In May 2001, according to the Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center, a civil rights group based in New York, herders in the eastern part of the province clashed with police as the government forcibly moved them off their grazing land.

Still, almost every current assessment, even those by the Chinese government, indicates the technical and policy programs have not stopped the deserts. Each time Chen Jiqun returns to Inner Mongolia, he sees more ground where grass once grew. The stretches of sand expand, the water holes and rivers run dry.

In 1998, Chen felt he needed to respond. "I kept reading about what was happening on the grasslands, but it was never from the viewpoint of the Mongol herders. Actually, they were always cast as the cause of desertification rather than as the victims," he said.

An Activist Born
Chen turned to his artistic spirit, finding a reservoir not only of empathy, intelligence, and anger, but also expert visual and communications skills. He had, in other words, the makings of an activist. Chen already was fluent in Chinese and Mongolian. He wrote well and painted superbly. His first step in responding to Inner Mongolia's human suffering and environmental deterioration was to start a bilingual Mongolian and Chinese website, Echoing Steppe, to help represent the views of the Mongol herders.

Echoing Steppe began as a free-form site, posting paintings and short text reports filled with anecdotes from herders, many by Chen, about what was happening. The site attracted the attention of Friends of Nature, an education and advocacy organization formed in Beijing in 1994, and China's first legal nongovernmental organization (NGO) specializing in environmental issues.

Liang Congjie, a professor at the Academy of Chinese Culture and the co-founder and president of Friends of Nature, took a personal interest in Chen's work, describing in words and pictures Inner Mongolia's deteriorating condition. Chen's reportage and images were fast turning him into one of the foremost experts on Inner Mongolia desertification.

By 2002 Chen found himself leading tours of Chinese students, activists, and interested citizens to the grasslands. He also studied laws that focused on property rights, grasslands, and desertification. Using the proceeds from the tours as well as his own money, Chen began translating and publishing those laws on Echoing Steppes.

"How can China become a nation of laws when its people can not even read the laws?" Chen said. He eventually added English translations to his website in order to raise international awareness about the situation in Inner Mongolia. He distributed copies of the laws to herders during his frequent trips to Inner Mongolia.

He also wrote with telling clarity. "In the mid-1990s, the ecological environment of Duolun drastically deteriorated," he reported in one particularly graphic passage. "Seventy percent of its land turned into desert, forming large areas of moving dunes and becoming one of the sources of sandstorms that threatened Beijing and Tianjin. To imagine how much topsoil is brought from Duolun to Tianjin and Beijing each year by sandstorms, visualize 1.7 million trucks, each with a capacity of ten tons, traveling to the two cities, loading and unloading sand throughout the year."

In 2003, Chen began working with the Korean Federation for Environmental Movement, South Korea's largest environmental group, holding workshops and conferences on desertification and preserving the grasslands.

One contact led to the next and the next, producing an array of creative ways to get more people involved. Chen and KFEM, for instance, organized eco-tours to the grasslands for Korean students, journalists, government officials, activists, and citizens. That led to the founding earlier this year of Nomad Family, a Mongol culture and eco-tourist site located in Xilingol Prefecture, East Ujumchin County.

The idea of Nomad Family is to produce a hands-on, elemental experience. Visitors get a chance to see Mongol herder culture, the grasslands, and be a witness to desertification. They come away with a better understanding of the ecological, historical, and political processes that are turning the grasslands into seas of sand.

"Desertification is complex, and we have to hear all sides," said Chen. "But people have not heard the side of the Mongol herders. I want people to understand the history of the Mongolian grasslands from the herders' viewpoint, because if we don't understand the history of the grasslands, the grasslands don't have a future."

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