Let's start with a good news story 💚 Following 25 days of vigorous local campaigning, residents in the supposedly-totalitarian country of China succeeded in halting highway construction that would have plowed through mudflats which 49 species of bird rely on for dinner and rest. Among these is the spoon-billed sandpiper, a migratory shorebird with a global population of less than 500, and which is considered “Critically-Endangered” by the IUCN. It’s a story as old as the automobile: straight roads make easy plans, and woe betide anything or anyplace, whether old-growth forest or mudflat, that is located along its path. So it was that on April 30th, in southernmost province of Guangxi, a highway plan was approved that would have severely impacted coastal mudflats that host 20,000 birds from 46 species including migratory ones. Under Chinese law, environmental impact assessments are required before any infrastructure project. A 27-mile long stretch of highway near Xichang town would cut right across more than 50 acres of mudflats and coastal mangroves, where a survey recently identified 14 spoon-billed sandpipers. The number qualifies the area to be of international importance under China’s commitment to the Ramsar Convention on the protection of ecologically significant wetlands. Aside from international law, the sandpiper is also rarer than virtually any other animal in the country, and already guaranteed the highest national protections. Li Jiahe came to learn about the sandpiper and the highway which threatened it while he was at university in the Netherlands. Online outcries reached Mr. Li at school, and loving all animal species, he quickly took action for the first time in his life to try and save what the Chinese English-language outlet Sixth Tone described as “a handful of birds he has never seen in a place he has never visited.” "We’re all ordinary people. We are small. But if we can raise awareness and plant a seed in people’s minds, that’s already a good thing,” Li told the outlet. More here: goodnewsnetwork.org/in-the-l…