Criminal Education?

This post is in reference to Joe Lai's post, Embracing Nature Conservation: How?.

Dave Santucci wrote a short article about the inspirational powers of being in close contact with animals. I won't disagree with him. As someone who is out in the field relatively often, I know how it feels to be up-close and personal with members of other species, be they crocodiles or platyhelminthes.

However, to have to hold animals captive in an area that isn't even 0.1% of their original range is a different thing altogether. If done on humans, it is called unlawful confinement, except in mental asylums and prisons, because they are considered the lower end of society. Mr. Santucci has assumed that humans are different, are on a higher level. Isn't that being elitist?

People still have not understood the difference between appreciating the whale sharks and dolphins for their presence in the wild, and appreciating whale sharks and dolphins as toys. What the aquariums possibly promote is appreciation of the animals as toys. We make them do tricks, and ride them like the kiddy machines that mothers put 50cents into to keep their kids entertained for two minutes. If someone forced another person to learn and perform tricks on command, it's called forced labour and violation of human rights.

While I have mentioned that I am continually inspired by contacts I make with wildlife while doing field work, my love for nature, and wildlife came from reading, fighting spiders and catching grasshoppers as a kid, and unlike what Mr. Santucci would like to believe, from the television. Has he wondered why we use the term “wildlife”? These are majestic creatures born to be wild, free, away from urban, human organisation and oppression. Appreciation of nature must come through responsible education, not education “by hook or by crook”. When we want to learn French (or whatever) culture and language, we do a French immersion programme. We don't go to France and kidnap a Frenchman. The same principle applies to the Whale Sharks.

Man's Greatest Mistake

I never thought one of the random conclusions I make when I am thinking to myself could actually be (sort-of) supported by a renowned academic. You see, normally I read, and what the brainy people say kind of influences me, so this coincidence really kind of struck me. So what was that controversial conclusion? Here it is: Agriculture is the root of all evils and problems that humans are facing (well one of the roots, at least).

I should elaborate. Agriculture is considered to be essential to our lives. It provides us with our nutritional requirements. It allows civilizations to feed millions of hungry mouths. It’s become so deeply rooted in our mindsets that when we find resource problems, more often than not, we ask if agriculture can help (think biofuels from palm and other rubbish along those lines). Heck, some even wish money grew on trees! Looking at that, agriculture should be good right? WRONG! It’s not! In fact, it’s evil, and mankind is so hopelessly stuck in this situation, we can’t hope to get out of it for the next 20 generations, or we destroy ourselves because Mother Earth decides to purge humankind, whichever comes first.

Putting all your eggs in one basket

The history of “civilized” mankind has been marked by numerous famines due to crop failures. Agriculture is one of the great examples of putting all your eggs in one basket. Sure, you can plant corn and potatoes and whatever plant that can be grown, but when the drought comes, it’s placing like your basket of eggs (maybe different types of eggs signifying different crop types) with a weasel – they’d all be gone. Then what happens? Famine, death and disease. With the current severe winter going on in China, Japan and Europe, we might see this repeat itself all over again. Of course, the problem can be alleviated a little by having stores and stockpiles, but it doesn’t really solve the problem, does it?

Agriculture resulted in the flourishing of human cultures, or does it?

The advent of agriculture has been deemed to be one the events in the history of man that allowed cultures to develop, because supposedly, it allows people time to think, where the “savage” hunter-gatherers would be running around the whole day trying to find food. I believe that is widely off the mark. The Inuit are still hunter-gatherers, so too the Kalahari bushmen. Dare we say they do not have a culture? Or that we have a superior culture? With regards to time, the bushmen spend a maximum of 19 hours a week gathering food only. Compare that with the farmers, especially here in Asia, where it is considered a virtue to be in the fields from daybreak to sunset (hardworking or just plain inefficient?). The amount of leisure time is a no-go argument right from the beginning. Hunter-gatherers had even more free time than the farmers.

Health

Another argument put forth by many is that agriculture allowed the improvement of nutrition for humans. However, by now, we all know that most of agriculture is skewed towards carbohydrate-rich crops like potato, rice, wheat, etc., and certain meat and milk producing livestock, e.g. cattle, sheep, goat. Modern diets are lacking in variety. These in turn limit the nutritional values of our diet. In Asia, people cannot do without rice (not me though) but rice itself, besides being a carbohydrate source, really has much of little else. Including things like Vitamin A, which was found to be lacking in the rural poor (farmers) in India, and there had to be a Golden Rice Project to try and fix the problem (see, agriculture again). In fact, paleontologists have found that rather than indicators proving good health, like longer life and bigger build, early farmers had a smaller build and appeared to live shorter and were disease-riddled. The phenomenon of size has still not recovered, as modern Mediterranean populations, like the Greeks, Turks, and Italians, are still considerably smaller sized that their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Agriculture also meant that populations have had to be clustered where resources are, in order to have access to them. The increase in population and livestock densities thus results in the easy spread of disease, like tuberculosis, (bird) flu, etc. (By the way, I believe that bird flu is firmly the fault of farming, and not fault should be put upon migratory birds.) The clustering and the emphasis on storage of food and resources also resulted in another evil.

