Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
not to drink. During this trip, I also happened upon an international environmental
conference where the Chinese taught me that living water is water that goes up and
down the mountain 10,000 times, which means it is highly activated by vortices, fil-
tered, and oxygenated. I was told, for example, that the best water for your heart comes
from the center of bamboo. We hatched the idea to do a Keepers of the Waters event
on the Yangtze River.
I had no budget, as no foundations would fund a project done in China, but fate
intervened in the form of an anonymous phone call that yielded $15,000. With addi-
tional fund raising I returned in 1995 with my new assistant, Kristen Caskey. All of my
money—$23,000 in cash and traveler's checks—was in a money belt around my waist
as China did not yet have a banking relationship with the rest of the world. Although
I had no official invitation or sponsor, within one week of arriving in Chengdu I was
engaged in discussions about the project.
Chengdu had evolved from a quiet city of two million, where remnants of ninth-
century Tang Dynasty culture could be found, into a pulsing, urban center of nine
million. The air was heavy from the increase of automobile exhaust and factories
spewing pollutants. With unchecked sewage spills and larger piles of garbage, the
river's stench was unbearable. All fifty-three species of fish had disappeared from the
river.
While directing the event, I was contacted by the planning bureau. On a swelter-
ing afternoon in late July, I was picked up at the university guesthouse where we were
staying and taken to a quiet street. On the sidewalk outside an old Tang Dynasty
pagoda, as a willow tree moved in a gentle breeze over putrid waters, I learned about
the plans for Chengdu and the river revitalization—which were exceptional in light
of the ecologically destructive design that was, and still is, pervasive in most of the
world. The Green Necklace, as they called it, was executed from 1992 to 1997 and in-
cluded creating twelve miles (19 km) of park along both sides of the rivers, rebuilding
the flood walls, moving 100,000 citizens to better housing, and installing the infra-
structure for treating the waste of two million people. I suggested that they make a
park to show citizens how water could be cleaned using natural means. To my sur-
prise, they asked me if I could do that. To my surprise, I said, yes. I was asked to aban-
don the public art event and design the park.
I returned to China in 1996 to present ideas for the park. We started with a meeting
of fifty people sitting around a long table with the Chinese flags and flowers flowing
down the middle. Present were academics, representatives from government bureaus,
advisers, and the people's council. Shaking, I sat down next to this patrician-type engi-
neer whom I had met in 1993. He whispered in my ear, “Don't worry, Betsy, you're
among friends!” Knowing that there were no landscape architects in Chengdu who
would understand my concepts, I had invited Margie Ruddick, a landscape architect,
who generously agreed to come help. I had been imagining work like this but had
never done anything on this scale. The meeting lasted three hours, then, after a large
banquet, we visited a number of potential sites. We were dismissed and told that the bu-
reau would get back to us in a week. Indeed, a week later, they said they would give us
the largest piece of inner-city land they had for our Living Water Garden.
