Megan Shank: The Dirt on Ecosystem Stewardship
Originally published at meganshank.com.
Filmmaker John D. Liu believes we have a solution to climate change, but it’s not as simple as reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Liu’s film Lessons of the Loess Plateau, recently presented at the Asia Society’s headquarters in New York, explores how, with outside investment and local people’s commitment and courage, ecosystems destroyed by human habitation and land misuse can be restored. The World Bank’s Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project, undertaken in cooperation with a team of Chinese scientists from the Ministry of Water Resources in the early 1990s in central China, prescribes a course of action–one Liu says we should take. Formerly a journalist who helped CBS open their China bureau after he arrived in Beijing in 1979, Liu has spent the past decade creating ecological films, primarily in China and African nations, and directing the Environmental Education Media Project. Here are excerpts from my recent telephone conversation with him. Soil isn’t a sexy sell for editors or producers.
I’d like to find a place for this film or find a company to work with on another, but they say, “Soil? Poor people? That’s a ratings disaster!” I don’t care about ratings. I think we have to communicate this message.
Did you depart traditional media so you could take on the role of an advocate?
I wouldn’t call it advocacy. The way I look at the difference between journalism and what I’m doing now is that in journalism if I got sent out some place and I was really on the frontline, my task is to gather the initial data, process it really fast and bang out a report. I’m told I have no responsibility beyond that. But knowledge is responsibility. You can’t critically look at this situation and walk away. It’s about more than making a television show.
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How did you come to this Loess Hills project?
The World Bank sent me to make a film about investing in people. The World Bank’s president at the time, James Wolfensohn, had the idea that instead of implementing giant infrastructure projects, which the organization had been criticized for because it disrupted culture and society and possibly enriched gigantic industrialists or corrupt politicians, that the World Bank’s goal was to end poverty. To do that it was necessary to directly work with local people.
Tell us about your interaction with the people of the Loess Plateau and how you followed up after the first film.
These people don’t have a lot of opportunities or opportunities, but they’re quite willing and able to participate at a high level. We finished that film immediately, but we didn’t know what the results would be. In 2004, the World Bank asked me to do another film, Scaling Up Poverty Reduction in China, which was to include land restoration among other topics. When I returned to that region, I was stunned that these were the same places I had filmed a decade ago. I knew we had to do another film.
When you first visited the region in 1995, did you believe this poverty alleviation project could also restore the ecosystem in any meaningful way?
I stood on a mountain for a 360-degree view and couldn’t see any vegetation, so you couldn’t get the idea, “Hey, let’s fix it.” We thought, “Let’s run.” (Laughs.) You’ve engaged in documentation of many grassroots efforts like this. How can responsible parties explain how bad local practices ruin land without making peasants feel their way of life is threatened or that they’re being personally indicted?
The best method I’ve seen is Participatory Rural Assessment (PRA). It’s consensus building, essentially. If the local population doesn’t have answers because most of their behavior is negative, you won’t necessarily extract the solution from them, but you still engage them in inquiry. For example, you can ask, “Is there a chance of growing crops without soil moisture?” And then you look into it together.
Can you give me another example where it’s people, not the natural ecosystem, that’s the problem–where changing paradigms could spur change?
What we’re finding in Africa is that these places have huge rainfalls–2,000, 3,000 milliliters of annual rainfall–and yet these places are deserts. And people are saying, “Well this is an arid or semi-
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