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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I’m missing something here: how is the growing of vegetation good, but the production of “carbon” bad, since I presume that he does actually mean carbon dioxide here, rather than carbon, per se?
I am vaguely prepared to believe that he is on to something here, but not entirely convinced.
Sheep will eat anything that grows and goats will eat anything left behind. Parts of north Africa were rich arable land in Roman times, only to be stripped bare by goats when Arabic nomads arrived. Why didn’t this theory work then?
In Ecuador, it was the sheep, introduced by the Spanish, which denuded the vegetation. When I went there, eight years ago, the practice was to encourage alpaca, instead of sheep, as alpaca ate less of the vegetation. They can’t both be right. Eat lots and deposit lots on the landscape (sheep), or eat much less and, presumably, deposit less (alpaca).
atheok says:
March 10, 2013 at 11:45 am
“Also great stuff about the reality of soils. Though I can’t quite agree fully with your statement that prairies only exist because of man.”
My comment was about “true prairies” or tall grass prairies as opposed to the mixed grass and short grass prairies. The tall grass prairies grow on different soils and higher rainfall compared to the other prairie types. We can see the key role of fire in the selection of tall growth prairie as a stable state with the change witnessed in US over the last century as tall grass prairie reverted to forest as a result of fire suppression. True Prairies don’t seem to exist during the previous interglacials at least in the US. Is this proof- no- does it mean it is all fire related- no. My goal was to raise concern with Dr. Savoy’s claim that fire can be removed without consequence and to present additional aspects that must be considerd in addition to the role of grazers.
“Not being convinced” is a good thing.
I don’t buy a single word of this presentation (except for the fact that 40,000 elephants were killed because of this fool’s conceit). Just about every supposition this guy uses as a basis of his talk is patently false. He starts with lies (“catastrophic global warming,” “carbon,” “saving the planet,” etc.), and he ends with pathetic lies.
For example, great deserts of Earth are not the result of any human activity, however “unscientific” or “politically incorrect.” The “climate change” that created these deserts (as well as any other “climate change”) was (and is) of cosmic origin — precession of Earth’s axis and other changes in Earth’s orbital position, as well as changes in Solar activity, are main causes of climate changes.
Other WUWT commentators (particularly, davidmhoffer) already explained, why this guilt-ridden old heel is not to be trusted.
Surely, if you gather on the patch of desert thousands of cattle that spent a few months on greener pastures or are being fed with the brought-in hay, you can make this particular patch of desert greener for a while. Otherwise, your cattle will die, and your desert will remain a desert.
The photos this guy is using to illustrate his implausible point look picked and altered; the abuse of color filters is evident.
Last but not the least — from my first-hand Soviet experience:
ANY PERSON (ESPECIALLY A WHITE PERSON) WHO KEEPS ANY POSITION OF ANY IMPORTANCE UNDER ZIMBABWEAN REGIME IS UP TO HIS EARS IN CORRUPTION AND LIES BY DEFINITION.
That is one of the most important posts ever on WUWT?
Gimme a skeptical break.
The biggest problem is that it conflates rangelands with deserts thereby confusing the scale of the opportunity to reverse desertification by altering grazing regeimes and and stocking rates. By way of example, cattle are never, ever going to turn the Atacama Desert into grazeable rangelands. Below a certain ratio between precipitation and evaporation rates you get desert.
Bare ground does not ’cause’ deserts. Climate causes deserts. Australia was once covered by rainforest. It was not cattle that turned a lot of it into desert and rangeland. It was climate.
If the post had had a core message of ‘Fiddle with climate and you fiddle with deserts’ then I would have been really impressed. Sceptical sites need to focus on the shocking risks we are taking when we fiddle with climate and generate AGW.
Various climate functinos, including albedo, changes to the water cycle, the role of forests particulates in droplet formation, and the role of wind-blown dust in droplet formation all lead to the conclusion that deserts also help make climate.
Fiddle with deserts and you fiddle with climate.
Anthropogenic activities can increase or increase the area of deserts by various interventions including by altering both micro- and macro- climates.
Natural processes other than climate tend to ensure that deserts are persistent in nature, although not permanently so.
The key here is the balance between the rate of soil formation and the rate of soil loss. Deserts lose soil faster than they form them, reducing the potential of other vegetation growth variables to reverse desertification.
‘Mimicing nature’ in a holistic way can not mean having a human population of 10 billion or 20 billion or 30 billion or wherever optimum human population it is that endless growth advocates think we should be aiming for. Nor does it include hundreds of cities with a population of greater than a million and many with populations of over 10 million. We have gone a long way past being able to survive as a species by ‘mimicing nature’.
Having kicked Mother Nature in the guts, we are on our own.
Others have canvassed the various issues relating to the lack of science underpinning Savory’s views so I will not repeat those.
