Alpine Conservation / Environmental Justice
An alpine plant conservation initiative examining how biodiversity protection intersects with livelihood, knowledge, labor, and belonging.
Paint It Black, Reimagining Naxi Tradition. A film by Vanessa He, following the fieldwork into weaving, dress, and the making of a living archive.
Paint It Black, Reimagining Naxi Tradition
Fieldwork, cultivation, exhibitions, film and conservation work, recorded in sequence, and still being added to. Most of what is listed here continued while the next thing was already starting. Scroll sideways →
Laboratory cultivation and field research on endangered alpine plants in Yunnan; fieldwork begins in Liju Village, Shitou Township, Lijiang.
Field research on the Naxi sheepskin shawl, travelling to Sanba Township to study traditional clothing and cultural practice.
A visit to Cizhong Church to explore the coexistence of Tibetan Buddhism, Catholicism and local tradition.
Joining a Peking University research project on Naxi traditional medicine, connecting medicinal knowledge with computational medicine.
A personal website, a WeChat public account and Xiaohongshu begin publishing research, fieldwork and cultural observation.
Site research and project planning in Liju Village; the first local volunteer team is formed.
Shanhe Garden launches in Beijing; more than thirty student volunteers bring endangered alpine plants into a school community.
A charity merchandise campaign, buy one item, help restore one alpine plant, links public participation to conservation.
Field research in the Dulong River Valley, searching for giant rhododendrons and collecting seed for cultivation.
Shanhe Garden arrives at BNDS. Rheum nobile and Primula lithophila germinate on campus.
The participatory exhibition Against the Flat presents plants, science and community as a way of reworking the relation between people and nature.
Continued high-altitude botanical fieldwork in Shangri-La; on 6 June, Shanhe Garden is formally established in Shitou Township, Lijiang.
An internship with an AI pharmaceutical technology company in Changzhou: patents, IP protection, computational medicine and bioinformatics law.
BNDS student volunteers travel to Shanhe Garden for field visits and exchange with local volunteers.
A visual-anthropology field study in Entuwan, Baidi Village, Sanba Township, and the start of a documentary on Naxi traditional clothing.
Return to Lijiang to continue filming, traditional dress, cultural continuity and identity.
Release of the Naxi clothing documentary, turning field research and cultural inquiry into a visual anthropology project.
The garden in Shitou Township is being extended, the oral-history archive is still being edited with the people who spoke it, and restoration work in Liju continues. This record is kept open.
Alpine plants in the Hengduan Mountains survive within narrow ecological limits shaped by altitude, temperature, moisture, seasonality, and highly localized habitats. For species already occurring in small and fragmented populations, even minor environmental change can matter.
Many alpine plants do not germinate simply when water arrives. Their seeds may remain dormant until they experience prolonged cold, moisture, and seasonal change. In their native mountain habitats, winter performs this work. Once seeds leave those environments, conservation requires us to reconstruct part of that ecological sequence artificially.
Light, moisture, substrate, temperature, labels, and repeated observation turn plant survival into a practice of care. Different species require different treatments; cultivation is therefore not a single recipe but an ongoing process of observation and adjustment.
When plants return to Liju, they enter more than a botanical habitat.
After laboratory cultivation and nursery growth, alpine plants return to a living landscape. But a landscape is more than temperature, soil, and altitude.
But what exactly are we returning a plant to?
A habitat is also a livelihood, a workplace, a home, and a governed landscape.
See conservation in practice →
The same landscape can be habitat, livelihood, infrastructure, income, home, and protected space. Conservation changes how these values are recognized, and who is asked to carry their costs.
Grazing is an important household livelihood, while local testimony links intensive free-ranging livestock to bamboo decline and pressure on high-elevation vegetation. The question is not simply whether grazing creates ecological pressure, but how conservation can respond without treating livelihood as disposable.
Birdwatching, guiding, camps, and small-scale tourism can create income around biodiversity. Yet local testimony also warns that too many visitors can bring trampling, waste, and new pressure to the environments they come to see.
Botanical expertise, bird knowledge, ranger observation, household experience, and conservation institutions notice different things. Conservation becomes more just when these forms of knowledge are attributed and placed in conversation rather than absorbed into a single authoritative voice.
Children join voluntary conservation activities; households exchange labor; cultivation and monitoring depend on repeated maintenance. Participation is not only attendance at a meeting. It is also the everyday work through which conservation becomes possible.
The fieldwork did not simply give Shanhe a vocabulary for describing injustice. It changed what we believed a conservation garden should do, who should shape it, and where its benefits should travel.
Recognition
Treat local observation and lived experience as attributed knowledge alongside specialist botanical expertise.
Distribution
Treat tourism and public access as questions of scale, ecological limits, and where benefits travel.
Participation
Build future garden programming around local priorities and feedback rather than treating the village only as a site of implementation.
Care
Make cultivation, monitoring, guiding, maintenance, and household labor visible in the project narrative.
Six visual investigations into how livelihood, biodiversity, knowledge, labor, value, and authority intersect in Liju.
Explore the atlas →
An edited oral-history archive built from field conversations with people who live with, work in, study, or care for the mountain.
Enter Voices from Liju →
In Beijing, thirty pots of six alpine species entered an unused school corridor. The ecological practice traveled, but the landscape, climate, institutions, and meanings of belonging changed.
Space
Who has permission to alter an unused institutional space?
Care
Who waters, maintains, labels, and notices the plants?
Classification
Why is one plant cultivated while another is called a weed?
Belonging
What makes a plant appear to belong somewhere?
INVITED / UNINVITED · PROTECTED / WEED · CULTIVATED / SPONTANEOUS · CARED FOR / REMOVED
Shanhe translates field research and conservation practice into visual, participatory, and archival forms. These works ask how ecological knowledge can be encountered, not only read.
Weaving, dress, and the making of a living archive in the Naxi villages of northwest Yunnan. A film by Vanessa He.
Watch the film →
A participatory exhibition using paper-cut forms to reinterpret high-altitude plants and ecological and cultural resilience.
See the installation →
Documentary film
The film is still being finished. It will play here once it is released.
A film by Vanessa He. Weaving, dress, and the making of a living archive in the Naxi villages of northwest Yunnan.
Shanhe / Closing
We began by asking how to keep an endangered plant alive. The work led outward, from seed physiology to livelihoods, institutions, labor, knowledge, and belonging.
