less water, energy and land. In addition, few ethical objections have been raised, largely because mass production of animals in factory farms and use of growth hormones and antibiotics is already considered questionable.

New crops

Few people have heard of Zhikang Li, but history may judge the Chinese plant breeder to be one of the most important people of the century. Last year, after 12 years’ work with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, he and his team developed “green super rice”, a series of rice varieties which produce more grain but which have proved more resistant to droughts, floods, salty water, insects and disease.

Zhikang Li achieved this without genetic modification (GM) technology, working instead with hundreds of researchers and farmers in 16 countries and using only conventional plant breeding techniques to cross-breed more than 250 rice varieties.

Green super rice, which could increase yields in Asia enough to feed an extra 100 million people, will be rolled out in the coming years. But better plant breeding – with or without GM – will be key to increasing the yields of all other crops.

However, most research money has gone into GM in the past 20 years. Here, the global agrichemical industry has promised new crops enriched with extra vitamins, enzymes or healthy fatty acids, as well as drought-tolerant corn and crops that can save carbon emissions. But while it looks ahead to bananas that produce human vaccines, fish that mature more quickly and cows that are resistant to disease, its promise to feed the world has been patchy in terms of results.

Last year more than 350 million acres (over 1.4 million square kilometres) – about 10% of global cultivated area, or the size of Germany, France and the United Kingdom together – were planted with GM crops; but this mainly covered only three big foods – maize, oilseed rape and soya – most of which went to animal feed.

Desert greening

Much of the world is arid, with its only nearby water being the sea. So could a technology be found to green coastal deserts in places such as Chile, California, Peru and the Middle East using salt water?

Charlie Paton, a British inventor, has a vision of vast “seawater greenhouses” to grow food and generate power. The idea is simple: in the natural water cycle, seawater is heated by the sun, evaporates, cools to form clouds, and returns to earth as refreshing rain. It is more or less the same in Paton’s structures. Here, hot desert air going into a greenhouse is first cooled and then humidified by seawater. This humid air nourishes crops growing inside and then passes through an evaporator. When it meets a series of tubes containing cool seawater, freshwater condenses and is then collected. And because the greenhouses produce more than five times the freshwater needed to water the plants, some of it can be released into the local environment to grow other plants.

Seawater greenhouses have been shown to work and this year a large-scale pilot project backed by the Norwegian government will be built near Aqaba in Jordan. The Sahara Forest Project will combine different technologies to grow food and biofuel crops and be up and running by 2015.

But this is just one of many technologies being developed to enable food to be grown in unlikely places. One of the simplest, but most ambitious, plans may be the long-mooted Great Green Wall of Africa. This linear forest would be 15 kilometres wide and 7,775 kilometres long, and stretch from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in east Africa. It would, say the 11 countries through which it would pass, help to stop the southward spread of the Sahara, slow soil erosion and wind speeds, help rain water filter into the ground and create micro-climates to allow fruit, vegetables and other crops to be grown.

Insects

Locusts, grasshoppers, spiders, wasps, worms, ants and beetles are not on most European or US menus but at least 1,400 species are eaten across Africa, Latin America and Asia. Now, with rising food prices and worldwide land shortages, it could be just a matter of time before insect farms set up in places such as Britain.

Not only are many bugs rich in protein, low in fat and cholesterol and high in calcium and iron, but insect farms need little space. Environmentally, they beat conventional farms, too. The creatures are far better at converting plant biomass into edible meat than even our fastest growing livestock; they emit fewer greenhouse gases; and they can thrive on paper, algae and the industrial wastes that would normally be thrown away.

The advantages of “micro-livestock” farming are great, say the United Nations and European Union, both of which are keen to see if insect rearing could be greatly expanded. The Dutch government is studying how to set up insect farms. But aware of western squeamishness, they have asked researchers to see if they can just extract the protein that many bugs contain.

Meanwhile, the EU is offering its member-states three million euros [more than US$3.9 million] to promote the use of insects in cooking, and has asked food-standards watchdogs to investigate their potential to supplement diets.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Copyright © Guardian News and Media Limited 2012

Homepage image by cwh3

Full circle for bikes in Beijing?

Olivia Boyd — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:13:00 +0000

Shannon Bufton promotes two-wheeled travel as an aspirational pastime. New Chinese riders are as interested in bicycles as cool objects as they are in where cycling can take them, he tells Olivia Boyd.

Australian bike enthusiast Shannon Bufton is the founder of Smarter Than Car, an NGO that promotes cycling in Beijing. He is also co-creator of Beijing Bike Week, which holds its inaugural festival this month, running from March 15 to 18.

Olivia Boyd: What is Beijing Bike Week, in a nutshell?

Shannon Bufton: It’s a week of celebrations of cycling culture and an exhibition of high-end bicycles and unusual bicycles in a luxury-brand mall.

First of all, we’re trying to promote cycling to new crowds. We’re trying to promote the idea of recreational cycling and particularly the idea of bicycles as objects the middle class might be interested in – high-technology objects, new objects. We’re hoping we can get Chinese consumers interested in the modern bicycle.

The second part of it is that there is already a very strong bicycle subculture in Beijing. The mountains are so close to the city, and for a very long time there have been people going out there with their bikes and exploring the wilderness. There’s a strong community of cycling fans in Beijing and we want to support that.

OB: So it’s a recreational culture rather than one rooted in environmental concerns?

SB: Yes. It’s mostly about the bicycles themselves and it’s becoming more and more about recreational cycling. But there are hints of people associating green with that as well.

The government is also really trying to promote cycling. It’s bringing a bike-hire scheme into Beijing, which will start this year in Dongcheng district. They also had a public-transport campaign last year during which they sponsored cycling events. But, again, these events were more about recreational cycling. In China, it’s very difficult to promote the idea of utility cycling – to go out there and say to people: OK, you’ve had your car for a couple of years; now you should put it away and ride your bike again.

OB: Why?

SB: The image of the bicycle is still ingrained as a vehicle that the old China was using to move around. There are a lot of people who believe the idea of riding a bike around the city is a good one, but very few are prepared to lose face and go out there and do it. The director of [Chinese NGO] Friends of Nature, Li Bo, told me about an acquaintance, a successful business person, who decided to start riding his bike to work. He began getting calls from people asking if there was something wrong with his business and did he need to borrow money. So there is still a stigma attached to the bicycle.

OB: How can you tackle that?

SB: I spent about a year and a half with my organisation Smarter Than Car going to talk to different groups, universities and so on, giving lectures about sustainable cities and how the bicycle is the solution to some of our transportation problems, and is also a cool and fun way to get around. The response I got from people was: we get it, because we used to ride the bicycle and we probably know more about the bike than you do. But we’re not interested in getting back on our bikes. The overwhelming message was that the Chinese weren’t ready to embrace the idea of utility cycling.

So after burying my head in the sand for a while, I decided that maybe recreational cycling is a way to keep the bicycle in the culture, in people’s homes and minds and as part of their lives. There’s still a long way to go before someone who is putting their mountain bike on top of their four-wheel-drive and driving out to the mountains is going to start riding to work. But at least the bicycle is still there.

These people are also reconnecting with childhood ideas of riding a bike, which are about freedom and being able to go fast and have fun with your friends. That starts to reposition the bicycle, not as something that’s a tool but as something that’s an addition to your life and makes it a bit more liveable. And then slowly the perception of the bicycle can change into something that’s not necessarily negative. And the culture will come full circle.

OB: How fast is the recreational cycling world growing?

SB: Very fast. If you go out to the mountains to the west of Beijing on the weekends during spring and summer, there are hundreds of riders. Most of them are under 30 and there are groups of friends and couples, spending the day out there just enjoying the outdoors.

There’s also growing interest in fixed gear, which is a type of bicycle that has one gear and you can’t peddle backwards. In the last five to 10 years, fixed gear has seen a huge growth in the west. All those urban hipsters in New York and London are riding around on fixed-gear bikes, and I’d say the fixed-gear bicycle has had a part in inspiring the bicycle revolution in other parts of the world. Bicycling all of a sudden became cool and sexy and fashionable.

And this culture is catching on in China, too. If you walk past a shop today, you’ll see it’s full of young Chinese getting into fixed gear.

OB: How do Beijing’s overall cycling rates compare with other parts of the world?

SB: Overall, China is still doing OK. Beijing has a ridership rate of about 19%, while most American cities are still under 1%. But the problem is those people who are riding are basically riding because they have no other choice and as soon as they have the opportunity to choose a different type of transport, they will.

More of a worry is that the culture of using the bicycle to get from A to B is completely disappearing. This city used to be one of the most amazing bicycle cities in the world. If you talk to anyone who lived here in the ’70s or ’80s, they’ll tell you about bicycle super-highways and how it was really difficult to turn left because there were so many people coming past. My wife is a Beijinger and she tells me the stories of the freedom she had as a child to roam the city. She used to go into the Forbidden City with her friends and they would ride their bikes there.