I note in passing that numerous so-called WUWT skeptical posters have done their usual hagiography and instantly done their ‘Wow!’ thing and ‘Greenies are wicked!’ thing. Grow up, guys. That sort of rubbish adds nothing useful. If you need to vent steam go to Yellowstone.
BTW, one of the elements that was missed in the well-known benefits of shifting your cattle from one paddock to another is that you can use it to help break, or reduce the impact of, parasite cycles. Many parasites have life cycles that includes passing out of cattle by way of dung, saliva and urine and then cattle picking them up by walking or lying down (eg ticks) or, more commonly, by eating them (numerous stomach worms). The trick is to know the ‘hang time’ available to the parasites when they are lurking in pastures, and to keep stock out. Herd health, herd productivity, reduction of chemical controls of herd parasites, reduction in the number of disease vectors, and profitability, all depend to some extent on moving cattle around at the right times.
Australian dairy farmers and beef farmers have been using these sorts of insights for years.
There is nothing new about Savory’s views. They have been one strand of thinking about rangeland grazing regimes and stocking rates for decades. So, remind again why is this one of the most important posts of all time on WUWT?
I can’t help but wonder if the commentators who so severely scrutinize the mouth of Allan Savory are folks who know no persons trapped in the CAGW meme, no folks passively acquiescent to the Big Governmentality with which they have been indoctrinated and propagandized for the past decades, no folks the Savory critics deeply desire and ache to find freedom from those shackles. I’ve found it a positive that “my” side neither imputes nor requires infallibility in those willing to step up to the firing line, take a stand, as opposed to lobbing pot shots from the sidelines or simply voting “present.” Savory’s gentleness, transparency, PC catchphrases, all contribute to a nonthreatening talk that has a chance of breaking through the stupor, the somnolence of those dear ones…it’s a gift I’ll receive with thankfulness and encourage everyone I can think of to view.
Many thanks to Anthony Watts for the posting. And I’m grateful also for the window into the workings of the Eschenbach screening processes. He does know how to make time work.
Willis’ 3/16/2012 post SEVEN BUILDING BLOCKS TO FAIRNESS & EQUITY is another I wish all those Big Governmentality folks would ponder, and the comment of Dave Wendt at 12:20 a.m. 3/17/2012 to that writing.
The globalists keep thinking their one world thoughts; Whittaker Chambers, though thinking world communism inevitable, nevertheless stepped away from it to stand with the projected losers. There is attraction to Oneness, maybe not as the planners envision it, the Agenda 21 folk. Leonard Cohen, visionary poet and songwriter, may have nailed it in “Anthem”, especially the line
“every heart, EVERY heart to love will come
but like a refugee”
I’d sooner show up with rings on my fingers and bells on my toes, as a dancer. The destination makes sense to me as the way, the one and only way, really, for EVERYTHING to be good. Part of traveling that way means being grateful for all the bits and pieces of the puzzle that anyone finds and offers up, to be turned and tried until finally there’s another little edge intact, and we can see a bit more.
Thanks again for accommodating so many voices, so many bits and pieces, and very large chunks.
Anthony, Allan Savory is my hero and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving more publicity to his ideas, and I hope Allan will come to this blog and answer some of the questions himself.
To Alexander Feht: I have always regarded you as a reasonable and very intelligent guy, but in this case I kindly suggest that you think again. I present you with just one simple point:
1) Quoting from his wikipedia page (you may contest this but that’s another question): “When Savory made a public statement that if he had been born a black Rhodesian, he would have been a guerilla fighter and although he urged white Rhodesians to understand why he would feel this, Ian Smith denounced him as a traitor”
2) Others you might want to think again after considering the first one.
As a more general note, I urge folks to watch the 2009 lecture linked by Anthony, it explains the concept much more thoroughly (though to really grasp it you need the book). In particular it explains the role of holistic thinking – he explains that without it one will experience spectacular successess with equally spectacular failures!
Mario Lento:
It threatens to cut the collectivists out of the loop. It could empower local societies.
Steve Oregon says:
March 10, 2013 at 11:02 am
I’ve noticed a common thread with “climate scientists” of the CAGW ilk is they place their paycheck/grant money/prestige first, while real environmental concerns are swept under the rug. I have several friends that listen only to Main Stream Media and they have never heard that CO2 was making things grow faster–the benefits of CO2 are ignored as they would defeat their argument about fossil fuels and all the other bunkum. You’ll find that commenters here at WUWT are some of the most considerate, well-meaning bunch. They actually care, as opposed to those who claim to be the only “credentialed caretakers”.
Oh, regarding C / C2O, I think he’s just toeing the line, trying not to annoy anyone lest that would become distracting to the main message (which is LAND USE). In this context, the amount of, say, the fossil fuels burned, is of little significance.
