What We Leave the Future

Conservation, culture, and what I learned through service

At the end of my summer 2025 trip, I wrote that familiarity might be an invitation to look again.

This summer, I came back without my family, carrying an iPad, a microphone, and a much longer list of questions.

Last year, I had mostly been amazed by what had lasted, like the Leshan Giant Buddha (乐山大佛), Dujiangyan (都江堰), and pandas of Sichuan. I haven’t thought very hard about what it meant to preserve them.

This time, I began with a different question: Why does conservation matter in the first place?

I found my first answer at Dujiangyan: Survival.

For over 2,300 years, the system has worked with the river rather than overpowering it. Li Bing used a natural curve in the river to spin heavier sand outward and downstream. The weir regulates how much water enters the irrigation system as the Min River rises and falls, without a dam to stop the river.

People also adapted the structure around it as the population of Chengdu plain grew. A gate was added in 1992 to send more water to the city. Since 1949, the irrigation area has grown from 2.8 million mu (亩) to 11 million.

On top of the hill inside the Daoist Erwang Temple (二王庙) sits Li Bing, the mastermind behind Dujiangyan. For two thousand years, people worshipped the man and the Daoist idea of 道法自然: working with nature rather than against it. The philosophy survived through the water that continues to sustain people’s lives.

People did not preserve Dujiangyan merely because it was old. They kept maintaining it because they still needed what it did. Dujiangyan’s survival helped make people’s survival possible.

At Shenshuping, survival looked different. Last year, I came to prepare panda food, clean enclosures, and take far too many pictures. This time, I wanted to understand what happened beyond the individual animals in front of me.

Researcher Du explained that one of the major challenges for wild pandas is habitat fragmentation. Roads and development can divide continuous habitat into smaller pieces, separating populations and limiting genetic exchange. Sometimes restricting human access and allowing habitat to recover naturally may create ecological corridors animals accept more readily than human-designed ones.

As an umbrella species, pandas depend on habitats shared by many other plants and animals, so protecting their survival can help protect an entire ecosystem. Survival, then, meant preserving the conditions that allowed many forms of life to continue.

Sea turtles made the idea of survival even more fragile. Lulu explained that female turtles return to the beaches where they were born to lay their eggs. Protecting the animal therefore also means protecting the beach it depends on. Turtles eat jellyfish, and a plastic bag drifting in the water can look enough like one to be swallowed with fatal consequences. Beach cleanups regularly turn up bags, bottles, disposable bowls, chopsticks, and other debris.

Today, local schools teach ocean protection, inviting keepers and rehabilitation specialists into classrooms. Conservation was also teaching each generation to understand what survival required.

Along the Li River, I began to understand conservation as belonging. For many families, it was part of what made life there possible. One security manager told me: “我们是漓江人,” We are Li River people. He worried about the eroding banks and hoped the grass would be restored. His daughter wanted to come home after college because the river was too beautiful to leave.

Later, our guide sang in front of the mountain peaks: “我今没有好茶饭，只有山歌敬亲人”—I have no fine food or tea to offer, only a mountain song to honor my guests. The river was not only something people protected. It was part of how they understood home and passed that sense of place forward.

Tourism could easily turn traditions into performances for outsiders. But it could also give mountain songs (山歌), tea dances (采茶舞) and stilt houses (吊脚楼) new audiences and reasons to remain alive. Ancient poems could survive in a book and feel distant.

Only a preserved landscape could let later generations look upon the same mountains and water and feel the centuries between themselves and Han Yu (韩愈) fall away.

At Leshan, cultural memory felt almost physical. The Giant Buddha grew out of the Buddhist idea of 慈悲 (compassion) in Tang dynasty. Stone carved from the cliff was dropped into the river below, helping calm the dangerous confluence. Faith and practical engineering had become part of the same monument.

To take care of the Buddha, vegetation has to be removed before roots damage the stone. Workers apply a protective coating with a mixture made from the local stone every few years. However, many missing parts of smaller Buddhas along the cliff have deliberately been left unreplaced. The principle 修旧如旧 (repair the old as old) allows history to remain visible.

Leshan’s Maitreya (弥勒佛), the buddha of the future, is solemn and dignified, unlike the round-bellied, smiling Maitreya, image familiar since the Song dynasty centuries later. The belief endured even as its form changed. Culture has its own way to decide what to preserve and what to let evolve.

In Huidong, the respect for Mazu (妈祖), the protector of seafarers and fishermen, can reinforce responsibility toward the ocean. The yearly fishing ban of three to four months is also a way of respecting the sea she watches over. Conservation keeps cultural values alive, but cultural values also give people reasons to conserve.

Across these places, conservation was not just about preventing disappearance. Dujiangyan kept water flowing to people. Panda habitats and nesting beaches kept species alive. The Li River gave people a place to belong, while poems, songs, and monuments carried memories across generations.

But all of them raised the same question: What happens when something disappears for good?

The landscapes, animals, poems, temples, and traditions earlier generations left us survived, so we can still decide what they mean to us. Mazu can remain a moral connection to the sea; the Buddha can be worshipped, studied, questioned, or simply stood before. Conservation extends that same freedom to the future. If we allow something to disappear entirely, such freedom to choose disappears along with it.

Lulu told me that some volunteers initially arrive for service hours or a certificate. However, once they work seriously alongside keepers and specialists, they often leave with more knowledge and a stronger sense of responsibility.

That idea became part of why I started Roots & Reach. I want to give students opportunities to learn through service; not simply to complete hours, but to enter a place as both a volunteer and a learner. The point is not to arrive believing I know what a place needs, but to contribute where I am useful, listen to those who know the work, and understand why it matters. Conservation can leave the future something to choose from. Experiential learning can help make sure the next generation understands enough to make that choice thoughtfully.