Do you know how good the Chinese are at planting trees? The Mu Us Desert, which was once equivalent to eight South Koreas, has now been tamed by the Chinese. is not only covered in green, but the local people have also cultivated thousands of acres of fertile farmland around it. is really a wonderful workmanship.
You must know that the Mu Us Desert sixty years ago was really a sky full of yellow sand. When people walk on the road, they can get hit in the face by sand. The people of Yulin City nearby even moved south three times to avoid the endless sandstorms.
It can also be seen from this how much influence the Mu Us Desert has on the people of Yulin . So how did it slowly evolve from a place where strangers should not approach it to an plugged into Jiangnan ? This has to start with the road to sand control in the Mu Us Desert.
The increasingly severe desertification in northern Shaanxi
Since the Qin Dynasty, the Mu Us Desert has already taken shape. In order to build Afang Palace, Qin Shihuang did not hesitate to cut down large areas of virgin forest in the Hetao Plain. In the end, this place became loess high slope .
As soil erosion gradually became serious, by the Tang Dynasty period, there was no longer any green vegetation in the Hetao Plain area. The wind blowing from the Mongolian Plateau carries large grains of sand and slowly accumulates in the northern Shaanxi area. Especially the Yulin area has gradually become a gathering place for sand.
During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, desertification in northern Shaanxi began to become more and more serious. According to the records about guarding the Great Wall in the "History of the Ming Dynasty", the Ming army at that time needed to complete the task of "scraping sand" every day, otherwise they would not even be able to find the camp the next day. From this we can also see how terrifying the desertification in the Yulin area is.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the farmers in Yulin faced the biggest enemy in their lives, the Mu Us Desert. According to the memories of farmers in Yulin at that time, they did not dare to take out their bowls when eating. Just stay outside for a short while and the bowl will be filled with sand. Sometimes when I go out to farm, the sand hits my face and it hurts. At that time, the people of Yulin were suffering terribly from the desert.
In order to solve the survival problems of the people in Yulin, the country sent a desert control team to the Mu Us Desert for inspection. The results of the inspection shocked the staff. At that time, the entire Mu Us Desert's quicksand area covered 800,000 square kilometers, equivalent to eight South Koreas.
And as the cold wind from Siberia continues to blow sand, the area of quicksand in the Mu Us Desert will become larger and larger. If we don't control it quickly, the entire northern Shaanxi region may be swallowed by quicksand. By then, Shanxi and Hebei will be frequently harassed by sandstorms, not to mention that Beijing is also in that area. Therefore, the task of managing the Mu Us Desert is urgent.
The arduous battle against desertification
In 1959, the expert group formulated the first plan to control the Mu Us Desert, which was grass square sand control. To put it simply, stack the haystacks into small grids and place them one by one on the sand. Then insert dead wood in the center of the haystack to prevent quicksand from spreading. In that era of water shortage and seedling shortage, this was the best solution scientists could think of.
As expected, the grass grid sand control finally achieved certain results. There are 130,000 square kilometers of quicksand in the southern Mu Us Desert that are firmly locked. The quicksand no longer spreads to the south, and Yulin has therefore avoided the dilemma of migrating south.
You must know that before this, Yulin City had experienced three southward migrations. Every time the desert "marches" southward, the people of Yulin City have to drag their families and run in front of the desert, otherwise they will be buried in the sand. Now through the method of locking sand in grass squares, Yulin City has maintained its status in the world.
Now that the desert has been fixed, the next step is the "counterattack". In the 1960s and 1970s, the people of Yulin City launched a nationwide tree planting movement under the call of the state. There was a popular slogan at that time: "It is better to have fewer children than to have more trees."
Villagers, led by the village party secretary, rushed to the supply and marketing cooperative to collect seeds and saplings.Then it is sown in the vast grassland transition zone, competing with the desert for living space. According to the memories of villagers at that time, every time after planting saplings, they would be covered with sand early the next morning. At that time, the saplings will have to be dug out one by one.
In addition to ordinary people, the local government also called on major companies to join the major project of preventing and controlling desertification. Companies responsible for transporting goods need to supply hundreds of thousands of saplings to the sand control team every month to ensure the huge consumption of growers. Water companies also need to transfer large amounts of water from nearby mountains and rivers every year to ensure water for these saplings.
The hardest-working people are the tens of thousands of growers. I patrol the mountains with a hoe every day to prevent the newly planted saplings from being blown down by sandstorms . According to a villager's description at the time, these mountain patrol teams traveled more than 10,000 kilometers every year, equivalent to a quarter of the equator. In this way, by fighting against the desert day after day, the people of Yulin City successfully won a battle to defend green plants.
Great achievements in desert control
Since desert control began in 1959, more than 6 million acres of oases have been added to now. The Mu Us Desert suddenly shrank by 80%, and the forest coverage rate was as high as 41%.
Since then, people in Yulin City no longer have to worry about eating sand. According to the remote sensing satellite images released by the United Nations, the area around Yulin City is basically covered by green plants, with almost no trace of desert around it. The once huge Mu Us Desert has now shrunk to a small dot.
In addition, the people of Yulin City have also opened up a 1.6 million acres of farmland in the south of the Mu Us Desert, which is quite a bit like being in the south of the Yangtze River. At the beginning, the people of Yulin were forced to death by the Mu Us Desert and moved southward several times. Nowadays, all farmland has been reclaimed near the Mu Us Desert. Do you dare to think about such a heaven-defying project?
In this three-generation desert control process, countless heroes of desert control have emerged. For example, Ms. Yin Yuzhen once spent all her money to buy 600 saplings. In the end, only 10 trees were left alive, but she still did not give up.
After that, she teamed up with local people to start the straw weaving sand fixation method and the minimally invasive planting method, and eventually more than 2 million trees were planted on more than 70,000 acres of sand. Today, these trees have grown into a forest, standing at the southern end of the Mu Us Desert, resisting sandstorms from the north.
and Shi Guangyin spent 40 years walking in the desert desert. With a shovel and a pot of water, 53 million saplings were planted directly, dyeing 250,000 acres of desert green. Such achievements are unmatched by anyone in the world.
Compared with China's desertification prevention and control and afforestation, other countries are hard to describe in this regard. In particular, Brazil, which is known as the "Land of Rainforests", almost adopts a prodigal attitude and has lost all its domestic forest resources.
For example, the Brazilians directly cut down 25% of the trees in the Amazon in order to deforest and create farmland. If these trees want to be restored, it will take every Brazilian to plant 100 trees every day for 115 years.
Even now, Brazilians are still "going all the way to darkness" on the road of deforestation. According to data released by , the world environmental organization , 40% of the vegetation in the Amazon jungle has been destroyed, and 763,000 square kilometers of trees are cut down every year, which is equivalent to losing a basketball court of forest every 8 seconds. It can also be seen from this that the speed of our afforestation is far less than the speed of other people's deforestation.
Here, I can't help but think of the ugly face of the Swedish environmentally friendly girl. She has repeatedly said before that Chinese people use chopsticks to destroy the ecological environment. Little did they know that the number of trees cut down by Brazilians every day was enough to provide the Chinese with chopsticks for hundreds of years.
It seems that in her eyes, she only sees the tiny bit of trees that the Chinese cut down every year to make chopsticks. But they ignored the people in the Mu Us Desert who have struggled their whole lives to prevent and control desertification.
It is precisely because of their existence that the earth will not be eroded by desertification, and mankind will have the opportunity to restore the little remaining green. Let us pay tribute to the heroes and those who have spent their lives fighting against the desert.
