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Jane Goodall: wild at heart

Stephen Moss — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:31:00 +0000

It has been 50 years since the scientist turned eco-evangelist began her seminal work with chimpanzees in Africa. But, writes Stephen Moss, her work is far from finished.

Jane Goodall, grey in complexion but resplendent in a red shawl, is sitting on the sofa in a dimly lit room in west London. The scientist-turned-environmentalist has just arrived from Bournemouth on England’s south coast, had a rotten journey, has a hacking cough, but accepts it all stoically, rejecting the suggestion that the heating be turned up.

She is here with her talisman, a stuffed monkey called Mr H, given to her by the blind magician Gary Haun (“the Amazing Haundini”), who thought it was a chimp. Goodall, who has a childlike quality, sees a metaphorical significance in a blind magician who is able to pull the wool over the eyes of the sighted. The letter H, standing for Hope, also attracts her.

The world seems to divide into people who are besotted with Goodall and people who have barely heard of her. She is more prominent in the United States, where the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) is headquartered, than in the United Kingdom, despite being born here in 1934; after half a lifetime spent documenting the lives of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park overlooking Lake Tanganyika in the far west of Tanzania, she is now living with her sister Judy in their old family home in Bournemouth.

Our meeting takes place at a flat that belongs to Mary Lewis, a JGI employee with a cut-glass English accent who appears to run Goodall’s life as if it were a military operation. The trigger is a book Goodall has written with two fellow environmentalists: a collection of stories of survival called Hope for Animals and Their World, the written-by-committee feel of which must of course be forgiven because of its subject matter.

Even I, an intermittent eco-worrier, was moved by the battle to save the California condor, and I feel doubly guilty for criticising the book because at the end of the interview she insists on signing it for me: “For Stephen. Together we can make this a better world for all. Thank you for helping.” Can is underlined, all is both underlined and capitalised.

These days, in her mid-70s, Goodall is more shaman than scientist. She has set aside a planned companion volume to her seminal study The Chimpanzees of Gombe, and instead tours the world preaching the need for sustainability, harmony and respect for the natural world (this makes me worry about the size of her carbon footprint).

It was in 1986 that, at a conference on chimps, she realised the extent of the crisis affecting them across Africa and determined, overnight it seems, on a life as an environmental evangelist. One journalist who has followed her career likens her to a “peripatetic Mother Teresa”, and it’s a good description: she combines stateliness with a kind of holiness, her religion a predominantly green one.

The message of her new book, with its stories about black-footed ferrets, American crocodiles and whooping cranes, is surprisingly upbeat. “My job seems to have increasingly become giving people hope, so that instead of doing nothing and sinking into depression, they take action,” she tells me. “It’s very clear to me that unless we get a critical mass of people involved in trying to create a better world for our great-grandchildren, we’d better stop having children altogether.”

Goodall has chosen to focus on the heroes fighting – and occasionally winning – individual battles, in the hope of attracting others to participate in a war she does not yet accept is lost. “I’ve seen areas totally despoiled that have been brought back to life. Animals that were almost gone have, with captive breeding or protection in the wild, been given another chance. If we stop now, everything’s going to go. So we have to keep on doing our best for as long as we can, and if we’re going to die, let’s die fighting.” The apocalypse is conjured up in a croaky and curiously detached monotone.

Do governments understand the scale of the crisis? Goodall argues that many are still in hock to “dark forces” – vested interests such as the fossil-fuel industry and agribusiness. Politicians, she says, should stop parroting the myth of limitless expansion. “Unlimited economic growth on a planet of finite resources is not possible; it doesn’t make sense. I thought this financial crisis would help people realise that, but it seems very much like, ‘Oh, let's get back to business as usual.’ ”

Much of her evangelising is directed at the young. Her institute – set up to protect chimps and their habitats almost 10 years before that Damascene moment in 1986 – has a dynamic youth wing called Roots and Shoots, which started in 1991 when 16 young Tanzanians met on the porch of her home in Dar es Salaam to discuss environmental issues affecting their lives.

Twenty years later, there are groups in 114 countries, with hundreds of thousands of youngsters involved in community projects. After a slow start, it has taken off in the United Kingdom in the past couple of years, with 700 groups now participating.

But apart from the headquarters in the US city of Arlington, Virginia -- which has 20-plus staff -- most of the JGIs that coordinate these projects are shoestring operations, and the institute has been hit hard by the credit crunch. “We’re in a financial hole in the US because of the downturn,” Goodall admits. “Money that should have come in has been cut.”

The organisation had just held a meeting in Belgium to discuss how to dig itself out, and one priority is to recruit an executive director. Is that recognition of a time when someone will need to take over from her? “Of course,” Goodall says. “It will probably be a collection of four people taking over from me.” Despite the holiness, she is not guilty of false modesty.

The institute today is not just concerned with her beloved chimps. “To me, it was obvious to grow from wild chimps to saving their forest to seeing about their conditions in captivity to working with local people and kids,” she says. “You can kill yourself saving forests and chimps, but if new generations aren’t going to be better stewards there’s no point. That’s why I’m so passionate about Roots & Shoots.”

Until the 1986 conference on chimpanzees, she had assumed she would spend her life studying chimps. “It was wonderful out in the forest collecting data and analysing it, giving a few lectures, writing books.” In her 1999 book, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, she says that as a Bible-reading teenager, she “fantasised about becoming a martyr”. In a way, she has achieved that ambition, sacrificing the paradise of Gombe for a succession of airport lounges.

When I ask if she is still a Christian, she gives a somewhat ambiguous answer. “I suppose so; I was raised as a Christian.” She says she sees no contradiction between evolution and a belief in God. Nor does she blame the Bible and the idea in Genesis that man has dominion over plants and animals for our exploitation of the natural world (she says “dominion” is a mistranslation; what is meant is “stewardship”). These might seem academic points, but perhaps they are a key to understanding her transition from scientist to eco-evangelist – and the resonance of her message in the more spiritually aware US.

“I realised that my experience in the forest, my understanding of the chimpanzees, had given me a new perspective,” she writes in Reason for Hope. “I was utterly convinced there was a great spiritual power that we call God, Allah or Brahma, although I knew, equally certainly, that my finite mind could never comprehend its form or nature.”

This year is significant for Goodall and her institute, marking 50 years since she began studying chimps at Gombe. As well as the new book, there will be a BBC documentary in the spring and a German-made film, Jane’s Journey, to be premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, in which Angelina Jolie has a walk-on part. It is indeed a remarkable journey, from a middle-class home in Bournemouth to secretarial work in London and then, thanks to the patronage of paleontologist Louis Leakey, to Gombe and beyond.

“I loved animals as a child, read the Tarzan books, and decided at the age of 11 that I would go to Africa, live with animals and write books about them,” she says. “Everybody laughed at me except my amazing mother, who said, ‘If you work hard and really want something and never give up, you will find a way.’ ”

In 1957, after earning the money for the boat fare by working as a waitress and a secretary, Goodall went on an extended visit to a school friend in Kenya. Someone suggested she get in touch with Leakey, a formidable figure who was then curator of the Coryndon museum of natural history in Nairobi. He barked at her down the telephone when she called, but she kept her nerve, got an appointment to see him, was given an administrative job and, in 1960, was given the chance to move to Gombe to start collecting data on chimps.

Leakey also dispatched Dian Fossey to Rwanda to study gorillas and Birute Galdikas to Borneo to observe orangutans; the three women were patronisingly known as Leakey’s angels or Leakey’s trimates, but each made significant contributions to primatology.

What did Leakey see in Goodall that made him choose her for Gombe? “I think he was amazed that a young girl straight out from England with no university degree knew so much,” she says. “I'd spent hours in the Natural History Museum in London, and could answer most of his questions.”

Goodall had planned to spend only a year in Africa but was there more than 30. She still has a home in Dar es Salaam, and makes the long trek to Gombe when she can. She learned her science in the field, but Leakey was keen for her to get academic training and, in the mid-60s, she did a PhD at Cambridge in ethology, the study of animal behavior. She needed the qualification to counter critics who attacked her approach as unscientific and anthropomorphic – she gave the chimps she studied names, and prided herself on getting to know them as individuals.

