Wearing a pair of glasses and plain clothes, 16-year-old Yao Yuan looks no different from other girls of her age, but what has put her in the media spotlight is her recent selection as one of China's first 10 "Environmental Ambassadors."

"It is a real surprise to me," said the student at the Second Middle School affiliated to the Capital Normal University.

No wonder Yao feels that way. The other nine recipients are all household names such as Sally Wu (Wu Xiaoli), a popular anchorwoman with Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV.

Although Yao is not as glamorous as the celebrities, they have one thing in common. They have devoted themselves to environmental protection over the past few years.

"The title is too heavy for me," Yao said. "I never thought what I have done would bring me something. I just like what I am doing."

Fascination with birds

Yao's interest in environmental protection can be traced back to four years ago, when she took part in a bird-watching activity organized by one of her mother's friends, a member of the Friends of Nature group.

Friends of Nature is one of the most active and influential grass-roots environmental non-governmental organizations in China, with its mission to help heighten the environmental awareness of the public through various activities.

Whenever an activity is organized, the relatives and friends of its members are always welcomed.

"City-born-and-bred children these days seldom show concerns about the environment," said Ding Ning, Yao's mother. "I wanted to let my daughter know more about nature."

Ding, an editor with a publishing house in Beijing, is also a member of Friends of Nature.

A professor with the Capital Normal University named Gao Wu impressed Yao the most during that bird-watching activity.

"He could identify birds by their twittering," Yao recalled, and his knowledge in turn shaped her interest in birds.

"He would always let children watch the birds first after he set up the telescope," Yao said. "On the way back, he offered us information on the trees lining the roadsides and the birds that came into our sight."

The experience, which Yao described as "fresh and interesting," generated a genuine love for the environment from that day on.

"The mention of watching birds will bring into some people's mind the birds being raised as pets at home, or those in the cages carried by senior citizens," Yao said. "Only when you face the birds in nature will you understand what beauty means.

"If you like birds, you'd better watch them instead of caging them. If you love your friends, how can you cage them?" she added, drawing an analogy.

About two years ago, a river flowing near Yao's neighbourhood in Xicheng District suffered serious pollution. The water not only stank up the residential areas, but also kept people away from the river. "You could smell it 50 metres away," she said.

Yao gave the Beijing Evening News a call, hoping that media involvement could prompt departments concerned to control the pollution and bring a clean river back.

It drew a response "quicker than previously imagined." Soon, the stink subsided.

"I don't know whether it was my efforts that worked. Anyway, I was very glad to see the polluted water gave way to a cleaner river," Yao said.

Every autumn, a large quantity of fallen poplar leaves covering the ground poses a problem to the urban public sanitation departments. The sanitation workers used to pile the fallen leaves and burn them. But this simple treatment always resulted in air pollution.

In 2000, Yao and three friends explored better ways to dispose of poplar leaves.

With the help of Friends of Nature, they embarked on an experiment to raise sheep with fallen leaves.

"We collected leaves after school every day and produced the foodstuffs for the sheep with 98 per cent leaves and 2 per cent corn," Yao said.

Based on their experiments, Yao and her teammates wrote a report titled "The collection and use of urban fallen poplar leaves."

Now the city has banned the burning of fallen leaves.

Touring rural schools has become a routine for Yao and her mother during holiday periods. They have gone to underdeveloped regions giving lectures and raising awareness about environmental protection. So far, she has been to some remote primary schools in Central China's Hubei Province, North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Northwest China's Gansu Province.

Once when she went to a small village in Gansu, Yao found herself teaching the students.

Yao found the children usually had names with environmental ties, such as lakes, rivers, oceans, flowers and mountains.

She first named herself "Xiao Hui" and explained to the pupils that it meant "sunshine in the morning."

"Who can tell me how your name is linked with the environment?" she asked the pupils in the classroom.

All minds whirred in silence, but interest began to stir among the children. They came to the blackboard one after another to write down their names and explained how they were linked to the environment.

"This way I brought home to them that loving nature means loving ourselves," Yao said.

Apart from the lectures on environmental protection, Yao also took some publications to these young pupils to broaden her efforts.

The day before she left the village, Yao came out for a walk around the village with five local children. She came across some pupils collecting trash on the roadside. They told Yao that it was the brochures that she brought to them that taught them to do so.

"Every child liked Yao very much," Ding said proudly.

When they were about to leave the village after finishing their mission in Hubei Province in 2001, all the children came to see them off.

A boy rushed to his sugar cane field and uprooted a cane to present to Yao as a gift.

Life and study

Born into a family of environmentalists, Yao has modelled herself after her parents. Her father Yao Yijun is a teacher with a secondary technical school. In their daily life, they separate domestic waste into different kinds. The used paper, bottles and kitchen leftovers are classified and put into separate dustbins.

The person in charge of reading the water meters in the neighbourhood is always surprised to find that the water consumption of Yao's home tends to be listed at the bottom of his page.

Yao accredits it to the water-saving measures that she has adopted. She puts several basins and barrels in the lavatory to keep waste water from everyday life.

"The water, after washing the clothes, is kept in the barrels to flush the toilet bowl," Yao said.

Putting a large bottle in the toilet tank is another water-saving measure.

Yao said she learned the water-saving method when she surfed the Internet.

"Although a bottle of water seems negligible, it takes time to know the result," she said.

Yao has managed to balance her studies and activities well.

"She studies very hard," said Liu Yanhui, a teacher of Chinese who taught Yao at Beijing Xicheng Foreign Language School, where Yao spent her junior high school years.

Each time that Yao came back from a village tour, she would share her stories with Liu.

"She would write her experience into her composition assignment. She wrote very well," Liu said.

Yao's parents have been strict with her since she was a child. "Yao has spent most of her weekends on extra-curricular studies, especially in English," said Yao Yijun. Aside from her great interest in English, Yao Yuan is also studying German in her spare time.

However, with the entrance examination for colleges two years away, the environmental ambassador with a two-year tenure is confronted with a great dilemma, and that is what she will do in the future.

"It is still too early for me to make any precise plans about the future," she said.

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