Race to Save Resources : Conservationist Enlists Help of Asia’s Buddhists

Growing up in greater Kansas City, Nancy Nash used to be on the side of the prairie dogs in their ongoing confrontation with the golfers on the course adjacent to her house.

Years later, a full-fledged conservationist, she would initiate the first contact between the Switzerland-based World Wildlife Fund International and the Chinese government, leading to a major cooperative effort to save the endangered giant pandas. She would also arrange a panda “event” for Nancy Reagan during the First Lady’s visit to the Peking zoo in April, 1984.

Pandas and Siberian Tigers

(For the record, Nash, who has visited in-cage with a nearly grown panda, said the adorable-to-look-at panda is nice to know. “I’ve met a couple of nasty ones, but for the most part they’re utterly charming,” she said.)

In 1983, while serving as a conservation officer and consultant to the World Wildlife Fund-Hong Kong, she helped to arrange for seven Siberian tigers, members of another endangered species native to China, to be transported from the Bronx and Minneapolis zoos to China. The tigers were a gift to Chinese zoos from U.S. zoos, which had been breeding them successfully.

“They were inbreeding in China,” Nash said, “and needed new genetic material.” The tigers were “very big, enormous, and very angry” by the time they arrived--via Flying Tigers airlines. “I’ve seen all of those tigers since,” she said, “and they’re doing very well. I think they’ll be breeding this year.”

Now Nash has enlisted the aid of the world’s foremost Buddhist, the Dalai Lama, in rallying the Buddhists of Thailand and the Tibetan refugee community in India to try to save the animal life and natural resources of those areas in the face of accelerating forest decimation and water pollution.

Nash, who describes herself as “a Christian, a lapsed Christian,” has no illusions about saving the Asians and their environment by “confronting them from outside with foreign formulas.

“Can you imagine,” she asked, “Nancy Nash from Kansas trying to do a Buddhist project in Asia without some personal contact? It doesn’t work.” And she just happens to number the Dalai Lama, “a marvelous person” and a staunch conservationist, among her friends.

Nash, the daughter of a golf course architect, was 18, a self-described “closet academic,” a rebel and a high school dropout, when 22 years ago she left Kansas City for Europe, where she lived for 18 months, headquartered in Frankfurt, West Germany, and working for an insurance agency.

“Once I started moving, I just kept moving,” said Nash, whose three siblings opted for a traditional Middle-America existence. Returning from Europe, she spent a year at home, just long enough to raise the money to take off for Asia in 1965. She has been home-based since 1966 in Hong Kong “in a flat with a harbor view, disappearing fast” behind high-rises. “I could go on exploring Asia forever. It’s a constant carnival.”

Nash’s first stop in Asia was Japan, where she lived for a year while writing a children’s book about--what else?--a little girl and her animals. With the money earned from that book she got on a boat for Hong Kong, where a job in public relations led two years later to a position with Hilton International as area PR director. She stayed at that post for eight years, a time during which Nash, who learned to speak Mandarin Chinese, also became a wildlife columnist for the English-language magazine Asia and a free-lance photojournalist.

Next, it was off to Northeast Thailand to take part in an important bronze excavation. “I helped them pack up,” she said of her contribution. She then spent a year in Europe, most of it in France, made a trip to North Africa and, with actress Yvette Mimieux, a journey to Iran.

Nash and Mimieux are longtime friends who have frequently traveled together in Asia and, on Nash’s recent visit to Los Angeles, she was the actress’s house guest in Bel-Air. Their friendship began 18 years ago when Nash, in her office at the Hong Kong Hilton, was alerted that “there’s a famous movie star and she’s got some monkeys in her room.” The actress was Mimieux, who was baby-sitting her two South American pet monkeys that had roles in a film being shot in Asia.

A friendship was struck immediately. The two later agreed to travel together to Malaysia and, Nash said, “Since then we’ve explored and explored.”

The ongoing U.S.-Chinese effort to save the pandas, which have been threatened with extinction because of the disappearance of their favorite food, bamboo, began with Nash in the summer of 1979 while she was working at World Wildlife Fund headquarters in Switzerland. Reasoning that the panda had been adopted by the organization for its logo, yet it was not doing anything for pandas, Nash had asked, “You’ve got the panda symbol. Why don’t you have a panda project?” The organization’s response: “It’s impossible.” Nash’s response to their response: “I’ll do it then.”

Back in Hong Kong, she went to work to make good on her pledge. “For years I’d been on a blacklist in China for having written a story defending Confucius,” she said. After the Gang of Four--Mao Zedong’s widow and three other leading leftists--were turned out in a 1976 internal power struggle, journalist friends in China had told Nash they would arrange for her to go in whenever she wished.

