The ancients said: The lonely smoke is straight in the desert, and the sun sets over the long river. Doesn’t this poem sound very picturesque when you read it? Suddenly, a lone smoke floated straight upward in the endless desert, and the magnificent scenery of the red sun about to set under the long river suddenly appeared before our eyes. The scenery of the desert may be very beautiful, just like the description in the poem, which makes many people want to experience this real and magnificent scenery, such as the mystery of the Sahara Desert, the magnificence of the Gobi Desert, the changeability of the Libyan Desert, etc. According to statistics, one-third of the earth's land is desert.
Deserts are generally formed due to landforms, mainly due to lack of water. There are very few lives that can survive in deserts, because water is the source of life. But in fact, there are oases in the desert that have not completely disappeared. From this point of view, the formation of the desert can basically be attributed to environmental problems.
The soil here is very thin, there are few plants, and the climate is dry. In ancient times, few residents lived in it, but today, basically no one will survive in such a harsh environment. . However, archaeologists like deserts very much. Because of the changes of the times and the changes in the sea, there are many human cultural relics and fossils in the desert, and there are precious mineral deposits and oil in some deserts. These are all the fruits of human civilization. wealth.
But the desert we are going to discuss today, the first to disappear in China, is not a natural landform formed by weathering, but caused by excessive felling of trees due to environmental reasons. The Mu Us Desert is a desert larger than Hainan Island.
The formation of the Mu Us Desert
Yulin City in Shaanxi Province, my country is called the "Camel City", which is the city of camels, and camels are the representatives of the desert, so Yulin is also called Desert city. Shaanxi, which is located on the high loess slopes, does have such a place surrounded by desert. To the north of Yulin, it is called the Mu Us Desert. Mu Usu means "bad water" in Mongolian. The name comes from Mu Us Village, Zetan Township, Jingbian County, northern Shaanxi. The continuous sand belt nearby was the Small Mu Us Sand Belt, which was formed during the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
Historically, this land was originally the political and economic center of the Xiongnu. At that time, the "Western Region" area was a natural pasture with fertile water and grass, pleasant scenery, vast grassy beaches, and clear rivers, which was very suitable for nomadic peoples. of residence. Whether it is from the records in history books or the restoration in today's movies and TV dramas, we can know that the places where nomadic people lived in the past were very pleasant. So how did a place that was once so suitable for people to live gradually evolve into a large desert?
This is actually due to humans. The Mu Us area vigorously developed agriculture during the pre-Qin and Qin-Han periods, and was later regarded as a nomadic area. Until the early Tang Dynasty, due to human's unreasonable reclamation of this land, coupled with climate change and endless wars caused by nature itself, the vegetation here was greatly destroyed. Originally, there was only a small piece of primitive desert here. After people's wanton destruction, the area of ??quicksand here continued to expand, and by the Ming and Qing Dynasties, it had formed a vast desert.
During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the Mu Us Desert began to gradually expand, and this was where the Great Wall passed. During the Ming Dynasty, the Great Wall was still used to defend against foreign enemies, so "scraping sand" for the Great Wall became an official task. It’s a major national event that I have to worry about. During the Qing Dynasty, the imperial court no longer used the Great Wall, and the activity of "sand removal" was stopped. This has become an abandoned piece of land again.
Control of the Mu Us Desert
The more it is abandoned, the more rapidly the Mu Us Desert expands. The Mu Us Desert has become one of the four largest sandy lands in China, with an area of ??4.22 square meters. Ten thousand square kilometers, an area larger than the entire Hainan Island. Since the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the country vigorously developed productivity, used all the available land, and planted all the crops that could be grown. So the country began to manage these damaged sandy lands that could still be repaired. Since 1959, the Mu Us Desert has begun vigorously building windbreaks, introducing external water sources to drain the sand and silt, and the huge project of transforming the desert has been grandly launched.
The smart working people began to vigorously build windbreaks here, and painstakingly planted various plants that can survive in the desert, so that they can take root in the desert. With the help of the government in planning, people We began to divert water to remove sand and divert floods to silt the land, putting this huge project of transforming the desert on the agenda.
This huge project not only has strong assistance from the government, but also has investment from many private organizations and some enterprises. So it is said: There is strength in numbers. With the unremitting efforts of countless people, after nearly sixty years, in the early 21st century, these ecological management finally played a big role, stopping the expansion of nearly 6 million acres of quicksand in the Mu Us Desert, and began to appear here. green plants.
The forest coverage rate of the entire Yulin City has also improved from 0.9% to 42.9% today, and nearly 80% of the area has been well managed and turned into an oasis. Therefore, the Mu Us Desert has become the first desert in China that is about to disappear.
Today, the sand control area of ??Mu Us Desert has reached 33,000 square kilometers. The water and soil here are no longer lost, and the vegetation coverage rate has reached 30%.
Decades of modern biotechnology and scientific grazing management, coupled with the good rainfall in the Mu Us area, have turned a large part of the Mu Us Desert into grassland and farmland. There have been news reports before It is said that the potato yield grown in the Mu Us Desert has reached five tons per mu of land! This is not only the government's strong support for desert control, but also the local people's consciousness and strong action ability.
We all know that there is only one earth, and most of human survival depends on ourselves. In the last century or even longer, we did not understand the importance of nature to us, so we destroyed it wantonly, discharged sewage and chemical pollution, cut down trees indiscriminately, wasted water resources, and released greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Gas... These behaviors have seriously affected the earth's ecosystem cycle, and it is us humans who will suffer in the end.
To paraphrase a line from the movie: If you go out to fool around, you will have to pay it back sooner or later. Nature's response to us is various natural disasters that leave humans helpless, such as floods, droughts, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, haze, etc. These are all nature's "revenges" on us. Fortunately, most human beings can correct their mistakes and start repairing the damage to the environment after realizing their mistakes. I just hope it's not too late to make amends now, and we can still live in peace with the earth.