An American Gamble On a Chinese Shangri-La
Ann McBride and Ed Norton stand on a bluff overlooking Kawegabo Mountain, the tallest point in Yunnan. (John Pomfret - The Washington Post)
Reprinted without permission
Ann McBride and Ed Norton stand on a bluff overlooking Kawegabo Mountain, the tallest point in Yunnan. (John Pomfret - The Washington Post)
YUBENG, China--A Marine artillery captain in Vietnam, a former federal prosecutor in Baltimore and a veteran of decades of environmental skirmishes in the United States, Ed Norton is fighting the battle of his life a long way from home.
Norton, 58, an environmentalist once called a "Rottweiler in granny glasses" for his clashes with the Reagan White House, moved to China last year to lead a multimillion-dollar bid by the Nature Conservancy to help create a string of national parks and wilderness areas in one of the most stunning patches of the world. His trek into this tiny Tibetan valley in southwestern China, at the base of the 22,113-foot Mount Kawagebo in the Himalayan foothills, was part of the project, which is the most ambitious U.S. attempt ever to help preserve the environment in China before it degenerates beyond repair.
"Look at this," Norton said, pointing through a natural archway formed by two giant cedars toward a Buddhist prayer wheel creaking beside a small rivulet. "It's on the edge here, and it could go either way."
Norton's task is to work with Chinese counterparts to bring environmental protection to the abundant resources at the farthest frontier of China, where every little town seems to be proclaiming itself a new Shangri-La. It is a high-risk gamble taken by the Nature Conservancy, a U.S. nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving wilderness, in a country that often neglects its wild spaces, air quality and rivers and is struggling to figure out what to do with the natural resources that remain. China has enormous ecological problems; in a few years it could overtake the United States as the world's biggest polluter.
The area at issue occupies a sweep of southwestern China as big as West Virginia. More than 3 million people--and 11 ethnic groups from Tibetan Buddhists and Catholics to the Mosuo--inhabit its mountaintop villages and riverside hamlets. Scores of migratory birds, including the black necked crane, 700 flowering plants; the endangered snow leopard; the snub-nosed monkey and the red panda make their homes in this region.
The land here in northwestern Yunnan, where the Indian subcontinent hits continental Asia, crinkles like a car in a head-on collision, compacting four of the great rivers of Asia--the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong and the Yangtze--to within 60 miles of each other. Some of the gorges cutting through this region plummet two miles into roaring whitewater. Walkers can be trudging through high desert one hour and among conifers the next.
"This truly is stunning country," Norton said. Behind him, bells jangled around the shoulders of longhaired yaks.
Norton's closest ally is his wife, Ann McBride, a self-described "genetic optimist" with a Louisiana lilt in her voice that has resisted decades in Washington. McBride joined the liberal nongovernmental organization Common Cause during an unsuccessful bid in the 1970s to get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified. She left last year, after four years as its president. Here, McBride has provided key strategic input in ways big and small.
One of the couple's goals has been to turn their home in Yunnan's capital, Kunming, into a forum where people can freely exchange ideas about the environment. To do that, McBride reasoned, they needed a round table, "so everybody could look in everybody else's eyes."
"Well, you'd think China, the land of round tables, would have a round table for sale," she said. "Wrong." It took months to find one.
McBride is also using a technique called "photo voice" to elicit villagers' views on the project and their hopes for the future. Under the program, villagers get a camera and are told to take pictures of the things they value. This is a subtle way of trying to get input from the affected people into the project plan. China, run by a government that often pays little heed to what its citizens think, is not used to this type of participation.
"Look, we are large, pale people," said McBride. "We are different from the vast majority of people around us. We came from a place where we knew how to do everything. We worked in D.C. for decades and suddenly we're in a place where we don't know how anything works. Basically, everything is new."
Just a few years ago, environmentalism was a dirty word in China. Chinese would argue that it was a plot to stop them from developing their land and their economy. Then massive floods in 1998 brought home a lesson to many Chinese that their devil-may-care economic juggernaut of the last 20 years, the unrestricted felling of trees, the drying of lakes, the polluting of rivers and the air, had costs.
Now everyone talks about sustainable development. But few practice it. Chinese think nothing of hiking to the top of a mountain and leaving it littered with the remains of their lunch. Streams are for washing cars. And on a deeper level, China's society still lacks the tools for sustained environmentalism.
"We have got to change the way we develop," said Ouyang Jian, the official in the Yunnan provincial government in charge of the project. "But it will not be easy."
