Chinese walker

The document now facing me, from the Kunming City Planning Commission Office, in the south-west Chinese province of Yunnan, is certainly worth a read. It states that in project planning for residential apartments under 40 storeys in downtown Kunming, “approval in principle is no longer required except as regards urban landscape considerations, requirements for aircraft clearance and controls on land construction sites%26hellip; detailed plans for %26lsquo;urban village` remodelling will, in line with this, undertake a comprehensive reorganisation.”

Let`s stop for a moment and consider the contemporary landscape of greater Kunming. There are now 330 areas classified as “urban villages” covering 18 square kilometres in the main city construction zone. Imagine, if you will, all this “remodelling” of the urban villages as a form of “strip integration”, which draws in neighbouring localities – even those that were outside the initial demolition and remodelling plans. A recent example is the urban village renovation of Panjiawan in Kunming. Although this urban village is only 39 acres (0.16 square kilometres), the area to be demolished is 129 acres (0.5 square kilometres).

Imagine now the picture of this future city: high-rise towers; every residence over 40-storeys high; the concrete forests and steel cities interspersed, of course, with green space and plazas. Imagine the legendary “Oriental Geneva”, the “bridgehead to south-east Asia”, the “Radiant Garden City Beautiful”.

This is no isolated case, but increasingly a model of Chinese urbanisation. I call this sort of city renovation and urbanisation “urban dinosaurisation”. The dinosaurs refer the enormous bodies formed by this urban expansion; to the unsustainability of this urban development; and also to their eventual, dinosaur-like fate. It can be fairly predict%26shy;ed that the cost of these dinosaurs will not be borne by those who created them: the city leaders, planners and real-estate developers. These people will leave early – and the price will be paid by those living in these areas.

It`s not going too far to call such cities dinosaurs. While satisfying a modernist desire to gaze over the human realm from some cosmic vantage point, such high-rise communities are hollow and will extinguish the intrinsic vitality of the city. In the cities of China today, vitality comes from three types of residential areas. First, traditional neighbourhoods like the hutongs of the Xuanwu and Chongwen districts of old Beijing. These have centuries of history; the city`s life was formed in these neighbourhoods, with their mixtures of residents always in view of each other. Second are the work unit communities formed in the 1950s. While the architecture of these areas is unremarkable, they have, like the older city neighbourhoods, social capital and vitality.

Third are the urban villages: city communities formed in a village framework. These are completely stigmatised in the current urban remodelling movement. However, as serious researchers and those who have lived in these places will attest, they are the same as the first two types of urban community in terms of being places that are functionally intact and orderly (albeit not in the eyes of city leaders), and whose residents are in close contact in a liveable environment.

It is these places that extend the life of the city, and promote the vitality that the modernist dinosaur city wants to extinguish. Can communities in the dinosaur city promote urban vitality? When a host of such communities emerged in the 1990s, planners designed ideal social spaces for these places, such as democratic homeowners` committees and market-oriented property management systems. But still the most fundamental problem of these communities remains: the impossibility of the community to organise and the difficulty of forming committees of homeowners, leaving residents to skirmish with – rather than resist – the property companies.

Superficially, these areas look bright, but apart from minority groups of residents brought in from work-units that bought their housing collectively, they cannot properly solve residents` or management problems. A great deal of social scientific investigation has confirmed this view. Such modernised communities need several decades of people living among each other before enough vitality gathers to change them from being empty giants.

Urban dinosaurisation is reflected further in the city`s external expansion and its engulfing of land and other resources to sustain it. Let me stay with Kunming as a case I know well. The area of the entire Dianchi Lake watershed is 2,920 square kilometres. Counting the plains and basin alone, the area is only 590 square kilometres. According to official plans, the central city area of Kunming should have been confined to 164.25 square kilometres by 2010, but the main urban region of Kunming already reached 249 square kilometres in 2008.

The consequences of such “urban dinosaurisation” have already been expressed by experts on resources and ecosystems. Following this year`s devastating drought in the Kunming region, experts pointed out that one of its causes was the rapid advance of urbanisation in the Dianchi Lake Basin, which has brought the capacity of its supporting water resources to the limit.

