China's Inspiration

 The CCP's use of internal-directed propaganda sounds like any successful corporation in the US. (that is a good thing.) Most US companies constantly role out initiatives, revise their mission and value statements, conduct constant surveillance and try to inspire workers with shared goals from the C-suit down to the entry level worker. Any organization that can achieve alignment will have higher morale and be more productive that one that cannot achieve this.  There are a number of sacrifices necessary to live in a democratic state, but I think this essay points at one of the most important: the lack of inspiration.

2016 Chinese Lunar New Year - The Beginning of the Year of the Fire Monkey!

Traditional Chinese Medicine - 5 Phases Theory

Graphic from pulse-academy.org.

Graphic from pulse-academy.org.
For more archetypal correspondences, see http://www.adducation.info/lifestyle/five-elements/

The Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) approach to health is based on categories (types, archetypes) and balance. The first thing to note is that stereotypes actually help individualize nutrition and health by putting human differences front and center. One size doesn't fit all when we acknowledge the obvious truth that humans can be more different than similar. Recognizing these differences and similaries is aided by categories. (see danger below).

Secondly, nutrition and health are pretty complicated. Even the simple dictum to "Eat whole foods, mostly plants."(Michael Pollan) hides a huge amount of confusion and contradiction about what is healthy and how to cook it.  Books like "The Perfect Health Diet" are a great place to start and I won't argue with their research showing the optimum ratio of the various macronutrients and amount of micronutrients to consume.  But which spices to eat, what recipes to make, how much exercise to get, and when to wake up in the morning are not covered.  A more intuitive approach is needed to comprehend the human condition.

Third, the importance of balancing constitutions and forces is absent from much of modern nutrition, which acts as if a simple summation of inputs is enough to insure health. Perhaps the most important insight of TCM-based approaches and Hippocratic humours is that health is the sum of harmonious balancing interactions (i.e. homeostasis, for the scientists). There are too many forces and nutrients to consider to balance every input and output analytically. A wholistic approach is needed.

However, one danger of the archetypal approach is the tendency toward simplification and identification. For example, saying that "I am a water-type", or "I am a phlegmatic". Many people resist such limiting classification, rightly so, and with good reason. The trick to using archetypes is to lean on them gently, maintain perspective, and flexibility.  No one is X.  They are themselves, a real, infinitely-complex human system.  But many of us manifest observable types, and recognizing those types gives us the three advantages described above.

 Another danger, perhaps part of the danger listed above, is the hermetic tendency to see all people, phenomena, etc within one system of thought.  No system can be complete. TCM cannot answer all questions, and it is unbalanced to rely on it obsessively. Another closely related danger is the esoteric tendency to compile endlessly complicated tables, enumerations, calculations, and the like, in order to fit all people and phenomena into a system. This is the inevitable result of the hermetic temptation to apply one categorical system to all phenomena.

 Pavlov encountered this when he tried to explain his dogs' behavior using Hippocratic types. He was forced to expand, and then expand again, endlessly redoubling the complexity of the system to attempt to fit a (probably infinite) range of idiosyncratic variation within a comprehensive system. Somewhat the same tendency can be seen in the 16 Type Indicators of Myers Briggs testing, which was an outgrowth of Pavlov's work. The system could easily be expanded to 32, or 64, or.. types, in order to continue to incorporate more degrees of variation. But the cost to understanding and ease of use is progressive.

 As any system becomes more baroquely complicated, it begins to lose the explanatory power of simplicity. In any analytical system, there must be a balance between conceptual simplicity and accuracy.

Traditional Chinese Medicine

"The logic underlying Chinese medical theory - a logic that assumes that a part can be understood only in its relation to the whole -- can also be called synthetic or dialectical.

The character for Yin originally meant the shady side of a slope.  It is associated with such qualities as cold, rest, responsiveness, passivity, darkness, interior, downward, inward, decrease, satiation, tranquility, and quiescence.  It is the end, completion, and realized fruition.

The original meaning of Yang was the sunny side of a slope.  The term implies brightness, heat, stimulation, movement, activity, excitement, vigor, exterior, upward, outward, and increase.  It is arousal, beginning, and dynamic potential.  