Many western cities have started to talk about car-free zones and more sustainable transportation, and Beijing used to have it – it was all here. But it’s getting lost and no one seems to really care about that. I think it’s sad: in the west, we are trying to move towards what Beijing was before in terms of its pedestrianisation and bicycle-isation, and Beijing is trying to move towards a 1950s American city, full of cars and highways.

OB: What more could or should the government could be doing?

SB: They could do a lot for protecting the rights of cyclists. The traffic situation is not conducive to encouraging people to get on their bikes. The infrastructure is here, which is great. It’s still part of the National Planning Policy to have bicycle lanes -- they’re just not well looked after. Cars park in them, taxis drive in them, people walk in them, and there’s no respect given to cyclists.

We did a report with Friends of Nature called “Bike for a Better Beijing”, where we put together a list of things we thought the government could do to improve the situation. One of those was to create some major cycling thoroughfares through the city and to start to protect those zones. Let the residents know these bike lanes are no-parking zones and have officers on hand to caution people who are in those lanes. And channel all of the energy of new cyclists into those spaces so that they can feel safe and others can see that they are moving faster and are looked after. That’s a way to encourage people to get back into cycling.

I think there are a lot of interesting things in Beijing’s old bicycle culture that could be adapted for future sustainable activities in cities.

OB: What sort of things?

SB: One of the great things here are the pop-up tricycle stalls. This idea of moving retail around to where people are is much more sustainable than having five different food shops in five different locations. In the old Beijing, bicycles and tricycles would go around the hutongs and ring a bell and people would know that was the flower-seller or someone was there to sharpen your knife. The idea that all you need is a bicycle or a tricycle and then you can service a population or provide a craft is a very sustainable way of thinking.

OB: How did you become so passionate about promoting cycling in Beijing?

SB: When I first came to China, I was working on large urban-design projects and I guess I got a bit disillusioned by the whole process. We sold our services as sustainability, but I knew the concepts we were putting in were going to be twisted this way and twisted that way and lose what they’re about by the time they got built.

I was really concerned about the way Chinese cities were heading, so I decided that I would move towards something more grass-roots. My wife and I thought let’s do something around the bicycle: it’s part of the city and has the potential to have a positive impact. And I fell in love with Beijing the first time I came here because I came on a bicycle.

Olivia Boyd is assistant editor at chinadialogue.

Homepage photo by Shannon Bufton (right) at a bicycling event in Guizhou province

Offsetting conflict-mineral guilt

Kate Dailey — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 10:14:00 +0000

Consumers who don’t want the metals in their mobile phones and laptops to help fund wars and rights abuses are protesting with the very technology that they hope to improve. Kate Dailey explains.

“Conflict minerals” that help fuel war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) often end up in the most popular electronic gadgets. Can consumers offset their guilt by using the smartphone as a tool of change?

When students at Duke University in the United States wanted to encourage Apple chief executive Tim Cook to produce a line of conflict-free products by 2013, they shot a video imploring the Duke alumnus to take a stand. Then they uploaded the video to YouTube.

Many people then watched that video on a laptop or smartphone containing materials mined in conflict-ridden areas of the DRC.

The contrast highlights the unique challenges of the growing campaign to end the use of “conflict minerals” in personal technology.

“As our devices get smaller and faster, they require some specialised minerals,” says Sasha Lezhnev, a policy consultant for the Enough Project, a Washington-based non-governmental organisation that focuses on genocide and crimes against humanity. “A significant portion of the minerals that accomplish those tasks come directly from Eastern Congo war zones.”

He cites the three Ts: tantalum, tin and tungsten, all of which can be extracted from minerals located in the DRC.

Tantalum is needed for most portable electronic devices: for instance, it’s used in capacitors that facilitate text messaging and other mobile phone capabilities. The circuit boards on most electrical devices use tin and copper, both of which are also mined in Eastern Congo, while tungsten is an important conductor.

Because these resources are in such high demand, the mines are often controlled by Congolese warlords, who use the profits to fund more violence, says Lezhnev.

The demand for profits contributes to dangerous working conditions, in which miners, often children, work gruelling hours in unstable shafts.

Not all mines fund the warlords, and some in fact have the potential to make a large positive impact on the Congolese economy. But many are dangerous and deadly, and have attracted the attention of activists and politicians.

Notably, it is thanks to the World Wide Web that more people than ever are aware of conflict minerals.

“We’re sitting here with a wealth of information about products which themselves are much more complex, and we’re able to track back the products and their components further than we’ve been able to trace them back before,” says Kirk Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

But for consumers eager to act on this new knowledge, two problems emerge.

The first is that the large American companies that sell the finished product do not deal with the mines directly.

Those companies buy parts from smaller companies, which in turn often buy the minerals after they have been mined. That makes it difficult to determine where the minerals originated – and easy for companies to establish plausible deniability.

“Manufacturers really have done quite a lot to create a system that absolves themselves,” says Josh Dorfman, creator of the Lazy Environmentalist website.

The second, larger, problem is that there is no true conflict-free phone or laptop currently on the market.

So what is a conflicted consumer to do?

Luckily, the answer does not involve switching off smartphones.

Rather than stage a boycott, people who don’t want their purchases to fund conflict minerals are now protesting with the very technology they hope to improve.

“The funny thing about product boycotts is that it can be difficult to get your voice heard. If it is heard, it can be difficult to articulate the message clearly,” says Kyle Whitaker, a US manager of SustainAbility, an international think-tank focused on enacting social change.

More effective than making a non-statement by refusing to purchase an item, says Whitaker, is combining voices and resources to get a company’s attention.

One way to do that, he says, is through socially conscious investments. The other is by letting companies know their products are in demand, and that conflict-free technology is important.

And in this case, the very technology that activists want to improve is a major force in unifying and amplifying their demands.

“In a world where brand and reputation are so important to companies, your voice can be much more powerful than your dollars,” says Hanson. “Photos and videos are a powerful part of the voice, and therefore the particular devices that allow us to shoot video and photo around the world via Twitter and text are very valuable.”

At a conference on conflict minerals held in December in Washington, activists and policy-makers alike typed notes on tablet computers while others tweeted on smartphones. Some handed out promotional DVDs burned on laptops.

Online petitions on Change.org seek signatures calling for more sustainable technology. A website launched in November, congomines.org, helps establish more transparency in the mines.

JD Stier, campaign manager for the Raise Hope for Congo campaign, says his phone is an essential tool. “I have a map out for a business meeting, I’m on a conference call and am shooting out texts at the same time,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine my job without it.”

Indeed, the indispensable nature of smartphones and laptops is part of the reason some activists feel so drawn to this campaign.

“I’ve been involved with a lot of different human-rights causes and a lot of different issues. This one especially captured my attention because of the direct connection I have,” says Stefani Jones. She is a Duke University student and chair of the Conflict Free Campus organisation that sent the YouTube message to Tim Cook.

“To the extent that my phone is, in part, funding the war in the Congo, I want to play a part in enacting change,” she says.

Technology companies are starting to respond. Apple recently released a list of all its vendors and announced it has become a member of the Fair Labor Association.

Companies like Motorola, HP and Intel are working to develop mines outside of the war zones, says Lezhnev. The goal is to develop more secure mines within the war zones to help empower residents and improve the local economy.

The Dodd-Frank act, financial legislation passed by the US Congress in 2011, has a provision that requires US companies to determine the origin of their minerals and then disclose their supply chain. Though the act has yet to take full effect, several companies have already begun the process, and the UN recently reported that the effects are being seen in the DRC.

That is good news to Stier, who says that technology at its best connects us all to the world around us – and gives us a sense of responsibility to our fellow citizens.

“We have a meaningful connection all the way back to the mine, and we want to use the leverage we have as users of these products,” he says. “The technology we have here can be a force of positive development around the world.”

This article first appeared on the BBC news website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16535620. It is published here by chinadialogue with the BBC’s permission. BBC © 2012

Homepage image from the Enough Project shows tin ore

Get the kids back to nature

Xinyan Liu — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:59:00 +0000

City children in China have become cave-dwellers in an urban jungle, with many unable to connect with the natural world, writes Liu Xinyan. Educators are working to rebuild the links to plants and animals.

We all met by the roadside before setting off for the nature camp. It was a clear, early-spring morning and several of the children played on a dusty patch of ground next to a run-down factory. We grabbed one of the girls as she ran past. “Do you like it here?” we asked.

“Yes,” she shot back.

“Really?”

“Yes!”

And off she ran. We watched curiously as the girls piled earth, stones, sticks and leaves together.

“What are you doing?”

“Making a cake!”

