China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World | Hacker News Reader

China’s Plan to Keep Sand from Swallowing the World

motherjones.com

50 pointsfern1226 comments

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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?

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.

According to some research papers [1] [2] it may be feasbible to use desert sand for concrete at least - However, my knowledge about construction is very limited so I may have misinterpreted the findings.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_it_possible_to_use_dese... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jamila_Abdalhmid/post/I...

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

There is an advantage on Mars - it's already 100 percent nothing. We could try 1000 different species of plant, mold, lichens, or whatever. Anything that becomes self sustaining would be step in the right direction. The biggest problems on Mars are the temperature and the atmosphere, and I have no idea what can be done about those. Well I do, but they're such massive engineering projects as to be impractical.

Futurologist says: build glass domes. On Earth, it is very much in the realm of practicability and costs so little that it might surprise you. On Mars, the biggest costs are transport across outer space and industry bootstrapping.

http://marshallbrain.com/mars.htm esp. chapter 7

One thought I had is this: Put superconducting cables around the planet at say 20-30deg north and south. Apply a huge current to provide a magnetic field to protect the atmosphere so that is may come back over time. We did the rough calculation and came up with something like 1 million Amp-Turns to get a decent planetary field but that seemed low to me and we never rechecked our work.

Well we know how to deal with a desert - don't overfarm, don't deforest, and if that's already happened, build walls and protected national parks. It's just that it's too little, too late, and restoring a forest + the damage done by lost land and productivity from desert growth far outweights the money earned by overfarming / deforestation. Short-term gains with long-term cost.

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?

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.

I like to add here: why don't we try a colony on the top of Mt Everest first? It is so much easier than going to Mars, what with (some) air and water already there. But otherwise pretty comparable. And no rockets needed.

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.

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...

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

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.

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?

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

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