 |
| Cun Yanfang has garnered international attention for her ability to change local attitudes. Peter Ford |
Relentless advocate 'greens' rural China, village by village
She has traveled Yunnan Province showing locals how conservation can make economic sense – and save the region's prized golden monkeys.
from the November 23, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
The campaign has not enjoyed the spectacular results that Cun – by her own admission, too much of a perfectionist – had hoped for, but it has got through to people. A survey last year found that the number of villagers aware of alternative energy sources had increased by nearly 50 percent, as had the numbers who knew that hunting the golden monkey is punishable by jail time.
"People here now have the sense that they should protect the environment, which they didn't before," says He Xuefan, headmaster of Shitou's elementary school. "There are some guys who go on hunting and logging, but now they come in for criticism by other villagers."
Among schoolchildren, the learning curve was steeper; before the campaign, only 9 percent of them said they had done something recently to promote conservation. After it, 51 percent could name something they had done, from nagging fathers not to cut down trees to refraining from littering. "There is still a long way to go, but the work is worth doing," says Cun.
That sort of attitude has propelled her through college, majoring in English at a university set up for ethnic minorities, and then into a job as a tour guide, where she ran across a visiting team from The Nature Conservancy (TNC).
They piqued her interest (she says she used to spend hours as a girl lying in the forest listening to the wind in the pines when she was meant to be collecting firewood), and when a friend told her the US charity was looking for local staff, she went for an interview.
"She stuck out," with "her incredible amount of energy and love for her home town," says Graham Bullock, the TNC staffer who gave Cun her first job with the organization. "She worked out great."
Though Cun is most at home in the hardscrabble villages of her native region, her work with foreign charities has given her an international sheen as well as a taste for fashion accessories rarely seen on Naxi women's heads, such as her natty tweed shooting cap.
RARE sent her to the University of Kent in England for a course on environmental education, and she has attended conferences in the US and Brazil. Next September, if all goes well with her English exam, she will be off to Cornell for a two-year master's program in natural resource management and policy, funded by the Ford Foundation.
She says she is not daunted by the prospect, though she is nervous about a mandatory economics course. "Because I'm Naxi, I have a strong sense of roots and belonging," she says. "I always take my national costume when I travel; I like people to know who I am. So maybe I won't get lost when I am overwhelmed by so many cultures and different things."
RSS feed
