Green Hero in China - Interview with Dr. Josef Margraf (LIFE Voices No. 1) - Transcribed

Green Hero in China - Interview with Dr. Josef Margraf (LIFE Voices No. 1)

Duration: 6 minutes and 36 seconds

Country: Switzerland

Language: English

License: Public Domain

Genre: Documentary

Producer: kedarvideo

Director: Kedar Misani ( kedar@goldenboat.net )

Views: 662 (115 embedded)

Posted by: kedarvideo on Apr 27, 2007

EPISODE 1 of "LIFE Voices - The Extraordinary in Everyday Life" - monthly podcast, presenting interviews with inspiring personalities from around the world. Published on the 13th of each month. Today with German biologist Dr. JOSEF MARGRAF who went to China to discover nearly extinct species and help establish a system of biodiversity in the rain forest region of the Sou thern Chinese mountains.

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♫ Music by Parichayaka Hammerl ♫
Photos by Kedar Misani
Chinese video footage courtesy of ZDF TV from a series on China
LIFE Voices is published on the 13th of each month on www.srichinmoy.tv, dotSUB and other video hosting sites.
YOU ARE WELCOME TO ADD TRANSLATIONS IN YOUR LANGUAGE
The concept that we are persuing all started one day with one plant that we found in a Buddhist monastery near the Burmese
border. The plant actually is just starting to blossom over there in our garden
It was a small Golden Lotus looking banana species and I had never seen this species before
and as I am a biologist, I was quite intrigued about it, and it was so beautiful that we thought, maybe, there are many more, thousands of people
thousands of people who would find this very beautiful as well, why do we not start a concept in which we can protect the species
we can grow the species, we can propagate the species and maybe we can even market it worldwide
and as a matter of fact we succeded, we sold many of those plants that have been grown by our farmers
out especially to America and to Europe, and we have definitely saved the species.
So with this initial success we thought, may be we can enlarge the idea. We can include more and more plants
and today we are working with more than 100 species. For those we design land use systems that we no longer call farming
systems, there are land use systems that resemple the original rain forest of the area where we live
and our goal is to reverse the trend of distraction and eventually design systems that look exactly like the old rain forest
that has been cut down by logging companies, that has been replaced by rubber plantations, by sugar cane plantations, and we
wish to reverse this trend, to come back to a rain forest that is actually useful.
We gave our company the name "Tian Zi" which is Chinese and means in translation "Seeds of Heaven", seed as the symbol of
initial growth. But for our business model we needed a new concept because we were so isolated in those Southern Chinese mountains
that we were quite sure that there would be no customers walking in our door and buy our products
but then through growing our business susteinably and slowly we soon realized that we need more outlets, so we opened this
teahouse and restaurant here in Chiang Mai in Thailand.
As a bilogical scientist I was always interested in biodiversity. So, the more you go into remote places, rain forests, rivers,
oceans, of course chances are that you once in a while discover new species, so I discovered new fish species in Philipine
rivers, I discoverd new Ginger species in mountains in China. On a more private note I would say the biggest discovery was about
myself because after half a century of living I found my wife in China and I discovered that my love to our children is the strongest force
I have experienced in my life.
One of the special eco systems we are working with are the tea forests in the mountains of Southern Yunnan.
This is how tea was produced thousands and thousands of years ago. It was pressed into those cake like structures with a very clearly
defined weight and as such they have been sent to the Emperor to Beijing as a token from the people from the Southern part of Yunnan.
This is the way that those people found out, tea can be transported over very long distances, and what is even better,
I guess I had to experience what most people experienced before they changed their diet, this is, you have to get sick first
and sickness happened to me about five years ago when I got a serious heart problem. After that I still didn't know what
I had to change but it was clear I had to change something. For example we all now nowadays we should never eat refined sugar
come in the vitamins, the fresh vegetables, come in nowaydays what we call Vitamin F, which are the unsaturated fatty acids,
the Omega acids. With this knowledge, you would already single out specific food that is reach in those and these are for example
nuts, cernels, seeds. With the knowledge about the pesticides that are used in growing agricultures you would of course exclude
practically everything you can buy in a normal store, because you know it is layed in pesticides
So, we started our own way of growing our own crops, of finding other people who were likeminded or going to places which were
so remote hat definitely there was no pesticides used in those areas. And these are nowadays our products, these became
the people we work with until today and we are very proud that nowadays we have a whole series of products from those remote
areas that are absolutely free of pesticides, that are grown in natural environments and our products contribute to the protection
of the biodiversity of large lands.