Chapter 6 The Land Longs for Life and Wisdom——Preface to the Collection of Reports Compiled by the Three-North Shelterbelt Construction Bureau

In 525 B.C., Sakyamuni deeply felt that there is no limit to the sea of ​​suffering in a short time in life, and the vast philosophical works make people at a loss what to do, so he abandoned his wife and children, fled the court, and wandered to Bodhgaya to practice under a bodhi tree. .Seventy-seven and forty-nine days later, a leap of thought took place, that is, enlightenment was achieved, and Buddhism was founded.The contribution of Buddhism to human culture is now well known. But what if there is no bodhi tree? Later, Confucius in China traveled around the world to promote his own reform policies and failed, so he returned to his hometown to start education.The first institution of higher learning in China was located in an apricot forest in Qufu County, Shandong Province today.There are three thousand younger brothers and two out of seventy saints, all from the lush apricot orchard.For more than two thousand years after the Western Han Dynasty, Confucianism has been the authentic Chinese culture.If our sense of smell is more sensitive, we can smell the fragrance of bitter almonds in the Confucian classics.

In the West, Plato, who was born in 428 BC, established his dissemination base in Athens, called Plato's Academy, when his thoughts had initially formed a system.The domestic forests are verdant, and according to the records of later generations, it looks like a "tourist spot" with beautiful scenery.A great fruit grew out of this grove, which was Aristotle.He wandered in this forest for more than 20 years from 367 BC, and finally became a Western sage after Plato.Now, when we comment on Western culture, we always go back to Plato.From Aristotle to St. Augustine, from Pascal to Whitehead, all have been influenced by him.As Whitehead said: If you want to find an appropriate generalization of the entire Western culture, it is nothing more than a series of annotations on Plato's philosophy.Therefore, we can also say that the entire Western culture was born in a small forest in Greece.

According to Marx and Engels, human beings are transformed from apes in the woods.The woods raised monkeys, and of course other animals, but only monkeys became humans.The first large-scale collective action of the monkeys who turned into humans was to walk out of the woods. The Bible says otherwise.According to the Bible, man was created by God.After God created Adam and Eve, he put this pair of living enemies into the Garden of Eden.The Garden of Eden is called "Garden". It can be imagined that it is a good place with trees, water, flowers and grass. Our ancestors lived a leisurely life without worrying about food and clothing.But the old lady Eve, like some fashionable ladies nowadays, cannot satisfy her spiritual needs with material abundance, and was tempted by the snake to eat the forbidden fruit.It doesn't matter if she has wisdom, but it caused Adam and us as descendants to lose the Garden of Eden, so that everyone has to "find their own way out".

Regardless of whether it is science or mythology, we can all see the same two points: first, the process of man becoming a man takes place in the woods; up the woods. So, what happens when people come out of the woods? Let's not talk about foreigners, let's take a look at us "the descendants of the Yellow Emperor". According to historical records, the northwestern part of China was originally a place with lush forests and abundant water and grass. Today's Shaanxi and Gansu areas are the horse farms of Zhou Tianzi.Even in the Han Dynasty, we can still see the landform descriptions of this area from "Hanshu", "Three Kingdoms" and other historical books: in a string of woodcut lines without punctuation, the rich green will rush to the face; Every page will bring you a cool breeze.

However, can you still see such a pleasant sight in this area now? In June of this year, I returned to China from Paris. The plane flew over the Himalayas, passed through Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu, Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Hebei to Beijing. My heart couldn't help but feel sour.It was full of yellow sand, horrible to look at, and the scorched land seemed to be determined to suck up people's tears.A naked woman is beautiful, if you look at it with an artist's eye, but the naked earth, not covered by a tree, is ugly, and has no beauty in any way you look at it. In the air, I suddenly realized that the decline of forests in this piece of China is an important reason for the decline of Chinese culture.

