Exercise #2: Family Environmental History

June 30, 2026 By: Lingling Hu

My Family Environment History
Our lives and the landscapes we occupy today are the living accumulation of choices made by those who came before us. My family came from a small village in Anhui province , and we moved to Huangshan city and now I am living in Guangzhou and travel between China and Canada.Over three generations, my family’s relationship with the environment transformed from a struggle for direct survival from the soil, to the active industrial modification of the landscape, to a contemporary lifestyle where we balance both highly artificial cities and protected natural worlds.
Generation One: From Wujia Mountain to Huangshan City
My family’s environmental history begins in 1935 in Wujia Mountain, Anhui Province, a remote village nestled among the mountains where my grandfather was born. The landscape of his childhood was highly localized, entirely dictated by the rugged mountain terrain. The villagers relied directly on local natural resources: mountain streams provided water, surrounding forests provided timber, and terraced fields were used for cultivation. The biological composition of this environment remained largely “natural,” dominated by native plants and traditional farming methods. In such an environment, people primarily viewed nature as a practical tool; survival meant enduring arduous physical labor every day.
However, our family’s living environmental and social shift occurred when my grandfather was in his late forties. He made the pivotal decision to leave the isolation of Wujia Mountain and move to Huangshan City to take a position as a manager in an oil company. This transition occurred right as China was beginning its economic opening and rapid modernization. By entering the energy sector, my grandfather stepped directly into the engine of industrial development. He went from a life bounded by local ecosystem limits to one dedicated to the distribution of fossil fuels. This move provided immense upward mobility and financial stability, permanently lifting our family out of rural mountain subsistence, but it also meant trading an organic environment for a heavily human-made urban space.
Generation Two: The Shift to Modern Urban Living
My mother was born into this changing reality in Anhui in 1970, growing up as the family transitioned into urban life. Her childhood environment was fundamentally different from the mountain wilderness my grandfather knew. Instead of open slopes and dirt paths, her world was constructed of concrete, asphalt, and expanding urban infrastructure. The natural resources that sustained her community were no longer gathered from the immediate surroundings; water arrived through centralized city pipes, and electricity was powered by the fossil fuel industries.
In this generation, the environment became almost completely human-made. The managed city parks replaced native ecosystems, acting as small green spaces within an increasingly paved landscape. Because of the economic security provided by the energy industry, my mother’s generation began to view the environment as a space that could be conquered, transformed, and managed to meet human comfort and national development, rather than as a precarious resource for survival. The environmental changes she witnessed were rapid and sweeping, as cities grew outward, swallowing up the surrounding wetlands and forests to make room for factories, highways, and residential blocks.
Generation Three: Living Between Two Worlds
I was born in Huangshan City. Growing up there in the 1990s and 2000s, I lived in a unique transition zone—a city famous for its natural mountains, yet rapidly modernizing. Today, my life is completely different from that of my grandfather and mother. I live and work in the hyper-dense, subtropical city of Guangzhou. Here, the landscape is entirely human-made. In places like the Yuexiu District, ancient historical water systems and early twentieth-century cemeteries have been paved over by massive roads like Xianlie Central Road. The environment I occupy daily is artificial, kept alive by global supply chains that bring resources from thousands of miles away. Unlike my mother and grandfather, my life has also spanned the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Every summer, we leave the intense heat of Guangzhou and return to Ottawa, Canada. This seasonal move exposes me to a totally different environmental system, with cooler temperate forests, wide rivers, and a society focused on conservation and recreation. However, this transcontinental life creates a heavy, direct impact on the environment through global plane travel and high consumption. While my family’s heritage freed me from rural physical labor, my generation’s lifestyle relies on massive supply chains and carbon-heavy travel that actively changes the global climate. Our annual long-haul flights between China and Canada release massive amounts of carbon emissions directly into the atmosphere, while maintaining households in two different countries doubles our consumption of electricity, water, and globally shipped goods.
Looking back across these three generations, our relationship with the environment has evolved alongside our family’s economic status and the places we have lived. The hard manual labor of my grandfather’s youth on Wujia Mountain gave way to his crucial career move to Huangshan City, which altered our family’s situation and set off a chain reaction of modernization. Because of that choice, I did not grow up in their time of direct survival; instead, I grew up in a modern city surrounded by man-made structures and global connections.
My position is completely different from theirs. While my ancestors had to focus on surviving or engineering the land for comfort, my urban upbringing and education gave me the knowledge to see the bigger picture. In the future, I want to use this knowledge to protect the environment rather than just consume its beauty. I hope to choose to live more responsibly, limit my personal impact on the earth, and actively work to protect the changing landscapes we have inherited.