Deserted
[Image: Photo by Benoit Aquin for Walrus Magazine].I came across an article just today called "The Chinese Dust Bowl," published last October in Canada's Walrus Magazine (a great magazine – don't miss their look at New York City flood barriers).
The accompanying photographs of dust storms, ruined crops, dead forests, and hazed-over city squares, taken by Benoit Aquin, are really fantastic – and you can look at a complete PDF of the article here.
For the article, author Patrick Alleyn rode something called the K43-T69 train west from Beijing to explore the seemingly relentless process of Chinese desertification. "A few hours after the train leaves Beijing," he writes, "a lunar black mountain range welcomes passengers into a vast arid landscape."
[Image: Photo by Benoit Aquin for Walrus Magazine].This is what Alleyn refers to as "the Chinese Dust Bowl" – "a dreamscape of steppes and deserts" – which is "probably the largest conversion of productive land into sand anywhere in the world."
- To date, Chinese farmers and herders have transformed about 400,000 square kilometres of cropland and verdant prairie into new deserts. The shepherds have overgrazed the steppes, allowing their sheep and goats to chew the grass all the way down to its roots. The farmers, for their part, have over-exploited the arable land by opening fragile grasslands to cultivation and over-pumping rivers and aquifers in the oases bordering the ancient deserts. The area of desert thus created is equivalent to more than half the farmland in Canada.
