Word: plant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Today, those highways are in pretty bad shape. More than 90% of China's 160 million acres (400 million hectares) of grasslands are classified as "degraded," slowly losing the diverse collection of native plants that normally flourish there and fueling the massive dust storms that blow across China every spring. Nomadic herders have raised camels, goats, cows, and sheep on these grasslands for hundreds of years, but in the middle of the 20th century, China's population boom and demand for more meat sent livestock numbers soaring. By 1990, some regions were literally grazed bare, herders whose animals were dying...
...less severe in the last few years. Though some scientists chalk uo the latter to fluctuations in weather, others say it's a sign that the grasslands are starting to return to health. "Maybe some places are getting better, but some places are getting worse," says Jiang Gaoming, a plant ecologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences...
...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 come back to the people in Inner Mongolia, who can use the profit to protect their land," says Jiang...
...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 percent...
...health care did not appear to be the immediate cause of the snag in negotiations. The strike was prompted by GM's prospective production plans, particularly the construction of a new assembly plant in Mexico that could be ready to export vehicles to the U.S. in about one year. Surprised union members cited job security as the key issue as they walked out of GM assembly plants around Detroit. "They just told us we were going on strike and it was about job security," said one member of UAW Local 594 in Pontiac, Mich. only moments after the strike began...