Vanessa's Journal

Dec. 29

Today Lao Wang and I hiked back up to Wuyipeng.  It was a beautiful day and it was good to come back.  I decided that it would be a good day to do laundry.  This is a first for me since I’ve been in China.  My field assistants all laugh at my lack of personal hygiene and I think they were all secretly relieved that I finally got on the laundry bandwagon. 

They reported that things with the cages are the same as usual.  The squirrels are still eating more than their share of meat and we haven’t trapped a panda yet.  The blood pheasants are still around and don’t seem to be scared off by our walking the trails every day.  They are planning on placing the new meat in areas surrounding each cage in a triangle configuration tomorrow, as suggested by our colleagues in the Ecology Office, in hopes of luring the pandas in.  We will wait for news of the new cages in the mean time. 

Today marks one month since I left the US (on November 29th).  Time has gone by so fast.  But I’ve enjoyed this winter immensely so far and am excited to see how things turn out.  I will be here until at least Feb. 29th, so that’s two more months.  It can only get more interesting from here on out.

Dec. 30

Today I did a lot of writing, which was nice.  The paper I’ve been working on is finished, at least in its first draft form.  I’ve also been reading a new book called “Evening Thoughts- Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community” by Thomas Berry.  It is a visionary book about redesigning the role of humans in the biosphere as more respectful and less destructive toward the environment.  It is powerful to read from a place like Wuyipeng.  At night I talked to my parents. My mom lamented the lack of attention that the environment is getting in the latest primary elections.  The blindness that particularly the U.S. possesses with regard to our current apocalyptic environmental problems is absolutely staggering.  It’s mind-boggling to me, as it is to Thomas Berry, that humans could be so ingenious to design the advanced technologies that we have created in the modern era but at the same time be so blind to how our actions effect other living beings on the planet.  Our arrogance is just so overwhelming at times.  And throughout the day today, I periodically heard loud booming noises that were deafening even at the secluded Wuyipeng field station.  The noise was from the local rock harvesting expeditions that have been going on where people blow up chunks of mountain near the road to go use to build things.   Somehow, all I could think of was what the pandas’ reaction to the noise was.  Did they nearly jump out of their skin like I did? Did they run up the nearest tree or did they sit there just waiting for the ground to drop out from under them?