In Northern China, the spring brings wind, and the wind brings sand. But the sand isn’t truly the Mongolian desert's, as commonly supposed – it’s deracinated topsoil from Northern Hebei Province and Inner Mongolia. One might think these storms a natural affect of such a wild and remote region, but they actually spring from civilized man’s innate drive to abuse the land that sustains him.

Today, the legacy of abuse, desertification from unsustainable agricultural practices, means a few weeks of discomfort and dust everywhere for those caught in Northeast China’s early spring. For the Chinese who inhabited the source of the storms less than two centuries ago, their unsustainable agriculture led to a calamity that devastated the area to such an extent that it never truly recovered.

By the mid nineteenth century, Jesuit priests had traveled extensively in Northern Hebei and Inner Mongolia, an expanse ranging from outside Beijing’s portion of the Great Wall to Xilinhot, less than five hundred kilometers north. Their discoveries and records tell of a land rich in civilization which bore the primary characteristics of the Chinese, who had supplanted the Mongols, who had in turn driven out Korean tribes. The priests, charged with documenting local culture, held extensive interviews with area scholars, who all affirmed that in ancient times, Koreans had sustained a rich and flourishing kingdom there, but were then driven during a time of great revolution to the peninsula where they now reside. The priests themselves met with the remains of great towns and ruined fortresses that very nearly resembled those of medieval Europe. Chinese farmers showed them early Korean lances, arrows, and urns filled with money that they had dug up while plowing.

Perhaps all this plowing was more peaceful than the endless warring of earlier inhabitants, and more productive than the nomadic lifestyle of those living north and west of the area, but not in the long term. Before Chinese encroachment in the middle of the 17^th century, the mountains and hills of the region had been covered with fine forests. The white tents of the Mongols dotted rich valleys which provided rich pasture for vast flocks of sheep.

To the Chinese and the rest of the world, however, this land was desert, a far-flung outpost of Tartary, an empire hacked out of sheer savagery by barbarians.

Rather than undertake timely and costly conquest, the Chinese prudently paid a small sum to a local Tartar king for permission to cultivate the land. Always desperate for more land to sustain a population which only disaster could halt from ceaseless proliferation, the Chinese rapidly advanced and agriculturalized hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. Trees were grubbed up and injudiciously burned or wasted. Prairies were cleared by arson, and the Mongols were obliged to retreat to a safe distance, to observe how rapidly a hungry people could exhaust the fertility of rich soil.

Even the Jesuit priests, far more interested in the divine father than mother earth, credited such despoliation for the harsh weather and natural calamities that the people in this region now suffered. They recorded the dust storms that turned day to night, deluges which washed away what topsoil remained, almost yearly droughts, and hailstorms which exterminated whole flocks in moments.

In less than a hundred years, the Chinese were reaping a far more bitter harvest than bad weather – its inevitable consequence, famine. The worst one came in 1832, during the reign of Qing emperor Dao Guang. According to Chinese records, a dark rumor had come into circulation and spread the previous winter. “Next year,” according to the malediction, “there will be neither rich nor poor; the blood will cover the mountains; bones will fill the valleys.” The ill omen was even on the lips of children, and the heavens fulfilled this dark prophecy. Both the spring and summer of 1832 elapsed without a drop of rain, and autumn frost struck while the few crops still growing were green. There was no harvest.

To a population entirely dependent on the farmers’ labors, chaos and destitution swept in like a bird of prey. All chattel of any worth, from houses to slaves, were quickly exchanged for what little stored grain there was. The sparse grass that had been allowed to remain on mountainsides was devoured by famished man and beast alike, while others spent their diminishing energies digging deep for roots. To no avail. The following spring thaw unveiled thousands of bodies in the hills, where they had perished searching for grass to eat. Corpses of elder and infant alike littered roadsides and filled houses, whole villages had disappeared. The devastation was still in flower over a decade later when the Jesuits made their visit.

The obvious lesson is a cliché one - that ignoring the delicate balance of one’s natural environment will always end woefully. We continue not to heed it to ever increasingly dire consequences. Some view it as a blessing that we can forget pain so quickly, that years of living horror can be swept away to the dustiest corners of memory within ten generations. The wise view it as a curse.