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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Here is a counterpoint:
http://www.mikehudak.com/Videos/SteveGallizioli2.html
Like everyone else, I found the talk impressive. But we are skeptics. What is the real deal here?
Cheap steak and hamburgers.
Less desert.
Happy cows (if you’ve ever seen them moved to a new pasture, you’ll know what I mean).
Its all good in my opinion.
“Before and afters” is all one needs to prove the point. We’ve seen the “before and afters” of most other methods and they don’t work. This method seems to.
If something works, you stick with it. If it works 19 times out of 20, you really stick with it. It if doesn’t work, you should try something else. Sometimes, things that seem like they should work in theory, just don’t in reality (like climate theory). The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again (especially when it didn’t work the first 100 times you tried it even though it seemed like it should at the beginning). Simple philosophy to guide most things in life that works really well 19 times out of 20. (This site has made me redo everything in math terms; another philosophy that works really well since numbers are truth, 19 times out of 20).
devijvers says:
March 10, 2013 at 2:47 am
….degraded soil handles a rain shower vs healthy soil you have to watch this:
(one minute).
Frankly, I’ve been telling for years that desertification is the most important cause of global warming. Hopefully this video will do some good….
Great little video on minimum (zero?) till farming!
And everyone else here seems to have missed the last point you made above which was very carefully stated by Dr Allan Savory:
That a big part of the temperature rise we are seeing is likely due to desertification. Really, it would be hard to argue that this could not be the case.
I think this will get traction in the warmists community because he pays homage to their global warming gods, but then goes on to point out a real manmade problem that needs attention.
Notice he didn’t answer the hosts question at the end.
Quack.
This article makes a lot of common sense, which is why it will without fail offend vested interest and self-appointed experts.
Dobzhansky said, correctly, that nothing in biology makes any sense except in the light of evolution.
Most earth land ecosystem including forest and arid / semi-arid ecosystems evolved in the presence of large numbers of grazing animals, first Carboniferous-Permian giant reptilian pigs, then sauropods, finally mammals and birds. It is important to recognise that ecosystems evolve as a connected whole. So the plants have evolved around the activities of animals in grazing and dropping manure and churning the soil. This has shaped their anatomy and physiology.
Spread of human civilisation has disrupted the continuity of pristine wilderness areas and decimated the numbers of wild grazing animals. Land stripped of these animals represents an ecosystem where one of its primary components, with which it together evolved and functioned for hundreds of millions of years – has beed removed. Then it is not surprising that disbalance should lead to desertification.
If animals reared for agriculture – huge herds of various Laurasiatheres such as cattle, sheep, horses even ostriches, can take the place of the prehistoric herds, then it makes sense that the ecosystems should return to something closer to normality.
Brazilians have the right idea. They raise millions of cattle and eating beef and other types of meat is central to their culture. I strongly recommend to anyone having the chance to eat at a Brazilian barbeque restaurant. I go to Brazil about once a year on business, and always enjoy these reseaurants where waiters continually come round the tables offering all kinds of different meat cuts, throughout the meal. One is given a big wooden thing looking like an egg timer with a red end and a green end, if you are still up for more carnivory then you place it with the green end up, when you have had enough you upend it so the red end is up, the waiters will recognise this signal and leave you alone.
Also – if you haven’t done it before – try a steak rare or medium-rare instead of medium or well done. You get the real taste of the meat much better this way.
“Beef, its what’s for climate”
In London:
Custemer: “Is this beef?”
Butcher: “Ofhorse!”
In Reykjavik
– Beef?
– No beef.
– Em,… Horse?
– No horse.
– Eeeem,… chicken?
– No chicken.
Anthony,
Grit + poo + piss + rain + solar + microbes = sustainable life. Works for me.
My degree is in biomedical science, majoring in microbiology. All of a sudden I feel more qualified than Mann, Gore et al to put forth contrary opinions on CO2 = AGW. Definitely a “lightbulb moment” for me.
Thanks for posting this. I am disappointed with myself for not being aware of Allan Savory or his work before today, and he’s been working for decades! Maybe, through WUWT, his voice just became louder. Also it’s a real eye-opener: that climate change could, after all, be human induced. Crikey! I suppose that makes this CO2=AGW sceptic open-minded after all.
