This volume of "The China Environment Yearbook" is the second in a series of annual records written, commissioned, produced, and edited by Friends of Nature, Chinaa (TM)s premier environmental non-governmental organization. This book provides a window on debates and events as they have affected Chinaa (TM)s struggles toward a more just and sustainable model of development during the year 2006. Courageous essays question policies of fencing Inner Mongolian grasslands in a way that contradicts local culture and ecology; probe the wisdom of the South-to-North water transfer scheme in the upper Yangzi (and of a potentially even more ecologically intrusive mega-project called the Shuotian Grand Canal Project); and analyze shortcomings in government efforts to clean up some of Chinaa (TM)s most heavily polluted waterways. There are candid accounts of new levels of environmental degradation in rural areas and of the difficulties encountered in Chinaa (TM)s effort to produce a a oegreen GDPa that would accurately reflect the costs of natural resource extraction and pollution. Other hard-hitting articles describe Chinaa (TM)s role in the global trade in illegal logging, analyze the problem of a oecancer villages, a and make clear the seriousness of problems with widespread groundwater contamination and lack of access to safe drinking water.

Yang Dongping is co-founder and vice president of Friends of Nature and professor of education at the Beijing Institute of Technology.
Friends of Nature was the first environmental non-governmental organization in the People's Republic of China, established in 1994 by Liang Congjie, Yang Dongping, Liang Xiaoyan and Wang Lixiong. The organization has more than 3000 active members and has been recipient fifteen prestigious national and international awards.