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Were Genghis Khan to arrive in Inner Mongolia today and hail one of the many buses that take tourists to the province's famed grasslands, he would probably ask for his bus fare back. And maybe not nicely. It turns out, Mongolia's favorite son was a rather militant environmentalist, whose code of law called for the death of anyone who messed with the verdant grasslands stretching across the steppes of inner Asia - the vast ecosystem that sustained his Mongol tribes and served as natural superhighways for his horseback armies...
...will take decades for the grasslands to rebound, but in the meantime, the scruffy acreage has given rise to a wave of environmental entrepreneurialism that has spun the badly hit steppes of Inner Mongolia into a hub of green research. Both Chinese and foreign scientists are stationed throughout the province, working to kick-start restoration through the right balance of land rehabilitation and social responsibility. "We're working with subsistence farmers," says Brant Kirychuk, a manager for the China-Canada Agriculture Development Program. "We can't just say, 'Man, there's too many livestock on the land. Cut them back...
...with such sensitivity. As herders lose animals and income, some communities have been scheduled for "ecological emigration," moved by the government from their native areas to less distressed land and, in the bargain, put in training programs to learn new trades. In Xinjiang, another remote province due west of Inner Mongolia, some 600,000 of the region's one million herders are scheduled to be switched to farming or blue-collar jobs by 2010. In Inner Mongolia, human rights groups have criticized the relocations, saying that sticking herders into unfamiliar jobs only exacerbates the poverty everyone is trying to fight...
Jiang thinks chickens - along with Chinese urbanites' growing hunger for expensive organic food - might be one answer. For the last two years, he has been running a pilot project in an Inner Mongolian village in which six dozen households have started populating their grasslands with chickens instead of hundreds of goats or sheep. More than 10,000 free-range chickens have fed on the grasslands' insects and plants, and then fertilized the land, restoring plant life and creating organic meat and eggs that can be sold at a premium. "Rich people in cities consume these products, and the money will...
Others are also finding ways to generate income and create green solutions for the grasslands and, perhaps, for the rest of China - a country that needs clean energy more than any other. A team at the Inner Mongolia Agricultural University is working in parts of the province near the Gobi Desert, planting sweet sorghum, a kind of grass that can be harvested by locals and sold for biofuel production. The plan dovetails with Beijing's ambitious goal of generating 2 million tons of bio-ethanol a year by 2010, and 15% of its energy from renewable resources by 2020. (Seventy...