The child who answered didn’t even look up, being too busy adding leaves to the “cake”. We laughed, but also felt a little sad. It was good to see the children at ease and happy and feeling close to nature. But it was also obvious that it had been a long time since they’d seen any real nature and that they rarely got to play outside; otherwise, they wouldn’t have been so excited about this scrap of land.

And – sure enough – when we got to our destination and saw the orchards, grass, ponds and hills, they whizzed off like escaped rabbits.

I still feel the same mix of happiness and sadness every time children get out of the car and run off shouting, ignoring any calls to return.

China’s rapid economic development has changed much of the country’s appearance. Childhoods of climbing trees, picking dates and grapes, catching fish, shrimp and tadpoles (or cicadas and crickets), making whistles from willow twigs, and spending all day outside until you were deeply tanned are gone. What have today’s children, growing up with TVs and computers, lost?

City kids in China became cave-dwellers in an urban jungle long ago. Children lose the ability to experience nature. They can talk at length about whales or cheetahs, but not describe a flower at their feet. Parents know that if their youngsters eat too much processed food, they will not have a balanced diet; yet they are less likely to know that too much processed information will also hamper children’s development.

In Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, the phrase “nature deficit disorder” is used to describe the broken connection between children and nature. And in a rapidly modernising and urbanising China, this phenomenon is spreading quickly.

Friends of Nature, formed in 1993, is one of China’s oldest NGOs and has provided links between the urban public and nature through bird-watching and gardening groups. Nature education aimed at children started in 2000, with Green Hope Action and the Antelope Bus.

Green Hope Action sees volunteers from the city visit poor villages to provide environmental education. The Antelope Bus is a mobile nature-education project that Friends of Nature adopted from Germany; in its early years, it also visited rural schools. Similar projects include the Beijing Brooks Education Centre’s programme to educate children who live near nature reserves about wetlands. These projects all started in cities and are aimed at rural areas. China’s early NGOs aimed to help vulnerable groups, rather than urban populations that tended to have access to more resources.

Over time, however, some of those involved started to question this long-distance approach and to look towards city residents. They found that children in cities had fewer chances to get close to nature than did their rural counterparts – that urban children suffered more of a nature deficit – and so they began to experiment with environmental education in cities. City children (and even some parents), it emerged, didn’t need more knowledge – they just needed to rebuild their links with the natural world.

Even an ant can cause both children and adults to panic, says Wu Yue, children’s nature tutor at the Lovingnature Education and Consulting Centre. The ants, worms and lizards we often caught and played with as kids have become terrifying beasts. Similarly, an experiment once found that Japanese university students preferred to play in a concrete gully, believing that two tree-lined mountain rivers nearby were dangerous. Long-term separation from the natural environment causes estrangement, fear and the loss of the ability to appreciate nature’s beauty.

As the NGOs worked, they came to understand that while it’s good for a child to be able to name a plant, more is gained if he or she can appreciate its beauty; understand its structure and evolution, its links with other animals and plants; and experience the connection between people and nature.

Within two or three years, these ideas gave birth to a range of educational activities based around the observation and experience of nature. These activities include Friends of Nature’s Nature Camps, run by members and volunteers; Beijing Brooks’s nature and art experiences at Waterdrops Camp at its Nature Study Centre in the hills outside of Beijing; Hanhaisha’s community gardens project; and Nature Heart’s classes combining observation, explanation and photography of nature.

And we were delighted to see how the children behaved during the activities, breaking down the barriers between themselves and nature; it was like a miraculous journey.

Song Xi works on Friends of Nature’s nature experience project. She asked a group of lively children to close their eyes and lie beneath the branches of a large tree. When they opened their eyes and saw the sun shining through the green canopy, they fell silent –as if the whole world had stopped.

At first, city kids are unruly and uninterested, but they become curious, excited and focused over time. Initially they don’t want to get dirty and they scream at the sight of a bug – but soon they get closer to nature than their parents do. If they have the opportunity to observe and experience nature, they discover new things, things we may never have noticed, and they become imaginative about things that look ordinary.

Nature is ever-changing and full of beauty, and everyone is drawn to appreciate and understand it. It sharpens our senses, stimulates the spirit and cleanses the soul. No matter what their background, all children can find restoration in nature. As Hu Huizhe of Friends of Nature says, even “adults caught up in themselves can feel the power of nature when they notice a dramatic mountain scene or the colours of a wild flower”.

Playing outside makes children more fit and coordinated, and helps them to build friendships. The “secret gardens” of our childhood can absorb our sadness, soothe our soul and nurture our lives – and build our future personalities. Activities in the natural environment are not optional; they are an essential ingredient of a healthy childhood, just like sunshine and air are essential for trees and plants.

Nature is a treasure-house of knowledge, a palace of art, a spring of imagination and creativity. Children who know how to appreciate beauty will be happier, and creative children will be more successful. In his “Song of the Open Road”, the 19^th-century American poet Walt Whitman said: “Now I see the secret of making the best persons; it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.” Letting children build an emotional connection to nature, to ignite their curiosity and passion – that is the root of all learning.

As Li Weiwen, chair of Taiwan’s Society of Wilderness wrote in his book Education Can Be Romantic: “Take your child for a walk, and if you have a calm and unflustered heart, nature will lead you to appreciate it and learn everything that we should know.”

Liu Xinyan is deputy director of the Beijing Brooks Institute.

Homepage image by DannamanXuejia

The only way is down

Duncan Clark — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Consumption of “stuff” – the weight of all that we use – may have peaked in the UK in 2001 and begun to decline, a green analyst says. Duncan Clark explores Chris Goodall’s claim – and possible lessons.

The year 2001 was more eventful than most and, a decade on, we’re inundated with anniversaries [among them, those of the “9/11” terror attacks in the United States, the invasion of Afghanistan and the Gujarat earthquake]. With so many significant events to look back on, one thing that few people will remember 2001 for is its entry in the United Kingdom’s Material Flow Accounts, a set of dry and largely ignored data published annually by the Office for National Statistics.

But, according to environment writer Chris Goodall, those statistics tell an important story. “What the figures suggest”, Goodall says enthusiastically, “is that 2001 may turn out to be the year that the UK’s consumption of ‘stuff’ – the total weight of everything we use, from food and fuel to flat-pack furniture – reached its peak and began to decline.”

Quietly spoken but fiercely intelligent, Goodall is a consultant and author who, over the last decade or so, has established himself as a leading analyst on energy and climate issues. Probably the only Green Party parliamentary candidate who also used to work at the global management-consulting firm McKinsey, his speciality is trawling through environment statistics that would send traditional eco-warriors to sleep.

“One thing that’s remarkable is the sheer speed with which our resource use has crashed since the recession,” Goodall continues. “In the space of a couple of years, we’ve dropped back to the second-lowest level since we started keeping track in 1970. And although the figures aren’t yet available for 2010 and 2011, it seems highly likely that we are now using fewer materials than at any time on record.”

Goodall discovered the Material Flow Accounts while writing a research paper examining the UK’s consumption of resources. The pattern he stumbled upon caught him by surprise: time and time again, Britons seemed to be consuming fewer resources and producing less waste. What really surprised him was that consumption appears to have started dropping in the first years of the new millennium, when the economy was still rapidly growing.

In 2001, Goodall says, the UK’s consumption of paper and cardboard finally started to decline. This was followed, in 2002, by a fall in our use of primary energy: the raw heat and power generated by all fossil fuels and other energy sources. The following year, 2003, saw the start of a decline in the amount of household waste (including recycling) generated by each person in the country – a downward trend that before long could also be observed in the commercial and construction waste sectors.

In 2004, our purchases of new cars started to fall – as did our consumption of water. The next year, 2005, saw our household energy consumption starting to slump (notwithstanding an uptick last year due to the particularly cold winter). And in 2006 we seem to have got bored with roads and railways, with a decline in the average distance travelled on private and public transport. All of this while GDP – and population – went up.

Other consumption categories have been falling for much longer, Goodall points out. Despite concerns about the increasing intensity and industrialisation of our farming, the amount of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium fertilisers being applied to British fields has been falling since the 1980s. Our consumption of cement reached a peak at a similar time.

Even our intake of food is falling. Although obesity is on the rise, the total number of calories consumed by Britons has been on a downward slope for around half a century, driven by the fact that, compared with previous generations, we do less exercise now and live in warmer homes. Perhaps more remarkably, our intake of meat – the food most regularly highlighted as an environmental concern – seems to have been falling since 2003.

Goodall’s research sends a counter-intuitive message. We might expect to have been getting through less stuff since the financial crash of 2008; but surely throughout the boom years of the 1990s and 2000s, our rate of material consumption was steadily climbing in step with GDP?

