Yale Environment 360

Seven years ago, China’s grassroots environmental activists won arguably their most remarkable victory. After a nationally coordinated, media-savvy anti-dam campaign, Premier Wen Jiabao responded in April 2004 by personally stepping in to suspend plans to dam China’s last free-flowing river, the Nujiang. With a nod to concerns that Chinese environmentalists had raised about the dam’s impact on local ecosystems, Wen asked that the plans be “seriously reviewed and decided scientifically.”

The Leshan Buddha, an ancient statue carved from a cliff in southern China, is slowly dissolving. The giant stone Buddha, the world’s largest, seated with its hands planted on its knees, looks out resolutely over the waters of the Minjiang River and across to Mount Emei, one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains of China. Since being chiseled from a cliff in Sichuan province in the Tang dynasty (8th century), it has for 1,200 years drawn a continuous stream of pilgrims, tourists, and scholars; in 1996, the Buddha was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

On a recent visit to the Gobi desert, which stretches across China’s western Gansu province, I came upon an unusual sign. In the midst of a dry, sandy expanse stood a large billboard depicting a settlement the government intended to build nearby — white buildings surrounded by lush, green, landscaped lawns, and in the center a vast, gleaming blue reservoir. The illustration’s bright colors were quite unlike the actual surroundings, which consisted of dull sky that faded into a horizon of undulating, parched-brown hillsides.

At a factory in Wuxi, China, workers lift solar panels onto conveyor belts, while others in white lab coats move between machines as they check on a process for etching and engraving silicon wafers to form solar cells.