
China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World - fern12
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/08/china-plants-billions-of-trees-in-the-desert/
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peterburkimsher
I remember learning The Man Who Planted Trees (L'homme qui plantait des
arbres) [1] in French class in primary school.

Even though many of the trees aren't surviving, I'm cautiously optimistic
about the Green Great Wall project. I think that trees breaking the wind can
stop more air pollution than grass. They will use more water, but when the
wind is blocked, the humidity can stay local, so even rotting dead trees can
fertilise the next generation of plants.

There's some skepticism about corruption and incompetence of government
planning, which is probably true. But has the American government put so much
effort and money into an environmental project?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Planted_Trees](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Planted_Trees)

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infinity0
86% or 60% dying is really not a big deal if the remaining surviving 14% or
40% are, in absolute numerical terms, greater than the amount it takes to
transform the desert.

The article unfortunately doesn't talk about what we think the latter is.

edit: explain the down vote. you think planting trees to die is immoral, or
something?

~~~
Arnt
It's both moral and practical.

It depends on the species, but in many cases the best way to get ten big trees
quickly is to plant many more, maybe even a hundred. The young trees enjoy
having dense company. As they grow each tree needs more room, so cut down a
few every year.

~~~
aidos
From the article:

>>>> The researchers’ biggest worry is that the trees are depleting
subterranean aquifers so that eventually nothing will flourish.

I know nothing about this subject so the above may be an issue, or it may not.
What can you take away from the article? I'm sure there have been a great many
displaced along the way by the project, is it going to be worth it in the end?

It seems like it should be a great project to analyse. There's a large amount
of money being injected into it and it's at a large enough scale that you
could try a lot of different approaches to see what worked. But, as ever, it
sounds like incentives are misaligned so we may never get true information
about what is actually working and what isn't.

Reading through the article it sounded spookily like China's Great Leap
Forward at the end of the 50s:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward)

~~~
eitland
Somewhat qualified guess (studied agriculture and forestry for 1.5 years):

If the desert expands that will most likely definitely destroy the areas.

And while trees will use a lot of water (somewhat depending on specie I think)
they'd hopefully also provide protection against direct sunlight for a more
diverse ecosystem to establish.

Compared to the Midwestern way of pumping groundwater only to grow seasonal
crops this seems like a good step in a better direction.

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ideonexus
This reminds me of Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps from 1933 to 1942,
which at one time comprised 300,000 people and planted over 3 billion trees in
America to combat the extensive deforestation brought by industry[1]. The town
where I live was almost abandoned at one point in the early 1900s because our
local sawmill had stripped the surrounding area of all trees for miles. It was
the CCC that brought them back.

I think preserving our commons is the most important role of government.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps)

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rayiner
I suspect science writing like this is one reason why public trust in science
is at a low. I read a passage like this:

> But plenty of scientists remain unimpressed. Many of the trees, planted in
> places they don’t grow naturally, eventually die. The survivors soak up
> precious groundwater that native grasses and shrubs need, causing more soil
> degradation. Meanwhile, thousands of farmers and herders are forced off
> their lands to make way for the trees. China may be winning its war against
> nature for now, but at what cost?

I was a STEM major, but my first reaction to this is still: so what the hell
is the takeaway? Science news coverage is all like this: “some scientists do
X; other scientists say Y; I’m a journalist so f--k if I know who is right.”
Science gets turned from something that offers clarity to something that
underscores humans’ inability to understand the world around them.

~~~
yorwba
Would you have preferred a confident but unsupported statement? Maybe
presenting a nuanced view undermines trust in science, but I think I prefer
that to blind trust without understanding.

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donquichotte
Maybe synergies can be used here! On HN 1 month ago: The World Is Running Out
of Sand:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15739917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15739917)

~~~
igravious
As noted in that discussion, there are different types of sand – (ironically?)
the growing desert is not usable as a construction material; the individual
grains are too small and spherical, in construction sand the grains are
coarser and larger. Why is why we have the situation where Gulf states import
some of the sand for their construction boom even though a huge proportion of
their land is desert (that is to say – sand).

edit: so no synergies unfortunately!

~~~
AndrewOMartin
So what you're saying is someone needs to invent a cryptocurrency where the
proof of work is measured by the number of spherical grains of sand you
coarsen?

~~~
donquichotte
We need to launch an ICO here. The Internet of Sand (IoS) is the future. Every
coarse grain will have its IPv6 address which is retained in a blockchain for
tracking, making "intelligent concrete" the very fabric of architecture 4.0.

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sand500
I wonder how we plan to terraform Mars if we can't even deal with a desert or
two.

~~~
throwaway2048
terraforming is pure scifi, the least hospitable place on earth is vastly more
hospitable than the best place on mars, even after almost every conceivable
planet scale disaster. Pretty much every technique that could be used to make
mars more hospitable could be used on earth instead. We dont have to spend 20
million dollars a kilogram to get there either.

Its part of a futurist escapist fantasy where we have somewhere safe to go
when we ruin the earth, so why worry about it right?

~~~
dsq
The way to develop technologies that will save the earth's environment is to
go to space or other worlds where there are no NIMBYs or reactionary fanatics
or existing corporate kleptocracies, develop them to maturity, and then
redeploy on the mother planet. Commercial fusion power, for instance, will
probably always remain 'thirty years from now' as long as the unholy alliance
of fossil fuel incumbents and so-called 'Greens' continues.

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partycoder
Israel has had a lot of success with their desert agriculture, even on soils
that are predominantly salty in composition. While there is no significant
precipitation, some of the water is captured from fog, through nets.

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tyu100
Sea Buckthorns are considered a much better desert fighter in China than
poplars or pines:

[https://books.google.ca/books?id=6XfgBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA293&lpg=P...](https://books.google.ca/books?id=6XfgBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA293&lpg=PA293&dq=sea+buckthorn+china+desert&source=bl&ots=SnLviA_vXY&sig=Pk-
IfxHkG2nfCLMNRrwqJgS8cVY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwisyMuA_5XYAhVIylQKHQQPDPEQ6AEISjAI#v=onepage&q&f=false)

I have one in my front yard, it's a neat but very aggressive and very thorny
shrub.

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crimsonalucard
People talk shit about china's one child policy but these guys know how to act
decisively and restrict individual freedoms for the greater good ( i know the
one child policy didnt have the intended consequences im more reffering to
decisiveness and purpose behind such an action... there is no first world
country that can pull off such a feat.)

Environmental problems which are largely based on over population can only be
solved with drastic controversial action.

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suvelx
I find it amazing that in some places in the world, there's too much sand, and
we're planting new ecosystems to control it.

And in other places in the world, there's not enough sand, and we're stripping
it away for concrete and killing the ecosystems that depended on it in the
process.

I know the two sands might be different, but is there a reason we're not
developing concretes that work with the invasive sands?

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mrarjen
Would like to see them try and do this, get the ground a bit more fertile and
planting native grasses perhaps to get it going somewhat?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI)