—————————
To all those that criticise Savory for using “Carbon” instead of “carbon dioxide/CO2” consider that he is adressing an audience that has been fed “carbon footprints” and “carbon neutral” by the MSM and eco-friendly advertisers. He is simply using an accepted catchphrase. Effective communication = understand your audience. Use lowest common denominator words = message received.
—————————-
Personally, as a Brit that once lived in the same part of the world as Allan’s African test sites, I find his matter-of-fact presentation style rather nostalgic, and somewhat reassuring. Loud does not mean correct.
Allan – stiff upper lip, chin-chin and bottoms up old boy!
Great info Geoff Sherrington (3:19am post)
Saved it to my “best of” file.
RR
Can we please get back to science…. Jeez.
http://www.srmjournals.org/doi/abs/10.2111/06-159R.1
I’would be happy if it were true, but searching for his name on Google Scholar I found that he developped his ideas at the end of the 80’s – beginning of the 90’s. If other scientists had been able to reproduce what he says he did, since this time it would have changed the face of the world. Wikipedia (ok, it’s Wikipedia, but nonetheless) says sadly: “Land management researchers have heavily criticized the concepts of holistic management because experiments conducted on grazed land in many different places in the last few decades have failed to find any scientific support for their validity.[5] Virtually no active academic rangeland ecology researchers have come forward to espouse holistic management principles”.
So we should remain sceptic.
Looked at Savory – really worthwhile. He certainly has “an idea worth spreading” as the TED people say. That made me look up some of their other presentations and I did not think they were all of the same quality. Some were actually annoying. Their operation has become international and their website recently reported reaching a billion hits. They get eight or nine hundred people to attend their conferences, at 4,000 dollars each. Now they also give prizes and Bill Clinton got one. Prize is worth 1 million dollars. I also had an idea worth spreading and published it. Had I known about the prize I would have submitted it to them too but instead I gave you a chance to put it up. You refused it because you are a lukewarmist and still believe that there must be something to that greenhouse effect. I assure you that the greenhouse effect is dead thanks to Ferenc Miskolczi’s work. You are not the only one trying to tear down my article. I gave a copy to Donald Rapp and immediately he took umbrage at a sentemce in my abstract. What he said was that “… It may well be that there was a ‘relatively sudden rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the century that directed warm currents into the Arctic Ocean’ but you have utterly no proof of this assertion.” I did have references to back it up and I also had a copy of his book. In it he quoted Scholaski saying that “The branch of the North Atlantic current which enters it by way of the edge of the continental shelf round Spitsbergen has evidently been increasing in volume, and has introduced a body of warm water so great, that the surface layer of cold water which was 200 meters thick in Nansen’s time, has now been reduced to less than 100 meters in thickness.” I told him to read his own book, page 130, and then apologize, and have not heard from him since. It is amazing the egos these guys have, on both sides of the climate debate. Now you have built up a reputation for your site but likewise are misdirecting your efforts because you do not understand my science. Not your fault, because you are not a scientist. My views derive entirely from science, regardless of people’s opinions.
Gary Pearse says at 11:33 am (March 9) :
“…we even forgot that the world was round – well known to scholars 2500 years ago – still Columbus deserves our respect for rediscovering it).”
That learned Europeans in 1492 thought the world is flat is a myth invented by story-teller Washington Irving, author of Rip van Winkle & the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. Least of all would sailors & Church scholars have supposed such an obviously false belief. The Earth’s shadow on the Moon when entering & leaving a lunar eclipse is always rounded, regardless of point of view. A ship’s mast appears over the horizon before its hull, which parts would both be visible at the same time in Flatland. Ditto churches & their spires viewed from a ship approaching land. By 1492, the Portuguese had already sailed a farther distance south than Columbus proposed sailing west. The Portuguese had crossed the equator, so sailors knew that constellations changed in the Southern Hemisphere, which again would not be the case on a flat Earth.
So, not only Columbus but his fellow mariners, the savants advising Ferdinand & Isabella & the king & queen themselves knew the world was spherical, as had sailors, scholars & monarchs for centuries, even during the so-called Dark Ages, as shown by the works, among others, of a Visigothic king & the Venerable Bede.
