On an idyllic holiday, questions of population become a weighty matter

Many Chinese born before 1979, like me, are sensitive to the population issue.

We often grew up in bigger families with more members than those born in and after 1979, when China adopted the one-child policy as one of its basic development strategies.

Over the years we have seen the size of Chinese families shrink, especially in cities, and felt the policy's profound influences on our daily lives and our society.

Now most of my colleagues are the only children of their families, and most of my friends, like me, have only one child.

I do miss those big family reunions held during Spring Festivals, when my grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins, parents and brothers were all present, occasions that are now just memories.

Nevertheless, I strongly support the one-child policy, believing it has been good for the country economically and for the country's fragile environment.

I am a nature lover and had got used to seeing human settlements sprawling into the country's most remote nature reserves and worried about increasing human disturbance to our ecosystems. However, in recent years I have seen more deserted villages in or near protected areas of the country.

The government's effort to move human settlements out of national and provincial reserves in recent years is one reason. However, more importantly it is because of the fall in populations in rural areas and the country's rapid urbanization, coupled with the economic boom.

Urbanization has drastic and irreversible effects on our environment, not all of them negative. Deserted villages are a true indicator of the decreasing environmental pressure from our rural population.

At a remote village in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province, an old hunter of the Dai ethnic group told me that hunting there has largely become a thing of the past because young people have migrated to cities to find work, considering hunting time-consuming, hard work, and unwilling to have anything to do with it when they return to their home towns or villages on holiday. For me, that is a positive consequence of urbanization.

When I go traveling I like to go to places that have natural attractions that are as little disturbed by humans as possible. Of course, I am more likely to find that outside China.

However, on a recent trip to Indonesia my feelings were mixed.

On the island of Halmahera and in Gede-Pangrango National Park in West Java, I saw beautiful tropical forests that are extremely rich in biodiversity. I saw many different species of birds and animals indigenous to the regions, such as Javan langurs (also known as Ebon leaf monkeys) and the fascinating Wallace's standard wings. This is a species of bird of paradise that presents its unique courtship display in a patch of forest on Halmahera.

However, in the lower part of the national park, which is dominated by the twin volcanoes of Mount Gede and Mount Pangrango, there was another not so unusual species: flocks of day trippers who were noisy, were often listening to radios, and who sang and shouted to each other. The also left a lot of rubbish on the trail. It reminded me of climbing Fragrant Hills, a park in Beijing well known for its maple leaves, on a weekend in autumn.

On Halmahera, so as to avoid weekend traffic, I changed my plan to explore the national park for another morning and left at 6 am.

These are only two minor downsides on a trip that was otherwise highly enjoyable.

It needs to be remembered, too, that Java is the world's populous island, home to about 139 million people, 57 percent of Indonesia's population, so what I experienced was no huge surprise.

In Halmahera, too, you still can easily find solitude in extensive tropical rainforests covering most of the island. Your chances of meeting indigenous people are limited, usually while traveling on the road. On the way back to where my friends and I were staying our car passed dozens of small villages.

Every family in the villages seemed to have one or two colorfully painted bungalows with a rectangular courtyard surrounded by a wooden fence in which a car or motorcycles were parked.

In every village I saw dozens of children, from toddlers to teenagers, chasing each other around, playing soccer, swimming in a river, or just sitting on porches with others enjoying the evening breeze.

When it dawned on me that children seemed to outnumber adults in a village, I imagined that this must be because a school was located nearby, an idea of which I was soon disabused.

Thinking about the demographics of all this, I soon began to feel uneasy, particularly after seeing how heavily populated Java is. I doubt that Halmahera will ever be as populous as Java, but the population growth will certainly add pressure on the environment, and on its precious ecosystem, including diverse fauna and flora.

Indonesia is a place I have grown to like traveling to, and there is little doubt I will return there, but places I have in mind to visit - West Papua, Sulawesi and the Lesser Sunda Islands - have moved up on my priority list, and the reason is my sensitivity to the issue of population growth.

chenliang@chinadaily.com.cn