The World in a Grain

by Vince Beiser

  Beijing didn’t stop with the Spratlys. It also built new territory in another tiny collection of South China Sea islands called the Paracels, where it installed airstrips and missile batteries and reportedly plans to deploy a floating nuclear power plant to provide power.36 Meanwhile, in another sign of Beijing’s ambitions to expand its global reach, in 2017 China opened its first overseas military base, in the African nation of Djibouti. That base didn’t require any land reclamation, but future ones might. China’s new power to alter geography with sand means that if necessary, it can change the shape of other friendly countries’ coasts or islands to accommodate its warships.

  The Spratly Islands have become a major flashpoint between China, the United States, and its Pacific allies. “China is building a great wall of sand with dredges and bulldozers,” warned Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, in a 2015 speech.37 China refused a US request to halt construction that year, declaring “the South China Sea islands are China’s territory.”38 The Obama administration responded with air and naval patrols through the area.

  The early days of the Trump administration, however, ratcheted up tensions to unprecedented heights. At his confirmation hearings, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson compared China’s Spratly buildup to Russia’s invasion of Crimea.39 He added: “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.” In response, state-run Chinese media warned that if the Trump administration was to try to blockade the islands, “it would set a course for devastating confrontation between China and the US.”

  Stephen Bannon, at the time one of Trump’s key advisors and a member of the National Security Council, seemed to welcome that prospect. A few months before he officially joined Trump’s campaign, Bannon told listeners to a radio show he hosted that China is “taking their sandbars and making basically stationary aircraft carriers and putting missiles on those.” His conclusion: “We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to ten years. There’s no doubt about that.”40

  The armies of sand may be pushing the human armies of the world’s two mightiest nations closer to conflict. For all the ways it helps us, sand can also endanger us. Which brings us back to deserts.

  INTERLUDE

  The Fighting Arenophile

  If we don’t count Indiana Jones, there aren’t many scientists who were also daredevil Nazi fighters—even fewer when it comes to scientists specializing in sand. In fact, there’s probably just one. That would be scientist-soldier Ralph Bagnold, explorer of the Sahara, scholar of the physics of sand, and scourge of the Third Reich.

  As a young British army officer posted to Egypt in the 1920s, Bagnold became fascinated with the desert. In his spare time, in fine mad-dogs-and-Englishmen style, he customized Model T Fords with oversize radiators, low pressure tires, and other modifications to enable them to drive in the sand, allowing him to explore deeper into the Sahara than any European had ever gone. He came to know the trackless terrain intimately.

  Then World War II broke out. Britain’s forces in Egypt found themselves facing off across the Sahara against Italian and German troops in Libya. Suddenly Bagnold’s eccentric hobby became a potent weapon. With his unmatched knowledge of the desert, now-Major Bagnold was charged with creating an elite commando force. In September 1940, Bagnold’s Long Range Desert Patrol Group, made up of a few hundred volunteers from England, New Zealand, Rhodesia, India, and other corners of the British Empire, went into action. “I had been given complete carte blanche . . . to make trouble anywhere in Libya,” he later wrote.41

  Bagnold’s men traveled deep into the uncharted sands in trucks equipped with enough food, water, and ammunition to keep them going for weeks. They cultivated a desert-pirate look, sporting Arab headdresses, unkempt beards, and a scarab insignia. Camouflaged amid the dunes, miles behind enemy lines, they monitored troop movements, radioing their intelligence back to British forces in Cairo. They launched lightning surprise raids on Axis convoys and airfields, then disappeared back into the vastness of the Sahara. They guided Allied troops through what was thought to be impassable desert, enabling them to launch a surprise attack that played a key role in defeating the Nazi “Desert Fox,” Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.42

  After the Axis’s African surrender in 1943, the LRDP went on to missions in Greece, Italy, and the Balkans before finally disbanding at the war’s end. Bagnold’s obsession with sand, however, continued. He became one of the world’s foremost scholars on how sand moves, and wrote the definitive text on the physics of wind-blown sand and desert dunes. Bagnold died in 1990, but his research is still in use: NASA scientists consulted it in planning its missions to Mars. Not even Indy could claim that.

