Except for the dashing antelopes painted on its sides, the Jinbei van looks like thousands of other minibuses cavorting through the streets of Beijing.

But inside the van it's a totally different world. Half the space is jammed with videotapes, books, pictures and other teaching apparatus.

Christened "Antelope," the van is actually a classroom on wheels, through which its drivers hope to spread environmental knowledge to Chinese children and arouse people's awareness of the importance of environmental protection.

The first environmental education van ( "ee-van") in China, "Antelope" has travelled more than 20,000 kilometres, to give environmental protection lectures in about 200 schools in Beijing, Tianjin municipalities, as well as in Hebei and Shanxi provinces since it was born in May 2000.

"More than 20,000 school children have attended our classes so far," said Hao Bing, the first teacher in this mobile classroom and also the head of the programme.

Hao is an environmental volunteer working with Friends of Nature, a non-governmental environmental organization based in Beijing.

The "environment education van programme" is one of the most important programmes of the organization.

"With our 'green van,' we hope to teach children to listen to the Nature, to revere all living beings and to understand the laws of ecology. And we hope our activities can sow the seeds of awareness of the need for environmental protection in the hearts of children," said Hao.

Urgent matter

Hao got the seed of the idea to create such a mobile classroom for environment education in China during her visit to Germany in 1996 with a delegation of Friends of Nature. There she found 25 environmental education vans shuttling between German nature reserves and primary schools.

"The mobile classrooms have been very effective, for they simplify complex environmental problems by letting students get directly in touch with Nature through playing games," Hao recalled.

Back home in Beijing, Hao started to take action to turn the idea into reality. Environmental education had just begun in China at that time, she recalled.

Even today, environmental education in most Chinese primary and middle schools is still spotty at best. Absence of teachers well-trained in environmental protection and management, as well as the lack of teaching facilities are the biggest barricades. Hao added that for schools in China, academic courses always seem to weigh much more important than immediate issues, such as the environment.

She pointed out that in rural China, environmental education is even more urgent, since most rural children still live in their hometowns after they grow up and they will be more closely connected with the natural world than the people living in cities.

Another reason that drove Hao to devote herself to this programme was the deterioration of the environment in China.

"The present environmental situation in China is alarming," Hao said. "For instance, 80 per cent of the rivers are polluted. Rising standards of living have resulted in more and more waste everywhere. In some places, parents carry their child all the time because carbon monoxide emissions settle to ground level becoming dangerously high."

When asked why their programme targets children, Hao said: "Children are tomorrow's leaders and activists as well as consumers and polluters. If they can become friends of Nature rather than destroyers, their future lives will be more beautiful and easier.

"To achieve this goal, they should first know both the beauty and the problems of their hometowns' environmental conditions."

New education form

To devote herself to the programme wholeheartedly, Hao Bing, who completed a master's degree in environment education at Beijing Normal University in 1996, quit her research work in the university's Environmental Education Centre in early 2000.

"Environmental education in China is not a green salon where people sit around and chat about the green mountains and make up slogans like 'Give back our blue sky' or 'Return our clean water'," she said.

"It is easy to shout the slogans, but you have to do something. You have to contribute your own efforts, your energy, your money and even your health."

With the hard work of Hao Bing and several other volunteers and with a donation from Save Our Future - an environmental foundation in Germany, they started their first journey with the environmental education van on May 31, 2000.

"Our van is just like a Noah's Ark that brings Nature back to the city," Hao said. "We offer children the opportunity to engage in games about the environment and get into contact with Nature and learn to treasure it," Hao said.

But some people are doubtful about the effects of the classes since children will only have the experience once or twice in their entire lives and it only lasts for one morning or afternoon.

"The number of times and their duration are not so important," said Hao. "We just want to plant seeds of beauty and love in children's hearts. With the seeds, they will be able to wake up to their responsibilities."

Hao said she is happy that the classes are quite effective. During her second visit to a school in the suburbs of Beijing, a boy told Hao that he used a piece of adhesive plaster to bind up a locust whose leg was broken.

"I am so glad to see that they begin to help the tiny insects, birds and frogs to survive instead of killing them," Hao said. "Children learn from our classes about how to respect living beings and thus also learn to respect themselves and the people around them."

The lively outdoor games they organize have attracted a lot of children to join them, Hao said.

In one class held at a primary school in a mountain area in Mentougou District in the rural suburbs of Beijing, Hao utilized a game to illustrate how the food chain was composed and operated.

Children in this game played different roles, some acted as plants, some as herbivorous animals, small carnivorous animals, and giant carnivorous beasts, so as to help them understand how life depends on life.

By doing so, the concepts of the pyramid of life and the food chain are no longer just black words on the page of a textbook but vivid images for the students.

And the children get to know that if one link in this chain is missing, the whole chain must collapse.

Some parents and local residents also joined the class with curiosity.

Intrigued by the classes, local people began to discuss local environment problems with Hao.

Some of them said the biggest obstacle for them to get out of poverty was the lack of water.

They told Hao that they realized that if there was no water, there would be no grass for raising sheep, from which they earned most of their income.

They also got the idea from the environment teacher that the proper way to keep water in the area was to plant more grass right away.

"It is never too late to do something for the environment," Hao said.

More vans needed

After one year's hard work, Hao Bing and her colleagues' new "Antelope" education has gained wide popularity among school children. It has also won the acceptance of the public and drawn attention from the media.

This acceptance has helped make it possible for a the second ee-van, "Bronco," to join in the team through the joint sponsorship of Nong.net company and Unilever (China) Ltd. The second van began its journey in June last year.

So far, "Bronco" has travelled more than 8,000 kilometres in Shaanxi and Qinghai provinces and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwestern China.

To encourage the two van's excellent work, the Ford Conservation and Environment Grants - a top environmental foundation in China - presented an award to the programme run by Friends of Nature in October 2001.

But Hao Bing is not satisfied with their achievements. She said China is so large that two vans are not enough to offer classes in every corner of the country.

She hopes the success of the two vans will inspire more people to get involved and eventually set up a full-fledged travelling environmental education network.

Hao said she has a dream that some day hundreds of vans will roam across China accompanied by herds of antelopes and wild horses and crowds of rosy-cheeked children who love and treasure the beauty of Nature.