First Impressions of the Loess Plateau Restoration Project with John D Liu

29 Mar 2018 · 4 min

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3:34

In this monologue, John D. Liu recounts his initial shock at discovering how the world’s largest ethnic group once inhabited the barren Loess Plateau and describes his growing obsession with understanding its massive ecological restoration. He details the techniques used to rehabilitate the degraded landscape—rehydrating arid biomes, revegetating barren soils, restoring microbial communities, and reestablishing microclimates that naturally regulate hydrology, weather, and climate. Liu explains how these processes revive soil fertility, support agriculture, and foster biodiversity, emphasizing that allowing natural self‑selection rather than forced species selection leads to evolutionary outcomes. He reflects on his role as a journalist witnessing a largely unnoticed transformation, contrasting the fleeting focus of political and economic systems with the deep, long‑term processes of life on Earth. Liu concludes that human civilization often misplaces its priorities, seeing itself as transient within the vast span of geological and evolutionary time, while the landscape slowly returns to life.

Chapters

I was gobsmacked. I thought, how could the largest ethnic group on the planet come from a place that was this barren? And so I kind of became obsessed with understanding this, and I just kept studying it, and I kept documenting and studying it. And as the restoration went on, I was following the techniques they were using, and I was amazed it was possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems. You could rehydrate dehydrated biomes. You could revegetate areas which had lost all their vegetation. This brings back soil fertility, brings back microbial communities, uh, restores microclimates below the canopy. And this is the natural regulation for hydrology, weather, and climate. This is the basis of fertility and productivity in agriculture. This is the basis of biodiversity. This is an evolutionary outcome if we allow it to, you know, to self-select and don't choose all of the species. And don't just modify everything. And so that, as I started to realize this, I looked around and I thought, there's nobody who's studying this. I mean, as a journalist, I would be a thousand camera people jostling to take pictures of egotistical political leaders and talking about economic developments and so on. And then I'm standing alone in the middle of this place, and I felt like I'm looking through history. I see all of human history, and then beyond that I see all of evolutionary history, and beyond that I see geologic time, you know, and suddenly I'm— I was just in another zone, and I felt like all the things that I'd been doing had given me some skills, but they also made me feel that You know, human civilization was misguided in believing that our political and economic systems and social systems are more important than life itself. Because we are only one part, one generation in hundreds and thousands of generations of life. And we're just passing through. We're here for a short time and then we're gone. And we, you know, and I, as I felt like I was maturing and learning something of great importance and I looked around and I realized I'm standing alone in a ruined landscape that's slowly starting to come back to life and very few people know about this.