This is one of the most important posts ever on WUWT, it will be a top “sticky” post for a few days, and new posts will appear below this one during that time.
People send me stuff.
Imagine, shooting 40,000 elephants to prevent the land in Africa from going to desert because scientists thought the land couldn’t sustain them, only to find the effort was for naught and the idea as to why was totally wrong. That alone was a real eye opener.
Every once in awhile, an idea comes along that makes you ask, “gee why hasn’t anybody seen this before?”. This one of those times. This video below is something I almost didn’t watch, because my concerns were triggered by a few key words in the beginning. But, recommended by a Facebook friend, I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did, because I want every one of you, no matter what side of the climate debate you live in, to watch this and experience that light bulb moment as I did. The key here is to understand that desertification is one of the real climate changes we are witnessing as opposed to some the predicted ones we often fight over.
It is one of those seminal moments where I think a bridge has been created in the climate debate, and I hope you’ll seize the moment and embrace it. This video comes with my strongest possible recommendation, because it speaks to a real problem, with real solutions in plain language, while at the same time offering true hope.
This is a TED talk by Dr. Allan Savory in Los Angeles this past week, attended by our friend Dr. Matt Ridley, whose presentation we’ll look at another time. Sometimes, TED talks are little more that pie in the sky; this one is not. And, it not only offers a solution, it shows the solution in action and presents proof that it works. It makes more sense than anything I’ve seen in a long, long, time. Our friend Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., champion of studying land use change as it affects local and regional climate will understand this, so will our cowboy poet Willis Eschenbach, who grew up on a cattle ranch. I daresay some of our staunchest critics will get it too.
To encapsulate the idea presented, I’ll borrow from a widely used TV commercial and say:
Beef, it’s what’s for climate
You can call me crazy for saying that after you watch this presentation. A BIG hattip to Mark Steward Young for bringing this to my attention.
“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it’s happening to about two-thirds of the world’s grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes — and his work so far shows — that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.
Published on Mar 4, 2013
There’s a longer version with more detail below, about an hour long. Also worth watching if you want to understand the process in more detail:
Feasta Lecture 2009
Extracts available at vimeo.com/8291896
Allan Savory argued that while livestock may be part of the problem, they can also be an important part of the solution. He has demonstrated time and again in Africa, Australia and North and South America that, properly managed, they are essential to land restoration. With the right techniques, plant growth is lusher, the water table is higher, wildlife thrives, soil carbon increases and, surprisingly, perhaps four times as many cattle can be kept.
feasta.org/events/general/2009_lecture.htm
Recorded 7 November 2009, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
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Richer people? More cattle? No wonder it’s been forgotten for four years. No self-respecting greenie will go for such an amount of positive news.
Remember, for them it’s miserabilism first. The environment can wait. Perhaps we should re-cast that talk in a way that properly explains how people will suffer in a way or another.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/24/the-earths-biosphere-is-booming-data-suggests-that-co2-is-the-cause-part-2/
putting more CO2 in the air also helps.
Nice find, Anthony. No news to me, I wrote about it here.
Best to all,
w.
Sounds very hopeful. Will the IPCC endorse this? No.
Why? ???
Amazing…
Thank you very much Anthony for bringing this here!
2 things:
A. Here in Israel you can see it happening for many years along with reforestation even in areas never thought to be able to hold forests (northern Negev desert).
B. This is going to be a mote in Gary Yourofsky’s eye. We will have to increase meat consumption worldwide to financially support the farmers and to manage the livestock. It is great for carnivores like myself, but Yourofsky is going to have a fit. 🙂
Eyal
A sizable tool in the colonialist’s arsenal was the insistence that native land practices (especially grazing) were ‘incorrect’ and merely extended ‘natural’ conditions, which were, as indicated above, thought to cause desertification. It was believed that only the European system of intensive land use along with the removal of nomadic grazing systems could ‘redeem’ the land and return it to its former glory. Oh, how wrong they were. It’s nice to see them come out and admit it, and do something positive for once. Hopefully a bunch of myopic, idiotic environmentalist fanatics don’t charge in and find away to muck this all up.
Thanks for that, Anthony. Great presentation.
Seems like a win-win proposition, even if AGW should prove to be overstated.