Two years went by before she had a compelling reason to do so. Then, in 1978, Nash had a telephone call in Hong Kong from the late humorist S. J. (Sidney Joseph) Perelman, an old friend. Perelman said, “I want you to help me get into China.”

While in Peking in December, Perelman, then 74, was hospitalized with bronchitis and Nash stayed on for a month, “looking after Sid,” taking photographs for Associated Press and “whoever called me that day.” For Nash, it was to be the first of more than 60 trips to China, where she is known today as “the panda lady.”

It was during that first visit, she said, that she began to think that a panda connection might be possible.

The following year, with the blessings of the World Wildlife Fund, she wrote a proposal, had it translated into Chinese and sent to the Environmental Protection Bureau of the state council. Her proposal coincided with a Chinese awakening to environmental concerns.

The agreement was signed that September and in May, 1980, Nash accompanied Sir Peter Scott, a British conservationist who was chairman of the fund; his wife, Lady Philippa Scott, and George B. Schaller of the New York Zoological Society on an expedition with a team of Chinese scientists into the remote mountain preserves where the giant pandas live. They were the first foreigners invited into panda country. The next month the Chinese agreed to establishment of a research station in Sichuan province to attempt to breed pandas.

A year later, with the giant panda population having dwindled to a maximum of 1,000, all in China, the fund and the Chinese government signed a $4 million save-the-panda agreement wherein the fund put up $1 million for a center where scientists have been working to combat panda diseases and to develop and plant a substitute bamboo strain.

Today, the panda project continues. “We’re in the last stages of the emergency now,” Nash said. “The bamboo’s coming back and the pandas seem to be very well protected, but (the situation) can’t take care of itself anymore as it has for 3 million years. It’s going to have to be a very carefully managed survival from now on. The Chinese government will probably have to set aside more reserves (there are now 11) and they will have to watch the bamboo situation all the time. And they’ll have to be braced for more emergencies.

“They’re going to have to do something about the human encroachment, which is just horrendous. The panda’s not going to be saved in any zoo. Keeping people out, I think, is the main thing. The animals don’t recognize the limits. They breed very well in the wild--it’s just that there’s so few of them and they probably can’t find each other in some areas.”

There have been 70 or 80 births since the project began but, Nash said, “They’ve lost a few” adult animals, perhaps 50. “We’ll be lucky if there are still 1,000, but it’s probably stable.”

Now, with her new project, Nash faces a challenge she considers “much more important than anything I’ve done.” Yes, the pandas are important. “Even if I didn’t love them,” she said, they are important “because of what they represent. The whales for the sea and the pandas for the land--they are the spirit and heart of the (environmental) movement.”

But she is devastated by the environmental destruction she sees in Southeast Asia, where overpopulation and exploitation have been major factors. “Twenty years ago,” she said, “I first saw Thailand. What I see 20 years later is just shocking. This is the place that jolted me most. They’ve lost so much.”

(Bruce Bunting, director of the fund’s Asia program, has reported that 1,000 animal species and 25,000 plant species, many of these of medicinal or agricultural value, are in danger of extinction there.)

Thailand is a country long exposed to science and technology and what Nash calls “old-fashioned (business) exploitation.” As an example, Nash gave production of a Thai whiskey, for which natural forests have been cut down to plant sugar cane and processed cane has been dumped into fresh rivers. Further environmental destruction, she said, has come as traditional small farms have been replaced by big one-owner mechanized farms.

“It’s not a matter of modernization,” she said. “It’s now a matter of starvation in some parts; that’s not modern. They’ve taken wholesale ideas of modernization without examining the repercussions. Until recently, Thailand never had a food problem. Now, in places of severe deforestation and drought, there’s a serious problem, and this is all over Asia.

“Villagers no longer have a source of clean water because of pollution from factories, so disease instead of going down is going up. A lot of (the damage) can be reversed, I think, but we’ve got to do it pretty fast. One thing we can’t bring back are tropical forests.”

Nash said Thailand is an extreme example of environmental mismanagement--”Most Buddhist countries don’t have destruction on that par.” She speaks of barren land that was once forests, extinct animal species, agricultural lands no longer producing food because of soil erosion and flooding.

A country about the size of California, Thailand 40 years ago was 80% forest, Nash said, a percentage that had dipped to 60% by the mid-’60s. Today, she said, “we’re very lucky” if it’s 22%. As the trees have disappeared, so have many of Thailand’s indigenous wildlife species, which at one time included 800 species of birds.

What is most alarming, in Nash’s view, is the acceleration of the damage in Asia since the turn of the century. There are factories “from the Himalayas to the ocean,” she said. “If the seas are filthy, you can imagine what the rivers must be.

“In the end, putting out fires is not what is going to save these environments.” What is needed, she said, is grass-roots involvement in a project with long-term goals.