Not according to Goodall. But do his claims stack up? One obvious counter-argument is the fact that we have “outsourced” our resource-hungry industries to China and other developing countries. After all, various reports have already made it clear that while the UK’s own use of oil, coal and gas is falling, our total carbon emissions, once you consider all Chinese factories producing our laptops, toys and clothes, continues to rise steadily.

Oddly, though, when it comes to overall resource use – everything from maize to metals – the same doesn’t seem to apply. At least, not if we believe the official figures from the Office of National Statistics. Each year, statisticians there estimate the UK’s Total Material Requirement, the grand total of all the goods we consume, plus all the materials used in the country and overseas to produce those goods.

The numbers are head-spinningly huge. Once you add up minerals, fuels, crops, wood and animal products, the UK churns its way through roughly two billion tonnes of stuff each year. That’s more than 30 tonnes for each man, woman and child in the country – a giant stack of raw materials as heavy as four double-decker buses. (Or, more specifically, as heavy as four old- fashioned Routemaster buses. In an exception to Goodall’s theory, some of the newer, more efficient buses are almost twice as heavy as the old ones.)

Although that’s still a massive – and doubtless unsustainable – rate of consumption, Goodall’s point is that our appetite for materials may finally be on a downward curve. In particular, he’s excited by the fact that over the past couple of decades, we’ve significantly grown the economy without noticeably increasing our resource use. To use the jargon, Goodall believes that Britain has finally “decoupled” economic growth and material consumption.

If correct, this means we’ve achieved something that many green commentators believed was impossible. In his influential 2009 book, Prosperity Without Growth, academic Tim Jackson argued that while economies could become more efficient in their use of resources, genuine decoupling – resource use falling while GDP rises – remained a “myth”. This view, and the argument that we therefore should aim for zero-growth economics, has become widely accepted in environment circles.

Goodall believes that the data from the Office of National Statistics, combined with his own research, challenges this assumption. “In 2007, just before the crash,” Goodall says, “our total use of materials was almost the same as it was in 1989, despite the economy having tripled in size in the intervening years. And the peak in resource use appears to have been in 2001 – many years before the recession halted economic growth.”

Jackson welcomed Goodall’s research, describing it as “long overdue” and “exactly the kind of analysis that is sadly lacking at policy level and desperately needed as the basis for a green economy”. But he also warned against drawing simple conclusions, pointing out that – thanks to Britain’s investments in the global commodity markets – our economy was continuing to increase resource use even if we had started consuming fewer of those resources ourselves. “For those hoping desperately for stuff-free growth”, Jackson added, “there is only cold comfort in these statistics.”

Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation (nef) also doubts the significance of the UK reaching “peak stuff”.

“Measures of our environmental impact are only meaningful when they’re related to the planet’s ability to keep up. For these findings to be significant, we’d need to be able to demonstrate that we’re on the way to being able to live within our ecological means. And on that measure we’re still a long way off target.”

Jackson and Simms are certainly right that – even if the UK has started consuming fewer resources – it’s hardly going to save the planet. Globally, resource extraction is rising, carbon emissions are climbing, rain forests are shrinking, oceans are acidifying and species are disappearing. Solving these problems will clearly take far more than stabilising resource use in mature economies like the UK.

Goodall acknowledges this. “I don’t want to suggest for a moment that the world doesn’t face massive environmental challenges. But the data I found does suggest the possibility – and it is only a possibility – that economic growth is not necessarily incompatible with addressing these challenges. If growth helps us get more efficient in our use of resources, and actually reduces our consumption of material things, then environmentalists may be very wrong to campaign for a zero-growth economy.”

Bringing the debate back to earth, he adds: “It is a trivial example but economic growth, and the innovation that comes with it, have given us the Kindle, a way of allowing us to read books without the high-energy consumption required to make paper. Digital goods generally have lower environmental impact than physical equivalents and if growth speeds up the process of ‘dematerialisation’, it has positive – not negative – environmental effects.”

The idea that the best way to get greener may be to get richer isn’t a new one. Economist Simon Kuznets argued decades ago that only when countries get to a certain level of wealth do they start to reduce their environmental impact. In green circles, however, such thinking is controversial. While environmentalists accept that poor countries need to grow economically to lift themselves out of poverty, most are thoroughly sceptical that conventional growth-focused economics is compatible with saving the planet from impending disaster.

There is, however, an emerging pro-growth seam of environmental thinking. Earlier this year, writer Mark Lynas caused a stir with his book The God Species, in which he broke a trio of green taboos by calling for environmentalists to embrace genetically modified (GM) foods, nuclear power and growth-based capitalism. GM food would allow us to leave more of the world as wilderness, Lynas wrote; nuclear energy would help us wean ourselves off coal; and climbing economic growth would give us the best chance of combating global poverty and funding the technical revolution required to green our production of energy and goods.

Simms says that to call for economic growth as the solution to the planet’s woes is to miss the point. “The important question is this: is your economy doing something useful, and doing it within environmental boundaries? If we want to create a happy, low-carbon world, there are better ways to do that than slavishly trying to enlarge our economies. Bear in mind that 50 years of GDP growth and increasing resource use in the UK has done nothing to increase our life satisfaction.”

Ecological and economic arguments aside, Goodall’s suggestion that the UK may have reached the point of maximum resource use throws up lots of interesting questions. Most fundamentally: is it definitely true? How can we be sure that consumption won’t soar to new, even greater, highs when the global economy eventually picks up? And if we really have reached a peak, how did we get there? Was it just a matter of shifting to a more service-based economy? Can the Internet – or even decades of green campaigning – claim the credit? Or could it be that our densely packed little island is running out of space for new buildings, vehicles and bulky goods? Could eBay [an online auction and shopping website] and Freecycle [a network that diverts reusable items from landfills] be a factor, helping to keep more goods in circulation for longer? Or the fact that more of us are living in cities?

If we can understand how we levelled off British resource use, perhaps that information could help other countries do the same. After all, in a world that may soon be home to nine billion people, there can be fewer more important messages than – when it comes to “stuff” – less can be more.

For more information, see:
Peak stuff: a look at the data behind the claim that the UK’s consumption of materials may have peaked

Tim Jackson on unsustainable plundering of resources and the need to embrace green technology
http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Copyright © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

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Our special relationship

Robin McKie — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 10:30:00 +0000

The urge to connect with other species helped to make us human. But, a US anthropologist told Robin McKie, the age-old ties that taught us empathy and understanding may be weakening – to our detriment.

Humans became masters of the planet for a startling reason: our love of animals gave us unsurpassed power over nature. This is claim of a leading American anthropologist who says our prehistoric ancestors' intense relationships with other creatures – including those we hunt, keep as pets and use for food – propelled humanity towards global domination.

Interacting with animals on an intimate basis led humans to develop sophisticated tools and evolve enhanced communication skills, including language itself, Pat Shipman of Pennsylvania State University in the United States told the Observer. Animals also taught us that others – even other species – have emotions, needs and thoughts, while they also helped us to evolve the vital skills of empathy, understanding and compromise.

"The longest and enduring trend in human evolution has been a gradual intensification of our involvement with animals," she added. "But now our world is becoming increasingly urbanised and we are having less and less contact with them. The consequences are potentially catastrophic."

Shipman traces humanity's animal connection to the period 2.5 million years ago when our hominid ancestors first made tools. These crafted pieces of stone still litter sites in eastern Africa, including the Olduvai Gorge in Kenya, and bear testimony to the mental transformation in our ancestors' brains.

"These apemen didn't just pick up stones and use them to hammer or pound prey or plants," said Shipman. "They shaped those rocks for specific purposes. They had a mental image of the kind of tools they needed and created them by chipping away at a large piece of stone until they got what they wanted."

And what they wanted were tools for cutting up carcasses. In other words, the sharp stone flakes spread over Olduvai were not used primarily as weapons to kill animals or to hack down plants, but to process dead animals that had already been brought down by other carnivores. Apemen had begun to scavenge for meat from carcasses of prey killed by leopards, cheetahs and other carnivores. Armed with sharp blades, they discovered, they could cut off chunks of antelope or deer and escape quickly before being eaten themselves by an enraged lion.

And that was the crucial point that began our special relationship with the animal kingdom, said Shipman, whose book The Animal Connection was recently published. "Until that point, we had been a prey species. Carnivores ate us. Then we began scavenging before going on to hunt on our own behalf. Meat provided our ancestors with a wonderful, rich source of sustenance. However, scavenging for it left us in a very vulnerable position. We were still just as likely to be consumed when confronted by a carnivore as we were to kill in our own right. To survive, we had to learn about the behaviour of a vast number of different species – the ones we wanted to kill and the ones we wanted to avoid.

"For example, we would have learned to spot when lions were preparing to mate – when a male was showing off to a female – so that we could take some its prey while it was otherwise occupied. We would have also built up knowledge about the migration of species such as wildebeest and other animals."

