Pushed up the Mountain

Dialogue & Text

                                                             

 

Text card: Line Street Productions presents a film by Julia Haslett

 

Text card: If you do not change direction, you are likely to end up where you are headed.

                                    ~Lao-Tzu, Chinese Philosopher

                                       6^th century BCE

 

Text card: Scottish Highlands

 

I’ve been coming to this place since I was a child.

 

Sometimes it’s felt like a refuge during periods in my life when a sense of home was particularly elusive.

 

It’s here where I got my introduction to nature conservation from my Scottish godfather who’s always had a thing for rhododendrons.

 

David Younger: Setting seed takes a lot of energy and if a plant flowers with lots and lots of flowers it’ll actually kill itself trying to set all the seeds.

 

We would spend days in his garden, which is a small part of a country estate that his family gave to Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden in the 1920s.

 

When I was young, rhododendrons looked primordial to me. I imagined dinosaurs wandering through their midst.

 

David Younger: Um, this is quite interesting up here where you’ve got a rhododendron called calophytum which is actually quite tender. The mummy has been here for about 80 years and the son here is now the same height as the mother although he’s only a quarter the age of mummy. And here’s a daughter here striving to catch up. These are all natural seedlings. She’s so prolific nature.

 

I was surprised when he told me most of the plants in his garden were originally brought from China over a hundred years ago. They were the fruit of Britain’s colonial exploits.

 

I quickly learned that over 30,000 plant species are native to China.

 

Great Britain has only 1,400.  

 

Many of these plants ended up at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh which amassed the largest collection of Chinese plants outside China.

  

David Chamberlain: And I will bring up fletcherianum.

 

Rhododendron expert David Chamberlain has worked here since the ‘70s. He told me a story about finding one rhododendron species that’s now endangered in the wild.

 

David Chamberlain: We were on the Yunnan-Tibet border on one of our expeditions and we found the plant. And I’m very proud of myself, I was the first person to see it. We knew it was exceptionally rare, and in this case a single fire might knock it out.

 

David Chamberlain: My feelings are they should be protected at all costs.

 

He went on to say that he and a group of Chinese scientists collaborated to bring some threatened rhododendrons back from Great Britain to their native China.

 

At a time of unprecedented destruction of the natural world,what can the journey of one migrating plant tell us about our entangled relationship with nature?

 

That question propelled me to the other side of the world.

 

One of the first people I speak to in China is environmental historian Zhou Qiong.

 

Zhou Qiong: We find it shocking. The road we are taking now is like the road the West took after the Industrial Revolution, a road of environmental degradation.

 

Does the rhododendron’s story offer hope that we can actually come together to protect nature—our collective home? 

 

Text Card: Pushed up the Mountain

 

Mountains and highland terrain cover two thirds of China.

 

They’re home to the majority of rhododendron species on the planet along with an astonishing array of plant diversity.

 

China’s mountains have attracted countless artists and, in recent decades, residents of urban centers along with the odd foreigner like me.

 

Hou Shen: Human history was not just made by humans. It’s always the history of the interaction between culture and nature.

 

Hou Shen is an environmental historian who writes about nature conservation in China and the US.

 

Hou Shen: The traditional Chinese way of enjoying nature, you go to a mountain and your servant would carry your stuff with you. And you’d…Of course, that’s very pleasant. You make a poem here, you have a drink there. 

 

Hou Shen: But the problem is, in this modern version, it becomes something very different.

 

Hou Shen: They want to get to see those places, but that does not mean they want to experience nature in a way of preserving nature.

 

Before images of dense air pollution started to emerge from Beijing in the 2000s, these were the most powerful visual associations I had with China––a grand mountain landscape with falling water and somewhere a tiny human figure.

 

Elaine Tann: Chinese philosophy describes a world where human beings are part of nature. Traditionally Chinese people revered nature especially in landscape paintings. Painters want to demonstrate nature’s magnificence so we call humans ornaments in these paintings.

