Nigel Sizer files a final post on his tour of Chinese universities.

Chengdu to Chongqing

Up at 6 a.m. to get the early flight, and as soon we’re off the plane, thinking we would have a couple of hours of down time, we instead enter an almost Kafkaesque experience where not a second is our own, and we never quite know what will happen next! 

We’re wearing our T-shirts and casuals, hot, sticky and bleary-eyed from the packed flight (no domestic flight in China ever has any empty seats on it!) and met by the charming Ms. Hwang from the Department for International Partnerships at Southwest University. “We will now go to have photo with the President!” she instructs us. Paul’s interpersonal skills were stretched to the limit to negotiate a fifteen-minute stop at the hotel first to drop out bags, put on presentable clothes and have a quick shower. We got five minutes, no time for a shower!  Then it was gladhanding with the University President, photos on the steps and off he was whisked for meetings in Korea. This is a busy place!

After that it was nonstop meetings with vce presidents of Southwest University (I lost track of how many), a banquet lunch, presentations, a two-hour drive into Chongqing for another banquet dinner on the banks of the Yangtze, another drive back and …. total collapse! But couldn’t sleep with the awful racket of a karaoke bar booming up from the hotel basement.

The university and its faculty were impressive; we’ll have to find a way to work with them too.

But I was also deeply troubled by the evening’s foray into the center of this metropolis.  Have you ever heard of Chongqing? Well, I hadn’t, but it’s bigger than Greater London and New York combined, with 32 million souls! And it looks to double in size soon from the number of skyscrapers and apartment buildings rising from the farmland amidst the existing sprawl. 

Just down the Yangtze from the city is the Three Gorges Dam. Every skyscraper in the city, especially along the river’s once verdant banks, is covered, and I mean totally crammed, with flashing neon lights, no advertising opportunity going unmissed. I just couldn’t help thinking that if they turned off some of those damn ugly lights they could conserve enough energy to not need the dam, but of course it ain’t that simple (or is it?)! Of course, we Americans don’t set a great example either. 

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Nigel Sizer’s fourth report on scouting university partners in China for Rare’s Pride training program.

Lijiang

Some down time! Turns out Paul is a serious shopaholic. The old town has hundreds of shops selling local crafts. Paul did all his Christmas buying, overwhelmed by the low prices. If you think Chinese stuff is cheap at Wal-Mart or Tesco, you should see how cheap it is in China itself – hard to see how anything made anywhere else could possibly compete. I think Paul bought presents for all of his friends and family for a total of under $5. He was thrilled.

Early morning before the tourists woke up and the shops opened, I could just about imagine what it was like a hundred years ago … shiny cobblestones glistening in the morning dew, dusty lanterns hanging in the doorways, waterwheels turning in the bubbling clear canals that flow through alongside the streets…

And then we had to question whether Rare really needs to set up a program in China at all. I photographed a cherubic five-year-old girl as she played with the leaves in one of the streams.  Angela asked her what she was doing. I will never forget her answer, as her eyes shone and she gave a huge innocent smile, “I am getting the leaves out of the water to put them on the tree, so that it can grow faster and be happier!” Who said the Chinese are not environmentally aware?
 
Lijiang to Chengdu

• 40,000 undergraduates
• 18,000 masters and doctoral students
• 800 international students
• 4,400 teaching staff
• 1,047 full professors
• 2,100 associate professors
• 110 years old
• In the top 10 out of 1,000 universities in China
• And a huge new campus on 600 acres, just outside the gleaming city of Chengdu.

That is Sechuan University! Plus it teaches 700 students each year in environmental education courses.

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Nigel Sizer’s third post from China.

You know you’re doing the right job when it brings tears to your eyes … even the eyes of a cynical middle-aged pair of conservationists, Paul and me. 

Three hours drive from Lijiang, floating in a near forgotten valley of the Liming River, nestles the town of Liming. On the edge of town (literally almost falling over the edge of the valley!) perches Liming High School. Dong Yu Cheng is one of the teachers at the school. He has set up a “green club” after training from Angela (replicated in ten other schools up the valley). 

The school is now covered in conservation slogans, pictures, proverbs and exhortations. The children have drawn beautiful pictures of Yunnan golden monkeys, tearful as their trees are chopped, and images of harmony between man and nature.  This in one of the poorest parts of China, and yet suddenly conservation is on the agenda of mealtime discussions between parents and their children. The walls of one large room in the school were papered from floor to ceiling with conservation artwork.

But poverty barks at the door like a hungry Chinese dog, and teacher Dong told us of the plight of some bright kids whose families can’t afford the roughly $100 per year that it costs to have a child attend the school. Paul and I immediately dug out our wallets and sponsored three children for the next year and promised to help find funds for more (if you’d like to sponsor a child send your $100 check payable to Rare and we’ll make sure it gets right out to Yunnan with zero administrative costs!).

Nigel Sizer continues to describe his adventures in this second post from China.

