There Is No Border

From LI Yifang Forest campaigner Greenpeace China:

I started to write my blog on a major Chinese website since my arrival at the Forest Defenders Camp. Now it has already got 260,000 hits. A guy left a message like this, “Indonesia people used to treat our people badly. Why we help them to save their forest? ”

I consider this as a common query in Chinese people’s mind. All I want to answer is, “We are not just helping them; we are helping ourselves.” Even something unhappy happened in the past between us, we won’t be better off if the whole Indonesia becomes a desert. Deforestation makes Indonesia the third largest GHG emitter in the world. And the climate change impacts are not restricted in some certain countries. If we keep doing what we are doing now, 80% of Himalaya’s glacier will be melted; there will be more floods, more tsunamis, and more droughts. And no one is gonna escape from that.

Surely, we used to think in the logic of “my back yard”, “my community”, and “my country”…I am no exception. When I was in the Europe, western people criticized about China being the largest emitter of GHG, I replied as “then what did your country do in the past century?” But when talking about the solution of the world’s environmental crisis, there is no national border any more. We have to consider the planet as a whole.

Taking the forest destruction in Indonesia as an example:
Timber is certainly harvested in Indonesia, but then export to China. After that EU and the US import plywood and wood floor from China. So who should we blame in this chain, source of the timber, producers, dealer, retailers or the end consumer?
So let’s face it. We have no other choice but work together. Stop sitting there and blaming each other, we don’t have time for this. Take some real action now! At the end of the day, it is our common future; it is we sharing responsibility.