NATURE FORUM WORLDWIDE

[Daan Vreugdenhil]

This is a very sticky issue for many people concerned about conservation.

I felt I would do well to share my experience with the Chinese people and various nations that are going through the difficult transformation from traditional communism to a different form of society.

My first experience with a transforming regime was with Hungary, right after the fall of the Berlin wall. With team of conservationists, we had to help the Hungarian conservation authority to make many transformations towards a society compliant with the EU, which it wanted to join at the time. One of the things we found out, was how difficult it was to untangle the change that had taken place in post World War II Hungary under communist regime. Many people had lost land and houses to the regime and under the new regime, the previous landowners started to claim it back. This had a considerable impact on the national parks and reserves, many of which were privately owned before the transformation to the communistic government.

A few years later, I was involved in a project for the Romanian Danube Delta. Communistic models in Romania had been far more embedded in society than in Hungary. I will never forget a director of a large production unit involving tens of thousands of hectares of farmland, a fleet of 700 outdated trucks soviet era trucks and some 300 outdated gas-gobbling river boats operating on the Danube, a fleet of tractors and most importantly, 10,000 employees. With tears in his eyes this gentleman asked me: Mr. Vreugdenhil, I want to change my organization so that my people can keep their jobs. Please tell me what to do and I will do it. This was some of the most painful moments in my life. I knew one thing:
I, nor anybody else in the world could give an answer to this gentleman. Economists from the West were flooding Romania with advise. But none of them new the answer! The process of changing from communism to something else had never taken place. Nobody knew how to do it.

The communist system was not stupid. In fact, it was highly organized in which large organizations were delivering products and services to each other in a prescribed fashion. Think of it this way: Fuel for the trucks and ships of this organization were delivered to this organization in a timed fashion (sure, late from time to time) at a fixed rate. That allowed this organization to plow and harvest the fields, and transport produce through the country. It got people food on their plates (no not as nice a products as in the west, but still it fed many poeple). Now, if all of a sudden, without a decent transition, you force this production unit to by oil at market prices, it starts with not having the cash to pay for enough oil to keep operating. So what happens? Their was not enough fuel to plow the fields. So, by fall, the fields had not produced enough food to feed as many mouths as in the past. Their also was not enough fuel to operate the entire fleet of inefficient Soviet era trucks. So, whatever was produced could not all make it to the markets. This production unit did not make enough money to feed its 10,000 employees!
When I was there, the system was coming to a grinding halt! Eventually, something has developed since, but corruption is still rampant in Romania and millions of people have suffered beyond imagination, particularly the old and weak.

When Mr. Jeltsin had the courage to resist the military coup in 1991, we had the wonderful experience of having a young exchange student from Russia from Youth for Understanding (http://www.yfu.org). She had just arrived as the coup took place, all of us watching the events unfold on CNN. Brave Mr. Jeltsin on the tank. Our Natasha would phone home every day telling her parents what was going on, as must Russians had no access to the news. Natasha could not go home for quite a while, something that none of us regretted, as it gave us the opportunity to get to know the Netherlands must better. Eventually, she went home, we became close friends with her parents and we had the privilege to visit them several time in the following years.

Immediately after the break-up of the Soviet Union, many things I decribed for Romaina happen happened to Russia at a much larger scale. Organizations of hundreds of thousands of people were being dismantled "cold turkey" (overnight without any safety nets for most employees). Despair among many was rampant. There was no legislation in place to deal with the situation and that is how a few sharks could get their hands on the properties of the people by simply taking it! Have you ever wondered how all of a sudden a number of people could become billionaires, while under communist rule everybody was earning pretty much the same?

A good way of thinking what was going on would be this: The communist system was functioning like a watch. Every action was pre-determined like a gear. It was not very flexible, but it worked. Sure, it was a bit slow, but it was a very sophisticated watch that could get people in space and modernize a country of which many people in Siberia hardly had left the stone age under Czarist regime (yes I know what Stalin has done). The Russians had built enormous irrigation works in Northern and Central Asia. Not with the most sophisticated technology, but they had succeeded in feeding millions of people that had suffered frequent hunger and feudal abuse previously. As well as health care and literacy (95+%!). The communists were not stupid or ignorant! Yes, there was a very high price to the progress they had made, but on the whole, most people had benefited and the system had brought a high level of living security: food, education, housing and healthcare.

The challenge that these transforming nations were faced with was how to change a watch to a multi-faceted society, where citizens and production units (corporations) make their own choices? A little bit like an ecosystem, where every individual of a species does his/her own thing by its own criteria and still the sum of all those actions looks like a nice forest. So, how to transform a watch to an ecosystem? Many western economists went out there to advise the Russians and most other transition governments what to do. The ultimate arrogance. Nobody knew what to do. Nobody could, because this situation had never occurred before in history. Did the people of particularly Russia pay the price! If those "smart" advisers would have been a bit more careful and advised the governments to go a bit more slowly, the process could have been far less painful.

In the mid nineties, I had the privilege to visit China for the first time. Beijing had a bit of car traffic, but there were no traffic jams anywhere. Millions of bicycles. China was and is a communist country that did not go through a revolutionary kind of transformation like the former Soviet countries. This has been a major irritation to many westerners. But if we look back at what happened to the former Soviet countries, should we be so judgmental?

In 2004, the National Park Office invited me with a team op GIS specialists to train a group of conservation workers in the use of GIS. When I arrived I must admit that I was curious about the party system. Having read many espionage books on the countless airports and plane-rides that I have made during my career of almost 4 decades, on my first trip, I could not help wondering about some kind of party “supervision” or guidance. Well, for starters, there was nobody at the airport, so if my Chinese hosts had any concern about my whereabouts and whom I would be in contact with, they sure had taken no measure to prevent me from contacting other people. Now, 4 years later, I have come to grips, that the Chinese government cares very little about where most foreigners go, what they do and whom they meet.

