Month: September 2016

Dispatches from Abroad: Two Feasts and a Biang-biang

~ amellison17 ~ 2 Comments

There is so much good food in Xi’an, it’s hard to resist yet another posting on its delicacies. Today’s foodie-fest reviews two celebratory dinners and a noodle interlude. The first feast occurred just over a week ago, when the students and post-docs in Professor Chen Yi-ping’s lab took me out for a fish grill the night before I left for the panda road trip (summarized in the previous three-part post on Walking in the Footsteps of the Giant Panda [I, II, III]). The second feast was Monday night, when the whole lab took me out for a farewell lamb barbecue at a local farm-to-table restaurant. In between, I finally encountered the mythical biang-biang noodle.

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Dispatches from Abroad: On Monumentality

~ amellison17 ~ 1 Comment

A number of years ago, Alfred Runte wrote an insightful article on the rationale for the creation of the United States’ (US) National Park System (“The National Park idea: origins and paradox of the American experience,” published in the Journal of Forest History 21[2], 64-75; April 1977)   He argued that in the 19th century, the US was still insecure about its identity as a nation. We felt that we didn’t have the cultural history, cathedrals, and other iconic buildings that Europe did, but we had awesome landscapes that Europe couldn’t match. This fixation on monumentality was enshrined in the enabling legislation for the National Parks (the 1916 Organic Act), has carried forward in management strategies and policies that emphasize retaining the parks in their “original condition”, and persists in such language as “National Monuments”.

But why write about this now, from China?

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The unBalanced ecoLOGist Abroad: In the Footsteps of the Giant Panda (III)

~ amellison17 ~ 3 Comments

After a final night in the city of Ya’an, Sichuan Province, we headed north back into Shaanxi Province, following the Bao Jiang (Bao River) towards Baoji. We were on a small, older road, but it is being replaced by the new Baohan Expressway. This superhighway will run 200 or so kilometers (at least 12o miles), and will have been built, start to finish, in about 3 years. According to Chen Dong, building a highway like this is considered an “easy” project: it follows an existing route (in this case, right up a riverbed; the existing road is built above the river on an old terrace), uses established precast concrete technology, and takes advantage of China’s immense and hungry labor force.

PandasWereHere-20160901-AME-7816But I think that it marks the end of the road for the Qinling panda. The sign at left, overlooking a reservoir (photo below; ironically established as a national wetland reserve – once the lake behind the dam silts in, it should be a very nice wetland!), reads: 熊猫故里 (xióng māo gù lĭ), literally the “hometown” of the panda, but idiomatically meaning “pandas once lived here [in this their native home], but they don’t anymore.”BaoJiangreservoirwetland-20160901-AME-7809

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