War

As agriculture gained importance, so did the necessity of fertile, arable land. The lack of such land will bring down any agricultural city state, and in order to get more land, a population cluster would have to expand, until they meet another population cluster, and tensions would rise. More often than not, the overwhelming desire for more land would result in the invasion and annexation of the lands of other populations. It is the same with any resource that is land-locked. Like oil. This doesn’t happen often with hunter-gatherer communities, as they are often nomadic tribes. The less physical people resorted to economics, but as the Chinese say, trade-zones are no different from war-zones.

Overpopulation

Well as many of us attest, the world is overpopulated. This is a result of agriculture too. Instead of a large forest with good food scattered through the area, we have now grown a lot of not-so-good food in a smaller plot of land, and exchanged quality for quantity. Nonetheless, it means that people are now able to feed more mouths, and so they they reproduce at an increasing rate. The limitations on quantity of food have been shown to limit the population growth rate in hunter-gatherer populations to a new child every 4 years, versus one every 2 years, in agricultural societies. This is because hunter-gatherer mothers had to raise a child until he or she is old and strong enough to keep up with the adults, something which is not necessary in a farming community where the family or population is much less mobile.

Class Divisions

Hunter-gatherers do not have stores of food. Essentially, they ate what they had gathered or hunted, and so there was no concentration, or “wealth”. Where there is a concentration of resources attached to individuals, then there are bound to be social “parasites”, like kings, and governments, which tax people, because there is a gain in doing so. You can’t tax people when they have nothing to tax from, and even harder when because you can’t bully similarly strong people as you into listening. On the other hand, in farming communities, it becomes possible for a small group of healthier elites to rule over the weaker masses, basically by bullying them into submission. Nevertheless, one hundred weak, hungry people can still overpower one healthy person, and so, social upheavals are commonplace in such societies (Also because everyone wants to sit and get fat while doing nothing).

The paper that I just saw that was similar was written in 1987 by UCLA academic, Professor Jared Diamond. The essay, “The Worst History in the History of the Human Race” (Discover – May 1987, pp. 64-66) is available online and you can get it just by googling around. He has just about the same points but he had a different order of thought, and he also mentioned sexual discrimination against women, which is an interesting point.

Agriculture is now probably an irreversible part of our lives. We cannot do without it anymore, at least in the next 20 generations. It has contributed in some good sense (we still get food after all), but is part of the problem as well. The over-reliance on agriculture has resulted in the over-reliance on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and economics. We humans have basically screwed ourselves. However, we are the only species that have the ability to reflect, come up with solutions, and convince ourselves to endure certain pains in lifestyle changes (although we haven’t evolve to WANT to use that ability), and our species might still get away with it. We need to reduce our population that is for sure, as there are too many mouths to feed, even with agriculture. What would the future be like? Stay tuned, and find out, 20 generations from now.

Not Everything Can be Priced

I read “Economics don offers unique perspective on Nature Conservation” in the “Battle for Singapore’s Green Spaces Blog” and it’s really infuriating. This is coming from one of the people being consulted by Singapore’s government ministries and statutory boards.

He, on the flawed basis that “Nothing is free” proposes auctioning the forests like the one in Mandai, to decide if the land should be developed. The extremely flimsy way of calculation makes no sense at all. There is no way in hell that the amount calculated from surveying so-called “stake-holders” will beat the price offered by developers (henceforth termed “destroyers”). If anything, it might allow them to escape with destroying forests at a lower price! Perhaps that is what Professor Quah would like to see? Buildings everywhere, with the only greenery being roadside trees?

He assumes that he is a more “educated” person than other Singaporeans (arrogant or ignorant?). What does he know of ecology? Of climatology? Has he considered the quality of the air we breathe when we are shorn of all forests? How that would affect our drainages? Would that drive investors away? It seems that in his ideal world, there would be no forests, no animals, no other forms of life apart from Homo sapiens and destroyers running everywhere offering more and more money for more destruction projects.

Taking this outside of Singapore, destroyers have cleared mangroves (number one target for economists like him, muddy, and smelling of Hydrogen Sulphide, and apparently costly to leave alone) and mined corals (to make lime for construction of buildings) in Sri Lanka. Christmas Eve of 2004, a tsunami hit and everything was wiped out. That tsumani took between 30,000 and 40,000 lives in Sri Lanka displaced 2.5 million others. In contrast, Bangladesh, with miles and miles of undeveloped mangroves reported a grand total of 2 deaths. In the Tamil Nadu village of Naluvedapathy, villagers had earlier planted a forest of 80,244 casuarina trees, which broke up the waves and only 7 deaths and “no psychological trauma” amongst the people were reported.

