Nursing China's Ailing Forests Back to Health

摘要

The swath of hilly terrain looked like a man's face after a poor shave. A few days earlier, villagers had clear-cut a fir forest and burned the stumps. Soon they will uproot the charred stubble and repopulate the barren land with eucalyptus, a fast-growing Australian import. "The timber is low quality," says Lu Yuanchang, a forester at the Research Institute of Forest Resource Information Techniques of the Chinese Academy of Forestry (CAF) in Beijing. But after 5 years or so, the villagers who manage this community forest in southern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, near the border with Vietnam, will hack down the eucalyptus and pulp it for paper. "They should turn a quick profit," Lu says.