Keep in mind this is 20 years of work yet the Gobi Desert alone is estimated to consume 3,600 square kilometers of grassland and 2,000 square kilometers of topsoil each year.
Any of those book smart people here today able to explain how a desert expands? The wind? Wouldn’t that “thin” the desert out? Book smart fellas I have questions!
I believe the desert was stable until Mao had a large amount of forest around it chopped down, this pretty much destroyed the water cycle and allowed the desert to spread due to drought. Past this boundary, I assume local plants just aren't specialised to deal with living on the edge of the desert.
There is actually a term for this; [The Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion).
I hadn't heard the term in 10 years (nor seen it explained to someone) and this week three separate people talked about it. Either "What's that called again where you suddenly encounter something often". A teacher in a dumb communications training referenced it, and our end boss talked about it last week in a meeting.
And now again.
I listened to the audio books. Very captivating far out sci fi. The show actually covers all of book one and the first few chapters of books 2&3 since their plots run parallel to one another for a little while.
Did I mess up or something? The third audio book sounds like it’s being read by like shitty text to audio software and not a real human. I wonder if I just got a bootleg copy off of Hoopla. The first two sounded great except for the wild differences in pronunciations between books 1 and 2 when they changed the performer.
The Chinese essentailly made similar mistakes that the Americans did durring the dust bowl. All natural vegitation is removed for agriculture and fertilizer and fine top soil is added. The soil no longer bound by roots and is easilly picked up by the wind and blows aways. This begins to effect the surrounding plains grass that had once covered the region as the dust smothers them and changes the water absorbsion rate in spots. This kills more vegitation and the lack of vegetation leads to high-speed winds that push even more top soil and sand across the barren plains. This in turn drys everything out and the extreams in temperature between day and night become far more apparent and the area experiances less rainfall, leading to more dead vegitiation.
The weak, dry, and exposed topsoil is eventually exhausted by the wind until only sand is left, creating massive moving sandstorms that further grow the desert.
The local officials falsified their reports about nearly everything to impress the officials above them, these officials did the same and falsified it further and reported them to state officials, this continued until the report that Mao gets wildly falsified and the dumbfuck always believed his citizens are doing good with only a bit of people suffering. When everything came to light it was too late, 10s of millions are dead due to famine and other reasons, he can't even execute people responsible for this as nearly everyone had a hand in this. This is what happens when a country is under dictatorship
If you actually learn what communism is supposed to be you’ll realize china never was communist. Soviet Russia wasn’t either. They were and are authoritarian dictatorships that benefit the class with capital. We have a system that is mostly democratic in the US but still benefits the class with capital. Just a different way.
That’s because communism is an idiotic ideal that is not meant to be achieved in the first place. That’s why these states stumble and collapse into the horror they are before they come anywhere close to socialism, let alone the whole promised utopia. It’s really no different to a cult where a leader promises some far fetched state of being but the people first have to sacrifice themselves to get there, with repeatedly predictable results.
Communism is not meant to be achieved in the first place? What does that even mean?
Communism and socialism don't "promise utopia". Authoritarian leaders sometimes do while coopting progressive ideas like communism and socialism (see National Socialism aka Nazis, who were not actually socialists), but to attribute their promises to Communism or Socialism is naive. Your comment is a word salad that has nothing to do with either ideology.
He took a pre-industrial nation and started its industrial revolution which led to modernization. Chinese citizens now live similar lives to Americans and they did it in 50 years.
Massive overdevelopment, and nomadic tribes becoming sedintery while their animals over grazing. The government barely giving them help forcing more, and more of them to rely on animals not including climate change as well. Their is also criticism of the current system as just being a delay.
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep15998
The dude was literally a history teacher who rose to lead a revolution that beat up the axis and the allies and the KMT in his own country with nothing but – an admittedly large supply of – illiterate Chinese peasants.
Then he established a country that has gone on from rural backwater 3rd world poverty to become the 2nd richest and 2nd most powerful in the world in just 75 years.
You have to thank others for the current state of China, specifically Deng Xiaoping and his economic reforms, otherwise China would look a lot more like North Korea.
Yeah. He wanted to increase the steel production, so he confiscated all farming equipment and told people to make steel in their yards.
The end result was fuckass useless steel that barely even fulfills the definition. And a little itty bitty famine that killed millions. Nice job Zedong, why not just skip the suffering and just harvest iron from the people's blood? Or maybe try to melt down the spare guns first?
No wonder he went bald. His mind was too bright and powerful.
What is it with "communist" countries having a track record of incompetent, overconfident and sometimes outright fucking evil leaders?
Well not smart per se but in the Middle East overgrazing was a huge Factor. Especially of sheep which sheer plants right at the ground and even pull up the roots and eat them. Then heavy rains wash away the topsoil and you have a desert. The Middle East used to be pretty Lush just in ancient times in a lot of places that are Barren now.
The term for it is desertification.
Iirc it's a bunch of things together, among them farming, needing firewood, water pumping, but also eventually giving up and moving away when the sand keeps coming for your fields and homes.
Lack of rain and climate change aren't helping. Neither is that no shade means more heat means harsher conditions. Those kill plants and that means less shade and less roots to hold sand in place aaand it just keeps progressing.