Yes, in Singapore we are sheltered from these. But we are still flood prone, and still subject to the effects of sea level rising. There is a whole lot of environmental processes to go into, besides the sentimentalism and aesthetics put forward by Prof Ng. It takes more than an economist to understand this. Economists, it seems, “must be educated” to use Prof Quah’s own words.

Where is the Balance?

Recently, there has been a lot of commotion in the nature circles over the turning of Mandai into a "spa retreat", not least by a long, rather scathing post by Joseph Lai. As I did my field work in Nee Soon (and hearing the Seletar Range firing away) I thought about the multiple land use in Singapore.

Singapore is a small country, and so the government has had to find multiple uses of a specific piece of land in the urban (High-rise homes or offices built over Multi-storey carparks over shopping centres over underground MRT stations)and the less urban (I refuse to use "country-side" or "rural" to describe any place in Singapore Island) areas (SAF training ground and nature reserves and tourist spots). But the contention many have is that what works in an urban setting may not work in a different, more natural setting, especially with regards to wildlife where you cannot plan things. Sure you can plan to build a resort with a good forest setting and a way to control the bugs, but will the bug-control result in the death of the forest and giving way to stale, sterile, ornamental plantation? (Yes I said it. I have a disdain for all the "touristy" flower places and nicely manicured, "planned" parks which are not natural at all) You cannot transplant animals into tiny cramped environment and expect them to behave as they would in their natural, wide-ranging habitats.

I started my conservation journey inspired by Dr. Jane Goodall's work at the forests of Gombe, how she managed to find a balance for the people there, between livelihood and protecting the forest. Singapore may be harder, it's too small, and our forests, frankly are not sustainable on their own, and need constant care. What's bugging me now, are the questions: Does this point of balance even exist in Singapore? Or have we passed it in 1850?

Irresponsible Designers

Early there was a Paris fashion week sometime ago (no I do not follow fashion, nor do I care for such pompous, resource-wasting activities), and obviously the big labels were there to showcase their new stuff. It turned out that there is an alarming trend in fashion design - the use of exotic skins.

Here're a few things that I found out:
1) Christian Dior had a collection that was made up of python, ostrich and fox skins.
2) Calvin Klein's collection featured jackets that had alligator skins.
3) Celine came up with a white python skirt.
4) Jimmy Choo made snakeskin sandals .
5) Ferragamo used alligator for their footwear.
6) Alexander McQueen used snakeskin in his skirtsuits.
7) Christian Dior had a ponyskin clutchbag.
Just a few to name, I stopped looking because it get depressing.

Roberto Cavalli had this to say about the use of animal skins in design:
"Exotic skins are hot right now, there's a real buzz. I love to use reptile skins because it excites me to take a material that is seen as wild and mix it with a look that shouts glamour and sophistication. Exotic skin - alligator, crocodile and snake - also gives the impression of being superluxurious and expensive, a look women are into at the moment. For men it's cars. For women it's bags, shoes and belts now. A rich woman wants her bag to do the talking. It's the most sophisticated way to say you have money. Exotic skin is the ultimate. Everyone knows it is expensive.”

That was disgraceful. Want a visual? Here's Kylie Minogue and Eva Longoria with their(then) new python bags (probably wasting away in their collections now). And check out the price tags.



It's scant consolation that they cost more than cattle leather.

This is getting too far. How would Mr. Cavalli like to be worn by a bear? A friend suggested dumping him into a Roman amphitheatre with four lions and a feather duster to defend himself with. That should shake him up a bit.

But seriously, people have become short-sighted and/or self-centred. They do not question, and more often than not, they do not care how that bag was made, from what, who does it and how it is done. I do not think that Ms Longoria (Mrs. Parker now) thought about any of those when she got that crazy bag. Pythons are remarkable animals in that they survive with remarkably low metabolic rates, and as such, are tolerant of low oxygen levels. They have a rather primitive brain, and such animals sometimes can survive as 2 seperate entities when decapitated. In fact, this can happen even in birds as well. Go look up "Mike the headless chicken". Therefore, it's virtually impossible to kill them by physical means without otherwise destroying the skin. Naturally it follows that people are actually skinning the pythons alive. Of course, they do die eventually, but that's probably because they dehydrate without their skins.

Pythons aren't the only sufferers. Alligators and crocodiles are getting it too. They are "killed" by driving a chisel into their spinal cord. Of course, not being physiologists, they do not know that these animals aren't dead when they are being skinned, they are still very much alive, and they eventually bleed to death during the skinning itself (the egoistic skinners will now tell you they complete the skinning before the animals die).

