If every filmmaker was truly born to tell one story, the photographer Mr. Zhang Fang was certainly born to document China’s desertification. His passion and persistence drove him to walk some 40,000 km across China’s deserts, living with the people whose lands and livelihoods are being destroyed by the encroaching deserts. The problem of balancing economic and environmental initiatives while preserving, as much as possible, traditional lifestyles, is so daunting that Mr. Zhang said at times he felt as depressed as the photographer Kevin Carter, who took his own life in despair only four months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his photograph in Sudan of a vulture waiting for a young child to die (Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1
A picture displays a conversation in Hohhot between William Brown and Zhang Fang, as well as a female member.

Photo by Zhu Qingfu

Prof. William Brown interviewing Zhang Fang in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia on July 10, 2019.

Full size image

Yet even after two decades of documenting the problems and potential solutions, he remains optimistic, and keen to share his insights on the desert and the people struggling to survive from it.

“Can you share what you’ve witnessed?” I asked Mr. Zhang. “What motivated you to press for ecological protection?”

“I began a photographic record,” Mr. Zhang explained, “because it seemed sand and dust are everywhere — even reaching Beijing. But where is the sand coming from, and why is it spreading? So I did a sociological survey of the literature, and my inspiration was from Fei Xiaotong.”

Fei Xiaotong was China’s most famous sociologist and anthropologist. He first majored in medicine but, like Lu Xun, who also started out in medicine, concluded that China’s greatest problem was not medical but spiritual. In a 2002 China Daily interview he said, “I abandoned the lifelong aim of treating people’s physical diseases, and went after the greater goal of curing social illnesses and injustice.”Footnote 1 Fei turned to the study of sociology and politics, and from the 1930s emphasized rural development. In 1939, he published “Peasant Life in China: a Field Study of Country Life” in the Yangtze Valley, his Ph.D. thesis about a village near his birthplace.

“I work for the Photographers Association in the Inner Mongolia Federation of Literary and Art Circles,” Mr. Zhang said. “In the year 2000, I obtained a three-year leave, so I could go deep into the field and interview people facing this problem. And I did this at my own expense. At that time, I earned only RMB600 a month [US$100], so the Publicity Department of the Party Committee of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region wrote me a letter of introduction saying ‘CoMr.ade Zhang Fang is going to the desert area to conduct interviews, and that all agencies and units are requested to provide strong support.’ Had the Department of Agriculture, Forestry, Animal Husbandry and other units not been so supportive, I would not have even had a place to live there.”

“I obtained transportation and even a desert guide, but once I got there, I found that the pace of pastoral life was even slower than I could have imagined. It was very challenging to nail people down for appointments. I’d set a time for three days later, only to find they’d totally forgotten about it.”

Mr. Zhang placed a large pictorial book on the table between us. “I did finally compile this book on desertification, beginning at the Yellow River and ending at the Great Wall. It has not been published but I have held two exhibitions featuring the problem — one in Beijing and the other in Hohhot.”

Mr. Zhang pointed to a photo and said, “This was in Dengkou County, about 350 km from Hohhot. This old man’s place originally had a very good environment but the encroaching desert forced him to move three times until eventually he was driven to the very edge of the Yellow River. If this continues, they will literally have no place to live. You can see his sheep in the photo but there is no grass, so they are gnawing on broken branches and bark. Behind his house — nothing but sand. How can he survive? How can we halt the desertification, so that he is not forced to move a fourth time?”.

I was astounded at the scope and detail of how desertification is destroying land and livelihoods across Inner Mongolia. “Local Mongolians asked me, ‘What can we do?’” Mr. Zhang said. He himself was no expert, but he hoped that his meticulous documentation would get the attention of decision makers who could invest in tackling the problem.

Mr. Zhang said. “This book tells the problem of desertification through photographs and stories. In the last section I explained the causes and made suggestions to solve it. I got many of these ideas when I shared my findings with ecologists. But the man paying most attention to desertification is not an ecologist but a scientist, Qian Xuesen, who was indispensable in China’s development of atomic bombs and missiles. He is very concerned about our country’s grasslands. This photo shows that Inner Mongolian grassland used to be very lush but it was destroyed by the trampling and gnawing of livestock. And we didn’t have good roads then, cars just went everywhere, destroying the turf beneath them. Now every village has good asphalt roads, so at least that problem is solved.”

