The Lessons of the Loess Plateau was produced, written, and directed by John Liu, an American and former CBS cameraman, who has been living in China for the past twenty-five years. It tells the amazing story of how scientists, working in collaboration with local farmers in one of the most eroded places on the planet, reversed thousands of years of environmental degradation perpetrated by the combined actions of humans and nature. Each year, Beijing residents choke on the dust swept in by winds from the Loess Plateau, an arid region in north central China, and millions of tons of fertile silt wash into the Yellow River, destroying natural fisheries and contributing to flooding. Here is a grim visual portrait of a collapsed ecosystem entrapping its human inhabitants in a fight for survival and an existence of extreme poverty. This is a problem for science to solve and science students and teachers will appreciate the emphasis on using the scientific method to tackle the problems of biological sustainability. A central question raised in the film is—if the loess is one of the most fertile soils, why is there so little arable land available to farmers? “That is why I became a soil scientist,” answers the filmmaker John Liu.