A muck-rake farmer by Dianchi Lake

Another example is the insertion of the north-south Kunluo Road, which extinguished “muck-rake” farming – where crops are planted in raked, muddy flats – along the east coast of Dianchi Lake: the route of the road destroyed irrigation system built in the 1950s, so that a place that in former times maintained high yields has been turned into one of alternating droughts and floods. Such roads also intensify urban expansion: once there is a road, property-development frenzy ensues. Kunming in the pre-drought years was already one of the nation`s 14 most water-stressed cities. This may seem ridiculous, but it`s true.

My warnings about urban dinosaurisation were once based on the notion that the dinosaur-makers entertained a na%26iuml;ve, modernist aesthetic. But I see that, in fact, all the 40-storey buildings imagined by these people are nothing but heaps of silver reaching to the sky, from the huge land transfer fees arising from urban village demolitions to the astronomical prices of the buildings and the so-called political merit that results. Such are the dreams of the dinosaur creators.

So, how can we put an end to urban dinosaurisation? Let`s start by giving up on the utopia described by Jane Jacobs as the “Radiant Garden City Beautiful”. The violence of profit-driven demolition and construction finds legitimacy within the enchantment of this utopian ideal, while the world of daily life of countless people meets its end. Let us hold fast to each “decrepit” neighbourhood and compound, and firmly reject the hard and soft violence of this silvery utopia. If we take this stand, we can stop the spread of the urban dinosaurs.

Zhu Xiaoyang is associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Peking University.

This article first appeared in Southern Weekend. It is translated and reproduced here with permission.

Homepage image by Philou.cn

Facts and figures about water in Europe

Water resources are unevenly distributed in Europe. Annual average run-off ranges from 3,000 mm in western Norway to 100-400 mm over much of central Europe and less than 25 mm in central and southern Spain.

Water resources in Europe have been profoundly influenced over the past century by human activities, including the construction of dams and canals, large irrigation and drainage systems, changes of land cover in most watersheds, high inputs of chemicals from industry and agriculture into surface and groundwater, and aquifer depletion. As a result, problems of overuse, depletion and pollution have become evident, and conflicts are developing between various uses and users.

In Europe, improved water supply coverage is high, with access provided for 97% of the population. 100% of the urban population has coverage, compared with 89% of the rural population.

In terms of sanitation, 95% of the population is totally covered: 99% of the urban population and 78% of the rural population.

Only 4 European countries reported not having full water supply and sanitation coverage in 2000, all of which are in Eastern Europe: Estonia, Hungary, Romania and the Russian Federation.

Improvements have been made in reducing water pollution, mostly through stricter controls on industrial discharges and more sophisticated and comprehensive sewage and stormwater treatment.

A majority of European rivers, particularly in their middle and lower reaches, are in poor ecological condition due to the impacts of canalization, dams, pollution and altered flow regimes.

About 12 million people have been affected in Europe by floods or droughts over the past decade, split about evenly between the two. There have been nearly 2,000 deaths from floods, approximately 0.5% of all flood-related deaths worldwide.

Half of Europe`s alpine glaciers could disappear by 2025. In 2003, extreme warm and dry weather conditions caused an average decrease in glaciers thickness in the Alps of about 3 metres water equivalent, nearly twice as much as during the previous record year, 1998, and roughly 5 times more than the average loss recorded during the exceptionally warm period of 1980-2000.

In the Russian Federation, 1,400 areas with polluted groundwater have been identified, 82% of them are west of the Urals mountains. In 36% of the cases, pollution is due to industry, in 20% to agriculture (fertilizers and wastes from farm animals), in 10% to municipal landfills and in 12% to mixed sources.

Information from World Water Development Report ‘Water for People, Water for Life’, from the %26lsquo;Freshwater in Europe – Facts, Figures and Maps`, from the Global Environment Outlook 2000 and from “Freshwater: Europe” of the GEO: Global Environment Outlook 3.

Facts and figures about water and industry

Water is used by industry in a myriad of ways: for cleaning, heating and cooling; for generating steam; for transporting dissolved substances or particulates; as a raw material; as a solvent; and as a constituent part of the product itself (e.g. in the beverage industry).

The water withdrawals for industry are:

World: 22% of total water use.

High-income countries: 59% of total water use

Low-income countries: 8% of total water use

Industries based on organic raw materials are the most significant contributors to the organic pollutant load with the food sector being the most important polluter.

The contribution of the food sector to the production of organic water pollutant is:

High income countries: 40%

Low-income countries: 54%

In developing countries, 70% of industrial wastes are dumped untreated into waters where they pollute the usable water supply.

