By Jim Harris, Vice President, International Crane Foundation

Everyone agrees that changing people's attitudes and behavior is key to almost all other conservation objectives. But how can you do this effectively, especially in a country as large and diverse as China?

The International Crane Foundation (ICF) works worldwide to safeguard cranes and the wild places where they live. We have worked in China since 1979, because China has more cranes (8 species, 6 of them threatened) than any other country. Education work, however, for foreign conservationists who cannot even talk with Chinese people, becomes a great challenge - one could even say a dream.

ICF has been very fortunate to partner with Beijing Brooks Education Center (BBEC). We are now in our fifth year of working together! 2007 was the best year yet for our collaboration.

Given the huge scale of Chinese landscapes, and the many people to be reached, we have decided to focus our effort on people living beside the cranes, people sharing the marshes with them and relying upon many of the same wild resources.

I am delighted that BBEC staff did not wish to go into the villages and small towns and simply tell teachers or local education staff what to do. We began as students, talking with and listening to local teachers, and to people in the villages who had long seen the marshes in every season and witnessed the changes.

BBEC involved local teachers and these other "experts" closely in the design and writing of curriculum for the school children, a special book for each place. We made this decision because each place has its own problems and its own cultures, and thus its own solutions to the conservation challenges. BBEC helped bring science into the curricula, and helped the teachers incorporate culture as well.

Through this work, we found common vision with the people living by the marshes. While some experts or media depict conservation as a conflict, where one must choose to help nature or to help people, our approach created alliances. Villagers, school children, BBEC staff members, and we from ICF all want healthy, productive landscapes that can support people and wildlife. We have the same values that help us work together for the same outcomes.

This past year, ICF staff members have felt very lucky to go into the field with BBEC staff. We visited wetlands in Heilongjiang, Jilin, Inner Mongolia, even nearby Russia, to share our passion for nature and conservation. We have learned as much as we taught, we came home inspired by what local teachers and even the youngest students are doing.

We experiment. This year and last, we have been trying new technology to link those rural children with children in the cities, not just in Harbin or Beijing but across America too. We believe students far away have much to learn from those living with the cranes, and the children by the wetlands can help inspire many other people to become involved. To learn more, I hope you will visit our project website www.trackingcranes.org - it is now in Chinese and English versions, and our partners in Russia (at the north end of the crane flyway) are preparing a Russian version now.

This year, we have also scaled up our efforts. Most of northeast Asia's waterbirds migrate north and south along the coast of Bohai, where they are funneled between the mountains and the sea. Thus one of China's largest cities, Tianjin, rises from a critical flight path of the birds. Tianjin's wetlands are extremely important for waterbird conservation, they provide essential rest places on the long migrations.

For these wetlands, there are a great many local people, indeed - millions of people of Tianjin. We have slightly modified our efforts, again working with local teachers and educators, to create a teachers handbook on wetlands and birds. This year, we printed enough copies so that every middle school science teacher in Tianjin can bring wetland conservation into their classrooms.

We are grateful for financial support from the ConocoPhillips SPIRIT of Conservation Migratory Bird Program.