 

Taiwan’s National Palace Museum has the largest collection of Chinese art in the world.

 

Elain Tann is one of the museum’s curators.

 

Elaine Tann: This looks more like a peony.

 

Elaine Tann: This looks like a rhododendron. This is good. It has a graceful bearing.

 

Despite all the rhododendron species in China, we can only find a handful of rhododendron paintings but there are a lot of other plants!

 

Museum curators sometimes need help identifying all these plants.

 

Pan Fu-Junn: When they enjoy or see the painting, they see everything there. They like to recognize everything there. Like this is a horse, this is what, this is what? And then, what is this?! That is plant. 

 

Pan Fu-Junn is a botanist and literary scholar.

 

Pan Fu-Junn: When reading Chinese literature, I found out that more than half of literature was related to plants. If you don’t know about the plants, you don’t understand literature.

 

Pan Fu-Junn: I set up a section in Taipei Botanical Garden called Plants in the Book of Songs.

 

Pan Fu-Junn: People got interested in it.

 

I ask him about the meaning of specific plants in China’s centuries-old artistic traditions.

 

Pan Fu-Junn: Starting in the Tang Dynasty poets would use rhododendrons when they wanted to express sorrow.

 

Pan Fu-Junn: Bamboo has moral integrity. Chinese intellectuals regard themselves as bamboo. Pine trees and cypress trees don’t wither in winter. Intellectuals see themselves as pine or cypress. They are saying that no matter how bad things get, they will not change.

 

How did we get to this point where nature no longer represents resilience?

 

The British went looking for plants in China at the height of the British Empire. When these photos were taken, Britain controlled over a quarter of the world’s population.

 

Britain’s Industrial Revolution was in full swing, setting in motion a rise in global temperatures.

 

Many plants from China ended up in the gardens of the well-to-do who were especially dazzled by the rhododendron’s colorful flowers.

 

Rhododendrons thrived in Scotland’s damp climate.

 

Today, descendants of those original plants are at the center of a conservation plan that my godfather and a group of Scottish rhododendron enthusiasts are working on in his garden.

 

David Younger: Now Ian, I’m with you. What are you going to show me?

 

Ian Sinclair: Just go through to your left.

 

Horticulturist Ian Sinclair is a driving force behind the project.

 

Ian Sinclair: I would say there’s a blotch in there.

 

David Younger: I would say so too. Fascinating.

 

Ian Sinclair: Well it doesn’t really help us.

 

David Younger: No, it doesn’t. Well it wouldn’t have helped us if it didn’t have a blotch.

 

Ian Sinclair: The flower’s lower down.

 

Ian Sinclair: That’s thoroughly attractive.

 

David Chamberlain: Well let’s have a look at the one down the bottom.

 

David Chamberlain: Looks like campylocarpum.

 

Ian Sinclair: Too pointy.

 

Ian Sinclair: Campylocarpum can’t have no glands I thought it was up to a quarter…

 

David Chamberlain: No, it can.

 

Ian Sinclair: It can? Ovary?

 

David Chamberlain: That’s the nearest I can give you.

 

Ian Sinclair: Campylocarpum aff.

 

David Younger: Right!

 

Ian Sinclair: We needed to have something that was a separate organization to look after this beautiful wonderful genus rhododendron. And that’s why we’re recording, plant by plant, exactly what’s here.

 

Ian Sinclair: That’s bracchycarpum 280 now.

 

Ian Sinclair: We know from fossil records that before India collided with Eurasia that genus existed. So, in each interglacial period what has happened is, over thousands and thousands of years, the plants have been able to migrate, generation by generation, down or back up again, as the ice age retreats. So the genus rhododendron has been through all of that until man eventually fucks the whole thing as we know.

 

I’d never heard someone talk about plants with as much concern as Ian Sinclair, until I met Sun Weibang.

 

He’s a researcher at the Kunming Institute of Botany in China’s biodiverse southwest.