The annual water volume used by industry will rise from 752 km3/year in 1995 to an estimated 1,170 km3/year in 2025.

In 2025, the industrial component is expected to represent about 24% of total freshwater withdrawal.

Of major concern are the situations in which the industrial discharge is returned directly into the water cycle without adequate treatment. If the water is contaminated with heavy metals, chemicals or particulates, or loaded with organic matter, this obviously affects the quality of the receiving water body or aquifer. The toxicity levels and lack of oxygen in the water can damage or completely destroy the aquatic ecosystems downstream as well as lakes and dams, ultimately affecting riverine estuaries and marine coastal environments.

Past mining activities caused heavy arsenic contamination of groundwater and topsoil over 40 km3 in Nakhon Si Thammarat province, Thailand. A study commissioned by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in 2000 concluded that the contamination would last for the next 30 to 50 years. Testing of 1,000 samples showed arsenic contamination in some groundwater wells to be 50 to 100 times higher than the World Health Organization’s guideline value for drinking water (0.01 milligrams per litre).

In 1986 a fire destroyed a chemical store in Basel, Switzerland, near the borders of France and Germany. Chemicals reached the water in the Rhine River through the plant`s sewage system when huge amounts of water (10,000- 15,000 m3) were used to fight the fire. The store contained large quantities of 32 different chemicals, including insecticides and raw ingredients, and the water implications were identified through the presence of red dye in one of the substances, which turned the river red. The main wave of chemicals destroyed eels, fish and insects, as well as habitats for small animals on the riverbanks. The total eel population was destroyed for 500 kilometres downstream, from Basel in Switzerland down to Loreley in Germany. It took 3 months after the incident for the contaminant concentrations to drop to normal values.

Information from the 2nd United Nations World Water Development Report, ‘Water, a shared responsibility’ and from the %26lsquo;Water and Industry` facts and figures` section of the World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) website.

If the world were to become drier in the future, wars triggered by water disputes would not only break out in places where there were good-quality water resources. “First-class” water would no longer be the only resource for which people would compete. Dirty, smelly and poisonous water also would become a precious resource, to be attained through force and bribery. Someday when people are boasting to one another about how many dirty-water reserves they have, pollution control technology, water decontamination technology and sea-water conversion technology will be dramatically improved. Technology such as drip irrigation, which utilises every drop of water, will greatly increase the productive capacity of water resources.

While some people wish that this day will come soon, some would rather that it never arrives.

Chinese people developed the bad habit of moving into big cities in ancient times. Metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are growing all the time. People who move to these big cities all hope that in the city they won`t have to worry about the water supply.

However, the water situation in the regions neighbouring big cities like Beijing is worrying. Take the Juma River in northeast China`s Hebei province, for instance. Less than one-tenth of its overall length goes through Beijing, but the river is reduced to a mere trickle by the time it runs out of the capital. The reason is quite simple: the water has been “confiscated” by Beijingers. In 2003, the people of Hebei became very upset over the situation and conflicts arose between them, but when these clashes did not resolve matters, they reported the case to the central government, demanding an explanation. In the end, the government said that “the amount of water that should be used is based on the scale of the drainage area”, a policy which did nothing to resolve the situation.

The Yongding River is the most famous river in the history of Beijing. Thanks to the Yongding, Beijing was once considered “a metropolis with a river running through it”. But now surveys list only three capital cities in the world with no river flowing through them, and Beijing is one of them. This is because the water in the middle and lower reaches of Yongding has already dried up. There are plenty of water reserves in the upper reaches of the Yongding, but the river has been prevented from flowing downstream by numerous reservoirs at different levels. Although building reservoirs can help prevent floods during the flooding season, the truth is that Beijing thinks it can divert water from these reservoirs to quench its thirst if a sudden cut-off in water supply should occur.

It has been some time since the start of the construction of the central route of China`s south-to-north water diversion project, which diverts water from provinces in central China all the way to Tuancheng Lake (next to Kunming Lake, on the grounds of Beijing`s Summer Palace). However, few people know what the real intention of this project is. In fact, the south-to-north water diversion project means diverting water from southern areas to Beijing. In case of a water emergency, reservoirs in Hebei province will have to ensure a sufficient water supply for Beijing, even if they run the risk of draining the water in the Baiyangdian basin (considered northern China`s “great funnel”).