“You compiled this book almost 15 years ago,” I said. “Has there been any improvement since then?”

Mr. Zhang said, “The good thing now is that everyone is aware there is a problem. Back then, people were just focused on survival. Today, the destructive traditional grazing has given way to modern animal husbandry. But it is not realistic or sustainable to simply ban herders from breeding and have them rely solely on the state for their livelihoods. Herdsmen must have their own source of survival and be self-sufficient. The country has now realized this. As you can see in this photo, the pasture had been badly damaged, but later it was covered in dense grass.”

“How was this pasture restored?” I asked.

“The biggest influence has been President Xi Jinping’s emphasis on promoting people’s welfare while also protecting nature,” Mr. Zhang said. “But even though everyone is aware of the problem and wants to solve it, we can’t do that without systematic, detailed investigation and research. The fact that some places have improved suggests desertification may be manageable. The problem is how to protect the ecology while at the same time helping to provide people with livelihoods that do not destroy fragile environments.”

“Yes, this is a problem even in my own Fujian Province,” I said. “Many areas now forbid pig raising because of environmental concerns. But what can local Mongolians do instead of raising sheep?”

“Tourism development is an option,” Mr. Zhang said. “If 50 people in a village of 200 engage in tourism, they can earn much more than grazing their sheep, and desertification can be reversed. For lands facing desertification, national law only allows one sheep for 108 mu (666.6 sq meters). More than this is unsustainable and leads to desertification. I worked hard to investigate and confirm this.”

“I believe it,” I said. “Arizona, in the southwestern US, is now a desert, but 150 years ago a cowboy wrote in his diary that the lush, tall grass reached his horse’s belly. Overgrazing by sheep destroyed it.”

“Yes, it is the same in any country,” Mr. Zhang said. “An Australian ecologist said their desertification is purely the result of greedy ranchers who won’t leave a place until their livestock eat the last blade of grass and the desert drives him away. Australia now limits the number of sheep. And the Dust Bowl in the 1930s led the US to restrict grazing.”

America’s infamous Dust Bowl showed that improper farming was as dangerous as overgrazing to a fragile ecology. Farmers who didn’t understand the need for “dryland farming” on the plains, much of which received less than 10 inches of rain per year, used machines for deep plowing of virgin topsoil. This destroyed the native deep-rooted grasses that had trapped moisture even during droughts and windstorms. The droughts of the 1930s turned the soil to dust, and “black blizzards” that reached even to New York City reduced visibility to less than 1 sq meter on the plains. The “Black Sunday” dust storm on April 14, 1935, displaced up to 300 million tons of topsoil from the prairie. The Dust Bowl affected 400,000 km2, and by 1936 losses to farmers reached US$25 million per day (the equivalent of US$460 million in 2019).

Sadly, even after such a disaster, giant US agri-businesses continue to this day to destroy the land with ecologically unsustainable farming.

“A man from the China Agricultural University visited me,” Mr. Zhang said. “He said, after thorough discussions, ‘Mr. Zhang, you were able to answer all of my questions. But if even after three days and nights you have still not even finished describing in detail the problem, this really is a big problem indeed!’”

“Mr. Zhang, I’m curious as to why you persist in this?” I said. “Many people are now aware of this problem, yet they haven’t devoted their energy and money to it like you have.”

“Actually, even in my youth I was very curious and liked to explore problems,” Mr. Zhang said. “As for why photograph all of this? Around 1995, while on official business, I would often see lots of fat sheep on the prairie in the autumn but by winter they were all dead. I asked the herders why they died, and they always blamed bad sheds and bad fodder, but I investigated this, and found they’d mainly died from cold and starvation. Sheep, just like people, struggle with Inner Mongolia’s bitterly cold winters. It’s not only cold but there is nothing to eat, so sheep eat the grass roots as well, which means there will be no grass the following year.”

