A village-level association in the Tibet Autonomous Region is hoping to reach a wider audience for an annual journal of Tibetan language materials about environmental protection.
Six years ago, the 1,347 Tibetan residents of Tserangding, a cluster of 13 hamlets in Gonjo County, Chamdo prefecture, Tibet Autonomous Prefecture, established a community organisation called the Voluntary Environmental Protection Association of Kham Anchung Senggenamzong.
The community association has a dual focus on environmental conservation and the preservation and enrichment of Tibetan culture. Located in an area of extraordinary biodiversity, the villagers' activities have included planting more than four hundred thousand trees on their own initiative, patrolling and preventing outsiders from coming to village lands to hunt and fish, monitoring wildlife numbers, cleaning up garbage, and most recently, environmental education through village essay contests, as well as environmental skits and games at their yearly summer festival.
The villages also have a tradition of collecting medicinal plants which are made into medicines and distributed free of charge, and of home schooling in Tibetan language. The latter has produced an extraordinarily high literacy rate in Tibetan, particularly considering the remoteness of the area and its lack of state services and infrastructure such as electricity and high-quality schools.
One of the groups' projects, which combines the goals of environmental protection and Tibetan education, is an environmental journal that one of the organizers, Rinchen Samdrup (ไป้ๆก็ ), has been producing for the past three years. This yearly journal is a compilation of Tibetan language selections about the environment ranging from quotes from religious texts to news from the Internet, translations of Chinese law, and the villagers' own essays.
The journal is distributed to villagers to raise awareness and knowledge of the environment.
By making important contemporary issues available in Tibetan, the journal not only reaches an audience that is otherwise unable to access information about the environment, but also encourages a view of Tibetan as being a suitable and useful language for the modern world.
The community association is now seeking funding to continue its environmental activities, and in particular, to produce and distribute their environmental journals on a wider scale across Tibetan-speaking areas of China.
Report by Emily Yeh, September 6, 2006