I grew up in Holland post WWII and as you can imagine farmers were, all over Europe in those days, an important group (sorry if I cannot express myself well), But some of my farming family always, always showed me small ways to grow things (composting and propagating, milking, birthing etc.) and to how ROTATE crops and grazing animals . Every week, or less, live stock was moved from one pasture to another to give the grazed pastures a rest and recuperation to give the “shit and piss” a chance to do their thing. As Holland was small it had to be done on a few hectares (if not acres) at a time but by darn it worked.
This Gentleman’s concept is not new but is on a scale I can hardly imagine ( like the size of all of Europe ). But I did like this video a lot because I do hope that people get a lesson out of it. The 40,000 dead elephants! It might wake up a few people.
As much as I think TED talks are good I really do wish they’d get Al Gore out of the opening frames.
Fascinating. I am always ready to consider that if an obvious solution has not worked after a sufficient amount of time then it may not actually be a solution.
Often the standard response is just to assume we have not done enough yet. (I also think this principle applies to a lot of problems from foreign aid to drug abuse but that is another story.)
Stopping the natives of Africa burning during the dry season might not be so easy, it seems to be a rather ingrained habit, but having spent a bit of time in that part of the world I would back this idea over any other project currently being funded there.
That talk is brilliant!
Anthony, this post was really important. Thanks.
Willis, although “Animal, Vegetable, or E. O. Wilson” (11 SEP 2010) was an excellent post, you wrote nothing directly about fighting desertification. However, a commenter on your post, E.M.Smith, September 12, 2010 at 4:14 pm, did.
Cows, not wind turbines.
I’ll have some of that!
Excellent talk and positive. Perhaps some of the temperature increases over the last 50 or so years are from increasing areas of bare ground and so a measure of increased desertification?
This may not explain why temps have not continued to increase unless desertification has stalled?
Real people understand this!
Enviromentallist dont! Its hard to profit from and hard to tax … and it gives you hope .. the most forbidden tinking in the green religion.
It’s all part of scientific pasture management. What we call land degradation today has long been known as “The Tragedy of the Commons.”
http://www.farmersweekly.co.za/search.aspx?s=allan%20savory
Yet another outstanding man from that very small tribe known as Rhodesians. Alan Savory has achieved so much in terms of wildlife management, zero tillage and conservation. His moving to New Mexico seems to have really given him the environment in which to shine.
The message, more livestock, is quite revolutionary but based on his previous successes and ability to learn from his mistakes I have no doubt this is a huge step forward for mankind.
So he suggests that we can reduce ” carbon” to preindustrial levels. I assume he means carbon dioxide which is of course a plant food. So there will be less plant food for this new level of growth.
hmmm…. Perhaps we should keep burning fossil fuels to help keep the level of CO2 up.
It’s still a very interesting idea though but the fixation with “carbon” makes me wonder about the original premise that there is such a thing as “climate change” (which in this case means anthropogenic climate change)
Not news to Australian Graziers. A similar programme was on Landline (Country TV series in Australia)
I interrupted watching an outstanding speech by a great teacher (Jon Kabot-Zinn) to watch this video.
Wow. Am I ever glad I did.
It’s important, and I found it gripping from stem to stern. I learned a lot, and it all makes sense.
A great idea that he appears to have been proved…and I am all for that. However he does not know the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide or that NASA report that the planet is greeening due to more CO2 in the atmosphere.
It is the soot and things such as sulphur dioxide that we need to address…..the extra CO2 is of great benefit.
Practical, scientific, sensible, humane, economical.
The eco-fascists and climate alarmists will oppose this with the last breath in their bodies.
Many have read the book “Collapse” by Jared Diamond. He writes about the demise of various civilizations, large and small. In almost every instance one of the main contributors is destruction of soil resources.
A community that is originally successfull increases its population and expands agriculture from the best lands to the maginal lands. Then during lean times they find that their practices have destroyed those marginal lands. The greater population is forced to overburden the originally better land, and destroys it also.
Today, one of the not so brilliant ideas is to use our most precious resources – land and water – to make fuel for cars. This will lead to disasters.
See, for example…
“Taking Measure of biofuel limits”
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/taking-measure-of-biofuel-limits/
Or
“Nobel Prize winning biochemist says ALL biofuels are ‘nonsense.'”
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/nobel-prize-winning-biochemist-says-all-biofuels-are-nonsense/
Wonderful. There has been a lot of discussion in Australia recently about ‘un-desertifying’ the land. It is known that the continent used to be largely forested, so it is clearly capable of having other than desert wasteland. This approach is clearly what we need.