Hard work brings improvements to area of Guizhou

A group of people patrol the Wuma River, a branch of the Chishui River in Guizhou province, in their spare time－sometimes deep into the night.

They pick up waste and prevent people from fishing in the tributary, which runs for nearly 40 kilometers through the city of Renhuai.

The group's work is not only dirty but also dangerous, as team members sometimes face violence when they confront people fishing illegally in the waterway.

Despite this, the group of volunteers has been doing this work for more than four years as part of the Wuma Environmental Protection Society, the first such civil organization in Renhuai county, Zunyi.

As China steps up environmental conservation in the Yangtze River Basin, the society is just a small part of increased civil participation in joint efforts to restore the Chishui, a major tributary of the Yangtze.

The source of the Chishui, which runs for most of its length in Guizhou, is in Yunnan province, and it joins the Yangtze in Sichuan province. The Chishui flows for more than half its length, or some 236 kilometers, through Zunyi.

The environmental protection society was formed in Wuma township in 2017 with just 21 members.

Luo Guohong, 52, its founder, said schools of fish were once a common sight in the clear waters of the Wuma River.

However, in the 1990s, booming coal mining and papermaking industries in the area left the waterway heavily polluted, he said. There used to be 278 papermaking factories in the township, which had a population of more than 30,000, Luo added.

Thanks to efforts by local authorities to shut down polluting enterprises and divert wastewater to sewage disposal plants with the help of an upgraded network of sewer pipes, water quality in the river greatly improved, Luo said.

Despite this positive development, Luo and his friends found that before they established the society, weak environmental protection awareness among residents was a major factor hindering local improvement efforts.

Illegal fishing frequently occurred and many people continued to dump waste and discharge domestic sewage randomly into the waterway.

"Waste could be seen almost everywhere in the river," said Luo, who worked as an auxiliary police officer for more than 20 years before resigning from the post after the society was formed.

The river's water was so dirty that few residents wanted to take part in a boat race he organized during Spring Festival in 2017, Luo said. This made him and his friends more determined to establish the environmental organization.

The first thing members of the society did after it was formed was to advocate an environmentally friendly lifestyle by using loudspeakers fixed to cars and to hand out leaflets in local communities for nearly a month. They often performed such tasks during hot weather that left them bathed in sweat.

Their approach was so unusual to many villagers at the time that the team was referred to by some residents as "a group of people with a mental illness who don't know what to do after they fill their stomachs", Luo said.