There was a brief period in the early Church when some of its Fathers interpreted the Bible literally, so argued for flatness, but by the time of Augustine (c. 400 AD), Church doctrine adopted ancient science, with a globular but immobile Earth. The elaborate Medieval Christian cosmos was entirely spherical, with Earth resting at (or near) its center, based upon Ptolemy’s 2nd century AD refinement of the Aristotelian universe (itself derived from predecessors as early as 600 BC).
The issue for Columbus & the Spanish crown was the size of the Earth, not its shape. For his proposal to succeed, the ocean between Europe & Asia had to be small enough to be crossed with ships of the day. Isabella’s experts’ estimation of the size of the Earth was roughly correct, so they naturally advised against financing a scheme to reach the (East) Indies by sailing west into the Ocean Sea. Columbus argued Earth was smaller & that Asia extended farther east than it actually does. He was wrong, but two other big continents happen to occupy the position where he expected Asia.
In the next century, Copernicus proposed that the Earth goes around the sun yearly, turns daily on its axis & wobbles in a 26,000-year cycle. He was in college in 1492.
Apologize for going on at such length off-topic.
A Greenpeace spokesman said today “Savory is an oil company shill. He is part of a conspiracy to distract humanity from the only viable solution that is the deindustrialisation of the western economies through the destruction of democracy and their energy infrastructure. Only by forcing the west back into subsistence farming can the ecosphere be optimised for the other species on the planet, which, of course, have been here a lot longer than humanity and deserve to get their planet back’.
[I assume there’s a missing /sarc tag – mod]
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme.
Loonies!
.
[Is that a dot.com or a dot.gone ? Mod]
Fake.
[were you referring to yourself? – mod]
Natural climate change itself is re-greeneing some Sahara regions. The livestock will follow.
Dont shoot goats – shoot vegetarians!
Dr. Savoy sees cattle as the control knob dialing in grassland or desert. Complex self- organizing systems are not controlled by a single variable following a simple algorithm. CO2 is one of hundreds of poorly understand variables influencing the complexities of climate and cattle is one element of hundreds determining the type and fate of grassland ecosystems.
Most troubling is Dr. Savoy’s dismissal of fire. True prairies do not exist in any earlier interglacial- they are arguably a construct of man and his use of fire.
Perhaps because Dr. Savoy’s projects are relatively new he has not considered how soil acidification will be stopped given the continuing addition of organic material. (Fire ash has a pH of between 12-13) His video did not address the all important soil formation processes that are simply not controlled by cattle. It will be interesting to see how long his restored grassland will continue in the absence of fire.
Fire also selects for the type of vegetation and prevents invasion by shrubs and later trees. Fire has a role in removing plant litter that can suffocate vegetation and prevent seed germination. Fire also removes the build up of allelopathic substances (herbicides produced by plants to kill other plants). Nitrogen mineralization as an example is inhibited by the formation of organic N and tannin complexes- fire destroys the tannins.
Fire is also essential to nutrient cycling and soil formation. Fire produces the alkaline pH necessary to foster nitrogen fixation and mobilizes phosphorus. If the soil pH falls much below a pH 7- nitrogen fixation ceases.
Dr. Savoy is correct about oxidation of plant material being problematic to grassland development but I’m not sure he appreciates the important nuances as fire also promotes soil water logging and thus moisture. (wet soils produce higher CN content compared to well drained soils- but while important beyond this note’s intent)
Nitrogen fixation requires anoxic or anaerobic conditions. These conditions are certainly fostered by cattle pounding down grasses that under anoxic condition become the substrate for an explosion of nitrogen fixing bacteria. However, it is but one important piece among many important pieces.
Missing from the discussion of desertification is past crop farming practices that drained the soil (ditching, furrows etc). This fostered the oxidation of which Dr. Savoy is concerned and the eventual destruction of the soil profile and disruption of the nutrient cycle. Too much attention has been focused on overgrazing IMHO and not enough on dewatering effects resulting from crop farming.
I’ve seen incorrect comments on this site that cattle “turned the soil.” The biological plows necessary to drive the organic and nutrient material into the deeper soil layers (and create the deep rich organic “black earth” underlying the US tall grass prairies) are the work of insect and burrowing mammals. The eastern mound ant as an example was found to have worked in a two year period 13,600kg/ha of soil down to a depth of 160cm. (Point here is that to create a grassland ecosystem we need all the biologicals not just cattle)
The type of cattle or grazer is also extremely important as it determines the type of grasses or forbs that are selected. You will end up with very different grassland of very different productivity depending on the dominant grazer.