It has been estimated that between 2000 and 2005, some 3.4 million lizard, 2.9million crocodile and 3.4 million snakeskins were killed and imported to European Union for their skins. These reptiles are in Appendix II under CITES now. Maybe it's time to push for something higher. They cannot afford to wait till they become really critically endangered before we do anything, because for all our ability to design, discover and engineer, humans can sometimes be the most stupid animals on the planet. People must start asking themselves if it is worth:
1)risking a poor native's life to try and catch and kill an animal perfectly capable of killing him,
2)sacrificing the life of the animal just for that weird bag which they can survive very well without.

I cringe everytime women see an animal skin product and go "I must have that!", because they don't have to have it. They won't die without it, and if they realise that, that python would still be somewhere in the rainforest helping farmers to control rat populations.

Are Biofuels the solution?

Everyone knows the link between global warming and combustion of fossil fuels, and how many organisations (except for oil companies) and governments (either out of good intentions or purely because of economics) have begun pushing for the increased use of biofuels, i.e fuels made out of biomass, e.g. manure, or ethanol from sugarcane fermentation, etc. But are biofuels good alternatives?

Biofuels are encouraged mainly for two reasons. First, under combustion, biofuels generally give off up to 60% less carbon emissions than fossil fuels. Second, that there will be some energy security (i.e life can generally go on if oil supplies and prices fluctuate).

However many things have not yet been taken into consideration. What about the production costs (in carbon terms) of producing the biofuels? Will the use of biofuels be an excuse to put more vehicles on the road (thereby negating the supposed carbon savings)? Will the production of biofuels adversely other things on Earth? Are people really looking at the big picture without cash-registers ringing in their heads?

Yes, we all know by now that use of biofuels can potentially cut carbon emissions by 60%. But how are the biofuels produced? We industrialise everything. So now we have to consider the carbon costs of the industry. Fuels need to burnt to manufacture fertiliser, to power machinery in the farms and biofuel plants, and fuel needs to be burnt to transport crops (or whatever biomass) to and from the biofuel plants. An whole new carbon emitting industry is setup. Will the eventual emission-savings of cars running on biofuels be enough to offset the costs? We don't know for sure yet, but I suspect, no.

There's worse to come. It's something that really riles me sometimes. And our neighbours in Malaysia are part of this whole farce. Whoever that did the calculations in carbon savings did so with the assumption that carbon absorption by forests would stay constant. But neighbouring countries around us are seizing this economic opportunity by clearing large patches of forest and starting palm oil plantations. The Malaysian Palm Oil Council CEO has also put the following blatant lie in the Council's website "www.mpoc.org.my":

"There are a number of advantages in using palm oil for the production of biofuel. Unlike fossil fuels, the combustion of palm oil biofuel does not increase the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as the oil is merely returning carbon dioxide obtained earlier from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. As such, biofuel is regarded as carbon neutral.

Since carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas responsible for global warming, the world benefits by the burning of biofuel instead of fossil fuel. Additionally, the palm trees that produce oil have simultaneously absorbed a lot more carbon dioxide during photosynthesis to form biomass for the other parts of the plant. The tree continues to absorb carbon dioxide throughout its life span of 25-30 years. A consumer of palm biofuel in Europe can therefore take comfort in knowing that palm biofuel is more than carbon neutral.

An added benefit of photosynthesis is the release of oxygen to the atmosphere. The quantity of oxygen released by oil palm, a perennial crop, far exceeds that produced by annual crops such as soybean or rapeseed. The cultivation of palm trees is therefore a huge contributing factor in the reduction of global warming. "

There is no way that clearing forests will result in reduction of global warming. Palm trees, although they do absorb some carbon during photosynthesis, will not absorb more than a patch of forest of the same area, simply because the density of vegetation is so different! Trees in plantations are planted some distance apart from each other, unlike in forests. They also have not accounted for the carbon costs in the production process and the loss of absorption when the original forests were cleared and there was no vegetation.

Now, the IMF has raised another issue. The use of other crops, like soy and maize, has put a lot of pressure on food supplies throughout the world. Food prices are rising, and the poor are starving more and more. Is it worth starving anyone just so that someone can turn their food into fuel for a car that they don't really need? Is it worth depriving a poor man of an ear of corn just so that someone can drive to his posh, air-conditioned office two blocks away? The magnitude of the problem (845 million people will go to sleep hungry tonight) makes it a hard problem to solve. People cannot put a face to it. Josef Stalin said "One dead is a tragedy, one million dead is a statistic". How apt is his description!

