ARTICLE: "To Stop Dust Bowl, Mongolia Builds 'Great Wall' of Trees: Planting Project Aims to Quell Gobi Sandstorms; Critics Cite Threat From Salt," by Patrick Barta, Wall Street Journal, 24 October 2006, p. A1.Mongolia, China's "near abroad," is too close for comfort on the subject of dust storms. Mongolia spent most of the 20th century under the Sovs' thumb, but it's basically on its own now following that collapse, falling increasingly under Chinese economic domination (all that resource desire). And with the dust storms increasingly reaching China, Korea, and even the U.S., Mongolia's under some pressure to stem the problem of growing desertification, which can be explained somewhat by global warming but even more so by local human behavior (good example: more livestock to satisfy China's needs puts more pressure on local vegetation).
So now we're watching a network of funding sources come together to help Mongolia build a "great wall"of trees to stem the dust bowl effect, much like FDR's CCC did here in the States (you see those lines of pines all over the Midwest still). The UN and some other major donors have declined to participate, but Rotary Club chapters in Mongolia and South Korea are leading the charge.
For now, the effort seems puny and pathetic, underfunded and unlikely to succeed. Yet it's a sign of the sort of efforts we'll see time and time again in environmentally stressed Asia, which will become a center of gravity in global environmentalism--out of necessity.
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