Complex systems do not conform to simple solutions. (Apologies to Dr. Savoy if he has addressed these matters outside the video)
Two great papers on US prairie ecosystems and soils here and here
I would second (or third, fourth or fifth) davidmhoffer’s comments on March 9, 2013 at 7:55 AM, except to add that in NE Oregon some of my neighbors still burn their wheat fields intentionally not so much to clear stubble, which is short nowadays, but to get rid of the straw left behind by combines. There is a market for straw & friends of mine have made a great living baling & trucking it to buyers far & wide, but not all farmers are able to sell theirs. Modern high-yielding soft white wheat varieties leave a lot of short straw.
Another friend of mine tried using goats to eat the straw, but there was not enough of a market for their meat. He & many of my neighbors rotationally pasture cattle (with movable electric fencing & similar in theory to the New Zealand system) in the stubble to eat the volunteer shoots in the fall in fields that will be disced later to be summer fallowed or seeded, depending upon the rotation, or to be left trashy if no-tilled.
So, dryland ranchers here on the semi-arid wheat plateau of Eastern Oregon & in the Blue Mountains above it (also in the Palouse Country of WA) have engaged in all or most of the practices advocated by Dr. Savory for decades (arguably since the 1860s), & others he doesn’t but which are successful in our environment. However the Columbia Plateau is a native bunchgrass prairie, blessed with deep loess soil, gift of the glaciers. Our unirrigated timber, crop & pasture lands get 12 to 18 inches of precipitation per year (up to 34″ in the mountains, mostly as snow), not the fewer than five average of the Sahara & eight to 24″ for the Sahel (rainfall varies on the mostly high plateau of Zimbabwe, but averages IIRC around 34″). Similar practices are possible on the arid Columbia Basin (8″ precip), in combination with center-pivot & wheel-line irrigation.
Indians in Western Oregon used fire to maintain the Willamette Valley as grassland rather than the western hemlock forest it would have been in a climax state. When botanist David Douglas (of the eponymous “fir”) first visited the upper valley in 1828, he found the smoke choking. So the grass farmers who burned their fields had history on their side, but environmentalists were still able to stop them.
Savory is right that public land managers have gone overboard against grazing. (There are few range managers anymore, since grazing is on its way out.) Every year less US Forest Service (Dept. of Ag) & BLM (Dept. of Int) land is leased for grazing, under pressure of “environmentalists” (the same people who love subsidized windmills despite their massacre of birds & bats, but hey, my family, friends & neighbors have made out like gangbusters from those on their land). The BLM now leases for grazing only 155 million of its 245 million acres, while the FS is down to around 80 of 193 million acres, from originally practically all of them.
I didn’t watch Savory’s longer presentation, so he may have answered some of my concerns, such as compaction. I suppose he proposes grazing on desertified ground only when dry, so even the large herds he advocates wouldn’t compact the soil. Zimbabwe has only about four months of (tropical southern) summer rain, but during the wet season the cattle would have to be pastured or fed hay somewhere. Naturally the steers & barren cows would be slaughtered, but that still leaves a lot bovines for which to care.
Finally, sometimes culling wild game is the right thing to do. My brother, a Central Oregon stockman, & his wife, a veterinarian, gained a reputation in the “international foot & mouth disease community” (more like a small village) due to their successful importation of a rare (in North America) breed of alpaca from Bolivia. They rinsed their mouths & noses with vinegar whenever leaving the Truman quarantine facility at Key West, which no longer exists.
The South African government in 1998 invited her to a long seminar on tropical diseases at Kruger NP’s Berg-en-Dal campsite, which then was for staff only & served as a training area for game guards.
The meeting was attended by several of the principals who eliminated FMD in the Australian Outback by a ten year-long extermination of feral bush bulls. FMD-free status was a big economic boon to Oz & would have been to SA. My brother said it would have been feasible to eradicate FMD & TB in the Cape buffalo population (a zoonotic threat to other game animals & humans). But it would have required shooting the buffs from helicopters with .50 cal door mounts (which he suspected were used for cross-border elephant poaching).
Kruger had tried game drives in past with a bunch of guys armed with rifles in hopes of getting one district at a time clean of FMD, but it did not work. There actually not all that many buff in SA & extermination as in Australia was possible. They could have been reintroduced from clean herds.