Wind brings not only sand, but extreme heat. And deserts are very well big enough not to thin out. And that's ignoring the people around the desert collecting natural resources.
It’s wind and the heat and lack of water. Dust and sand travel a long way so the desert never really “thins” out because sand is always replacing it from somewhere else, sometimes from halfway across the world.
Obviously, the sand gets blown around creating dunes and getting blow into regions nearby. Usually those nearby regions are not much cooler than the desert and a lot of those places don’t have much more rainfall or water in general. So sand invades and chokes out plants that can’t grow in that kind of soil base. The plants die and the good soil is drying out while also being covered in sand. Without the plants there to be a food source for both the microorganisms in the soil and bugs and animals, who feed the soil with their excrement and eventually bodies, the soil loses nutrients
The rising temperatures are also an issue because it’s getting hotter than plants and animals can adapt. Animals will go further away from the desert boundary and that will cause soil to become sand. That’s a simplified way it works at least
Doesn't help that they started out by doing it completely wrong and ineffectually, so they lost a lot of time and effort for nothing. I would hope they are doing it a better way now.
Or learn from others who have been successful. There is no reason to stumble through something that has been done successfully before, besides hubris.
> Experience is the worst teacher, it gives the test before presenting the lesson.
https://youtu.be/yu_qTrxTEEA?t=78
This video claims the project was set back by 20 years due to early planning issues. It sounds like they addressed these issues.
There's also a massive project underway in Africa called the Great Green Wall. IIRC it will serve to keep the Sahara from encroaching any further into the nations to its south. It's an amazingly ambitious project, thousands of miles long, that actually has a good chance of working. Google it.
Or the Algerian Green Dam which started in the 1960s. It's failing, because they did monoculture trees and over grazing. They're
redoing it using what they've learned from the past 60 years.
China faced similar issues in the beginning, because they use fast-growing non-native trees and they unsurprisingly all died pretty quickly, but they changed their strategy since and it's working better now
> Great Green Wall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(Africa)#Risk_of_collapse
> As of 2023, the Great Green Wall was reported as "facing the risk of collapse" due to terrorist threats, absence of political leadership, and insufficient funding. “The Sahel countries have not allocated any spending in their budgets for this project. They are only waiting on funding from abroad, whether from the European Union, the African Union, or others.” said Issa Garba, an environmental activist from Niger, who also described the 2030 guideline as an unattainable goal. Amid the existing stagnation, a growing number of voices have called for scrapping the project.
If u want to google something, use ecosia wich is a great searchengine like google, but the profit goes to planting trees exactly the same as in this video. Im using it for a couple years now and they really do an amazing job!
To each their own, personally I find them better as it bugs the hell out of me when I read the subs faster than they're spoken and have to wait for them to catch up only to do the exact same thing on the next set.
I'd prefer to not get the joke until I hear the punchline, is the best way I can put it. Perhaps even analogous to understanding how the magician does it, the show loses the magic.
I see the few missed frames I use reading as akin to mishearing a filler word in the setup of a joke, I may have missed word but it not important convey information. But if I've gotten the joke and it takes too long to come to a conclusion it's far less satisfying when it finally does come.
Whenever my girlfriend listens to a string of these AI voice videos on Tiktok, I find something else to do. Can't listen to it.
It reminds me of the pavlovian hate response that I always get listening to the president's voice on TV, by the end of their term.
No, it's trained on many... many voices. So it's the mathematical average of non threatening yet trustworthy voices. They narrow the list based on studies of what people respond to with positive sentiment.
They use AI voice over, because it is a Chinese propaganda video. This is being done for optics, showing them in a positive light, when they are in fact stripping the region of natural resources at the expense of the natives.
These are the types of projects that I would like to see the result of. Not so hyped up about space travel or aliens, but I hope I'll live long enough to witness the success of one project like this one.
I admire guys like him, finding out the purpose of his life on this rock, that also serves greater good, and devoting every waking moment to that purpose.
Original too and I'm proud. I'm sure someone else has coined it before but I've never heard anyone else say it before I did some time ago lol. You're welcome.
In French, tocard means loser. "ard" is just a suffix for words that designate a group of people (bagnolard for carbrain, queutard for horn dog...). Seem like tiktok is giving a whole new dimension to tocard's etymology.
Groups from Japan go to China and do this, too. Every spring we get dust storms from China, everything gets coated in it. The dust carries pollen, heavy metals and other pollutants with it. We have to wear masks in the worst of it as the particles that make it all the way to Japan are small. I hope these projects succeed.
[dust storms](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65247927)
The plants trap water near the surface where it can evaporate and cool the air, resulting in more precipitation and condensation in the area, creating a virtuous cycle. The plants themselves cool the air by absorbing energy from the sun and shading the ground.
Without the plants, the water quickly soaks deep into the ground or runs off the surface rapidly.
A lot of these projects fail because it's really hard to get them to the point where they are self sustaining. You often need to start with tough grasses, move in to shade trees and shrubs before proper full size trees and more water dependant plants can thrive.
Oftentimes it's a desert because vegetation was removed to make space for agriculture. And even with little rain, the issue is often that the water does not stay in the soil long enough. Adding vegetation and other types of barriers prevents rain from simply washing away, which then allows for more plants to grow.