“I was told at Cambridge I shouldn’t have named the chimps and that they should have had numbers,” she says. “I wasn’t allowed to talk about them having personalities, and certainly not about them thinking or having emotions. But then I thought back to my childhood teacher who taught me that this wasn’t true – my dog.”

The scale of Goodall’s observational data eventually silenced her critics. She was the first scientist to observe an animal, her favourite chimp David Greybeard, not just using a tool (a stem of grass poked into a termites’ nest to dig out the insects) but fashioning it for that purpose. When she telegraphed a report of what she had seen to Leakey, he replied: “Ah! Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.”

We haven’t quite accepted chimps as human, but the work showed that the distance from one to the other was far less than previously thought. In his introduction to a revised edition of Goodall’s most famous book, In the Shadow of Man, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould called her work “one of the western world’s great scientific achievements”.

In 1964, she married the Dutch-born wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick, and their son (also called Hugo, but known as Grub) was born three years later. In her books there are several sweet pictures of Grub growing up at Gombe, but the relationship of mother and son has not always been smooth. At one point he was engaged in commercial fishing, of which she as a committed vegetarian disapproved, but is now developing an eco-tourist project in Tanzania and they are getting on much better. Goodall and van Lawick divorced in 1974 and she married Derek Bryceson, director of national parks in Tanzania, who died of cancer in 1980.

Is she one of those naturalists, as Fossey supposedly was in her dark final years, who prefers animals to people? “I’m not one of those people who says let me go and live with chimps forever or dogs forever,” she says. “I certainly prefer a lot of animals to a lot of people, but then I prefer some people to some animals too.”

And does she miss the chimps? “All the chimps I knew so well have gone now,” she says sadly. “Fifi, the last of the real old-timers, died four years ago. It’s not the same as it was.” But she still enjoys returning to Gombe. “When I get up on to my peak where I sat for so long, I can get back into the skin I had and remember just what it felt like – the excitement of never quite knowing what you’d see and what you'd find.”

Hope for Animals and Their World is published by Icon Books.

www.guardian.co.uk/

Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Homepage image from Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees

Slideshow: organic overtures

Si Meng — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:53:00 +0000

Meng Si visited a project in eastern China that trials natural farming methods. Introducing her photographs of the farm, she says extending its agricultural revolution still seems a distant dream.

In late 2008, reports claimed that pesticide residue in peanuts grown in one county in Shandong, eastern China, were at potentially fatal levels. Official investigations discredited the rumours and peanut-lovers continue to enjoy their snack. But issues in peanut-growing, such as the use of toxic chemicals and agricultural membranes, remain unaddressed.

Peanut farmers know there is a range of factors that can reduce harvests, including pests such as beetle larvae. And, for the majority of farmers, the only way to deal with pests is powerful toxic pesticides, such as the long-banned “666”. In addition, agricultural membranes – thin plastic sheets – are often laid over fields of peanuts and other crops in order to prevent the evaporation or run-off of water and fertiliser and to reduce weed growth. But these membranes are difficult to gather up after use, and are usually abandoned by the side of fields, polluting the soil.

“Our existing agricultural methods cut off ecological cycles,” says Jiang Gaoming, chief researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Botany and a columnist for chinadialogue. “We need to restore and make use of those natural cycles.”

Since 2007, Jiang's research team has rented 27,000 square metres of land in Shandong, eastern China, to use as the Hongyi Organic Farm. The project aims to demonstrate organic farming practices, exploring commercially-viable forms of organic agriculture and attempting to grow the most successful organic crops in China.

The idea of organic agriculture originated in Europe and, by the year 2000, it was being used to some degree in 141 nations. But the amount of farmland dedicated to the practice in Asia remains fairly low compared to Europe, where organic methods are relatively widespread.

However, as living standards and awareness of environmental issues have increased in recent years, China has started catching up with the west in enthusiasm for organic farming, although high prices and inconsistent certification have left many consumers unconvinced about organic products and reluctant to buy them.

Jiang explains: “We have stopped all use of pesticides, herbicides, fertilisers, membranes and additives and we don't use anything genetically modified; we're testing the role of organic agriculture in maintaining yields and improving profits. In just three years, we have already seen the power of this approach.”

Jiang is no mere follower of fashion. He believes that, if Chinese agriculture fails to move towards organic practices, the nation's soil will lose its last remnants of fertility. Like so many other commercial operations that have failed to account for environmental factors in business planning, the farming sector has long ignored the vital role of the soil. As a result, agricultural membranes, fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides have turned rich, dark earth pale.

But is it possible just to do away with chemicals in farming? What about their role in fighting disease and pests? China uses 7% of the world's arable land to feed 20% of the world's people – a miracle made possible by the use of over 1.2 million tonnes of chemicals annually.

“Farmers use 50 yuan (US$7.30) of toxic chemicals for every 667 square metres of peanuts planted but this still doesn't bring the pests completely under control. Our costs are much lower,” Jiang points out. In one of the team's small fields, pesticides have been replaced with two lamps that use light of a particular spectrum to attract insects to traps. “It doesn't catch all of them but it achieves an ecological balance,” says Jiang. “Even if the insects aren't there, the lights won't do any harm.”

The lights can attract up to 4.5 kilograms of insects a night. But, due to insect lifecycles, they are only caught on 70 nights of the year. In the last year, the farm has collected over 100 kilograms of insect larvae to use as feed supplements.

The farm also uses manual labour or mowers rather than weed-killer to remove weeds, which are then fed to locusts and freshwater fish. The income from this is enough to employ two farm labourers all year round. A 120-strong herd of cattle is fed using straw and cattle dung is used to produce methane to provide energy for the farm, with the waste products returned to the fields as high quality, organic fertiliser.

According to Jiang Gaoming's research, up to 70% of fertiliser used in China is wasted and overuse of such chemicals is a serious problem. He believes organic fertiliser could help China's agriculture move from a sector that is “high cost, high output, high pollution” to one that is “low cost, low output, no pollution”.

Can improving soil fertility and using organic practices result in lower costs than traditional methods? Organic grains and vegetables currently cost three to five times as much as normal equivalents on the market, while leeks and celery from Shandong province sell for 20 yuan (US$2.9) per half kilogram.

One person who believes low costs are feasible is Zhan Peilin, chairman of Rizhao Yikang Organic Technology. His company's microbial organic fertiliser is made out of sludge waste from kelp processing and bacteria imported from Japan, and trials have shown it is as effective as its chemical equivalents. However, he says state subsidies and preferential policies for chemical fertilisers are reducing the competitiveness of alternatives.

Zhan also believes that Jiang's farm suffers from a disconnect between production and the market. “As soon as production expands, you'll find the market is too small, unless you are providing animal proteins for food processors," he says, after visiting the locust-feeding hut. He adds that a single farm running a range of operations will incur higher management and business costs than larger ventures. And, with food safety legislation and monitoring still in need of improvement, only corporations – with their strong management and concern for corporate reputation – can be relied upon to provide accountability.

The farm is currently helping local farmer Jiang Gaoyu raise free-range chickens, using the “organic space” between crops. “In theory, the bigger an organic farm gets, the better the ecological and economic results are; management costs go down and more jobs are created,” says Jiang. His immediate goal is to persuade the villagers to dedicate 67,000 square metres of land to organic agriculture, with a long-term goal of converting the village’s entire 667,000 square kilometres to the practice.

As well as peanuts, the farm grows around 20 types of grain and vegetable, including wheat, corn, soya, green beans, chives, celery, potatoes, onions and garlic. These now carry an “organic” label and are described as high-standard, high-quality products, with no chemicals, fertilisers, additives or artificial compounds used. It seems that, after the excitement of increased yields brought about by such substances, followed by a period of overuse, those at the cutting edge of farming in China have decided to sever links with chemicals after seeing the damage done to the soil.

Despite a disappointing yield from the first crop of corn due to waterlogging, Jiang and his students remain confident. They believe that patience and constant experimentation are essential. It was the urgent quest for immediate results that led the farming industry to ignore soil quality in the first place, and to use fertilisers, chemicals and membranes, creating hard, polluted, infertile and unsustainable soil.

