When I was growing up in the 60s, Science Fiction was enormously popular. “Terraforming” was a key concept in stories about space travel, but rarely if ever related to our own earth. What it means is changing the land or the atmosphere or the flora and fauna to create an environment that would support life. Notably in those days, this meant ‘human life’. Terraforming requires that you create changes to a complex system so as to create a self sustaining ecosystem with the characteristics that you would like to see. For instance, terraforming Mars would entail melting the icy surface and and triggering some sort of growth cycle beginning with plants to free up oxygen for breathing and create food for imported animals, and so on….
Capitalism and colonial expansion were so deep in our acculturation that no one questioned the context of these stories. Terraforming was a tool for colonization and colonization is what civilized nations do. There was no need to terraform your own planet or your own location because that already supported your life. More than that, there were many stories where people were looking to terraform a new planet because we had destroyed the old one (usually, the earth).
Terraforming requires a very sophisticated understanding of the current environment and the way in which environmental elements interact. It is both challenging and fascinating; technological and mystical. The same technologies would work to rejuvenate our own world as would be needed to conquer another. But we never really questioned the necessity of a future dystopia, nor considered using the tools of terraforming to restore our own planet.
Israel is what I would call a failed attempt at using terraforming in support of colonization on this planet. People moved, mostly from northern Europe, to the edge of a desert with a completely different climate. The indigenous people lived in harmony with their environment. They had a deep connection with the land and a long history. Palestine was an ancient seat of culture with great libraries, beautiful architecture and technological innovations in Jerusalem consistent with cities in Europe and the US. The culture was more than literate. They cultivated flora and fauna that was indigenous and thrived in their environment.
The Israeli colonizers arrogantly discounted the indigenous people and their lifestyle. They brought in their own plants and crops from eastern Europe, and covered the villages they had forcibly depopulated with trees from ‘home’ that failed to thrive in this new world. Meanwhile they uprooted the citrus groves and olive orchards that had been the sustenance of the indigenous people for millennia. Accustomed to the presence of large reservoirs of fresh water, they created a world that required continual acquisition of new resources. For instance, they built swimming pools and parks, bleeding underground aquifers relied on by thousands of Palestinians for drinking and bathing. They then built desalinization plants along the ocean and turned the flowing waters of Syria’s Golan back into their land. Stolen water for a stolen land. They dried up the Sea of Galilea.
Elon Musk, one of the primary drivers of technology in this country, reflects the original model of colonizing in space by terraforming other planets. We thought then that this was an aspirational model. “Go where no man has gone before”(Star Trek). So Elon is proclaimed a sort of technological genius for pursuing this dream, and receives billions of dollars from our government to continue his work. While public schools are under attack and our healthcare system is overloaded, Social security, Social Services and the social safety net are derided and recipients of assistance considered leeches, Elon gets billions to go to a frozen wasteland that will not in its present form, support life.
He is not investing in terraforming technologies. He has not even developed the technology to go to the moon, much less Mars. In a world where solar and wind power are suppressed to make way for gas and oil, where the possibility of using technology to mitigate global warming is dismissed by many political forces, the tools of terraforming are passe. Gas and oil and weapons are our tools and war and competition are the only game in town. Terraforming, supporting the environment to enrich our lives is left to Elon, and Mars, if he can find a way to get there. It is relegated o the final phase of a fantastic dream.
And then comes China, Terraforming for life
The successful end of the Chinese revolution ended 35 years of chaos and civil war in China, 15 years of fighting off brutal Japanese colonizers and 200 years of British and American subjugation. The revolutionary government and 1.4 billion people found themselves hungry and tired and surrounded by a post-war wasteland. The communist party of China rolled up their sleeves and went to work.
Fortunately, they didn’t begin with nothing. They had deficits in resources, education and scientific development, soon to be overcome, but serious impediments in the early years. Still, their work was founded on 3 thousand years of civilizational development. Over millennia, infrastructure from the great wall to canals and irrigation ditches to grain stores, medical and educational systems, historical and philosophical works and community solidarity already existed.