It seems to me that biofuels is not the answer. And its benefits could possibly be overhyped by governments trying to make a quick buck. People must change their lifestyles. E.O. Wilson said that we will probably need two more planets in order to sustain the lifestyles of typical Americans (which the majority of the world is trying to "acheive"). Earth, big as it is, is running out of space, and is being suffocated by us. Look at the picture below. It shows how much space (and you can imagine the carbon emission) it takes to transport a bunch of people by car.



And the group, if transported by bus (See the difference!).




The pictures are courtesy of the Geo-4 report, which got them from the Press-Office of the City of Münster, Germany.

So in the end, I ask the same question to all reading this. Are biofuels the solution?

Choking on Growth

The below is an article from The New York Times, October 14th, 2007

In China, a Lake’s Champion Imperils Himself
By JOSEPH KAHN
Published: October 14, 2007

ZHOUTIE, China — Lake Tai, the center of China’s ancient “land of fish and rice,” succumbed this year to floods of industrial and agricultural waste.

Toxic cyanobacteria, commonly referred to as pond scum, turned the big lake fluorescent green. The stench of decay choked anyone who came within a mile of its shores. At least two million people who live amid the canals, rice paddies and chemical plants around the lake had to stop drinking or cooking with their main source of water.

The outbreak confirmed the claims of a crusading peasant, Wu Lihong, who protested for more than a decade that the region’s thriving chemical industry, and its powerful friends in the local government, were destroying one of China’s ecological treasures.

Mr. Wu, however, bore silent witness. Shortly before the algae crisis erupted in May, the authorities here in his hometown arrested him. In mid-August, with a fetid smell still wafting off the lake, a local court sentenced him to three years on an alchemy of charges that smacked of official retribution.

Pollution has reached epidemic proportions in China, in part because the ruling Communist Party still treats environmental advocates as bigger threats than the degradation of air, water and soil that prompts them to speak out.

Senior officials have tried to address environmental woes mostly through pulling the traditional levers of China’s authoritarian system: issuing command quotas on energy efficiency and emissions reduction; punishing corrupt officials who shield polluters; planting billions of trees across the country to hold back deserts and absorb carbon dioxide.

But they do not dare to unleash individuals who want to make China cleaner. Grass-roots environmentalists arguably do more to expose abuses than any edict emanating from Beijing. But they face a political climate that varies from lukewarm tolerance to icy suppression.

Fixing the environment is, in other words, a political problem. Central party officials say they need people to report polluters and hold local governments to account. They granted legal status to private citizens’ groups in 1994 and have allowed environmentalism to emerge as an incipient social force.

But local officials in China get ahead mainly by generating high rates of economic growth and ensuring social order. They have wide latitude to achieve those goals, including nearly complete control over the police and the courts in their domains. They have little enthusiasm for environmentalists who appeal over their heads to higher-ups in the capital.

Mr. Wu, a jaunty, 40-year-old former factory salesman, pioneered a style of intrepid, media-savvy environmental work that made Lake Tai, and the hundreds of chemical factories on its shores, the focus of intense regulatory scrutiny.

In 2005 he was declared an “Environmental Warrior” by the National People’s Congress. His address book contained cellphone numbers for officials in Beijing and the provincial capital of Nanjing who outranked the party bosses where he lived.

But Mr. Wu was far from untouchable. He lost his job. His wife lost hers. The police summoned, detained and interrogated him. The local government and factory owners also tried for years to bring him into the fold with contracts, gifts and jobs. When party officials offered him a chance to profit handsomely from a pollution cleanup contract, a friend warned him not to accept. Mr. Wu, who needed the money, said yes.

Lake of Plenty

The country’s third largest freshwater body, Lake Tai, or Taihu in Chinese, has long provided the people of the lower Yangtze River Delta with both their wealth and their conception of natural beauty.

It nurtured a bounty of the “three whites,” white shrimp, whitebait and whitefish, and a freshwater crustacean delicacy called the hairy crab. Natural and man-made streams irrigated rice paddies, and a network of canals ferried that produce far and wide.

Along the lake’s northern reaches, near the city of Wuxi, placid waters and misty hills captured the imagination of Chinese for hundreds of years. The wealthy built gardens that featured the lake’s wrinkled, water-scarred limestone rocks set in groves of bamboo and chrysanthemum.

Since the 1950s, however, Lake Tai has been under assault. The authorities constructed dams and weirs to improve irrigation and control floods, disrupting the cleansing circulation of fresh water. Phosphates and other pollution-borne nutrients made the lake eutrophic, sucking out oxygen that fish need to survive.

Even in its degraded state, Lake Tai made an ideal habitat for China’s chemical industry, which expanded prolifically in the 1980s. Chemical factories consume and discharge large quantities of water, which the lake provided and absorbed. Its canals made it easy to ship goods to the big industrial port city of Shanghai, downstream.