But most importantly, I like to share some experience related to conservation. The participants in the training course were very independent and hard working conservation workers of different disciplines and different organizations. Intelligent, motivated and fun to be with. But it had a downside. Each was very busy and some would not show up from time to time. This interrupts a training course, of course, and we discussed with our counterparts of the National Park Office. We were being told that there was very little they could do, even though the Office is part of the very powerful Ministry of Transportation. After discussing with the participants, it turned out they were very sensitive to our pleading, while much less to the powerful ministry of transport! So much of endless control of the government over its people.

During the period of the training course, which involved several trips over a 2 year period, we were informed that the Olympics would have “green” as one of its themes. Very shortly thereafter, we noticed an enormous programme being started in the area where we gave the course. Every bare spot all of a sudden was being tilled, grass was being planted as well as trees and shrubs. Not just a few, by the thousands, 8 m tall trees. Amazing!

As part of the training course, we went to Shanxin Mountain National park to draft a masterplan with the participants as an exercise. To us, this exercise was just as revealing as to the participants, as we got to see how much the Chinese are putting into their national parks and UNESCO heritage sites. The 10 most heavily visited national parks and heritage sites are getting as many as 44 million visitors per year! To handle so many people the Chinese are building world-class visitor infrastructure in place, that in quality is not inferior to that of the USA. Only the interpretation quality needs considerable improving, particularly the English texts of sign and informative boards. Well, the toilets could do with some modernization, too. http://www.birdlist.org/downloads/parks/visitation_protected_areas_megacountries_with_megadiversity.pdf

Last year, with a small group of family members, we went to visit a variety of Chinese heritage sites and national parks, which was organized to our needs by an independent translator, know from previous trips. Again, no government interference in what we wanted to do or where we wanted to go. Air tickets for internal flights were purchased on line. The previous impression that China is heavily investing in its national parks and heritage sites was reconfirmed. What is so impressive, is that the visitors to those parks are for 95% Chinese. Often, we were the only blue-eyed visitors among the hundreds of thousands of black-haired nationals of the People’s Republic of China, usually to the great delight of families with children, who wanted their picture taken with such and odd-looking tall traveler from afar. This is extremely important, because that means that more and more middle-class Chinese people are starting to love their national parks and other protected areas.

Quite frequently we can read in the newspapers that the Chinese have had an environmental incident. From my visits to China, as well as from colleagues, I can report that the Chinese government is painfully aware of the environmental vulnerability of the entire nation, and environmental incidents now often result in the persecution of the polluter. So what can we expect from the Chinese government? Should we demand that it cleans up all its environmental mess? O yes, last year we traveled through some of those coal mining regions. Areas where the sun never seems to get through the sky. The penetrating smell of freshly mined coal. Gruesome landscapes! Well, I think we need to all wake up: the Chinese Government simply can’t even if it would like to. Change in China goes fast. Faster than anywhere on earth. The greening of Beijing that I mentioned previously, did not only take place in the capital to impress the world with the Olympics: It takes place EVERYWHERE in every city of China. Cities, in Lonely planet branded as horribly grey, like Chengdu, have been greened impressively over the past 2 years. More and more protected areas are getting fabulous infrastructure and they are getting more and better staff. But there are many hundreds of protected areas in China, and they cover more than 15% of the nation! So we can’t expect them to be well managed all at the same time. There are horribly polluted rivers in China and cleaning them up will take time. But remember, that in 1970, the River Rhine in Europe was pretty much lifeless. It took 20 year to get it back to a fair condition, and the water quality still is not perfect.

So now the Olympics. Tibetans demonstrating. Many feel that Tibet has been occupied illegally, and at least, that is what I have been brought up to believe. I know too little to know exactly what the historical developments were of that region. But from my experiences in former soviet republics, I have come to understand that it is impossible to turn back history. I wish the Chinese wisdom in addressing this issue and the Tibetans patience and perseverance in finding an acceptable balance between their ambitions and hopes from the situation in which they find themselves now. I also believe that the Chinese people are aware of the need to search with the people of Tibet for solutions to what they experience as injustice, even though the Chinese people see it differently. However, I don’t think that a boycott of the Olympic games, so graciously hosted by the Chinese people, will bring a solution any nearer; nor will it contribute to improving the environmental protection or on human rights. I have learned that the Chinese people greatly enjoy working with people from other parts of the world. They are certainly open to many of our suggestions – although at their own pace (which can be incredibly fast by the way) and timing. But trying to force a solution upon them will be counter-productive. The Chinese people has a long road to travel towards reasonable prosperity for all, environmental health and social equity. But they are working at it very hard and we should give them technical assistance and political encouragement, not political pressure during their moment of well-deserved pride and happiness. boycotting the Olympic games would not force a solution to the Tibet dilemma and it would be harmful for the relations between China and the rest of the world, particularly also for the environment.
So, for whatever it is worth: I recommend that you enjoy the games, along with 1,3 billion Chinese people, who proudly host the greatest athletic duel on earth: the Olympic games. This wonderful party the Chinese people celebrate with the rest of the world.
_________________
Dr. Ir. Daan Vreugdenhil
Please visit: http://www.birdlist.org/site/why_birds.htm and
http://www.adopt-a-ranger.org
as well as our beautiful pictures at:
http://www.nature-worldwide.info/phpbb/album.php