Imagine a piece of land larger than France, stripped so bare that its dust once blew all the way to Beijing. By the late 1990s, that was the state of the Loess Plateau in northern China. Then something shifted. Farmers planted trees, and the hillsides were green again. And a World Bank feature story on the project noted that the soil washing into the Yellow River had been cut by more than 100 million tons a year.
A landscape that was falling apart