With strong local government support, the northern arc of Lake Tai became home to 2,800 chemical plants, most of them small cinder-block factories that took over rice paddies beside canals.

Mr. Wu’s hometown alone had 300 such plants. His narrow village road was reinforced with concrete to withstand the weight of cargo trucks. Factories here made food additives, solvents and adhesives.

The industry transformed the economy. By the mid-1990s, taxes on chemical industry profits accounted for four-fifths of local government revenue, according to a report from the city of Yixing, which oversees Zhoutie.

Mr. Wu benefited as well. In his early 20s, he got a salaried job as salesman for a factory that made soundproofing material. It allowed him to travel around the country, and paid nice commissions on his sales. His wife, Xu Jiehua, made dyes.

Mr. Wu took long walks after dinner. The acrid tinge in the cool night air was the smell of prosperity to some locals. But it nauseated him, Mr. Wu recalled in later interviews.

In streams where he and Ms. Xu played as children, teeming whitefish used to tickle their legs. By the early 1990s, there were no fish in the streams, which ran black and red. “Rivers of blood,” Ms. Xu quoted him as saying.

Mr. Wu is small and pudgy. Ms. Xu calls him “little fatty.” He also has a short temper, and pollution sparked it.

“In the beginning I didn’t understand it myself,” he recalled years later in an interview with Farmers’ Daily. “It was my personality that decided all of this. I felt the burden getting bigger.”

He began by snapping photos of factories dumping untreated effluent into canals. He mailed them, anonymously at first, to environmental protection agencies.

When that produced few results, he signed the letters and included his phone number, volunteering to help inspectors see the problem for themselves.

Local regulators ignored him. But fish kills, declining rice yields and slumping tourism to the once pristine area made Lake Tai’s ecology a broader concern. Higher-ranking officials in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu Province, got in touch.

One evening, Mr. Wu brought provincial inspectors to see concealed pipes running from a factory near his home to a stream that flowed into the lake. The factory, Feida Chemical, got slapped with a fine, and Mr. Wu got his start.

Friends and Enemies

Mr. Wu’s farmhouse filled up with the evidence he amassed, a bit haphazardly, of a looming environmental disaster. He used his pantry to store plastic bottles containing muddy water samples from streams and canals. Near his queen-size bed he kept stacks of newspaper clippings and photographs, letters and petitions.

One letter from local farmers described how a nearby factory making 8-hydroxyquinoline, used as a deodorant and antiseptic, emitted noxious fumes that “make our days and nights impassable.” Another writer referred to a local factory as “a new Unit 731,” after the Japanese team that conducted chemical warfare experiments in World War II. Members of another group said they did not dare tend their rice paddies without wearing gloves and galoshes because irrigation water caused their skin to peel off.

Mr. Wu answered many such calls for help. Between 1998 and 2006, the environmental protection agency of Jiangsu Province recorded receiving 200 reports of pollution incidents and regulatory violations from Mr. Wu.

Many of those he helped became allies. But Mr. Wu was making as many enemies as friends.

“Our society lacks the right atmosphere for environmental protection,” he told one local newspaper. “Even in areas where pollution is most severe, I still have a hard time winning people’s support.”

Some residents feared for their jobs, with good reason. The soundproofing factory fired Mr. Wu in 1999. His notice of dismissal, which he saved among his other papers, cited his failure to attend a meeting.

His family lived off his wife’s salary at the dye factory for a time. Then one day Ms. Xu mentioned to Mr. Wu how the stream near her factory changed colors depending on which dye they made that day. Mr. Wu brought a television crew to film the rainbow-colored stream. Ms. Xu soon lost her job as well.

“He did not always have our family’s happiness at heart,” Ms. Xu recalled. “He probably should have investigated someone else’s factory.”

Such pressure, though, made him confront local authorities more directly.

In 2001, Wen Jiabao, then a vice premier, now China’s prime minister, came to investigate reports of Lake Tai’s deterioration. Like most Communist Party inspection tours, word of this one reached local officials in advance. When Mr. Wen asked to see a typical dye plant, one was made ready, according to several people who witnessed the preparations.

The factory got a fresh coat of paint. The canal that ran beside it was drained, dredged and refilled with fresh water. Shortly before Mr. Wen’s motorcade arrived, workers dumped thousands of carp into the canal. Farmers were positioned along the banks holding fishing rods.

Mr. Wen spent 20 minutes there. A picture of him shaking hands with the factory boss hangs in its lobby.

Mr. Wu fired off an angry letter to Beijing recounting the ruse and warning the vice premier that he had been “deceived.” Mr. Wu circulated copies among his friends. Local officials saw it, too. Several villagers said they were warned then that they should keep a distance from Mr. Wu.

