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China’s Last Angry River
That’s the thing about religion – you start out with the answers, instead of arriving at them, through observation and experience. The new Eco-religion comes loaded with articles of faith: bio-diversity before jobs, parks before people. Its believers wax dogmatic, patronizing, blind to the problems developing countries like China have in converting.
Luckily, we still have environmentalists wise enough to remain objective. Edward Grumbine, chair of Prescott College’s Environmental Studies Program, decided to drop the assumptions and see for himself China’s take on Green, by studying Yunnan’s Nu River, the last major undammed river in the Middle Kingdom. The resulting book, Where the Dragon Meets the Angry River, shines among more religious tracts, merely for having the humility to ask, rather than preach.
Pointing out China’s contradictions comes as easy as pointing the finger at heretics. The Daoists, China’s spiritual fathers, saw that the roots of growth and change died without flowing water. Yet today, China is busy damming the whole country in the name of progress.
But it’s to Yunnan’s chagrin, not relief, that it has largely escaped the national mandate to Xibu Da Kaifa, Develop the West. To Chinese north and east, Yunnan is Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon rolled into one. The central plan calls for tourism to drive progress, but how many of the province’s 45 million are expected to make a living dancing in traditional costume? Nationwide, the urban/rural income gap stands at three-to-one. In Yunnan, it’s five-to-one. To preach sustainability to the 30 million in Yunnan subsistence farming is like telling feudal serfs to look to God for their salvation.
Where the Dragon Meets the Angry River is as much travelogue as it is monograph, gleaming with authenticity from its author’s down-n-dirty research. It’s endearing to hear Grumbine wonder over the many high-rises and shopping plazas in Kunming, Yunnan’s capital (1.3 billion, big noses! You think we’re all knee-deep in rice paddies?) It’s encouraging, however, to hear that this is only the first of his many assumptions to be turned upside-down.
Try wrapping your head around the fact that, although only twice the size of California, Yunnan has more varieties of plants and animals than the entire United States. You may yawn, but an environmental renaissance man like Grumbine finds his mind continually blown as he treks out to Nu River country. Not only the many eastern relatives of North American genera, but the non-Mandarin, endless minority flavor evoke wonderment.
And wait, could China’s government be something more complicated than the authoritarian ogre so indispensable to the West’s foreign policy fairy tales? Area officials had had a plan to tame the Nu River with a baker’s dozen hydropower plants, relocate some fifty thousand indigenous locals, and sell electricity to thirsty Bangkok and Hanoi.
Widespread outcry, admittedly boosted by international groups working in the area, reached Beijing ears, and led to a moratorium on damming the Nu River. A happy ending for the eco-worshipper, but perhaps not for your average Yunnanese, who has yet to know the lamp post’s light on his darkened village path.
Grumbine ventures out to such a village, taking the bus until there is no more road, and winds up at Dimaluo, a village of the Nu minority. Chased south out of Tibet more than a thousand years ago, the Nu still graze yaks while wresting crops from ever-dwindling soil. Wild mushroom gathering adds some nutrition and income, but the nature reserves all about them restrict these pursuits severely. The average villager gets by on something like fifty cents a day.
The villagers sharing indoor space with chickens, the hearths with holes in the roof rather than chimneys, such are the quaint rural compromises a serious Yunnan traveler like Grumbine encounters, as rude as the villagers themselves are friendly. But for a real shock, Grumbine’s guide takes him up to Bai Hu Luo village, miles from the nearest road, a seven-hour hike up a steep ridge.
The first thing Grumbine sees is a massive satellite dish. Then the basketball court. Without, an electric grid or even indoor plumbing, these dwellers on the fringes of civilization nonetheless have TV – every village in China does – and can bandy the names of Yao Ming and his peers.
As to the damming of the Nujiang, however, there is less unity. While many Nu are game for a supply of electricity other than the generator that powers the dish, others don’t want to make the river unhappy. A primitive belief, perhaps, but in the grand scheme of things insightful. Their wish to keep mother Nu content bespeaks a view of nature at once far ahead and behind our contemporary, condescending attitude towards the environment. Both perspectives, for all that, compare favorably to Mao’s dictum, ren ding sheng tian, man must conquer nature, still fresh in some revolutionary minds.
In the end, Where the Dragon Meets the Angry River doesn’t answer questions, rather raises good ones. If we all belong to this planet we’re supposedly “saving”, don’t we all deserve an equal voice in how and for whom? A fair question, but then organized religion has never cottoned well to rational inquiry.
Related posts:
- Review: River Town
- Splashing about the Nanting River
- Dogsleds on the Songhua River
- River to Nowhere
- Goodbye to the River Goddess
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