Jiang believes the farm's role as a demonstration project is more important than commercial success. But farmers need more than faith; they need reliable models and a stable income before they can be persuaded to abandon conventional practices.

Many agricultural experts share Jiang’s views and hope to save the soil – and the farming industry – through organic practices. For seven years, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences has been running a project investigating key technologies for new types of multifunctional microbial fertiliser. Yuan Longping, the 79-year-old “father of hybrid rice”, is hopeful he will see 1,000 kilograms of super-hybrid rice produced per 667 square-metre harvest by the time he is 90. But, for now, eating healthily and eating enough remains no easy task for China’s 1.3 billion people.

Meng Si is managing editor at chinadialogue’s Beijing branch

Can consumers save our climate?

John Elkington — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:13:00 +0000

After Copenhagen, can market forces – and consumers in particular – help address global warming? John Elkington looks at the promises and pitfalls of “green” consumption.

Many of the business and government leaders who gathered in Copenhagen for the United Nations climate talks believe that market forces in general—and consumers in particular—will drive the transition to a low-carbon economy. It’s a comforting thought, but I wouldn’t count on it just yet. Having coined the term “green consumer” in 1986 and co-written the million-selling book, The Green Consumer Guide in 1988, I clearly believe in the effectiveness of well-targeted consumer action in tackling environmental issues—but I also fear that anything today’s green consumers may do will be swamped by the actions of hundreds of millions of tomorrow’s new consumers in the emerging markets, particularly in China.

As climate change becomes an increasingly urgent priority for all of us, governments clearly have a crucial, central role to play. But governments don’t operate in a vacuum. Every one of us will need to think – sooner or later – about how we can use the leverage we can apply in our multiple roles as citizens, employers or employees, investors and, critically, voters, not simply as consumers.

Yes, we have seen major retailers like Wal-Mart launching major new initiatives such as their Sustainability Index, designed to pressure suppliers throughout their value chain to “green” their operations. But I have often argued that consumers are – at best – the equivalent of “shock-troops”. That is, they can be mobilised for short periods of time, as they have been on issues like CFCs, lead in petrol or genetically modified foods, bringing intense pressure to bear on various leverage points in the economy. But for sustained action we need concerted, effective and long-term action by business, by investors and governments.

On the positive side, however, there is growing evidence that consumers around the world are paying more attention to environmental issues, including climate change. Earlier this year, for example, The National Geographic Society and Canada’s GlobeScan released the second annual “Greendex” of sustainable consumption patterns across 17 countries. And it was a fairly sophisticated piece of work. A total of 65 lifestyle choices of consumers are included in the index, covering areas as diverse as energy use, transportation, housing, food and product purchases.

The headline result was that “sustainable consumer behaviour” had increased in 13 of the 14 countries surveyed in both 2008 and 2009. Perhaps surprisingly, but repeating last year’s results, the top-scoring consumers of 2009 – at least according to this analysis – are in the emerging economies of India, Brazil and China. By contrast, US and Canadian consumers again scored lowest. To look at the results from a different angle, consumers reporting the best year-on-year improvement in “environmentally sustainable” consumer behaviour turn out to be the Spanish, Germans, French and Australians – while Russians, unsurprisingly, and Mexicans show the smallest increase. Intriguingly, Brazilians were the only consumers measured in both 2008 and 2009 to show a fall in their Greendex score.

So what’s behind all of this? Much of the increase in the overall 2009 Greendex scores was due to improvement in the area of housing, where the Greendex measures the energy and resources consumed by people’s homes. Changes in the areas of personal transportation, food and consumer goods proved to be more mixed, with some up, some down. The changes have been driven by a complex mix of cost concerns and environmental awareness.

Consumption as measured by the Greendex is calculated both in terms of the choices consumers actively make – such as repairing, rather than replacing items, using cold water to wash laundry, or choosing green products rather than environmentally unfriendly ones – and choices that are controlled more by their circumstances – such as the climate they live in or the availability of green products or public transport.

All very interesting, but if you were to ask me which recent green-consumer-related initiative has me most excited about the potential to drive future consumer pressure on climate-related issues, I would point you elsewhere. Recent weeks have seen the launch in the United States of a new application (“app”) that runs on Apple’s iPhone, which will allow users to scan products using a phone fitted with a barcode scanner. I have tried the system, which is available from GoodGuide and is free, and it is extraordinary in terms of how quickly it recognises and processes a given barcode.

The new app can help consumers to make on-the-spot decisions about a growing range of products as they walk around stores. They are fed user-friendly information, along with rankings across product categories. So, for example, it can help consumers to choose the healthier of two moisturisers, determine what’s in various all-purpose cleaners or learn whether organic product manufacturers can boast good social practices alongside with their healthy manufacturing processes. As GoodGuide explains: “Consumers can scan a barcode in the supermarket aisle and immediately see detailed and independently researched ratings for health, environment and social responsibility for over 50,000 products and companies on the phone.”

More powerful still, GoodGuide aggregates information about which products are scanned most frequently and use that information to prioritise the products that are rated in future rounds of research. No, I don’t believe that this product will solve all our climate problems, but I do believe that it will give us all a better sense of our environmental footprints, if we are interested enough to look beyond the packaging and the price-tag.

Whether our future turns out to be more globalisation or more localisation, and I think that we will see both trends playing out simultaneously, better-informed consumers have the potential to be important drivers of business and government action on climate change. A huge opportunity space is opening up to mobilise them in new ways. The unanswered question: will Chinese consumers be part of the problem or, in increasingly large numbers, part of the solution? It is no exaggeration to say the future of our world hangs on the answer.

John Elkington is co-founder of SustainAbility and of Volans. His personal website is at http://www.johnelkington.com.

Homepage image from hudong.com

Young China’s long green march

Weiya Huo — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:01:00 +0000

The work of the country’s largest youth environmental movement is only beginning, writes Huo Weiya. Students’ sense of not doing enough provides an impetus to keep going.

“Back when I was in junior high school, the grass in my village would reach up to my chest,” recalls Liu Shitie, a student at Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology. Yang Qian, in her first year at China Women’s University, finds that a bit odd. She’s from the coal-producing province of Shanxi and has never been to the grasslands. “The grass is much shorter now,” Liu explains. “There are very few places you can see it grow that tall, and a lot of places are suffering desertification.”

Liu’s group – with the poetic name of Grassland Strollers – is one of the seven teams that participated in this year’s Green Long March event. The Green Long March is a youth environmentalism event held jointly since 2007 by the US organisation FutureGenerations and Beijing Forestry University. Every year students from nearly 50 Chinese universities campaign and research on a green theme in an environmentally sensitive area.

The events of 2009 drew to a close on October 30. This year – the third in which the Green Long March has been held – saw almost 1,000 students take part in environmental and energy education and research into the use of new energy in Inner Mongolia’s grasslands, the Yangtze and Yellow River basins, and on China’s south-east coast. The results of their work have been published as a collection of articles.

At the closing ceremony, students from 17 provinces presented their findings. The opening discussion of the book was taken from one of the discussions at that ceremony.

In fact, the Grassland Strollers were not actually focusing on the grasslands themselves. They went there to visit a wind farm. The theme of the Green Long March this year is new energy, so each group designed their activities around this topic.

Zhang Zongshuai is a member of Grassland Strollers, and also a student at Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology. He and his colleagues investigated the use of methane, with the details of their research being included a video about the 2009 event. As the video shows, the local villagers are happy to use methane due to government subsidies – for only several hundred yuan then can build a methane generator.

Methane is the only new energy source to have been widely adopted in rural China. So another group, Gold Coast – formed by students from four universities on China’s south-east coast -- also opted to investigate this source of energy. But as one member, Chen Mingwei, noted in his journal, the case they chose to study was a failure. In 2006, the village of Wushi in Guangzhou province set up a methane demonstration project. At the start, 10 households were participating; now, only two or three are still using methane.

The students were aware of this before carrying out the field study, and initially wavered over whether or not to continue. But in the end they went, to find out why it didn’t succeed. As Chen wrote in his summary, it turned out that regulations designed to prevent pollution of a nearby river meant that large numbers of livestock could not be kept in the village. But without livestock, the animal dung to use as methane feedstock was not available, and so households dropped out of the scheme. Hence, not every location is suitable for methane generation – and this needs to be taken into consideration.