  CHAPTER 9

  Desert War

  From the top of a certain windblown hill in Duolun County, in China’s Inner Mongolia region, the view could be described as either profoundly inspiring or deeply strange. For miles around, the terrain is dun-colored and dry, sandy desert stubbled with yellow grass. But the cluster of hillsides closest to the one I found myself standing on in spring of 2016 were emblazoned with enormous, carefully configured swatches of green trees. They were planted to form geometric shapes: a square, a hollow-centered circle, a set of overlapping triangles. The flatland below them was striped with ruler-straight bands of young pine trees, all the same height, standing in formation like soldiers ready for battle.

  Zuo Hongfei, the cheery deputy director of the local “greening office” of China’s State Forestry Administration, eagerly pointed to an eighty-foot-long display showing how barren this part of Duolun County was just fifteen years ago, before a massive greening campaign installed millions of trees across the land. Photos and satellite images show it was largely desert, dotted here and there with spindly trees and shrubs. “See?” said Zuo, pointing out a picture of an old man and a young girl in front of a low dwelling half swamped by dunes. “The houses were almost buried by sand!”

  Though armies of sand are our indispensable allies, supporting our way of life in so many ways and in so many places, they can also turn against us, becoming a remorseless enemy force. The vast legions of sand in the world’s deserts are largely useless when it comes to building cities; in some places, as if angry at being left out, they have become threats to those cities.

  The sand lands that cover about 18 percent of China have expanded rapidly. By 2006, they were devouring usable land at a rate of almost 1,000 square miles per year, nearly the area of Yosemite National Park, up from 600 square miles1 per year in the 1950s.

  That’s a problem not only for the people living in those areas, but also for the many millions more who live close enough to deserts to be affected by the movements of sand. Migrating dunes threaten farm fields and even whole villages. Stretches of roads and railways are constantly shut down by blown sand. Sandstorms regularly blow tens of thousands of tons of sand and dust into Beijing and other cities, snarling traffic and creating a vicious health hazard. The World Bank has estimated that desertification costs the Chinese economy some $31 billion per year.2

  This is an issue that goes far beyond China. According to the United Nations, desertification directly affects 250 million people worldwide, including parts of the United States.3 Sand is slowly burying the once-flourishing Malian town of Araouane, on the edge of the Sahara Desert. In 2015, a massive sandstorm blanketed Lebanon and Syria, killing twelve people and sending hundreds to the hospital with respiratory problems. And particles from dust storms in China have clouded the air as far away as Colorado.

  Deserts have always advanced and retreated over the centuries, driven by large-scale shifts in atmospheric and geologic conditions. But what’s happening in our time is different. It’s not that the world’s deserts are spreading like some aggressive disease; rather, the land surrounding them is drying out.

  Climate change, by rais
ing temperatures and reducing soil moisture, is partly to blame. But the main culprits are people. Lots of people. The population of Inner Mongolia, where much of China’s desert lies, has quadrupled in the last fifty years to more than 20 million, mostly thanks to ethnic Han Chinese moving into the area. Those people cut trees for firewood and draw groundwater to irrigate farmland and run heavy industries. The number of livestock has also grown sixfold, and those animals eat a lot of grass. As underground aquifers get depleted, the land dries up. Without plant roots to anchor it and moisture to weight it, topsoil blows away, leaving behind only pebbles and sand. Which means that at the same time that we’re running out of the sand we need, we’re generating more of the kind we don’t.

