Grasslands Route Volunteers Team Up with American High School Students!September 1, 2009

The GLM Grasslands Route volunteers in Baotou had a special opportunity to team up with a group of high school students from Americans Promoting Study Abroad (APSA) to organize an environmental awareness campaign and visit a Green Seed Award site. The high schoolers were selected by APSA as being high-achieving students from inner-city school systems on the east coast of the United States. All ten have been studying Chinese language in the states and the summer program in Beijing allows them their first chance to travel to the Middle Kingdom and put their skills to use.

The first activity was a site visit to Yongfeng Village outside of Baotou where a student at Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology, Zhang Zongshuai, received a small grant to carry out his Green Seed Award project. Nearly ninety percent of households in the village are making use of renewable energies—especially methane gas tanks, solar cookers and solar hot water heaters—and they are the topic of his interest. The team visited the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lu who are using all of the above technologies on their small farm where they grow tomatoes, corn, eggplant, and pears. The American students were able to see first-hand these technologies that are making China’s rural areas especially progressive in their generation and use of energy. “This family is using technologies I have never even seen in the US such as solar hot water heaters. It makes me realize how much is being done here [in China],” said APSA student Briana Marshall from Atlanta.

In the afternoon, Future Generations China staff organized an interactive activity that allowed the Chinese and American students to talk about issues related to environmental protection and climate change. Questions were posed to the group and they were to physically move themselves on a green space that represented a scale indicating their agreement or disagreement with a given statement. Afterwards, a “future mapping” activity gave them the chance to graphically depict an ideal relationship between the US and China regarding the environment. The multi-cultural atmosphere provided a unique opportunity for students to stimulate conversation about the environment. Many from the group admitted that they will be much more interested in seeing what comes of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen that will take place in December.