In the discussion cited above, Yang Qian mentioned a case she knew of. Her neighbours at home were also using methane, she said, and there was no shortage of the gas – but clearing away the waste sludge was a problem.

Yang Qian and her three companions didn’t actually participate in any of the teams this year. They attended the closing ceremony, as they will be taking part in next year’s Green Long March. Three students from Hong Kong University came for the same reason, and have already planned their activities for 2010.

The participation of students from almost 50 universities and the publicity generated means the Green Long March is China’s largest youth environmental movement. It is attracting increasing numbers of young people to get involved, learn about the environment through research, and spread knowledge. This is something new when compared with the Chinese youth environmental movement that started in the mid-1990s.

One of the organisers, FutureGenerations, is an environmental NGO founded in the United States. As an overseas group, its role in the Green Long March is fund-raising, expert guidance and communication with sponsors. Its cooperation with Beijing Forestry University differs from the usual form of youth environmental movements in China.

In the past, when Chinese students got involved with the environmental movement there wasn’t much active guidance or support from their universities; it tended to be the students themselves getting together. There was only so much they could do. Support from the universities or official organisations was rare, so their fund-raising ability was limited and activities were simple and run on a shoestring.

But if a university itself organises activities in its own name, it becomes easy to work with government and businesses – and that’s the strength of the Green Long March.

Its sponsors are also different, in not just providing financial support. The Grassland Strollers were able to get access to the wind farm thanks to help from their sponsor, turbine manufacturer Suzlon. Employee volunteers at Swire Pacific participated in the entire process of Gold Coast’s activities, helping them in making preparations, optimising questionnaires to make them more targeted, and so on. Exposure to these professional attitudes towards standards, rigour and attention to detail meant the students learned about more than just the environment.

But the grassroots nature of earlier movements does have one advantage – more freedom, and so no curbs from the university or even government. The Green Long March is at a disadvantage here, as China’s universities are political in nature and sensitive topics – which environmental matters sometimes are – cannot be touched upon. Operations can also be limited in terms of efficiency.

A major part of China’s youth environmental movement has always been students carrying out environmental education on campus, in communities and even in rural areas. This type of activity is easy to conduct and requires little if any funding or capability; with just simple training, individuals and groups can carry out environmental education work. Environmental groups at Chinese universities are still doing this.

But many people doubt the efficacy of these events. Spending a few hours in a community and then leaving – do these one-off events actually do much good? Evaluations always talk about how many people were influenced – but were they? These questions remain.

The participants in the Green Long March had the same doubts. Liu Shitie says that publicity alone isn’t enough. Issues need to be followed up in a sustained manner. Many participants in this year’s research had the same feeling.

A FutureGenerations project coordinator, Clay Baylor, told me that “the Inner Mongolian team felt that methane use is worth expanding in villages, and they hope to do more on that – not just research.”

So Green Long March has been making changes over the last two years, including a new “Green Seed Awards” designed just for those students who think they’re not yet doing enough. The prize requires students to carry out initial research in a community and use the information gathered to design a project. The winning project will get a small amount of funding for implementation. Twenty-five awards were made this year.

The students’ sense of not doing enough indicates that there is plenty more to do – and this is the impetus to keep going. The Green Long March of China’s youth has just started.

Huo Weiya is operations and development manager for chinadialogue in Beijing and former editor-in-chief of Environmental Culture Newsletter, published by Green Student Forum, an environmental NGO established in 1996.

Homepage image from FutureGenerations

All over the world, ordinary people are seeking solutions to environmental problems and asking how they can reduce their own impact on the earth. Many feel that solutions lie in our hands and in our pockets. Cooler Living talks about consumer power, ethical shopping, eco-design, sustainable consumption and more.

Join us in exploring and debating what it all means.

The dangers of boosting consumption

Weiya Huo — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:09:00 +0000

China’s government and the domestic market are calling for greater spending. Economic growth may be maintained, writes Huo Weiya, but US-style living may mean we need another two Earths.

To maintain an 8% economic-growth target through the current global financial crisis, the Chinese government has launched an investment stimulus package worth four trillion yuan (US$585 billion) and eased bank-lending restrictions. But another important measure is the increasing of individual consumption.

In 2008, the Chinese government launched “village appliance” schemes nationwide, with subsidies used to increase sales of televisions, refrigerators, washing machines and mobile phones in rural areas. Another two billion yuan (nearly US$300 million) was invested in 2009 in a “new-for-old” policy that will see individuals and businesses sell old appliances back to the state and receive a 10% subsidy on new purchases. Besides this, the automobile market is benefiting from subsidies and tax breaks, and many cities have handed out shopping vouchers to local people.

The export-oriented economy has been hard-hit by the economic turmoil, increasing the government’s determination to make the domestic market the engine of growth. “Increase domestic demand, maintain growth” is seen as the secret to guiding the economy through hard times. But there are dangers hidden in this strategy, and there will be considerable environmental consequences if a long-term approach is not taken.

First, there is the issue of reusing resources. In China, it is not just rubbish that gets buried in landfill; many materials that could be reused also end up there. And once products have been used, they are treated as rubbish and thrown away. Any recycling that takes place is often the result of scrap collectors sifting through rubbish for the more valuable items; the rest goes to scrap or compost.

Increasing amounts of rubbish mean that many cities – including Beijing – are at risk of being surrounded by landfill sites and are turning to power-generating incinerator plants. This is controversial, with environmental bodies saying China should be sorting and recycling its rubbish. But China does not have a system for sorting rubbish.

When explaining the “new-for-old” policy, a National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) spokesperson said that it would see five million appliances replaced, while 90 million of the types of appliances mentioned above would be discarded annually. But the pervasive presence of scrap collectors throughout China’s cities demonstrates that standardised collection and disassembly companies are not yet common. The sector is dominated by small, informal traders, and the environmental consequences of this already have already been covered in our earlier article “Low-carbon living begins at work”.

The authorities released guidance alongside the “village appliances” and “new-for-old” policies, but with the recycling sector just getting started, it is unclear if the measures will be effective and if they will reach out into the rural areas.

In February, the State Council issued Regulations on Recovery Processing of Waste Electrical and Electronic Products, setting out the direction for the sector. But this only comes into effect in 2011. Until then, those small scrap merchants will be the main channel for recycling. They will purchase discarded appliances and then sell them on to companies unable to process them properly or to small, unregistered workshops.

The inadequate processing of waste doesn’t just create pollution; it’s also the cause of significant waste. According to the same State Council spokesperson, the new-for-old policy would see 2.3 million tonnes of resources collected for reuse. But without systems in place, much of that will be treated as garbage.

Another risk is the inflation of consumer expectations. A special feature on a well-known Chinese website, 21cn.com, recently described white-collar workers as the killers of the environment. The white-collar lifestyle involves high levels of consumption, and consumption is the natural enemy of the environment. In a poll on the website, the vast majority of those surveyed said that it is everyone’s duty to protect the environment.

But despite these views, what actually happens is different. From July 1, hotels in the city of Changsha were no longer supplying items such as disposable toothbrushes and single-use tubes of toothpaste for free; they will be charged for. A survey on People.com.cn found 77% of respondents opposed the move, complaining of inconvenience.

These two surveys demonstrate the clash between ideas of consumption and environmental protection. Environmental awareness was non-existent three decades ago. Today, the environment is often the focus of public debate. But the Chinese seem to be becoming ever more like the Americans they so often point fingers at – happy to protect the environment, as long as they don’t need to change their lifestyles.

The “3R” principles of waste-management strategy are “reduce” (to minimise energy and resource use), “reuse” (to use an item more than once), and “recycle” (to process used items into new products). Reduction and recycling have been put into political and economic practice, but reuse -- the concept at the heart of the circular economy – has been given the cold shoulder. Most consumers seem to have left environmental matters to environmental groups. As long as they can afford to, they’ll consume as much as possible that is new.

China is placing more emphasis on its domestic market, with a range of methods applied to increase consumption and boost the economy, thereby making consumption seem ever more natural. With both the government and the market calling for greater spending, will China’s potential consumption be realised?

