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The Sino Connection, Part II

Tourism Forever
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The Great Wall at Mutianyu is a unique example of sustainable tourism in China. Home to the Schoolhouse project, it mixes shutterbug vistas with social benefits

Found: Wallet in Alpine Landfill

Greg McDonnell doesn’t dig on suits, does not feel at home swaddled in threads so strict. In fact, he doesn’t even feel at hotel, not even at slumping tree fort. A suit is simply not the dress code for his comfort zone.

But this is Beijing, and he has a presentation to make. So, clad in a blue shirt and tweed-type blazer, his tie decorated with red spots, the executive director of the Whistler Community Services Society (WCSS) takes to a podium in the B.C. Canada Pavilion and begins a stirring talk on sustainability.

This is the second stage of the Whistler Forum’s Harmony Project, a two-day affair that has a raft of delegates descend on China to exchange ideas on sustainable and accessible tourism. Yesterday’s speakers dealt with the latter topic; today’s are on the former.

Think of the Harmony Project as an open invitation to a massive and burgeoning tourist market some 8,500 km away — a stroll through the marketplace of ideas before lunch, maybe an exchange of business cards over dinner.

Slotted near the day’s end, McDonnell is one of several speakers to take to the mic. He comes on the heels of a number of presentations, some dealing with community planning, others with leadership history and progress monitoring. Though McDonnell arrives late in the program, his presentation serves up an ideal summation of a hazy buzzword: Sustainability.

Sustainability, he says, is a complicated fabric, something sewn in social, economic, environmental and cultural threads. Taken together, those threads produce a warm blanket, something for locals and tourists alike. Whether Chinese or Canadian, it just makes sense, both for prosperity and for longevity.

“Currently,” he says, fingers drumming the podium, “as you all know, the world economy cannot sustain itself indefinitely. We have this decline in life-sustaining resources, the world’s resources. And we have an increased demand on those resources. As humans we’re living here trying to survive this narrowing action.”

His fingers stop their nervous patter and his arms go momentarily akimbo. All heads are cocked in his direction, translations chattering through earphones as he goes.

Now, at home with his subject, relaxation takes hold. “This is really important for me,” he continues, “as a community development worker and as a social services worker.”

That suit, rich in value, came sweet on the cheap. The lifeblood of WCSS is the Re-Use-It Centre in Function Junction, and the heart pumping that blood is something called a cyclic economy.

“The idea on the table was we’d create this Re-Use-It Centre to recycle the things in our economy, keep them out of the landfill, sell them and in fact fund social programs,” he explains. “Does that contribute anything? These are questions I ask myself quite often. And I can tell you: In a small world, it does.”

That’s a theme McDonnell often hits on when explaining his work. It’s not a foreign idea to the Chinese – they have a convention coming up in October – but, at the same time, it doesn’t resonate in quite the same way as it does with McDonnell. Still, for him, it’s all about the micro, and, if enough people think that way, changes go macro.

For WCSS, it’s been working well. The organization funds 75 per cent of its 25 social programs through the Centre. It diverts 205 tonnes of material from the landfill, raking in $550,000 in the process. The Centre and the programs it helps fund are invaluable to the transient worker community that tends to define much of the Sea to Sky corridor, especially Whistler.

“It’s not unlike the migratory workforce that I hear about in Beijing,” McDonnell says, “people who come from outlying communities and arrive in Beijing to help build your hotels and what not.”

Wanted: Used Red Stars

The Harmony Project has two key components. One is to exchange ideas, and the other is to build relationships. Given that rapport is almost a natural part of intellectual human interaction, the latter is less difficult. But the former is far more daunting, especially when participating histories, economies and cultures are rooted in such different soils.

The Global Village of Beijing is one of China’s first non-governmental organizations. It works to bring enterprise, government and citizen action groups together in shared responsibility for the environment.

That will be hard work. Seven of the world’s 10 most polluted cities are in China. Eighty per cent of urban sewage is pumped straight into lakes and rivers without treatment. Car culture is crazed and growing, and last year international media reports placed China above the U.S. as the world’s biggest producer of carbon dioxide. In the run up to the Olympics, the country’s single biggest tourist event to date, officials searched desperately for ways to clean the sky, even as 560 million of its nationwide urban population sucked in air deemed unfit by the European Union.

