Earth Day China
Linda Sheehan
San Francisco Chronicle
04/22/2011
Earth Day in the U.S. grew out of a public fed up with sewage-choked waterways, rivers spontaneously combusting, oil-slicked coastlines, and massive fish kills in lakes deemed dead. Along with Earth Day, we created bodies of federal and state environmental law that gave us the right to speak out, agitate, and generally cause trouble for business as usual, which was focused on the short-term profit provided by profligate pollution, at the expense of our lives and neighborhoods.
This pattern is beginning to play out again in China, which similarly faces rivers and bays choked with sewage, industrial wastes and trash.
Small but determined groups of citizens around the country are beginning to band together to protect their families and communities, and to speak out where they can.
I was fortunate to be able to visit several of these groups this month, in a Waterkeeper tour of four cities around the country. As we spoke with environmental groups, citizen organizations, university students, and sympathetic government agencies, we found an overwhelming interest in our own path as a nation in tackling our past pollution problems, and a willingness to step forward in the face of sometimes significant personal risk.
One example is Zhang Gongli, the farmer hero of the 2011 Oscar-nominated short documentary film The Warriors of Qiugang. He and his villagers fought a chemical company literally poisoning their air, water and land, finally succeeding after five years to force the company to move. We visited Zhang Gongli to learn from his experiences and visit the site of the now-defunct factory looming over the healing village. However, local officials insisted on accompanying us on both our visit and our site tour, severely limiting any discussion to only the improvements that were being made. Zhang Gongli's resilience and good humor in the face of this setback, however, was contagious, and we began to understand how he and his fellow villagers found the fortitude and courage to continue and win their fight, one that is now playing itself out all over China.
Recognizing the need to begin to rein in the human and ecological costs of the severe pollution levels facing much of the country, the national government in Beijing is increasingly supporting improvements in environmental laws and policies. Environmental Protection Bureaus are springing up around the country, local citizens now have the right to publicly comment on new industrial developments, water pollution information is slowly being released to the public in a more unified manner, and environmental public interest litigation is being tentatively advanced. Groups such as Ma Jun's Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, which maps available environmental data to help the public understand local risks, are gaining respect.
Progress, however, is slow, with human and environmental health continuing to suffer. The national government in Beijing may be increasingly supportive of environmental change, but it still grades local officials on economic progress, and the mixed messages cause difficulties for local environmental and citizen groups. These groups have told us that they test new laws outside of their communities, on smaller (less politically powerful) industries, to avoid local repercussions. Activism so far has been more successful working with large, multinational companies with a significant public profile to highlight the pollution caused by their local suppliers far down the manufacturing chain. For example, Ma Jun's Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs has created a Green Choice Alliance that uses world consumer power to change the environmental practices of companies with suppliers in China. These efforts include an investigation to reverse heavy metal pollution practices by suppliers to the international technology industry, such as Apple, Sony and Nokia.
In honor of our struggling fellow Earth citizens in China, let us take this Earth Day to reflect and act on our own hard-won rights to comment, investigate, protest, advocate and agitate for clean water, air, and land. We have the power to protect our families' and communities' health, power that we can exercise freely without the fear of retaliation that our colleagues currently face in China. This is an incredible gift from past American heroes who fought for their own communities like Lois Gibbs, and who faced censure from colleagues for speaking the scientific truth like Rachel Carson. By exercising our own right to speak out for a healthy environment, we acknowledge and support these past and ongoing struggles, which benefit us all.