 

Sun Weibang: They found the biggest rhododendron in Yunnan province. This is the biggest one in the world. Now there are only one, two locations in Yunnan province, less than 200 individuals in the wild.

 

He tells me rhododendron species range in size from 4 inches to almost a hundred feet!

 

Sun Weibang: Every day I come to see this plant. To see how it’s growing.

 

Wen: He takes care of this plant as his daughter.

 

Soon our tour expands beyond just rhododendrons.

 

Sun Weibang: This is a very unique conifer. We found about ten individuals in Guangxi Province. 

 

Sun Weibang: This one is extinct in the wild. Only under cultivation.

 

Julia: Extinct?

 

Sun Weibang: Extinct in the wild, yeah.

 

Julia: What caused it to go extinct?

 

Sun Weibang: Because of the damage of the construction. The habitat changed.

 

Can you imagine human beings down to just ten individuals?

 

I go on an expedition with conservationist Fang Zhedong and his team who are looking for a rhododendron species first collected by Scotsman George Forrest in 1917. It hasn’t been seen in years.

 

Finally, Fang emerges.

 

Julia: What did you discover?

 

Fang: It’s also rhododendron delavayi.

 

He can only find another similar-looking species.

 

He goes to ask some local people if they’ve seen this plant.

 

Fang: This flower is thinner

 

Old Man: The trumpet-like flower is smaller.

 

Lisu woman in yellow: If rhododendron is red it’s not edible.

 

Woman (off cam): How many have we cut down for burning wood?

 

Fang: Is it far? Maybe we can go take a look?

 

Fang: They say they have seen some plants that look like the other one.

 

Fang: The hope of finding that rhododendron is slim.

 

Fang tells me the rhododendron’s root system has helped prevent deadly mudslides in this mountainous region for millions of years.

 

Fang: I just saw there was a hydroelectric power station being constructed. It will flood here,

 

Ranger: The dam will not flood up here.

 

Fang: No?

 

Wen: How big is it?

 

Ranger: I don’t know its size.

 

Wen: But many plants are already gone.

 

Fang: If we could protect the rhododendron’s habitat first, the ecosystem of the whole region would be protected.

 

Text Card: Chengdu, Southwest China

 

Given the rhododendron’s importance, who else in China is bringing attention to it?

 

I arrange a meeting with Geng Yuying who’s written the first comprehensive book in China about rhododendrons.

 

She suggests we meet at a museum devoted to a famous poet who wrote many poems about them.

 

YG: Rhododendron is a special plant. But in the West they researched it more and started 100 years earlier. For this book, I looked at about 100,000 specimens, sitting with a magnifying glass to review them one by one. Some characteristics weren’t clear on the dry specimens. I had to see them in the wild.

 

Geng brings me to the rhododendron conservation garden she helped start in the 1980s. It’s one of only two of its kind in the country.

 

Geng Yuying: I didn’t know much about rhododendrons when I first got to Huaxi Botanic Garden.

 

Geng Yuying: Like most people in China, I didn’t have a way to see rhododendrons in the remote mountains. But as I went out to collect seeds, it was very interesting and fun to see different colors and sizes, its biodiversity in the wild.

 

Geng Yuying: Some alpine species are used to cure cardiovascular disease.

 

Geng Yuying: Some poisonous species can be made into pesticide.

 

Geng Yuying: This is a new species from Chamberlain. What’s its name? That’s probably the one I’m talking about if it came from Tibet.

 

Zhang Chao: It came from Tibet in 2010.

 

Geng Yuying: I felt a sacred duty to bring our rhododendrons back to our own gardens.

 

Geng collaborated with David Chamberlain to bring endangered Chinese species to this garden from Scotland.

 

Geng Yuying: There was a gate here. The words were carved The Returning Garden.

 

Geng Yuying: All these are from Edinburgh.

 

Geng Yuying: Most of what is in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is originally from China… I have complicated feelings about that.

 

Geng Yuying: What’s important now is to shift our attention to our nation and not species abroad because their material is actually ours.