Northwest is the birthplace of two great rivers in China.The Lianghe culture started from the source, then flowed along the river to the Central Plains and then to the coast.The Han, Tang, Wei and Jin civilizations that we are proud of many times now center on Shaanxi and Gansu.The original Silk Road was by no means as desolate as it is today. When we appreciate the art of Dunhuang Grottoes and the bronze chariot terracotta warriors and horses unearthed from the Qin Mausoleum, we all admire the high artistic creativity of the ancients.This area is the upstream of water, the upstream of Chinese culture, and the upstream of Chinese wisdom.And once upon a time, upstream declined.Simultaneously with the decline of culture and wisdom, is precisely the decline of trees.We can also say in reverse, that it is the decline of trees that leads to the decline of culture and wisdom.

Without trees, there would be no human beings, and without trees, there would be no human wisdom.Both man and man's wisdom are produced and developed in the woods. The descendants of the Yellow Emperor, or the descendants of monkeys, God's creation, live under the shade of losing green, give birth on the bare stone beach, generation after generation, the skin becomes rough, the expression becomes dull, The nerves became numb, and the brain actually shrank.The wild beasts living in the forest are more lively and strong, and their fur is brighter than the wild beasts living in the Bald Mountain Desert.What's more, the spirit of all things - human beings?Try to compare the image of the peasants living in the barren mountainous area with the appearance of the soldiers and horses unearthed in the Qinling Mausoleum, and we can see that our race is degenerating.

How many places have no trees, and how many places have lost the spirit of heaven and earth, so how can human beings be produced? ! Perhaps nature is too lenient to us "children of the Yellow Emperor", and the things that nature bestowed on us were almost within our reach.The land of China used to be a Garden of Eden, otherwise, China would not have become an ancient civilization in the world. "I used to be rich too!" This statement is not false.Thus, we became the rich young masters favored by nature. Don’t look at the poor peasants who are so poor that they can’t even wear pants, but they use wild firewood to cook rice and batter, but they fill the stove pit in bundles.A beggar would have to chop down a few trees and burn it to steal a chicken, and the delicacy of "beggar's chicken" is still floating around.In the United States, a professor who has tasted good food and wine from all over the world told me that only Chinese food (except Cantonese food) is the worst cooked food in the world. For the most generous sake.Turning over the history books, every page is filled with smoke and fire, and the sound of felling forests resounds.Trees are cut down for food, trees are cut down for building houses, and trees are cut down for road construction (falsely claiming that a certain ancient tree has become a psychic, and asking the officials to build a road to bypass it is the traditional struggle method of Chinese green protectionists) , the war will burn the forest even more.There are also those that are cut down and then burned, such as an Efang Palace.The forests of the Nanshan Mountains built a palace far beyond the style of Versailles, and then burned it. "The moon is dark to kill people, the wind is high to set fire to the sky", "burning, killing and looting", whether it is a peasant revolution or counter-revolutionary suppression, "burning" always comes first.This tradition continued until the "Cultural Revolution", and the flames seemed to become the flowers of the revolution.The Chinese nation is a nation that loves revolution, and it is also a nation that loves lighting fires. No wonder we can't look up at the green shade and live under the scorching red sun.

The Chinese have many good traditions, but comparing horizontally now, you can see that others have your good traditions and are still inheriting them, while the bad traditions of the Chinese people seem to belong exclusively to the Chinese and have gradually disappeared from others.Just as I was writing this article, newspapers and television reported that several places in the south in the Dadai mountain forest, a group of hundreds of people were fighting with open flames, which constituted a crime of robbery.However, the Chinese tradition is that the law does not punish the public, and it is likely that the felony will be given a light sentence or nothing will be done.Cut south and burn north, Yiyuhudi?

