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
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Hoser says:
March 9, 2013 at 12:33 am
Here’s my rules of thumb for preventing or reversing desertification in Africa, while providing much needed protein.
1) When you cut down the trees, you cut down the clouds.
and
2) Every day, kill a goat and plant a fruit tree.
If everyone in Africa did that for a year, have daily goat feasts until the goats were all gone and plant loads of locally adapted fruit trees, date palms, mangos, coconuts, whatever fit the climate, the place would be much more pleasant.
The problem is that goats are browsers, meaning they eat tree leaves. As if that’s not bad enough, they can also climb trees. Sheep and cattle, on the other hand, basically eat off the ground. They are grazers.
As a result, the goats are a huge threat to the trees. I used to herd goats, take a dozen of them out for couple miles of grazing every day or two. So I know their evil ways of old. They can do outrageous aerobatics, bounce up the trunk of a tree like mountain goats up a sheer cliff, and eat the poor tree to death.
That’s my simple prescription for stopping anthropogenic desertification …
w.
” Bruce Foutch says: March 9, 2013 at 9:19 am ”
Thanks for that video. It is never going to be “one way only”. That self certainty is what got him in trouble with 40,000 dead elephants to his name. To his credit he does admit when wrong and it seems to have bothered him. That is good, but his “It’s the only way” is BS.
There are many ways to bring soil back to life even in salty deserts like Jordan. I love his “it’s not rocket science” line. Honest and humble and not insisting his way is the only way.
And for the the moving chicken coop idea (uses the same amount of land per chicken as raising feed). Lots of stuff available online. Great protein and fertilizer out.
This stuff is fairly old hat to pastoral farmers practicing rotational grazing,.
I didn’t read all the posts , but it was clear that this approach was news to many. I just hope that I am not the first commenter to mention the work of Andre Voisin, from which Alan Savory devised “his” method.
The same principles were further developed in N.Z. in the 40s and 50s by McMeekan and others leading to modern pastoral farming.
He’s wrong in one important respect. Get rid of grazing animals and you don’t create a desert, you create a forest, at least in all but the driest places. And a forest sequesters rather more carbon than a grassland, however well managed.
Grasses and trees have been in competition for land for a few 10s of millions of years. Grasses and herd grazing animals have co-evolved in competition with trees.
Here in Western Australia we have what is called the Great Southern Woodland, the largest warm temperate forest on Earth. In the early 20th century large areas were cleared for wheat growing, but it was found to be too dry and the farms were abandoned prior to WWII. There are no native herd grazing animals in Australia and sheep graziers didn’t move in after the wheat farms were abandoned. I believe too many dingos. So now those farms are dense secondary growth forest, too thick to walk through, and not a blade of grass in sight.
An interesting video, but let me rain on the parade: what does the science say (as opposed to the anecdotes)? Note that there are other viewpoints: http://allenpress.com/pdf/i1551-5028-61-1-3.pdf
If this be true – and I would certainly wish for such a simple solution to be true – is there proof, other than a convincing orator with slides?
Thank you for bringing Allan Savory and ‘his findings’ to this web site. It strikes me that together with the recent work on tree planting and humidity, practical answers to ‘micro’ desertification and rainfall issues appear to reside easily within our (community) grasp, theoretically unencumbered by the impoverishing and toxic politics of the Greens.
Like you Anthony, it took a breath or two to get beyond the beginning of the Savory presentation. I was struck by a couple of things. Firstly, ‘Fool me twice – shame on me’ – Savory had the grace to admit that his ‘scientific’ analysis of the elephant problem, reviewed and endorsed by his expert peers, was a frightful error that he would take to his grave. His volte-face led has to a new paradigm, which he demonstrated in his TED presentation. Nevertheless, as others have commented he causatively endorses the AGW/CO2 meme, as he indeed he does global population as two out of three cataclysm factors (the third being desertification) about to visit a ‘perfect storm’ on humanity and the World…..BUT he is propounding a practical community based solution to ‘micro’ desertification, quite do-able without punitive taxation, Green morality politics and UN/government intervention. So he stumbles again on consensus, the climate consensus, as he did once on the elephant consensus.
Secondly, he opens his TED address with an attention grabbing strategy that includes the ‘I would guess’ statement that two-thirds of the world is ‘desertifying’ accompanied by a slide with red ellipses around the regions where this process is said to be occurring. There is an ellipse around the entire continent of Australia for example…that ignores large tropical regions of rain forest and which could quite well have furnished some of the images of slides he had used to demonstrate humid regions at the beginning of his presentation. Furthermore, as seven-tenths of the World is covered by water, it is hard to see how he arrives at two-thirds being desertified. Of course, I realise there is a measure of poetic license here that ignores the 70 percent of the planet that is covered in ocean to an average depth of about 1,000 meters, but make no mistake, it is the same distorting language that is used to talk up the AGW meme.
