A short while ago, there was a fire outbreak on our mountain due to dry weather in the spring. It was the very first forest fire in our village’s recent memory. The last time I came across the forest fire issue was in the news. I spent a few minutes contemplating big concepts such as climate change, Anthropocene, or biodiversity loss. Everything felt remote, set apart from my daily reality. Yet, considering these global issues gave me a sense of superiority. I am a good, responsible human, I thought I genuinely cared for the planet. 

But this fire which I and my village just escaped from sent me to a different zone. Upon seeing the fierce flames rising above the mountain just a few miles away, I was initially shocked, physically trembled, then went on to devote myself to supporting the local village firefighters. I was barely a sufficient community member in this mild crisis, but I tried my best. 

I started work on the China section of the Countryside, The Future for the New York Guggenheim- exhibition in 2018. Since then, I have returned to China and started working on a community learning centre in Sichuan’s Tibetan cultural region. The centre was born out of a regional ecotourism planning project in 2015. The designers/founders asked how design can intervene in the rural area to help sustain a balance between economic development and ecosystem restoration. The past two years of constant travelling between rural Sichuan and Shanghai allowed me to reflect on my experience collaborating on the Countryside project as a researcher, compared to working on one project that’s deeply rooted in place. Once I realized that this is a long distance, I just started walking the distance from learning about the countryside in order to intervene, to learning to be with the countryside to allow it to work on me. 

One of my first tasks at the OMA/AMO Countryside studio in Beijing (we collaborated with the architecture department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts) was to find an architectural construction manual for rural China. I was given Henry Dreyfuss’s The Measure of Man as a reference. I was fascinated by the preciseness of the measure-ments detailed throughout the pages as if the world could be built around human-scale, taking abled men and women as a standard measurement for everything. But how was I to find an equivalent construction manual for the countryside of China? And if such a guide existed, what village could be a standard for over 3 million villages in China? If any form of guidebook could qualify, then surely it must be the book of Feng shui or I Ching.   

Meanwhile, I discovered that China is quite unique in the way that it simultaneously is a place of great diversity and unity, and capable of operating on a large scale, whilst keeping an eye on local specificities. The central government issues guidelines for rural development all year round, from sanitation standards to clean energy regulation to land use reformation. From the state council, these policies are send to a myriad of respective local departments, who start localizing these plans. Eventually their implementation is different everywhere, turning the Chinese countryside into a painting with constantly changing pixels. As you can probably guess, I did manage to find construction manuals in the end, not in one book, but many. 

This experience stayed with me as a metaphor. In fact, the more I researched, the more data I collected and narratives I encountered, the more I felt like running in deep and muddy waters. Slippery in nature: if I make a judgment hastily, I will be proven short-sighted just as quickly. The countryside appeared to be a unique place to generate and explore questions. It is a loophole of modernity, through which many contradictions of our contemporary world are presented, some of which we have avoided dealing with in a globalized, neoliberal, capitalist, linear and mechanistic, and increasingly technocratic world.

HEAL WITH OR WITHOUT HUMANS?

Does preservation of the eco-system need to exclude humans? Or can humans play a meaningful role in healing the planet? In the modern conservation narrative, humans should be kept away from nature, to leave it in peace to regenerate. Man is seen as a destructive force to the balance of nature, thus should be kept away from it. This sollution works on paper: we keep half of the world preserved for biodiversity and the planet will be healed. However, it misses the root cause of the loss of biodiversity. Imagine we restore biodiversity yet maintain the same worldview in which humans exist at the top of the ecosystem hierarchy. It will just be a matter of time until we run into some other, perhaps more severe red alert crisis.

Many cases from long-standing local indigenous communities worldwide have proven the same hypothesis that humans can be and should be a positive force for the living planet. The worldview of interconnectedness and interdependence has sustained us a long way until that worldview changed - humans are no longer a part of nature but set apart from it.

The worldview of separation invited depletion, as the Canadian First Nation elder Chief Dan George said, “what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys.” 

SUSTAINABILITY. WHAT ARE WE SUSTAINING? 

Spending time in the countryside teaches me to think in the long term, both towards future generations and those from the past, making it clearer to situate the current generation

as a member of a continuous presence. It encourages me to trust human nature again and our positive role in assisting the planet’s regeneration.

When we were confronted with the fire on our mountain, neither manuals and data-enquiry nor most of the modern firefighting technologies at hand could help us respond appropriately. Instead, having over 200 community members gathered under one roof, led by experienced elders had shown me the warm reality of interdependence. If the idea of sustainability is the ability to withstand, then the countryside could teach us divergent and yet important lessons.

The climate is changing like it always does. Unlike the 'climate' in the current global narrative, which is continuously on red alert. What I am implying here is that we inhabit

a living planet with various complex interactive cycles. Climate as a concept is, according

to many indigenous people, the temper of the earth, or symptoms of impending calamity.

To decipher the Earth's 'temper' in the countryside has proven difficult, because of insufficient scientific data available, at least the countryside I'm familiar with. Where it lacks in data or modern technology, the countryside is rich in lived experience and local solutions based on trial-and-error that have withstood the test of time. The countryside can't be studied with the intention of copy/pasting its wisdoms. It can however be consulted if we are ready to listen.

Vivian Xinlin Song is an educator and a journalist. She is currently working on deepening her knowledge of the place and the community where Yunhe Centre is located while developing programs and experiences that facilitate a process of de-learning, re-learning and re-membering. Additionally, she is also a researcher of new economic theory and traditional ecological knowledge, and explores where these two meet. Within the framework of Chapter 5IVE, we asked her to reflect on the experience of deep time and the connection to locality as a source of knowledge, wisdom and altered practices.

VIVIAN XILIN SONG