“During a photography exhibition, a colleague said to me, ‘If you have a truly original story, and it is truly gold, you will always shine.’ I have always wanted to do something big and make a difference — but on what topic? When I witnessed the fragility of these herdsmen’s lives, I knew that if I did not shoot this topic, I would regret it for the rest of my life. Once I had this idea, I could not sleep for a month, although I did not dare tell anyone because I had to first think out clearly what I would shoot, and how, and how to post it and where?”

“I shared my idea with my leader, who passed it up to the ministerial leader in charge. He said, ‘Other photographers go in groups of 50 or 60 to shoot something like this but CoMr.ade Zhang Fang wants to go alone, live amidst the people and explore and document the causes of this problem. It’s commendable, and I support everything needed.’ After this, everyone knew there was no turning back for me.”

“When I told a good buddy who has a photo agency that I wanted to shoot desertification, he paled and went silent. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him. He said he too had wanted to do the same thing but kept delaying it until he had enough funds. ‘Go for it!’ he said.”

“So you see, many people have such ideas, but then don’t actually carry them out. This man gave me a motorcycle key and said, ‘Get on the bike and get financial sponsors, otherwise how can you do it?’”

“What was it like filming this?” I asked.

“Well, I really suffered,” Mr. Zhang said. “The nomads on the grasslands lived in yurts but they would not let me stay with them. They said they had a small house for me in the back — but it was a donkey shed! I kicked the donkey out so that I could sleep. And some locals did not trust me, thinking I would give exposure on their lives. The lack of funds was not my only problem.”

“Did you win their confidence?” I asked.

“I did! I borrowed an old car, and then bought it for RMB7,000. When I set off alone from Hohhot, I wore the same kind of old tattered clothes as the herdsmen. Otherwise, I’d never be able to get close enough to them to truly understand their conditions. I met with them by day and by night I stayed in small hostels for just RMB2 to RMB3. But I was also in pain both physically and emotionally. After I finished the project, and the Beijing photographic exhibition was over, I was a little depressed and just didn’t want to think about it anymore. You asked why I’d not published the book yet. I spent nearly 10 years on this, and probably felt like Kevin Carter who committed suicide at age 33, only four months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his photo of a vulture watching a starving Sudanese child.”

“This must have also taken a toll on your family. Do they support you?”

“My family has truly invested a lot in helping me. But I am an adult, and was a soldier for three years. I didn’t want my family to spend money on me. I did it all by myself. What pains me is that no matter how much I promote it, people still don’t grasp the scope of the problem. And some local leaders feared that revealing the problems would reflect badly on them. People’s misunderstandings and lack of objectivity hurt me emotionally. I don’t fear suffering or hardship, but I am troubled by people’s thinking. The crux of the desertification problem is still people. I boldly proposed not to put desertification management in the forestry department but to set up a grass industry department. Now China has established the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, which was originally meant for serving economic construction.”

“Since ancient times, Chinese have valued trees over grass. Words related to grass, such as ‘grass mustard,’ ‘wall top grass,’ etc., don’t have good meanings. I think the Ministry of Civil Affairs should oversee the department of ecological management because the problem is closely related to population layout and management. For example, people in pastoral areas mainly rely on meat. The state needs to plan on how to respect ethnic minorities’ eating habits while producing food.”

“Do people listen to your suggestions?” I asked.

Mr. Zhang shrugged. “Many people feel this is not my concern. As a photographer, I should just take photos, publish them and forget it — but I can’t. To document this problem, I have walked over 40,000 km, and really did settle down and became one with the herdsmen. I walked back and forth from Hohhot, sometimes four or five times, going as far west as Gansu Province. I interviewed Ren Fengming, a genuine sand control man. He contracted 450 mu of land, and made enough income to send his three children to college. He earned RMB100,000 from that land. It’s truly magical. He’s smart, and thoughtful, and knows the key issue in the desert is water, so he invented the ‘plum blossom well.’ And to limit grazing he used earth and rocks to keep animals out, and the grassland gradually recovered. Later, he planted reeds, and a year later he planted fruit trees amidst the reeds. In the fall, he cut the reeds and sold them to factories, earning RMB50,000. After much trial and error, he has transformed his sandy land into a fertile, life-sustaining oasis.”