If the water supply in Hebei is not enough, then they will draw water from Henan province, even pumping water from the dying Yellow River; if this is still not enough, water will be drawn from the Yangtze or the Han River in Hubei province. If the water supply from the central route of the south-to-north water diversion project is not enough to meet Beijing`s demands, then they will start using the eastern route and western route. If water from lakes and rivers are not sufficient, then they will pump water from the sea. (And if the sea`s water is still not enough, maybe we`d have to transfer water from Russia`s Lake Baikal, in Siberia, which contains about one third of the world`s fresh water.)

Recently, due to the global water crisis, Beijing`s “political priority in water use” – its special-needs status (as the country`s capital) over other regions — has encountered economic demands. During this year`s annual session of the National People`s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People`s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), Xiao Yutian, a representative from Chengde city, in Hebei province, said:

“The fast development of Tianjin and Beijing, instead of radiating benefits to the surrounding areas, is actually absorbing their resources. For example, infrastructures, industrial projects and human resources have all flowed to these metropolises. In addition, in order to protect Beijing and Tianjin from sandstorms and desert winds, large amounts of farmland have been reforested in Zhangjiakou and Chengde districts, which has greatly hampered the development of their animal husbandry. In order to ensure the sufficiency and quality of the water supply for Beijing, Zhangjiakou and Chengde districts are striving to meet high standards in drinking-water protection. For example, on Chaobai River alone, over 800 industrial projects have been suspended from operation, which has resulted in huge tax losses. However, people in Zhangjiakou and Chengde districts never give up the responsibility for protecting the ecosystem in Beijing and Tianjin. There is a saying in Chengde: %26lsquo;Halt the sand and storms at the threshold of Chengde, send clean and clear water to Beijing and Tianjin.`Beijing and Tianjin should shoulder greater responsibility for the development of their neighbouring regions, and the government should take immediate action to put in place a compensation mechanism for Zhangjiakou and Chengde districts. Additionally, the central government should increase investment in the infrastructure construction in the underdeveloped regions around Beijing and Tianjin, and integrated measures should be taken to achieve a relationship in which the industrial boost in Beijing and Tianjin can exert positive influence on the surrounding underdeveloped areas.”

The call for an ecological compensation mechanism is particularly loud and clear in places such as water sources and regions located at the upper reaches of rivers. Zhangjiakou is the area providing the main water source for Beijing, and its five major reservoirs have been continuously transferring water to Guanting reservoir and Baihebao reservoir in Beijing since 2003. In the past three years, a total volume of 259.2 million cubic meters has been transferred into Beijing, a major part of which should have been used for irrigation by local farmers in Zhangjiakou.

Bai Junjie, a CPPCC member for Zhangjiakou, said: “If the water price is 0.15 yuan (US $0.018) per cubic meter — the lowest market price — the direct financial losses of these five major reservoirs (with over 300 employees in total) reached 7.5 million last year.” If they get compensation of about 0.1 yuan per cubic meter (US $0.0125) according to the current national water-compensation standard, it would still be very difficult for them to survive.

A lot of industrial projects in Zhangjiakou cannot be permitted because they are located at the upper reaches of the river, a situation which has greatly restricted the development of the local economy. But they have not got compensation of any kind from Beijing for many years. It was not until 1995 that Beijing started to allocate funds for water and forest preservation in Chengde and Zhangjiakou, two million yuan per year at the beginning, which later increased to eighteen million per year. The funding for soil preservation in Zhangjiakou has also increased to around eight million yuan per year.

The compensation mechanism proposed by Bai Junjie is to identify a place`s original water rights and to reach an agreement between the upper and lower reaches of the river on transferring these rights on a fee basis. In this way, if water used for irrigation in farming in the upper reaches should be transferred downstream for industrial purposes and household uses, the farmers could attain some financial compensation to help them build up industry in their area.

Zhangjiakou was the first city around Beijing to propose this mechanism, but in other parts of China, particularly places where the length of the river is confined to within one province, similar fee-based compensation mechanisms are quite popular.