 

It makes sense that Geng would feel possessive of plants native to China.

 

But should any country be able to claim a part of nature as its own?

 

That’s of course the project of empire––of humans seeing nature as a natural resource to exploit and profit from.

 

Nothing symbolizes that more than this plant––the poppy.

 

In the 19^th century, Britain and China fought two wars over opium derived from poppies. British traders wanted to keep selling opium to the Chinese who were facing an addiction crisis.

 

China suffered a humiliating defeat and was forced to grant Britain more access to its ports and interior, as well as give up the island of Hong Kong.

 

The deeper I dig, the more I uncover about the legacy of colonialism on this story of conservation.

 

Wang Fei: 215, 219. Here it is.

 

Wang Fei: This specimen was collected by George Forrest. The collection date is 1914. Its Latin name is Rhododendron facetum.

 

Wang Fei is an engineer at the Kunming Institute of Botany’s herbarium.

 

Wang Fei: Balfour is a famous Scottish botanist.

 

Wang Fei: This was sent to our herbarium as a gift from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Specimens collected by early British collectors are in Britain. European herbariums have backups, but there are few in China.

 

This means Chinese researchers have to leave their country in order to learn more about it.

 

Wang Fei: We need research the routes collectors took 100 years ago. Where and when did they collect? 

 

Wang Fei: If we don’t go back we might never find the species because the environment has changed or been damaged.

 

Photos taken by foreign plant collectors help document plant loss and receding glaciers not even a hundred years later.

 

Growing at high altitudes, rhododendrons are particularly susceptible to climate change. As the planet grows warmer, they are being “pushed up the mountain” in search of cooler temperatures.  

 

Eventually, there will be no place left for them to go. 

 

I continue to shadow Fang Zhedong and his team as they evaluate rhododendrons in the wild.

 

Fang: Many plants have foreign names because they were collected by foreign plant hunters. Because no one described or recorded them before researchers label them as a new species.

 

Fang: Local people know the species already but researchers don’t know what they named them.

 

Researchers wrote up their findings devoid of this context and their authoritative texts got consulted the world over.

 

This erasure of indigenous knowledge continues today with majority Han Chinese scientists who repeat the same practices.

 

Indigenous people appear in many photographs taken by foreign plant hunters in southwest China. Archivist Leonie Paterson went to see the places where Scotsman George Forrest collected.

 

Leonie Paterson: I did a lot of taking photographs of mountainsides in the hope that would help me identify some of his photographs. Which it didn’t.

 

Leonie Paterson: This is a lovely photograph showing one of Forrest’s collectors. Very rarely do we find the names of these men…

 

Leonie Paterson: That’s what got me into the Forrest collection. We’d had an inquiry from one of the collector’s granddaughters. He Wei Min was the name of her grandfather. Did we have any photographs of him? And I couldn’t answer it. Because I thought maybe we do?

 

Leonie Paterson: It’s frustrating not to be able to answer questions like that.

 

The men Leonie is unable to identify lived in China’s mountainous borderlands alongside Myanmar and Tibet.

 

As a performer, Yuqin Li works to preserve her traditional Naxi culture whose language contains the only living hieroglyphic script in the world. The song she sings is a love song about rhododendrons.

 

This couple is here to get their wedding photos taken amidst the purple rhododendrons.

 

Yuqin Li: Naxi are hardworking people. We don’t have a lot of leisure time to enjoy flowers or entertainment, especially Naxi women. We find passion for flowers in daily life and put them in clothing design.

 

I keep looking for more people and places in China that celebrate and give meaning to nature. That’s because I believe art and culture are our best defense against the dominance of technology and extractive capitalism. It seems like China’s ancient traditions are still the best source for that.

 

Geng and her colleague Zhang Chao bring me to this temple to show me how rhododendrons got their Chinese name.

 

Zhang Chao: When cuckoo chirps at midnight in Cuckoo City, the sound spreads far. The bells are ringing and people are woken up to farm. 

