A retired elderly couple has been fighting the desertification of their home in North China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region for the last 19 years by planting hundreds of hectares of drought-resistant plants.
Seventy-year-old Tububatu and his wife Taoshengchagan live in a village on the edge of Badain Jaran, China’s third-largest desert, and they’ve been spending every day since their retirement (in 2002) fighting the advancement of the desert with the help of plant-life. Others had tried fighting the desert and failed, but Tububatu just wanted to know if he could make a difference. He started out by planting just 50 trees, but kept doubling his efforts to the point where he now plants thousands of saplings a year. His small desert oasis now spans over 266 hectares and numbers tens of thousands of drought-resistant trees.