Finally, desertification is a complex process occurring on different scales that may or may not be related – on macro and micro scales, so to speak. I suspect that here we are witnessing the ‘micro’ scale…whose collective restoration and regeneration would indeed achieve much good. It does not however, appear to provide a way of dealing with the following: http://egyptianbreeders.com/index.php/topic/2061-sahara-desert-to-become-grasslands-and-forest-again/
“Interesting scientific discoveries have been reported. The Saharan Desert began about 3 million years ago. Prior to that it was swampy and prior to that the Northern part was a shallow sea which ran from Gibraltar to the Pacific. This was prior to the Indian peninsula crashing North into the Asian continent.”
“Deep sea core drills in the Atlantic show the Saharan history. 500 million tons of sand blow into the Atlantic yearly, but in cycles. The current cycle is desert, but this is part of a 40,000 year cycle which is due to a corresponding earth rotational wobble cycle. 7000 years ago, the Saharan desert was non-existant with heavy Summer rains and huge lakes and forests and grasslands. The cores show that the cycles cause change within about 200 years turning rapidly to desert. The next change is expected in about 12,000 years and the Summer rains will bring grasslands, forests, and huge lakes again.”
“Also found were huge water reservoirs under the desert sands protected by layers of clay so as not to evaporate. It is a sum of fresh water equal to the Great Lakes in America.”
I’ve enjoyed reading all the comments. Allan Savory is an eloquent speaker, there is no doubt. And promoting crop and herd rotation is very reasonable and certainly a refreshing change from the usual ‘climate change’ rhetoric. However, a few things are bothering me:
1. The answer to the question of what will the vast herds eat to begin with (when first introduced to a ravaged, desertified land) was not satisfactory to me. Savory said that in the beginning they sometimes provided supplements, but then gave an example where apparently the cattle survived perfectly fine on a land where there was not a single blade of grass. Really???
2. If the desertified land requires only that herds of animals pass over it, then why are wild deer, buffalo, antelope, etc. not already roaming there in vast numbers?
3. There was hardly a word about variations in rainfall as a contributing factor.
4. The comparison of two plots of land, one desertified and one ‘treated’ with rotating cattle was frankly a little too good to be believed.
5. As others have already pointed out, the issues of desertification and whether carbon dioxide levels are related to climate change are separate.
6. Just as the Green Revolution gave the green light for unchecked population growth, so will Savory’s Save-the-World Solution, but even more so. This is not what we need.
Therefore, I remain to be convinced (that this– running herds of cattle over dried-up and abused lands — is the one single solution to all our problems). Meanwhile, I’ll take my steak rare and with a glass of merlot, please!
Willis says;
“Call me crazy, but as a man who grew up on a cattle ranch, I’ll lay long odds that that system would beat continuous grazing …
All the best,
w.”
FB says; Sometime , when you are bored , you might like to read up on variable- rate set-stocking. You may be surprised.
Willis:
Thanks for mentioning Polyface. That was one of the farms I was thinking of, but couldn’t remember the name right off. I agree that Polyface is doing some good stuff.
You contrast Polyface’s approach with “continuous” grazing. Who was advocating continuous grazing? I didn’t hear Savory argue for that.
Great discussion of best practices for certain land use.
How the climate gets dragged into his talk is beyond me since these changes are so very very very small compared to the regional climate oscilations. The real elephant in the room (with apologies) Every time he mentions Carbon in the atmospghere as though it were a poison instead of food I cringed with dismay.
Careful. This guy is an impressive and effective speaker and he’s on a mission. He was previously convinced of the opposite theory, and his conviction led to the slaughter of tens of thousands of elephants. I can’t believe 15 million hectares have been saved from the desert and we have no scientific data to show for it. Anecdote is not science. What type of deserts ? Which herds for which deserts ?There are a million questions. He couldn’t even answer how to start the process when introducing large herds in a desert. He may be right, and this requires urgent investigation, but i’m sceptical. Where’s the science ?
Fair enough. It was an incorrect guess on my part, and the reason for that guess was that in American culture the term is usually not considered offensive, but in Britain or the Commonwealth countries, for example, it generally is.
As far as substantive conclusions on issues are concerned, I go with reason and evidence, not PC conformity. However, one doesn’t have to be politically correct to both refrain from and object to the unnecessary use of terms that can be hurtful to others’ perceived sense of self-worth and dignity.
It’s a matter of basic kindness, not political correctness.
NorthStarState says:
March 9, 2013 at 11:23 am
The industrialization of India and China, as well as promoting the West’s consumption based economies as being the “ideal” has doomed this planet’s living inhabitants. Sadly, the poorest, least well represented, will suffer the most in the coming, turbulent years
+++++++++++
And yet we have more people living longer and in better conditions than at any time in history.