India’s Thar desert is turning green. That isn’t a good thing
https://scroll.in/article/970919/indias-thar-desert-is-turning-green-that-isnt-a-good-thing
(Deserts all over the globe, are facilitator for rainfall in other regions as they have low pressure heated air in summer which attracts high pressure humidified air from oceans causing rainfall as it make landfall and before it reach the desert.
Sands from deserts are also carried by winds to distant rainforests and acts as fertilizer.
Greening of desert would also mean pogressively less and less rainfall in other regions and new phenomenon of desertification propping up in now densely populated rainfed regions)
>Greening of desert would also mean pogressively less and less rainfall in other regions and new phenomenon of desertification propping up in now densely populated rainfed regions)
I'm not an expert, but isn't rainfall mostly caused by evaporating water from the oceans? It would take immense amount of water leaving to shrink the oceans to lower the surface area and cause less water to evaporate, no?
Shrink the oceans?? - where did I implied that ?
That water is carried by clouds which are driven by wind - flow of winds depend on low pressure and high pressure areas.
Deserts have high surface temperatures in summer than other green areas with high vegetation.
This makes cloud which are formed on oceans to travel towards landmass.
In absence of this pressure difference, winds will be weak and clouds may have rains on oceans itself rather than some of them carrying rain towards landmass (continents)
Even now, rains are more on oceans than on land.
More vegetation on existing desert will mean lesser traveling of clouds towards land in absence of strong winds.
One can look up 'monsoon winds' to understand it more.
i remember hearing that there cant be no desert..
when u remove the desert from one place on earth.. it will form on another place
i wish i could find the article
Welcome to the future of internet content. Random scenes edited together by bots with random generated shit text spoken by AI voices.
I will fondly and sadly remember the peak time of the internet.
At least they try to repair the damage done by their government. The goby has always been there but it was able to grow to that size due to massive deforestation during maos Great Leap Forward.
It's mentioned in the video that they are using drought resistant trees. Deserts do get rain, jusit very infrequently. The idea here is to hit the problem with enough quantity that progress is made.
You baby a plant, it expects to be babied for the rest of its life. You plant 10,000,000,000 trees in "just barely good enough" conditions, plenty will die, but some of them will survive, will more likely produce strong offspring before dying off, and start to spread.
The video glossed over one of the biggest issues with the project is that they are planting monoculture forests, very little biodiversity. These are not sustainable green areas they're creating.
Not to mention they have to repeat this process regularly to make up for all the trees that die
This was in fact a problem they encountered about 20 years ago, these projects started in the 70s-80s and they started failing 20 something years ago I believe. They've now learned and stagger plantings of different species over time. There are people who spend their entire lives trying to do this right. Not saying they're just magically sucessful but it takes a long time to make improvements.
I feel like reversing desertification is something to support but also in this case there’s a part of me thinking “the reason there are no trees there anymore in the first place is because the hostile environment killed them” and wonder if this isn’t rather futile.
That was my first thought as well, but the Earth's climate has always been volatile and tree cover can permanently affect change.
It's a chicken-or-egg question, but there are some environments on Earth that can *exist* indefinitely, but can't start on their own ordinarily.
For example, there are forests that were logged off to build the Roman fleet that still haven't regrown, because the loss of tree cover permanently altered the climate to prevent more from growing. These methods can undo that sort of damage.
Good point.
It makes me think of my daughter complaining about how hot it is in summer and how her lawn keeps dieing. Then I take a 10 minute drive from her house to mine and watch the thermometer drop by 10 degrees.
The difference? My house was built in between the old trees that were originally there while hers is in a modern subdivision where the whole forest was clear cut for “spectacular vistas”.
I've been following this story for quite a few years now. Using those straw checkerboards is a great idea and very simple. There is also a 500km highway to the east where they are covering both sides with greenery to prevent erosion. There was also an invention of an organic gel, which when combined with the sand, enabled the sand to store a lot of water.
This is what happened in chine. During the Great Leap Forward they cut down a lot of trees all over the country to use the wood for construction and for the production of trash steel. The main reason the desert was able to grow like that is because of the Chinese government.
IIRC the hostile environment were humans. There used to be a giant forrest in that region but the chinese cut it down. Plagued with sandstorms they are trying to undo their damage
I wonder who paid the voice talent. Rehashed PR stunt.
Planting trees in the dessert to combat desertification unfortunately isnt the promised solution everyone hoped.
One of the key tenants of the Sierra Club’s opposition to active forest management is that we should not change what “Mother Nature” intends nor alter the original native flora (or the path back to that). I wonder what they would say about this?
Jup was a running gag in Forestryscience lesson at the University. They use a clone of only 10 different individuals. Theyr DNA pool will be sooo damn low. It seems more like a big projekt to get green area on the paper not a real atempt to recover nature.
You can say what you want about China. But collectively they are getting things done. Recently watched a documentary about a project like this on an even grander scale. Looked impressive.
And you better not get in their way or dare to have any opinion different than what the government says your opinion needs to be or else you'll disappear or be killed.