For example, in order to ensure water safety, Guangdong province allocates 150 million yuan (US $18.8 million) every year to Xunwu county, Anyuan county and Dingnan county in Jiangxi province, located at the upper reaches of the Dong River (the eastern tributary of the Pearl River) for them to protect the ecosystem of the river`s source. A river called the Luoyang runs through Quanzhou city, in Fujian province. In order to maintain the quality of the water, the Quanzhou government set up the regulation stating that cities in the lower reaches which have benefited from the river should establish a special compensation fund to support the construction of environmental infrastructure in the areas on the upper reaches, and the funding should be shared among these cities according to the amount of water each of them has used.

Such a mechanism has also been put into action on the Jialing River, a branch of Yangtze, since last year, so that polluting factories in the upper reaches will have to provide financial compensation to the residents living downstream. Zhejiang province established a set of specific regulations on ecological compensation, and these regulations set clear rules regarding who is entitled to compensation and the methods of paying that compensation. Besides paying compensation through government funding, it can also be achieved through methods such as the trading of water rights or by increasing business investment in the markets of areas in the upper reaches.

“Compensation can be achieved by various ways,” said Ren Yong, the deputy director of the Policy Research Centre of China`s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA). He said he particularly appreciates what has been achieved in Zhejiang province. He also noted: “There won`t be any significant breakthrough at local levels if the central government fails to lay down relevant legislation and policies. Particularly where border issues are involved. Without a policy platform, small rivers may not be a problem, but what about large rivers like the Yangtze and the Yellow River, which run through a number of provinces, and what about some big international rivers like the Lantsang River? You can imagine, if provinces like Yunnan, Sichuan, Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu and Xinjiang all start to demand compensation, then who will be paying the bills, in what way and to whom? All these are very complicated problems.”

There are two things that humans do every day: one is consume resources and the other is create pollution. Ecological compensation emphasises increasing the value of natural resources, but it doesn`t provide an effective way to solve the problem of pollution. Addressing pollution requires taxpayers to pay an “ecological tax” – also known as an environmental tax or green tax. It is inevitable that people will pollute the environment, but the issue is that we have to take the responsibility to dispose of the waste we produce, and every one of us should pay to reverse the pollution resulting from our consumption and minimize the damage caused by industrial activities as much as possible. Only then should you be able to keep on polluting, and other people can have a safeguard for this continuing pollution.

The author: Yongfeng Feng is an award-winning journalist with the Guangming Daily.

A debate has raged for about three years now on whether a cascade of 13 dams should be built on the Nu River, sections of which are located in a UNESCO World Heritage site. Proponents have argued that it would be a waste of the river not to harness its turbulent water for hydroelectricity — and some have even claimed that 70% of local people like the idea, as they hold out hope that the dams might help lift them out of poverty.

Opponents, however, insist that the Nu River — one of only two major rivers in China that remain undammed — should be left undisturbed. They argue that building the dams would pose a serious threat not only to the environment in an area of spectacular beauty, but also to the region`s unusually rich cultural diversity. A multitude of minority nationalities have long lived in harmony with each other, and with the river and the mountains, in the Nu valley.

In late August 2005, an open letter to the government signed by scores of Chinese organisations and individuals called on the authorities to release environmental-impact documents and hold public hearings on the Nu River plans. Many months later, the petitioners and the public still await a reply.

Meanwhile, an army of engineers has descended on the valley, leading survey teams that are exploring the proposed dam sites. The teams are drilling on the riverbanks, drilling into the mountain cliffs and drilling down into the riverbed. Rock debris is strewn along the banks of the river, roads are suddenly blocked by mud-rock flows, and the river itself has turned from green to yellow. It is as if a grand campaign has been launched aimed at striking it rich and turning the Nu River water into oil and all the activity now occurring in the valley is just the beginning.

Site of the proposed Maji dam

The mountain ranges of the Tibetan plateau contain the largest concentration of glacier ice outside of the high latitudes, yet, until quite recently, large areas were relatively unknown to western scientists. In the last couple of years, a number of scientific reports written by Chinese glaciologists have provided inventories of the mountain glaciers of Tibet and assessed their response to recent climate change. These findings make uncomfortable reading.

The Tibetan plateau is bounded by enormous mountain ranges — to the south by the Himalayas, to the north by the Tian Shan and to the west by the Karakoram and Pamirs — and is the size of western Europe, forming the largest high-altitude land mass on earth. At an average height of around 4,000 meters above sea level, the plateau contains more than 45,000 individual glaciers covering about 90,000 square kilometers and extensive permafrost.