So restoration was necessary, but there were foundations to build on, remnants of a thriving social structures and physical infrastructure already existed.
In the modern era, the arid land became less inviting; China was isolated from world trade routes by poverty and colonialism. The silk road became a memory, increasingly buried in dust and sand. When the people’s government came to power they saw work to be done. As the dream of the new silk road came into focus, the old silk road became a point of interest.
50 years ago, they began the work of restraining the two great deserts, the Gobi in Outer Mongolia and the Taklamakan Desert here in Xinjiang. They began to build the “Great Green Wall”, tree by tree. The Great Green wall was a people’s project. Thousands volunteered for the work of restoring the land. Young and old, peasants, farmers and workers flooded the boundaries of the desert with pick axes and shovels, planting seeds and seedlings… and they failed. The developed world laughed. But survival is a powerful incentive. They persevered.
Trial and error, innovation, technological and scientific advances eventually paid off. Little by little the great sandy Taklamakan desert was restrained. Along the road from Kashgar to Hotan, ther are bands of flourishing trees, and also areas of scrub and brush growing along rickety fences. This is a work in progress. But, the desert is no longer growing. Highways cross the sandy wasteland, are not buried by the shifting dunes. The process has been expedited by water from the oasis where the ancient city of Hotan is once again a thriving center of agriculture and trade.
Xinjiang lies north of Tibet in the shadow of Kunlun mountain, not the highest in China but a place of mythical proportion, that feeds the oasis at Hotan as well as groundwater reservoirs under the desert. Peaches, come originally from this region where they were once deemed the food of the gods. To the north high mountains bring glacial waters into the region north of the desert. We visited Altay, a stunningly beautiful city in the far north. This apparently desolate region is endowed with great wealth.
Meanwhile, with 1.4 billion mouths to feed, the Chinese government continued to experiment and innovate. They found that the desert and the glacial waters coming from the towering mountain ranges provided a fertile environment for growing fish. Salmon thrived in the fresh mountain streams. Desert lakes and tanks filled from the underlying aquifier could be seeded with fish and shellfish from far away lakes and oceans, and with a little technology, their progeny would thrive.
Aquaculture is a growing resource and business opportunity in China’s great deserts, making high quality protein and delicious fresh seafood available to once impoverished populations, and supporting a high end export business as well. We visited a fish farm outside of Hotan and had a brief conversation with their communications guy, a very pleasant young man who provided tea and fruit during our conversation which took place in a quietly affluent corporate office.
I was aware that the aquaculture business around Hotan was not fully developed and expected to meet with a local farmer with a couple of tanks, but this was a large corporate undertaking initiated in late 2023 and already operational with 56 tanks amounting to 2240 square meters of fresh water and another 72 temporary tanks for imports. The tanks are moderated by a considerable technological setup. Hotan is a great location for this type of aquaculture since it is situated on an fresh water oasis with the water table only 10 meters below the ground so there is no risk of undermining local water resources.
They are specializing in large fish like bass, blackfish and silver cod, suitable for sale to restaurants. So far they only have permission to sell locally but they expect to be exporting before long. Meanwhile they use their temporary tanks to house king crab and fancy shellfish imported from other parts of China to boost interest locally. The enterprise is a private company with a couple of large investors from Beijing, and also some government investment. Most of the employees are local Uyghers. This will allow them to integrate over time with the more developed business culture and scientific development in the east. Overall, the business is a win for the local community bringing jobs and prosperity as well as a source of quality nutrition.
They are a model for more fish farms in similar contexts. On the day we visited, the company was expecting to entertain a delegation of investors from Tibet who are interested in developing a similar startup.
The Great Green Wall and desert aquaculture are 2 ways in which China is terraforming the desert to enhance the wellbeing of local populations and also increasing the longterm balance of natural resources. It is a model for other regions where vast areas of desertification have made life difficult for humans and for life in general. Natural processes can be augmented to bring about prosperity and a greener and healthier earth. The Chinese are leading the way,