The problem I see with this system is the management of it by tribal people in the third world. As one commenter noted there is an absolute requirement of social stability (no raiding militias or bandits) and you will have quite an investment in fencing to say nothing of supplying water to each plot and moving the cattle about.
All of that says more government control. Good luck with that.
*C2O->CO2, could as well fix that in the original (previous) message, thanks!
The whole point (which Allan Savory places his CONSISTENT success on) is a whole new Decision Making framework called Holistic Management. It’s not about government control, it’s simply being more conscious about potentially smart things to do.
KM
‘Savory’s gentleness, transparency, PC catchphrases, all contribute to a nonthreatening talk that has a chance of breaking through the stupor, the somnolence of those dear ones…it’s a gift I’ll receive with thankfulness and encourage everyone I can think of to view.’
Quite right. This has got nothing to do about communication styles or about personalities. It would not matter whether Savory is a thug or a saint. You seem to think he is some sort of saint. I don’t care, frankly. The question comes down to this: ‘Does he make scientific sense?’
IMHO, an approach that integrates social, economic and biodiversity thinking is much more likely to work than an approach that simply says, axiomatically, ‘Burning more fossil fuels is good.’ But that does not mean that ALL the elements of Savory’s approach are valid. Nor does it necessarily mean that it would work in ALL circumstances. We have had many a farmer, ex-farmer, poet, or cowboy opinionating on WUWT and then expecting WUWT readers to accept the sometimes absurd generalisations they come up with on the basis of personal experience.
It is often interesting and entertaining. It might be vaguely useful. It might not.
But it is not science.
Glad to see this presentation getting wider currency. I wrote a piece about this a while ago (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5339/), and have met Savory: he seems utterly genuine to me.
CO2 accounting as currently practiced regards cattle as massive GHG producers. Hence the incentives are perversely in the direction of cutting back or eliminating them.
NASA: Amplified Greenhouse Effect Shifts North’s Growing Seasons (March 10, 2013)
“Vegetation growth at Earth’s northern latitudes increasingly resembles lusher latitudes to the south, according to a NASA-funded study based on a 30-year record of ground-based and satellite data sets.”
“In a paper published Sunday, March 10, in the journal Nature Climate Change, an international team of university and NASA scientists examined the relationship between changes in surface temperature and vegetation growth from 45 degrees north latitude to the Arctic Ocean. Results show temperature and vegetation growth at northern latitudes now resemble those found 4 degrees to 6 degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 1982.”
From http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/10mar_greenhouseshift/
What about the upwelling of CO2 from the ENSO ocean cycle hitting Peru?
Watch the second video. Don’t miss it.
I’d like to read all comments after I make a few of my own.
Re:
He appears to be just using the global warming meme as an attention grabber; it’s the wrong justification to launch into his solutions to desertification. He is, unfortunately, a CO2 alarmist, using the idea of “a tsunami” of destruction in the same way that other AGW alarmists do – to promote his own special cure-all as a solution to the world’s problems. As advised by the intro, I overlooked the initial hyperbole, and found that I agreed with much that he says about positive effects of grazing on the grasslands. I found many aspects of his presentation surprisingly weak and actually disturbing.
Savory is unable to answer the moderator’s very reasonable question at the end: how do you re-introduce cattle to land which is barren of every blade of grass in the first place? His answer: we’ve been doing this a long time; and we trebled their growth in the first few years.
…Well, HOW??
Savory blames early nomadic herding practices for creating the desertification in the Sahel in the first place, but never explains just how his herding practices are any different. What, exactly does he do, and for how long does he do it?
What happened to those herds of elephants which (he claims) he was instrumental in decimating? If they were an effective mechanism for “greening” the savannah, rather than just blaming himself, wouldn’t he have done something to see that the elephant was reintroduced in the area?
Savory says there is “only one” thing that can resolve the problem of desertification. Assuming that trampling of the soil and spreading of dung and urine are what he means, how has he shown that human efforts to do this are insufficient?
Assuming that what he is presenting is more than just Savory’s special sauce, where is the research by other experts in desertification to back up what he only claims (as Jens says – and I agree with Jens) anecdotally?
A few of the pictures are impressive – but I would like to see much more.
Side trivia on the Alan Savory story;
One of the arresting slides of African predators used by Alan Savory in the YouTube video (09:15), has a photo credit to the late, great, Bruce Davidson.
Bruce was a well known Australian agronomist whom also worked in Africa and was most likely known to Alan himself. Bruce is best known for his clinical demolition job on the potentials & economics of the Ord River Irrigation scheme in Northern Australia;
“The northern myth: A study of the physical and economic limits to agricultural and pastoral development in tropical Australia.”
http://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Northern_Myth.html?id=2HIEAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/rooted/2011/09/23/sinking-the-top-end-dams-and-food-bowl-plan/?wpmp_switcher=mobile
The book title is largely self explanatory. Apart from the purely economic arguements against large scale irrigation in remote areas, one of the chief problems cited, centres on the endemically unsustainable soils of northern Australia. And so, it appears, at least one of Alan Savory’s contempories would counsel caution in applying overly optimistic ‘holistic’ outcomes to one of the worlds major savannas… one that has been grazed continuously by cattle and buffalo for the past 100 years or more.