Words From Above

One summer afternoon in 2002, Mr. Wu went out on an errand and saw a banner stretched across the main road downtown. It read: “Warmly welcome the police to arrest Wu Lihong for committing blackmail in the name of environmentalism.”

Mr. Wu told friends he initially suspected that the banner was hung by local factory bosses to intimidate him. But when he went to the police to complain, he found a stack of placards with the same exhortation in the police station. The police had erected the banner themselves, and they detained him on the spot.

His family received a detention notice accusing Mr. Wu of inciting farmers to stage a public protest about pollution a few weeks earlier. The notice did not mention blackmail, as the banner had, and the police never pressed charges. He was released within two weeks.

That episode appeared to be part of an inconsistent, somewhat bumbling effort to keep Mr. Wu boxed up and harmless.

There were carrots as well as sticks. Zhang Aiguo, the chief environmental regulator in the city of Yixing, struck up a dialogue with Mr. Wu, several friends said.

Hang Yaobin, a truck driver and sundry shop owner in Zhoutie who has also pressed for better environmental controls, said Mr. Zhang told Mr. Wu that they could improve the environment together. But Mr. Wu should expose problems in other jurisdictions and should stop damaging Yixing’s reputation.

“Zhang Aiguo told him: ‘Don’t make me stink, or I’ll lose my job. Then we’ll accomplish nothing,’” Mr. Hang said.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Zhang declined to discuss his dealings with Mr. Wu in detail. But he acknowledged that the two talked regularly before he was assigned to another position in the Yixing government.

In 2003, Mr. Zhang offered Mr. Wu a business opportunity. A steel plant in Zhoutie had been ordered by environmental authorities to buy new dust-control equipment. Mr. Wu could find a vendor for the equipment and earn a handsome commission, several people told about the arrangement said.

Mr. Zhang confirmed that he told Mr. Wu of the opportunity.

Mr. Wu debated whether to accept. Mr. Hang said he advised his friend against it. “If you’re engaged in a confrontation with officials you can’t gamble, or visit prostitutes, or have any other vice,” Mr. Han said. “They are always looking for ways to get you.”

But this contract involved an environmental cleanup. And with both Mr. Wu and his wife out of work, they needed money. Mr. Wu agreed to contact a vendor recommended by Mr. Zhang.

It was not a rewarding endeavor. He brokered a contract. But the dust-control company gave him only a token advance on his promised commission. The steel plant boss, who had befriended Mr. Wu, eventually withheld part of what he owed the dust-control company to compensate Mr. Wu, according to Ms. Xu, his wife.

That was one of several muddled interactions with local officials and businessmen that did not satisfy either side. Mr. Wu remained cash-strapped. He did not stop contacting Nanjing and Beijing about pollution problems.

In 2005, he heard that the local government would be the host of a big delegation of Chinese reporters as part of the China Environmental Century Tour. He got in touch with China Central Television, the leading national broadcaster, and promised to reveal the story behind the story.

He arranged covertly for the reporters to inspect a section of the Caoqiao River that he learned the government planned to show them on the coming tour. He revealed hidden pipes that discharged black effluent from local factories into the river, which flows into Lake Tai.

The China Central Television crew later joined the Potemkin official tour. They aired a special report on “the river that goes from black to clear overnight.”

Mr. Wu was the star of that report, an environmental celebrity. Later the same year, the National People’s Congress, China’s party-run Parliament, declared him an “Environmental Warrior.”

Model City

With President Hu Jintao and Mr. Wen demanding tougher action on pollution, local officials in 2006 came under new pressure to clean up Lake Tai. Despite repeated pledges and campaigns to protect the once scenic lake, it was still rated Grade V by the State Environmental Protection Administration, the lowest level on its scale.

Yixing ordered a new crackdown on small chemical factories. It claimed to have reduced the total number by half from the peak of 2,800 in the late 1990s. The city said the industry, which once accounted for as much as 85 percent of the area’s industrial output, constituted just 40 percent in 2006.

But local officials put at least as much emphasis on fighting the perception that they had a pollution problem. They lobbied heavily for the State Environmental Protection Administration to declare it a “Model City for Environmental Protection.”

Around the same time, Wu Xijun, the Communist Party boss of Zhoutie, called Mr. Wu to his office. The two Mr. Wus, who are not related, had a “face-to-face talk” about the damage Wu Lihong’s environmental protests were doing to the area’s reputation. The party secretary then made him an offer, according to friends of Mr. Wu and an official court document that confirmed the meeting.

In March 2006, the township party committee paid Mr. Wu to promote tourism on the condition that he stop “nonfactual reporting” of pollution problems. The payments totaled about $5,000, the court document confirmed.