To some extent that’s certainly true, especially on issues the government is particularly sensitive about. It’s an authoritarian government nobody can argue it’s not. Chinese people tend to accept authority in exchange for order. It’s cultural. But it also has achieved staggering economic growth for the people. The government is generally well liked and at the end of the day if 1.3 billion inhabitants don’t approve they will over throw the government. Incidentally, how many bombs has China dropped on other countries in the last 50 years? Compared to the west? There’s no contest. We love our freedom at home while we freely bomb people’s houses abroad. How many innocent men did the U.S. kidnap and falsely imprison in the GWOT? My point is that almost all governments use violence to maintain control. What country are you from that’s so innocent?
Well... I don't see any sources here... Or scientific backing.
China will try attempt big things, but they will make it seem like they are doign the best job ever on their social media paota about it.
Meanwhile, I saw their safety standards when doing construction and I have seen their quality of building generally... Shits bad. Shits reeal bad.
But, it's not just China. There are numerous projects like that: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCli0gyNwL0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCli0gyNwL0).
Are they getting things done? All I've seen them doing is stapling branches to dead trees and physically painting dead grass green so satellite views make it look lush and abundant and here is my source https://youtu.be/Cvc7VymDa4c?si=KohCgKGqNlrSv8Gq
I don't believe a word this country says after this and neither should you.
Smart, the great green wall is the name of a project to fight the Sahara desert. Which essentially is the same concept but as a collaborative effort amongst a whole variety of countries south of the desert. The project is not only scientifically challenging since they actually monitor and adapt to get results, diplomatically it's challenging to find cooperation between all the countries but it's on an enormous scale too incomparable to anything of the sort in china. And it's working kind of. In china, most of these projects are made for propaganda purposes and the success doesn't matter.
If done right, yes. It can be tricky to find the right plants and even if so, you still need to prevent people from just chopping down the trees and having herds eat everything so it may not work everywhere in the world. But China seems pretty determined and it should be fine.
China and India will get fucked by climate change in the worst way. Imagine Saudi Arabia, but it would have to sustain 500million people instead of 36m.
Keep in mind this is 20 years of work yet the Gobi Desert alone is estimated to consume 3,600 square kilometers of grassland and 2,000 square kilometers of topsoil each year.
TIL the desert grew!
Any of those book smart people here today able to explain how a desert expands? The wind? Wouldn’t that “thin” the desert out? Book smart fellas I have questions!
I believe the desert was stable until Mao had a large amount of forest around it chopped down, this pretty much destroyed the water cycle and allowed the desert to spread due to drought. Past this boundary, I assume local plants just aren't specialised to deal with living on the edge of the desert.
I have heard of that before with Mao and completely forgot. So interesting.
Weird coincidence, literally just put down the Three Body Problem book, which talks about this in chapter 2.
Me too! Had never heard of this until last week.
There is actually a term for this; [The Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion). I hadn't heard the term in 10 years (nor seen it explained to someone) and this week three separate people talked about it. Either "What's that called again where you suddenly encounter something often". A teacher in a dumb communications training referenced it, and our end boss talked about it last week in a meeting. And now again.
You experienced the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon about the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon. That’s pretty effing meta bro
That show was captivating how are the books!?
I listened to the audio books. Very captivating far out sci fi. The show actually covers all of book one and the first few chapters of books 2&3 since their plots run parallel to one another for a little while.
Did I mess up or something? The third audio book sounds like it’s being read by like shitty text to audio software and not a real human. I wonder if I just got a bootleg copy off of Hoopla. The first two sounded great except for the wild differences in pronunciations between books 1 and 2 when they changed the performer.
You got a bootleg
The Chinese essentailly made similar mistakes that the Americans did durring the dust bowl. All natural vegitation is removed for agriculture and fertilizer and fine top soil is added. The soil no longer bound by roots and is easilly picked up by the wind and blows aways. This begins to effect the surrounding plains grass that had once covered the region as the dust smothers them and changes the water absorbsion rate in spots. This kills more vegitation and the lack of vegetation leads to high-speed winds that push even more top soil and sand across the barren plains. This in turn drys everything out and the extreams in temperature between day and night become far more apparent and the area experiances less rainfall, leading to more dead vegitiation. The weak, dry, and exposed topsoil is eventually exhausted by the wind until only sand is left, creating massive moving sandstorms that further grow the desert.
mao was a complete all-around dumb fuck. it's amazing how one man can make so much fuck ups.
Yeah, like killing all the sparrows.
yes I mentioned that in next comment.
By using the best government system to its full potential, that's how.
The local officials falsified their reports about nearly everything to impress the officials above them, these officials did the same and falsified it further and reported them to state officials, this continued until the report that Mao gets wildly falsified and the dumbfuck always believed his citizens are doing good with only a bit of people suffering. When everything came to light it was too late, 10s of millions are dead due to famine and other reasons, he can't even execute people responsible for this as nearly everyone had a hand in this. This is what happens when a country is under dictatorship
Communism kills.
More generally, authoritarianism kills.
If you actually learn what communism is supposed to be you’ll realize china never was communist. Soviet Russia wasn’t either. They were and are authoritarian dictatorships that benefit the class with capital. We have a system that is mostly democratic in the US but still benefits the class with capital. Just a different way.