The Chinese did not use to be heavy consumers, either because they did not have the funds or the lack of a welfare system meant they saved their money for a rainy day. But 30 years of economic growth have given us ample material desires – a lifestyle of keeping up with the rich, keeping up with the Americans, has taken root. As soon as we are able to consume, we do so – no less than the citizens of developed nations do. Economic growth may be maintained, but as the environmentalists warn, we may need another two Earths to meet the new US-style consumption of the Chinese nation.

Huo Weiya is operations and development manager for chinadialogue in Beijing and former editor-in-chief of Environmental Culture Newsletter.

With policy encouragement causing sharp increases in consumption, how should China improve the reuse of resources? What are your views on waste processing? Increased consumption brings environmental dangers, but lower consumption could result in slower economic growth, leading to social problems such as unemployment. So what should be done? Tell us what you think on the forum.

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“Why don’t we stop hurting Earth?”

Leo Hickman — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 06:34:00 +0000

Telling children about climate change could leave them angry, worried or even traumatised. So when and how should we do it? Leo Hickman explores an issue that can only grow in importance.

“A four-year-old child could understand this! Run out and find me a four-year-old child.” For the past year or so, this Groucho Marx line from the 1933 film classic Duck Soup might well have been tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. This is what happens when you undertake the challenge of writing a book for children about a subject as complex and, at times, depressing as climate change. With every turn of phrase, I’ve had to remind myself that we must never underestimate a child’s intelligence, or their capacity and eagerness to learn something new.

But as I struggled to explain concepts such as, say, the albedo effect, chlorofluorocarbons and the Milankovitch cycles, I was forever troubled by a central question: what is the right age to tell a child about climate change? And, furthermore, how do you go about discussing a subject that will be an increasingly impactful and predominantly negative presence in their lives? Should we be shielding children from the bad news for as long as possible? Or do they deserve to know the truth as early as possible? After all, their generation will have to pick up the tab, as well as live with much of the fallout.

If there had been enough room on the insides of my eyelids to write it, I would probably have squeezed in another pertinent quote: “War is never so ugly as when you explain it to children.”

Climate change has joined a long and growing list of difficult subjects -- a death in the family, terrorist attacks, poverty, drugs, bullying, natural disasters, racism -- that can leave parents and teachers flailing in search of ways to explain them without leaving a child traumatised, perplexed or angry. (Could it even supersede that oh-so-awkward conversation about the birds and the bees as the on-the-knee chat that parents most dread?)

As a topic for discussion with children, climate change is challenging on two levels. First, in terms of the underlying science, it can be very complicated to explain. But it also throws up so many vexed issues, especially when you move on to who’s to blame and what the solutions might be. Climate change oozes politics from every pore, which is what makes it such a controversial subject with so many adults.

Inevitably, my own children were my first point of reference. My six-year-old daughter, Esme, the eldest of three, is so far the only one with any concept of climate change. I don’t think she knows the term itself, but she has brought home from school related talk of how “leaving lights on can cause the ice that polar bears live on to melt”.

“That’s right,” I responded warmly, congratulating her on knowing such a thing. But then I wavered: do I really want her to be fretting about the fate of polar bears, a cuddly, miniature version of which currently sits on her bed? This is a child, after all, who will start crying when she sees roadkill lying limp on a verge. Would it be better to couch talk of conserving energy in terms of saving money for her parents?

I can well remember some of my own vertiginous epiphanies from childhood. For example, reading Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows left me cowering under the sheets at night, fearful that the Russians would nuke us all at any moment. Did this instruct me about the realities of the big, bad world? It helped to politicise me, but I could have done without the cold sweats. My conclusion from having written my book [Will Jellyfish Rule the World?] is that it must be all about tone, balance and timing. Esme’s primary school has been excellent at instilling in her a sense of wonder about wildlife and the wider environment, as well as the need to recycle and not waste resources such as water and electricity. Naturally, I too try to nurture an interest in her, but joining the dots to reach a wider understanding that our climate is changing -- and that we humans are to blame -- seems quite a way off and I’m happy not to push it too hard.

In fact, the national curriculum in England dictates that climate change need not enter a child’s formal education until the age of 11, the start of secondary school and key stage 3. Since September 2008, it has stated that the study of science should include an understanding that “human activity and natural processes can lead to changes in the environment", which includes the impact on the climate of burning fossil fuels. In geography, “environmental interaction and sustainable development” are now taught as “key concepts” to students aged between 11 and 14. The topic of climate change is creeping into citizenship classes, too.

However, the subject’s introduction has not come without controversy. In 2007, a school governor in Kent, in south-east England, took the government to the high court over its decision to distribute An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, to secondary schools across England, saying he did not want “our young people indoctrinated with this political spin”. He failed to get the film banned, but the judge did order that the DVD be accompanied by guidance giving the “other side of the argument”.

But should we be leaving the job of explaining climate change to secondary school teachers? Can the subject be raised with younger children? Debi Gliori, the popular children’s book illustrator, believes so. Last year, Bloomsbury published The Trouble with Dragons, Gliori’s book aimed at five- to seven-year-olds, which describes how when “dragons” chop down trees, build roads, eat lots of food and “blow out lots of hot air”, it helps to destroy the world around them.

“Children don’t like being lied to,” says Gliori. “This is their world, too. They will inherit it. It isn’t a Disney movie. I like to use euphemism in my books because I don’t want to frighten them. I want to tell them the truth, but I use dragons to talk about the big stuff. I have had children become upset at talks I’ve given, though. Once they realise that the dragons represent us, they have asked questions such as, ‘Does that mean there will be no world left for us?’ I do sometimes feel guilty about interrupting their world. It doesn’t make you many friends writing about things like this, but I just don’t like lying to children.”

Professor Hugh Montgomery, an intensive-care consultant and the director of University College London’s Institute for Human Health and Performance, spends his downtime writing children’s books. The Genie in the Bottle is aimed at the seven-to-11 age group and tells the “simple story of climate change: how fossil fuels were laid down, how humans have changed the environment, how carbon is affecting the atmosphere and therefore how it might affect our future on this planet”. The book forms the basis for lesson plans now being used by primary school teachers as part of the BT-sponsored Project Genie, an education-based programme focusing on climate change and sustainability that has been trialled in 150 primary schools. Montgomery is adamant that there is no such thing as too young when it comes to telling children about climate change: he has even told his three-year-old about the “stinky gases” damaging the planet.

“You can tell them as young as you want,” he says. “Children are no more readily frightened than adults. It’s a question of context. We must avoid the conspiracy of silence. In my work in health care, I find that children dying of cancer usually know well before their parents think their child knows. We mustn’t underestimate them. I’ve spoken to five-year-olds in schools about climate change. They understand the idea of carbon dioxide. I show them a piece of coal and describe it as “fossilised salad”. But I will also talk about how people are at risk of dying if we don’t tackle climate change. We shouldn’t give them mixed messages.”

He stresses that the way we tell them about climate change is important. “It's exactly the same with my patients. If someone is at risk of coronary disease – they’re overweight, they smoke, et cetera -- they need to be told the truth. You have to tell them they are in a desperate situation. But rather than overwhelm them with a new health regime, I will try to encourage them step-by-step by getting them to do some exercise first, before I get them to, say, stop eating buns. Children can actually achieve massive change. Pester power is crucial. We know that from what we’ve learned in health care. Your own daughter telling you you’re going to die from smoking is much more powerful than any government poster saying so.

“Children love being given responsibility and being told they can do things without their parents. In our Project Genie primary schools, children have achieved a 42% to 72% reduction in electricity use, simply by policing energy use themselves.”

Current thinking among educationalists and child psychologists seems to confirm that children can grasp a subject as cognitively and emotionally challenging as climate change.

“Children are much cleverer than previously thought,” says Frances Gardner, professor of child and family psychology at the University of Oxford’s department of social policy and social work. “They think outside themselves. We generally believe now that we need to be more emotionally open about things with children. A generation ago, death and grieving were shielded from children. Children weren’t taken to funerals, for example, but this is changing.”