Mr. Wu may have toned down his protests for a time, friends said. But early this year, he learned that Yixing had won the environmental administration’s designation as a “Model City for Environmental Protection.” Enraged, he began his most assertive effort to date to embarrass local officials.

He spent weeks traveling throughout the area on his motorcycle, collecting water samples and photographing rivers and canals. He gathered data he hoped could prove that factories released most of their polluted water at night in quantities that the currents could wash away by dawn.

In April, he prepared to bring the water samples and photographic evidence to Beijing. He told friends he intended to file a lawsuit there against SEPA, the environmental administration, for its decision to honor Yixing. He never made the trip.

On the night of April 13, several dozen police and state security officers raided his farmhouse. Climbing ladders, they pried open the windows to his second-floor bedroom, arresting him and seizing documents and a computer.

Prosecutors quickly indicted Mr. Wu on two charges of blackmail. The first charge claimed that after he “gained knowledge” of a contract between the steel company and the dust-control company in 2003, he threatened to use his connections to undermine it unless the dust-control company paid him to keep quiet.

The second charge claimed that Mr. Wu extorted money from the Communist Party Committee of Zhoutie by threatening to report pollution problems.

Prosecutors revised the indictment twice in the following weeks. They dropped the charge of blackmailing the Communist Party, offering no explanation. Then they added a new charge, this one for “fraud.” It claimed that Mr. Wu had illegally aided the steel company boss in preparing false documentation to account for the money the steel company paid Mr. Wu in 2003.

The three indictments each claimed that Mr. Wu confessed to the various charges. The last week of May, with Mr. Wu in custody, Lake Tai cried for help. Nitrogen and phosphorous, the untreated residue of chemical processing, fertilizer, and sewage, built up to record levels, while rainfall fell short.

Lake Tai’s Revenge

Lake Tai had algal blooms before. This time, according to an analysis by the State Environmental Protection Administration, cyanobacteria “exploded” at rates that had not been seen in the past. Much of the lake was covered with a deep, foul-smelling canopy that left most of the 2.3 million people in Wuxi, the biggest city on the northern part of the lake, without drinking water for many days.

Local officials initially called the outbreak a “natural disaster.” But state media rushed to the scene, and some showed pictures of chemical factories dumping waste into the lake even as residents formed long lines at supermarkets to buy bottled water.

Neighboring cities shut sluice gates and canal locks to prevent contamination, creating a monumental maritime traffic jam and further reducing circulation around Lake Tai. The problem did not ease until central authorities ordered Yangtze River water diverted into the lake. Even then, the bloom lingered into late summer.

Mr. Wen convened a meeting of the State Council to discuss the matter. “The pollution of Lake Tai has sounded the alarm for us,” state media quoted him as saying. “The problem has never been tackled at its root.”

Five party and government officials in Yixing and Zhoutie, including three involved in environmental work, were dismissed or demoted. Li Yuanchao, the party boss of Jiangsu Province, vowed to clean up Lake Tai even if it meant taking a 15 percent cut to the province’s economic output. Authorities pledged to shut down hundreds of the most egregious polluters in their most sweeping crackdown to date.

Ms. Xu, Mr. Wu’s wife, said she hoped the authorities would conclude that it would be improper, or at least inconvenient, to prosecute Mr. Wu under such conditions. His trial, initially scheduled for June, was delayed, prompting speculation that someone at a higher level had intervened.

But although Mr. Wu’s arrest generated attention in both the domestic and international media, there is no indication that central government officials objected to his prosecution. On a Friday afternoon in August, the road in front of Yixing’s courthouse filled with Volkswagen Santanas, the standard-issue sedans of China’s police and security services. In a park nearby, officials hung a banner advertising the city’s new status as a “Model City for Environmental Protection.”

The evidence against Mr. Wu consisted mainly of written testimony and his own confession. The judges rejected a request by Mr. Wu’s lawyer to summon prosecution witnesses for cross-examination.

Mr. Wu told the judges in open court that the police had deprived him of food and forced him to stay awake for five days and five nights in succession, relenting only when he signed a written confession. He said that the confession was coerced and that he was innocent. The judges ruled that since Mr. Wu could not prove that he had been tortured, his confession remained valid.

Mr. Wu lost his temper. “Since I was a child I have never broken the law,” he shouted, according to relatives who attended. “If I could right now, I would like to split you in two.” He was sentenced to three years.

Shortly after the trial, Mr. Hang, the sundry shop owner and colleague of Mr. Wu, handed a reporter photos, clippings and documents collected over a decade of environmental work. He said he had no use for them now. Environmental work had become too risky.

He said he had recently seen some little fish darting around in the milky green water of a canal nearby. He took it as a good sign. “Once the white shrimp come back, that would be good,” he said. The white shrimp had not come back just yet.