The rich natural conditions have fostered the habit of the lazy and prodigal Chinese. They only know how to ask for money, and they don't care about construction. They are short-sighted and eager for quick success, and gradually become poorer and poorer.But it's not that if you are poor, you want to change, but because you are poor and crazy, you are destructively plundering nature.A "Twenty-Four Histories" has been going on for thousands of years, and the appeals of people of insight to protect nature are always drowned out by the sound of axes and saws.People of insight are the backbone of China, and trees are the backbone of the earth. People of insight and trees are struck by axes at the same time; China is overthrown!It's like playing a board game, the opposite of green is yellow, and the land called China has changed in the blink of an eye.

Wisdom and the tree are here at the same time dying out. After 1949, the land of China should have begun to turn around. Unfortunately, the old habits that have been passed down for thousands of years are hard to change. It seems that bad habits must be pushed to their extremes. It seems that the Chinese must go bankrupt before they can completely consciousness.Our satellites went to the sky, our atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs exploded, but on the one hand, we have created things that have never been done before, and made many great pioneering feats, but on the other hand, we have achieved unprecedented scale Destroy the remnants of our predecessors, including a little bit of the poor forest.The pile of scrap iron smelted in 1958 wiped out countless forest areas.In the future, in order to solve the immediate food problem, they will burn forests and open up wasteland with a hundred times more enthusiasm.The natural green is eaten away inch by inch by billions of green army uniforms on the map.In 1978, when hundreds of millions of people took off their uniforms and put on their favorite clothes, they bowed their heads and looked around, knowing that almost all of us were standing on a barren land. Where did the green go?Where is the vitality of life?Where did the light of wisdom go? Peasants do not know how to manage and build cities, and the minds that have been influenced by the feudal natural economy for a long time think that the concept of "city" is completely different from "rural".How can a city have grass?When grass grows in a city, it is a scene of decay. Isn't there a sentence like "the country is broken, the mountains and rivers exist, and the city is full of spring grass and trees"?Please look at the original Tiananmen Square, the symbol of the People's Republic of China. It is famous all over the world for its vastness, emptiness, and greenness without any life.In 1968, I was released by the reform-through-labor authorities for the second time. I went to Beijing to see my dear mother. I passed by the streets and alleys, and everywhere I saw the ladies of the neighborhood committee leading the gray people to fight tenaciously with the grass growing in the cracks at the bottom of the road and walls. The struggle to build a "red capital" is euphemistically called. There is no room for grass to grow under the "Red Ocean". In recent years, for the first time, Tiananmen Square has been covered with greenery and planted with trees and flowers. Don't think that this is just a change in urban planning. It shows a huge and painful change in concepts and a change in the quality of the new generation of leaders.There is a saying that you can know by seeing it. From a small grass in front of Tiananmen Square, you can see that tomorrow's 9.6 million square kilometers are covered with greenery. In an era when peasants’ ideas prevailed and minds influenced by the feudal natural economy prevailed, the main task of China’s forestry industry was to chop wood. There seemed to be such an equation in the national economic development plan: forestry-arbors-timber-benefits.Although Zhou Enlai instructed the Ministry of Forestry in the early 1960s to pay attention to afforestation and put afforestation at the top of the work, how could his scientific foresight resist the stupidity of "revolution".There is a "top" in cleverness, but there is no bottom in stupidity, and what is even more frightening is the stupidity of geniuses. Of course, a genius is a genius after all. We have also shouted "based on agriculture" and "all-round development of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, sideline fishery", but romantic geniuses have never been able to implement the correct slogans they chanted, but they are always random. sexually do wrong.Originally, the Chinese have been "cutting down the sandalwood" for generations. Since the trees have the ability to regenerate themselves, why should we worry about it?No wonder a foreigner said, you Chinese dare to fight the Japanese, the Americans, and the Russians in order to defend your homeland. This spirit of fighting for every inch of land is admirable, but you don’t know how to cherish it. In 1978, after the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Party, the trembling land finally attracted the attention of a new generation of leaders. Finally, the "Three