Christine Howe, professor of education at the University of Cambridge’s faculty of education, believes that climate change should now be a recurring theme throughout the school curriculum. “Relevant work could even be done in pre-school facilities, familiarising children with sources of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’,” she says. “However, early teaching should focus on manageable constructs and simple relations -- with gradual scaling up over a very long period of time.”

But there are those who worry that by speaking to young children about climate change we could risk encouraging a sense of inertia, either by leaving them paralysed with fear, or cosseting them with reassuring talk of switching off phone chargers when we know that it won’t make a blind bit of difference.

“I think telling five- to seven-year-olds is too young,” says George Marshall, a veteran climate-change campaigner, author and founder of the Oxford-based Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN). “Maybe 10- to 11-year-olds is OK, but, in general terms, I try to teach my own children [aged five and seven] that we are living through an extraordinary period of change. They actually seem quite excited by that. I don’t talk to them about guilt, western lifestyles and things like that. I don’t want to scare them. It’s very different from, say, how children were told about the threat of the Nazis or the nuclear bomb. They were an external enemy, whereas climate change is an enemy within. We should be careful what we tell children when we haven’t yet put our own house in order as adults. Ultimately, I’m not really persuaded by the argument that they are the next generation, because we have to tackle climate change so fast. We have other priority audiences more important than children.”

No matter how many times I toss that last sentence around in my mind, I just can’t accept it, no matter how ice cold and pragmatic its logic might be. Surely, our children must be a priority when it comes to invoking a meaningful response to climate change? I believe so, and it’s why I’ve spent the past year writing a book aimed at nine- to 12-years-olds that will hopefully spark in its readers a lifelong concern about climate change and, more importantly, a passion to be part of the solution. As my daughter Esme said to me recently: “Why don’t we just stop hurting the planet?”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

www.guardian.co.uk

Copyright Guardian News and Media, 2009

What do you think about discussing climate change with children? How important is it to do so? At what age should children be introduced to such a serious subject, and how? What is the best way to reassure a frightened child? Would you lie and say everything will be all right?

Let us know your thoughts on the forum.

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China’s bag ban, one year later

China Dialogue — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:44:00 +0000

In an effort to reduce “white pollution”, the country restricted the sale, distribution and manufacture of flimsy plastic sacks. Is the effort working? chinadialogue joined the discussion in Beijing.

China’s restrictions on the plastic bags came into effect on June 1, 2008. How well have the rules been implemented? What problems have arisen? What changes are still needed? chinadialogue, the internet portal Sohu’s environmental channel and the Global Village Environmental Culture Institute of Beijing (GVB) recently held a forum to mark the anniversary and to explore these questions.

In attendance were Li Jing, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission’s resource conservation and environmental protection department; Li Jiajian, head of the ministry of commerce’s standardisation office; Dong Jinshi, deputy director and secretary-general of the International Food Packaging Association; and various NGO and consumer representatives.

The following is an edited transcript of the discussion, hosted by Su Su of green.sohu.com

What the ban changed

Host: Why were the regulations implemented? How should we understand this policy?

Li Jing: China is a major producer and consumer of plastic bags, and their overuse and poor disposal cause a large amount of waste – particularly with the thinnest bags. They do not biodegrade easily; in soil they reduce permeability and water absorption, and threaten crops; and they can be fatal if eaten by animals.

The policy aimed to save resources and protect the environment, and also show China to be a responsible country on the international stage. Over a dozen provinces and cities had implemented their own bans and restrictions, but on a national level this wasn’t very significant. These nationwide restrictions helped change that.

Host: And over this last year, have we seen the hoped-for results?

Li Jing: Personally, I think the results have been clear and, in the main, positive. In particular, environmental awareness has increased. Shops and supermarkets have implemented the rules well. Things aren’t ideal at some markets, particularly as time passes and the policy gets forgotten. I pretended to be buying vegetables once and asked a few of the stallholders. They felt that nobody was enforcing it any more.

Li Jiajian: Markets and some more remote areas haven’t done so well, and there are variations in implementation. But there’s a process from setting rules and seeing them fully implemented.

Host: A survey published on May 20 by the China Chain Store & Franchise Association found that while plastic-bag usage in foreign-invested supermarkets had dropped by 80%, the fall was only 60% in Chinese-owned stores. The overall drop was 66%, and about 40 billion fewer bags had been used. Mr Dong also has a set of figures.

Dong Jinshi: Our survey, conducted over more than a year, found that the number of plastic bags in garbage has reduced by over 10%. Beijing produces over 20,000 tonnes of garbage a day, with 10% -- about 2,000 tonnes of that – being plastic bags. A 10% reduction means 200 tonnes less garbage.

The effects of the policy have received national, and even international, recognition. When it comes to the environment, we often learn from abroad. But in this case, it’s the other way round.

Host: Wang Jie, you’re a full-time housewife. What changes have you seen?

Wang Jie: It’s definitely made a difference. Now when I go out to buy something I have to check I’ve remembered to bring a bag. It’s a little inconvenient. But I think it’s worth it. Some of my neighbours and friends think it was just for the Olympics, and that the ban should end now. But I think we should stick with it, make it a good habit.

Implementation problems

Host: Once the ban was announced, environmentally friendly replacement bags were promoted, mostly cloth bags. Some NGOs hold that the manufacturing of any product consumes resources and creates pollution, and that only reducing use is actually environmentally friendly. This includes non-woven fabric bags and the plastic bags used for fresh produce.

Li Jing: Fresh-produce bags are only used in the supermarket for buying fish, fruit and so on; they’re a kind of pre-packaging. As shopping bags now cost money, the free fresh-produce bags are used more often. Non-woven fabric bags aren’t plastic, but do consume more oil in production than the plastic equivalent. Nor can they be recycled, so widespread use could be a potential danger, causing greater waste of resources and environmental damage.

Host: Also, the bags used by restaurants for takeaway or delivery food aren’t charged for. Why is that?

Li Jiajian: First, the level of bag use in the catering industry is very low. Secondly, making it easier for consumers to take leftovers home is actually saving waste – so restaurants weren’t included in the restrictions, nor were hospitals. However, I’ve observed that most hospitals do charge for plastic bags [in which to carry medicines]. I believe that the catering industry will follow suit in the near future.

Host: We carried out an online survey in May, and found that only 15% of markets charge for bags, and the vast majority still provide free super-thin bags. Why?

Li Jing: The new rules have two main points: a strict ban on super-thin plastic bags, those thinner than 0.025 millimetres; and the encouragement of charging for bags that do meet national standards. But control of manufacturing isn’t very effective, and it’s easy to set up simple workshops producing plastic bags -- which means enforcement isn’t easy. And if the super-thin bags are available, markets in more remote areas will use them. There’s room for improvement here.

Host: Mr Dong, do you have any suggestions here?

Dong Jinshi: Markets have lots of stalls, and it’s hard to manage them all – but it can be done. Take Beijing’s Dongjiao market as an example. That sees annual sales of over three billion yuan [about US$440 million], but only six stallholders sell plastic bags and they have to be authorised to do so. Traders pay a deposit of 30,000 yuan [US$4,400], and if they are found to be selling substandard bags then punishments – including loss of that deposit, or even removal from the market – are enforced. Also, the prices charged for bags must be clearly marked. Since these measures were brought in, not one trader has had a deposit confiscated.

Host: What issues has the ministry of commerce seen?

Li Jiajian: We’ve found that some street traders, and some restaurants, are using large quantities of substandard bags. This is to some extent related to the difficulties and costs of monitoring the situation.

Recycling of old plastic bags

Host: Mr Dong, you’ve bought us a brick made from plastic bags?

Dong Jinshi: Discarded plastic bags can affect the soil and groundwater. This brick is made from plastic bags, coal ash and clay. It’s strong. You can drive a car over it. It turns plastic bags into a resource, a product, rather than burying or burning them.

Host: What has the National Development and Reform Commission done towards the recycling of plastic bags?

Li Jing: We’re working on it. There are regulations for the recycling of reusable resources, including plastic bags, which set minimum standards for recycling firms. Those requirements are still low, or non-existent, and we’re working on that. We’re also setting up similar projects as part of circular economy trials, particularly after the release of the circular economy law.

