Posted by Yang Chu

It’s the 14^th day of my 28-day trip backpacking around China to help seek out, investigate, and report on sources of water pollution. I’m in a village in Bengbu, trying not to breathe as factories around me belch black smoke into the air. With me is Zhouxiang and Zhangjun, Executive Director and Operations Director of Green Anhui, respectively. Next to us a group of local construction workers are in the middle of re-plastering the walls on someone’s decrepit looking house.

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Posted by Xiu Min Li

I arrived in Hong Kong thinking that I had packed a perfect amount of clothes. The weather was warm and humid but also slightly breezy at times. Weather.com was once again reliable until the Chinese government decided to shoot some silver iodide and dry ice into the sky, to induce rain to relieve the drought in the north. It set off a snow storm and extreme weather conditions across the country that was to claim 40 lives and billions of dollars in lost agricultural and industrial productions. Luckily, all it gave me was a cold that lasted for weeks. When I arrived in Guangzhou it was as if I had walked into a freezer. I scrambled to a nearby mall and filled up my suitcase with new winter clothes. By the time I sat down at Green Eyes’ office near Zhongshan University, I was appropriately bundled up.

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Posted by Evan Sparling

On 16 November 2009 a panel of Kamchatkan activists from the Lach Ethno-Ecological Information Center awarded first, second, and third prizes in a photography contest held during this summer’s salmon spawning season. The panel selected 34 finalists from 70 entries addressing the topic “The salmon in the life of the native peoples of Kamchatka” before whittling the group down to three winners. The top three submissions are displayed after the jump. All 34 finalists can be viewed here.

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Posted by Evan Sparling

David Gordon and I spent the last few days at the Wild Salmon Center’s annual “Sustainable Salmon Fisheries in the Russian Far East” conference in Portland. Still in my first month on the job, I boarded the plane last Sunday both excited and anxious. I was thrilled at the opportunity to meet my American and Russian colleagues and learn from their experience, but I was also nervous to be a neophyte among so many respected and experienced conservationists.

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Posted by Xiu Min Li

I was born and grew up along a tributary of the Pearl River, the Fenjiang in Foshan. In the early 90s, one of our favorite pastimes during the warm summer nights, was to get “yeshao” or “midnight snacks” at the dozens of outdoor eateries that sprang up along “Fenjiang”, the Fen River. These eateries would cook up greasy but tasty fried noodles, fried rice and various seafood stir fries. Vegetables and dishes were washed with water directly pulled up in buckets from the river. No one thought much of it.

By the time I returned from my first trip home after immigrating to the US, in 1998, things had turned badly. The Fenjiang smelled like the Soy Sauce factory nearby and had many different colors similar to the textiles coming out of another factory. In my most recent trip last year, the river didn’t smell as bad, but still look dead, if not poisonous. People had different ideas as to which factories caused the pollution, but everyone accepted the situation as inevitable and never bothered with finding out the truth. Then this week came a timely and well investigated Greenpeace report on the companies that are poisoning the Pearl River and the larger political context which are allowing the situation to deteriorate. It answered so many questions and highlighted the urgency to speak up.

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In an exchange, our partners from China met with US NGOs to learn about their work.

Posted by Xiu Min Li

Today I met one of the NGOs we work with in China – Green Student Forum. It is the foremost student environmental organization that is comprised of student groups across Beijing and the country. GSF is characterized by the discipline and enthusiasm of China’s new generation of leaders.

GSF’s office was located in one of Beijing’s tens and thousands of residential complexes, like most NGOs. When I arrived I was met by a student volunteer, Zhang Xiangui, the coordinator of the water project, and six other students. They were eager and shy. They shook my hand heavily and looked away as soon as I caught their eyes. I was sent to sit in the best chair in the midst of a room of tiny wooden stools.

These students came from the four teams of university volunteers who were assigned different sections of the Long River. They were responsible for organizing student volunteers from their own school to do a survey of the river, compile information about the history and important sites in the area, and interview neighborhoods along the river about their concerns. The end result would be a Green Map of Beijing’s Rivers. The plan was to include facts on the river and a conservation guide on the back of the map. This map would be distributed through various public events in schools and neighborhoods. They would also contact the Tourism bureau to see if they would be interested in distributing the map.

About eleven students and I went to do a field trip to the Long River. We went to Jishuitan, one of the subway stops I was most familiar with as it was nearest to my house when I lived in Beijing almost 7 years ago. It was still familiar but visibly renovated. A giant new bike tent was created with rows of racks two levels high. Across from the station is a shining new shopping center. The Military Theatre next door had a complete face lift. It used to be an aging building with a stale facade and a dusty ticketing booth that was always closed. Now it’s an artsy glass structure with spiky steel bars rising to the sky and a digital display of its current shows.  The sidewalks have all been fixed up and along the river that run through the area, it was landscaped with plants and trees along stone walls with carvings of calligraphies and were equipped with viewing platforms dotted with people fishing, couples cuddling and old people idling. A student from Beijing Normal University met up with us and served as local guide.