  “We can probably go on for another five years, possibly ten, but after that it’s simply not an option to go on losing land at the present rate,” Louise Baker, a senior adviser to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, told a British newspaper. “Every minute, twenty-three hectares of land are lost to drought and desertification. The global population is already 7 billion, and by 2050 it’s projected to reach 9 billion. We need to produce more food, but the area of productive land is going down every year.”4

  Duolun County, which lies at the southern edge of the Gobi Desert, has always been a dry place. But during the last century, decades of overfarming and overgrazing desiccated huge areas of it into pure desert. By 2000, 87 percent of its total area was sand land. The situation was so dire that in 2000 Premier Zhu Rongji visited the area and declared, “We must build green barriers to block sand.”

  And so they did. In the first fifteen years of this century, the government planted millions of pine trees all over Duolun County. More are put in the ground every spring. Zhu’s “green barriers” aren’t just blocking the sand; they’re forcing it to retreat. By now, according to official Chinese statistics, 31 percent of Duolun’s land is forested. The total would be even higher but for some missteps in the early years of the project, says Zuo, the county greening officer. Huge numbers of fast-growing poplars were planted, but most of them died. “We had poor knowledge then,” says Zuo. “We found they needed too much water.”

  Duolun’s afforestation project is just a tiny sliver of a project of bedazzling scale unfolding across the country. China is building a new Great Wall—this one aimed not at repelling invading Mongols, but a more insidious menace from the northern drylands. This wall is being built not of stone but of trees—billions of trees, enough to stretch nearly the distance from San Francisco to Boston. Its purpose: to push back China’s vast deserts.

  The project, officially dubbed the Green Great Wall, was launched in 1978, and is slated to continue until 2050. It aims to plant some 88 million acres of protective forests, in a belt nearly 3,000 miles long and as wide as 900 miles in places. Prompted by China’s ever-worsening environmental conditions, the government has added a handful of other major afforestation projects in more recent years. It all adds up to what is easily the biggest tree-planting project in human history.

  The results so far have been splendid—at least according to the Chinese government. Thousands of acres of moving dunes that threatened farmers’ fields and villages have been stabilized. The frequency of sandstorms nationwide fell by one-fifth between 2009 and 2014. And though deserts continue to spread in some areas, the State Forestry Administration, the government agency that oversees the main tree-planting programs, claims that on balance it has not only stopped but even begun to reverse the deserts’ expansion.5

  It’s heartening to see a nation famous for its warp-speed industrialization and world-beating levels of pollution undertaking such a colossal effort to make their nation green. But many scientists in China and abroad say the actual results are unimpressive at best and disastrous at worst. Many of the trees, planted in areas where they don’t grow naturally, simply die after a few years. Those that survive can soak up so much precious groundwater that native grasses and shrubs die of thirst, causing more soil degradation. Meanwhile, the government has forced thousands of farmers and herdsmen to leave their lands to make way for the desert-fighting projects.

  In short, China has undertaken the most ambitious effort anywhere to beat back the sands of the desert, and it appears to be winning. But that victory raises some troubling questions. What is the cost it has incurred—and will it last?

  China isn’t the first country to try shoring up degraded lands with man-made forests. In the 1930s, the US government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt planted some 220 million trees in a largely successful effort to block the dust storms blighting many central American states. Joseph Stalin launched a similar effort in the 1940s, planting more than 10,000 square miles of steppe land with trees; almost all of them were dead within twenty years.6 Algeria tried planting a 930-mile “green dam” in its southern desert in the 1970s, with lackluster results.7 And today in Africa, eleven countries are fitfully trying to create a continent-wide green barrier similar to China’s to hold back the spreading Sahara. As in China, the problem is largely driven by demography: the population of the Sahel, the semiarid region bordering the Sahara, has more than quintupled in the last sixty years.

  But nothing touches the scale of China’s sylvan crusade. Practically since the Communist Party took power in 1949, it has promoted tree planting as a righteous cause, even a civic duty. Tree planting kicked into overdrive with the launch of the Green Great Wall in 1978, the same year Beijing began opening up the Chinese economy. Since the project’s inception, Chinese citizens have planted billions of trees, foresting an area larger than California.