Recent work by Dong Guangrong at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has shown that recent climate change has had a severe impact on the mountain glaciers and permafrost of Tibet and threatens to affect water supplies to many of the rivers draining the plateau. His analysis of data from 680 Chinese weather stations shows that average temperatures in Tibet have risen 0.9%26deg; centigrade since the 1980s and this has precipitated an annual 7% reduction in glacier extent and the melting of permafrost. These findings provide further support to research published in 2005 by American scientists who observed significant recent warming in Tibet from ground-based surveys.

In 1995, the World Bank asked John D. Liu to record the early stages of its Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project for a film called Investing in People. That film was about initiatives that were changing the bank`s focus from large infrastructural projects to ones in which poor people living in remote parts of the world would directly benefit.

Over the following decade, Liu led the Environment Education Media Project on numerous other visits to the Loess Plateau, which is considered the cradle of Chinese civilisation. Approximately the size of France, the plateau is 640,000 kilometers square, situated in the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River, and stretching over parts of seven provinces. Its name comes from the powdery, mineral-rich, windborne loess soil that characterises the area – and which gave the Yellow River its name.

Settled agriculture is thought to have emerged 9,500 to 10,000 years ago on the Loess Plateau. Throughout the plateau`s long and complex history, human activity produced a great civilisation, while also ecologically destroying the region. It came to be known as the most eroded place on earth. Silt raised the riverbed, making it more prone to flooding – flooding that often preceded drought and famine. The Yellow River, which has flooded more than 1,500 times in recorded history, became known as “China`s Sorrow”. But each time it flooded, the people rebuilt.

The ecological devastation of the region took place over generations with the cutting of forests and removal of vegetation cover, leading to soil erosion, disruption of the water cycle and the disappearance of wild plants and animals. A cycle of poverty and environmental destruction ensued, a cycle that fed on itself.

In the 1990s, the Chinese government decided to restore what took 10,000 years to destroy. Thanks to a complex programme of watershed management – formulated by the World Bank in cooperation with the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources and the local people — an astounding transformation has occurred within just 10 years. Ecological improvements have shown tremendous promise, and local people`s income and quality of life have improved.

Planting on steep slopes has been banned, as has tree-cutting and grazing of goats and sheep. Farmers are responsible for maintaining tree-planting areas and terraced fields, to reduce erosion. Sand dunes have been stabilised, and grasses and bushes are taking hold again. Small dams are helping to restore productive croplands in eroded gullies, and perennial crops (such as orchard fruits) are reducing the disruption of soil cover and helping to diversify local economies.

The successful start to the ambitious rehabilitation of the Loess Plateau has significant implications for other places on earth which suffer from large-scale environmental degradation as a result of human impact, and can serve as model for those regions.

The plateau`s tale, Liu believes, provides the kind of critical knowledge the world needs now if it is to envision a sustainable future for a human race living in harmony and sharing the planet`s resources. With support from several development agencies, he has collected more than 100 hours of videotape of the region, its people and the ongoing rehabilitation effort. A fraction of those tapes will make up his latest film project, China`s Sorrow, Earth`s Hope.

The Author: Maryann Bird is a London-based journalist

Still image taken from John D. Liu’s film China`s Sorrow, Earth`s Hope

Isabel Hilton: You`re now a filmmaker, you live in China — tell me about your background.

John D. Liu: I went to China first in 1979. I was 27. I`m half Chinese and my father had been telling me since [then United States president Richard] Nixon`s visit in 1972 that I had to go to China to help China develop. I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and was living in Bloomington, Indiana, in the US. I didn`t want to go to China. It was an interesting time: I was young and America was an interesting place.

I had been to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, but China didn`t seem very interesting. It had a communist government and when I looked across the border from Hong Kong when I was 13, I saw a man pointing a machine gun at me. China to me at that time meant [the philosopher] Lao Tzu and Taoism and Tang literature. Contemporary China didn`t resonate. Then, in the late 1970s, my father said, “You must go because your grandmother is going to die.” What could I say?

So I went to China and I realised he was right: it was much more interesting for me to film in China than in the US. So I did a semester of language training and I went to work for [the American television network] CBS as a producer-cameraman. I worked for them for 10 years.

IH: How did you get from there to the environment?

