Word: lands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Nearly 20 years on, the crisis is far from over. Eight hundred thousand acres (2 million hectares) of grassland continue to turn into desert every year, and climate change, bringing yet more drought to dry land, hasn't helped. Still, if there hasn't been sweeping progress, there has been -for better and for worse - a lot of action. Beijing has sunk millions of dollars into the effort to stop the advance of the desert and has set up a system of laws to manage the land from afar; herders are being relocated and it's now forbidden to graze...
...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...
...efforts have been executed 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...
...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 come back to the people in Inner Mongolia, who can use the profit to protect their land," says Jiang. "In this way, the ecology...
...endangered grasslands. Solutions have to sustainable, but more importantly, they have to be useful, says Jim O'Rourke, who is helping organize the International Grassland and Rangeland CONGRESS in Inner Mongolia next summer. "'Preserving' is a touchy word. Preserving might mean locking [the grasslands] up," O'Rourke says. This land evolved with animals and people living on it, and keeping it healthy will mean resisting the urge to turn it into a museum...