The World in a Grain

by Vince Beiser

  The road eventually led to the company’s palatial, dome-topped “Seven Star Kubuqi Hotel.” It was surrounded by carefully irrigated rows of poplars and swaths of green grass, with a fountain out front. The hotel grounds include, improbably, a golf course. When a hotel staff member spotted my photographer Ian Teh out there one day, he hurried out and demanded Teh delete his pictures.

  How can a desert sustain so many trees, let alone a golf course? Where does all the water come from? “Everyone asks this question,” replied Wang with a gruff fraction of a smile. The trees use only a tiny amount of the region’s underground water, he claimed; the most important factor is that the company has literally made it rain. Increased evaporation from all the new plants has made the climate more humid, Wang declared. “Twenty-eight years ago, there was only about 70 millimeters of rainfall. In recent years it has reached 400 millimeters,” said Wang. “We changed the ecosystem.”

  I asked several independent Chinese and international researchers about this claim. All of them were skeptical. Planting an area that large might increase humidity and rainfall to some extent, they agreed, but to more than quadruple it? “Sounds like bullshit to me,” said Mickey Glantz, a University of Colorado researcher who has been studying deserts in China and around the world for forty years.

  Cao Shixiong, a lean, banty researcher at Beijing Forestry University, has a simple explanation. “When there’s profit at stake, people tell lies. The central government gives out billions of yuan every year for tree planting. So there are many companies that want to take part. They’re not concerned with the environment, but with profit.”

  Cao used to be a believer. He spent twenty years working on State Forestry Administration tree-planting projects in Shaanxi Province. “I thought it was a very good way to combat desertification,” he said. But his trees never survived for long. “I realized it’s because of policy. The problem is, we were choosing the wrong place to plant trees.”

  Cao and most critics of the tree-planting campaign acknowledge that it has benefited some areas. But those benefits, they argue, are localized, and may not last. In some ways, they may even be making things worse.

  It’s true, for instance, that sandstorms have decreased around Beijing in recent years, a welcome development for which some researchers credit the Great Green Wall. Other experts, however, say that change may be at least partly because there’s been more rain in northwestern China over the last several years, which keeps dust down and makes more plants grow naturally.

  “Nobody knows how much is because of the government and how much is natural,” said Shen Xiaohui, a retired SFA engineer. “But you know the government will claim it’s all because of them.”

  It’s also undeniable that billions of trees have been planted in formerly barren areas, and in some places those artificial forests are thriving—stabilizing and enriching the soil and generally making those areas more livable. But huge numbers of them have also died.9 Some fell prey to the arid environment, some to diseases and pests that spread rapidly through the monocultural artificial forests. In 2000, a beetle infestation in north-central China wiped out 1 billion poplars, the fruits of two decades of planting.10

  The most serious concern is that all those newly planted trees will suck up the desert’s precious groundwater. That’s what’s keeping millions of them alive at this point. In Duolun County, Zuo Hongfei assured me, this isn’t a problem, because the area naturally gets enough rain to sustain the drylands-adapted trees they’ve been careful to plant.

  But research suggests it is already happening in other, drier parts of China. Ultimately, that could cause not only the trees but also whatever smaller plants grew there naturally to die of thirst, leaving the land in worse shape than ever.11 “For the past thousand years, only shrubs and grass have grown in those areas. Why would you think planting trees would be successful?” asked Sun Qinqwei, a former researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Desert Research Institute who now works for the Washington, DC-based National Geographic Society’s China Program. “You can succeed in the short term by pumping groundwater, but it’s not sustainable. Investing money on trees that are not supposed to be there is kind of crazy.”

  So what’s the bottom line? Is the Green Great Wall hurting or helping? It’s hard to know. The effects of such a large and complex change to the environment can take years, even decades to manifest themselves. In the meantime, considering the enormous scope of these programs, good data is startlingly scarce. As a 2014 study12 of China’s major tree-planting programs by a group of American and Chinese scientists concluded, “the extent to which the programs have changed local ecological and socioeconomic conditions are still poorly understood, as local statistics . . . are often not available or unreliable.” Another study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Normal University adds: “Although numerous Chinese researchers and government officials have claimed that the afforestation has successfully combated desertification and controlled dust storms, there is surprisingly little unassailable evidence to support their claims.”13

  Factor in also that, for Chinese researchers at least, criticizing a pet project of the autocratic government carries real risks. Cao says that’s the reason he hasn’t been able to get any outside research money for the last five years. “Before my academic career, I thought science was just science,” he said. “But science is nothing when facing politics.”

  On the other hand, bureaucrats and researchers connected to the State Forestry Administration all have plenty of reason to declare the Great Green Wall a roaring success. “There are stakeholders all along the chain,” said Sun. “There are State Forestry Administration bureaucrats in every province and county. They get a lot of money for planting trees.” Considering that the SFA is tasked with both planting millions of trees and assessing whether it’s a good idea to plant millions of trees, you can understand why outsiders are skeptical of their findings.

