Saving Nature Gene By Gene - China Embarks On Controversial Environmental Program
By A. A. Quong, Pacific News Service, July 13, 2000

The extraordinary diversity of plant and animal life in China's Yunnan province -- threatened by growth and modernization -- has drawn particular attention from both scientists and politicians. Their approach to protecting threatened species is both novel and controversial. PNS correspondent A. A. Quong is a freelance journalist.

KUNMING, CHINA -- In China these days the environment is such a hot issue -- and the government is so keen on preserving it -- that a good idea combined with a top leader's personal endorsement can ignite a high-powered conservation initiative.

One recent example is a gene bank dreamed up by leading members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and backed by a government pledge of $130 million. The project -- the "Wildlife Germplasm Bank" -- has the ambitious aim of collecting and preserving the genetic material from 16,000 species of animals, plants, seeds and microorganisms, mainly from Yunnan Province, by the year 2005.

The idea caught the attention of Premier Zhu Rongji last August during a visit to the International Horticultural Expo in this southwestern provincial capital. At the expo, the provincial government joined scientists in arguing that the province's unique biological diversity must be saved by storing its regenerative material and genetic stock -- which could, in theory, be used to re-introduce species that have gone extinct. It could also be used for genetic engineering of new food crops, livestock and medicines.

Zhu was reportedly so entranced with the proposal that he noted in the margin: "Agree to make this gene bank in Yunnan. Please ask provincial government and institutions to do a deep investigation of this and submit results to the State Council."

Early in June, capping three months of non-stop brainstorming, a working group of two dozen scientists submitted a 300-page proposal to Beijing that covers everything from how to take samples from wild animals painlessly to setting up a world class genetic research center.

The principal gene bank is to be based here. Yunnan, which borders Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, encompasses diverse environments from tropical forests to snow-capped peaks. It has long held a place in the Chinese imagination as wild and exotic.

But with half of China's flowering plant, mammal and freshwater fish species, not to mention nearly two-thirds of its bird species, the rapidly developing province also contains extraordinary biodiversity.

Translating that heritage into a futuristic facility is the job of a handful of scientists, economists, and engineers, led in part by Long Chunlin of the Kunming Institute of Botany. Long says that government agencies have endorsed the idea but "wanted more details." So the proposal "includes everything we want to build, what we will collect and preserve, how much it costs."

Skeptics worry that this approach, called "ex-situ conservation," takes valuable resources from the task of protecting populations in the wild. It assumes not only that natural populations will inevitably dwindle to extinction but also that humankind will find a way to manufacture complex organisms.

"It's basically a denial of ecology," says James Harkness, project officer for World Wide Fund for Nature in Beijing. "It's not the most useful approach to conservation, especially when you have limited resources."

Similar criticisms have come from within the Chinese scientific establishment.

While the plan calls for three "back-up" banks spread out around the country, it also calls for five new botanical gardens and animal refuges throughout Yunnan, closer monitoring of wildlife in nature reserves, and preserving thousands of unique traditional crop varieties developed by Yunnan's farmers over hundreds of years.

The crown jewel is the Kunming-based central bank which will contain much of China's biological wealth and one of the highest concentrations of genetic resources in the world.

Who will have access to that wealth? Working group scientists gave different answers. One wants the information "kept secure," another says it should be "public." Long, an ethnobotanist, says "the information should be public, but the resources, especially endemic and endangered species, should be kept secure."

National policies banning logging and combating desertification receive high-level support. Population pressure and relentless modernization are to blame for much of the degradation -- but in Yunnan, where development proceeds at steamroller pace, the official belief is that conservation can go hand in hand with economic development.

One hopeful sign is the exceptional teamwork among those working on the planning process. The scientists eat together, rarely go home before nine, and forgo the usual two-hour lunch break. This has nurtured a rare synergy between individual specialists. Taken from their respective institutes and deposited in what amounts to a work refuge, the scientists are in some ways freed from internal politics and factionalism.

Outside, just behind one of the city's major boulevards, men sell plums and mangos from wooden carts in the interstices between crammed-together, low-slung buildings. The contrast between the proud tall structures of the boulevard and the ill-fitting jig-saw puzzle of the alleyway is telling.

"For the social and economic development we need to use natural resources," says Dr. Yang Xiangyung, a seed preservation expert at the Xishuangbanna tropical botanic garden. Mixing hope and pragmatism, he adds, "On the other hand we cannot use it and lose it for the future. So we need to use it in a wise way."

Somewhere between the old and new, the planned and organic, something new is taking root.