【Shen Qiu 100 Celebrity List】(7) Huo Daishan:
Guard the Huai River today • Protect the flowers to bless future generations
(Folk environmental protection defender Huo Daishan)
First, he is a pair of eyes that monitor the Huai River
In order to guard the Huai River, he resolutely resigned from the public post of photojournalist of Zhoukou Daily, watched over a river for more than ten years, and became a "Guardian of the Huai River". In order to defend the Huai River, their entire family (including two sons who graduated from college) became unpaid "non-governmental environmentalists". His film "Flowers Refuse to Pollute" shocked the country; the water quality problems he reflected on the Huai River alarmed the province and the central government, and he was praised by the State Environmental Protection Administration as "a pair of eyes on the Huai River".
(Today's beautiful Huai River tributary Shaying River)
His hometown was once a demonstration area for irrigation projects, and as long as the floodgates were opened, the water in the Shaying River could flow to every piece of land in every village. At the end of the last century, this extensive water conservancy network became a nightmare for my hometown. There was once a village where many cancer patients had died, some families had died, and among the patients were one-year-old babies. After he reported it, it attracted great attention from the above, and now, with the help of the state, the village has become the first village to get rid of poverty, get rich, and get healthy.
(Huo Daishan Photo Exhibition: The Huai River, which was heavily polluted in the past)
Second, find pollution and look for ironclad evidence
His name was Huo Daishan, and he was born on the banks of the Shaying River, the largest tributary of the Huai River in Shenqiu County, Zhoukou City, Henan Province. The time goes back to the late 1990s. In mid-July 1994, by chance, when he was a professional photographer at Zhoukou Daily, he photographed layers of fish corpses that made him "shake his hands" by the river in his hometown. Since then, his lens has been directed at the Shaying River and the Huai River.
In 1994, the state put forward the goal of harnessing the Huai River: to meet the sewage discharge standards by 1997 and to improve the water quality by 2000. At the end of 1997, various places along the Huai River announced that the governance was "up to standard".
(Photo taken by Huo Daishan: Flowers refuse to pollute)
However, Huo Daishan found that the pollution had not been alleviated during the field trip. Especially when the gates in the upper reaches of the local rivers are opened to release water, the stench is so bad that people can't open their eyes. That winter, in a middle school less than a hundred meters from the Shaying River, Huo Daishan found that the children who sat neatly in the classroom to listen to the lectures, in order to resist the invasion of the odor, even wore masks to class, and some even wore sunglasses.
Huo Daishan believes that if this wind of fraud is allowed to spread, the water quality of the entire Huai River Basin will become worse and worse. As a journalist, Huo Daishan knows that exposing the truth requires ironclad evidence. He was only 44 years old.
(Huo Daishan and volunteers carry out the moat work)
Third, spend all your savings and be not afraid of danger
For the next four or five years, he left early and returned late every day, and traveled to more than 200 villages in the Huai River Basin, large and small. Every morning, Huo Daishan woke up her son to start their busy day. To his wife and many friends, he was an unprofessional man.
Behind Huo Daishan's environmental protection road gradually moving towards the right track, it is the increasing poverty of the family. Soon, the family's savings of more than 200,000 yuan were spent by him and invested in various environmental protection activities for the pollution control of the Huaihe River.
Dangers ensued. From time to time, he received anonymous threatening phone calls from strangers. In June 2000, Huo Daishan began to look for sewage outlets around a "Lotus MSG factory" in a neighboring county on the upper reaches of the Shaying River in the morning, and when he returned home at dusk, he chased a motorcycle from behind, crossed the road in front of him, and drove another car behind him.
But he did not compromise: "The water of the Huai River is not clear for a day, and I will not stop calling for a day." It's not my business alone, there are tens of millions of people behind me. ”
(Huo Daishan took a photo to collect evidence in 1995)
Fourth, guarding the Huai River, meritorious achievements
Huo Daishan's efforts soon achieved some results. In 1998, a local leader saw it and immediately decided to invest more than 9 million yuan to build a deep-water well to solve the villagers' drinking water problem. This incident made him see the value of his own efforts. Therefore, he decided to quit his job at the newspaper and spend three years making a comprehensive inspection of the Huai River.
After resigning, while relying on "odd jobs" to survive, he walked alone through more than 20 counties and cities along the Huai River, traveling more than 4,000 kilometers from the source of the Huai River to the end of the Huai River; he photographed more than 15,000 works on water pollution in the Huai River Basin at his own expense. More than 120 ecological pictures of the Huaihe River were selected by himself, and 105 exhibition boards were made into 105 exhibition panels, with the theme of "The Call of the Huaihe Homeland", which has been exhibited more than 70 times in well-known universities such as Beijing, Henan, Anhui, Jiangsu, Hubei and other well-known universities and cities along the Huai river, with the purpose of exposing pollution through images, awakening the people and defending the homeland. At the same time, the speech "Huaihe River - The Life of 200 Million People" was held, with an audience of more than 1 million people, which effectively promoted the "Huaihe River Environmental Protection Fever".
(The water quality of the local waters of the Huai River is different from the past and the present)
On March 17, 2005, the provincial government launched the "Rural Drinking Water Safety" work. The state drilled 46 deep-water wells for Huo Daishan's hometown, between 150 and 400 meters deep, and as a result, 130,000 people drank clean water. By the end of June of the following year, 1 million people in the heavily polluted areas of the Huaihe and Haihe rivers in Henan Province had access to safe water, involving 800 villages in 30 counties (cities, districts) in 9 provinces and cities in the Huaihe and Haihe river basins. Enterprises such as the "Lotus MSG Factory" that pollute the Huaihe River have also transformed and joined the team of sewage emission reduction.
(Today's Huai River tributary sky blue water clear beautiful scenery)
Fifth, environmental improvement, deserved
"I'm not a radical environmentalist, I'm an activist. I focus on changing the environment and try to make everything impossible possible. This is Huo Daishan's evaluation of herself.
(Huaihe Defenders has won many awards and deserves it)
He has won awards such as "Top Ten Outstanding People of China's Non-governmental Environmental Protection Award", "Green China Person of the Year Award" and "Magsay Award "Nobel Prize" in the environmental protection industry. He is the State Environmental Protection Administration 's eye on the Huai River'.
(The smile of today's primary school students on the Banks of the Shaying River)
With the efforts of countless "Huo Daishan" and the attention of the state and local governments, the shaying river, a tributary of the Huai River, is no longer the scene of sewage everywhere and stinking. Walking on both sides of the river, people will linger: birds and flowers, the four seasons of the song; clear water, fish and shrimp full of river; fresh air, blue sky; summer lotus flowers, spring rape golden yellow ... • • • •
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