This week as part of the National Governors Association Conference, Salt Lake City is hosting the U.S. Governors' Forum — a groundbreaking event in diplomacy between U.S. governors and Chinese officials. As a proud Utahn, I'm thrilled that this conference will also be the backdrop for an important milestone in Chinese environmental protection.
The Yunnan Province will sign an agreement with The Nature Conservancy, a leading global conservation organization, to design and create new national parks in China, protecting some of the world's most important and breathtaking landscapes and ecosystems.
It's fitting that this historic conservation initiative will be launched in Utah. The environment is essential to Utah's way of life: imagine this state without its famed sandstone arches or this city without the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake.
It's equally impossible to think of Yunnan Province without conjuring up dramatic landscapes. Yunnan is China's most ecologically diverse province, and it extends from tropical rainforests in the south up to the Himalayas — and some of Asia's most vital rivers — in the North.
Yet, in both Utah and Yunnan, many of us have become increasingly disconnected from the natural world around us, and development is a growing environmental threat to both of our homes.
But Utah and Yunnan Province have also been at the forefront of bold new initiatives that protect nature not from people, but for people. Both regions have profited from the science and experience of The Nature Conservancy, a leading conservation organization working locally and around the world to protect lands and waters for nature and people.
Here in Utah, the Conservancy recently celebrated its 25th anniversary of protecting the lands and waters that make our state special. Over the last quarter-century, the Conservancy, in collaboration with a suite of partners including many government entities, has protected over 1.2 million acres of public and private land in Utah.
The Conservancy has been working in Yunnan since 1998, helping the government to plan and launch China's first three national parks. One of those — Laojunshan National Park — boasts sprawling sandstone cliffs that wouldn't look out of place in Arches National Park.
Similar scenery, similar solutions. Yet we still have much to learn from each other's efforts. The Yunnan national parks don't just protect habitat for wildlife (although they do — an important service in a province with some of world's last Asian elephants and the only remaining Yunnan golden monkeys). They also provide livelihoods to the local people who live in and around these parks, protecting the lands these communities have farmed for centuries.
In Utah, at the iconic Dugout Ranch, the Conservancy has established the Canyonlands Research Center, a powerful science collaborative and outdoor laboratory that is yielding practical solutions to help ranchers, communities, agencies and policy makers in their efforts to sustain the lands and waters of the Colorado Plateau.
Bold new partnerships like these are essential if we are to preserve the ecosystems necessary to the health of our planet. Yunnan is China's most ethnically diverse province, and Utah is home to a wide variety of different, competing interests. Yet we all depend on an increasingly vulnerable environment for survival, and building alliances around this shared condition has been key to the Conservancy's success in the U.S. and China.
Equally important to our planet's future is meaningful leadership. This upcoming Governors Association Conference provides a chance to rededicate resources toward environmental protection and to examine how we can refashion our past accomplishments to help people and nature around the globe.
Throughout history, we have learned that when humans are in harmony with nature, both reap the benefits. It's a lesson that's been taken to heart in both Yunnan and Utah — a vision that unites both China and the United States and an exhortation to do more for the natural world around us.
Teresa Beck is co-chair elect of The Nature Conservancy's Board of Directors as well as a trustee of the Conservancy's Utah Chapter.