Childhood memories spur sandstorms fight
Print Edition
FENG Qi has been putting up with biting wind, baking sun, sand, sand and more sand for the past 26 years.
The 50-year-old geologist is no stranger to sand. Born in the Loess Plateau in northwest China, he has known the power of sand since he was a child.
“Sandstorms came every spring and swallowed the whole sky. It was suffocating,” he says.
Crops barely grow in deserts, meaning food supplies were limited.
“We only ate steamed buns made of wheat bran. It was difficult to digest, so I was often constipated,” Feng says.
Such memories motivated Feng to choose geography in college. He wanted to change the desolate environment he had suffered as a child.
Heihe, a branch of the Yellow River, was his first assignment. In the 1980s, the water table of the Heihe basin had degraded dramatically due to climate change and human activity, resulting in frequent sandstorms.
Feng, then a student in Lanzhou Institute of Desert Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, searched for solutions.
But sand control is not possible behind closed doors and most of the time Feng and his colleagues stayed outside, sometimes for months, collecting data.
Their efforts eventually paid off. Traditionally, experts believe arbor forests are most effective for water conservation, but Feng and his team found that a combination of grassland, open forest and woodland worked better.
“The area of woodland should be no more than 15 percent in upper basins of inland rivers like Heihe. This could cut soil erosion by 40 percent,” Feng says.
Thanks to the work of Feng and his colleagues, the Heihe basin’s economic losses from natural disasters such as sandstorms, drought and salinization have declined by 60 percent since 2000. His methods have been successfully applied in other northwestern areas in Gansu and Qinghai.
In 2003, Feng turned to Gansu’s Minqin County, one of China’s four main sandstorm areas.
Surrounded by two large deserts — Tengger and Badain Jaran — ferocious sandstorms force many to leave the area.
Sand control experts tried several methods to fix the sand, but none worked. Feng undertook research over a long period before finding a solution.
He designed a six-level sand control system, planting different vegetation in sand dunes, sandy land and desert, effectively containing the occurrence of sandstorms.
Under Feng’s watch, Qingtu Lake was revived in 2010 after having been dry for 51 years, and the number of sandstorms in Minqin decreased from six in 2007 to just one in 2011.
Local farmers have been encouraged by Feng to take part in desertification control and make money out of the sand by planting Saxaul, a shrub that can endure drought. Saxaul has a parasitic plant, Cistanche deserticola, that grows on its roots, but fortunately this plant is known in traditional Chinese medicine as “Ginseng of the desert” and can sell at 140 yuan (US$20) per kilogram. In the desert where so little grows, it is like gold.
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