According to a report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a handful of consultants, China steers about 80 per cent of its waste into landfills, only five per cent of which meet American standards, while 50 per cent are just open, stinking dumps. The government is aware of the problem and is trying to address it through the National Action Plan on Urban Solid Waste Landfill Gas Collection and Utilization.

Maybe, McDonnell figures, a plan like his could help. Maybe, if a series of Re-Use-It Centres sprung up around Beijing and other major urban centres, something special could be sewn from the four threads of sustainability.

But maybe not.

Lin Wenshan works with the Global Village. A thin man with slight stubble and greyish clothes, he shifts back and forth on his brown loafers while talking. There are attitudes to change, he says, a lot of them – nearly 1.3 billion.

“Here, people don’t separate their trash,” Wenshan says. “They take stuff and throw it away on the streets. There’s enough poor people that some of it doesn’t even make it to landfill.”

In China, everything works on a larger scale. While some waste may not make it to landfill, a good deal obviously does. Meanwhile, when poor people scavenge alleyways on their bikes, the socio-economic principles of McDonnell’s sustainability philosophy are lost. Those principles, at least when manifested in the context of a Re-Use-It Centre, might not be a fit for China.

“People are concerned about face and the image they put out,” says Wenshan. “There are some people who would buy second hand, but those with increasing income would not.”

And others can get it free on the streets. So, he continues, the government would have to sanction a different approach.

“It’s possible, and it’s something that should be done. But without the government mandating that people do things, it would be hard to set up.”

Bend It Like Brown

Bespectacled Bill Brown radiates quiet and calm. One of the Harmony Project’s key coordinators, he can be seen throughout the Pavilion, in restaurants or along Beijing’s frenetic streets, here giving pins to children, there photographing delegates, here listening attentively to a presentation, there entering a book store in search of information.

He’s the lead planner with the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW), and part of his mandate in Beijing is to showcase the Whistler 2020 framework for community sustainability. When Brown gets in front of an audience, a change comes over him: His personality becomes more dominant, and his sense of humour shines.

“I don’t really like the word sustainability very much,” he says. “It’s a concept. It’s difficult to define, and you can’t really tell if you’ve achieved much. But we use the word anyway.”

Like McDonnell, Brown imagines sustainability as a layered concept, an idea, however vague, that involves culture, economics, socialism and environmentalism. Through Whistler 2020, which, despite the title, aims to have the town sustainable by 2060, Brown’s department and others in the RMOW work towards a specific set of priorities: enrich the environment, improve the resort experience for locals and tourists, improve the environment, partner with others, and ensure economic viability.

“The big thing that happened in Whistler,” explains Brown, “is the community said we want to do something. If a community in China says, ‘Yes, we want to buy in,’ then it will be successful. It has to be grassroots. It has to be the citizens saying, ‘We want to change. We want to do something.’”

Eventually, says Brown, the municipality will have nothing to do with Whistler 2020. It will be purely grassroots.

There are two men in black shirts seated in the audience. One of them is young, the other a few decades older. Both are white, though they seem to understand Mandarin as easily as they do English. The older one speaks first. He is bald and stocky, though his voice sounds soft, almost childish, beneath the tone of incredulity.

“Nothing happens here without the government being first, last and always,” he says. “You have this wonderful idea that people are very excited about, have the government involved all along and now you want the government out of it.”

The second man also seems sceptical.

“How do you develop these partnerships?” he asks, noting that his community doesn’t have the educational pedigree that exists in Whistler.

In short, these two men feel the model of Whistler 2020 is not applicable to China. It’s too grassroots for a country with such an unbending bureaucracy. There’s too much poverty to draw in the plethora of educated minds that bore out Whistler 2020. Further, partnership opportunities are few.

At this point, another Whistler delegate pipes up. Dave Williamson is the president of Cascade Environmental, a consulting company that works with government, developers and resort operators. He urges delegates to consider the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) building code, criteria many developers strive towards.

“The templates abound,” Williamson says. “They’re out there in the world. One of the things we’ve encountered in Whistler is that LEED is an American model, developed in the Midwest, where there are no mountains.”

And so some Whistler buildings label themselves LEED equivalent, meaning builders work with the lay of the land to achieve what they can. It’s a sort of bending process favoured by Brown.

“You take the ideas and transform them into something that fits into your culture, time and place,” he says.

