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NPR host today: “The original ‘Avatar’ made a worldwide profit of three billion dollars -- that’s billion with a ‘B.’”

The explanation goes beyond the animals' capacity to breed. This is about money.

China, Mongolia's biggest trading partner and southern neighbor, has strict controls on importing meat and milk from Mongolian sheep and cows, but not on cashmere. It is the biggest consumer of cashmere from Mongolia.

Mongolia produces a third of the global supply, and cashmere makes up 40 percent of the country's nonmineral exports. Mongolia produced more than 7,000 tons of cashmere in 2015, the last year on record.

The rise of China's consumer class has meant the price of cashmere has risen by more than 60 percent since the 1980s.

Now, Mongolia's million nomadic herders have turned to herding goats to make a living, destroying their own grasslands in the process. In the past, they relied on cows, sheep, camels and yaks to make a living instead.

"Today, Mongolian rangeland is at a crossroads," says Bulgamaa Densambuu, a researcher for the Swiss-funded Green-Gold project. Her organization focuses on preventing overgrazing of Mongolia's grasslands, which Densambuu calls "rangeland."

Densambuu recently completed a survey that found 65 percent of Mongolia's grasslands have been degraded due to overgrazing of cashmere goats and to climate change. The climate change has led to a 4-degree Fahrenheit rise in average temperature in Mongolia, outpacing the rest of the world by three degrees.

But Densambuu hasn't lost hope.

"Ninety percent of this total degraded rangelands can be recovered naturally within 10 years if we can change existing management," she says from her office in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. "But if we can't change the existing management today, it will be too late after five to 10 years."

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Review: Street of Eternal Happiness by Rob Schmitz #bookblogger

Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road by Rob Schmitz

I don’t sign up for a lot of sites offering free books for review. I learned my lesson years ago. Yes, the idea of free books is great but I acquire books faster than I read them. And it’s unfair to the author or publisher to leave them hanging after promising them a review. You get the books for free but binding…

Review of Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road by Rob Schmitz

About Street of Eternal Happiness

Modern Shanghai: a global city in the midst of a renaissance, where dreamers arrive each day to partake in a mad torrent of capital, ideas, and opportunity. Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz is one of them. He immerses himself in his neighborhood, forging deep relationships with ordinary people who see in the city’s sleek skyline a brighter future, and a chance to…