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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Hi Anthony – Thank you for alerting us to this TED talk! With respect to desertification, see also this study of Inner Mongolia
Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, 1992: Grasslands and grassland sciences in Northern China, Office of International Affairs, National Research Council, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 214 pp. http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=1942
Roger Sr
There is no doubt that sensible land and livestock management can reduce the desertifying effects of low rainfall.
In the end though that which is achievable is limited by the amount of rainfall.
For those limits we have to look at the way global air circulation and the positions of the dry zones change over centuries.
Thanks for sharing. The answer to most of the environmental problems are to just let nature do nature, right?
I’m definitely going to spend some more time researching and learning about this!
So, a real estimate of the number of buffalo on the North American continent prior to say 1200 A.D.
Add in the deer, antelope, moose, and other grazing ones.
Odd how it worked do fine.
Nobody ever wonderd why millions and millions of buffalo didn’t destroy the American soil.
I had the great privilege of meeting Allan years ago. He is a legend in the ranching industry and the Savory method of land management can triple the carrying capacity of the land. My best friend, Duke, is a long time student of Allan’s and studied under him for years. You can literally see the difference in the foliage on Duke’s side of the fence from his neighbors after a few years of applying the Savory system.
I have ‘reclaimed’ degraded land along the railway line where I live in
Melbourne Oz and turned it into a wild life corridor. In the early days of
the global warming scare before I’d done the reading 🙂 I wanted to play
my part in covering the earth and sequestering carbon . I still do this but
no longer motivated by fear of unprecedented warming. I’m happy to see
clay become good top soil and grow bushland and support life.
Say, … ..’O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee……
…. (but
true
to the incomperable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerwst
them only with
spring)’ H/t e.e.cummings.
In one of the posts on my own blog, I try to lay out a politically progressive argument for dealing with climate change as a way of “doing the things we should be doing anyway”. This is a great example of exactly what I meant.
http://broadspeculations.com/2012/08/26/climate-of-change/
The only question I have is whether this strategy will actually work across the whole of North Africa. This region has been subject to periodic dry and wet periods going back over 100,000 years. I always thought this was related to changes in Earth’s orbit and tilt. However, this might raise the possibility that the desertification of North Africa at least in last several thousand years might have come about through humans destruction of the grazing wildlife that must have existed at one time in the region.
Once again it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
So is the answer in subsistence farming, which the Greenies could sympathise with, or in huge great castle ranching ?
Does this mean we can export all the radicals busybodies that are now infesting Washington to give them something to do, and leave my power bills alone?
I knew it – Vegetarians are causing global warming.
P.S. I’ll have my steak medium rare with a nice domestic beer.
How can we believe this guy — where are his computer models?
All he does is fieldwork, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and then applying it. /sarc.
And for our own health, on Willis’ article that he linked above, someone recommended this book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, here on amazon http://tinyurl.com/b4vfek8
All the wheat, pasta, carbs we eat are not the healty way to go. A big part of that may be the processing.
Dust Bowl Classic: “The Plow that Broke the Plains” 1936
http://youtu.be/bpi_rJZTM44
Fascinating talk. Kudos to Mark Steward Young and Anthony for bringing it forward. This makes so much sense.
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.
Firstly, it’s the water. Liquid water.
Sunlight.
Assimilable Nitrogen and other trace elements.
The green plants also have another absolute requirement for them to grow. What was it? My mind has gone blank.
Oh, Yes, I remember now. Carbon dioxide.
Also, I get slightly uneasy when someone is so supremely confident that they are in possession of the one true solution and that there are no others possible. A heuristic approach has served us well in the past.
Outstanding post Anthony! Given the dominance of carbon in living tissue, this makes perfect sense for a greener planet.
Frankly, I have never believed that increased CO2 was a CAUSE of warming, but rather an EFFECT of warming. There is a CO2 flux into the atmosphere from the world’s great CO2 sinks: the land and the sea. This presentation clearly explains how to capture more of this CO2 flux at the surface where it is best used for enriching plant life.
The government needs to quit flying drones to measure herd size and magnitude of cow farts. Allan Savory appears to be bringing back common sense agricultural management techniques.
Thanks for sharing this Anthony.
And one more comment, he is still blaming the CO2 boogieman for climate change.
Here is a paper that presents an analysis of one of the locations discussed in his talk
Beltrán-Przekurat, A., R.A. Pielke Sr., D.P.C. Peters, K.A. Snyder, and A. Rango, 2008: Modelling the effects of historical vegetation change on near surface atmosphere in the northern Chihuahuan Desert. J. Arid Environments, 72:10, 1897-1910, doi:10.1016/j.jaridenv.2008.05.012.
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/r-2973.pdf
It is notable that most of the examples of massive desertification are occurring in places that have no private property rights, or have been confiscated by government to be “conserved”. Issues of “carbon” aside (it is still not clear that increased concentrations of atmospheric CO2 have much if anything to with “climate change”) – anyone who grew up on or near a ranch or dryland farm whose livelihood depends on the continuing productivity of the land would understand the concept of the video.
Respectfully, this video says more about the failure of central planning and technocracy than it does about “climate” – a lethal combination of bureaucracy and the “tragedy of the commons”.
Given the opportunity, individuals will prove to be far better stewards of the land than governments or well meaning organizations.
40,000 elephants would agree.
The Parable of the Lost Sheep
All very good but it is underpinned by holism and at its core profoundly anti-science.
Here is a quote from the longer version:
“We’ve had one Green Revolution that was disastrous, we’ve got another one taking place that’s going to be a bigger disaster.”
Not much praise for Borlaug there then.
Rather than describe itself as anti-science it is couched in terms of being anti-reductionist. Holism is a philosophy, an overarching belief system that trumps other systems of thinking and allows gentlemen such as Savory to make statements indicating that theirs is the only solution (which he does in this case).
It also has political underpinnings which in the hands of its inventor, Jan Smuts, gave rise to the “All Things Bright and Beautiful” flavour of ecology, with predefined roles, for plants, animals, and humans subdivided by race.
It is also a very static view under which nature or perhaps God always knew best and humanity is the root of the world’s evils. It was one of many ideas that underpinned environmentalism and is echoed in the terminally static vision that gave us “Limits to Growth”.
If it were only a set of ideas towards better husbandry and land management, amongst other equivalent sets of ideas that would be one thing. But it isn’t, it is a philosophy and in its own terms the only solution.
I suggest that people who doubt this watch the longer version and follow up on what Holism and Smuts were all about, and where the science ends and the woo begins.
tobias says:
March 9, 2013 at 12:28 am
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 no new news and was done by farmers as they cared for the land.
He has learned how wrong the “consensus science” can be and still does not understand and is not a bit of skeptic for the “climate-change” meme.
He tries to point to real problems, but this will not have the same traction with the religious part of warmista community as it does not have the religious elemtents in it: the sinns that we commited and the need to do penitence for the sinns.
And sorry but, before killing those 40000 elephants would it not have been good to test the solution on a couple of hectars to see if it works?
Stephen Richards says:
March 9, 2013 at 2:28 am
I dislike immensely the continuous use of carbon as opposed to CO² (a minor thing but annoying) and the absolute assumption that CO² of itself fuels (climate change) global warming. He like many other environmentalists has adopted the “climate change” description of global warming to avoid conflict with reality.
Totally agree Stephen, same for me. To mention also black-carbon use instead of soot. I feel it is done to use “carbon” in connection with polution, identify it automatically as polutant.
I find this being language phychology.
Now if the planet greens it is because of the added CO2, this works.