June 24, 2002

Dispatch 6 – Wolong Nature Reserve, Sichuan Province, China

by Sue Nichols

WOLONG NATURE RESERVE, Sichuan Province, China – The concept of saving the environment, described in a set of standardized documents, seems pretty dry.

But put that environmental policy in the Chen family’s home, and it breathes.

A big part of the MSU panda research project is about understanding how the Chinese government’s efforts to protect and restore giant panda habitat affects the people who live in the reserve.

So in addition to hiking up mountains scrutinizing panda poop, Jack Liu’s students also knock on people’s doors. They talk to the families that have lived in the mountains for generations. They ask them how they’re doing with the changes the government has required them to make; ask them about how their families are changing.

Guangming He, a Ph.D. student, took us on a visit to the Chens. They live at the base of a mountain in Wolong. To hear Guangming is a strain as his quiet voice has trouble carrying over the clucking of chickens.

The Chens have been there for some 80 years, since the elder grandmother – now 95 – was a young bride. They farm cabbage, a huge crop in Wolong whose pungent scent is the trademark on the gas fume-choked roadways.

The government is paying them to grow less cabbage now, to return cropland to forest.

The government also has asked the Chens to be stewards of some of the forest. The Chens are paid – handsomely by Chinese standards – to regularly walk into a plot of the woods to make sure no one is logging.

Liu’s team is working to understand how these new subsidies are affecting Wolong’s population. Subsidies are paid per household, and indications are that they may encourage multi-generational groups to split up. It’s simply more profitable.

"This is significant because more households mean more consumption of resources," Liu said. "Small households have lower efficiency in using resources."

Liu said that the people of Wolong generally have embraced the new rules. Farming is hard on the steep slopes. So is gathering firewood, which now is banned.

But the changes are there. The grandmother is frail and needs heat to take the chill off the mountain mornings and evenings, even in the summer.

She misses sitting by a fire, and the electricity that warms the antiquated hot plate is expensive.

Nothing is simple about environmental policy, especially when it sits in your living room.