Li Jiajian: The ministry of commerce ran a first set of plastic-bag recycling trials in 26 cities, and we’re now running a second stage in all provincial capitals and local administrative centre cities. Central authorities are also to finance local government centres for sorting building waste. These measures are bound to help with the recycling of plastic bags.

Li Jing: I’ve visited a number of provinces to see what’s happening and, in some, recycling is already taking place at scale, such as Linyi in Shandong. It’s doing really well there. We try and see recycling as a mine in the city. We don’t use new resources. We use recycled resources, saving power and protecting the environment.

For more from the Beijing forum, see http://green.sohu.com/s2009/may-forum/

Also, please add your thoughts about the issues raised on chinadialogue’s forum.

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A natural state of mind

Kate Humble — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:39:00 +0000

Is this busy, technological world a happy one? Kate Humble explains why we can improve our state of mind if we log off and spend more time with nature.

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

Our vocabulary has changed so much in recent decades that our grandparents would now wonder what we were talking about. In the 1980s we got stuck in a language of acronyms, full of yuppies, dinkies and nimbyism. By the 1990s we’d become subversive, flipping “wicked” on its head and turning “mobile” from an adjective to a noun.

As we entered the new millennium, we retreated to our computers and started blogging and googling for all we were worth. Busy, busy words for a busy, busy society. Shorthand terms for those short of time. As the pace of our lives has increased, so the rate of our linguistic change has comfortably managed to jog along beside it. And where has this heady hedonism led us? We’ve made up a new phrase for that, too. The credit crunch has the ability to affect all our lives, yet, again, previous generations would have no idea what it meant. Good heavens, most of them weren’t even able to get credit in the first place.

But there’s an answer to it all and, unsurprisingly, a new word to sum it up, too. It’s called ecopsychology, and although the word may be less than 20 years old, the concept it describes is most definitely not. In a nutshell, it means that nature makes you feel good, and if that seems a rather banal and obvious statement, consider how far removed from nature so many of us have become.

In Britain, one survey last year showed that only 53% of children could correctly identify an oak leaf, and nearly one in three had no idea what a magpie looked like. Another asked children to rank their favourite ways of spending their free time: playing in the countryside came bottom.

Add to these statistics the World Health Organisation’s prediction that depression will become the second-biggest cause of ill health by 2020, and you start to wonder whether our decreasing contact with nature and increasing reliance on antidepressants are in some way connected.

It appears that they are. A number of studies around the world have shown that patients in hospital beds where the view through the window is of greenery tend to recover faster than those who look out on more industrial or urban views. Other studies have shown that in many urban environments reports of violence lessen by up to 50% when greater access to nature is built into people’s lives. There are reports of the effect of nature on children’s attention-deficit disorders, and on adults’ irritability levels. Socialisation in a community can be up to 90% higher when green spaces are available than when they are not. Stress levels go down. Crime is reduced. It’s all good stuff.

Let’s be frank. It makes sense, really. As the great Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) legend Janet Kear once wrote: “Just as you can’t sneeze with your eyes open, you can’t feed a bird from your hand without smiling.”

Meanwhile, simply walking among all that greenery gives us a certain level of exercise, which is good for us, too.

The scientific benefits of nature are increasingly being proven, but there’s an aesthetic aspect, too. The poet William Wordsworth wrote of his daffodils: “For oft, when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood,/They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude;/And then my heart with pleasure fills/And dances with the daffodils.” He did not write of his oxygen intake or his neurobiological system.

Medical science is proving that nature is good for us, and this is an excellent and timely thing. Yet we are human beings, not just machines, and use human judgements to help us make our decisions. A recent poll asked whether respondents would be happy for their doctors to provide outdoor exercise instead of prescription drugs, if they thought it would work. Now, outdoor exercise is more time-consuming and requires more effort than popping a pill, yet 94% said that yes, they would be happy to accept that advice. Could it be that stirring inside us all there’s not just a medical need to spend more time in green spaces, but a spiritual one, too?

This is not about religious domains, but a connection with our natural environment that’s tucked away in our collective psyche. We are natural beings ourselves, yet we’ve transplanted ourselves from the woods and wetlands into brick boxes with tarmac links between them and shimmering screens to occupy our hours. Are we simply yearning for the world that directly gave our ancestors their life and livelihoods?

The biologist and thinker EO Wilson believes that our humanity effectively depends on how we interact with nature. “We are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms,” he wrote. “They offer the challenge and freedom innately sought.” He calls this biophilia, and it basically means love of life.

Compare this with the writings of another man. As he sits at his window looking out, he sees his wife helping his daughter put caterpillars on to fresh poplar branches, and his son drawing a picture of a tree. He contemplates his life in the midst of nature and writes: “I am more than ever convinced that I am the luckiest man I know. I say this not with smugness or self-satisfaction but because I can think of nothing sadder than to live a happy life without recognising it. Maybe I am an ostrich with my head in the sand. Maybe fate or my own or other men’s folly has all kinds of disasters in store for me, but they cannot take away these exciting and happy years. Not to acknowledge such good fortune would be inexcusable.”

This was Sir Peter Scott, the founder of WWT and a man for whom other organisms truly offered that challenge and freedom. He wrote those words in 1960, and they conclude his autobiography The Eye of the Wind. When you’ve lived a life as full of connection with wildlife as Scott’s was, and sum it up by dwelling on happiness, then you truly understand what nature can offer you.

Many have followed in his footsteps at WWT, continuing his work, visiting reserves, offering their services as volunteers and finding ways in which the outdoor life gives them untold pleasure. Those reserves, that work and those levels of happiness await us all.

Ecopsychology and biophilia are good words, but don’t just google them. Come along and find out what they mean in the real world.

Kate Humble is a vice-president of WWT.

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

Do you feel close to nature? Are too many people too removed from green spaces these days? How much time do you make to simply walk among trees or over hills, or to camp or fish? Do such experiences alter your mental outlook?

Share you thoughts and experiences on the forum.

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Go green, in death as in life

Weiya Huo — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:02:00 +0000

China is advocating environmentally friendly funerals, but most people still prefer traditional burial ceremonies. Cultural change cannot be forced, writes Huo Weiya, but awareness can be raised.

A new type of funeral – the “ecological funeral” – is being advocated by China’s government and media, with suitable memorial parks established in many areas.

Ecological funerals refer to new “tree funerals”, “flower funerals”, “grass funerals” and “water funerals”. In the first three types, the ashes of the deceased person are spread on earth in which trees, flowers or grass is planted. In water funerals, the ashes are scattered over a river or the sea.

Such funerals represent China’s second reform of funeral customs. In the first reform, cremation replaced burials. Now the ashes are not retained, but are returned to nature.

Traditionally, burial was the main form of funeral in China. But in 1956, 151 senior officials -- including Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, signed a document calling for the use of cremation. In 1985 the State Council published regulations stipulating that cremation should be carried out in areas that are densely populated or lacking in arable land, with punishments for public officials who did not comply. Cremation then became the most common form of funeral, with the deceased’s ashes stored in one form of memorial or another.

In China, 100,000 mu of land – nearly 70 square kilometres -- are used every year for those memorials, along with large quantities of bricks, concrete and marble. And these figures are expanding. The land used is not replaced, and we are faced with the dead and the living competing for space.

The ashes of Zhou Enlai were scattered in the air over Beijing, the Miyun reservoir and the Hai and Yellow Rivers in 1976. Deng Xiaoping’s ashes were scattered over the sea in 1997. Both of these ceremonies can be considered water funerals.

In many ways, these ecological funerals meet the needs of the times, especially in our cities. The Chinese population is getting older faster, and there is a shortage of land, so there is a risk of having nowhere to build traditional cemeteries. With the Chinese tradition of lavish funeral ceremonies, burial costs are spiralling. In some cases, a funeral can cost more than a house, and people speak of being able to afford to live, but not to die. A recent case exposed by China Central Television (CCTV) -- of a village official in Guangdong who felled 24 mu (16,000 square metres) of forest to create a luxury cemetery -- highlights the environmental dangers of these traditions.