  One major reason China has been able to get so many trees in the ground so fast is the same reason it has been able to open so many factories so fast: by freeing people to make money. Rather than relying on revolutionary idealism, the government now pays villagers to plant trees. In some places, the government also leases their land for afforestation. Entrepreneurs cultivate and sell seedlings to the government, and harvest mature trees for lumber. According to official Chinese statistics, all of this has reduced poverty in many areas. It has also made a few people very rich.

  Wang Wenbiao is one of those people. He grew up in a village on the edge of Inner Mongolia’s vast Kubuqi Desert, adjacent to but not technically part of the Gobi Desert, in a family of farmers so poor he and his siblings were allotted one new set of clothes per year. They were on the front lines facing the adversary of sand. Wind constantly blew grains into their bed and onto their food. “Two words were very important in my childhood,” says Wenbiao. “Sand and poverty.”

  Sand is still an important part of Wang’s life, but the poverty is long gone. These days, he runs a multibillion-dollar8 corporation that aims to not only help hold back the desert but also make a profit from it.

  I met Wang one spring morning in the sleek Beijing headquarters of Elion Resources Group, the putatively environmentally beneficent enterprise he heads. The vibe was imperial. Wang is a mirthless, heavyset, middle-aged man, his thick hair swept back off his broad forehead. He was seated in a white leather chair in front of a mural depicting waterfalls and forests. Arrayed around him on more white chairs were me, my interpreter, a company PR rep taking notes on everything, and another aide who chimed in frequently to reinterpret how my interpreter had interpreted Mr. Wang’s declarations.

  Wang got his start at age twenty-nine when he was appointed head of a salt and mineral mine in the Kubuqi Desert, in northeastern China. Sand bedeviled him from his first day on the job. “A jeep took me to the mine, but it got stuck in the sand outside the gate,” he recalled. “Rather than give me a proper welcome, the workers had to come and help me get out.” Sand and transport, Wang realized, were his biggest problems. There was no direct road from the factory to the outside world. The salt field sat only 37 miles from a railway station, but reaching it required a 200-mile detour. With funding from the local government, Wang set to work building new roads and plan
ting trees and shrubs alongside them to keep the sand from inundating them. By now the company has planted 30 percent of the Kubuqi Desert—some 2,300 square miles—a feat that has earned it recognition from the United Nations.

  The barriers kept the roads passable, and the salt factory’s business boomed. Wang’s company branched out into other industries, including chemicals and coal power plants. Today it employs over 7,000 people. It is now seeking to rebrand itself as an eco-friendly enterprise, singing a song sure to please the ears of modern investors concerned about the environment. The company runs solar power fields, cultivates licorice and other desert plants prized in traditional Chinese medicine, and claims to bring thousands of ecotourists to the Kubuqi every year. Elion has also become a major contractor for the Green Great Wall, installing instant forests from the western deserts to an area north of Beijing that will host the 2022 Winter Olympics.

  “Green land and green energy,” says Wang. “That will be our future direction.” When pressed, though, he acknowledges that about half of the company’s $6 billion in annual revenues still come from “traditional” industries, including chemical production and coal power plants.

  Elion’s flagship project is its tree-planting campaign in the Kubuqi Desert. The word desert is often used loosely, a judgmental label slapped on a whole range of low-moisture drylands. The Kubuqi isn’t your American Southwest, Palm Springs–type desert, drylands bedizened with cactus, creosote, and Joshua trees. The Kubuqi is mostly sand, and nothing but sand.

  A trip along one of the Elion-built roads through it was surreal, almost dreamlike. The road was a ribbon of smooth asphalt lined on both sides with orderly ranks of stubby pine trees and slender poplars, spears of green sticking straight up out of the sand. Elion billboards in Chinese and English popped up every couple of miles trumpeting eco-corporate-Communist slogans: Promoting Eco-Civilization; Green Desert—Beautiful China; Ecology brings benefits, green brings prosperity. Most of the trees were no taller than a fifth grader; the bulk of them have been planted only during the last few years. Past those belts of green, as far as the eye could see there was nothing but barren, rolling sand dunes.