Off The Wall

Jim Spear married his Mandarin tutor 27 years ago. So open a new book, a story both convoluted and compelling, one that took him from California to Mutianyu, with a stop over in the B.C. Canada Pavilion, where the idea of Whistler 2020 struck him as so foreign.

“It’s a very small scale business,” he says, holding court over lunch. “You’ve heard of chickens with their heads cut off?”

He’s talking about his own tourism operation. Mutianyu is a Great Wall town. It’s about an hour outside of Beijing, a galaxy of calm separating the two. Spear took a shine to it in the late ‘80s, just a guy roaming around curious. He fell in to conversation with a merchant, expressed an interest in living here, and was connected with a real estate opportunity.

“It was still quite a closed society,” he says.

But he squirreled his way in just the same. Meanwhile, locals worried for their way of life, much of it hinging on the flogging of souvenirs to Great Wall wanderers. But tourists were getting scarce, and young people were leaving in leagues. And so someone suggested Spear give back at least as much as what he got.

“We came up with this crackpot idea of taking over the abandoned schoolhouse and starting this operation.”

It’s called the Schoolhouse at Mutianyu Great Wall. The actual schoolhouse is a banquet hall and art shop, with blown glass as the focus. Vases, bowls, plates and figurines line shelves in the gallery, and here and there throughout the courtyard are bowls of water filled with glass pebbles, all of this crafted in a basement blow room by local artists. Food is western, though ingredients are sourced locally whenever possible. Employees are also local.

“We didn’t start off with a big philosophy,” Spear says. “A lot of you people from Whistler, from what I hear, you didn’t start off with a big philosophy, either. You started thinking a lot about what would work. We can learn a lot from you.”

And Whistler stands to learn from them. The enterprise extends beyond the gates of the schoolhouse, includes three restaurants and a series of vacation homes. Existing buildings, many of them run down to ramshackle, are renovated and restored, then rented out to tourists. Although none of the rental proceeds, which are substantial, end up in community programming, the operation still draws a crowd. And every crowd has its spenders, exactly the kind of people village merchants feared extinct.

“One of the parts of sustainability is using existing footprints,” says Spear. “All these workers are local workers, and they’re beginning to learn new skills.”

Off the main road, which slowly rambles up to the Great Wall, workers form furniture, pony walls and other structures, the air they breathe markedly cleaner than the smoggy fair in Beijing. Also in contrast to Beijing is the soothing calm of the place, clotheslines shifting in the wind as villagers amble slowly past.

Energy efficiency is part of the mandate. The light standards are fitted with solar panels, and most every roof in town has a black pipe contraption that heats water with the benefit of the sun.

Of course, all this exists only tentatively. Even though this is a national park, there’s nothing in place to prevent a resort developer from swooping low and building high. Things could go Whistler unaffordable at the swing of a hammer, especially if government mandarins become interested. But Spear shrugs that off; it hasn’t happened yet, he says. He’s more focused on the present, which, despite his pessimism at the B.C. Canada Pavilion, is inspired by the same ethos propelling Whistler 2020.

“It’s what we hope to be a model for sustainable development based on tourism,” he says.

Fitting that all this goes down in the shadow of the Great Wall. That thing, marvel though it is, never actually kept anyone out. Rather, it was probably more of a transportation corridor, a high road across rocky terrain.

Sino Connected

A funny thing? Spear has been to Whistler – several times. His daughter goes to UBC. But he never knew anything about the place, just drove through it, took in some scenery and then went back down to the city. It took a trip to China to point out some of the Sea to Sky corridor’s more lofty goals.

If it’s all about linkages, and it is, there are many to celebrate. There’s Greg McDonnell, the man in the second-hand suit who galvanized his audience, both Chinese and Canadian, probably more than any other Forum delegate. And then over to Wenshan, who liked McDonnell’s ideas and struggled to apply them to the world he knows. There are the similarities between Whistler and Mutianyu, the gentle hills and climbing peaks, the unique tourist opportunities, and the potential for the whole thing to swan dive at the feet of irresponsible development.

There’s a group of people coming from one place, from one history, and making their way to another place, another history, in the process new people promising to do the same.

And then there’s affable Bill Brown, no longer the centre of attention and quiet once again. He’s standing in the lobby of Hotel Beijing. Under his arm is a bundle of paperwork, and the most noticeable document is his prized planning booklet.

“I’m waiting for someone who couldn’t make it to the Pavilion,” he says happily. “We’re going to talk about Whistler 2020.”



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