Andy Fryers

This is again a project of an unfathomable scale that's just been completed in China and barely anyone has heard of it in the rest of the world teapawt.net/tphuang/status/1863336… China has just finished constructing a continuous 3,046-kilometer (1,892-mile) green barrier - made of plants and trees - completely encircling the Taklamakan Desert, the world's second-largest shifting sand desert which is about the size of Germany (!). To put this in perspective, this is like building a living wall from Paris to Istanbul, or from Los Angeles to Chicago – except they built it in one of the world's most inhospitable environments. They spent about 40 years building this "green wall". The final 285 kilometers was completed in 2024 on November 28. They built the "wall" with desert-hardy plants like Populus euphratica (desert poplar), Haloxylon (saxaul), and Tamarix (salt cedar), along with innovative sand-control engineering and solar panel installations. The objective of the project is to contain the desert's expansion and to protect surrounding agricultural areas and cities from sandstorms. Before this project, many towns in the region had to be relocated multiple times due to encroaching sand. For instance, the town of Qira in Xinjiang had to move three times in its history, with sand dunes once approaching as close as 1.5 kilometers from the town center. This is easily one of human history's most ambitious and grandest ecological engineering projects. It's insane when you think about it: completely containing a desert the size of Germany! And it's also insane how little attention this has received globally: sadly we've apparently lost the capacity to be impressed by such a project, let alone have the boldness of vision to conceive of one ourselves. All resulting in the fact that whilst China is out there completing 40-year missions to tame entire deserts, we can barely fix potholes in our roads.