 Photo: Ed Norton and wife Ann McBride |
MOUNT KAWAGEBO, China - Standing at a Tibetan shrine with the evening wind whipping through thousands of brightly colored prayer flags, Ed Norton marvels at the valley before him as it rises from high desert to snow-capped peaks over a distance of three vertical miles. Below lies the muddy Mekong River, rushing past limestone rocks and cactus on its long journey to the South China Sea. Perched over the water in natural amphitheaters sit small villages dotted with fortress-like homes, terraced cornfields and groves of walnut trees. Towering above it all at more than 22,000 feet stands the razor peak of Kawagebo, a sacred Tibetan mountain blanketed with fir trees and the ice-blue tongue of a glacier. |
"I've never seen any place like it," says Norton, an environmentalist and Harvard-trained attorney who traded his five-bedroom home in Columbia last year for an apartment in Kunming, the capital of Southwest China's Yunnan Province. "It has it all: landscape, culture, biodiversity."
"And to be able to reach it before it's spoiled and have the opportunity to protect it," adds Norton's wife, Ann McBride, who gave up her high-profile job as the president of the citizens action group Common Cause to come here.
In heading to China, Norton left behind strong ties to Maryland and his grown children. One of his sons is Edward Norton, the star of such films as American History X and Keeping the Faith. Norton's first wife, Robin - who died of cancer - taught English in the Howard County school system and was the daughter of Columbia's founder, James W. Rouse.
After lengthy careers in Baltimore and Washington, Norton and McBride have traveled halfway round the world to try to save one of China's most scenic areas before it is trampled in the nation's wind-sprint toward modernization.
Last year, at age 56, Norton took a job as co-deputy director of the Nature Conservancy's ambitious Yunnan Great Rivers Project. The goal of the multi-million dollar venture is unprecedented in China: develop a series of wilderness preserves and national parks across a spectacular swath of land covering 16.5 million acres in northwest Yunnan.
The area includes four of Asia's great rivers - the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Salween and the Irrawaddy - which flow within about 60 miles of each other.The accordion-like landscape of mountains and deep river valleys was formed 5 million years ago when India plowed into the Asian continent.
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Today, the area is home to more than 10,000 plant species, including 1,600 varieties of wildflowers and at least 30 endangered animals such as the snow leopard, the red panda and the snub-nosed monkey. Protecting this natural treasure presents a tremendous challenge. Market economic reforms begun two decades ago have unleashed the pent-up demand of China's approximately 1.3 billion people. As Chinese have rushed ahead to develop a modern lifestyle, the nation's environment has suffered terribly. Air pollution from the growing number of cars is so bad at times that smog envelops 15-story buildings, leaving them invisible from just a few blocks away. In the Great Rivers area, commercial timber operations have reduced forested mountainsides into tree stump graveyards. |
 Photo: Ed Norton and his wife, Ann McBride, cross the Mekong River, one of four rivers to be conserved. |
The Nature Conservancy, an international conservation group, and officials in Yunnan face a question that now bedevils the nation as a whole: How does China balance the economic needs of its relatively poor people while preserving its landscape and culture from the ravages of unfettered development?
To find the answer, the Nature Conservancy is working with the government and local people to identify and develop plans to protect the region's most precious resources.
McBride, a project consultant, distributes cameras to villagers as part of a program called "photo voice," which encourages people to shoot pictures of the things they most value in their communities. The pictures are designed to help villagers come up with ideas for environmental and cultural protection as well as economic development.
Despite such creative concepts, Great Rivers faces a host of potential pitfalls and conflicts.
The populist approach behind "photo voice," for instance, runs counter to China's authoritarian tradition in which leaders often ignore their subject's wishes. With four prefectures and 15 counties covering a region slightly larger than West Virginia, the Great Rivers project makes a tempting target for China's multilayered bureaucracy.
"Everyone thinks that they should have a role in this project," says Duan Senhua, a provincial government official who serves with Norton as a Great Rivers co-deputy director.
And given that some foreign-assisted efforts have failed to deliver here in the past, Great Rivers also runs the risk of creating unrealistic expectations.
One of the biggest challenges Great Rivers faces is helping the region shift its economy from logging to tourism. The project enjoys good timing.
In recent years, environmentalism has emerged as a grass roots issue in China. Officials in Northwest Yunnan are also desperate to find new sources of income after Beijing banned commercial logging here in 1998 when soil erosion contributed to massive flooding on the Yangtze.
Protecting the forests is difficult, though, because cutting for residential use is still permitted. Tibetans, an ethnic group in the region, rely on wood for heat and construction material for their homes. Despite the posting of guards along mountain roads, timber rustling from nature areas remains a problem.
Last year, a large truck loaded with contraband wood ran a checkpoint early one morning. Li Bo, a Cornell University graduate student and Nature Conservancy consultant, chased the truck through the dark for an hour. When he finally caught up, he found a Tibetan Buddhist monk at the wheel.
