By 2013, Ma Jun was one of the world’s most prominent environmentalists. His writings, lectures and innovative online tools for tracking pollution—and polluters—in China had won him international recognition. In 2006, Time magazine named Ma “one of the world’s most influential people.” In 2009, he won the Ramon Magsaysay Award, sometimes referred to as “Asia’s Nobel Prize.” He was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2012 and, the same year, was named by Foreign Policy magazine one of the “100 top global thinkers.”

Born in 1968 in the coastal city of Qingdao, Ma Jun’s path to environmentalism led through journalism. He learned about China’s dire environmental problems as an investigative reporter with the Hong Kong-based English language newspaper South China Morning Post ( SCMP ), where he worked from 1993 to 2000, eventually becoming Beijing bureau chief for SCMP.com. Ma was among the first mainland Chinese reporters to focus on environmental issues.  While traveling on assignment, he was “shocked by the environmental degradation, especially the destruction of the water resources, in our rivers and lakes,” he says. ^[2] In the north, rivers had become trickling streams, or had completely run dry, as their waters were diverted to agriculture and industry. For a 330-day stretch in 1997, the Yellow River did not reach the sea at all.

In the south, where rainfall was much heavier, rivers escaped overbuilt embankments and dams to flood intensely farmed land. In the summer of 1998, China experienced its worst flooding in 40 years, leaving 14 million homeless, destroying 25 million hectares of farmland and generating over $20 billion in damages. In urban areas, aquifers were being rapidly depleted. Everywhere, water was becoming too polluted to use even for irrigation. Untreated sewage and industrial discharge flowed directly into rivers, lakes and coastal fishing grounds. Fertilizer runoff caused choking algae growth. The government estimated $240 million in economic losses due to “red tide” algae blooms between 1997 and 1999.

What he saw convinced Ma to write a book, China’s Water Crisis , published in 1999 (and translated into English in 2004). ^[3] In it, Ma shared his observations and described the history of government policies—from imperial times, through Mao’s reign, to the hyper-growth oriented leadership that followed—that had allowed the wanton destruction of essential resources. China’s Water Crisis was frequently compared to Rachel Carson’s landmark work Silent Spring (1962) for focusing public attention on a looming ecological catastrophe. Like Carson, Ma raised the alarm about what unfettered development could do to the environment.

The book marked a turning point in Ma’s career. He moved from reporting on environmental problems to trying to solve them. He proposed methods for sustainable management of rivers—for example, reforesting denuded plains, moving farming out of inefficient areas, and raising the price of water to encourage conservation and make sewage treatment a more attractive business.