Andy Pan · Jiangsu Tianyi High School, China · World Speech Day 2021
Andy Pan was still at school in Jiangsu when he was selected to travel with a Nanjing University team studying how European countries had cleaned up the Rhine. He came home to a town where cable manufacturing accounts for around 40% of the economy, and where the forests and streams he ran through as a child have largely gone. What makes this talk unusual is that he refuses the choice everyone expects him to make between the industry and the landscape. He proposes a test instead: that a new factory should have to earn the land it takes.
Transcript
Published as spoken.
Hello everyone, I’m Andy Pan from Jiangsu Tianyi High School.
Once upon a time, I was quite fortunate to be selected to go on a scientific excursion to Europe with the investigative team of Nanjing University, to study how European countries cooperated together to address the chemical pollution of the Rhine River Basin since the 1980s, which might offer us a lesson about the Yangtze River development and pollution addressing.
So there, I was quite impressed by the beautiful scenery behind the Rhine River in Basel, Switzerland. We can see the fish swimming freely in clear water and we can just walk on the pebbles at the riverside. On the river, I can also see people reading and relaxing themselves in the pleasant sunshine in July. And just not far away from this river, an investigative station and dam coexist there peacefully, in case further accidents will happen.
As a member of the Environmental Planning Group, I didn’t think about how to address the pollution in a chemical or biological or engineering measure, but instead we need to think about how these measures would affect our society in the long run. So the two feedbacks we offer, the first is cost effectiveness. It’s like you cannot invest your money just for this pollution. You have to ensure that this project, for example a dam, will have some further use in the future. And the second thing is about sustainability. We need to shift our economic focus to ensure that such accidents like the chemical pollution will not happen again in the future.
And such a sense just grew stronger for me when I came back to my hometown, which is a small town by the Yangtze River Basin, and where cable industry is the dominant economic factor and contributes to almost 40% of the economy in our town. And residents in town are quite proud of the industry, since we are the ones who are responsible for the cable part in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
But at the same time, however, residents in town also showed concerns about this industry. We are gradually losing our childhood memories and the beautiful nature. In my childhood, I still remember clearly about running across the little forests and running by the brooks and watching those little fishes or the small rabbits just in the mountains. It’s like, since we are the people who live beside the mountain and water. Nowadays these scenarios are quite rare, and even some of them are forever gone, due to the expansion of the cable industry.
So how can we preserve our current living standard while sustaining nature? It’s quite a good problem for everyone. Some residents suggest that we can merge existing factories to save land and recover ecology for our town. And some also suggest that we can add cost effectiveness, it’s like a ratio of your production per unit of land, and the sustainability of the factory, to a standard, to decide whether you can build this new factory or not.
People are showing more and more concern about this issue, because I think this is a global issue. This lesson can be used for economies everywhere in the world, as human interactions with the environment are growing more and more significant in the world. We have to leave some treasure and a healthy environment for our descendants in the future.
So my idea is that I could enjoy a cup of coffee by the lakeside in my hometown, watching the tall residential buildings stand in the faraway in the dusk. And everything, the lake, the buildings, and me, just coexist peacefully, just like us people and the nature.
So that’s all. Thank you.
Recorded at World Speech Day China, 2025.
World Speech Day is a global movement in over 100 countries, giving anyone with an idea worth hearing a platform to share it.