 

Geng Yuying: This is about Emperor Wang Du Yu after he was reborn as a bird.

 

The myth goes on to say the cuckoo chirped so hard he spat up blood and that blood is what made rhododendrons red, and gave them the name: “cuckoo flower.”

 

 

Geng Yuying:Someone also said…

 

Geng tells me a different version where the Emperor goes off to war and hasn’t come back for ten years. Distraught his wife goes looking for him and eventually becomes a cuckoo and calls out for him. She calls so hard her mouth starts to bleed and dyes the rhododendrons red.

 

Geng takes me to another culturally significant place.

 

Geng Yuying: Emei Mountain is the most important plant ecosystem in China. It has more than 3,000 species.

 

Mt Emei has so many plants because it’s a famous Buddhist mountain and Buddhism, like China’s Daoist tradition emphasizes a harmonious relationship between humans and nature.

 

This makes religious sites some of the best protected natural areas in the country.

 

Geng Yuying: This one is quite big.

 

Zhang Chao: Rhododendron.

 

Geng Yuying: This is a very rare species. You only find it in Sichuan, only find it in Emei Mountain just now.

 

Through her work on rhododendrons Geng met her Scottish husband who’s pictured here holding a rhododendron leaf.

 

He died just a year before she brought me to Emei Mountain.

 

Geng Yuying: But when I came here in 2012, it was just for few days holiday. He always wanted to come because it’s a very famous mountain. He thinks it’s the last time maybe he can come to China. We came here and spent two nights.

 

Text Card: Difficult Road to Sichuan, Xie Shichen

 

The Himalayan Mountains region began forming 50 million years ago.

 

That’s young compared to the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina, the state where I live. They began their ascent 480 million years ago. When the Earth had just one huge super continent, Pangaea, the Appalachians were at its center, and they stretched all the way to what is now Scotland.  It turns out this region has the highest concentration of native rhododendrons in North America.

 

Seeing them here is strangely moving. They’re testament to how plant life connects countries and people even when our species is so divided.

 

Rhododendrons date back almost as far as the dinosaurs, at least 55 million years. Our species has been here a mere 200,000 and now their survival depends upon how much we value them.

 

Originally brought to the UK from its native Turkey, rhododendron ponticum is known as an aggressive colonizer.

 

Ian Sinclair: Rhododendron ponticum will swamp everything in its path.

 

Ian Sinclair: And as you can see from what’s above me, it will grow in virtually anything and it doesn’t even need to be horizontal. When people complain about it, they don’t call it rhododendron ponticum, they call it rhododendron.

 

Ian Sinclair: This is like the black sheep of the family. It’s a real shit.

 

Ian Sinclair: We know it was introduced in the 1750s by landowners for cover for shooting. The ponticum just slowly spread and spread and spread.

 

Ian takes me to see Fraser MacDonald at the Scottish Forestry Commission.

 

Fraser MacDonald: We cut and burned and stump treated all the rhododendron, you can see, just above us here. Eighteen months ago we carried this out.

 

Fraser MacDonald: The ponticum is a hardy plant to kill off and control, as soon as you clear an area the seeds in the ground already just flourish again.

 

Fraser MacDonald: You know there’s a lot more invasive species than there ever used to be that I can remember.

 

Fraser MacDonald: Climate change takes ahold and runs rife.

That’s the biggest problem.

 

 

Ponticum has made it harder for Ian and his colleagues to get people to care about rhododendron conservation in Scotland. In China, Geng has a very different challenge and opportunity.

 

Geng Yuying:  The rhododendron’s habitat is closely related to that of pandas.   

 

Center director: When pandas get old their bodies and organs don’t work as well. You don’t feed them the same way. Their teeth are broken and they eat bamboo, so we have to feed them special meals. So this place also serves as a special care provider for old pandas.

 

Geng Yuying: In the high mountains of Tibet, Yunnan, and Sichuan there are only rhododendrons and alpine species. Imagine the ecosystem without these two species. The water…when it rains, water will flood, right?

