Loess Plateau

But let's talk about the people who are in this situation, right? How are we gonna deal and how are we gonna reverse desertification? Well, we've kind of already figured that out.

So the Loess Plateau, the birthplace of Asian agriculture, this only took nine years.

So it was earthworks and perennials and time.

It's remarkable.

Today's episode is a really, really special one because I had the privilege to talk to an absolute legend, John D. Liu.

We talk about large-scale ecosystem restoration projects such as the Loess Plateau in China.

That's an area roughly the size of France that was turned from a barren desert into a lush, vibrant ecosystem full of life.

we then tackle the big question of if we know that we can do this, why are we not doing it everywhere? And that naturally leads us to a really important conversation about the major flaws in our current economic system and the need for a paradigm shift where we put nature at the heart of our society, of our economy, instead of doing the exact opposite.

We're rolling, right? I'll tell you a story.

So I was asked to speak to the global environment facility high-level technical roundtable in 2000, and I believe it was 2005.

And I gave this presentation where I discussed what I had seen in the rehabilitation of the Loess Plateau in China.

And after that, the head of the soil...

Today's episode is a really, really special one because I had the privilege to talk to an absolute legend, John D. Liu.

We talk about large-scale ecosystem restoration projects such as the Loess Plateau in China.

That's an area roughly the size of France that was turned from a barren desert into a lush, vibrant ecosystem full of life.

we then tackle the big question of if we know that we can do this, why are we not doing it everywhere? And that naturally leads us to a really important conversation about the major flaws in our current economic system and the need for a paradigm shift where we put nature at the heart of our society, of our economy, instead of doing the exact opposite.

We're rolling, right? I'll tell you a story.

So I was asked to speak to the global environment facility high-level technical roundtable in 2000, and I believe it was 2005.

And I gave this presentation where I discussed what I had seen in the rehabilitation of the Loess Plateau in China.

And after that, the head of the soil...

The second step of the staircase described as the average elevation of 1,000 to 2,000 meters.

This step includes the sprawling Inner Mongolia Plateau, the erosion-sculpted Loess Plateau, and the cross-sided Yuman-Gangsu Plateau.

It also contains massive basins like Tsarim and Jinger into the northwest, and the fertile Siwan Basin in the southwest.

The third step drops to elevation between 500 to 1,000 meters.

Which inadvertently trapped humanity in a vicious cycle of exponential population growth, We watched the Sumerians engineer incredible irrigation systems that ultimately poisoned their empire from the ground up with salt.

We saw how farmers in China pulverized the Loess Plateau, turning the Yellow River into a suspended, elevated lake of mud that drowned millions.

We observed the singular, miraculous exception of Egypt, protected by the perfect geological rhythm of the Nile, until modern engineering hubris broke that natural machine in exchange for electricity and cotton.

And finally, we saw the foundational empires of Western civilization, Greece and Rome, strip their landscapes down to skin and bone, forcing them to become aggressive imperial conquerors simply to feed their exhausted populations.