Grasslands Olympics
As Beijing prepares for the 29th Olympic Games in August 2008, the dust storms and deteriorating condition of Inner Mongolia's grasslands have also become a priority of Chinese environmental scientists and agronomists.

During the first of week of July China will host the International Grassland and Rangeland Congress in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Monogolia, a high plains city of 2.3 million people. Hong Fuzeng, head of the preparatory committee of the 2008 Congress, and a grasslands scientist, said the conference will focus the attention of 3,000 rangeland experts from around the world on the environmental, demographic, and industrial trends that are turning Inner Mongolia's grasslands to desert.

The blowing sand, in short, is more evidence of the consequences of the irrational duel China fights daily as it promotes rapid industrial development while exposing land, water, communities, and people to levels of pollution, waste, and resource diminishment never before seen on the planet.

China is the most polluted country on Earth. It's air and water consistently ranks among the dirtiest anywhere. The World Health Organization estimates that pollution causes an estimated 750,000 premature deaths annually in China, the majority among the elderly and children.

There are economic costs as well. Earlier this year, the World Bank conservatively estimated that the cost of China's environmental degradation is 3.5 percent to 8 percent of the gross domestic product annually. The cost of desertification caused by water scarcity alone, said the bank, is roughly $31 billion a year. While many finance theorists predict that China may become the preeminent industrialized nation this century, environmental economists say China is outrunning the capacity of its natural resources to sustain such rapid development, and could instead experience a frightening ecological collapse.

Grasslands Activist Emerges
Blowing sand has attracted advocates of all stripes in China. One of them is Chen Jiqun (pronounced chun gee chun), an artist who specializes in landscapes and portraits, and whose work is in the prestigious permanent collection of the National Gallery. Chen was 20 years old in 1967 when he decided to go to East Ujumchin Banner, a section of eastern Inner Mongolia 600 hundred miles north of China's capital, in search of adventure after the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing was closed along with other universities.

Like many other educated youths during the Cultural Revolution, he also was required to do manual labor. Inner Mongolia during that period was a place of astonishing beauty and harshness. Though the air rarely was still and the ground was dry, great expanses of tall grass swept to the horizons, unfurling like a great waving sea beneath surpassingly huge skies. Summers were short and hot. Winters were ferocious, marked by blizzards and knife-edge cold.

Though the central government discouraged self-identity by almost every means imaginable, thousands of Inner Mongolians, a people distinguished by sturdiness and stamina, followed the nomadic ways of their heirs, freely herding livestock from one range to the next. Chen Jiqun stayed for 13 years, working different jobs on the land as he painted. He spent a few of those years as a semi-nomadic sheepherder.

Even when he departed Inner Mongolia in 1980, Chen, now 60 years old and living in Beijing, did not really leave. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he visited frequently to see friends and paint. The grasslands of Chen Jiqun's student years live in his paintings. Vast landscapes filled with horses galloping between herds of sheep, goats, and cows grazing on foot-high grass on the banks of rippled rivers.

Those paintings, drawn from personal history and memory, could now just as easily fall into the category of artistic fantasy. The grasslands of Inner Mongolia and other northern Chinese provinces are dying, turning into mini-deserts that grow and connect, forming oceans of sand. In some regions of the province, 70 percent of the grasslands have turned to desert. Inner Mongolia, according to conservative estimates is losing 1,500 to 2,000 square miles annually to the desert, or an area every five years about the size of New Hampshire.

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