 

Director: Without that layer, whether it’s the pine forest or the panda’s habitat it will be destroyed.

 

Geng Yuying: Right, panda’s habitat.

 

Geng Yuying: Most people only know one kind of rhododendron called “Red over the Mountain.” Few recognize evergreen rhododendrons.

 

Director: The flagship species of animal conservation is the giant panda. Could there be a flagship species for plant conservation? Could it be rhododendron or other flowers?

 

Geng Yuying: When the public know about how to identify rhododendrons they will be interested in them.

 

If the rhododendron gets aligned with the giant panda, that’s sure to improve its chances. Though it’s always much easier getting people to care about animals, than getting them to care about plants.

 

 

Ian Sinclair: Three and I’m not sure what we’ve done in four.

 

Ian Sinclair: Yes, we’ve done all of four, correct. We want to do ten and three after lunch and then maybe move back out into this section.

 

Ian Sinclair: If you grab it.

 

David Chamberlain: Have you hurt yourself?

 

David Chamberlain: Are you okay?

 

Ian Sinclair: I’ve done something to my arm, but nothing serious. 

 

David Chamberlain: Okay, well we’ll stop now I think.

 

David Younger: These medical dressings are supposed to be very good.

 

IS: I’ll pull my shirt down, honest.

 

David Younger: I’ve got that.

 

Ian Sinclair: No

 

David Younger: Ian, those things can go septic.

 

Ian Sinclair: It’ll be fine.

 

David Younger: Why don’t you sit down. You’ll feel better if you sit down.

 

Ian Sinclair: No, I’m fine standing up, ta.

 

David Younger: I prefer to stand.

 

Ian Sinclair: I think I need a chocolate biscuit.

 

David Younger: A chocolate biscuit.

 

Ian Sinclair: There’s no use noting that’s something in trouble. You have to be able to do something with it.

 

As one conservationist in mainland China said to me: we are conserving, but the speed of conservation is slower than the speed of damage. All we can do is save as much as possible. For that, they turn to what many call the ultimate insurance policy.

 

He Hua-jie: China has 32,000 native plant species. A little over 30% are stored in our bank. This is very sacred to us because every seed we take care of today could have important economic values or ecological value.

 

He Hua-jie: After cleaning, every seed goes through quality testing.

 

He Hua-jie: Here are 50 seeds. You can see the structure of the rhododendron seed.

 

This is seed curator He Hua-jie.

 

He Hua-jie: You can come in.

 

He Hua-jie: They are sealed here and the temperature is 20 below celsius. You can feel how cold it is.

 

He Hua-jie: Seeds can survive for one and a half years under regular conditions. But if they are in our cold storage theoretically they can survive for 1,826 years.

 

He Hua-jie: For extremely endangered species like southern lacebark pine where there are only 29 individuals in the wild we not only back them up in our bank but in Britain’s Millennium Seed Bank.

 

Female educational video voice: So if you decide that all over the world there are plant species threatened with extinction, you’d try to save them, wouldn’t you?

 

He Hua-jie: There won’t just be one Noah’s ark. There could be two or three.

 

The only plants on Noah’s Ark were there to feed the animals and the people.

 

Traditionally, western religions haven’t revered the plant world in the way many eastern religions do.

 

Plants themselves don’t eat other organisms. They use light to create their own food and are in turn the basis of all life on earth.

 

Liu Huajie is a philosopher of science at Peking University and author of the book How to Live like a Naturalist.

 

Liu: Francis Bacon wrote, “Knowledge itself is power.” Right now we have thousands of scientists producing knowledge every day. The speed of knowledge production is too fast for us to control. Where are we headed?

 

Liu: Our daily life gets faster and faster. More and more people are getting depressed. Things are moving too quickly for nature to adapt. We need to take measures to slow things down so that we will have more time to think.