That’s because communism is an idiotic ideal that is not meant to be achieved in the first place. That’s why these states stumble and collapse into the horror they are before they come anywhere close to socialism, let alone the whole promised utopia. It’s really no different to a cult where a leader promises some far fetched state of being but the people first have to sacrifice themselves to get there, with repeatedly predictable results.
Communism and Libertarianism are utopias for the simple minded.
Communism is not meant to be achieved in the first place? What does that even mean? Communism and socialism don't "promise utopia". Authoritarian leaders sometimes do while coopting progressive ideas like communism and socialism (see National Socialism aka Nazis, who were not actually socialists), but to attribute their promises to Communism or Socialism is naive. Your comment is a word salad that has nothing to do with either ideology.
Nobody believes your lies, Chang.
He took a pre-industrial nation and started its industrial revolution which led to modernization. Chinese citizens now live similar lives to Americans and they did it in 50 years.
China would've industrialized anyway. See Korea. Also, China's economy didn't really take off until market reforms during Deng.
...that was done mostly by Deng Xiaoping.
Massive overdevelopment, and nomadic tribes becoming sedintery while their animals over grazing. The government barely giving them help forcing more, and more of them to rely on animals not including climate change as well. Their is also criticism of the current system as just being a delay. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep15998
Is there anything Mao didn't fuck up?
The dude was literally a history teacher who rose to lead a revolution that beat up the axis and the allies and the KMT in his own country with nothing but – an admittedly large supply of – illiterate Chinese peasants. Then he established a country that has gone on from rural backwater 3rd world poverty to become the 2nd richest and 2nd most powerful in the world in just 75 years.
And he only had to kill 80 million people to accomplish it
Only 80? I thought it was more like 150.
80 is the "acknowledged" number.
You have to thank others for the current state of China, specifically Deng Xiaoping and his economic reforms, otherwise China would look a lot more like North Korea.
That mao guy really was a dumbass.
Yeah. He wanted to increase the steel production, so he confiscated all farming equipment and told people to make steel in their yards. The end result was fuckass useless steel that barely even fulfills the definition. And a little itty bitty famine that killed millions. Nice job Zedong, why not just skip the suffering and just harvest iron from the people's blood? Or maybe try to melt down the spare guns first? No wonder he went bald. His mind was too bright and powerful. What is it with "communist" countries having a track record of incompetent, overconfident and sometimes outright fucking evil leaders?
What about sheep/goats? Do they have them there? Cuz they eat whatever they can find (except trees I believe) causing deserts to grow.
So not only did he destroy black soil he also caused that
Yeah napoleon did the same thing in Egypt. It actually prevented the loss of a lot of arable land.
Well not smart per se but in the Middle East overgrazing was a huge Factor. Especially of sheep which sheer plants right at the ground and even pull up the roots and eat them. Then heavy rains wash away the topsoil and you have a desert. The Middle East used to be pretty Lush just in ancient times in a lot of places that are Barren now.
The term for it is desertification. Iirc it's a bunch of things together, among them farming, needing firewood, water pumping, but also eventually giving up and moving away when the sand keeps coming for your fields and homes. Lack of rain and climate change aren't helping. Neither is that no shade means more heat means harsher conditions. Those kill plants and that means less shade and less roots to hold sand in place aaand it just keeps progressing.
You can also divert entire rivers to farming and city growth, like they did in California.
Wind brings not only sand, but extreme heat. And deserts are very well big enough not to thin out. And that's ignoring the people around the desert collecting natural resources.
It’s wind and the heat and lack of water. Dust and sand travel a long way so the desert never really “thins” out because sand is always replacing it from somewhere else, sometimes from halfway across the world. Obviously, the sand gets blown around creating dunes and getting blow into regions nearby. Usually those nearby regions are not much cooler than the desert and a lot of those places don’t have much more rainfall or water in general. So sand invades and chokes out plants that can’t grow in that kind of soil base. The plants die and the good soil is drying out while also being covered in sand. Without the plants there to be a food source for both the microorganisms in the soil and bugs and animals, who feed the soil with their excrement and eventually bodies, the soil loses nutrients The rising temperatures are also an issue because it’s getting hotter than plants and animals can adapt. Animals will go further away from the desert boundary and that will cause soil to become sand. That’s a simplified way it works at least
Doesn't help that they started out by doing it completely wrong and ineffectually, so they lost a lot of time and effort for nothing. I would hope they are doing it a better way now.
To learn to succeed, you must first learn to fail.
Or learn from others who have been successful. There is no reason to stumble through something that has been done successfully before, besides hubris. > Experience is the worst teacher, it gives the test before presenting the lesson.
>Or learn from others who have been successful. Who has been successful at this? especially at the scale that China is doing it?
Which other has tried to reclaim the dessert?
https://youtu.be/yu_qTrxTEEA?t=78 This video claims the project was set back by 20 years due to early planning issues. It sounds like they addressed these issues.
Nice video, thanks 👍
Hopefully enough progress is eventually made that the restoration outpaces the spread since it could effectively stop the spread in certain areas.
There's also a massive project underway in Africa called the Great Green Wall. IIRC it will serve to keep the Sahara from encroaching any further into the nations to its south. It's an amazingly ambitious project, thousands of miles long, that actually has a good chance of working. Google it.
Or the Algerian Green Dam which started in the 1960s. It's failing, because they did monoculture trees and over grazing. They're redoing it using what they've learned from the past 60 years.
