MCLC: Beijing Besieged by Waste

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kevin lee <kevin at dgeneratefilms.com>
Subject: Beijing Besieged by Waste
***********************************************************

Photojournalist and filmmaker Wang Jiuliang discusses his
investigations into Beijing's garbage crisis, which led to the making
of his documentary film BEIJING BESIEGED BY WASTE:
http://dgeneratefilms.com/catalog/beijing-besieged-by-waste-wei-cheng-la-ji
/

Kevin

==========================================================

Source: 
http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/photo-essay/beijing-besieged-g
arbage/statement

Beijing Besieged by Garbage
Wang Jiuliang

In the summer of 2008, I returned to my hometown, a small rural
village, to take photographs for a project on Chinese folk religions.
I needed to find particularly clean natural environments to use as
backgrounds for the photographs. But such places are hard to find now.
Everywhere, covered by plastic tarps, there is the so-called modern
agriculture, which has produced a countless number of discarded
pesticide and chemical fertilizer packages scattered across the
fields, ditches, and ponds. Herbicides and pesticides together have
transformed the once-fertile natural environment into a lifeless one,
and the rapidly developing consumerist lifestyle of the villagers has
filled the village with piles of nondegradable garbage. The clean and
beautiful hometown of my childhood memories‹only a decade or two
old‹is nowhere to be found. This rapid transformation prompted me to
start thinking about the problem of garbage brought about by modern
civilization.

With the problem of garbage in mind, I started a videographic
investigation of the state of garbage pollution around the city of
Beijing in October 2008. Before starting this project, questions about
the ultimate destination of my own garbage had never even crossed my
mind. I started to follow the garbage collection trucks that came to
our community every day. The result was shocking.  I learned, for
starters, that there was an enormous refuse landfill site only seven
kilometers away from where I live. And, only one kilometer away from
that putrid landfill, a large residential compound was under
construction.  With my eyes on the high-rise buildings under
construction, I lamented the proximity of the landfills to our city.
On maps of Beijing, however, there is no indication of any of these
large-scale refuse landfills, although they are intimately connected
with each of our lives.

My investigation revealed that 11 large-scale refuse landfills
affiliated with the municipal environmental sanitation services system
are scattered around the close suburbs of Beijing. Each landfill
occupies tens of hectares of land, some of which have grown into
mountains of garbage over 50 meters high. Out of concern for
individual rights and interests, protests against these landfills have
been steady; despite such efforts, the landfills grow taller and
taller.

I learned that, in actuality, the garbage we produce does not all go
to legitimate, government-affiliated refuse landfills. A considerable
amount of the garbage is channeled to the so-called underground
garbage industrial chain. This garbage is purchased at a low price
within the city, transported outside the city center, and sorted by
scavengers employed for this task. This is how so many illegal garbage
sites have come into existence in hidden corners of the city. The
particular details of their geographical distribution are effectively
unknown, as are their exact numbers.

At first, I did not know where these illegal dump sites were. So, I
rode my motorcycle and followed suspicious-looking garbage trucks.
This is how I found the first few garbage dump sites. I carefully
studied the visual characteristics of these garbage dump sites and
used this information to find similar sites on satellite photographs
of greater Beijing, marking every location that might be a potential
dump site. Then, I went to each of the noted locations and confirmed
their status. Using this method, I identified hundreds of illegal
garbage dump sites one after another.

People involved in one way or another with the illegal dump sites, in
the interest of keeping their trade clandestine, are quite cautious
toward outsiders. Because people with cameras on their backs are
especially unwelcome, it was impossible to shoot freely at these
sites. In fact, I was frequently refused entrance, berated, chased by
wolfhounds, or threatened with cooking knives. Several times I was
kept hostage and my photographs were deleted from my cameras. In order
to photograph these dump sites in detail, I was, therefore, forced
come up with creative solutions. Sometimes I pretended that I was
there to repurpose garbage and looked for opportunities to take
pictures when I was granted entrance. More often than not, I engaged
in a kind of guerrilla warfare with the guards, quickly shooting
pictures and leaving when they were not paying attention. I also
looked for commanding heights, such as treetops, or high-voltage
electricity poles, where I could take pictures that captured the
entirety of a site including its surroundings.