All things have Yin and Yang aspects....and any Yin or Yang aspect can be further divided into Yin and Yang.  

Yin and Yang mutually create, control, and transform one another.  Although Yin and Yang can be distinguished, they cannot be separated.   Yin and Yang are always subtly supporting, repairing, and transforming into one another.  This constant transformation is the source of all change.  Organic transformation can occur harmoniously in the normal course of events or sudden ruptures can occur. If Yin and Yang are unbalanced for prolonged periods of time or in an extreme manner, the resulting transformation can be drastic.  

Lao Tzu says:  

In order to expand, it is necessary to first contract.  In order to stregthen, it is necessary to first weaken.  In order to create, it is necessary to first destroy.  In order to give, it is necessary to first take.

In Chinese thought, events and phenomena unfold through a kind of spontaneous cooperation, an inner dynamic in the nature of things.  The key word is Pattern - people and things behave in particular ways not necessarily because of prior actions or impulses, but because their position in the cyclical universe and their endowment with intrinsic natures. 

The Chinese assume that the universe is continuously changing.  The cosmos itself is an integral whole, a web of interrelated things and events.  The desire for knowledge is the desire to understand the interrelationships or patterns within that web, and to become attuned to the unfolding dynamic.

A traditional Chinese landscape painting captures the essence of nature in balance and in flux.  The paiting is like the Taoist symbol, containing Yin and Yang in their proper proportions but constantly interacting and transforming into each other.  

The scene depicts a vast range of elements, from the towering mountain to the little trickling stream.  Nature is shown as a balance of the yielding Yin (foliage, water) and the unyielding Yang (rock, trees).  There are the dynamic (water, people) and the quiescent (mountains, houses); the slow (trees) and the fast (mist); the dark and the light; the solid and the liquid.  All things contain both Yin and Yang.  The water, for instance, is both yielding (Yin) and dynamic (Yang).

The picture is a totality, and each detail takes on meaning only as it participates in the whole.  The mountain is immense by virtue of its smaller foothills; the people are small by virtue of the vastness of nature.  All things are imbued with interactive qualities and dynamics in their relationships to the things around them.

The painting depicts a time and place that through their correspondence with the cosmos become timeless and placeless.  It rediscovers the elemental and continuous course of the cosmic pulsation through the figurative representation of a landscape...The tension created by the correlation between the lines and the washes, the visible and the invisible, fullness and emptiness, endows the landscape with a power to suggest more than the merely visible and open it to the life of the spirit. " 

(from p. 7-17 The Web That Has No Weaver by Ted Kaptchuk)

The Theory and the Reality of Shelterbelt Afforestation Projects

The Theory of Shelterbelts

The Reality

Introduction:  dust bowl, us efforts

Following the dust bowl years in the U.S. the government planted 220 million trees in a strip 100 miles wide, stretching 18,600 miles from Canada to the Brazos river.  1935-1942  Today, the growth and vigor of many trees has declined due to close spacing, age, and invasion of undesirable short-lived trees.  Wikipedia.

There are currently two major afforestation programs, one in China, and one in the Sahel.

Great Green Wall in China. 

This project aims to afforest 90 million hectares and eventually contain 100 billion trees in a 4500km belt.

A recent paper by Tan (2014) found decreased dust transport due to the plantings so far.  But independent Chinese media reported in 2013 that dust storms were increasing:  For centuries in northern China, annual sandstorms, called the Yellow Dragon, have been ripping through the city.  Wind erosion is obvious and most pronounced in spring, when sandstorms are common and the vegetation is still absent or dormant after severe winter temperatures. Sandstorms have increased in the last few years, calling into question whether the Great Green Wall is working.

Liu Tuo, head of the desertification control office in the state forestry administration, is of the opinion that there are huge gaps in the country's efforts to reclaim the land that has become desert. At present there are around 1.73 million sq kilometers that have become desert in China, of which 530,000 km2 are treatable. But at the present rate of treating 1,717 km2 per year, it would take 300 years to reclaim the land that has become desert.  

