It’s Getting Hot In Here

Beijing – After attending the College Environmental Groups Cooperation Forum in Xi’an, China last week, I traveled back to Beijing to see this historic, enormous city and meet with several of the national student environmental networks in China, including the Green Student Forum (GSF), Green Camp, and the Greenpeace China-sponsored by Solar Generation. The enormous changes that China is undergoing as a result of economic expansion are on display in Beijing – on the outskirts of the city one can find California-style suburban villas as well as makeshift communities of migrant workers from the provinces. Being the capital and because of the upcoming Olympics, the government is working hard to clear the air of local pollution, with mixed success – but the different from Xi’an was clear. While Chairman Mao’s face still watches over Tiananmen Square downtown, organizations like the Green Student Forum are working from spartan offices in bare apartment buildings to ignite the Chinese environmental movement from the bottom up.

After a long (but still absurdly inexpensive) cab ride from my hostel and attempting unsuccessfully to decipher Chinese characters on street signs, I met on Tuesday morning with representatives of Green Camp and GSF at the GSF office in the Haidian District. Green Camp’s main activity is to sponsor annual trips to sensitive ecological areas for Chinese college students – and over 10 years it has produced numerous student leaders who have formed environmental associations at their own universities. GSF focuses on assisting such environmental associations with training programs and a newsletter about activities at different universities. The growth of the student environmental movement in China seems to have been slow but steady over the past decade – GSF and Green Camp were both formed in the mid-1990’s, making them only a few years younger than the first national student environmental networks in the U.S.

On Thursday afternoon, the Greenpeace-sponsored Solar Generation team in Beijing met me for dinner in the Xicheng District. Over a dinner including roast chicken – head still attached – they told me about their efforts to address renewable energy and climate issues in China. Although the Chinese government is more forthright in acknowledging anthropogenic climate change than the U.S. government is today, not surprisingly this addresing this issue is as difficult in China as in the United States, if not moreso. Nonetheless, these students seem excited to take their message to Chinese students. This year the program, as part of the global Solar Generation program that Greenpeace sponsors, will make grants to environmental associations at 5-10 universities to address energy issues and will sponsor a film-making trip to Shanxi Province, in which 25% of China’s massive coal reserves can be found. These new actions will supplement the 8 univerisities already working together in Hong Kong on a similar “Solar Campus” campaign.

The two countries that – because of their enormous coal reserves – have more power to decide whether we stop global warming or not are China and the United States. For this reason alone, building a powerful student movement for climate protection and environmental protection in general in China will have a global impact. In all these meetings, I talked with activists about how student organizations in the U.S. can support their critical work – conducting trainings, translating materials, collaborating at international meetings, and more. We hope for this to be the basis for a continuing relationship. One key, however is overcoming the Chinese-English barrier. So if you’ve got Chinese language skills and want to devote some time to building this collaboration, please email me at nathan.wyeth@ssc.org – there’s a lot of work to do.