Human Impact in China

The above image is no mirage. It's the Crescent Lake in the middle of the Gobi Desert in China. It's been there for a long time, but now, it is rapidly receding, as you can see. I just read this NY Times article on the reasons as to why this is happening.

In this desert oasis where East once met West and that is home to one of the world's greatest shrines to Buddhism, the water is disappearing. Crescent Lake has dropped more than 25 feet in the last three decades while the underground water table elsewhere in the area has fallen by as much as 35 feet.

An ancient city that once served as China's gateway to the West, Dunhuang is now threatened by very modern demands. A dam built three decades ago to help local farming, combined with a doubling of the population, have overstressed a fragile desert hydrology that had been stable for thousands of years.

"I would call it an ecological crisis," said Zhang Mingquan, a professor at Lanzhou University who specializes in the region's hydrology. "The problem is the human impact. People are overusing the amount of water that the area can sustain."

Here as elsewhere in western China, the country's poorest region, the emphasis in recent decades has been on economic development at all costs. Isolated by the desert, Dunhuang has virtually no industry, so agriculture has dominated the local economy. In the 1970's, the government dammed the Dang River, which once flowed past the city, to provide better irrigation for farmland and to help relieve poverty.

Farming did improve, but in a fashion that brought a larger burden: a desert oasis that had fewer than 100,000 people before the dam now has roughly 180,000. As more people arrived, the underground water table that is the city's main source of drinking water started dropping.

This Wold Heritage site may very well disappear, like a mirage, in the next decade or so as a direct result of what we humans do/did to the earth. It's sad. They didn't know they were doing anything wrong and now, it's probably too late.

"As local people, we are very worried," said Fan Cun, who heads the agency overseeing the lake. "We would have failed future generations if we watch this lake disappear."

The fate of the lake is now in our hands. I had never heard of the lake until reading this article, but now I want to go there and see it with my own eyes. I don't think I'll make it there before it is gone.

Photo: Michael Zhao for The New York Times