JL: I was so exhausted after the collapse of the Soviet Union that journalism had lost its appeal and I wanted to make films instead news reports, so I went to work for Italian state TV, where I made one-hour documentaries, then for German TV for three years. By then it was the mid-1990s and the environment had been deteriorating. China was changing from a fearful place, just out of the Cultural Revolution, to a market economy. There was a flowering of creativity and greater social freedom. Although 1989 punctuated it somewhat, even that was book-ended by decades of peace and prosperity.

During this amazing period of reform, opening and economic progress, there was so much pollution. Finally it struck me: I live in Beijing, my children were born here, and we were all suffering. It was clear to me that I had both the right and the responsibility to do something.

Most of the Chinese seemed detached, as though it wasn`t their responsibility. I think they thought the government was responsible and they had been conditioned to believe that they didn`t have either the right or the responsibility [to act]. Some people thought, “I`m just one person; there`s nothing I can do.” Others thought, “It`s nothing to do with me; it`s [the role of] somebody else.”

And in a way, that was my attitude. I used to think somebody ought to do something about the environment but what I meant was, “Somebody else ought to do something about the environment.” I was too important and busy. But after a while I realised that this was the same attitude that was part of the problem. So we began the Environmental Education Media Project, to take existing films on the environment to China and to translate them into Chinese.

We started working with the Television Trust for the Environment, and we brought over [Britain`s] Channel 4 and BBC`s excellent documentaries, on pest management and water wars. Finally we took hundreds of films. Then we wanted to make films and needed research, but there was no research facility.

So we said to SEPA [China`s State Environmental Protection Administration] that we wanted to build a reference and research facility. They have a huge US $70 million building built by Japanese foreign assistance, called the Japan-China Friendship Environmental Protection Centre, on the Fourth Ring Road in Beijing. They opened up the cupboard where cleaning ladies were storing their mops. We said this wouldn`t do. Finally they took us up to the seventh floor and opened a door marked “Library” – it turned out to be a huge room, 750 square meters — that had been empty for three years.

So we began to build a library. Now it`s the largest concentration of environmental information in China — the China Environment and Sustainable Development Reference and Research Centre. It`s on the web. [American environmentalist] Amory Lovins has spoken there – so many people have been through there now.

Then we started making films, researching water, wetlands, grasslands, migration and so on. Then we found HIV was a huge problem in China and there wasn`t much information about it. So we helped the Chinese Centre for Disease Control to create the China HIV/Aids Information Network (CHAIN).

On August 5, the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, laid the foundation stone for the vast Ilisu Dam project in southeastern Anatolia. In doing so, he revived one of the most bitterly contested dam projects in western Asia, which has drawn protests over the past few years not only from the local population but from ecologists, human-rights defenders and archaeologists all over the world.

The Ilisu Dam is to be built across the upper Tigris, which runs south from Turkey into Iraq and reaches the sea in the Persian Gulf. The region, watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, once known as Mesopotamia, formed one of the most important centres of settlement and urban culture in early human history. Alterations to the flow of the Tigris will profoundly affect not only those living close to the dam but also the populations of Iraq, who — in the present chaos following the American and British invasion in 2003 — are in no position to make their objections felt. The dam is a key part of the South-East Anatolia Regional Development Project (GAP in its Turkish acronym). GAP is one of the biggest regional development projects in the world, involving 90 dams and 60 hydroelectric power plants on the Tigris, Euphrates and other rivers.

The population in the area of the dam is largely Kurdish. Armed conflict in the 1990s between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers` Party (PKK) led, among other tragic results, to the displacement of up to three million people from their homes. Women have been at the heart of the movement, demanding to return to villages they were forced to leave by Turkish security forces. But many of these villages are now in the area of the proposed Ilisu dam reservoir.

Maggie Ronayne, an Irish archaeologist who knows the region well, has been a leading figure in the international protest movement against the dam. In 2001, the British government proposed to offer export credit guarantees to British companies in the dam-building consortium, and issued an Environmental Impact Assessment Report. With her colleague Willy Kitchen, Ronayne responded with a devastating critique of the report which demolished it point by point. The following year, the British construction firm Balfour-Beatty pulled out of the Ilisu project, and the consortium collapsed.

Now, however, the Turkish government has returned to the project. A new consortium has been formed, and a revised environmental impact assessment has been prepared. Maggie Ronayne is reassembling the international, scientific and scholarly opposition which helped to halt Ilisu in 2002, at least for a time.

– Neal Ascherson

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