Ecological funerals use little or no land. What they do use is not covered with a gravestone, but with plants. As it happens, China’s Tomb-Sweeping Festival – when relatives of the deceased visit and maintain graves and memorials -- fell in April, just as plants are growing and flowering. Memorial parks will double as green spaces.

Popularising this practice would save both costs and land, and increase the amount of green space.

Despite all this, however, many media reports published after this year’s Tomb-Sweeping Festival showed that only a minority of people choose ecological funerals.

The Chinese people traditionally plant trees beside graves, particularly in rural areas. The tree is believed to host the spirit of the departed, and the death of one of these trees is seen as a bad omen. The same worries are expressed about tree, flower and grass funerals. There is even less acceptance of water funerals. Many people feel that there is nowhere for the bereaved to focus their grief.

“The old burial practices have existed for thousands of years. You can’t replace them overnight,” says Zhu Huamin, head of the Shanghai Burial Culture Institute. “I think for some time to come, ecological funerals will only be accepted by some people.”

Attachment to the idea of traditional funerals is the greatest current obstacle to ecological funerals in China. Despite the earlier reforms, cremation still is not accepted in rural areas, and 50% of Chinese funerals involve burial. The success or failure of this second round of reform rests on changing those deep-rooted cultural beliefs.

The government has no specific regulations on ecological funerals. In April the Legal Daily reported that the drafting of the Funeral Management Regulations, first published in 2007, is due to be completed this year. According to Di Yingqi, a representative in the National People’s Congress, the draft doesn’t mention ecological funerals.

In order to meet targets during the earlier reforms, local governments attempted to make cremation compulsory, but to little effect. Burials took place in secret, and corruption resulted, especially in rural areas. Di argues that a funeral law should be drafted, providing for a range of funeral styles.

Both the current financial crisis and China’s long-standing sustainable development strategy require a shift to the environmentally friendly in the economic, social and cultural sectors. Funeral practices are no different, but using legal and administrative measures to do so will have little effect, at best. You cannot force cultural changes. It is not a matter of law and institutions, but of raising environmental awareness among the people. Then will choose more environmentally friendly ways of life – and death -- of their own accord.

Huo Weiya is operations and development manager for chinadialogue in Beijing and former editor-in-chief ofEnvironmental Culture Newsletter, published by Green Student Forum, an environmental NGO established in 1996.

What are your views? Do you support environmentally friendly funerals, or do you prefer traditional burials? Are young people more open to new forms of funeral ceremony? Do concessions to customs need to be made, given the conflicting demands on available land? Let us know on the forum what you think.

Homepage photo by hunangov

Sailing on the ocean’s behalf

Robin McKie — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:02:00 +0000

British banking heir David de Rothschild plans a remarkable journey in a recycled plastic boat to highlight the huge “garbage patch” caught up in swirling Pacific currents. Robin McKie reports.

An heir to one of the world’s greatest fortunes, David de Rothschild, plans to set sail across the Pacific this summer -- in a boat, the Plastiki, made from plastic bottles and recycled waste. The aim of this extraordinary venture is simple: to focus attention on one of the world’s strangest and most unpleasant environmental phenomena: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a rubbish-covered region of ocean several hundred kilometres in diameter.

The patch, north-west of Hawaii, was discovered in 1999 by researchers who found that its waters contained tens of thousands of pieces of plastic per square kilometre, the remains of rubbish caught in the region’s circulating ocean currents. This pollution is now devastating populations of seabirds and fish that live in the region.

During his trip, which is being sponsored by the International Watch Company (IWC) and Hewlett-Packard, de Rothschild will collect water samples and post blogs, photographs and video clips of the area in an attempt to publicise the perils posed by plastic pollution.

To further highlight the ocean’s plastic-pollution problems, the 30-year-old environmental crusader has designed a special catamaran with a hull made of frames filled with 12,000 plastic bottles. The cabin and bulkheads of Plastiki also have been constructed out of a special recycled material called srPET [self-reinforcing polyethylene terephthalate], made of webs of plastic.

“The plastic water bottle epitomises everything about this throwaway, disposable society,” said de Rothschild, who trained to be an equestrian show-jumper in England and who has trekked to both the north and south poles. However, he added that he was not aiming to demonise plastic, but was trying to highlight its alternative uses, as well as focusing global attention on the dangers posed to the ecology in regions such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The Plastiki -- its name inspired by the balsa raft Kon-Tiki that was built and sailed across the Pacific in 1947 by the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl -- is now undergoing trials in San Francisco Bay. “The project has gone through several materials, exploring everything from bamboo to plywood, even playing around with the idea of sewing all the bottles together in one giant sock,” said de Rothschild. As a result, the 20-metre catamaran has cost several million US dollars to construct and has taken three years to reach its current design.

When it is ready, it will carry de Rothschild and a crew of six on a 17,000-kilometre journey from San Francisco to Hawaii, Midway Island, Bikini Atoll, Vanuatu and, finally, Sydney. There will be no accompanying craft, but the Plastiki will be met by a support team at each landfall.

The destinations for the craft’s great voyage have been selected to highlight a variety of environmental threats, including overfishing and climate change. However, the most important part of Plastiki’s route will be its voyage round the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where it will focus global awareness on the issue of marine debris and pollution.

The patch was discovered 10 years ago by the oceanographer Charles Moore when he was sailing off Hawaii. “I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic,” Moore later recalled. Among the items he spotted were plastic coat hangers, an inflated volleyball, a truck tyre and dozens of plastic fishing floats.

“In the week it took to cross, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments.” Indeed, the term “patch” does not begin to convey the nature of the phenomenon, Moore added. A “plastic soup” has been created, he said, one that has spread over an area that is now bigger than American state of Texas (about 700,000 square kilometres).

The plastic -- most of it swept from coastal cities in Asia and California -- is trapped indefinitely in the region by the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex of currents that circulate clockwise around the ocean. Scientists estimate that there is six times more plastic than plankton by weight in the patch and that this is having disastrous ecological consequences. Fish and seabirds mistake plastic for food and choke to death. At the same time, plastics absorb pollutants including PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and pesticides, bringing poisons into the food chain.

In one study of plastic pollution in the Pacific, scientists found that populations of albatrosses in the north-west Hawaiian Islands, a national marine sanctuary, have been devastated by plastic from the garbage patch. “Their body cavities are full of huge chunks of many types of plastics, from toothbrushes to bottle caps to needles and syringes,” said Myra Finkelstein, an environmental toxicologist based at University of California, Santa Cruz. “They can’t get them up. They can’t get them out. It’s heartbreaking.”

This point is backed by Moore. “The plastic gadgets one typically finds in the stomach of one of these birds could stock the checkout counter at a convenience story,” he said.

Last year, a raft built of waste and debris, known as the Junk Raft, was built by the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which had been set up by Charles Moore after discovering the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This simply constructed craft floated on a mass of 15,000 plastic bottles and was sailed through the patch by oceanographers Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal. They, too, were aiming to highlight the global issue of plastic pollution in the oceans.

However, de Rothschild insists his project has a grander vision. He is seeking not just to show up the planet’s ecological woes but, through the design and construction of Plastiki, he also will be highlighting how disposable plastics can be used in a constructive way.

“I want the Plastiki to make a statement that it’s our lack of reuse, uses and disposal that it is at fault, not the material itself,” he said.

The eco-warrior also has designed his mission so that it copies key features of the voyage of the Kon-Tiki in which Heyerdahl -- a hero of de Rothschild -- sailed across the Pacific to show how ancient South American Indians could have colonised Polynesia. As a result, de Rothschild originally set his launch date for 28 April -- exactly 62 years to the day when Heyerdahl set out on his epic journey across the Pacific. However, teething problems with Plastiki recently forced him to postpone departure until this summer.

Nevertheless, de Rothschild insists his craft will sail shortly and could one day revolutionise the use of recycled plastics in general and the design of boats in particular. Much will depend on how his craft behaves once the Plastiki expedition is under way, he admitted to the New Yorker magazine. His craft should perform well, but could break up, he said.

“These are just unknowns,” he added. “That’s an adventure! If it was planned and everyone knew, no one would be interested.”

www.guardian.co.uk

Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

Homepage photo by cesaharada.com