Editor's Note: As protection of the planet's flora, fauna and resources becomes increasingly important, China Daily is publishing a series of stories to illustrate the country's commitment to defending the natural world.
Liu Jun and Wang Juan look out from their checkpoint at the Saihanba forest farm in Hebei province last year. (PHOTO / XINHUA)
Fire wardens looking out for forest's future
By Hou liqiang
Lonely! That is the most accurate word to describe the lives of Liu Jun and his wife, Wang Juan.
They have spent 24 years at various posts at remote and isolated checkpoints and watchtowers in a vast forest farm.
For the past 14 years, they have hardly enjoyed a good night's sleep because they have to remain vigilant during the hours of darkness to keep a watch for fires.
This year, Liu was selected as one of China's 100 model environmental protection volunteers.
In 1998, after working at the Saihanba forest farm in North China's Hebei province for six years, Liu, now 50, made a decision that consigned the couple to lonely lives. He volunteered to fill a vacancy at Jiaodaokou, the most remote checkpoint on the almost 76,667-hectare farm.
With only a three-room bungalow, the checkpoint was so isolated that there was no other household within 5 kilometers.
To take the post, which has no annual vacation allowance, Liu and Wang had to send their daughter, who was 3-year-old at the time, to live with her grandparents in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.
"I knew it was not an easy job, but no matter how difficult it was, someone had to fill the vacancy," Liu said.
The couple depended on shoulder poles and buckets to carry water from a nearby creek. When the creek froze in winter, they turned to snow to meet their needs.
Early one winter, Li fell over while carrying water back to the checkpoint, cutting his face and leaving it covered with blood. From then on, Wang decided to only wash her hair once every 10 days or so to save water.
There was no TV set or radio at the checkpoint. For entertainment, they sometimes read the newspapers that had been used to cover the walls. Occasionally, they took out photos to look at their daughter.
The couple worked at that checkpoint for about a decade. Day after day, they inspected all the vehicles and people who passed by to ensure that matches, lighters and other items that could be used to start fires were not taken into the forest.
One of the most memorable events for Wang during that period was when she was hospitalized for surgery to remove her appendix.
After she was rushed to the hospital one day in the winter of 1999, many of her colleagues from the forest farm came to visit.
"It felt so good to have someone to talk with," she was quoted as saying by Hebei Daily in Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital.
Fourteen years ago, the couple transferred to new posts in a watchtower at an altitude of 1,900 meters. At this post, they have to look out from the tower every 15 minutes between 6 am and 9 pm to check for fires. The rest of the time, they have to look out once an hour.
Even when the coast is clear, they have to record their observations every time and report to the forest farm's headquarters via phone calls.
In 2011, the monotony of life in the watchtower was relieved when the forest farm management allocated them a small black-and-white TV set.
"When I was on duty after midnight, I often kept the TV set on. It made me feel like I had some company," Liu said. Their living conditions have also been greatly improved since 2015, when all nine watchtowers at the forest farm were renovated. Now, the couple are not only able to make video calls to family members, but also learn more about the outside world via popular social media platforms.
Although satellites and infrared cameras are now playing a bigger role in fire control at the forest farm, the management hasn't yet been able to completely replace the fire wardens, Liu said, adding that he and Wang are determined to continue keeping the forest safe.
"It's a great honor for us to witness the trees grow up in the plot of forest we oversee," he said.
Wei Xingzhi (left) and his colleagues use infrared monitoring equipment to search for Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys on Laojun Mountain in Yunnan province in 2019. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
Monkey guardian set to branch out
By Hou liqiang
In 2013, when he quit his job in the northern port city of Tianjin, Wei Xingzhi simply wanted to travel and see the world. He didn't imagine that he would stay in one place for almost 10 years mainly for one thing — to help protect Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys.
Before he became a volunteer for the species' protection in Yunnan's Yulong county, the 36-year-old knew nothing about the animal.
Born and raised in an area with a wide expanse of flat land in Henan province, Wei had limited opportunities to visit mountains. After majoring in mechanical automation and business administration at university, he worked as an executive in charge of five electrical appliance chain stores for a company in Tianjin.
As a travel enthusiast, he spent a lot of time trekking around during his college days. For example, he toured many parts of the Bohai Sea coastline by bicycle.
In 2013, Wei was traveling in Yulong when he discovered that a local NGO named the Yulong Wildlife Conservation Association was recruiting volunteers to protect the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey.
"As a Henan native, I had only seen the animal on television back then, and had never come into contact with it. Out of curiosity, I wanted to have a go," he recalled. However, recalling his early days prompts many bittersweet memories.
Animal encounters
He described the primate as an animal that moves extremely quickly. "They can move 2 to 3 kilometers in what seems like the blink of an eye," he said.
The monkeys spend most of their time in the trees, and even though you may be standing directly below as they rest in dense forests with trees up to 40 to 50 meters high, you can hardly see them unless the large black-and-white primates move, he said. Once they do, however, it's extremely difficult to track them. They can climb a hill in just a few minutes, but a human would take about an hour to reach the same height. Tracking the monkeys in their habitats, which feature rugged terrain at an altitude of 3,000 to 4,000 meters, means that he easily gets out of breath and has to rest frequently.