The conditions of these illegal dump sites are appalling. Perhaps only
when you stand amid them, can you feel the immensity of the garbage.
It often occupies tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of square
meters of land and is over ten meters deep. At first, when I stood on
garbage piles that were sticky, slippery, loose, and soft, I did not
dare to move, fearing that I might be devoured by the refuse. The air
was rank with a thick stench. I got dizzy and experienced headaches
after less than ten minutes. The dump sites are so full of flies in
the summer that the faces of anyone in the vicinity are covered with
them, and the flies are impossible to drive away. Many scavengers work
in such conditions, with no protection whatsoever, not even a
breathing mask.

I have great respect for these scavengers. Although they are in an
ancient and humble trade, deep in their hearts they harbor the hope
and dream of a better life. To understand their lives at a deeper
level, I lived at the largest construction waste site for three
months. At its peak, more than 2,000 migrant peasant workers lived
there, in make-shift shacks built from materials scavenged from
construction waste. Women, using hooks, poked around for small objects
of value from the waste, and men, swinging huge hammers in their
hands, smashed concrete blocks to collect any steel inside. As the
sweat of the adults infused the site, the place was also filled with
the laughter and commotion of children playing and running around.

My photography of this waste site began with the children of the
scavengers. When I gave the developed pictures to the children, they
ran to show them to their parents. Even at a distance, I could clearly
see the smiles on their parents¹ faces. As many of the children here
had never had their pictures taken before, I was received by the
community with particular respect. (Nothing is more encouraging than
bringing happiness with a camera in your hand. This is far more
rewarding than working on exquisite and highbrow ³art.²) As I took
these pictures, I learned that almost all of the children younger than
ten had spent their childhoods on the dump site. Any understanding of
the outside world they had had been gleaned from the tiny televisions
in their homes. On these dump sites, the children scavenge for toys
and play barefoot in the garbage. Even though these dump sites are in
many ways barren, there is a kind of irrepressible weedlike vitality
there that often exuded passion and confidence toward life!

While the scavengers are confined to these dump sites to construct
their dreams for a better life, people living in the city continue to
engage in a carnival of consumption that grows ever more intense. The
city is expanding, the population is on the rise, levels of
consumption are growing, and so the production of garbage is less and
less likely to diminish.

Up to the end of 2010, I visited five hundred dump sites, one after
another, covering 15,000 kilometers in and around Beijing. I took more
than ten thousand photographs and shot over 60 hours of video footage.
In these pictures, I did not focus on the squalid and chaotic details
of the dump sites. Instead, my emphasis was on the relationship
between these dump sites and the surrounding natural environment and
conditions of human life. Therefore, I chose to point my lens from the
dump sites toward the outside, or to leave the dump sites and
ascertain their effects from higher and more removed perspectives.
When I saw from high and afar the pollution of the rivers caused by
these dump sites, I felt closely the water crisis that Beijing
currently suffers. When I saw herds of sheep and cows grazing in these
dump sites, and knew that almost all of the pigs were fed with
restaurant waste from all over the city, I felt a deep concern for our
food safety. Standing within these garbage sites, looking at the
high-rise buildings under construction nearby, I thought, maybe the
tidy streets and beautiful communities are only pleasant illusions. It
is the dump sites, on the contrary, that are the reality behind the
facade of the city.

Many of us believe that we are completely disconnected from the
garbage we produce once it has left our sight. Few realize that their
garbage has not gone far. The garbage, albeit in a different form,
always comes back and casts a perpetual shadow over our lives. My
photographs, together with my on-site interviews, serve as detailed
archives of the dump sites that are surrounding Beijing. They reveal
to people the basic fact that we are literally surrounded and besieged
by garbage, and they draw attention to this issue, hopefully prompting
some viewers to reflect on their own daily consumption practices. No
one can deny that we are creating an economic miracle above ground;
yet, we are also creating a world of garbage under it.