More ‘green heroes’

The Green Chinese campaign is not the only indication of the grassroots development of environmental awareness.

“I think we have more green heroes in this room than the campaign [of the Green Chinese of the Year] could ever find,” said Mu Guangfeng, a senior official of SEPA, pointing to the people sitting around him during a small ceremony to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Green Earth Volunteers, a grassroots environmental protection NGO in Beijing. Mu has been a member of this organization almost since its inception.

The celebration, in a northern Beijing primary school classroom on the last day of 2006, was intimate and cozy. During the ceremony, as slides of members planting trees, collecting trash and watching birds over the last 10 years were shown on a big screen, one member exclaimed in delight over the growth of her son from a toddler to a handsome youngster, as seen in the photos.

Her comments were immediately echoed by other people present, who also had motivated their whole family to join the organization.

Mu said he was proud of his identity as an NGO member and talked about it so much that he once confused a visiting foreign environmental official over whether he was a government official or an NGO activist. “I told him I am both; I am a government official during eight working hours and an NGO activist beyond those eight hours,” said Mu.

In 1996, when China’s first group of NGOs faced a deadlock in development because of a bottleneck in government registration policies, Mu drafted the first document of the State Council that requires governments at all levels to offer support and guidance for environmental NGOs, which ushered in a spring of grassroots environmental activity in China. According to a survey by the All China Environment Federation released in 2006, 12 years after the registration of the country’s first environmental NGO, China has 2,768 such organizations.

“Many issues can never be solved by solely relying on the government and their solution requires the strength of the whole society, especially the active role of NGOs,” said Mu. This view has been echoed by Pan Yue, Vice Minister of SEPA. According to Green Earth Volunteers founder Wang Yongchen, Pan on different occasions called environmental NGOs the natural allies of government environmental agencies.

A critical stage

Yang Dongping, a founder of Friends of Nature, China’s first environmental NGO, said the development of environmental NGOs in the country is at a critical transition from educating the public on environmental protection to promoting public participation in the government’s decision-making.

Mu said an important role for NGOs at this stage is to raise the quality of public participation and arm themselves with expertise in certain fields. “We sometimes have to fight powerful interest groups when any loophole in our logic could be used by an adversary as an excuse to deny all our arguments,” he said.

These lessons have been learned through hard experience. The fiercest battle between China’s environmental NGOs and economic interests in recent years has taken place over the construction of a dam on the Nujiang River, one of the few rivers with a relatively intact ecological environment in the wake of the fervor over building hydroelectric plants on China’s major rivers.

In August 2003, a blueprint for constructing 13 dams along the middle and lower reaches of the Nujiang River was revealed at a regular meeting of the National Development and Reform Commission, but was vetoed by the representative from SEPA in the absence of a persuasive environmental appraisal report. China’s Environmental Impact Assessment Law, which went into effect in September 2003, requires environmental impact studies by construction companies for all construction projects.

One week later, Wang from Green Earth Volunteers, who is also a journalist for China National Radio, voiced her opposition to the dam at a SEPA hearing and persuaded other journalists at that hearing to report on the hearing and environmental experts’ concerns. This marked the official beginning of an anti-dam campaign joined by a handful of NGOs, including Green Earth Volunteers, Friends of Nature and Yunnan-based Green Watershed.

Confronting the pro-dam contingent of local governments at prospective dam sites and big hydropower companies, NGOs conducted field surveys of the area, published articles, organized seminars, delivered public speeches, handed over reports to the government and gathered support from their foreign counterparts at international conferences. They even had face-to-face debates with hydropower experts who support dam construction. Their efforts scored a victory in February 2004 when Premier Wen Jiabao wrote, “Colossal hydropower projects like this that attract wide public attention and arouse strong environmental concerns require careful research and scientific decision-making.”

Despite the suspension of the project, the battle between the pro-dam and anti-dam camps is still going on as the Central Government has yet to make a final decision. Wang, 53, said her organization has been keeping up with the latest developments at the grassroots level on a daily basis.

She said this would not be the first time environmental NGOs influenced a major government decision if they succeed in protecting the Nujiang from dam construction. The anti-dam campaign, with NGOs as pillars, has already prevented two dam projects in southwestern Sichuan Province since 2003.

Another victory is the “26-degree campaign” initiated by six NGOs in 2004 to alleviate the country’s chronic seasonal power shortage. The initiative of setting air conditioners above 26 degrees centigrade in the summer became a government regulation released by the State Council in August 2006, stipulating that all public venues, except those with special temperature requirements, have to set air conditioners above 26 degrees in summer and below 20 degrees in winter.

Wang has been nominated for the “Green Chinese of the Year” prize twice, but missed it both times. She said she does not care about any prize and will continue her efforts out of a pure love of nature. “I started to get close to nature as a journalist concerned about environmental problems, but as I get closer to nature I have developed deep emotions with her as a ‘friend,’” Wang added with a grin.