Wasteland Turns Green

When Zhou Ye stood at the door of a provincial key middle school for the first time, the soles of his shoes were still covered in hoarfrost from the saline-alkali land in his hometown. The head teacher glanced at the results of the class placement test, frowned and said, "With your basic skills, our class is like a barren field." He did not refute, but just wrote "barren field" on the back of the draft paper and drew a seed next to it. In his three years of high school, he was the only one in the school who ran five kilometers to attend class - he stayed in a storage room at his aunt's house in the suburbs, wiping his face with snow in winter, and posting words on the wall in summer, turning over and memorizing them. The physics competition notes were circulated throughout the grade, and there was an abrupt sentence written on the margin: "There is actually water under the saline-alkali soil." He ranked among the top ten in the province in the college entrance examination. He entered a top engineering school, but fell last in the first final exam. When his classmates were talking about internships in Silicon Valley, he was calculating student loans. That wasteland is back again, and nothing grows no matter how much water it is watered. In his sophomore year, he went to the northwest with his tutor to restore desert vegetation and was responsible for data analysis. When all models determined that a certain experimental field was "dead", he relied on his intuition for improving the saline-alkali land in his hometown and proposed "deep infiltration irrigation + microbial flora". Half a year later, the first cluster of green buds emerged from the dead ground. After that, the seal seemed to be unlocked: continuous master's and doctoral studies, three top-ranked papers, and the "adaptive ecological restoration system" was promoted to Kubuqi. At the age of thirty-four, on the United Nations Environment Program award stage, the PPT compared the vast white saline-alkali land of my hometown with the alkali-tolerant pastures and seabuckthorn in the wild today. He said: "People say that it is impossible for the wasteland to turn green. They forget that the original name of the wasteland is 'fertile soil waiting for watering'. I just led the underground river up."