The green leap forward: environmentalism is China's fastest-growing citizen movement. Beijing isn't cracking down on these new activists--it's empowering them.

• Author: Larson, Christina

China is on its way to becoming not only the world's largest economy, but also its largest polluter. Of the world's twenty most polluted cities, sixteen are in China. Ninety percent of the country's cities have contaminated groundwater. The World Bank predicts that in the next fifteen years, China's shortage of clean water will create 30 million "environmental refugees."

China's pollution problems, moreover, are no longer solely its own. Winds that whip up over the Gobi Desert sweep dark clouds of mercury, soot, and carbon monoxide to South Korea and Japan; as much as 40 percent of the air pollution in these countries can be traced to China. The toxic plumes travel further a field, now detected by scientists in San Francisco and Lake Tahoe. On bad days, a quarter of Los Angeles's smog originates in China. Later this year, China is expected to overtake the United States as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases; within twenty-five years, its annual contribution to global warming could triple.

One of the most polluted cities in China is Lanzhou, the capital of western Gansu Province, situated at the point where the Silk Road crosses the Yellow River. Historically a remote trading outpost, Lanzhou was transformed in the 1950s and '60s in keeping with Mad Zedong's vision for China's future prosperity: "The machines are rumbling, and smoke is rising from factories." Adopting the adage of the time--"Pollute now, clean up later"--Lanzhou became northwest China's primary hub for oil refineries and petrochemical plants. Today, the city stretches long and narrow between the Gaolan and White Pagoda mountains, but on many days thick smog masks their peaks. Just by breathing the city air, Lanzhou's 3 million residents inhale the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes a day. Ten percent of the Yellow River near Lanzhou is now sewage, and last year three industrial spills turned its waters an ominous red.

One snowy morning in March, I drove along the river in a rented white van with Zhao Zhong, a twenty-five-year-old nuclear engineer by day and grassroots environmentalist by night. He wore a blaring red imitation North Face jacket, and his cheeks, resembling polished apples, pushed up the lower rims of his glasses when he smiled. As we drove, he pointed out factories that defile the river. Since last fall, Zhao has been mapping the coordinates of these factories with a GPS device borrowed from a local university, and unearthing public but hard-to-find pollution data. He slowed the van near one imposing gate, and we peered through the bars at the Lanzhou Petrochemical Company plant, a state-owned facility that Zhao has been watching closely. Construction on the plant started in 1956 under Mao's first Five Year Plan, a massive facility churning out lubricating greases, petroleum resin, and antifreeze. Today, it's the largest petrochemical campus in northwest China, with tens of thousands of employees and a calamitous record of fires, explosions, and chemical spills. Several years ago, its drainage system leaked forty-five tons of heavy oil into the Yellow River, followed last winter by a discharge of engine oil.

I had met Zhao the previous night in his office, a two-room apartment on the rundown western side of town. This modest flat is the headquarters of Green Camel Bell, Lanzhou's first environmental group, which Zhao founded three years ago. On the wall, there was a tidy whiteboard with assigned tasks and a giant map of the city, hand-drawn in Magic Marker, which showed the course of the Yellow River and the locations of factories near the water. A group of mostly twentysomethings, along with an unassuming fifty-something-year-old woman, sat around a table, discussing an environmental curriculum for local schools. I later discovered that the older woman was Zhao's mother, and one of Green Camel Bell's most dedicated full-time volunteers.

Green Camel Bell's mission is the "protection of the Mother River," a motto that evokes the history of the Yellow River basin as the cradle of Chinese civilization. Among other activities, the organization's two paid staffers (Zhao draws no salary) and several dozen volunteers assemble the environmental records of factories across Lanzhou: culling newspaper articles, academic studies, and reports prepared by local environmental officials, many of whom Zhao knows. They send the information to a partner group in Beijing, which feeds it into the China Water Pollution Map (www.ipe.org. on/english), a free online database that allows users to access information about water quality in their region. The site also publishes a list of factories that violate national environmental standards--including many...