 

Liu: By practicing natural history, seeing birds and flowers, people become happier.

 

Liu: Everyone should know about the environment they live in. 

 

Liu: From the perspective of conservation, only when we know about nature, will we care how much it’s been damaged.

 

David Younger: The tide is coming in, it’s been out for some time, because when they’re wet these bladders get much. They blow up much more….Now the great thing is when you take it home, you don’t want to take a whole lot of stones home. So you’ve gotta shake off the stones.

 

David Younger: Compost goes on rhododendrons to keep them healthy. You break down all your waste material, potato peelings, egg shells, orange skins. All vegetable matter. And you take it out and you add activator in the shape of seaweed to…it gets very hot! You have a sort of central hole that allows air to get in it, and if it’s really going well, you put your hand over the hole. Ow! It’s so painful, it gets so hot! And the advantage of that is it kills off all the stuff that’s there. I put bracken into it, I put dandelions into it, anything goes into it. Because I’m rather good at making compost, says I rather boastfully. 

 

The line between inside and outside has always felt blurred at my godfather’s house. It’s hard to imagine one without the other.

 

David Younger: If you’re a developer and buy an old country house with a whole lot of funny green bushes, you pull in the bulldozers before you’ve got planning permission and you’ve lost stuff that is literally irreplaceable.

 

On the one hand, he voices the threat of his garden’s annihilation by human hands, on the other he points to a different future.

 

David Younger: Mother nature overcomes. Anything I’ve done will disappear in the next 10-15 years. Once I go on, I will merely be a “who was he?”

 

This is the site of a massive earthquake that struck Sichuan province, killing over 90,000 people.

 

The earthquake’s epicenter was just 10 miles from the rhododendron garden Geng helped found.

 

Mudslides followed that destroyed the road leading to the garden. 

 

Zhang Chao: Living conditions here are quite hard. The biggest difficulty now is we don’t have electricity.

 

Zhang Chao: I suffered a lot after the earthquake. One of my teachers told me: Sinking into degradation is the right of the rich. They have enough money for the rest of their lives. You must walk out of the shadow of the earthquake. You have parents and kids.

 

Earthquakes put all empire building into a far broader context––one measured by geological versus human time. 

 

As China expands its economic reach, the environmental impact is being felt across the globe.  

 

As a species, can we learn from the mistakes of the Industrial Revolution and re-imagine our relationship to nature?

 

Our planet’s four and a half billion-year history is as close to infinity as I can imagine. Religious traditions have always been the best at describing the infinite. And China’s Taoist philosophy gets the closest to understanding humans as just one drop in a vast ocean.

 

While I was making this film, my godfather David Younger died of cancer at the age of 82. 

 

After his death, some of his worst fears came true.

 

His house and garden were sold and turned into an AirBnb.

 

Ian and I come to check up on the garden and see if there are rhododendrons that need saving.

 

 

Ian Sinclair: Stunning bark, but it’s dying, dying.

 

Ian Sinclair: Pretty overgrown. Yeah, this is it.

 

We find one of the endangered rhododendron species that I’d seen with Geng on Mt Emei.

 

Julia: What are you looking at?

 

Ian Sinclair: Well, this was David Younger’s main bonfire site for this part of the garden. This is probably a pile that’s been here…that he probably created not long before he died.

 

I remember the Tang poets used rhododendrons to signify sorrow. That somehow feels fitting to me now.

 

There’s one less advocate for nature in the world.

 

The Scottish Forestry Commission has set aside land where Ian

and his group can plant endangered rhododendrons from my godfather’s garden and elsewhere for safe keeping. 

 

Ian Sinclair: I think the project will never finish, but it might help to save some species of rhododendron for those that come after us. We’ll mostly all be dead. We’re not doing it for ourselves, we’re doing it for the plants.

 

Here we are preparing for a world where everything might get wiped out. A world where we’re killing the very organisms we need to survive. Or at least some of us are. Others are doing the Sisyphean work of protecting nature for and from ourselves.