ABSTRACT
The global challenge of rapidly declining vegetative cover is being addressed by massive replanting projects that cross territorial, political, and cultural boundaries. By considering two contemporary examples in different stages of cultivation-“The Great Green Wall” in the Sub-Sahara Africa and the “3 North Shelterbelt Program” in China-a perspective is offered that highlights the tension between engineering infrastructure and cultivating healthy ecosystems. Considered together, these projects aim to replant more than 170 million hectares of land that is classified as semiarid, arid, or hyperarid. The tradition of planting deserted land is an ancient practice, most often initiated as a response to local climatic variation. The contemporary tradition tends to attribute the need to plant as a consequence of human activities. Although the global concerns surrounding the threat of desertification act as the impetus for both megaprojects, desertification is not offered as the framework for this discussion as it is often misused and confused with drought (Thomas 1993). Instead, both initiatives are presented as a form of planted infrastructure, most often specified within the prevalent framework of “green infrastructure,” a dominant theme within current policy making. These projects represent the largest horticultural projects the world has ever considered, which categorically of green removes them from the discourse of green infrastructure and opens a discussion of territorial geopolitics. In both cases, a principal species acts as the foundation for planting an entire region and structures
16.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 301 16.2 Conditions .....................................................................................................304 16.3 New Deal Shelterbelt ....................................................................................307 16.4 3 North Shelterbelt Project, China ................................................................ 311 16.5 Populus simonii, Simon’s Poplar, Chinese Poplar ........................................ 315 16.6 Great Green Wall (GGW), Africa ................................................................ 316 16.7 Accacia sp. .................................................................................................... 318 16.8 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 319 Common Abbreviations ......................................................................................... 320 References .............................................................................................................. 320
the associated conditions of each site (Figures 16.1 and 16.2). Therefore, the varying frameworks that allow new plant cover to be introduced will be studied to form a perspective of each project, exploring the role of plants from innovative seed mechanics to regional bionetworks. Rather than desertification, the biological and ecological processes themselves are offered as the basis for understanding the goal of each project. In other words, the political frameworks that enable processes (such as desertification) to become permanent are revealed when addressing projects at this scale. Subsequently, this category of infrastructure is exposed as a totalizing system rather than framed as a series of projects. The speculative argument offered here is that planting deployed at a local scale considers micro-conditions and species suitability more prudently than the agencies that describe and articulate the complications to a wider audience across territorial scales.
