Published: January 21, 2008

By W. Chad Futrell
Circle of Blue

More than 600 miles north of Beijing, where the shallow Nailin Rivulet meanders in lazy curves beneath a high ridge near the border with Mongolia, the whole of the largest contiguous grasslands on Earth opens to the horizon. There is nothing like this incandescent green sea of grass, covering much of the central and eastern regions of Inner Mongolia, anywhere on the planet. Its breathtaking beauty has inspired a nascent eco-tourism industry exemplified by the nearby Nomad Family, a clutch of six yurts along an empty highway overseen by four men, three women, and a small boy.

The idea is to give the trickle of tourists who make it out this far from China's capital an idea of traditional nomadic culture on the Asian steppes, a life marked by the insistence of wind, herding, and the search for water. It's the latter that also attracts visitors to the Nomad Family encampment. The family has incorporated into their business plan tours of dried lakes, great expanses of dusty ground, and impromptu sprints to sudden dust storms that gather speed, darken the sky, and sting the air.

On the day in September that Chen Jiqun visited, a storm of mixing dust and swirling sand erupted miles beyond the Nailin Rivulet. It swept eastward, growing in intensity. Chen, a prominent Chinese artist and grasslands conservationist who helped found Nomad Family last year, joined several of the men and raced off with a group of visiting journalists. Even though the storm was small compared to many others in Inner Mongolia, its fury was nevertheless surprising. Dust obscured a bright yellow sun. Sand stung exposed skin. The wind pried at loose clothing.

It was easy that day to imagine the towering blasts of sand and dust, growing in strength and frequency, that are now closing off huge expanses of east Asia every spring. Typical is what happened on the morning of April 1, 2007, when the people of Liaoning and Shandong provinces in northeastern China, an area roughly the size of New Mexico and home to 130 million residents, awoke to the sound of grating winds and scratchy veils of dust that hung in their homes. Outside, yellow clouds of sand darkened the streets.

Springtime in China's northern provinces, like late summer and fall along the American Atlantic and Gulf coasts, is storm season. Terrible storms of sand and dust have been a fact of life in arid China for thousands of years. Depending on who you ask, roughly a quarter of China's vast territory is desert, much of that in northern China. Yet just as hurricanes in the age of global climate change have grown more frequent and intense in the American south, the number and severity of sand and dust storms in northern China also is rising.

The worst was a three-day sand storm in May 1993 that engulfed four northern Chinese provinces, covering an area the size of the American Midwest. When it ended 85 people were dead, 246 were injured, 120,000 head of livestock perished, 4,400 homes were destroyed, and 5.7 million acres of crops were ruined, according to the Chinese Academy of Forestry Sciences.

During the first decade of the 21st century, the conditions that scientists say produce the storms—dryer climate, heavier winds, severe water shortages, over-grazing, population growth, and a clash between nomadic herders and the government over range and farmland management—worsened. Many of the same conditions that produced the American Dust Bowl in the 1930s, an environmental calamity and human tragedy that journalist Timothy Egan called the "worst hard time" in United States history, are being replicated in China with even graver consequences for the land, and for people in and outside China who are directly affected by the sand storms.

The dimensions of the disaster, like the gravitational pull of a heavy magnet, attracted Chinese scientists, prompted a nascent national environmental movement to take note, and spurred calls for action from other nations--Japan, South Korea, the United States--that choke on China's dust. And for good reason.

In 2001, dust from a violent storm closed airports in Korea. A year later, on April 12, 2002, South Korea was engulfed by another dust storm from China that left people in Seoul literally gasping for breath. Koreans have come to dread the arrival of what they now call "the fifth season"—the dust storms of late winter and early spring. In March and April 2006 Beijing, the Chinese capital, was enveloped eight times by choking storms.

Costs of Desertification
Most importantly, the dust and sand storms, along with the growing expanses of extremely dry and eroding grasslands and desert from which they are born, threaten the livelihoods of 400 million Chinese. Sand storms driven by 80 mile-per-hour winds that can last days are putting severe stress on China, causing roughly $1 billion in damage annually, according to the Chinese government. An Asian Sahara of sand is moving closer every year to Beijing, blackening the sky, and producing environmental refugees and social unrest in Inner Mongolia and throughout China.

"Desertification is not a natural function," said John D. Liu, an American-born journalist, researcher, and director of the Environmental Education Media Project for China, a 10-year-old environmental organization based in Beijing. "Scientifically what's happening is that the grasslands are losing natural infiltration and retention of water, which is altering respiration and evaporation rates. That affects relative humidity, and potentially precipitation in other regions."

"Socially and politically what you are talking about are policy decisions made in earlier eras — from the 1950s to the 1990s — and now those mistakes are really biting them," added Mr. Liu, who's lived and worked in China since 1979, when he helped open the CBS television news bureau in Beijing. "They have to deal with the decisions made in those years. And in Inner Mongolia those decisions have produced some horrific consequences. Large areas of the region have been massively devegetated."

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