posted by Wen Bo, China Program Co-Director, Pacific Environment

The third and final day of the conference was titled “Pondering Gaps and Needs of Stakeholders in Taihu Basin. How to Build New Clean Water Networks?”

Jun Bi, the local organizer from Nanjing University was the first to speak. In his presentation, he noted that NGOs in China are very weak and that they need to work with researchers and governments more.  He also stated that NGOs often lack funding and the necessary knowledge to be effective. He acknowledged that he also belongs to an NGO called PACE, whose members are mostly Ph.Ds, and have access to governmental officials. He indicated that no matter how hard an environmental NGO tries, there is no single comment that could be made in front of governor of Jiangsu province that would actually influence a government’s decision making.

Jun Bi made the point that most people in the Lake Tai region seem to care more about their own interests than collective interests such as environmental improvements. And, that like it or not, the economy of Lake Tai region would have to first double to keep up with the demand of the people’s wishes to develop their economy; and, that similarly, China, would have to develop first even if to some extent at the price of the environment.

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Posted by Wen Bo

On the first night during the conference I saw a CCTV- 2 documentary film on water pollution in China. When I turned it on, it was presenting on Lake Tai pollution. Then the program reported more about a series of other toxic pollution problems. Ma Jun, founder and director of Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), was interviewed as well as a retired director of Yangtze River Water Resources Management Bureau. The retired official stated that each year the amount of polluted water carried into the Yangtze is nearly the amount of the entire amount the Yellow River itself.

Ma Jun showed up on the morning of the second day of the conference and was the first one to present. Unfortunately all the governmental officials, provincial and local, had all left the conference the previous day.

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Posted by Wen Bo

This week, I attended a conference in Nanjing, China on Taihu Lake water pollution. The event was organized by the Woodrow Wilson Center, Japanese Institute of Developing Economics (IDE-JETRO) and Nanjing University.

Several of my colleagues from partner organizations based in China were there as well as several from U.S. based organizations, including one from Great Lakes Office of National Wildlife Federation. On the Japanese side, there were five to six institutions, including professors, researchers and one NGO, Japan for Sustainability.

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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 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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Posted by Jackie Dragon

Last week I spent three days in cool rooms at the Sustainable Shipping Conference in San Francisco with an incredible array of experienced people, from Port directors and shipping company executives to air pollution specialists and NOAA scientists – all focused on how to make shipping cleaner.

After endless Power Point charts of daunting statistics about NOX, SOX, Particulate Matter (PM), and Carbon Dioxide (CO2), everyone seemed to be in agreement that shipping is a dirty and dangerous business, year round.

• Shipping burns some 350 million tons of heavy bunker fuel
• Ships emit about a billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2)
• Ships contribute 17% to the U.S. PM inventory, and 18% in California
• 100,000 cancer deaths worldwide are attributable to shipping

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Posted by Yang Chu

Yang Chu, China Program Associate at Pacific Environment, sat down with Zhao Zhong, a Pacific Environment partner and Time Environmental Hero of the Year.

Zhao Zhong, tell us about how you became an environmental activist in China, and why you chose Gansu Province as your base.

I’ve always been a mountaineering enthusiast. In my travels I saw beautiful sceneries but also serious environmental problems. I felt I should do something, and started by picking up garbage in my hikes. After graduating from University I moved to Gansu for a position with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. There, I saw declining ecosystems and a lack of NGO presence, so I established Green Camel Bell. Now I am a full time environmentalist.

What are your thoughts on being named a 2009 Hero of the Environment by Time Magazine, and what impact do you foresee this honor having on your cause?

So many other environmentalists also deserve this honor, so many have contributed as much or more than me. My own contributions are made possible by the Green Camel Bell team. Perhaps more volunteers will join us now from abroad, and we will receive more attention from researchers and the media. Time Magazine named me a hero for water pollution monitoring, but the work of Green Camel Bell is more than that – I will continue to focus on supporting rural communities and developing NGOs.

What advice do you have for those in China, and the rest of the world, who want to follow in your footsteps and work for environmental protection in their own communities?

Everyone has what it takes to go into environmental protection. Everyone can be a hero of the environment.

What immediate plans do you have for yourself and your organization? Where do you see yourself decades from now, and what will you be doing?

In the immediate future I’ll be completing two projects, from the World Bank and the Ford Foundation, which will have me working in rural communities for much of my time. I’m also improving the operations at Green Camel Bell, to make the organization run more smoothly and sustainably. As for the distant future, it’s hard to see years into the future, everything is changing so fast.

5th Annual Water Coalition Meeting Participants.

Posted By Xiu Min Li

The first time I met Zhang Yadong, he had just started working at Green Longjiang full time for 2 months. The new graduate of Harbin Industrial University had been a long time volunteer leader of the organization and was recruited to be the Executive Director as soon as he completed his study in Water Engineering. A year later, the baby-faced Zhang retains his small and skinny frame but has grown a beard and a mustache. He was nervous and excited when he greeted a horde of us at the hotel. I, Wen Bo, all of our partners and allies within the Water Pollution Coalition were arriving from all over the country to attend the 5^th Annual Coalition Meeting hosted by Green Longjiang. It will be held in the provincial capital Harbin of Heilongjiang Province and Wudalianchi, a famous volcanic park surrounded by 5 lakes.

Zhang now manages two new staff and was entrusted to host this year’s Water Pollution Coalition Meeting, a task he volunteered at last year’s meeting in Lanzhou and apparently regretted shortly after a few drinks during our last night there.  At the time he was still managing the office and the Songhua River project alone. He would get up at 7am every day, for six days a week, to arrive at the empty office at 9am and work all day alone except when there were volunteer activities. It has been a lonely 10 months but Yadong has proven himself to be patient and resilient. He told me during one of our long chats about how he wanted to make a difference and develop his own signature program to protect Songhua River. He wanted to make sure he grows as a leader and he was giving himself two years.

A year later, he and his team successfully hosted our biggest Water Pollution Coalition Meeting ever with almost 30 participants from 10 different organizations all over China.

Everything went smoothly in the course of the 3-day conference, beyond even my own expectation. We informally reflected on our accomplishments and disappointments as environmental activists in the last year; learned from two leading environmental NGOs working on water pollution issues and environmental governance – the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) and Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) in Beijing; did training on Strategic Planning for organizations and for the water project; presented Pacific Environment’s new subgrant proposal guidelines for 2009-2010; held two sessions of Board Meeting for Green Longjiang; and brainstormed our new idea to form a Rapid Response Team within the coalition to respond to severe water pollution incidents such as the ones that occurred in Inner-Mongolia, Henan and Shaanxi Province in the last months.

By the time we got on the bus for another 6-hour ride back to Harbin, new friendships have formed between the many new and old members of the coalition; fatigue and excitements were budding in the air and there was a line of people trying to sit next to me to discuss their thoughts and ideas for the Rapid Response Team.