Background
In early times, Korqin was not a semi-desert, but savannah-type woodland, in transition between dense forest and the steppe zone. The rolling sand-sheet was deposited during the last glacial period (12000 years BP). During 10,000 years of vegetation growth, thick dark topsoil developed. Since historical times, the region has gone through several cycles of man-induced desertification and subsequent recovery, when human pressure lessened. Fertile dark topsoil vanished and extensive dune fields gradually build up.  Overgrazing (by cattle, goats, sheep, camels, horses), clearing of land for agriculture and over-cutting of trees and shrubs in this vulnerable ecosystem have resulted in an increasingly severe land degradation and desertification.

Other Approaches?

There are many who do not believe the Green Wall is an appropriate solution to China’s desertification problems. Gao Yuchuan, the Forest Bureau head of Jingbian County, Shanxi, stated that “planting for 10 years is not as good as enclosure for one year,” referring to the alternative non-invasive restoration technique that fences off (encloses) a degraded area for two years to allow the land to restore itself.  Soil fertility, already critically low, has shown a sharp decline as all organic residues from crops are removed for fuel and fodder during wintertime. Willow and poplar stands are pollarded in autumn, before leaf fall, for the same purpose. The continuous removal of potential nutrients to the soil is not balanced by the relatively small amounts of manure and inorganic fertiliser applied to crops.

Problems

 Jiang Gaoming, an ecologist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and proponent of enclosure, says that “planting trees in arid and semi-arid land violates [ecological] principles”.The worry is that the fragile land cannot support such massive, forced growth. Tree growth in Korqin is largely dependent on the presence of a high groundwater table, fed by percolation and inflow from the western and southern mountainous areas. The long-term trend of a decreasing depth of the groundwater table is due to an increasing demand for water to irrigate crops and for human and industrial needs. If the trees succeed in taking root, they could soak up large amounts of groundwater, which would be extremely problematic for arid regions like northern China.  For example, in Minqin, an area in north-western China, studies showed that groundwater levels have dropped by 12–19 metres since the advent of the project.

Progress So Far

As of 2009 China’s planted forest covered more than 500,000 square kilometers (increasing tree cover from 12% to 18%) – the largest artificial forest in the world.However, of the 53,000 hectares planted that year, a quarter died. In 2008 winter storms destroyed 10% of the new forest stock, causing the World Bank to advise China to focus more on quality rather than quantity in its stock species.  FAO report

But the program’s widespread tree planting campaigns typically allot only one or two species of tree to an area. Professor Jiang wrote in a 2009 Epoch Times article, “In Ningxia, for example, 70 percent of the trees planted were poplar and willow. In 2000, one billion poplar trees were lost to a disease (Anoplophora), wiping out 20 years of planting efforts.”  FAO report followup

More criticisms:  Wikipedia.

Great Green Wall in Africa - the Sahel

The Great Green Wall initiative is much more nuanced than simply planting a belt of trees across the continent: “Behind the name or the brand ‘Great Green Wall,’ different people see different things. Some people saw just a stripe of trees from east to west, but that has never been our vision,” he says. “In Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso . . . natural regeneration managed by farmers has yielded great results. We want to replicate and scale up these achievements across the region. It’s very possible to restore trees to a landscape and to restore agroforestry practices without planting any trees. This is also a sustainable way of regenerating agroforestry and parkland.”

But it should be noted that the Great Green Wall is not designed to prevent the Sahara Desert from expanding. “We are not fighting the desert,” he says. “In the majority of the areas we are working in these 11 countries, the desert is not advancing. The [Sahara] Desert is a very stable ecosystem. Of course, there are some areas on the margins—for instance in Senegal, Mauritania, and Nigeria—where there are some sand movements. But from a geographic perspective, over time the desert has been relatively stable in this area.” (Source)

But some authors advocate  "a shift from planting trees in the GGW to utilizing shrubs (e.g., Leptospermum scoparium, Boscia senegalensis, Grewia flava, Euclea undulata or Diospyros lycioides), which would have multiple benefits, including having a faster growth rate and proving the basis for silvo-pastoral livelihoods based on bee-keeping and honey production.” (Connors and Ford, 2014 Sustainability)