The simple fact is that every person on this planet is already doomed. No matter what you do. In something less than 100 years you will be dead, I will be dead, and so will everyone that reads these words.
What low cost energy has done has freed millions of people from poverty and subsistence lifestyles. It has allowed us to feed 7 billion people. Something that was completely impossible before fossil fuels.
I’ve yet to hear the poorest of the poor crying out. “oh please, do not bring us electricity, do not build paved roads, do not bring us tractors to farm our land, do not bring us trucks to take our products to market”.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in India and China, where only a generation or two ago these people were among the poorest on the planet. Today, hundreds of millions of people in India and China enjoy health and prosperity that was reserved only for the richest of the rich only a few generations ago.
Are there warts? Of course there are, and like the west which largely cleaned up its act when it had enough to feed and clothe its people, the same will happen in India and China. As will happen across the planet given that the rich don’t stand in their way and steal from the poor, which is a major cause of poverty. The rich and powerful taking from those least able to defend themselves, to benefit the rich.
Across the planet some 2 billion people live a life better in many respects than the most powerful kings and queens a few hundred years ago. Largely a result of fossil fuels. Primarily coal, which is very cheap and very abundant. Are we to deny these advantages to the remaining 5 billion people on the planet? If you are one of the 2 billion “haves” that seek to keep these benefits from the “have nots”, out of fear that they will harm your own well being, then shame on you.
If it’s a way for politically connected leeches to get more money and power, it will happen; if it isn’t, it won’t (c.f. current climate ‘policy’).
I have a hard time with this at minute 3 of the long version.
He said “should be no debate whether or not climate change is occurring it’s already destroyed more than 20 civilizations”
I did not know that.
Where have I been?
Mostly, what have I been doing?
cn
” We have changed more than 1/2 the World’s Land”. Look, although he may have some points… that number is a FANTASY.
We have only touched about 1/5 to 1/7 of the world’s dry land, no matter which way you cut it. I have trouble working with statements from anyone, no matter HOW well intentioned, when a blunder THIS COLLOSAL is made in the presentation.
I hope someone else (Willis are you there?) will call him on this. Tragic in many ways. Underminds that which can be very useful. I guess I’m a “stick in the mud” when it comes to DETAIL.
farmerbraun says:
March 9, 2013 at 3:17 pm
Thanks, FB. I have to tell you I never go look when someone says “you might find this interesting” with no further info. I don’t do it. Disappointed too many times.
In addition I don’t google random topics just because someone says I should do so. Same reason.
I’m not saying this to tell you you’re going about it backwards. I’m here to explain what forwards looks like.
1. Summarize your point. At present I know nothing about variable-rate set-stocking, nor do I know if I want to waste ten seconds finding out anything about set-stockings. Heck, I don’t even wear stockings. So what is it that makes VRSS something I should spend my precious time on? Does it cure what ails me? What is it? Why on earth would I take some random anonymous internet guy’s word for it?
2. Provide a clickable link.I am totally uninterested in googling some new topic. I know nothing about it, I can’t tell the Shinola from the shirt. You obviously at least believe you know something about it … OK, provide me with the key piece of evidence, point me in what you think is the right direction. I’m not going out looking on your say-so.
3. Don’t waste my time. You have one shot at attracting someone’s attention, Don’t waste it with bloated descriptions or claims. Don’t waste it with weak or faulty web sites. State your point, provide your link, and you might get traction.
Waving your hands and uttering the magical shibboleth “variable-rate set-stocking” on the other hand … pretty much guarantees you’ll get nothing.
Regards,
w.
Oh darn, edited and took out an “m” from “more” giving ORE…please note that.
[Fixed -w.]
@ur momisugly Willis
Fair enough. You were talking about continuous grazing and made an unsubstantiated comment.
I suggested you learn more. Please yourself ; I have no axe to grind , just 35 years experience of pastoral farming.
Anyway , you’re an intelligent person and the name says it all. Variable -rate set-stocking; you could work it out for yourself.
Sorry to waste your time.
@ur momisugly Christopher Dollis,
No, I don’ think I missed much. CO2, anthropogenic or otherwise is well known not to be the principle variable driving GLOBULL WARMING, which hasn’t been happening for 18 years despite increased CO2 concentration.
You have to accept quite a bit of NON-science, and ignore quite a bit of Green Religion-speak from the video to believe what this guy is carping about.
1) CO2 concentration increases are good for organic growth
2) warming has caused CO2 release from the oceans,
3) There is no overpopulation
4) Nobody who has been educated has believed that the earth was flat for 3000 years, at least.
The host of the video said that he formed his opinion about animals, THEN confirmed than after he went to school.
He is an activist trying to prove a point…..like everyone in the GREEN religion…. and destroying science in the process.
