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Lu Zhi |
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Lu, in her 40s, is both a professor at the College of Life Sciences in Peking University and the director of Conservation International's China Program. But after working more than 20 years in wildlife protection, she is no longer excited by simple projects addressing panda protection or other environmental issues.
"I feel more and more the importance of changing the values of society in promoting the cause of wildlife protection." Lu told EurekAlert! Chinese.
"My ultimate goal is to have people know what we should really care about in our lives and what kind of lives we really want to live."
That public message has been CI's focus since Lu joined the organization in 2002. She sees the approaching Beijing Olympics as a precious opportunity to advance her message.
"We are going to start with big cities several programs aiming to change the consumption concept of the general public," Lu said.
She and her colleagues are organizing the first zero-carbon concert series of the country this summer in Beijing. Organizers will offset the emissions of the concert, including traffic emissions, by planting trees.
The concerts target children especially, with large posters dedicated to climate change posted throughout the concert venue.
CI has also launched a website tailored to foreign tourists in China, complete with an animated carbon calculator.
The website, www.chinagreentravel.com, also provides greenbelt maps of China's major cities and a "green dining menu," free of endangered animals. China is expected to attract 2.5 billion travelers by 2008.
All these new projects are elevating Lu's community-based approaches to another level, in which urban residents are more directly involved with rural residents in the alliance for environmental protection.
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Lu Zhi |
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Though Lu admitted that changing the values of a whole society is extremely difficult, she added that when it comes to a certain group of people, it may not be that hard. Her confidence is based on one of CI's successful projects in southwest China.
CI launched a conservation project called Sacred Lands in 2004, encouraging local Tibetan communities to take active roles in ecological system protection.
The project includes the development of ecotourism and the establishment of an ecological compensation mechanism, the training of local organizations and individuals, and the regular scientific assessment of the region's ecological diversity.
More than 30 communities in the majority-Tibetan area have participated in the project, which is still expanding at an overwhelming speed.
Lu attributes the huge success to the traditional Tibetan reverence for nature.
"In their concept, those mountains and lakes full of wild animals are sacred places no one should desecrate," she said. "What we do is simply to utilize this culture as a motivation to encourage these people to take more active actions."
For example, since 2004, a village of ordinary Tibetans living near the Sanjiangyuan Nature Reserve has been given an extraordinary assignment: observing and recording ecological diversity in the roughly 4,000-square kilometer area.
"The villagers have been very active and supportive. We reward them with some money, but that is only a small sum compared to what they help us with," Lu said.
Local monasteries are also included in program management. Monks and lamas take advantage of their special position in Tibetan society to discourage deforestation and hunting.
"Our experience is to unite as many local forces as possible to do the job," Lu said.
Thanks to Lu's efforts, CI China has grown into a team of more than 30 employees, with fieldwork stations in Yunnan and Qinghai and offices in Beijing, Chengdu and Kunming.
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Lu Zhi |
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Lu herself has a long history of involvement in conservation causes.
At the age of 16, Lu was admitted to Peking University as a biology major. During summer vacation of her sophomore year, she came into contact with China's famous panda specialist Pan Wenshi. Since then, her life has changed completely.
After completing undergraduate studies in 1985, Lu became Pan's student and started a long-term field study on ecology, social behavior and genetic diversity among giant pandas.
She spent almost 12 years living in near-primitive conditions tracking wild pandas in the high-altitude forests of northwest China's Qinling Mountains. Yet during that time, she still published a number of papers and books related to panda studies.
The pandas, she says, are not simply "some animals," but her best friends.
In 1995, Lu joined the World Wildlife Fund as a program officer for panda protection, where she did everything from program planning to providing on-the-ground support in WWF's fight against poachers.
But after moving to CI, Lu has become more involved in the policy end of environmental activism.
"Being scientists can enable us to raise questions and suggestions to influence the policy makers. However, we cannot solve the rudimentary problems," she explained.
Despite her busy schedule, Lu still makes time to regularly visit her panda friends.
"I plan to visit them next spring when they flirt and mate with each other," she said. "That is the most likely season to really see a panda."
Wu Chong is a freelance journalist who has written for China Daily and SciDev.net. She is also an editor for Global Environmental Review, a Chinese electronic magazine about environmental news.
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English (英文)
Chinese (中文)