In the end, this expertise would have become crucial to human survival, a point illustrated in the cave paintings in Lascaux and Chauvet in France and the other caves painted by humans 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. They show us that after two million years of evolution, humans had become utterly fixated by animals.

"These paintings are stunningly beautiful and superbly crafted," said Shipman. "Sometimes scaffolding was erected in the caves. At the same time, artists went to enormous lengths to get their pigments mixed with the right binding agents and placed in exactly the right spot. And what did they depict when they got things just right? Animals, animals and more animals.

"There are no landscapes and only a handful of poorly executed depictions of humans. By contrast the paintings of lions, stags, horses, bulls and the rest are magnificent. We were besotted with animals because our lives depended on our relationships with them."

Not long after these paintings were created, the first animal was domesticated – the dog, followed some time later by the horse, sheep, goat and others. The development was crucial. In each case, humans had to learn to put themselves in the minds of these creatures in order to get them to do our bidding. In this way our senses of empathy and understanding, both with animals and with members of own species, were enhanced.

Our special relationship with animals is revealed today through our desire to have pets. "Humans are the only species on earth to have one-to-one relationships with a member of another species," said Shipman. "No other creature would waste resources on a member of another family, let alone a member of another species. But we do, and that is because we have evolved such close ties with specific animals over the millennia and because we are adapted to empathise with other creatures. It is a unique human attribute. We get so much from animals, much more than we appreciate."

Unfortunately, as society becomes increasingly urbanised those ties are being stretched and broken, added Shipman. "Our links to the animal world are precious and shouldn't be taken for granted," she said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Copyright © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Homepage image by edbrambley

Green Anhui and the grass-roots way

Hannah Lincoln, Neha Sakhuja — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:23:00 +0000

Activist Zhou Xiang discusses environmentalism, civic engagement and NGOs in China with Hannah Lincoln and Neha Sakhuja. Education and the news media, he says, are key factors in increasing social awareness and common action.

Green Anhui, a Chinese environmental NGO, leapt from obscurity in 2009 via the Academy Award-nominated documentary Warriors of Qiugang, which followed Qiugang village residents as they struggled to shut down a chemical factory in Anhui province. In an interview excerpted here with permission, one of Green Anhui’s founders, Zhou Xiang, spoke with Hannah Lincoln and Neha Sakhuja of Asia Society Northern California.

Asia Society: How did your environmental activism career begin? Can you tell us about your experience as an environmental activist in China and how you came to found Green Anhui?

Zhou Xiang: In 2003, a group of us from Anhui got together and founded Green Anhui. At the same time I went in 2004 to work with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), an American international NGO with an office in Shanghai. I was the Chinese delegate, in charge of the Chinese alligator programme. The programme took the New York Bronx Zoo’s Chinese alligators and Chinese zoos’ Chinese alligators and put them on Shanghai's Chongming Island, where they were introduced back into the wild.

So I did four years of field work, from 2004 to 2008, and then returned to Anhui. Now I consider myself a full-time staff member, someone who in America would be called an environmental activist.

AS: Where does Green Anhui get its funding?

ZX: We had a small start-up cost of US$200 donated by the US-based Global Greengrants Fund. Today the group’s funding comes primarily from writing proposals to foundations, companies and local governments. Right now, 55% of our funding comes from Chinese foundations and the remaining 45% from overseas sources.

AS: Do the Chinese foundations that fund you have any connection to the government?

ZX: No, the NGOs have no connection to the government. They are established by Chinese individuals with no governmental ties.

AS: Do the other provinces have similar NGOs? Do you work together with them?

ZX: There are not others like Green Anhui. China’s NGOs are very few.

AS: So what are Green Anhui’s primary activities?

ZX: We have three offices. ... We have one office in the city of Bengbu, near the Huai River. There is an office in Hefei, [Anhui’s capital] near Chao Lake, which also serves as our headquarters. We also have another office in Wuhu. ... In Hefei we do education, training, workshops and policy. In Bengbu, we do more campaign stuff -- things to do with human rights and environmentalism. Wuhu’s office deals in waste. Now we’re building the fourth office at Yellow Mountain [Huangshan]. There is a river there that leads to Hangzhou called the Xin’anjiang that we look after.

AS: What is the pollution situation like for these three rivers and Chao Lake?

ZX: Chao Lake and the Yangtze River were not always all right, but the government recently invested a lot of money in cleaning them up. They are OK now. Chao Lake is China’s fifth-largest lake, and it has the largest government investment in lake clean-up. They spent US$100 million on cleaning up Chao Lake. Right now, the worst pollution is of the Huai River.

AS: So even though the documentary was about your success on the Huai River, Huai River is still not in good shape?

ZX: The Huai river is very long. It crosses four provinces. Our staff is just at one location. Later on, we may map out a plan along the Huai in other places. But right now we are just focused on Anhui. Other than that, we will be most effective by slowly influencing local people in all these places.

AS: And what about the Xin'anjiang?

ZX: Xin'anjiang should have some of the best water in all of China. But downstream it’s all polluted. So what's to be done? Upstream, we have to protect the water, otherwise downstream, no one can drink it. Yellow Mountain is extremely beautiful, and that's where a lot of the water comes from, so it's important to protect it.

AS: At the Yellow Mountain office, do you have any specific plans?

ZX: In June, we carried out an investigation with the help of Alibaba, China’s eBay. They gave money to build our Yellow Mountain office. Xin’anjing is a beautiful river and Yellow Mountain is a beautiful mountain, and we are a small organisation. So Alibaba is helping us protect them.

AS: Have average Chinese people heard of your movie?

ZX: Yes, many have, especially people with environmental interests. Also government officials. [Laughs.]

AS: When Warriors of Qiugang began filming, how was it received by the villagers? Were they suspicious of you in any way?

ZX: When we started out, the villagers thought the movie director Ruby Yang and her cohort were reporters. The villagers hoped to expose what was going on and attract the government’s attention. So from the beginning, the villagers were very supportive.

When they realised we were making a movie, they were happy because in the end, this is a problem that the government does want to solve. The governmental departments all handled it differently, though. Some of the departments were not too pleased. But the environmental ministry really liked it, because the villagers’ success was also a success for them.

They had hoped that someone would pay attention to them, and they do not fear the media.

AS: Did the villagers see the movie?

XS: Yes, they saw it. They thought it was pretty interesting. They smiled a bit and cried a bit. Because in the process of making this movie some of the villagers died. Some of the people we interviewed died; you can see it mentioned in the end of the movie.

AS: In Warriors of Qiugang, village leader Zhang Gongli goes to Beijing to attend a conference and also to appeal to the higher authorities about Qiugang's issue [a common occurrence known as shang fang, 上访]. The video shows several people at the conference passionately discussing environmental issues, in particular the role of law and authority. Can you tell us about what Zhang Gongli did in Beijing?

ZX: He went to shang fang, but he also went to join a conference. He had already appealed to some authorities in the Anhui province city of Bengbu, and the next step was to shang fang in Beijing as well. We told him about a conference and helped him get there. The goal was to study how to protect oneself and one's environmental rights and interests.

The conference was a meeting of NGOs in Beijing, environmental activists and many village leaders like Zhang Gongli, who were victims of pollution.

AS: Do you think the Qiugang story is the norm or the exception? And when people shang fang, do they usually succeed?

ZX: Some win, some lose, and I'd say that there are fewer wins than losses.

Many will not succeed because they do not have a method or a foundation [base]. Even though the Qiugang documentary is only 39 minutes long, you can see that we used a lot of different tools. For instance, we used the media. We had the elementary school children write essays [to newspapers about the environmental situation of their town].

AS: You guys orchestrated that activity?

ZH: [Laughs.] Yes, that was one of the activities we planned.

This is a long-term project that we started in 2006. We spent four years on Qiugang's pollution issues – a very long time. Secondly, they had stand-out community leaders, like Zhang Gongli. We also had overseas support. So I think the success of Qiugang is not inevitable, because there are a lot of contributing factors. But China's environmental activities must have the support of the media, NGOs and community leaders in order to succeed.

AS: Is the Jiucailuo company [the chemical factory that was shut down] still polluting?

ZH: After it closed, it was moved to a chemical-factory district. There are a lot of companies together there, and no residents. There is also a water treatment facility there, and it cleans up the water. If they start to pollute again, we'll just go back and do it again.

AS: Would you sue them?

ZX: In China, we don't really sue. We use the media. We will write a report and give it to the government. We won't use a lawyer until the last minute.

AS: Have you worked on any other Qiugang-like cases?

ZX: Wanggang village and Xiaogang village. We are still working on these cases. Their pollution is also very serious. They probably won't need to shang fang. We use the media. We give local governments pressure.

AS: Do your activities and the law system have a tight relationship? Does the legal system as it now exists suit your activities?