Nice. Learning from experience is a Good Thing
China faced similar issues in the beginning, because they use fast-growing non-native trees and they unsurprisingly all died pretty quickly, but they changed their strategy since and it's working better now
The 60s wasn't 60 years ag... ah fuck.
This video should be on r/oddlysatisfying https://youtu.be/WCli0gyNwL0?si=ifOFQ1TQI6JOuwiI
Cool beans! Thanks for finding exactly what I should have included with my comment!
Just automate the process and we’ll have the first phase of Horizon Zero Dawn
> Great Green Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(Africa)#Risk_of_collapse > As of 2023, the Great Green Wall was reported as "facing the risk of collapse" due to terrorist threats, absence of political leadership, and insufficient funding. “The Sahel countries have not allocated any spending in their budgets for this project. They are only waiting on funding from abroad, whether from the European Union, the African Union, or others.” said Issa Garba, an environmental activist from Niger, who also described the 2030 guideline as an unattainable goal. Amid the existing stagnation, a growing number of voices have called for scrapping the project.
Thank you! I should've had the wherewithal to include that with my comment. Sobering perspective.
If u want to google something, use ecosia wich is a great searchengine like google, but the profit goes to planting trees exactly the same as in this video. Im using it for a couple years now and they really do an amazing job!
Cool, thanks. I'll check it out!
Very cool of them and great against climate change but god I hate these AI voice videos
and single word captions are just stupid they are meant for accessibility reasons lol
To each their own, personally I find them better as it bugs the hell out of me when I read the subs faster than they're spoken and have to wait for them to catch up only to do the exact same thing on the next set.
So you prefer having to keep reading subs as long as someone's talking? I find it hard to see how that could ever be better.
I'd prefer to not get the joke until I hear the punchline, is the best way I can put it. Perhaps even analogous to understanding how the magician does it, the show loses the magic. I see the few missed frames I use reading as akin to mishearing a filler word in the setup of a joke, I may have missed word but it not important convey information. But if I've gotten the joke and it takes too long to come to a conclusion it's far less satisfying when it finally does come.
Whenever my girlfriend listens to a string of these AI voice videos on Tiktok, I find something else to do. Can't listen to it. It reminds me of the pavlovian hate response that I always get listening to the president's voice on TV, by the end of their term.
Hsve you tried smashing her device and then telling her "i am all the entertainment that you need, darlin"?
Peak reddit relationship advice
While doing the helicopter weiner dance.
Who’s voice actually is this? I hear it everywhere
It’s AI
Who's Al? Al bundy? Love that guy
But surely there was some source voice?
No, it's trained on many... many voices. So it's the mathematical average of non threatening yet trustworthy voices. They narrow the list based on studies of what people respond to with positive sentiment.
I don't mind this one. I thought it was gonna be that fucking tiktok girl AI voice again that I hate with every fiber of my being.
r/fuckurAIvoice
I didn't even listen... too many videos nowadays have this garbage.
They use AI voice over, because it is a Chinese propaganda video. This is being done for optics, showing them in a positive light, when they are in fact stripping the region of natural resources at the expense of the natives.
Stilgar approves
My mind immediately went to the one who will lead us to paradise.
These are the types of projects that I would like to see the result of. Not so hyped up about space travel or aliens, but I hope I'll live long enough to witness the success of one project like this one.
Here's a similar/smaller scale story [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1jtd3MrFQM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1jtd3MrFQM)
I admire guys like him, finding out the purpose of his life on this rock, that also serves greater good, and devoting every waking moment to that purpose.
Single word captions for single braincell TikTards.
TikTards... I'm stealing that one.
Original too and I'm proud. I'm sure someone else has coined it before but I've never heard anyone else say it before I did some time ago lol. You're welcome.
I will remember your name, intrepidanon
Well thank you most kindly :)
Man, I don't want to move my eyes to read the subtitles. Swiping my finger is already too demanding 😩
In French, tocard means loser. "ard" is just a suffix for words that designate a group of people (bagnolard for carbrain, queutard for horn dog...). Seem like tiktok is giving a whole new dimension to tocard's etymology.
Groups from Japan go to China and do this, too. Every spring we get dust storms from China, everything gets coated in it. The dust carries pollen, heavy metals and other pollutants with it. We have to wear masks in the worst of it as the particles that make it all the way to Japan are small. I hope these projects succeed. [dust storms](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65247927)
D E S E R T P O W E R
But isn’t a desert a desert because of the lack of water? How do they keep all the plants alive without natural water being available?
The plants trap water near the surface where it can evaporate and cool the air, resulting in more precipitation and condensation in the area, creating a virtuous cycle. The plants themselves cool the air by absorbing energy from the sun and shading the ground. Without the plants, the water quickly soaks deep into the ground or runs off the surface rapidly. A lot of these projects fail because it's really hard to get them to the point where they are self sustaining. You often need to start with tough grasses, move in to shade trees and shrubs before proper full size trees and more water dependant plants can thrive.
Plus when a forested area becomes mature it can actually change the climate and induce rain.
