Planting a Million Trees in China

The Asia Society's China Green project continues to produce compelling and informative video features about environmental challenges in China and their effect on the rest of the world. (Disclosure: several of my friends have been involved with this project.) For instance, before the 2008 Beijing Olympics the "Room With a View" feature chronicled the air in the city every single day for more than a year to see what improved and what didn't. I've also previously mentioned its compelling historic-comparison features about now-disappearing glaciers in Tibet. It has recently presented a very powerful report on the consequence of coal mining in China.

Now appearing: a more positive-toned feature, by Jonah Kessel, about efforts to plant a million trees in the arid wastelands of interior China, to slow and perhaps reverse the spread of deserts that have taken over grasslands there. It includes the work of the China office of Roots and Shoots, a program from the the Jane Goodall Institute that I mentioned in this article. This three-minute video is worth watching (there's a button to click for Chinese language version), and the whole site is worth following.