Comments and Debates on Ecology
There's No Tomorrow |
| The rain falls on all men(J. D. Embury) |
| Liang Congjie, modern China's first environmentalist(The Economist) |
There's No Tomorrow
The rain falls on all men
David Embury of PMME
As I watch the televisions reports from Cancun or reflect on the climate conference in Copenhagen. I am struck by the contrast with Science in the period of Humphry Davy* and his work related to the terrible mine disasters of north eastern England in the early 1800s. Sir Humphry Davy improved the safety of coal mines by going into mines talking to miners and working directly to achieve an economic and tractable solution to the terrible problem of mine safety. It is also of interest that he never patented the lamp but was awarded the Rumford medal for his exceptional contributions.
In contrast, in our age of instant “knowledge”, we watch petty officials debate on Climate Change in terms of whether the industrial revolution is the root cause or whether the coal utilizing nations of the developing world should pay for the costs of climate change. The issue is not the origins of the problem; it is our communal human response. The responses are not simply in terms of tax structures, perceptions of national responsibility, appropriate fuel supplies etc., but the real recognition of the human impact which the extremes of climate change will inevitably bring and which we as a human community share. The real issue is how we can become proactive and prepare responses which will save lives and minimize suffering in any devastated area of the earth.
We need the will to apply new combinations of sciences to view issues of feasible, future agronomies, materials for disaster relief and temporary housing and repair of infrastructures, transportable and deployable flood control systems, membrane technologies for water conservation and reutilization and new ways to use the biosphere. Further, we need to develop these responses now and to educate the public to the real issues of climate change and the massive social upheaval and human suffering it will bring.
Climate change is not a passive sport; it is a threat to all of us as a cohesive, caring, human society. As individuals and organizations we need to be active and demand action, leadership and education from our political leaders not a public posturing based on ignorance and lack of vision.* Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829) was a British chemist and inventor. He is probably best remembered today for his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline earth metals, as well as contributions to the discoveries of the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine. In 1815 he invented the Davy lamp, which allowed miners to work safely in the presence of flammable gases.
Liang Congjie, modern China's first environmentalist
The Economist (Nov 18th 2010) | from PRINT EDITION
UNTIL the air began to clog and burn, the rivers turned to sludge and desert sand began to sift into the streets of Beijing, China's people did not much care what Mao Zedong's great leap into industrialisation had done to the motherland. Pollution did not happen in socialist countries; it was a Western, capitalist evil. But Liang Congjie noticed. He realised he no longer saw the blue skies of the
Beijing of his boyhood, or the courtyard trees he had loved to climb. In the rugged south of Shanxi province, the water in the mountain streams was now black with coal dust and undrinkable.
As a historian Mr Liang was a traditionalist, sighing sometimes that nothing could surpass the wooden temples of the Tang dynasty; by breeding he was a preservationist, the son of a distinguished architect who had famously sat weeping on the medieval walls of Beijing the night before Mao's bulldozers demolished them. Some were inclined to think that Mr Liang was less than committed to
China's progress. But he was determined that China should surge forward armed with green sensibility, and a green heart.
Friends of Nature, founded by him in 1994 with three colleagues from the Academy for Chinese Culture, was China's first legal NGO and the first committed to protecting the country’s environment.
At its inaugural meeting it drew 60 members; there are now around 10,000. As Mr Liang proudly said, it was for everybody: housewives, students, food-sellers in the market, even workers from the Capital Steel Corporation factory where Mr Liang, each January, would gather snow in plastic bottles to show schoolchildren the little black specks of pollution in it.
Though based on Western organisations he had seen on television, Friends of Nature was less a lobbying outfit than a club, whose members would go tree-planting, camping and chorus-singing to spread the green message through the land. In the main Beijing office, a homely red-painted house in a courtyard littered with bicycles, visitors would be handed staff cards printed on recycled paper and given metal reusable chopsticks, together with a lecture on how much of China's virgin forest was disappearing for wooden chopsticks every year. Here, among countless papers and the relentless tap of computers, Mr Liang would be working away in shirt and casual slacks, never raising his soft voice, modest as ever. His bike was among the others outside.
He came to his cause when he was past 60, a dignified figure with greying hair. Most of his professional life had been spent unremarkably, teaching history in universities and compiling a 74-part encyclopedia of China. His family background-American-educated parents, a grandfather renowned as a reformer under the Qing dynasty-made him suspect during the Cultural Revolution, and for nine years he was forced to teach in a cadre school in rural Yunnan. But he was slow to radicalise, and cautious even as his radicalism grew. Not for him the prison or martyrdom route. Instead he joined the right committees, especially in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and used his connections to persuade the government and the media to listen.
This was delicate work. In China, he always said, there was no point in the sort of dangerous and eye-catching stunts favoured by Greenpeace. He indulged in one or two, handing a letter to Tony Blair, on a visit to China in 1998, to petition him to help save the Tibetan antelope, or bringing in secret cameras to record illegal logging in Sichuan. State goons kept a bit of an eye on him. But in
general his campaigns were conducted in an orderly Chinese manner. You did not criticise your parents; instead, you helped with the housework. Similarly, you did not attack the government; instead, you reminded it that there were laws already on the books to protect the land, the water and the air, and offered to help enforce them.
Within these self-described limits, Mr Liang and his NGO notched up several famous victories. He managed to stop the cutting of virgin forest (and the destruction of golden monkey habitat) in Yunnan province. With others, he killed proposals to build giant dams on the Salween river and in one of the most spectacular gorges of the Yangzi. The Tibetan antelope, hunted almost to extinction for the
fineness of its fur, remained his favourite cause, and he went to the icy plateau to burn sequestered skins himself-though, to his sorrow, he could not stop the disbanding of the heroic anti-poaching brigade and the transfer of patrols to corruptible local officials. He was sure, he said diplomatically, that the government would do all it could.
Kestrels in the smog
His proudest achievement, however, was to start environmental awareness in China. Where FON led, some 3,000 NGOs have followed. His “Project Hope” sends out buses, painted with an antelope, to rural villages, to teach schoolchildren to treasure flowers, streams and woods. His bird-spotting book encourages residents of Beijing to look out, through the still-smoggy air, for egrets and kestrels. “Mr
Liang's heart, very sensitive, very soft,” wrote a sad Chinese blogger after his death. All hearts should be so soft, he would have said, the better to plant green seeds in.
more to come ...