ZX: Yes, there is a very tight relationship. Why, at the end of the day, did the chemical company have to move? Because according to Chinese law, a chemical factory cannot have residents living within one kilometre of it. But the company was just 20 metres away. So it was shut down.

The legal system is very broad. We may need a few specific problem-solving methods. That is to say, we need specific environmental-protection laws. So they are in the process of being written. Afterwards, they will be applicable and usable.

Also, China's standards need to be lower than, say, Europe's.

AS: Why's that?

ZX: Because only if standards are low will companies be willing to build in that area. For instance, I went to Asia Pacific Environment Network (APEN) in Oakland [California]. They told me that a chemical company in Oakland closed and moved to Shanghai, due to Shanghai having lower legal standards.

AS: To what extent do you represent a trend? How many environmental NGOs are in China, and where are they?

ZX: China's environmental NGOs over the past few years have started to increase. But most of what they do is education and training. They do not do things like what we did in Qiugang, because they think the issues are too sensitive. The other problem is, the groups are all very young – four years old or younger – and a lot of the staff is also pretty young. So they do education training.

Our activities in Qiugang are not typical of all NGOs. It is not typical for us, either. We mostly do education and training.

The number of NGOs in China will continue to increase because China has recently opened up registration. In the past, it was very hard to register because we had to go through multiple departments for permission. Now you just have to register with one bureau. It's like in America, where if you want to become a 501(c) [a non-profit business classification], you register for it, and then you get certain tax benefits. This is now available in China, too. So lately regulations have loosened up a bit.

Most of all, NGOs in China need time. They need experience. They only have a little money. Some only have one or two staff members – extremely small.

AS: With regards to your NGO or environmental NGOs in general, what political obstructions exist?

ZX: Our NGO manages to stay out of the fray, because we don't touch on sensitive issues. We don't get involved in political problems; we focus purely on environmental-protection issues.

There, of course, will be a little overlap of environment and politics. But we aren't left-leaning or right-leaning – we stay in the middle. Most of China's NGOs are going to be in the middle.

AS: The government's current Five-Year Plan's top priority is environmental protection, so they must have a pretty supportive attitude toward environmentalism?

ZX: I wouldn't say they are very supportive. If certain matters are very influential, then they may support it. But if no one knows about an event, they won't pay attention to it.

AS: Can you explain how you identify community leaders and what methods you use to train them?

ZX: First, in towns, we will disseminate information about environmentalism, try to educate people and also do some activities. And then some people will stand up and say that they want to help out. These people tend to be teachers and [school] principals, or old villagers – they are often the ones willing to help out.

One training method is to hand out pamphlets that explain environmental law. [The pamphlet] lists articles and regulations they can refer to if their environmental rights and interests are threatened. On the back of the pamphlet are our telephone number and the Environmental Protection Bureau’s number, which they should call if they are being harmed by pollution.

AS: So you train these few people, and then they will ...?

ZX: Bring power to the people. They will give a call to the Environmental Protection Bureau and say that this chemical company is polluting, and invite them over to check it out.

AS: A lot of villagers do not have internet access. So what kind of role does social media play in your activities?

ZH: We don't use these methods much. A lot of people have not graduated from high school, or even middle school. They might not use texting yet. We still use the traditional methods such as newspapers and posters and such. That way the local people will understand.

AS: Can you explain more about the activities you do in the cities?

ZH: We encourage everyone to use public transportation … Hefei city government dispensed a new electric bus this year, and through our magazine we encourage everyone to ride it. We also gave bus drivers shirts with green logos.

Also, on our website, we have a carbon calculator. For instance, if you drive a car, you may generate 100 tonnes of carbon dioxide in one year. By bus, you might not even make 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide. We train corporations to calculate their carbon production and teach them how to cut back.

AS: In the 20th century, a lot of Chinese scholars wrote about China's “pan of sand” issue. That is, they bemoaned the inability of Chinese people to group together and fight for a cause. Do you think this is the situation now?

ZX: There have been some changes since then. But there are so many people in China that a big change still has not happened. It is still in the beginning stages.

But nowadays, a lot of young people are very highly educated. They've gone to college and gotten master's degrees. They are more willing to talk about certain issues. … So there is a trend of increased social awareness. And now with social media, people will come together much more.

AS: Do you think that people with better civic engagement necessarily have better educations? Or is it that they have more channels, such as the internet and texting? The people of Qiugang were not very educated, but they were very civically engaged.

ZH: Hmm ... right. I don't think that civic engagement and education have a direct relationship. For instance, why do Qiugang people have this mentality? First, it's because the people in Bengbu city dare to campaign. They dare to fight. So people there, their mentalities are more willing to fight for human rights. But other places may not be like this.

Also, it's not to say that if you get a good education and can go on the internet, you definitely are civic-minded. It's not that direct. But these two factors are pretty necessary.

AS: I remember as a kid that we learned about environmentalism in elementary school. What's China's primary education on environmentalism like?

ZX: It exists in China, but it’s not very widespread. Why? Because even though education departments in all places have brought up the need for environmental education, it's still abstract.

AS: Do you feel like a hero?

ZX: I am not a hero. I didn’t even appear in the movie. [Laughs.]

AS: Like that Bei Dao poem [“Declaration”] which says [in essence] I am not hero, I am just doing what I must do?

ZX: Yes, just like that.

Hannah Lincoln and Neha Sakhuja interviewed Zhou Xiang, director of Green Anhui, for the Asia Society Northern California. The interview is excerpted by chinadialogue with the society’s permission.

Image from Green Anhui shows Zhou Xiang.

A greener city, house by house

Wei Zhou — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:35:00 +0000

China's oldest environmental NGO is on a mission to bring low-carbon renovations to Beijing homes. Zhou Wei met the campaign’s first wave: 21 families tasked with cutting their energy use by a third.

As we pulled up outside an old block of flats, Friends of Nature project officer Chen Wanning pointed to a window on the third floor. “That’s one of the families participating in the low-carbon households project,” she said. Looking up, I knew immediately which one she meant: a metal rack laden with plants was visible in front of new, double-glazed panes. The window stood out from its old, rusty neighbours.

This summer, 21 Beijing families took part in a programme run by Chinese NGO Friends of Nature to promote low-carbon and low-energy living, one they hope will be the first of many. The organisation gave a grant of up to 10,000 yuan (US$1,600) to each family to fund low-carbon home refurbishments, as well as providing them with electricity meters. The families were asked to measure power use before and after the changes, and the goal was a 30% reduction in energy use. The refurbishments are now drawing to a close, and the Friends of Nature project team has been inspecting the properties.

Most of the families taking part in the project live in old-fashioned residential blocks. Often the walls and windows in these buildings are poorly insulated, meaning the apartments get hot in summer and cold in winter, and residents rely on energy-hungry heating and air-conditioning systems. So double-glazing, which insulates and blocks out noise, was the top priority for the 21 households.

Wang Xinxuan, a geography teacher, lives in an old Beijing high-rise on a busy road, in an apartment with many windows. Originally, there was only a single pane of glass in an iron frame, so the apartment was always freezing in winter. And, even if all the windows were closed, people inside could still clearly hear the traffic noise.

So Wang and several other householders made a bulk online purchase of high-quality, double-glazed windows. They cost two or three times as much as ordinary windows, but Wang is happy with them. She showed us how they allow ventilation and block out sound. “It’s worth the money – we’re warm in winter now,” she said. “I’m not planning to use the air-conditioning next year; the windows let air in, and hopefully they’ll keep the heat out, too.”

Friends of Nature’s deputy director, Zhang Hehe, said the most impressive insulation improvements were at the Kong household in Shunyi district, east of the city. Kong Qinghai lives in a single-storey brick house and uses a coal stove for heating in the winter. Conditions are basic. After joining the project, he renovated his home to his own design, improving both insulation and ventilation.

When they were selecting their “low carbon families”, the project team hesitated over including this kind of household, but in the end accepted two like Kong’s. When work started, Friends of Nature was delighted to find that these families were more easily able to measure the impact of the changes than others, as they burn coal for heat and know exactly how much they are using. “Saving energy while improving quality of life” – that’s the aim of the project, said Zhang.

Wang Xinxuan’s radiators are hidden behind wooden slatted panelling. Ten or 20 years ago, this was a fashionable way to fit out a home. It was thought to look cleaner and more elegant, but it trapped the hot air, wasting heat. Zhang calls this a “beautiful mistake”, and it is next on the list of things Wang plans to change: she wants to remove the panels and swap the old radiators for new models. “I learnt a lot about low-carbon design and energy-saving appliances on the low-carbon course,” Wang said.