North Shelterbelt System Construction" appeared. The North Shelter Forest Construction Bureau, referred to as the "Three North Forestry Bureau", is directly under the leadership of the Central Forestry Department.The proverb says that "the predecessors planted trees and the descendants took shade", we are "the predecessors cut down the trees and the descendants planted them", and only then can we talk about giving our descendants a slap in the shade. One day in August 1988, in the Sanbei Forestry Bureau, Li Jianshu and Gao Qing had two directors talking with me.Although great achievements were made from 1978 to 1988, under extremely difficult conditions, more than 130 million mu of forests were afforested and preserved in the ten years. Benefits and economic benefits, but the brows of the two bureau chiefs are still frowning.I admire this kind of person who is still worried after achieving results. This is a performance of brains and vision.Bad habits and old concepts cannot be completely changed in an instant; the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee is just a starting point, and the warriors who stand up always feel that they are trudging through the mud in the fog.You can't see the edge of the mud, and you can't even see your feet. You only find it difficult to walk, but you don't know which piece of mud sucks your feet.Now, only 300 million yuan of the one billion yuan budget allocated for the first phase of the project (1978-1985) has been allocated, and the funds for the second phase (1986-1995) remain the same. It is in arrears every year.The bureau chiefs waited for the rice to come to the pot every day, and ran around the relevant departments of the central government to demand cash. The "Three-North Shelterbelt System Construction" is known as the "Green Great Wall" and is listed as "the most ecological project in the world" internationally.In the history of world ecological engineering, there are such four major projects: Roosevelt Project, Stalin’s plan to transform nature, the joint green dam of five African countries, and our “Three North Shelterbelts”.The first and second items have already been completed, and the third item is under construction smoothly. Only our item is going through rough and heroic. The first phase of the "Three-North Shelterbelt" project can only be started from areas that are relatively easy to construct due to limitations in manpower, funds, and transportation.Eating meat first and then gnawing bones, everyone with bad teeth will do this, there is nothing wrong with it.Therefore, it is self-evident that the projects ahead are becoming more and more arduous.Now, the directors are worried about whether the project can continue without sufficient funding.Originally, anticlimactic has always been our problem.If the "Three-North Shelterbelt System Construction" dies due to funding problems, it will be a misfortune not only for us Chinese but also for all mankind. A western authority on meteorology said that a butterfly flapping its wings in Shanghai will also bring about changes in the weather in New York.These words vividly illustrate the unity of the global ecology. The "Three-North Shelterbelt System Construction" is undoubtedly a work that benefits all mankind.The shrewd Japanese have long recognized this, and they have offered to assist in this project, and have begun to set up a site in Inner Mongolia. Of course, now various departments (formerly called "all fronts") are clamoring for insufficient funds, education, scientific research, health, transportation, culture, etc. are starved for food, and any department is concerned with the safety of the people's survival. We have no power and no reason Putting forestry construction on a higher position than other departments, but if we can change our thinking of purely pursuing economic benefits and realize more deeply that forests are closely related to us, our wisdom and the growth of civilization, even in the In the face of difficulties, we will also pay more attention to forestry construction. I don't want to say more. This collection of reports will tell readers more examples. The impression of this long-term project may not be so grand, but it is indeed magnificent.It takes time for trees to grow. That is not a trick played by the orange planters in "Liao Zhai". The actual benefits and achievements must be accumulated slowly over a long period of time.Our vast number of forestry workers, technicians and cadres have devoted their youth, prime of life and all their lives to planting trees. When the trees grow up, people are aging.In other industries, a person may achieve many achievements in his life, but those engaged in forestry construction are considered lucky if they can achieve one or two in their life.For this alone, people engaged in forestry construction should be respected.Trees grow silently, and so are those who do forestry - but tenaciously.I hope that the green dreams of the characters described in this book will finally become a reality. The prosperity of China and the Chinese people must be synchronized with the prosperity of the trees. The two are in a relationship of prosperity and failure.We need both sunshine and shade now. September 1988 in Yinchuan