Family Environmental History
February 21, 2026 By: JingYuan Zhu T00745320
My family’s environmental story centers on Nanjing and the lower Yangtze region. Even though my grandparents, parents, and I all lived in the same city, our surroundings were very different. My grandfather was born in 1929 in Yancheng, a small city near Nanjing. Back then, rice fields, ponds, and ditches were everywhere, and life was mostly agricultural. Their main foods were rice, vegetables, and fish from the ponds. For cooking, they used leftover crops and wood, and later switched to coal briquettes. My grandfather remembers that the land was what kept them alive.
Between 1930 and 1945, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, my grandfather’s family did not have a stable home. The war made it hard to get food and travel, so relying on one village’s harvest was risky. In the early 1940s, they moved to Xuancheng, about 120 kilometers from Nanjing, because it was one of the few places with jobs. Life in the city was very different from his childhood. He no longer lived near fields and ponds, but instead in crowded housing with few and unreliable resources. They had to wait in line for water and use shared wells. Food came from ration channels, small street markets, and sometimes from nature. After the war ended in 1949, my grandfather found work making seals. The biggest change for him was moving into a dormitory, a large room shared by 16 people. By today’s standards, it was not comfortable, but having peace and order made daily life easier. The government provided heating fuel in winter. Electricity was limited at first, and the water system was slowly getting better. Over time, more families switched from shared water sources to indoor tap water. For my grandfather’s generation, this meant their lives changed from relying only on nature to depending more on industry.
Xuancheng is upstream, so it often has heavy rain and floods that can damage fields, roads, and houses. Because of this, my father left Xuancheng at 19 and moved to Nanjing to find a steadier job and better living conditions. Nanjing’s spot along the Yangtze River makes it a key transportation center with better geography and infrastructure. Unlike the rural area where my grandfather grew up, Nanjing had clean tap water, paved roads, and drainage systems. Urban growth also brought problems like pollution, traffic jams, and worse air quality. Still, for people who had just escaped war, life in Nanjing was much better.
Growing up as part of Gen Z, I’ve always lived in a world where everything feels easy and convenient. Things like water, electricity, transportation, food delivery, packaged food, and air conditioning are just part of daily life, so I rarely think about where they come from. Nature is still around, but I usually see it in places like parks or along city streets, not in untouched wild areas. Even though I’ve heard a lot about pollution and climate change, I still use things like plastic packaging, shop online, and rely on electronics. Unlike my grandfather, I don’t really know how to use or recognize natural resources, and this often leads to waste and pollution.
When I compare daily life in Canada and China, the biggest difference I see is how people sort their garbage. In China, garbage sorting became a government policy around 2017. Before that, we just put all our trash in one bag. After moving to Canada, my family bought three bins in different colors to separate our waste. For example, we use a green bin for kitchen scraps, a blue one for recyclables, and a black one for plastic waste. This new system really changed my habits. I started to notice product packaging and sort my trash every day. It also made me realize that garbage is part of the environment, and how a city deals with waste and recycling affects landfills and greenhouse gases.
Looking at three generations in my family, the biggest difference is how close daily life is to nature. During wartime, my grandfather had to use natural resources carefully, or his safety could be at risk. For my generation, almost everything is easy and already taken care of. I don’t expect to live the way my grandparents did, but I know the natural environment helped them survive. Now that I live in a peaceful time, I feel like I should do something to help protect nature too.