Friday, September 19, 2014

China's Great Green Wall




In a Geico commercial, the Mongol army stopped at the Great Wall and asked "What should we do?” We know from history that the Mongol armies marching through the gate eventually overturned the Song Dynasty. Nowadays, Chinese, themselves, ask the same question "what should we do?” This time, the relentless foe to the capital city is a sandstorm blowing from the northern desert. In the north-west, north and north-east of China, starting in 1978, row of trees designed to protect Beijing from sandstorms with a goal to last for 73 years, cover an area of 4.069 million square kilometers (42.4% of China’s total territory) to surpass Roosevelt’s Great Plains Shelterbelt and Stalin’s Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. The ambitious “Three North Shelterbelt Project" is by far the world's largest tree-plant project. This was to be China’s “Green Great Wall”.

I knew neither the scale of the desertification in China nor the huge number of people in Inner Mongolia who have been move off land. A big portion of the trees that were planted are withering. Many have died of age as those grown from cuttings have a shorter lifespan. Afforestation in China is a serious business. It is not just planting trees but a monumental effort to restore the productivity of the soil.  Furthermore, it seems the idea that wealthy industrialized countries invest money to adopt tropical forests and pay indigenous people to be rainforest police in order to protect trees is a win win situation. 



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In early September, famed primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall visited Tulsa and opened her talk to students of a private school, one of the member sites of her Roots &Shoots program. Before leaving Tulsa, Dr. Goodall helped to plant a tree which she affectionately named “Treebeard” on the West side of the River (in the Arboretum off 21st Street).

https://www.upwithtrees.org/files/2814/1082/0020/Dr._Goodall_small.jpg




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