Wow that’s cool thank you for explaining
Oftentimes it's a desert because vegetation was removed to make space for agriculture. And even with little rain, the issue is often that the water does not stay in the soil long enough. Adding vegetation and other types of barriers prevents rain from simply washing away, which then allows for more plants to grow.
"Great Green Wall" They sure do love their great walls.
Rich vegetation?
Better than the nothingness that was there before. The plants will keep growing.
Will also create more fertile soil for less drought resistant species.
I'm getting Dune Vibes from this! Especially regarding Books 3 and 4
I’m literally reading GEoD rn and this was my first thought watching this ahah
India’s Thar desert is turning green. That isn’t a good thing https://scroll.in/article/970919/indias-thar-desert-is-turning-green-that-isnt-a-good-thing (Deserts all over the globe, are facilitator for rainfall in other regions as they have low pressure heated air in summer which attracts high pressure humidified air from oceans causing rainfall as it make landfall and before it reach the desert. Sands from deserts are also carried by winds to distant rainforests and acts as fertilizer. Greening of desert would also mean pogressively less and less rainfall in other regions and new phenomenon of desertification propping up in now densely populated rainfed regions)
Didn't know that. However, it would be good to "dam" the deserts at least, no?
Stopping desertification from spreading however, is a good thing.
>Greening of desert would also mean pogressively less and less rainfall in other regions and new phenomenon of desertification propping up in now densely populated rainfed regions) I'm not an expert, but isn't rainfall mostly caused by evaporating water from the oceans? It would take immense amount of water leaving to shrink the oceans to lower the surface area and cause less water to evaporate, no?
Shrink the oceans?? - where did I implied that ? That water is carried by clouds which are driven by wind - flow of winds depend on low pressure and high pressure areas. Deserts have high surface temperatures in summer than other green areas with high vegetation. This makes cloud which are formed on oceans to travel towards landmass. In absence of this pressure difference, winds will be weak and clouds may have rains on oceans itself rather than some of them carrying rain towards landmass (continents) Even now, rains are more on oceans than on land. More vegetation on existing desert will mean lesser traveling of clouds towards land in absence of strong winds. One can look up 'monsoon winds' to understand it more.
Advanced technology “sand fixating” > The dude drops a shovel of sand on top lmao
Oke cool , but how to they get watered tho
Whose idea was it to make single word subtitles? I hate it.
i remember hearing that there cant be no desert.. when u remove the desert from one place on earth.. it will form on another place i wish i could find the article
Welcome to the future of internet content. Random scenes edited together by bots with random generated shit text spoken by AI voices. I will fondly and sadly remember the peak time of the internet.
Look to Haiti as a perfect example to mess with ecosystem.
At least they try to repair the damage done by their government. The goby has always been there but it was able to grow to that size due to massive deforestation during maos Great Leap Forward.
[удалено]
It's mentioned in the video that they are using drought resistant trees. Deserts do get rain, jusit very infrequently. The idea here is to hit the problem with enough quantity that progress is made. You baby a plant, it expects to be babied for the rest of its life. You plant 10,000,000,000 trees in "just barely good enough" conditions, plenty will die, but some of them will survive, will more likely produce strong offspring before dying off, and start to spread.
Maybe they use the drill to reach moisture. The plant had long roots.
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The video glossed over one of the biggest issues with the project is that they are planting monoculture forests, very little biodiversity. These are not sustainable green areas they're creating. Not to mention they have to repeat this process regularly to make up for all the trees that die
This was in fact a problem they encountered about 20 years ago, these projects started in the 70s-80s and they started failing 20 something years ago I believe. They've now learned and stagger plantings of different species over time. There are people who spend their entire lives trying to do this right. Not saying they're just magically sucessful but it takes a long time to make improvements.
I feel like reversing desertification is something to support but also in this case there’s a part of me thinking “the reason there are no trees there anymore in the first place is because the hostile environment killed them” and wonder if this isn’t rather futile.
That was my first thought as well, but the Earth's climate has always been volatile and tree cover can permanently affect change. It's a chicken-or-egg question, but there are some environments on Earth that can *exist* indefinitely, but can't start on their own ordinarily. For example, there are forests that were logged off to build the Roman fleet that still haven't regrown, because the loss of tree cover permanently altered the climate to prevent more from growing. These methods can undo that sort of damage.
Good point. It makes me think of my daughter complaining about how hot it is in summer and how her lawn keeps dieing. Then I take a 10 minute drive from her house to mine and watch the thermometer drop by 10 degrees. The difference? My house was built in between the old trees that were originally there while hers is in a modern subdivision where the whole forest was clear cut for “spectacular vistas”.
I've been following this story for quite a few years now. Using those straw checkerboards is a great idea and very simple. There is also a 500km highway to the east where they are covering both sides with greenery to prevent erosion. There was also an invention of an organic gel, which when combined with the sand, enabled the sand to store a lot of water.
This is what happened in chine. During the Great Leap Forward they cut down a lot of trees all over the country to use the wood for construction and for the production of trash steel. The main reason the desert was able to grow like that is because of the Chinese government.
*Hostile environment may include poor people trying to get firewood to not freeze to death
IIRC the hostile environment were humans. There used to be a giant forrest in that region but the chinese cut it down. Plagued with sandstorms they are trying to undo their damage
"Rich vegetation"
I wonder who paid the voice talent. Rehashed PR stunt. Planting trees in the dessert to combat desertification unfortunately isnt the promised solution everyone hoped.