A quiet day. We left Beijing with a three-hour flight to Kunming aboard a totally full 300-seat Hainan Airways plane. Lunch was “fun.” We thought we’d found a Western restaurant, but upon opening up the menu were greeted with full color pictures of goat penis stew, dog hotpot, baked pig claw and so on … and on … and on… I am not making this up! I had broccoli.

Paul is losing weight. He finally found pizza at 9 pm in the deserted restaurant of the hotel in Kunming. I have rarely seen a man so ravenous.

TNC’s China program has doubled in size since the last time I checked in a couple of years ago. They are impressively consolidating efforts in Yunnan with the Great Rivers Project, and going national in a big way. We got some great input from their senior managers in Kunming.

But once again we saw how hard it will be to choose our partner university. TNC’s experts stressed the value of setting up the program in Beijing, with proximity to the central government and very prestigious national universities. They are also inundated with foreign organizations seeking partnerships. Beijing Normal University has over 100 such agreements. A provincial university, such as those we will visit next week, might see the partnership with Rare as one of its highest profile activities. 

The Yunnan TNC team are pleased with the results of the Rare Pride campaign run by Angela Cun. Angela was trained through Rare’s Kent program in English (her undergraduate degree is in English). Her successful Pride campaign was built around the charismatic Yunnan golden monkey. Angela will now train colleagues and replicate the approach at four other sites in Yunnan as TNC’s lead environmental educator for China.

An evening flight will take us to the exquisitely preserved old town and UNESCO Cultural World Heritage Site, Lijiang.

Nigel Sizer, Rare VP, Asia Pacific, traveled to China to consider candidates for Rare’s fourth university-based Pride training program. This is the first in a series of his reports.

Bali: I haven’t even left Bali yet, and Paul Butler, Rare’s inimitable SVP for Global Programs, already in China for a couple of days, is complaining that there’s no “real food”.  Colleague Carrie Drummond suggested I take him some Snickers … but with two weeks of travel around China ahead of us, I hope Paul can start to enjoy China’s amazing culinary diversity and forget his bangers and mash. I won’t take Snickers in principle … I’m not sure what principle, but it’ll be good for him. Besides there are KFCs and MacDonalds everywhere in China these days, and even a Starbucks in the middle of the Forbidden City.

Bangkok: Bali to Beijing means changing planes in Thailand’s huge new airport. It’s open but still not finished. The duty free shops seem to hang in a giant void of unfinished design … or maybe it’s meant to look like that? Air travel is contributing a lot more than its fair share to global warming, must remember to get Rare to offset all of the emissions from travel!

Beijing: In Japan, if you do weird things with your food they can get pretty disgusted, but they’re too polite to ever let on. The Chinese are a lot more tolerant and less polite.  They also suck up new ideas like a continental sized sponge. So when Paul used the wrong end of one chopstick to stir sugar into his green tea at a formal luncheon, our hosts weren’t quite sure whether to laugh, look the other way, or do as he was doing because maybe the foreigner had just had a good idea. We got revenge later in the day by trying to feed him some crunchy fried insects from the street vendors. 

We’re here to screen five Chinese universities that have been shortlisted to host the Rare Pride training program. This is an exciting move for Rare, heading into one of the most biodiverse countries as well as one of the politically and socially most distinctive.  We know that we’re going to hit some major bumps in the road, but we also know that we must succeed if Rare is to take Pride and other tools and approaches to scale.
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Rare mascots can be like the Energizer Bunny and just keep on going and going. Below is a picture of Mana, the mascot from a 1994 Pride campaign in Western Samoa. Toni Tipama’a, the campaign manager, chose the endangered manumea (tooth-billed pigeon) to be the flagship species and mascot. And Mana has now been honored as the official mascot of the 2007 South Pacific Games. He recently made an appearance in a parade kicking off the build-up to the games.

Fernando Garcia, Rare’s Manager, Ecotourism Promotion, reports on his teaching stint at the Fisheries Fellows program in Baja California Sur.

I spent a week at the Fisheries Fellows training course, teaching site assessment, a personal passion. We talked about a basic question: How can we improve small-scale fisheries and at the same time promote marine biodiversity conservation? During this process I was thinking about similar questions, like “Can well planned ecotourism do something to preserve a valued threatened species? What is the major threat for it?”  Complexity, uncertainty, and limited resources are common obstacles to respond to those questions and reflect the underlying difficulties of many environmental challenges.

But in the rich menu of Rare’s tools developed to support local conservationists, site assessment is fascinating for me. Well, it is more that a tool, it is a process that involves several methodologies and tools. During the week I was teaching it to the fellows, they all had different ways of seeing how it could help them.

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Rare Pride campaign manager Tisna Nando, working with partner Fauna and Flora International in the Aceh province of Indonesia, is featured in a special issue of Time Asia devoted to the environment. Under the headline, “Rising to the Challenge,” Time lauds her as one of “five members of a new generation fighting to save the environment.” Good work, Tisna.