His long experience of tracking the primate means he has developed the skill of descending hills in just a few minutes: he simply sits on the slippery slope and slides down. To avoid sliding dangerously fast, however, he always has to find something to grab.
However, he is not always lucky enough to grab the right things. One time, he grabbed a prickly plant, and on another occasion, he touched a plant with barely visible thorns. The formic acid they contained made it feel as though he had been stung by a swarm of bees, he said.
Wei looks through binoculars as he watches the monkeys on the mountain in 2013. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
The most challenging periods for Wei are the rainy season — which lasts from June to September — and winter, which leaves snow that sometimes doesn't thaw until May on the shaded sides of the mountains.
With no roads, Wei often has to tramp through bitterly cold water. In some places, he uses fallen trees to cross creeks and rivers. However, they are often covered by fungi that produce slippery secretions.
"It's very easy to slip over," he said, adding that it's not unusual for him to fall over dozens of times a day. Luckily, he has yet to have a serious injury.
One thing he has to do frequently during the rainy season is dry his trekking shoes by the fire, which can make them shrink or even burn a little. Some years, he has worn out five pairs of trekking shoes.
Years of tramping in such conditions mean that his knees hurt badly, which can be extremely painful. Moreover, it is often so cold during winter that he only feels warm after cuddling up in five sleeping bags, he said.
Financial problems
The past decade has seen Wei racking his brain to cope with financial difficulties. Initially, he only received a monthly subsidy of about 2,000 yuan ($290) for his voluntary efforts. Though the amount has now risen to 3,000 yuan, it's still far less than his salary in Tianjin.
The grassroots NGO is funded by donations. The first year he volunteered for the organization, it experienced a total loss of funding, but thankfully, the situation only lasted a few months. The problem happened just as the program for the Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys started, which meant many plans were disrupted.
"We spent a year training villagers to work as rangers and patrol the primate's habitat. In the second year, however, we ran out of money. We had no option but to disband the patrols," he said.
"When we tried to reach the villagers again after we managed to raise the necessary funds, some had left home to become migrant workers. This meant the NGO barely made any progress in helping the monkeys."
Thankfully, the rangers had recorded a lot of information about the primates they had discovered, including the locations and altitudes of the areas in which they roamed, major features of the environmental conditions and local tree species.
All the information was handed to Wei. In addition to offering it to wildlife protection agencies, he provides some to the media if he thinks it will generate valuable publicity.
When a teacher from Beijing led a group of students to experience the association's conservation work, an idea occurred to Wei to start a nature education business that could help fund the NGO's operations.
However, his investigation of the sector was affected by the COVID-19 epidemic. Luckily, the delay helped him greatly improve the course design and gain a lot of knowledge about the natural world education sector.
He is very optimistic about the business this year. "The country is gradually recovering from the COVID-19 epidemic," he said. "So, I think we will have a much more favorable situation this year because many institutions have recently asked me for information about our summer courses."
Xu Ting leads a group of young volunteers during a river protection activity. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
App harnesses people's desire to help protect rivers
By Li hongyang
After working in the field of water pollution control science and technology for 14 years, Xu Ting from Huzhou, Zhejiang province, realized that environmental protection efforts are all about people's desire and ability to take care of rivers and lakes.
As a result, in 2016, he devised an applet named Smart River Chief, an intelligent, national river platform that allows people to become involved as "managers" of local waterways by posting photos of specific rivers to monitor their condition and point out problems.
The platform allows the public to update photos of polluted rivers anytime, anywhere. In addition to photos, they can leave comments related to dead fish, garbage or black and dirty water. The platform then helps them report the location of problems to the departments that deal with such issues.
Xu recalled that one user posted photos of a tributary that was polluted by black discharge. "The photos showed that he took them from a high-rise building, something like the 20th floor. We passed them onto the environmental protection bureau, which solved the problem," the 43-year-old said.
In 2017, the environmental engineering graduate from Zhejiang University started his NGO — the Dayu Public Welfare Association — in Huzhou. He works as a full-time engineer at an environmental science and technology company and runs the NGO in his spare time. "The two don't contradict each other, but actually support each other," he said.
His full-time job involves developing water-monitoring systems that can trace polluting factors, while his NGO focuses on popularizing water protection to people in the province, especially at primary and middle schools.
"Although people want clean water and air, most of them don't know how to take action. We provide demonstrations, so they can follow suit," Xu said.
"For example, after we led some families to pick litter out of a creek, we showed them how to sort the refuse and put the three most prevalent types out for analysis. It turned out that water guns were the most commonly seen type of litter along the creek. We always remind tourist families not to throw such toys around.
"We need to tell people to just do one small thing well, instead of 100 things poorly. It would scare people away to tell them that environmental protection is a wide-ranging issue," he said.
From 2014 to 2021, he delivered more than 100 lectures about environmental protection in schools, communities and hospitals. The topics included "understanding five types of clean water", "river and wetland protection" and "ecological fish tanks and marine life".
Xu describes his NGO work as his "career". "A job just lets people earn money. After a long time, it will become boring. However, the NGO is my mission. As long as the earth is still there, the career of environmental protection must also be there. We need to ensure our planet's health," he said.
"The environmental protection mission cannot be completed even in several lifetimes. Twenty years are definitely not enough, so I am in a race against time."
Gu Yehua contributed to this story.