Well, EARTH University in Costa Rica is taking him seriously. They’ve even set up programs in Brazil:
http://www.earth.ac.cr/2012/07/31/modulo-demostrativo-de-pastoreo-racional-intensivo-en-la-finca-pecuaria-integrada/?lang=en
John Tillman says:
March 10, 2013 at 11:38 am
now that Tordon is banned.
Dang! When did that happen? (Disclaimer – I have not speared a tree or chopped brush for 25 years).
Re: Tordon ban.
It started with a ban on aerial application over federal lands, then for general use in Oregon. Some ranchers continued using it until stocks were exhausted, so couldn’t recall the exact year.
Appears to have been 1968:
http://hgt.stparchive.com/Archive/HGT/HGT08011968P06.php
Now of course the state requires farmers to take & pass a licensed chemical applicator test.
In Oregon, nobody actually owns any land. The state lets you use it, if you follow the bureaucrats’ orders.
PS on Columbia Plateau dry land crop rotation:
I neglected to mention canola in recent years replacing green or dry peas. And of course with irrigation a variety or other crops can be grown, as diverse as strawberries & bush beans. But raising water to local elevation costs at least as much as buying the land.
Chris D. says:
March 9, 2013 at 6:22 am
“I’m reminded of a paper I read back in the ’70s that was part of an assignment for – of all things – an aesthetics course I was taking in college. It described the interrelationships among the various species of grazing animals that migrated through the Serengeti Plains of Africa. The first species to migrate through were those that fed on the softer tips of the grasses. After that came species that had evolved teeth that equipped them to feed off the thicker stems. And so on. Each subsequent migration benefited from the preceding due to their being able to access the parts of the plants that had been exposed by the last species that went through. Thus, the plants and soil benefited from the selective, but progressive, pruning and fertilization such that the entire ecosphere of the grassland was elegantly balanced around large scale migrations. It was a fascinating read, and was one of my most memorable assignments as an undergrad.”
The extinct steppe-tundra biome of Eurasia & North America during the Pleistocene glaciations worked like the Serengeti. To a certain extent, the ecosystem of remaining bits of the Indo-Gangetic Plain still does.
Ice Age horses filled the role of zebras in Africa. They’re non-ruminants who process cellulose in their ceca rather than elaborate stomachs, with cud-chewing in safety after cropping rapidly. Ruminants follow the equines: antelopes, wildebeest or buffalo in Africa & bison, ibex, red deer, Irish “elk” or saiga in Laurasia, with aurochs in more wooded terrain. Wooly mammoth obviously played the African elephant role (or Indian elephant in that subcontinent), with teeth & trunk tips specialized for tundra vegetation, adapted from its ancestral steppe mammoth. The diet of wooly rhino has been controversial, but it now appears to have been primarily a grazer. Africa of course has a grazing rhino & a browser. The “white” rhino gets its name from the Afrikaans word for wide, referring to the shape of its mouth.
The predators too echoed Africa: lion, leopard & hyena, plus cave bears, brown bears, wolves (v. African hunting dogs & jackals) & sabertooth “cats”. North America had an even more diverse herbivore & carnivore population, including the giant short-faced bears, predators so effective (especially the larger western species) that some have argued that humans were kept out of this continent until they went extinct.
Owen Morgan says: March 10, 2013 at 12:52 pm
“…Sheep will eat anything that grows and goats will eat anything left behind. Parts of north Africa were rich arable land in Roman times, only to be stripped bare by goats when Arabic nomads arrived. Why didn’t this theory work then?…”
It’d probably help to watch the video again and also get some direct information on the topic.
I got the distinct impression some management might be required: (ie, rotational grazing, for a start…).
“whole new Decision Making framework called Holistic Management.”
It is true that this is what Alan Savory is really all about, and the cover of his book presents the various management models in a pictorial form , which makes it clear exactly what he means by holistic resource management, but the idea that this is new , at least to those farmers, of any era (except perhaps the present) with a few decades of experience, will not stand scrutiny.
In fact FB believes that both of his grandfathers employed exactly the same management model; they were dealing with a complex , semi-chaotic biological system with multiple negative and positive feedback loops, and the task was to keep it on a roughly even keel in the face of constantly changing externalities. How else to manage it , except wholistically?
That’s farming, and a certain type of busy brain finds it enormously interesting and challenging, and rewarding if you get it right.