Norton is part of a continuum of foreigners who have journeyed to China to proselytize. Only this time the gospel is not the Bible or capitalism, it is the environment. While Norton takes pains to be sensitive to his Chinese hosts, Chinese remain wary.
History, however, may be on his side. Seventy-five years ago, Joseph Rock, another American, worked and lived in the region, writing articles for National Geographic such as "Through the Great River Trenches of Asia" and "Weird Ceremonies Performed by an Aboriginal Tribe in the Heart of Yunnan Province, China." Rock is remembered in these parts as a friend. "Ed Norton is a second Joseph Rock," one Chinese ethnologist said.
Norton and McBride moved to China in May 1999. Over the past year, they have had their share of excitement and a crash course on living with the Chinese. Norton, the father of actor Edward Norton, has shown flashes of drama as well as hints of the tough prosecutor he once was.
A few weeks after they moved into their apartment in Kunming, Norton and McBride journeyed north to a Tibetan region. On the program that afternoon was a horse race. McBride urged Norton, an able equestrian, to join in, arguing that as the leader of the Nature Conservancy project in Yunnan, he should do it for "face."
"I was third and coming on strong, I dug my heels into the horse and slipped off the saddle," Norton recalled. The result was a dislocated left shoulder.
"Not exactly the Asian concept of face," quipped McBride--"face down in the mud."
Then there is the donation of $6,000 worth of goods from Patagonia, the California-based outdoor gear retailer. Chinese customs officials demanded a huge payoff in taxes. Norton demurred, and the imports were blocked. "The entire customs department will be outfitted in fleece!" predicted McBride.
In Beijing, there has been some sniping at the project. One Western environmentalist said the project is too gigantic and ultimately will fail because it is trying to deal with too many bureaucracies competing at once.
Chinese, too, have expressed disbelief that the project is going anywhere. "There is no law in this country about national parks so how can TNC say they want to make a national park?" said one Chinese government official. "Do they want to write legislation for us as well? Sometimes foreigners want to help us in areas that can't be helped."
From one vantage point, the project started at a good time. Because of erosion caused by clear-cutting and bad environmental policies, massive floods ravaged China in the summer of 1998. That year, the government instituted a ban on commercial logging. Yunnan made almost $1 billion a year from that timber. Most of the forests are in the project area.
These days, the search is on for ways to replace the lost income. Eco-tourism has become a new buzzword in the mountains and rivers of the project area. But simultaneously, there is a desperation for cash--so much so that any idea, no matter how loopy, is often entertained, as long as it promises money.
In Yubeng, for example, local authorities have plans to run a road toward the village and then send 600 to 800 people a day on horseback into the pristine valley, home to about 125 Tibetans and 25 houses.
Plans are also afoot to dam the main stems of all the rivers, even though electricity prices are crashing in China, and its current headline-stealer, the $35-billion Three Gorges Dam, is wracked by corruption and incompetence. China has just begun building a massive dam on the Mekong River south of the project area. When it is finished it will be 958 feet high, one of the tallest in the world. The British mining firm Billiton is negotiating for a large lead and zinc mine near the project area. The air and water pollution and soil erosion it generates could bedevil the region for years.
Another challenge is helping the Chinese figure out how, in their headlong rush toward their concept of modernity, they can preserve the area's treasures.
One of the stunning man-made beauties in the region is the old town of Lijiang, with cobblestone streets, crenelated houses and airy courtyards. But Lijiang, noted Zhao Jiawen, head of the Yunnan Minorities Institute, was preserved by accident.
"When new China was formed," he said, "there was no money to destroy and rebuild houses. So we built a new city next to the old one. Now we realize that the preservation of ancient cultures has a value in and of itself."
How to govern access to the massive peak of Kawagebo raises another question. No one has ever scaled the glacier, and local Tibetans oppose any attempt to do so because it is considered sacred. In 1991, a team of 17 Japanese and Chinese climbers died in an avalanche after abandoning an attempt to reach the summit. While the men were on the mountain, Tibetan monks prayed the climb would fail.
This kind of issue cuts to the heart of the kind of experience the Chinese want relative to nature. Near the summit of the 18,360-foot Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, next to the cheesy gondola stands, there is a small go-cart-like track for snowmobiles that go around and around all day. The Chinese developer got a government award for his project, which was called a model for tourism development.
Norton wonders if that's the right way.
"Why do you have a place like Yellowstone?" he asked. "Why do you have a place like Jade Dragon Snow Mountain? What kind of experience do you want people to have? A high-speed ride around a short circle? Why have a national park? The Chinese may come up with different answers, but those are the questions."
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Nature Conservancy's goals in China
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