In 1986, China ran an experiment so strange that the world’s top ecologists laughed out loud when they heard it. They flew eleven animals into a dying desert that was swallowing three thousand square kilometers a year and walked away. No fences. No irrigation. No engineers. Nature magazine called it throwing good money after dead soil. A BBC crew packed up after two days, certain they were filming a disaster. Not one of those eleven was expected to survive the first winter. Then something started happening to the ground itself. Something the satellites caught before the scientists did. And nobody saw it coming.
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