Course: WRITING 101-16 Saving Nature Saving Humans, Duke University
Instructor: Paolo Bocci
Peer Editor: Leona Lu
For the Chinese people living in northern provinces, notably Hebei, the azure sky has become merely a picturization deep inside their minds. In AirVisual’s 2018 report, 19 out of 50 most air-polluted cities in the world are in the North China Plain, predominantly in Henan and Hebei. Conveniently located near Beijing and Tianjin, respectively with the highest and the third highest per capita GDP in China, Hebei ranked only the 21st. Therefore, since the end of twentieth century, Hebei has been targeted to take in many pollution-generating factories relocated from these two cities, whose air quality improvements are prioritized by the central government. This dangerously increased the already huge pollution-generating industries in Hebei. The northern provinces’ subordinating position to the development interests of Beijing and Tianjin is behind the regional air pollution and environmental injustice, limiting the local communities’ governance over their territories and equal opportunities to develop.
Confronting such injustice, local communities respond in three stages: increased awareness of air pollution and environmental injustice, individual litigations and complaints, and association of environmental civil societies. Through these, local communities organized around the issues of their territorial autonomy and autonomous future.
Initially, public awareness of the environmental injustice was greatly increased by the continuity and deterioration of pollutions plus the information exposures predominantly made by foreign sectors. A field research in 2009 interviewed local villagers in Baocun, China. Villagers demonstrated an explicit understanding of pollutions’ impact on their many aspects of daily life – “decreased agricultural yields”, “poisoned drinking waters”, “incidental nose infections”, etc. (Van Rooij et al. 2011). Thus, Van Rooij concluded in his analysis that local communities are well informed of the cause-and-effect relations between pollution-generating firms and people’s hampered living conditions. In addition, foreign sectors operating in China provide crucial information access to the public. As an example, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing has been publishing air quality data online since 2011, informing the public of the “beyond-index level of air pollution” and its health impacts (Wang et al. 2018). Such exposures approach the deliberate misinformation by local governments that prioritize the political consequences. In this case, public awareness is not raised by video of glacier melting or graphs of endangered species statistics but by relating pollutions with people’s own health and livelihood.
However, habituation is a substantial challenge to public awareness. “If the pollution is bad and you cannot grow anything on your land, don’t grow anything, let it lie idle and buy foods,” said a villager in Baocun, suggesting that he had already got used to the pollutions (Van Rooij et al. 2011). Similar habituation to the abnormality caused by pollutions were observed in Baocun. Without the capacity to carry out individual response or the establishment of collective actions, public awareness is only effective in raising the environmental injustice issue but insufficient to address it.
Entering the second stage, individual legal actions against environmental injustice and transgression skyrocketed. Turning into the 21st century, the Chinese government started to instrument laws and regulations to protect the environment and local living conditions. The increasingly sophisticated legal frameworks institutionally enable the local residents to accuse corporations that violate the laws and government agencies that lack adequate supervision or enforcement. According to the research led by Xianbing Liu, the amount of citizen-submitted environmental complaints in China grows from 67,268 in 1996 to 750,127 in 2008, multiplying by a factor of 11. This showcases that sufficient social capacity and well-functioning legal mechanisms leads to proactive civic engagement in addressing environmental issues. Similar to the case of Francia Márquez’s legal actions towards unlawful mining corporations, litigations can bring immediate effects to redress specific cases of environmental injustice or offenses.
Nevertheless, just as Márquez’s environmental justice movement faces regional limitations and requires collective actions, the solidarity of individual legal actions limits the generality of their influences. Most successful lawsuits oftentimes focus on a region-specific issue or violation, which requires lower practical thresholds to win over. Usually concluding with fines or punishments on the law-breaking corporations, these cases mostly satisfy only individual interests and are only applicable to a single case. The judicial system in China does not adopt case laws, therefore the previous rulings are quite less likely to serve as precedents or models for future legal proceedings or for improving the existing legal framework. The absence of collaboration and interconnection among different concerned individuals and the deficiency of shared values and goals towards environmental injustice results in zero positive externalities.
Thirdly, the association of environmental non-governmental organizations and other civil society sectors create shared values and interregional collaboration. Environmental civil society exhibits increasing visibility and proactiveness since the beginning of the 21st century. With the “extensive involvement of journalists” in NGO activities and some government officials’ support in return for their position secured, ENGOs in China have considerable capacity to carry out civic education programs and preservation campaigns (Lu 2007). To address the air pollution in Hebei, a number of NGOs releases public reports on pollution status and improvements of policy and enforcement, stated by the research led by Li Wang. Some civil societies take collective and larger-extent legal actions against the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei areas’ municipal governments in 2017, requiring more rigid and efficient policy enforcement, according to the Guardian. Without an effective and representative legislature, civil society becomes the primary platform for the public to associate and participate in community regulation on the environment. Distinct from a national-level government’s political considerations, civil societies concern more of the needs and interests of the locals that they represent.
Notwithstanding, the absence of cross-sectoral collaboration and coalition of civil societies hinders the further development of civil societies’ capacity of influencing environmental legal and policy frameworks and redressing environmental injustices. In her research, Yiyi Lu argues that owing to the complex nature of environmental injustice issues, environmental protection is increasingly linked to topics like “poverty reduction”, “women’s development”, and the “development of local economies” (Lu 2007). Civil societies in these sectors also participate in dealing with environmental injustice. Reforming the political ecology, as Escobar stated in his article, is fundamental to eradicate environmental injustice and is only achievable by forging coalition among various sectors in the existing political ecology.
If the purpose of national parks and preservations is to separate humans from the “pristine wilderness”, local communities in Hebei engage in conservation to actively associate human aspects with ecological well-being. After all, it’s not nature itself that should be conserved, but the complex and intertwined coexistence and connections of humans and other actors in nature. It’s not a question of “nature or humans” but a never-ending story of “humans in nature” with ups and downs.
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