  A few miles from the Duolun County hilltop with the view of all those new trees lies a settlement called New Granary Village. It’s a grim assemblage of small, cookie-cutter brick houses lining a grid of bare dirt streets, most of them unrelieved by so much as a blade of grass. It calls to mind less a village than a long-term refugee camp—which, in a sense, it is. New Village was built early in this century to house some of the 10,000-plus local farmers who have been forced to relocate to get them out of the way of the SFA’s new trees. They are some of the hundreds of thousands of mostly Mongol, Kazakh, and Tibetan farmers and herders whom the Chinese government has forced to move off the grasslands and into urban areas, leaving their traditional way of life behind. Officially this is to reduce overgrazing. Many believe it’s also a land grab to free up water and other resources for Han Chinese businesses. In some places the herders have resisted with violent protests.

  “We didn’t want to move, but we were forced to. They would have demolished our home if we had stayed,” said Wang Yue, a sinewy sixty-five-year-old with a resigned air. He was born and raised just a few miles away, in a now-vanished village where his family had lived for generations. He has a decent house in New Granary Village—a couple of rooms with a platform to sleep on, a coal stove to cook on, and windows looking out on a tiny courtyard. But he lost his land when he moved. “Life was better in the old village,” he said. “Here we have to buy oats to feed the animals. We used to just let them graze.” He ekes out a living now doing odd jobs, but at his age, it’s getting difficult. His wife is dead, and his two daughters have moved away. He said he has never received the government subsidies he was promised, a complaint I heard from several others in New Granary Village.

  “They lied to us,” he said. “Tree planting is making some officials rich, but we lost so many things.”

  Desert sands and their own government combined to force Wang and his neighbors from the rural villages of their ancestors into an urban-style settlement. That’s a story specific to
Inner Mongolia. But the experience of migrating from a rural village to something resembling a city is one he shares with hundreds of millions of people. That migration is rapidly reshaping our world, in ways that are forcing humans to rely ever more heavily on ever larger armies of sand.

  CHAPTER 10

  Concrete Conquers the World

  A thousand miles southeast of Duluon County stands the gleaming megalopolis of Shanghai, China’s biggest city and main financial center. Thirty years ago, almost everyone in Shanghai lived in two- or three-story shikumen, picturesque alleyway complexes fronted by stone gateways.1 But the shikumen have all but disappeared, bulldozed out of existence in the ongoing maelstrom of development that has transformed the city since the 1990s.

  Shanghai’s growth makes Dubai’s look halfhearted. Seven million new residents have poured into the city just since 2000, raising its population to more than 23 million.2 In that time, Shanghai has built more high-rises than there are in all of New York City. That’s on top of adding countless miles of roads, a gargantuan international airport, and other infrastructure.3

  Manufacturing all the concrete needed to create this urban colossus has required mobilizing armies of construction sand on an unprecedented scale. In the early years of Shanghai’s boom, much of the sand for all those new buildings and roads was recruited from the bed of the Yangtze. Miners—many of them operating illegally—pulled out so much sand that bridges were undermined, shipping was snarled, and 1,000-foot-long chunks of riverbank collapsed.4 Unnerved by the damage being done to the nation’s most important river, which provides water to some 400 million people, Chinese authorities banned sand mining on the Yangtze in 2000. That sent the miners flocking to Poyang Lake, China’s largest body of freshwater, which drains into the Yangtze some 400 miles from Shanghai.

  Now, on any given day, hundreds of dredges, some the size of tipped-over apartment buildings, may be on the lake. The biggest can haul in as much as 10,000 tons of sand per hour. A study by a group of American, Dutch, and Chinese researchers estimates that 236 million cubic meters of sand are taken out of the lake annually. That makes Poyang Lake the biggest sand mine on the planet, far bigger than the three largest sand mines in the United States combined.

  Pulling those legions of grains from the bottom of Lake Poyang is a profitable business, but it may be wreaking havoc on the lake itself. Poyang’s water level has been dropping dramatically in recent years, and researchers believe sand mining is a key reason. The dredging boats haul out thirty times more sediment each year than the amount that flows in from tributary rivers, according to David Shankman, a University of Alabama geographer and one of the authors of the study that came up with the figure of 236 million cubic meters. “I couldn’t believe it when we did the calculations,” he said. So much sand has been scooped out, Shankman and his colleagues believe, that the lake’s outflow channel has been dramatically deepened and widened, nearly doubling the amount of water that flows out into the Yangtze.5

  The resulting lower lake levels translate into changes in water quality and supply to surrounding wetlands that could be ruinous for the lake’s inhabitants. Poyang Lake is Asia’s largest winter destination for migrant birds, hosting millions of cranes, geese, storks, and others—including several endangered and rare species—during the cold months. It is also one of the few remaining habitats for the endangered freshwater porpoise. Researchers warn that besides the loss of habitat, the sediment stirred up and noise generated by sand boats foul up the porpoises’ vision and sonar so badly they can’t find the fish and shrimp they feed on.