The students were pleased with the makeover but skeptical it would be kept up with after the Olympics. A decorated fountain was pumping up clear water that quickly merged into the deep green river too muddled to see through more than two inches deep. Occasionally there were tiny black fishes that swam right beneath the surface and they would be met with utmost enthusiasm by the students. I asked if people fishing here would actually eat them, they laughed. They fish for pleasure and always released them back in. The fish are not edible – some fish can grow even in the most polluted rivers.
We walked along the river on a stone path. There was a long patch that ran next to residential buildings and offices. It was a mile long path with no exit in between. All the entrances were sealed off with medal locks reinforced with medal fences. We just walked and walked and walked. Every section of the river was heavily maintained, either through careful landscaping or heavily secured fences. But clearly no one was keeping it sanitized because the path was dotted with spotty feces and trash that the students called bombs.

Our last stop was the reality part of the tour of the river. We arrived at a section populated by the “floating population” as the students called them – migrants who came to seek jobs and managed to stay within the city as opposed to being out on the 4th ring road on the outskirt of no man’s land. We immediately came upon foul odors as we entered a narrow alley leading to a settlement. Amongst dilapidated houses there was a hair salon and a restaurant. Three teenage girls with various styles of colored and spiky hair were lounging around in shorts and fixing their nails inside the salon where there was clearly no business.

After dinner, we returned to the office for the report and their plan for next year. Inspired by Fei’s visit to the US with the Green Corp, GSF wants to implement similar program in China. Through their experience working with other environmental NGOs, they feel that many NGOs’ main obstacle is lacking good leadership/organizers. They would like to establish a training program specifically to address that. The training would include team building, project management, technical understanding of environmental issues and other basic skills like material developments. Approximately five participants would be trained on this issue while taking on a community based project. They would then be dispatched to other established NGOs as interns during the summer to gain hands’ on experience in all the elements they had been trained on.

As I looked around the room, most students including Fei and Zhang were not from Beijing, with many from the countryside which desperately needed attention to their most basic environmental needs. From the perspective of building a widespread environmental movement across China, I felt that it was important to have an element in their training that involves students doing a small project to fix a small problem facing their own home town/village. They agreed that this would be appropriate at a more advance stage of their training, once they’ve been trained of all the elements of doing a project and gotten experience working with a successful NGO seeing how a project plays out in real life, it would then be a logical step to bring their new found knowledge to make a difference in their hometown.

Sakhalin-II caused severe environmental and social damage

Posted by Rachel James and Leah Zimmerman.

On the morning of September 7, 2008, Exxon and Sakhalin Energy prepared to face off in a much-anticipated soccer match to celebrate Oil Workers’ Day. Meanwhile, we (Rachel and Leah, two Pacific Environment staffers) packed a vehicle and headed north on the island with two staffers from Sakhalin Environment Watch, including Dmitry Lisitsyn, a superstar of the Russian Far East environmental movement. We traveled with Dmitry and Katya for three days along the Sakhalin-II pipeline route, a several hundred mile gash running the length of the otherwise wild island.

Dmitry’s questions are relentless. Whether addressing us, shopkeepers on the side of the road, or construction workers on the pipeline route, Dmitry is able to disarm and charm, while extracting critical information with measured precision. For us, time with Dmitry is a lesson in the art of community organizing as well as a lesson about Sakhalin-II itself.

We are struck time and time again by similarities between Shell’s activities on Sakhalin Island and the company’s current strategies in the Alaskan Arctic. Shell could easily write a textbook on how to break promises, give and take bribes, buy off scientists, employ divide and conquer tactics with local opposition, and emasculate environmental assessment processes.

Sakhalin Island was once a prison destination. Today, oil and gas pipeline infrastructure crisscross the island and inflation from the flux of oil executives and construction works has seriously changed the capital city, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. A two-room apartment goes for an exorbitant $1600/month, food prices are among the highest in Russia, and luxury SUVs can be counted by the dozens. While oil executives enjoy a luxurious lifestyle on Sakhalin, Sakhaliners bear the brunt of the grossly inflated costs for food and housing in addition to the devastating environmental, social and economic damage Sakhalin-II brought.

Now that construction of Sakhalin-II is nearing completion, Sakhalin Environment Watch predicts its next great battle will be poaching. We saw first-hand this week how Sakhalin’s rivers, like many on Kamchatka, are being raped by poachers who operate without fear of punishment from disempowered or corrupt government agencies. Imagine thousands of salmon returning to spawn in the river where they were born after years at sea. Now imagine a net stretched across the entire mouth of the river, preventing only a handful of fierce jumpers from among the thousands to return upstream to spawn. After a few years of this, we don’t understand why people are surprised that there are no fish left in the rivers. And so, Dmitry and SEW plot their next move …