She is convinced that the way to accomplish this is through the teachings of Buddhism, a religion that stresses man’s interdependence and his responsibilities to nature, the need to co-exist with nature, not to conquer it.

There are about 300 million Buddhists in the world and, true, the destruction she has seen is in countries with Buddhist majorities. “They’re human,” she said. “And very few (of us) are 100% anything. How many Christians are practicing their Christian precepts every day? Every Thai does not go about his daily life thinking, ‘I’m a Buddhist. I’m a Buddhist. I’m a Buddhist.’ Some Buddhists eat meat and say somebody else killed it. But without Buddhism, I’m convinced, Thailand really would be a wasteland.

“A good Buddhist knows what’s right. We’re just going to make it a little more emphatic.”

It was the Dalai Lama, she said, who first brought home to her “the tragedy of the disappearance of life.” The Tibetans were good environmentalists, she said, until the 1959 takeover by China. “Now, I’m told, the wildlife (in Tibet) is almost gone. They moved in half a million Chinese soldiers (who) brought in guns and shot all the wildlife, cut down trees willy-nilly and built roads.”

Education is the key, Nash is certain. She said that, although the Thais are seeing the effects of environmental destruction, “They link being hungry with being hungry,” not with the causes of the food shortage.

Nash’s project, which has endorsements and grants from Wildlife Conservation International, an arm of the New York Zoological Society, the Munro Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund U.S. and Hong Kong and the California-based C S Fund, is budgeted at $167,000.

During her Los Angeles stay, Nash received a large contribution from one anonymous donor. Until then, she said, “I was the biggest single donor.” She estimated her investment, in cash and services, at $10,000 and she winced a bit when she thought of “the nasty-looking letters (bills) waiting for me in Hong Kong” on her return earlier this month.

As international coordinator for the conservation project, Nash sees herself as a catalyst working with Thai and Tibetan coordination teams to develop books, audio-visual aids and other educational materials, in Tibetan, English, Thai and Pali, for distribution in the pilot areas, Thailand and Himalayan India, where about half of India’s Tibetan refugee population of 100,000 lives. In both countries, materials will be distributed through places of worship and, in Thailand, to 36 teacher-training colleges.

In many places where conservation is most needed, she said, the temples, mosques, churches and synagogues are the population’s sole sources of education. Materials to be developed under the theme, “Buddhist Perception of Nature,” will include teaching tools and a compilation of the religion’s literature, providing easy access to pertinent teaching.

Non-technical is a key word in Nash’s plan for reaching rural populations with little or no access to formal education through the wats, or Buddhist places of worship (Thailand alone has 45,000 to 50,000 wats ).

While “no rational conservationist wishes to replace science with appeals to aesthetics,” Nash wrote in her formal proposal, science and technology alone are no “magic cure”--it is important to consider ethical, aesthetic, historical and perceptual values and to appeal to the “human conscience.”

In Thailand, Nash said, certain birds and primates have been saved only because their breeding or feeding grounds are within the sanctuary of temples.

Written materials may contain a message from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, an introduction by Scott, facts and figures on deterioration of the natural world and an outline of the precepts of Buddhism by recognized scholars. (Wildlife Conservation International gave Nash $5,000 to convey its “endorsement and approval,” while pointing out that it is not interested in theology.)

Nash intends for the project to explore applications of Buddhist codes of conduct to modern agriculture, forestry sciences and human settlements. (She is not proselytizing for Buddhism, she said, but, rather, sees her pilot project as a blueprint that could be adapted by other faiths in other countries.)

Results will be monitored at selected sites where the project will conduct surveys of wildlife in areas of human encroachment and assess the effect of its educational campaign. Project research began six months ago in Dharamsala, India, under direction of the Dalai Lama’s Council for Religious and Cultural Affairs and in Bangkok under auspices of Wildlife Fund Thailand, a new conservation organization under the patronage of the Queen of Thailand. Nash anticipates completion of the project 15 months after it is fully funded, which she hopes will be this year. Meanwhile, she said, “We’re going ahead as best we can.”

Project personnel include Thai and Tibetan scholars, government officials, educators, conservationists, artists and businessmen. At a recent meeting of project coordinators in India, the Dalai Lama spoke of the destruction wrought through “ignorance, greed and lack of respect for the Earth’s living things.”

Nash emphasized that this is a pilot project, that Asia is a rational place to begin “because there’s still a lot left” in Asia. Already, she said, there is a commitment from Nepal and “We’re in touch with the Burmese, the Sri Lankans.” She sees no reason why similar projects might not be undertaken in Vietnam, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Japan and China and, she said, “I think this project has applications to Africa.” Materials also will be made available to world conservation bodies.

To Nash, it goes beyond saving forests, jungles and oceans. Environmental destruction and disappearing resources place additional stress on populations. “Conservation and world peace are probably linked in more profound ways than have been recognized.”