The Sabi River was a natural barrier for a lot of hoofed stock & that part of Kruger would have been the best place to start. SA did not adopt his pretty radical proposal, but the Aussies loved it.
Male lions feed on buffs & lionesses on kudu. The buffalo-lion-kudu loop is a human health issue, since TB is one of many diseases we share with animals. It spreads from infected animals via meat, blood & thorns. Acacia thorns are like barbed wire & can infect humans when infected animals are scratched.
A buffalo he shot years later in Zimbabwae had a lesion that looked a lot like those they saw in Kruger on kudu, so he didn’t eat any of the meat or get involved with butchering that animal.
FMD is still a problem in SA & even more in Zimbabwe, now that its descent into chaos has hastened. In 2011 Botswana’s FMD-free status was violated by incursions from Zimbabwe.
Calvin Long: There is a net gain in nitrogen. Ruminants have nitrogen fixing bacteria in their stomachs.
I did not know that. Thanks. All the better.
davidmhuffer: 1. A maximum is still arrived at at some point.
2. Prairie fires regularly set the grassland back
3. The notion that a single hectare of land could sequester the output of 6,000 cars on an on going basis is ludicrous.
1. that is not known. Experience shows the soil getting thicker year after year.
2. The accumulated carbon in the soil is little disturbed.
3. I agree with you there, but I think it’s irrelevant; his talk would have been better without the claim, but I never made the claim.
Willis and Crispin in Waterloo but actually in Yogyakarta:
Thanks for your comments. My intent was to question the veracity of “burning one billion ha of grassland annually” (11:08) and Willis you concur. “To start with, there aren’t a billion hectares of grasslands in all of Africa … ” Not questioning burning…just the actual figure used.
I do not dispute the general concepts of the video because I do not know this subject. I was just questioning the figures which Willis confirms to be incorrect.
The speaker was most emphatic about this point at 11:08. If the “one billion” is inaccurate then what else is inaccurate? Just sayin’
Regards
Clive
Steven Mosher says:
March 9, 2013 at 6:30 pm
Steven, I’ve given it a day to let my blood pressure drop down to the triple digits, so let me answer your objection.
Farmer Braun quoted me in his first comment. Fair enough, well done.
However, in his second comment he didn’t quote one word. Instead he referred to some vague unspecified “unsubstantiated comment” he said I’d made during my discussion of grazing, viz:
farmerbraun says:
March 9, 2013 at 4:22 pm
Now I’m not a mind reader. Which comment is he referring to? He gives no hint or clue. I made a number of comments about continuous grazing in my post. Is he talking about his previous quote? Is he thinking about a different comment?
I have no way of knowing, Steven. And having gotten into trouble when I’ve made assumptions in the past, these days I am more careful to be sure what the other person is referring to.
So I asked him to point out, by quoting my words, what “unsubstantiated comment” he was talking about. Crazy me, huh?
However, clearly asking for more information must be either a high crime or a misdemeanor in your book, because at that point you waltz in, Steven, to abuse me for seeking clarification … what, are you seriously claiming it would be better for me to make rash assumptions??
Sometimes, my friend, the damage you do to your own reputation is substantial. I don’t understand your desire to bark and snap at my ankles, but whatever your reasons, you are doing yourself harm.
Just sayin’ … you are a very smart man, your science-fu is strong, but your unrelenting, mindless, content-less attacks on me for doing things like seeking clarification before answering are harming you, not me.
w.
… Yeah, that’s a more measured response. I’ll learn how to be Canadian yet, Steve McIntyre is my sensei in these matters …
It is at 11:50 forwards.
PS: My suspicion is, without having done any actual research, that the frequency & severity of western US forest fires are in part attributable to reduced grazing. Without low-level fires, pine forests don’t regenerate naturally. Decades of fire suppression led to horrific fires once started, due to fuel build up. Then when the USFS begrudgingly let some natural fires burn, they intentionally allowed them to get big, to boost the agency’s budget. And when the Park Service tried setting fires, they no surprise let those burn up beloved Yellowstone.
The government is usually not your friend, especially when it’s trying to help. The EPA may have helped clean up the environment, but now it has gotten out of congressional control & become a monster, declaring contrary to all real science that CO2 is a pollutant. Brilliant! Now at last breathing can be taxed.