I sympathized. But I would see and hear worse. As I was to learn in neighboring Gansu, coal digging was surpassed only by water mining as an environmental threat to China. Both were unsustainable. Together, there was no more destructive combination.
11. Attack the Clouds! Retreat from the Sands!
No matter how hard mankind tries to transform nature, the largest plots of cultivated land are often overtaken by the elements: the wind and the sand which turns them into dunes, neither arable nor edible.
Flying into Gansu was like landing on the moon. The plane descended through a rugged corridor of barren, gray-brown mounds that swelled up on either side and stretched away into the horizon. Bereft of trees and water, the corrugated landscape looked utterly desolate. Inside the hills, there was no sign of human activity. The earth seemed too dry to support life.
Overcultivation had left mountains naked. Mines, factories, and farms had drained streams and fouled rivers. Many wells no longer held water. Sand dunes threatened farm fields.
The same was true of much of the country.2 The droughts were getting worse. The shortage of water in northern China was the most pressing environmental problem facing the country and it prompted some of the most desperate remedies. Man had been fighting a battle against the desert here for centuries. Now, thanks to a squandering of resources, dire pollution, and climate change, humanity was in retreat on several fronts.
Guo Yuchun and Wei Guohu were the last to abandon their village at the foot of the Great Wall. They did not want to leave. Although the river that irrigated their crops had dried to a trickle and the dust storms were growing fiercer, they preferred their ancestral home to the new house provided under a government resettlement program. Living with scarcely any water was tough, but so were the old couple, who during their long lives had survived many deadly droughts and famines. But, in the end, even they joined the exodus, though not because of the elements.
“It got too lonely,” Wei told me with a broad smile that he seemed to save for his saddest comments.
Wei was eighty-four years old. He sported chunky, round dark glasses of a sort popular among old men in northwestern China and stroked a long, wispy beard that made him look like the guru in a kung fu movie. He was not used to visitors. They were few and far between in Jintai, a remote county on the provincial border between Gansu and Ningxia. This area is so dry that many villagers padlock their wells, even though they leave the doors to their homes open.
Wei and his wife had left their village the previous month. The couple’s new home had been hard to find. We had driven for three hours through some of the bleakest scenery in China to reach it. The area was almost devoid of human life. Over a 50-kilometer stretch I saw a single mining truck, an old brick kiln, three tethered asses, the dust of a nomad riding his horse up a distant mountain track, and, surreally, two workers in fluorescent orange jackets sweeping an empty road with straw brooms.
Even after reaching Wei’s village we struggled to follow the directions to his home. The hard brown land of gravel, loess, and sand lacked obvious features by which to navigate.
After going around in circles for a while, we reached a cluster of newly constructed brick dwellings with solar panels on the roofs. They were smart, but the residents clearly had more time and less money than the farmers I had seen in Henan. The stalks from the harvest were carefully bundled and stacked outside every home rather than burned in the fields.
Everything felt new and transient. Wei’s children and grandchildren showed us into a house that smelled of plastic and fresh paint. The furniture was still covered by the factory wrapping and the ceiling light was a fluorescent lamp rather than the naked bulb that was more usual in a farmer’s home. Even the wall portrait of Mao Zedong was shiny and plastic-coated. The colors were so garish that the dead chairman appeared to have transmuted into an Indian deity with lipstick and eye shadow.
The family were warm hosts, plying my assistant and me with fruit and tea as we waited to be properly introduced to the old couple. Wei seemed to find my assistant, with her city ways, almost as strange as a foreigner. When he shook her hand, he held on for almost a minute, scrutinizing her smooth fingers and palms so carefully that it was unclear whether he was trying to read her future or envying a past so evidently free of manual labor.
But, later, as he smoked and smiled, his wife, Guo, did most of the talking. During their childhood, she said, they often had no money for clothes and no food at all. Wei’s young brother died of starvation during the famine of 1930. Thirty-one years later, after the Great Leap Forward, there was another. Guo recalled starving people from neighboring villages dropping dead in the streets as they went out to forage for food. Ten years earlier, they had suffered again: when their son and his wife, who already had two children, broke family-planning regulations by having twins, half the family’s land and furniture was confiscated as a punishment.
Life was still tough today. Guo told me about conditions in a neighboring village deeper in the hills. “There are droughts nine out of ten years,” she said, “so they learn to make one harvest last a decade.”
“Why don’t they move like you did?” I asked. “The authorities are doing it in stages. It isn’t easy to find land for everyone. And not everybody wants to move.”
I asked her to take me to their old home. It was a twenty-minute drive across a rutted, blasted landscape of crumbling orange earth, gray grit, and splotches of white alkaline discoloration. Bleakly beautiful though it was, I struggled to imagine how such an environment could support human life, or life of any sort.
We drove alongside a dry riverbed that usually flooded just once a year for just four or five hours and then trickled dry. On the far bank I spied several dozen mud-brick buildings in various stages of collapse. It looked like an ancient ruin.
“That’s where we lived,” Guo said.
We got out of the car, walked across the riverbed, clambered up a bank dusted with white alkaline deposits, and entered the ghost village. Eight hundred people had lived here a few years earlier, but it was now in the process of being repossessed by the elements. All that was left of the community were crumbling walls, torn paper windows, and fading New Year decorations on the doors.
Guo’s was the only one still locked. She opened it up and invited us inside. The house was spacious and well proportioned with a large courtyard. In its day, it would probably have been the best in the village. But the poverty was evident in the rough earthen floor and the newspapers used to insulate and decorate the walls. There was no running water, no electricity. “This was our light,” said Guo, holding out an old Red Bull can with a kerosene wick sticking out of the opening.
The area was barely fit for human habitation. In the winter the ground froze and snow often blanketed the land. In spring and summer the village was frequently buffeted by sandstorms that choked the lungs and scratched the faces of residents. Guo said these had become more frequent and more frightening in recent years. Crops had become harder to grow. It was drier, warmer than in the past. There was less rainfall. Life was unbearably tough.
I was surprised that I had not yet seen the Great Wall, even though one of the oldest sections was marked on the map as being next to the old village. Considering that the wall was widely (though incorrectly) believed to be the only man-made structure visible from space, it seemed strange that it was not obvious. I asked Guo where it was.
“It is just outside, though it is not easy to make out,” she replied.
That proved an understatement. Long before the village, the Great Wall in this area had been claimed by the harsh environment. All that was left was a snaking mound of mud that blended into the landscape. The heaped- earth ramparts had been abandoned more than a century ago and were now covered in gravel and scrub. Guo had to point out where they once stood, the swelling of red earth that I had just crunched under my feet. Visible from space? It was barely visible even as I stood on top of it.
The same thing was happening to mankind’s best-known fortification as was happening to the rest of
