Environmental stories in their eyes

"Without vultures, the sky on the plateau is so empty," said Lama Tashi Sange from Guoluo Prefecture in Qinghai to the camera in his documentary My Himalayan Vulture.

My Himalayan Vulture is one of the films of program "In Their Eyes", a public video program initiated by Shan Shui Conservation center, a Non-Governmental Organization, in 2007 to help villagers from the remote mountain areas of Southwest China record their culture and environment, and express their concerns and hopes about environmental and cultural change.

Training sessions were held by the organization and over 60 rural photographers have been trained.

Most of them pay their attention to the theme of local ecological environment due to the direct connection between rural life and natural environment. The photographers feel painful for the rangeland degradation, river pollution and other environmental issues for their life has been greatly influenced by those changes.

Tashi Sange is one of the trainees of the program.

His film My Himalayan Vulture tells the story of how humans have been driven to steal from vultures in their pursuit of financial gain.

The highland vulture is a kind of gentle bird living on only dead bodies. The bird is connected with the reincarnation of Tibetans for it brings away the remains of the deceased, and leads the soul into another world.

At present, however, vultures on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau are in danger of dying off for lack of food resources.

Tashi Sange wants to tell that human beings' behaviors are linked to the lives around. The existence of those lives should be taken into consideration when people are in pursuit of financial gain.

Lance, a people travel to Tibet, lifted the camera for the first time of his life and focused on the cow dung.

With temperatures falling as low as -40℃ on the plateau, cow dung is a valuable source of warmth for herdsmen.

A non polluting fuel, it is used to burn offerings to the gods and light oil lamps, and to build houses and walls. It is the natural fertilizer of the grasslands, and it can be used as medicine and washing clothes. Children can even make toys out of it, while artists sometimes sculpt figurines of the Buddha out of the material.

But the day Tibetans will have to live without out it is getting nearer and nearer.

When that time comes, the director said, Tibetans' compassion, benevolence and sense of karma will also be doomed.

Wangta from Diqing in Yunnan tells of The Wonders of Water to present the beliefs and attitudes about water held by the Tibetans of Yunnan.

With their immature filming techniques, these primitive photographers record the environmental changes in their life,

 "Let alone whether we can stop the changes or not, we just want to record them first and let more people know about them," said Tashi Sange.