Before remodelling their homes, the families went through two months of training activities – the “low-carbon course” Wang refers to – which included activities like attending lectures and visiting exhibitions on energy-saving and efficient water use. Friends of Nature also arranged for energy-saving experts to make specific suggestions for each family. For example, Wang Xinghua, a music teacher, was advised to remove a wooden partition in her lounge, which improved lighting and ventilation and reduced the amount of time her family needs to keep the lights on. She also hung a hemp curtain in the bedroom to block out the afternoon sun and cut air-conditioner use.

The project team set up an online forum, where participants could chat about products and refurbishment techniques. “Everyone in the group shared information and experiences, and helped each other out,” said team member Jing Meng.

Wang Xinghua’s flat is on the top-floor of a residential block. As the roof is a very poor insulator, her home gets oppressively hot in summer. The obvious solution – a suspended ceiling (a second layer hung below the main ceiling) – would provide insulation, but also make the rooms feel smaller and more cramped. Wang and her husband looked at the building supplies available on the market and found a wall coating made from natural fibres, said to block out noise and provide insulation with a single layer.

As it was a plant-based product, she decided to try it. “We used this bedroom as a trial, and let everyone come to see it,” Wang’s husband, Liu Deli, said. The pink coating on the ceiling of the bedroom looks good, and feels like plastic. Zhang said she is planning try it out herself.

Wang Xinghua said her family had also considered installing a solar water heater on the roof or an external wall to use the sun’s energy to heat water and cut down on electricity consumption. But the building management refused permission due to safety concerns and she had to abandon the idea. Solar water heaters are great for saving power, Zhang said, but sales in large cities like Beijing are low. The appliances are hard to install, and building managers often refuse to allow them on safety grounds. This makes it difficult to sell the heaters on any scale in the cities, and many who would like to use them simply give up.

Another programme participant, Duan Yundong, has successfully installed a solar water heater, however. He chose a model that can be placed on the walls of an ordinary balcony. “Sunlight-to-heat conversion is the most mature solar technology, and there are clear energy savings,” he explained. After attending a Friends of Nature community event, Duan – whose family was chosen the neighbourhood’s “green family of the year” in 2007, thanks to his water-saving efforts – started using a meter to measure his household’s power consumption. Finding its appliances were eating up a lot of electricity, he decided to make changes.

According to the National Reform and Development Commission – China’s top economic planner – the average Chinese family uses 87 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity a month. But there are wild variations across regions and between households. One recent survey indicated that most urban families use between 110 and 140 kWh a month, while the rural average is 60. Other reports show there is huge potential for domestic energy saving. If an average family adopted energy-saving appliances, for example, it could save 1,000 kWh of electricity use per year, as well as 42.6 tonnes of water. Most energy is used in the bathroom and the kitchen, and air-conditioning, refrigerators, washing machines and televisions are all big power-users.

Zhang hopes that the 21 households that took part this year will act as leaders in future neighbourhood schemes. The government is also experimenting with residential low-carbon and energy-saving schemes, for example using insulating materials in new buildings and carrying out “earthquake-resistant and energy-saving refurbishments” on old buildings.

At the Yuegezhuang shopping area in western Beijing, there used to be a specific market for energy-saving and low-carbon products. It was one of the places visited by the 21 families during their low-carbon course. Founded by the Beijing Energy-Saving Environmental Protection Centre and subsidised by the government, the market displayed and sold a range of energy-saving and environmentally friendly products. But its remote location and a lack of consumer demand meant the stalls struggled, and the market closed early this year.

Despite generous government subsidies for businesses in energy-saving and green-technology sectors, Zhang explained, the investment does not necessarily filter down to the public. “There’s actually a lack of money directed at encouraging low-carbon choices among ordinary people,” she said.

Zhou Wei is assistant editor in chinadialogue’s Beijing office.

Homepage image from FON

Protecting China’s wetlands

Malcolm Tait — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:18:00 +0000

Increasingly, the wonders of the country’s waterfowl -- and their green and blue habitats -- are being revealed. To help safeguard them, the UK conservation group WWT works with Chinese authorities, writes Malcolm Tait.

[This article first appeared in the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust’s magazine Waterlife and is republished here with permission.]

To many in the general public in the western world, the wildlife of China is something of a mystery. Giant pandas, of course, hit the headlines in decades past when they were used as a tool of diplomacy, offered up as gifts to nations with which China wanted to develop strong relationships. In more recent times, however, those same animals have become a symbol not so much of entente cordiale, but of global conservation, their fame for scarcity matching that of the tiger and the whale.

It’s not just the panda that’s been in decline, either. A few years ago, the world witnessed the first probable extinction of a large mammal species for many decades, when surveys for the bajii, or Yangtze River dolphin, were not able to find a single remaining individual. There might be one or two still roaming the deeper waters of the river, but to all intents and purposes, the bajii is now functionally extinct – the first cetacean to succumb since humans came onto the scene.

If the western public has a view of Chinese wildlife, it’s likely that it’s one of decline and fall. Which would be a shame. Although there are valid concerns for much of China’s wildlife, there is still much to conserve. “China and, in particular, the south-western region of the country, is in fact one of the richest nations for biodiversity in the world,” says Sir Anthony Galsworthy. He was a council member of the UK-based conservation organisation Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) for eight years, and now sits on the board of WWT Consulting, the country’s leading wetland consultancy.

Galsworthy was also the UK ambassador to China from 1997 to 2001, which gives him rather a unique perspective. “During my time in Beijing, we replanted the embassy garden to encourage the birds. We ringed some 60 species in all, many of them warblers, which was a rather remarkable total for what was essentially a small oasis of green in the heart of one of the world’s busiest capital cities.”

His tenure covered a significant period in China’s recent history. In 1997, the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong from the UK to China took place, making Galsworthy’s first year one in which the eyes of the world were focused on China. Interestingly, it also coincided with some early roots of environmentalism in the country. It was in the late 1990 that NGOs first started to take shape in China, and most were of an environmental bent.

“Environmental NGOs tended to be seen as less politicalthan many others,” he says, “which I believe gave them the opportunity to develop as the millennium drew to a close. The Chinese government is very supportive of environmental effort – the nation was one of the first to sign up to the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, for example.

“Yet governmental backing doesn’t necessarily translate into local support. During my time as ambassador, the premier [Zhu Rongzi] started putting restrictions upon tree-felling activities, as they were causing flooding in various parts of the nation. A strong law, but difficult to police, particularly in a country so huge, and with more than one billion inhabitants. NGOs that tried to enforce the laws were sometimes subjected to threats from local groups and businesses that objected.”

If the government is not able to keep tabs on its outlying regions, imagine how difficult it must be for those who are trying to monitor the wildlife that is there. In the UK, we have a long history of recording, monitoring, exploring and understanding our wildlife. There are very few individual fields, let alone regions, that haven’t been exhaustively studied for biodiversity. Yet Britain is quite small compared to China. Very small indeed. In fact, the near 250,000 square kilometres that make up the nation would fit no fewer than 40 times into China’s boundaries. China, quite simply, is huge, and monitoring its wildlife is a massive task.

Yet it’s a task that needs undertaking. The species that WWT works hard to conserve – such as the Bewick’s swan, and the globally threatened spoon-billed sandpiper and scaly-sided merganser – use China as a migratory path from eastern Russia or as wintering grounds. To be able to build up a full picture of their ecology, we need to know where they are during their sojourns and how many go there.

Richard Hearn is WWT’s head of species monitoring, and has been spending a fair bit of his time in China recently. “Since 2008, we have been working to support WWF China’s efforts to develop a skilled, comprehensive and well-coordinated waterbird monitoring network in the Yangtze floodplain, the most important region in Asia for wintering migratory waterbirds, particularly wildfowl and cranes,” he says. “It’s complex and demanding, due mainly to the vastness of many of these wetlands –Poyang Hu is over 3,500 square kilometres, for example – and the sheer number of them.”

“The work has involved training courses for reserve managers, members of local civil society birdwatching societies and other interested individuals and, in 2011, we supported the recruitment of a Yangtze waterbird monitoring project officer who will coordinate and undertake training activities. One of his first tasks has been to collate a report on a waterbird census, carried out in January 2011. The results will allow the first accurate estimates of the population trends of many of these waterbirds, crucial for the conservation of these globally important populations.”

Understanding where birds might be is one thing; providing protection for them is another, and this is where WWT Consulting comes in. Several years ago, this international consultancy wing of WWT was called in to assist with the development of a wetland centre in Hong Kong, and so successful was the venture that within the first three months of opening, no fewer than 250,000 visitors passed through its doors.

“This is another change that’s been taking place in China,” says Galsworthy. “Hong Kong, of course, has long been a reasonably affluent place, but since the 1990s, similar signs of affluence have been appearing in mainland China. With affluence tends to come more leisure time and, for many, leisure time is an opportunity to develop an interest in wildlife.”

