And the winner of ‘Trees that Go Hard’ goes to…
I also wanted to include eggtroll’s tags:
A huge dust storm blowing south from the Gobi Desert into China. Photo taken by NASA’s Terra satellite March 9th.
A thirsty goat sneaks water from a washing machine. The herder family living here runs it with a generator.
Gobi desert, Mongolia. Photo by David duChemin. Part of a cool tutorial on digital photo adjustments.
The Mongolian government has just set aside 3.7 million acres (about the size of the state of Connecticut in the USA) as a conservation area.
Top: Kherlen Toono. Bottom: Bayantsagaan Tal.
I’m not sure what “conservation area” means in Mongolia, given their land system, which is a legacy of a nomadic past. The government owns all land, and most of it is just open to herders grazing their flocks. Any Mongolian citizen can request a free lease for small plot of land in their home aimag if they want to stay in one place for a while. Hospitals and schools also get free land leases. The government sells long term leases for agriculture and mining, but as far as I know, you can’t own land in Mongolia.
I think herders will be able to graze flocks in the “conservation areas” as they always have, but that no leases will be granted or sold there.
Saxaul is the only tree that grows in the Mongolian Gobi desert, and the wood is so dense and hard it does not float in water.
Not Mongolian, but funny history anyway: in 1851, Vasily Perovsky ordered the commander of Fort Aralsk to collect as much saxaul as possible to burn to power Russian imperial steamships. Unfortunately for the Imperial Navy, saxaul is crooked and lumpy and was impossible to stack in large quantities in steamships or fit into boilers. The imperial navy had to ship coal by caravan instead, which was so expensive they got rid of a bunch of the ships.