@ur momisugly louis,
Did you look at the satellite photos of the desert that was turned into farmland through irrigation?
http://design.epfl.ch/organicites/2010b/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/irrigation_arabie.jpg
http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Shared/StaticFiles/Photography/Images/POD/i/irrigated-fields-kendrick-731194-xl.jpg
http://slowmuse.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/saudi-blogspan.jpg
The guy has an axe to grind. I don’t grind axes for Globull Warming zealots trying to confuse the issue by making peripheral claims. He is making several absurd underlying claims that simply are not true. So his “solution” is for a problem that does not exist.
He staged a fake problem, lied that there was no other solution for it, then created a cock-a-mamy solution, all while providing a fake backdrop of fear-mongering overpopulation and Globull Warming. Total BULL!
I have visited a 35,000 acre farm near Tsumeb where holistic veld management is practised and they were about to double the carrying capacity of the land, they said, to 1300 (very large) cattle.
The explanation at the time (about 1990) was different from that proposed in the TED talk but Savory was still the motivating influence on the method. I believe we met at the time – certainly met some implementers of his ideas in Windhoek.
A very different perspective on this subject is taken by Dr Bill Millison ({Permaculture) who contended that the problem with the destruction of the laterite soils in Africe is cattle. They compact the soil with their hooves and create the equivalent of a hard ‘ploug pan’ (farmers will know what I am talking about) through which water cannot penetrate the soil deeply. There may be a balance of ideas that will work as well in both cases because Savory and Mollison have both been successful in reclaiming deserts and rebuilding the aquifers using techniques that are polar extremes. I have seen them both working.
It behooves us to examing the scenarios to find why two ‘opposite views’ create the same result and why the middle path doesn’t work.
I do not agree with the idea that ‘fossil fuels’ are responsible for ‘causing climate change’. The human influence is undetectable, while the influence of grazing patterns is. The whole carbon storage thing has ‘lousy numbers’.
Mollison pointed out some eroded land and said that the only thing left that can survive on it is goats, so people blame the goats for eating every leaf on the few remaining trees. But, he said, the real cause of the destruction of the soil was the the cattle that created the impenetratable compressed layer under the topsoil with their hooves. He demonstrated in the same area as Savory (in the US) that getting the heavy hoofed animals off the land and ‘denting it’ with little craters (using a special wheel) created hollows into which grass seed fell and rain accumulated. Without any animals at all, the entire patch (SW US area) that had been completely re-grassed. It is in one of his videos. The effect is as spectacular as Savory’s. It was untreated land that continued to degrade (no animals, no denting).
What Savory has shown is that such reclamation can coexist with herds that are intensively eating things in small patches but which do not reurn for a long time (mimicking the behaviour of wild herd animals). That is the essence of holistic veld management. Continuous occupation by cattle on an ‘allowed stocking level’ merely allows the cattle to eat what they like and leave what they do not which then takes over. This results in thornveld encroachment and the loss of all animal productivity to trees. The forest is created by the cattle. Huge areas of S Africa are covered with thorn trees that did not exist historically because the animals trampled them and were forced by fear of moving (lions) to eat everything before moving on. This stripping of the thorn trees improves grassland productivity. Elephants were good at that.
The ‘return period’ in Namibia is 7 years. In other words the productivity is caused by leaving the land alone, then taking off just about everything using animals, then leaving it alone again for a long time. The consequence of that is ‘a doubling of carrying capacity’. The method includes the eradication of ‘all non-native species’ of plants – a fanatical response but to be expected I suppose from innovators. The idea of gardening the desert (which would involve using non-native plants) is too radical.
Dr St Barbe Baker (founder, Men of the Trees) advocated desert reclamation using techniques more in line with Mollison’s but which do not contradict the idea that more animals can be supported, as long as they do not destroy the trees.
All of this must be set against a backdrop of a natural drying/wetting cycle – remember the story about the advancing desert in Sudan started by a casual observation by a pilot who calculated the advance of the Sahara 50 years ago (now in full retreat without any interference at all by Man). It may be that the experiments were conducted over long periods when the climate (as usual) was changing, and the natural influence overwhelmed whatever puny works were performed by Man.
Francois GM;
I can’t believe 15 million hectares have been saved from the desert and we have no scientific data to show for it.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Was that his claim?
Wow.
At 6000 cars per hectare, he is off setting the co2 from 90 billion cars.
I’m guessing we have no scientific data for that either….
Anthony,
I don’t perceive a bridge to embrace. I see a desperate man trying to have it both ways… while being nutty about both. His kind of bridge is a like the Bridge of San Luis Rey. Not one I want to walk on.
Some very basic “grazing” terminology. Variable – rate set-stocking gets a mention under other grazing methods (last section)
http://www.clarkcd.org/pdf/Pasture%20Systems%20and%20Grazing%20Methods2.pdf