Across China there is a growing interest in wildlife, a commitment to restore wetlands and create green and blue spaces. Galsworthy’s colleague, Emma Alesworth, is associate director at WWT Consulting, and, with the team, has worked on a number of projects in central and eastern China. These include master plans for new wetland centres, providing advice on wetland restoration, and developing management plans for nature reserves.

“At WWT Consulting,” she says, “we feel passionately about wetlands, their species and the benefits they can bring, so one of the most important considerations is how to sensitively integrate people and wildlife. This is where we can help, undertaking assessments that ensure the wetlands work for a range of species, and adopting holistic approaches when designing hides and boardwalks, so that they fit into the landscape and help minimise disturbance on the wildlife. The wetlands we have been working on in China provide opportunities for setting up environmental-education programmes and really getting people inspired by nature, which can only be a good thing for the long-term protection of these special habitats.”

China’s wetlands may once have been among the least well known in the world, but things are changing. With continued support from the national government, and more hard work on the ground by WWT and its international and local partners, we hope to discover more and more about the beauties of these wonderful lands and how they can be protected and enhanced.

And if that is so, then the case of the baiji may be consigned to history as a one-off.

Strengthening the links

Wetland Link International (WLI) is a global support network, coordinated by WWT, for wetland centres that provide education and visitor activities on site. Of the 320 current centre-based members around the world, some 25 are in China.

“That’s nearly 8% of the entire membership,” says WLI head Chris Rostron, “demonstrating the importance of Chinese wetlands on a global scale. In 2007, WWT’s chief executive, Martin Spray, and the then-head of WLI went on a fact-finding mission to China, signing a memorandum of cooperation with China’s State Forestry Administration. This put WWT in a stronger position to play an active role in working to protect and enhance Chinese wetlands, and showed great intent on the part of Chinese authorities.

“WLI currently has a proposal to develop a new WLI Asia post, which will work closely with partners in China. Later this year, we’ll be attending a key Asian wetlands symposium in China [in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, in October], by which time we should know the result. All going well, we’ll be able to support more wetland-protection projects in wetland centres across China.”

Malcolm Tait is editor of Waterlife, the magazine of the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust.

[This article first appeared in the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust’s magazine Waterlife and is republished here with permission.]

Homepage image by Kathy&Sam

A dog fight in China

Si Meng — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:12:00 +0000

In a culture in which views of canines can be contradictory, animal-protection activists’ recent rescue of over 500 dogs bound for slaughter has ignited controversy. Meng Si examines the dispute.

The “April 15th Incident” -- when a group of animal-lovers halted and rescued a truck-load of dogs bound for slaughter -- has brought the debate to the boil in China and exposed a lack of legislation regarding dog meat and animal abuse.

Animal-protection volunteers used their micro-blogs to gather a crowd of 300 supporters and -- at the Zhangjiawan toll booth on the Beijing-to-Harbin expressway -- stop a truck carrying 520 dogs being transported for slaughter. Both the truck driver and the volunteers phoned the police at the same time. With no chance of an arrest after a 15-hour stand-off, the volunteers raised 115,000 yuan (roughly US$17,770) to buy the animals.

“We hope that saving those 500 dogs will arouse the consciences of five million people,” said one volunteer, known by her online name Dabaoma, on Dragon TV’s chat show “Dragon Studio”. Clutching a microphone, she choked up as she described the dogs’ plight.

Video recorded at the rescue scene showed the truck packed with dogs, all dehydrated and suffering breathing difficulties. Pups born during the journey had been crushed underfoot. Later checks determined that many of the dogs were seriously ill. Some died during the stand-off. On the television programme, Dabaoma criticised the driver, Hao Xiaomao, who also was in the TV studio, as having no conscience.

“They think dogs are more important than people,” Hao declared. Aged 31 and from a poor family, he started working in the dog trade in 2006. He complains that the incident lost him 20,000 yuan (about US$3,000) – equivalent to a year’s school fees for two children. And since the incident, no one has been willing to let him transport dogs. He thinks his legal rights have been infringed upon. His personal details were made public, and he was hounded by insulting and threatening text messages.

“Hao Xiaomao wanted RMB 128,000 [nearly US$20,000], but we didn’t give that much,” said Wang Yunjie of the Shangshan Animal Charity. “We wanted him to suffer a little. If we gave it all to him, it’d encourage him to do such evil things again.” She says the dogs had been mistreated.

But when Hao Xiaomao’s friends asked what she meant by mistreated, Wang did not explain. Currently China has no law on the mistreatment of animals. At the start of the year a draft law was made available for public comment and debate, but so far no regulations have come into effect.

In China some people think keeping dogs is a lifestyle choice for the rich. Internet user Poppy0 wrote: “Those speaking up for the dogs are all rich city wives who don’t understand rural hardship.” Little Tiger Xu said: “RMB 100,000 to buy the dogs, who knows how much to look after them. Wouldn’t it be better to use that money to help the poor – and the more you helped, the fewer people would be smuggling dogs.”

Views of dogs in Chinese culture are contradictory. Dog-lovers see the animals as loyal and understanding companions, but dogs are often viewed with contempt.

In Chinese villages, dogs often are eaten at festivals, weddings and funerals, particularly in the north-east. When his truck was intercepted in April, Hao was taking his truck north-east, bound for Jilin province.

One of the many trucks packed with dogs destined for slaughter in northern China. Photo by kilroy238

Fan Xiantao runs a dog-meat factory. His family have been in the trade since the Han dynasty – for 77 generations. Fan sees dog meat as having a history and a culture. Speaking on the Dragon TV show, he explained that “we kill over 100,000 dogs a year, producing 500 tonnes of meat. We sell to Russia, Japan, Korea and Singapore.”

His plant is in Pei county in Jiangsu province – China’s “home of dog meat”. According to Fan, the province has applied to have dog-meat products recognised as an intangible heritage and is awaiting state approval. About 100,000 people there are involved in the dog trade, and sales approach one billion yuan (some US$155 million) annually.

Fan classifies the animals as either police dogs, meat dogs or pets, and he doesn’t see any need for conflict with the animal-lovers: “You keep your pets, I kill my meat.” But shoes were thrown when one member of the audience accepted a gift of dog meat from Fan.

Some ask why animal lovers treat various animals differently. Why do many object to the eating of dogs, but not of chickens, pigs and cows?

There also was criticism that barricading trucks on a highway is dangerous. Yan Yan, a lawyer, said that protecting animals should not mean putting yourself, others or general public safety at risk. Many opponents of the method say it is too radical and gives no thought to possible consequences.

But writer Chen Lan believes that the volunteers didn’t break the law, also “rescued” Hao Xiaomao and prevented the dogs from ending up on dinner tables.

On June 15, a legal working-group set up by Shangshan published the results of an investigation: the quarantine certificates for the dogs, listing them as being “for slaughter”, had been illegally issued. Beijing Animal Hospital tested 40 of the animals for rabies antibodies and found that none of them had been immunised. Further investigation found that Hu Genjun, who was named as both administering the immunisations and issuing the certificates, was not legally qualified to do so.

At a press conference two months after the truck was stopped, the focus was no longer on the animals themselves, but on food safety.

The working group pointed out that the “Jilin Five-Star” brand of immunisation said to have been used is not suitable for dogs that will become meat. While regulations state that dogs not immunised against rabies cannot be sold on the market, there is no immunisation suitable for meat dogs. Also, most of the dogs were suffering serious illnesses already.

Their investigation reveals the grey area in which the dog-meat supply chain exists, the group said. Eating dog meat is not illegal in China, but there are no health standards for meat dogs, nor for non-farmed animals – so there are no safety guarantees for any dog meat on sale.

The animal lovers noted that there was no record of the dogs being sourced legally, and it was unclear where they had come from. Some were pet breeds, and some may have been stolen; dog-theft is common. In November 2010, the Yangtze Evening Times exposed trade in stolen dogs. One trader told an undercover reporter that “I’ve lost count of how many dogs I’ve sold, but 99% of them were poisoned and stolen.” The report also said that health- and quality-supervision authorities all stated that dog meat was not under their jurisdiction.

“These kinds of safety risks are, from a scientific angle, very worrying,” said Cai Chunhong, a lawyer with the legal group.

The group is currently reporting the illegal immunisations and certifications to the authorities – including the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Health, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine and the State Administration of Industry and Commerce. Hao Xiaomao is also to sue Shangshan to prove that he is not at fault.

Meng Si is associate editor in chinadialogue’s Beijing office.

What do you think about the dog rescue? Should dogs and other animals in China be legally protected from mistreatment? Should dog meat be eaten and, if so, what health standards should be applied to meat from non-farm animals? Is killing a dog for food much different from killing a pig or chicken? Let us know your views.

Homepage image by jwalton4th