china is genociding the desert and you're celebrating??
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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I am once again stating that deserts are incredibly important biomes that contribute to the existence of fertility of green areas world-wide. We need deserts for actual global sustainability with the ecosystem we have now, they are hubs for global distribution of minerals that all life needs.
The Amazon rainforest would be significantly diminished if the Sahara desert were to be 'green'ed tomorrow. We can't just eliminate deserts willy-nilly and claim we have done a good thing.
However, China is for the most part doing re-forestation, rather than converting areas that were always deserts. So it's not a real issue in this case. This program in fact, seems to have been ongoing since 1978 to prevent further desertification. So it's Ws all the way down in terms of their actual strategy.
Yeah a lot of "greening the desert" headlines are actually about regreening former areas that used to be green like 100-400 years ago. Like large parts of the Sahel were lost to the Sahara, even in like 17th century there were european reports about kingdoms that are now lost to the sands. The Kingdom of Yam is an famous example from ancient egyptian times.
The entire Sahara being eliminated would be a fruitless endeavour anyway, re-forestation and green projects in places like Argentina, Rockies and Central Asia are way more successful because they're often not fully deserted
China is killing all the Sandworms
They need to plant a diversity of crops to actually restore the ecology. Wildlife tends not to survive monocultures. The belt is ironically a green desert in terms of nutrients. Its also important to make the project more resilient to fire and disease
This isn't specifically a critique of China, this happens in the US all the time
wouldnt other plants just move in between the trees on their own though? agricultural monocultures dont stay monocultures on their own, they're actively maintained, arent they? unless the trees are planted so densely that nothing can live beneath them, but based on some of the images in the article, it doesnt look like that.
I've read mixed things on whether any of the planted trees are native. If they purely selected trees for fast growth, nothing native to the ecosystem will find its niche and grow. Even if they are native and its a monoculture, that doesn't guarantee that other native plants will find their way into it
I'm more familiar with forestry practices in the US, but in forests where a single tree is replanted the regular species do not return in significant numbers
Remembering the insane vitriol directed at Corbyn when he proposed planting trees Remembering the insane(ly racist) claim that Israel "made the desert bloom"
God, it pisses me off from afar how much the UK with great happiness, enthusiastically threw away all its soft power like it was radioactive because “we wanna be JUST LIKE ‘MURICA!”
Yeah, there is a leftist case to be made for Brexit, but Britain pig-headedly voted for it because “funny internet pictures told me to!” and when that fucked up because of course it did, the UK happily votes to double down on more of the same each and every time and they blow a gasket when someone tells them to stop doing this.
I mean I do kind of agree, but the elephant in the room wrt Brexit is that the effects of immigration were very unevenly felt — with certain communities, particularly those with a lot of agricultural laborers, affected quite negatively — and the only response anyone on the mainstream left had when xenophobes took advantage of the resultant discontent was, "shut up, peasant, it's good for the economy"
Tbqh though the main thing preventing anything good from happening in Britain is that they haven't begun to get their heads around what the British Empire was. They have to construct these insane fantasies, because the alternative is realizing that they've literally never had a proper economy outside of wringing the colonies dry and then spending the years since then selling off the silverware
Brexit was also very much driven by London profiting massively from financial services, while the rest of the country rotted away. Rural vs Urban, English vs British all were components.
I remember the time ChapoTrapHouse was trying to gaslight its audience into thinking the Brits did Brexit as solidarity with Greek workers or because it was mistreated by the EU. Despite the UK being amongst the top pro-austerity countries alongside Denmark and the Netherlands.
What? I know they’ve shitted on the European Union but when did they say anything about it being solidarity with the Greek?
Yes they did in their brexit episode years back, I think it was something along the lines about the EU "beating greece up" which scared the UK into leaving or something.
If Communism is good for the Chinese why are they planting trees whose shade they will not get to rest under?
But at what cost!?
