Page 118 - EarthHeroes

When Yuzhen and Wanxiang became parents, their young children liked to help care for the trees and often begged to hear songs and stories about the desert. Yuzhen and Wanxiang found that the trees not only helped shelter their home from the winds, but also improved the soil so that they could grow food and keep some animals. As the dunes stopped advancing towards their house, wildlife arrived too. Yuzhen now noticed birds, foxes and rabbits where there had been none before.
As the forest grew around Yuzhen’s home, people stopped laughing at her
and began to help her to plant trees instead. News of ‘Yin’s Forest’ spread,
and around 15 years after she and Wanxiang had planted their first saplings, TV news reporters came to see them. Government officials soon followed and offered them more plants, money and help. A road was built to their home and they were connected to the electricity supply. Yuzhen’s work was held up as an example for other regions in China to follow.
Over the last 30 years, Yuzhen has planted a million trees in around 70,000 hectares of desert – the area of 50,000 football pitches. Her small village is unrecognisable from the one she saw the day she first arrived; the endless sand has been transformed into a green oasis, with trees as far as the eye can see. There are fruit orchards, fields of wheat and colourful meadows of flowers. Cows and sheep graze contentedly and wild roosters peck the ground. Inspired by Yuzhen’s success, other families from the area began to plant saplings too, and today more than 240 families have tree plantations around their homes.
Now the mother of four children, Yuzhen is also an entrepreneur. The land that she once battled is now a source of income for her family and many others in the area. She runs her own company and has created an ecological park with a sapling cultivation centre. Visitors travel from afar to see this miracle in the desert, and to learn Yuzhen’s methods of fighting desertification. She has her own offices to manage the forest and nursery, while in a large meeting hall people can enjoy the organic fruit and vegetables grown on Yuzhen’s land – including watermelons, pears, peaches, corn and potatoes – which Yin sells through her company Mohai, or ‘desert ocean’.
Her home – no longer a mud-brick hut but a multistorey house – is like a small museum with walls covered in awards and certificates. The girl who had never left her village before moving to the desert has since travelled all over the world to give speeches about her work in stopping desertification. In 2005, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and she has won other international
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