Planting Trees and Reforesting Is Not as Good as Preserving Wasteland

At the time of Arbor Day, I had finished listening to the Keke Forum and was about to write this piece, but after jotting down a title, for some reason I put it aside and forgot about it…

A while ago I saw a news item about a “barren mountain painted green” incident, saying that somewhere they had smeared an entire barren mountain with paint and counted that as greening; it really was laughable. Later I heard that this was all because of “feng shui.”

Actually, if one really planted trees out of feng shui concerns, that would instead be a very good thing! I think if you rummaged through the feng shui books of our ancestors, you still would not find the notion that paint can substitute for forests. If people really did things honestly according to feng shui, then the trees planted that way would be both good in quality and sufficient in quantity, and no one would go around destroying them afterward.

But the current state of afforestation in China is, in fact, extremely, extremely terrible. Trees are planted not out of religious superstition or for the sake of one’s own property, and even less for environmental protection, but for the sake of political achievements. Planting trees has become a matter of formality.

China’s Arbor Day is set on March 12, but this time is not suitable for planting trees in northern regions; the season appropriate for planting trees generally does not arrive until after Qingming. Yet when large-scale tree-planting is carried out on March 12, the survival rate is extremely low — according to one classmate, where he was, out of ten trees planted, nine would die within a few months, and the remaining one would die the next year too!

But because tree-planting is a political requirement, whether the trees live or die after being planted is a natural matter, whereas whether trees are planted at all is a matter of attitude, and of course one’s attitude must be positive — so Chinese people often won’t adapt flexibly, nor is there any need to adapt flexibly; so let’s just plant trees every year on March 12!

If the trees merely died of natural causes, that would be one thing. I once heard a teacher from the School of Environment mention that in some places it is like this: land is valuable, vast stretches of land need to be opened up as farmland or developed for industry, but every year there are still certain tree-planting quotas that must be fulfilled—what to do? So they do this: they set aside a small hill as a tree-planting base, and every year plant however many trees the quota requires. If the trees die, that’s best; if they don’t die, then they will even pour boiling water on them to kill them. In the end, all the planted trees die completely, and the next year they can once again fulfill the tree-planting quota on the same little patch of land… Absurd to the extreme, isn’t it? But when tree-planting is treated as a political achievement, such absurdities are very likely to become a common phenomenon!

In addition, China is vast and its climate is diverse, so not every place is suitable for planting trees. In the northwest, some places that ought to have been “savannas,” or even desert climates, are also being afforested in the same way; this goes against nature.

According to the teachers in the School of Environment, the environmental science community has already begun to recognize these problems; for example, the original “return farmland to forest” plan has been improved into “return farmland to forest and grass.”

But whether returning to forest or returning to grass, there are still problems. Artificial forests or artificial grasslands often have a single species composition, cannot withstand pests and disasters, and lack vitality. And most crucially: the ideas behind returning to forest or returning to grass are both this: humans have the ability to mend nature; the damage humans inflict on nature still needs to be repaired by human power — are humans really that great? Destroy, then repair; after repairing, continue destroying?

Thinking of this, I could not help associating it with that patch of wasteland near my home during junior high school — that tiny piece of wasteland in Shanghai, where land is worth its weight in gold, which had, due to some conflicts encountered by a construction company, been extraordinarily able to remain unmanaged for several years! Every day I could stand by the window and gaze at that overgrown wasteland; in my eyes, that wasteland was far more beautiful than any manicured lawn I had ever seen! No one needed to sow seeds, water, trim, or care for it; as long as people were willing to let a piece of land lie fallow, then whatever it ought to grow would grow. The vitality of weeds is more tenacious than any greening project.

But people often cannot stand wasteland or weeds. In other words, what they need is not nature, but an environment made by human hands; only when the environment is designed by humans and under human control do people feel at ease. And wasteland and weeds are not human achievements, nor are they human power; people dislike them and find them an eyesore.

Fortunately, someone had already proposed “return farmland to wilderness,” and I was heartened to hear that “Beidahuang” is also advocating “returning to wilderness.” Indeed, the best environmental protection work is to do nothing at all.

March 31, 2007, 15:12

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.