Seeds of hope grow into a force of nature
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A dangling, moon-shaped feeding device for playful cubs to cling to; a geometric structure of interconnected triangles to hold honey; and a pair of nut-filled cylinder tubes wrapped in wool yarn — these are the toys designed for moon bears, named for the crescent-shaped white marking on their chest. The toys were handmade by Chinese students aged 10 to 17 back in 2011, before they were sent to a moon bear protection centre in Chengdu, Sichuan province.
“With this work for mine comes my sincere wish that the bears, who themselves had endured human cruelty, would be able to recover physically and mentally, and live in love and in peace,” wrote Li Zhao, one of the students who made the toys back then, explaining her design idea on paper. She was referring to the highly controversial practice of bear-bile farming, which involves extracting bile from captive bears through invasive methods.
In 2011, Li’s design won first prize in a designing-for-moon bear competition, one of the organisers of which is the Beijing branch of Roots and Shoots, a youth-led community action programme launched two decades earlier by the internationally renowned primatologist Jane Goodall.
“Many young people who were with us have later gone on to take leadership roles in China’s ongoing effort to balance development with environmental protection,” said Goodall, who visited Beijing from 30 November to 5 December. Her groundbreaking research into chimpanzees has transformed the human perception of both apes and themselves.
Jiang Yan, 62, joined the Beijing office in 2006 and has met Goodall for the 10th time. “At 90, she’s here to celebrate with us the China programme’s 30th anniversary, and to show to people that when one is immersed in something one truly loves, there’s no such a thing as retiring,” Jiang said.
No more than two hours after Goodall’s arrival in Beijing, she was in the China Science and Technology Museum collecting stories from young followers from the Roots and Shoots programme who had come from all over the country.
One team that won a “Persistence Award” on 30 November hails from Qingdao, a coastal city in East China’s Shandong province. Since their inception under Roots and Shoots, the team — now boasting over 1,000 members — has engaged in a wide range of projects, from mapping the region’s water resources to protecting the endangered finless porpoise inhabiting the bays of China’s Yellow Sea.
The award-winning project involves collaboration between high school and university students and local fishermen — an example of the community-based conservation that Goodall has always championed.
“Anyone who wants to join our programme can do so by forming a team with like-minded friends and neighbours. Our role is mainly supportive: We provide the resources, guidance, and platform the young people need to bring their visions to life,” Jiang said.
Writing in an article on 4 June, 2017, one day before World Environment Day, Goodall recalled her China experiences which started with her first visit to the country in 1998, and four years after the Roots and Shoots programme was brought to China by a Canadian friend of hers.
In the article, Goodall recalled her conversations with George Schaller of the World Wildlife Fund, the first Western scientist invited by the Chinese government to work at the Wolong National Nature Reserve in Sichuan province, which is home to the giant panda. “When he left (in the 1980s), he told me he was pessimistic about the future of the iconic animal in the wild,” wrote Goodall.
A few thousand words later, Goodall readers got an update: “The situation regarding wild pandas has improved to the extent that it is now classified as ‘vulnerable’ rather than ‘endangered’ by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature,” she wrote. “I’m told that Schaller commented how glad he was that things had tuned out so much better than he had predicted.”