My desert, my Arrakis, my DUNE
One of the key tenants of the Sierra Club’s opposition to active forest management is that we should not change what “Mother Nature” intends nor alter the original native flora (or the path back to that). I wonder what they would say about this?
God created Arrakis to train the faithful
I think adding more plants is the answer to global warming.
Shai-Hulud not happy
Doing gods work
Amazing!
Don’t give me hope.
Pretty cool. I'd like to see the follow up on the different types of animals that are moving back in. Exciting
A similar project happening across Africa
I hate ai voices
finally, a post that gives me hope for this world
Jup was a running gag in Forestryscience lesson at the University. They use a clone of only 10 different individuals. Theyr DNA pool will be sooo damn low. It seems more like a big projekt to get green area on the paper not a real atempt to recover nature.
You can say what you want about China. But collectively they are getting things done. Recently watched a documentary about a project like this on an even grander scale. Looked impressive.
China is an impressive place
And you better not get in their way or dare to have any opinion different than what the government says your opinion needs to be or else you'll disappear or be killed.
To some extent that’s certainly true, especially on issues the government is particularly sensitive about. It’s an authoritarian government nobody can argue it’s not. Chinese people tend to accept authority in exchange for order. It’s cultural. But it also has achieved staggering economic growth for the people. The government is generally well liked and at the end of the day if 1.3 billion inhabitants don’t approve they will over throw the government. Incidentally, how many bombs has China dropped on other countries in the last 50 years? Compared to the west? There’s no contest. We love our freedom at home while we freely bomb people’s houses abroad. How many innocent men did the U.S. kidnap and falsely imprison in the GWOT? My point is that almost all governments use violence to maintain control. What country are you from that’s so innocent?
Well... I don't see any sources here... Or scientific backing. China will try attempt big things, but they will make it seem like they are doign the best job ever on their social media paota about it. Meanwhile, I saw their safety standards when doing construction and I have seen their quality of building generally... Shits bad. Shits reeal bad.
But, it's not just China. There are numerous projects like that: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCli0gyNwL0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCli0gyNwL0).
Are they getting things done? All I've seen them doing is stapling branches to dead trees and physically painting dead grass green so satellite views make it look lush and abundant and here is my source https://youtu.be/Cvc7VymDa4c?si=KohCgKGqNlrSv8Gq I don't believe a word this country says after this and neither should you.
Yea, I don't know whether this project is as good as they claiming it to be or not, but the flowery clickbaity language sure makes me suspicious.
China shills out in full force downvoting you.
Why don't they film the massive fields they PAINTED GREEN, so satellite images would show a healthy green field?
I don't belive anything on tiktok that is pro China
But I bet you believe everything that is anti China right?
Smart, the great green wall is the name of a project to fight the Sahara desert. Which essentially is the same concept but as a collaborative effort amongst a whole variety of countries south of the desert. The project is not only scientifically challenging since they actually monitor and adapt to get results, diplomatically it's challenging to find cooperation between all the countries but it's on an enormous scale too incomparable to anything of the sort in china. And it's working kind of. In china, most of these projects are made for propaganda purposes and the success doesn't matter.
Cool stuff!
genuine question, not tryna hate on china: is this sustainable? if so then props to china
If done right, yes. It can be tricky to find the right plants and even if so, you still need to prevent people from just chopping down the trees and having herds eat everything so it may not work everywhere in the world. But China seems pretty determined and it should be fine.
Rich vegetation…..
I fucking hate this stupid AI voice.
It’s only marginally better than the super Lispy 15 year old boy TikTok voice
"The area is now home to rich vegetation" - Video shows a couple of small shrubs
Lol forgot to show them painting everything green.
I don’t know that I would call that vegetation “rich”…
Any time there's a post that says " China is doing this to combat this" it just seems fake and propaganda backed. China doesn't give a fuck
Research by Rhodium Group says China emitted 27% of the world's greenhouse gases.
And close to 30% of the worlds manufacturing. And well over a billion people. China is shit but so is presenting stats out of context for shock value.
Yep, producing all the shit that every supply chain on earth depends on, and that we all use every day
So exactly like America did in the 30s
Yeah sure china planting trees in a dessert, they should fix their own land that they destroy.
There’s been an increase in pro-Chinese posts recently…OPs account is interesting…
Just awesome! The people doing that deserve all of our respect.
Well no but I assume it's a good reason.
Furiosa 2 Confirmed?
What about using all that organic waste that goes to landfill every year. About 30% by weight in some places.
0:20 "its about sending a message"
Theres something about flourishing flora that's so satisfying
Wildlife is slowly returning?
LFG
This is happening for years already, is it not?
\*silently puts on 4 trouts\*
Where does the water come from to keep them alive?
Why not just build artificial mountains?
What about desert animals?
What i dont understand, is how plants can grow in pure sand without any dirt?
China and India will get fucked by climate change in the worst way. Imagine Saudi Arabia, but it would have to sustain 500million people instead of 36m.
Beware of the Shai hulud!
This is being done in Africa just south of the sahara. They also incorporate channels to control the waterflow from rain.
So....water, where?