Tibet, Mongolians are Buddhists who revere nature, which is a major reason their economy has been slow to develop and their environment has until recently been among the least spoiled in Asia.
But Inner Mongolia, the Chinese region that spans most of the country’s northern border, was very different. Modernity and Han influence were evident in the factories and white-tiled buildings. Large areas of grassland, the traditional home of nomadic Mongol culture, had been converted to agriculture or fallen victim to the desert. Under low gray skies, the landscape looked drained of color.
This was the last leg of my journey across China. What had started with a search for a mythical natural paradise in the southern mountains of Yunnan was finishing with an all-too-real man-made crisis in the flat northern grasslands. This was where the environmental buck stopped. Two hundred years of carbon-driven, capital-financed development had been deferred and outsourced to places like this. The West had pushed its waste and dirty industry on to Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. They, in turn, had dumped the same problems on China’s coastal provinces. From there, the ecological stress was transferred to remote inland areas. At each stage, the impact grew bigger. By the time the world’s environmental trauma reached Inner Mongolia, it had swollen to staggering proportions.
Polluting factories that cannot satisfy the increasingly stringent environmental regulations of the newly rich coastal regions have found a welcome home in Inner Mongolia, where itinerant local party bosses are anxious to make their mark before moving on to new posts. Clusters of heavy industry have spread up from Shanxi, Ningxia, and Gansu, clogging the U-bend of the Yellow River, which is here so contaminated the water is consistently ranked as unhealthy even to touch.
It is also the new center of fossil-fuel production, taking over from Shanxi’s depleted mines even though the quality of coal in Inner Mongolia is poorer and the region has even less water for cleaning and processing the fuel. Engineers have also moved in to exploit the biggest natural gas field in China. Huge wind farms are rising up on the pastures. The land of the nomads is rapidly transforming into a hub of heavy industry. Thanks to these trends and its low population density, Inner Mongolia now has the highest per capita carbon emissions in China.3
Most dramatic has been the change in the land itself. Desperate to feed a growing population, the Chinese government tried to cultivate the grasslands. As in Xinjiang, it was a disaster for the environment. Nomads were driven off the plains; settlers moved in and applied the same inappropriate irrigation techniques.4 The fragile grassland ecosystem collapsed, lakes dried up, and wide areas turned to desert. Inner Mongolia became the main source of the dust and salt-alkaline storms that plague northeast Asia every spring. Mixed with pollution from the growing number of heavy industries in northern China, the particles create photochemical smogs in Korea, Japan, and toxic winds that blow across the Pacific to the west coast of the United States, adding the problem of “global dimming” to that of global warming.5
In places the plains had surrendered to sandy dunes. Elsewhere, defensible areas were bolstered with lines of trees and shrubs. Mostly, though, the surface was low grass, gravel, or scrub, hence the generic name
If tended well or left completely alone, grass will protect the soil. But beyond a certain point, overused grassland degrades irreparably, and soil becomes as much a nonrenewable resource as oil.8 Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute considers this one of the greatest environmental problems facing the world, far bigger than the dust bowls that devastated the wheat production of the United States in the 1930s. He fears that China faces a calamitous loss of arable land in Inner Mongolia and other northern regions that will lead, at best, to rising global food prices and tensions and, at worst, famine, instability, and war.9 This is not only a problem for food security. The world’s peaty grasslands contain huge amounts of greenhouse gas. If they deteriorate and these gases are released, the effect on the climate could be catastrophic.
In 2002, the State Council warned that 90 percent of China’s usable natural grassland had suffered some level of degradation.10 A huge greening campaign was set in motion in an attempt to repair the damage. Depending on the area, it combined elements of the “Great Green Wall” tree planting I had seen in Heilongjiang, the “grants for green” incentives for farmers to cease cultivation I had admired in Gansu, and the mass resettlement of nomads I had witnessed on the Tibetan Plateau. But government money and mass mobilizations tend to deal with the consequences rather than the usual cause: excessive economic exploitation of areas ill-fitted to agriculture and industry. This was recognized more clearly at the grass roots, where the budding NGO movement started to advocate a different approach.
Among those most familiar with Inner Mongolia was Chen Jiqun, who worked with communities of former nomads who had been resettled into concrete houses on the steppe. Having spent more than thirty years in the area, he told me the problem of land degradation was ultimately one of culture.11 “China’s production system has totally destroyed the northern grasslands and lifestyle. The Han just don’t understand the steppe. We should stop sending people into the wilderness. We are not just destroying our own ecology, we are damaging others.”
An artist by training, Chen moved to Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution. The situation for students who “went down to the countryside” here was different from those who went to Heilongjiang or Xinjiang. In Inner Mongolia the political violence was bloodier while the war against nature was relatively subdued, at least in terms of land reclamation.12 Between purges and factional fighting, Chen spent long enough among herders to develop a lasting respect for their understanding of the grasslands.
He believed modern efforts to resettle them were misguided. By taking the nomads off the prairies both here and in Tibet, the government aimed to ease overgrazing. But instead of moving seasonally and relatively lightly across the land, the herders’ flocks were now penned in smaller, fixed areas that they quickly chewed into dust. The grass could not recover, so the flocks moved on to destroy other areas.
Alarmed about the impact on milk, beef, mutton, and cashmere, scientists from Beijing were asked to restore the productivity of the grassland. Among their solutions was to douse the prairie with rodenticide in the mistaken belief that the slaughter of pika, rabbits, and rats would leave more nutrients for the cows and sheep. But the rodents were vital to the ecosystem. By burrowing into the earth they made the grassland moister and healthier.13 When they disappeared, so did many other animals, such as snakes and birds, higher up the food chain. The rodent-control officials belatedly learned that biodiversity was not a luxury but a vital element to sustainable productivity.14
Many grassland plant species were in decline.15 More land was being given over to monocultures of wheat, corn, and grain, but they did not naturally produce more food without massive inputs of fertilizer and diverted water.16 Nor were cows and sheep fattening up as they once did.17 Such problems were sometimes blamed on climate change, but it was clearly not the only reason. Just across the border in Mongolia there had long been far better protection of biodiversity of both plants and animals (though in recent years, it too was suffering as a result of the demand from China and other countries for land, minerals, and ingredients for traditional medicine).
Chen focused his efforts on education, but this was not easy in such a sparsely populated expanse. In Wuzhumuqin County, there was just one elementary school for an area twice the size of Switzerland. Using his fine-art training, in 2008, Chen illustrated a book that encouraged the 300,000 former nomads to assert their legal rights over the land. It told the story of Qiqige, a young Mongolian girl who dreamed of a lost idyll of beautiful open scenery, rich wildlife, and horseback rides, then woke up and looked out of her window on a degraded, polluted land divided up into barbed-wire pens for cashmere herds. The book’s message was reinforced by a copy of the relevant laws and regulations printed in Chinese and Mongolian that reminded herders of their rights to use the land. Local authorities were so worried by these materials that they ordered police to seize copies and threaten locals who distributed them with arrest.
Chen has always tried to keep the law on his side, turning to the courts when necessary. In 2006, he helped a nomad community to mount a legal challenge against the East Wuzhumuqin Paper Mill, a polluter that had been relocated to Inner Mongolia after an earlier “cleanup” at its original location in Hebei. The nomads won compensation, and the factory was moved on, although the land it had contaminated remained a blight on the
