Ecological Restoration Project Aims to Revolutionize Relationship Between Villagers and the Local Environment

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An hour’s drive north of Beijing lies the county of Miyun, a semi-mountainous agricultural suburb that is home to the Miyun Reservoir, the single-largest water source for China’s burgeoning capital city. Although the local government has invested billions of dollars in tree planting and other ecological protection initiatives and imposed a ban on chemical fertilizers in the region, dangers such as erosion, overgrazing, and pollution continue to threaten the livelihoods of local residents. A new pilot program is attempting to change all this, however, by restoring a 55-hectare plot of land near the reservoir to its original ecological state.

The project, known as the Applied Systems Ecology Demonstration Program, is the brainchild of restoration expert Dr. Zheng Baiyan. Zheng received her bachelor’s degree in architecture in China before moving to Japan to study forestry, and eventually received a doctorate in environmental resources management. Three years ago, she bought a 45-year lease on the Miyun plot with private funds. She has since received additional support from the local government to develop the program.

The Miyun project site, which drains directly into the Miyun Reservoir basin. Invasive shrubs cover the hills and prevent full-grown trees from surviving.

Zheng was inspired to launch the project during a visit to Miyun after spending more than a decade doing ecological restoration work in Japan. She was deeply troubled by what she saw. “The locals were using the land to herd their goats and there was nothing left, just rocks and dirt eroding into the reservoir with every rain,” she recalls. With steep slopes and little vegetation, the land had been nearly stripped of its topsoil and had lost its ability to retain water. To exacerbate matters, local villagers were breaking up and mining the site’s larger boulders for building materials, further destabilizing the hillsides.

“At first I thought it would be a good idea to buy the land to stop people from putting goats on it and from removing the boulders,” Zheng explains. But the longer she stayed, the more concerned she became with the poor ecological management and resulting poverty in the area. “Living in Japan for so long, I hadn’t realized how severe the situation of poverty, pollution, and ecological fragility had become here,” Zheng says. “If you were to see the state of the water in Miyun, the way it is treated by the locals, you would never dare to drink Beijing’s water again.” It was not uncommon, she explains, to see trash, raw sewage, chemicals, and dead animals being dumped into or floating in the reservoir.

Zheng points to a combination of “outdated or backward ecological literacy, government policy, and technology” as the source of these problems. While there have been many ecological restoration attempts throughout China, nearly all have relied on the more profitable approach of using metals, cement, and plastics to build human-dependent environments, she explains. But “these methods are incorrect. Not only do they fail to take advantage of or develop local resources, they don’t actually create functional ecosystems.”

Wetland under construction. Dr. Zheng aims to slow water flow through the land, retaining as much as possible in the soil to replenish groundwater and prevent erosion.

Zheng notes that local officials in Miyun have also been overly eager to plant trees, even when this is inappropriate for the local ecology, because the government provides generous funds for such “restoration” work. Yet, based on her many years of study of forest ecosystems, she believes that for meaningful restoration to take place in China, degraded environments must first be planted with native grasses and shrubs to help rebuild the topsoil and boost rainwater retention. “But who wants to plant grass when you can get several dollars per tree and only fractions of pennies for grass?” she asks, adding that the current tree planting program results in an endless cycle. “They plant trees, pocket the money, the trees die; they plant more, pocket that money, those trees die too, and on and on.” The result is a very profitable tree-planting business for local governments, but a social and environmental tragedy in a country that is rapidly losing its arable land to desert.

Zheng is working with students at Beijing’s University of Forestry to collect and study plants native to Miyun. She hopes to publish the information later this year in a book, Wild Plants of Miyun County, and will begin introducing the plants on her land once a greenhouse is finished. “There are a wide variety of wild herbs, flowers, fruits, and nuts native to this area,” she explains. “Many of these are being successfully cultivated in New Zealand, the U.S., and other countries, but China has yet to take advantage of them commercially.” Zheng is optimistic that wild or semi-wild foods could provide a sustainable alternative income for the area’s inhabitants.

In addition to cultivating native plants, Zheng is creating swales and a small wetland on the Miyun site to encourage rainwater retention and curb the loss of soil and rocks—which will allow her to restore a wider variety of the original vegetation. “Before this area was logged four-to-five-hundred years ago, the land was rich with water” including waterfalls and wetlands, she says. “Now, when it rains, the water just rushes off the land, taking all the dirt with it.” To locate water on the site, Zheng had to dig a 400-meter well.

Traces of a former waterfall that no longer flows. Many of the larger boulders will be carved with quotations of classical texts to prevent villagers from removing them and causing further erosion.

Zheng plans to set up a community training center on the site as well to teach local villagers sustainable livelihood practices, less-invasive cultivation techniques, and market skills. “You have to approach China’s problems with a holistic perspective,” she explains. She has already begun some training with the local villagers she hired to construct the site’s wetland area, greenhouse, rock art trail, and roads.

With the example of her restoration methods, Zheng is optimistic in her ability to help local villagers learn to work with nature and pull themselves out of poverty. “A lot of people hear about my project and think it sounds too good to be true. They don’t believe that it will work. In doing this demonstration project, I want to show people that it can and it does work. I want to prove that there is a better approach to making a living that is in harmony with the environment.”

In another effort to stabilize the land, Zheng is working with graduate students from Shanxi University’s School of Fine Arts to carve images depicted in the several-thousand year-old Chinese text Classics of the Seas and Mountains on some of the larger boulders, to prevent villagers from removing them. “The rock carvings can bring in revenue from visitors, while simultaneously keeping the land intact and reviving part of our cultural heritage,” she explains.

All photos courtesy Lila Buckley