Photo by Quan Jing on Unsplash
A rural village has led the transformation of a barren ravine into a flourishing forest mosaic in one of the least-habitable parts of their country.
When Deng Xiaoping took control of Communist China in the 1970s, the land around the Mo Us desert was described by visiting environmental scientists as a heavily desertified landscape unfit for human habitation.
Given to large social engineering projects, there were discussions among Party bosses about moving the entire Youyu county population away from the hostile land, where yellow sands would whip through towns, darkening the sky.
You’d never know that now if you passed through the Shipaogu area, where tree-planter Wang Zhanfeng lives today. Cloaked in grasses, Mongolian pine, and larch trees, as well as orchards, animal pastures, and soccer fields, the landscape has been completely reversed.
“In my childhood, we had to cover our bowls while eating, otherwise they would be filled with sand,” Wang told China Daily.
Wang, his father, and his father before him, all worked on the Youyu county afforestation movement, where the county’s villages rejected the fate seemingly dealt to them by nature, and began pursuing a radical and complicated method of afforestation.
China Daily writes that Youyu had been a meeting point of agricultural and grassland civilizations, as well as a crucial passage for Shanxi merchants traveling to Mongolia. However, continuous wars had ravaged its ecology.
With the arid soil incapable of holding water, it wasn’t possible to simply plant trees where they needed them most. Instead, the villagers would grow seedlings on the nearby mountain sides—where they also fetched water necessary for manual irrigation of each individual tree.
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Teams of women would carry the water, while men would dig pits with shovels and line the bottom with river silt to improve its holding capacity. While China was experimenting with market capitalism, while she was becoming the workshop of the world, this backbreaking labor continued until the method for cultivating trees on the harsh land was perfected.
That work eventually spanned over 240,000 acres.
The Youyu afforestation program was recognized by the UN as one of the world’s finest examples of human desert control and ecological restoration, winning the New Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements Award in New York City last October.
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The return of workable land meant the return of economic opportunity. Youyu county is now one of the largest horse-breeding centers in all of China, as well as one of the great centers of soccer talent production. Sheep wool, fruit, and tourism all bolster the local economy, generating tens of millions in revenue.
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