Quake Douses Olympic Spirit for China's Most Adorable Ambassador

Young panda at the Giant Panda Breeding Center, Wolong Nature Preserve, in 2006.

As the Olympic games get underway today in Beijing, Laguna resident Tom Lamb is more concerned with nature than athletics. His particular concern is China's Wolong Nature Reserve, which was home to a large portion of the nation's endangered great panda population before its infrastructure was devastated by a May 12 earthquake that also killed hundreds of Chinese school children. Located in the Sichuan province six miles from the epicenter of the quake, the reserve is now only accessible through a mountain pass and its eco-tourism aspirations set back years by the quake.

While tourists admire the eight "Olympic pandas" at the Beijing Zoo, the fate of the pandas in the wild is more tenuous. Wei Fuwen, from the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was optimistic about the future of the panda and said the population was still increasing. Yet Wei admitted, "the habitat loss is very bad," Reuters reported earlier this week.

Quake-caused landslides, such as the this one within the Wolong Breeding Center, cut off highways, damaged electrical generating facilities and destroyed towns across Sichuan province.

The drumbeat of attention over the Beijing Olympics is all but eclipsing news of earthquake recovery efforts, Lamb fears.

An aerial, architectural, landscape and ethnographic photographer and Festival of Arts board member, Lamb manages to blend his interests with an extraordinary volunteer preservation effort. He is the vice president of USCEF (U.S.-China Environmental Fund), the first registered environmental non-profit, non-governmental organization in China that has been largely responsible for the development since 2001 of the Wolong Giant Panda Nature Reserve and Breeding Center.

Lynne Hoopes, USCEF staff member, interviews a grandmother and her grandchildren, whose parents were both killed in the May quake.

About 85 of the 1,500 great pandas in China were housed in the Wolong captive breeding program and all of them had to be resettled after the earthquake because of the damage to the center, Lamb said. One panda died when a concrete wall it huddled against during the earthquake collapsed under a landslide.

And resettlement was no easy task. Wolong is now virtually unreachable by car or plane, with massive destruction to major highways and roads leading into the reserve from Chengdu, the nearest big city with an international airport. Lamb made the journey to Chengdu in June, just weeks after the tragedy, traveling by car for 15 hours over high mountain passes that close in winter. Previously, Wolong could be reached via a four-hour drive from the airport.

USCEF, whose mission is conservation and education through partnered projects involving both American and Chinese organizations and personnel, had developed a master plan for the nature reserve aimed at shoring up the facility's breeding center with modern buildings and technology, and supporting land preservation efforts. All plans came to a halt with the earthquake. And while the buildings constructed by USCEF at Wolong - a conservation institute, an ecolodge, a restaurant and a tea house intended to lure tourists - survived the quake, Lamb says they are not usable because they were compromised by ensuing landslides.

A relief tent set up alongside destroyed local housing and retail building after the May earthquake in Genda, Wolong.

Lamb met USCEF's founder, Mark Brody, while serving as a partner in S.W.A., a Laguna Beach-based international landscape architecture firm. Brody approached the firm as a U.S. partner for a park project he was pitching at the behest of the mayor of Beijing, and Lamb adopted the project personally in 1994.

As project director of the Badaling International Friendship Forest and Park, as it was named, Lamb created an open space preserve and an environmental tourist destination at the site of the most-visited gate on China's Great Wall. The park was dedicated in 1998, but Lamb's friendship with Brody and their mutual interest in USCEF have been growing ever since.

Laguna Beach photographer Tom Lamb at the Wolong panda preserve in northern Sichuan gets the inside scoop on panda breeding.

Locally, Lamb is involved with an equally ambitious open space project, development of Irvine's Great Park. With his largeformat panoramic camera, he is documenting the reconfiguration of the former El Toro Marine Base into a natural preserve for public use.

As the Badaling project was coming to fruition, Lamb and his wife Vicki decided to visit Wolong to see the pandas. Recognizing another opportunity to be of service in China through USCEF, Lamb and Brody began working with the center in 2001, redesigning and rebuilding the facilities, working with a Seattlebased design group to help the center establish itself as a tourism destination.

The earthquake has been a major setback in the effort to continue Wolong's development and preserve its integrity. Lamb explained that the indigenous Quing and Tibetan people who reside throughout the reserve and region lost virtually everything. He figures it will take at least two years to rebuild the villages and the buildings at Wolong. The reserve previously had an important role in the restoration of the giant panda population, housing 18 pregnant females at the time of the quake. Since then, those pandas have given birth at other locations, but Lamb says the ideal habitat for them is Wolong. It is there that they can be re-introduced into the wild.

Sichuan province map shows World Heritagedesignated panda sanctuary.

Another challenge comes from the economic power of Hong Kong developers eyeing postquake development projects in Sichuan, which may attempt to intrude on the pandas' natural habitat, Lamb speculated.

The administrators at Wolong had anticipated a tourist influx with the Olympics in Beijing this year. Now there are no pandas, no hotel, no restaurant and no tea house and, obviously, no tourist dollars to help rebuild Wolong.

Lamb is hoping an Olympic effort will be made for the future of Wolong and the pandas who live there.

For more information: visit www.uscef.org