"I was totally shocked," says Li. "That monk was enormously embarrassed."
 Photo: Friends: Norton befriends a yak in the foothills of southwest China. Norton, co-deputy director of Nature Conservancy, sold his home in Columbia, Md. and headed here for the preservation project. |
Driving for eco-tourism As Norton travels across the region, ideas for eco-tourism to help replace lost timber jobs fill his head. Standing at the shrine looking up at Mount Kawagebo, he envisions a lodge nearby with massive whitewashed walls in the traditional, Tibetan architectural style. Driving above the banks of the Mekong, he pulls over to study the churning rapids and imagines pleasure-rafting through the valley - something local villagers say no one has ever done. He traces a route around the standing waves along the right side of the river and later spots stony beaches upstream suitable for a boat launch. Getting local officials to recognize such opportunities for low-impact/high-yield tourism ventures or - better yet - to develop their own is another matter. Norton has already taken a group of government leaders to Yellowstone to give them a feel for how the U.S. National Park system works. The Nature Conservancy is trying to arrange a trip to the Annapurna range to introduce officials to Nepal's successful trekking business. |
Tourism projects in China, by contrast, often follow what could be called the Niagara Falls school: aim for the lowest common denominator and pack in as many people as possible.
In the valley where Mount Kawagebo stands, local officials wanted to build a cable car to carry people to the foot of the glacier. Norton says the plans have been scrapped, but Tang Yuchun, who oversees environmental protection in surrounding Deqin County, says no final decision has been made.
A recent meeting with Tang illustrated the different approaches taken by the Nature Conservancy and its Chinese government partners, who are funding the majority of the project. Over bowls of beef noodles during a visit, Tang told Norton that the county's top priority is developing tourism.
One idea, he says, is to build a park showcasing the region's numerous ethnic minorities, such as Tibetans. Norton lets the idea pass. He is familiar with such parks in China, which often amount to cultural sideshows.
Norton has come to organize an international workshop to focus on the project's main goals: environmental protection and economic development.
One of the advantages the Nature Conservancy brings to the partnership is access to Western media and publicity, which could help attract investment and wealthy tourists. As a sweetener, Norton tells Tang that a journalist from National Geographic is coming to write about the area for a book called "Earth's Last Great Places." Long Yongcheng, a Chinese zoologist working with Norton, notes that National Geographic has a global circulation in the millions.
Tang seems impressed by this.
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Eclectic career Norton's move to China is the latest in an eclectic career that has taken him from the jungles of Vietnam, where he served as a Marine artillery captain on the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the late 1960s, to federal court in Baltimore, where he was a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office. Before heading to China, he spent nearly two decades fighting to protect the environment at the Wilderness Society and as co-founder of the Grand Canyon Trust - a sort of Chesapeake Bay Foundation for the Colorado Plateau. Most recently, he served as vice president for law and public policy at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Trading his Washington office on Massachusetts Avenue for one in Kunming, where the expatriate population is perhaps 1,000, marks a radical departure. Neither he nor his wife speak Chinese. Norton's friends, though, weren't surprised by the decision. |
"It surprised me it took so long," says former U.S. Attorney Tim Baker, who hired Norton in 1977. "He was in Washington basically working as a lobbyist dealing with the bureaucracies and the disillusionment. He just wanted to bust out."
And bust out he has.
When he is not in his office in Kunming chewing toothpicks into splinters as he paces and chats on his cell phone, Norton is often hiking where few foreigners have gone before.
In September, he and McBride were among the first foreigners to climb along a Tibetan pilgrimage route that winds around Mount Kawagebo. The trail rises through a steep canyon filled with wildflowers and a cascading river, which tumbles down with such force that water leaps from the banks in some places.
For Norton, a three-day business trip can mean rising at 4 a.m. to send e-mail, lurching down muddy switchbacks at night in the back of a rickety van, strolling along a wooden suspension bridge over the rushing Mekong and chatting around a Tibetan hearth over silver cups of yak butter tea. (Like many foreigners, Norton detests the rancid-tasting tea, which he pours back into the metal pot when his host isn't looking.)
Norton misses his family and the Orioles.
He uses e-mail to stay in touch with his three children, who share his love of the outdoors. Edward, 31, the actor, recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Jim, 28, works as a rafting guide on the Middle Fork of Idaho's Salmon River. And Molly, 24, is a manager for Geographic Expeditions, an adventure travel company in San Francisco.
Norton sold his home in Columbia earlier this year. He says he plans to stay in China indefinitely.
Norton knows some criticize the Great Rivers project as wildly ambitious and seriously question whether it will succeed. During his time here, though, he's been impressed with many of his Chinese colleagues and remains optimistic. Ultimately, he says, the fate of China's environment rests with its people and leaders.
"It's their country, these decisions are theirs to make," says Norton. "There is still plenty of time to do things right in Northwest Yunnan."
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Nature Conservancy's goals in China
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