“How on earth did he come up with these ideas?” I asked.

“He was forced to innovate to survive. He had no choice but to keep trying.”

“Are others learning from his example?” I asked.

Mr. Zhang shrugged again. “Very few, he said. “People all say, ‘If the government gives me the money first, I’ll try.’ But Ren Fengming is a real hero.”

“How did you find people to interview?” I asked.

“The forestry department found some people,” said Mr. Zhang. “But after I learned more about them, I didn’t feel any were worth the interview. Most only did a little work on their own and then relied on heavy government funding. But Ren did not have anyone’s support. He did everything by himself. He once said, ‘Israel is great in desertification control. If we had 10,000 people like me in China, our desertification control would definitely be better than Israel.’”

“How should China combat desertification?” I asked him.

“The problem is not technological but human — a problem of human consciousness. In the final analysis, desertification is still a sociological problem. Two years ago, Ren Fengming told me, ‘I am old now and can’t continue, but my children are all in Xi’an and other places. They are doing well, and young people’s thoughts are different from mine. They want to build a villa on my place.’ I told them that this too was progress, because the ecology would be maintained, and their children want themselves to be comfortable in old age.”

“Do you think your work will have any long-term impact?” I asked.

“I’ve worn out my shoes visiting government departments in Beijing to draw attention to desertification. I was so determined to make everyone aware of the problem that I even fought with some departments. This can only be solved if everyone works together — not just one or two people or departments. Some Xinhua News Agency friends who read my photographic report said it should be sent to leaders across the country. And CCTV Channel One News once reported my work. CCTV did not report much about Inner Mongolia back then, and I remember that my project was reported right after some news reports about the King of Jordan.”

“My work has influenced Inner Mongolian leaders to adopt some new policies, and now the entire country is concerned about working on ecological protection. At least some people now understand the problem and such strategies as enclosing to prevent overgrazing.”

“What are your plans for the future?” I asked, because it did not seem like Mr. Zhang was ready to give up his fight yet.

“I’m thinking of waiting until I retire and then retracing my previous trips and documenting the changes. But then I want to publish a book with short stories about people and culture — not any more books like this one. This is too political.”

Desertification is indeed a great political issue, but frankly, I can’t imagine a man who has trekked 40,000 km through desert to ever give up the fight entirely. As Dan Krauss said, “Every filmmaker has at least one story that he or she is born to tell.” And I think it is fate, or yuánfèn for Mr. Zhang and for the rest of us that he was born to enlighten us on this growing global problem.

I admire Elon Musk for his vision and courage to tackle so many disparate issues—electric cars, solar energy, underground tunnels for transportation. But when he talks about devoting his entire fortune to colonizing and terraforming Mars, I can’t help but wonder why people like him don’t devote their talent and wealth to terraforming our own little planet. They act as if the earth were hopelessly doomed, and yet restoring deserts would take a fraction of the resources needed to get people to Mars and restore the dead planet’s atmosphere. In addition to the costs, the red planet has only 1 percent as much water as earth, and radiation is deadly. And given that terraforming Mars is estimated to take 1,000 years—why not fix our little home planet now?

Fortunately, some have begun thinking this way. There is even talk now of terraforming the 8.6 million sq km Sahara Desert—a desert almost the size of the US. Although some doubt it can be done, many say that China has given the world hope with its successful Kubuqi Ecological Restoration Project in Inner Mongolia, which over 30 years greened one third of the Kubuqi desert with 70 different plant species. TIME magazine noted the UN Environment Programme estimates this project will be worth US$1.8 billion over 50 years, and French President Macron declared after the UN Paris Climate agreement, “Now China leads.”

“[China] is the world’s largest renewable-energy investor [nearly US$90 billion last year], and employs 40 percent of the sector’s global workforce, aiming for 13 million jobs by 2020.”Footnote 2

I know of course that some have warned restoration of the Sahara could harm the Amazon basin, etc. Global climates are complex. But regardless of complexities yet unknown, desertification is too grave to ignore. I hope governments, and people like Elon Musk, will learn from China’s lead and Mr. Zhang’s vision, and try terraforming our home planet before they spend trillions to terraform long dead planets.