MANILA, Philippines - Newspaper photographer Ho Daishan, commended for his documentation of pollution and marine life kill in the Huai River, urges environmental journalists to be actively involved in preserving the environment.
“Awareness on environmental protection should be spread. The view of the people should be changed, they should have more positive views about the environment,” Huo told The STAR during the opening of the exhibit of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay awards. “This kind of journalism did not exist before because there was no environmental problem.”
Huo himself went beyond his duty as a journalist to spread awareness of the pollution problem threatening the Huai River.
In 2001, Huo strung together on a clothesline more than 15,000 photographs of pollution in the Huai River, calling public attention to the condition of the third largest river basin in China.
The exhibit was mounted 70 times in various cities and villages.
The photographs taken with a cheap camera showed the water covered in noxious foam, dead fish floating, and children in riverside communities wearing gas masks stirred public debate and reaped the ire of local officials and businessmen affected by the expose.
Massive industrialization in what is now one of the largest economies in the world has left 70 percent of China’s rivers contaminated.
The Huai River, one of the most polluted in China, runs through four provinces and forms a major agricultural basin, which is home to 150 million people.
In 1994, the Chinese government responded to the problem with a multi-billion pollution control project in river basins which proved inadequate.
The contamination of rivers in China gave rise to the so-called “cancer villages,” impoverished communities by the rivers where there are high occurrences of tumors and cancers associated with contaminated water.
Huo began documenting the pollution problem in the river in 1987 as a one-man campaign to raise awareness on the condition of the river and the people living near it.
In 1998, he decided to make it a fulltime mission to expose to the public, through the media, the activities of local officials and businesses that contribute to the pollution problem of the river.
With the help of his wife and two sons, he worked from their small apartment in Shenqiu, with meager resources and little outside assistance.
Aside from taking photographs, he also organized a group called “Guardians of the Huai River” to help him in research. The group regularly monitors the river and conducts water-testing along the communities.
“When I was a child, I lived beside the river and I saw it as one of my mothers. So when I saw the pollution destroying the river and the health of the people living beside the river, I could not accept this fact. Even the people who have seen the river before cannot take this change,” he said.
In 2000, when his advocacy was gaining media attention, he started receiving threatening phone calls and letters. At one time, he was beaten up by several men when he was on his way home from conducting research in a city affected by river pollution. It took him a week to recover in a hospital.
“(At that time) I felt I was very small in this world, that my power is not enough to face the problem so I thought I must have a way to gain more knowledge to find a solution for it,” he said.
Despite the harassment received from local officials and factory owners, Huo succeeded in linking up with local authorities and industries to install water wells and low-cost water filters in the affected villages near the river.
A major polluter of the river, one of China’s largest MSG manufacturers, is now working with Huo in implementing pollution control measures.
In electing him to receive the award, The Ramon Magsaysay Awards Foundation cites his “unrelenting efforts, despite formidable odds, to save China’s great river Huai and the communities drawn to it.”