  To make matters worse, as several local fishermen told me, there are fewer fish to be found in the first place. “The boats are destroying our fishing areas,” said one fifty-eight-year-old woman, who did not want her name published. The dredging, she explained, destroys fish breeding grounds, muddies the water, and tears up her nets. She lives in a village on the lakeshore that is little more than a tiny collection of ramshackle houses and battered wooden docks. It is dwarfed by an offshore flotilla of dredges and barges with industrial cranes jutting from their decks.

  In the twenty-first century, the army of sand has fanned out to conquer the entire world. The building methods and materials that a hundred years ago were mostly confined to wealthy Western nations have in the past thirty spread to virtually every country. This epochal shift is what lies behind the sand crisis.

  Though we use sand for thousands of purposes, concrete is really driving that crisis. More sand particles are pressed into service to make concrete than all those used for asphalt, glass, fracking, and beach nourishment put together. Poyang Lake, Morocco’s beaches, Kenya’s rivers, the fields outside Paleram Chauhan’s village—they’re all being pillaged to make concrete.

  Concrete has become the most widely used building material on Earth; we use twice as much concrete every year as steel, aluminum, plastic, and wood combined. An estimated 70 percent of the world’s population live in structures made at least partly out of concrete.6 The world’s biggest dams and bridges are all made with reinforced concrete. Even steel-framed skyscrapers require massive quantities of concrete for their foundations and floors. The earth’s total paved area is estimated to be more than 223,000 square miles—just a bit less than the entire state of Texas.

  “The equivalent of forty tons of this material exists for every person on the planet,” writes historian Robert Courland in Concrete Planet. “And an additional one ton per person is added with every passing year.”7

  The reason we are using so much concrete, as we’ve seen, is the historic demographic shift that is changing how people live in almost every country on Earth: urbanization. Every year, tens of millions of people, especially in the developing world, leave the hardship and poverty of rural villages for a shot at a better life in the city.

  Across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and especially Asia, towns are swelling into cities, and cities are bloating into megacities. In 1990, there were only ten cities in the world with 10 million inhabitants or more. By 2014, there were twenty-eight of them, home to a total 453 million people.8 Those people want the armies of sand to work for them, too. They want and are getting, however unevenly, the benefits of concrete and glass homes, offices, shops, and roads. Even places that used to be completely empty of people are now thick with concrete high-rises and paved roads, from Dubai to Inner Mongolia.

  We are building cities so fast that “the volume of urban construction for housing, office space, and transport services over the next 40 years could roughly equal the entire volume of such construction to date in world history,”9 according to the US National Intelligence Council.

  There’s no way cities could grow this fast without sand, in the form of concrete. It’s an almost supernaturally cheap, easy way to quickly create relatively sturdy, sanitary housing for huge numbers of people. It’s strong, capable of holding thousands of tons worth of people, furniture, and water. It won’t burn or get infested with termites. And it’s incredibly easy to use. A single person can mix a batch of basic concrete and slap together a serviceable shelter. A well-financed contractor can pour the foundation of a towering building in a matter of days.

  Urban areas are mushrooming everywhere, but China is on a city-building spree that beggars anything the world has ever seen. There are more than 220 Chinese cities with over a million inhabitants; the entire continent of Europe has only 35. Upwards of half a billion Chinese now live in urban areas, triple the total of sixty years ago.10 That’s about the same as the total combined populations of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. And millions more come every year.

  To connect all those urban centers, China is also vastly expanding its road network, as well as its airports and maritime ports. To help power them, it is building dams, including the infamous Three Gorges Dam, the biggest civil engineering project in history, a leviathan comprising more than 35 million cubic yards of concrete.11 Meanwhile,
Chinese companies are building thousands of miles of roads and hundreds of high-rises all over the world, from central Africa to central Europe.

  China is so building-happy that whole cities have been built from scratch in recent years that they don’t even need—at least not yet. Filled with uninhabited apartment blocks and unused offices, they’ve become known as “ghost cities.” Most are in China’s relatively poor and undeveloped western regions. The government invests in them in hopes they will lure people away from the country’s overcrowded eastern shore, and developers build them thinking they will be cash cows. Actual residents, however, are proving slow to take the bait.

  The “city” of Kangbashi, for instance, sits on the edge of the Inner Mongolian desert. It was built from scratch in 2004. Architecturally speaking, it’s impressive, or at least ambitious. It features a meticulously landscaped central plaza more than a mile in length, along which sits a library shaped like a trio of enormous shelved books, a museum shaped like a cross between a peanut and a bronze beanbag, and an art gallery vaguely modeled on a pair of yurts. Wide avenues lead to shopping malls, hotels, and high-rise housing developments. The city was built to house more than a million residents.

  But when I was there in spring of 2016, it held barely one-tenth that number. On a Thursday afternoon, the only people in the plaza besides my interpreter and me were a scattering of cleaning workers lazily ambling after the odd bit of windblown trash, and a solitary pedestrian in the distance. The shopping-mall-sized library was dark and nearly deserted. As I was on the way into the library’s main entrance, my phone and camera set the walk-through metal detector buzzing angrily. No one stirred.