Published in Living on Earth: Public Radio’s Environmental New Magazine, February 2020

Most of the time, living in this place feels like a respite from environmental woe; sometimes though we feel like we’re living on the front line. 

The intelligent find joy in water. 

If Confucius is right, we must all be prodigies.
We moved to this mountain village, a three-hour drive from our home in Shanghai, because of the water, because of the air, because the inner-city pollution was quite literally making us sick. In moving to the country-side we were swimming against the tide; rural villages in China are draining, as young people migrate to the city for work. We joined a small trickle headed upstream, closer to the source of water.

Water isn’t magnetic, but it draws us to itself. All summer we swim in cool, deep channels, caressed by water heavy as silk. We slide down slick rockfaces into churning whirlpools. We climb to the sources of springs to collect water sweet to drink and fragrant with minerals. Read More at Living On Earth