Last year, China gazetted its first national parks.
Everything about China is super-sized: The five new parks, which in some cases stitched together an older patchwork of conservation zones, sprawl across more than 88,800 square miles of territory—a protected area more than 25 times the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States.
The rainy, mountainous Labahe Conservation Area, in Giant Panda National Park, was the site of the first storytelling workshop co-taught by the Out f Eden Walk in China.
Photo by Sun Xiaodong
China’s newly minted national parks don’t just safeguard famous keystone species such as Siberian tigers, giant pandas and Hainan gibbons. They are also designed to preserve the shrinking ecosystems that support such iconic wildlife, ranging from sweltering (tropical jungles in the southern province of Hainan to the chilly maple forests of northern Heilongjiang and Jilin Provinces bordering Siberia. As in any country, getting human buy-in for such protected spaces is essential. Visitors and local populations need to comprehend—and support—the importance of setting aside lands for biodiversity. And this is where the Out of Eden Walk project, which is currently pacing off 3,500 miles of trail across the Middle Kingdom, paused its GPS to help out.
In August, we partnered with the National Geographic Society and the Chinese Forestry and Grasslands Administration—the agency managing the new park system—to train local and provincial park staff in the art of “slow storytelling.” Our goal: Teach immersive writing and photography techniques to better equip park workers with the narrative skills needed to deepen public awareness about pressing conservation issues in China.
“Preparing the workshop participants for temporary failure, allowing them to get lost and in trouble, was part of the process,” said Sun Xiadong, a veteran documentary photographer who helped teach the four-day session. “We encouraged them to be creative, to work out field problems by themselves. This sort of thing was new to many of them.”
Trainee writer Liang Xue reports on a field trip in Giant Panda National Park.
Photo by Sun Xiaodong
Indeed, the workshop’s 12 trainees were forest rangers and office workers who were composing their first multimedia stories. Gathered at the remote Labahe Conservation Area, in Giant Panda National Park in Sichuan province, they slogged through rain-drenched forests, scrambled 1,500 feet down muddy mountain trails, stalked and photographed red pandas and water deer, and battled leeches. Each 12-hour day included lectures on everything from interview techniques to sensory writing to wildlife photography. Reporting trips required navigating around road-blocking landslides.
Workshop teacher Xi Zhinong, perhaps China’s most accomplished wildlife photographer, inspired the fledgling storytellers with his years of pioneering advocacy for conservation in China. They responded by producing in-depth stories about everything from the daily life of park rangers to ecological woes associated with deer overpopulation.
“I really felt the vastness of nature and the insignificance of human beings,” said a park service worker named Liang Xue. “I thought to myself, ‘Thank you nature for tolerating human beings and tolerating our harm.’”
Liang wrote a melancholy portrait of a forest ranger who scaled the mountains of Giant Panda National Park to set up camera traps, baffling his 21-year-old daughter, who “like many young people in China is not at all interested in her father's work.” Another workshop participant, Renqing Ruo’erma, looked down at her feet to photograph the miniature world of mosses and insects on the forest floor at Labahe. Labahe’s field biologist, Yin Housheng, wrote how, in forests overgrazed by deer, “dew condensed on the tips of arrow bamboo leaves, like a little point of starlight in the river of the sky.”
Using the senses in descriptive writing: one lesson of the storytelling workshop.
Photo by Sun Xiaodong
More storytelling workshops are planned at national parks along the walking route for the frontline defenders of China’s—really, the world’s—biotic heritage.
“Despite having heard and read each of the trainees' stories during and after the training, each final draft still draws my attention,” said Tian Yanfang, a Forestry and Grasslands administrator who hopes that deeper, slower narratives can help build popular enthusiasm for national parks in China. “These stories present many unexpected surprises.”
Tian practiced what she admired. She surprised us all by joining the Out of Eden Walk herself through 20 miles of Sichuan.
Tokens of shared toil: gifts exchanged at the conclusion of four long days of immersive storytelling training in Giant Panda National Park.
Photo by Sun Xiaodong
