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
I have finally had the chance to sit and watch this through and found it very validating of some notions arrived at on my own over the years. It has been rather well known that grasslands and ruminants co-evolved and so it would be expected that the removal of the herds of ruminants would change the land. But this sort of thing even extends to other environments and what I mean by “this sort of thing” is where humans intervening to “protect” or to “save” something actually does more damage than leaving things alone. I’ll give a couple of examples.
In California, whenever there is a dolphin or an adolescent whale that ends up in the Sacramento River delta or even farther up the river, thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours are spent “saving” the animal. Well, who “saved” them before we arrived? The problem is that this would have been a fairly normal occurrence before we arrived and there were probably one or two of these every year or so. A sea mammal that wanders into a fresh water area and dies would be a food bonanza for many species. Small fish and other scavengers would have had an absolute feeding frenzy on these. Young salmon and trout would possibly feed on the smaller fish feeding on the carcass. We wonder why the smelt populations are down.
Whales that beach themselves are quickly removed or if they haven’t died are “saved” or attempted to be “saved” by people. These beached whale carcasses were a major food supply for the California Condor and all sorts of other scavenging species on the beach. Crabs, insects, birds, all sorts of things would find a smorgasbord in a beached carcass. Flies would lay eggs in the carcass, birds would eat the larvae, others would eat the hatched out flies. These carcasses would be absolute “food bombs” that would maintain populations of these animals all long the coast. The decay would also act to fertilize beach grasses and other plant life that help stabilize the beaches.
In many cases we need to stop “managing” things so “carefully” because I believe that in many cases we are “saving” things right to death. Where possible, allow that whale carcass to remain on the beach. Don’t “save” that young whale that wanders into the delta. Ok, fine, maybe move it after death to a place where it can decay without being too much of a health hazard to people, but allow it to decay. This is how those ecosystems evolved. When we started to harvest the great whale herds, these events became less common. As those events came less often, we saw the demise of the condors and the smaller species that used those carcasses for bottom of the food chain nutrition. That lack of abundance worked its way up the food chain.
The great cattle drives of the 1800’s where great herds of cattle would be driven from Texas, across Oklahoma and Kansas and delivered to the stockyards in Kansas City or Omaha were probably very good for that land and replaced the actions of the buffalo. Since those have stopped, we have likely seen a degradation of that land.
As the whale herds begin to recover, we will likely see an increase in beached animals. These animals will likely cause a boom in the numbers of the very species they feed on.
We need to stop “saving” things to death, we need to stop trying to “manage” things so closely but it is an industry with entire government departments and various NGOs devoted to it. It needs to stop or at least be dialed back a bit.
In Australia we have developed Cell Grazing where instead of having a 100 acre paddock you have 10 x 10 acre paddocks. You put grazing animals into the first paddock for a week, then the next paddock for a week etc . By the time the animals get back to the first paddock it has been 10 weeks, two and a half months. What happens is that the plants have 2 1/2 months to recover and when they first tried it out in our outback suddenly new plants appeared that had never been seen before.. (Janet Holmes A’Court tried it on the Barkley Tablelands in the Northern Territory with amazing success)
We also burn, like he said they do in Africa. From May this year to October right across the top end of Australia there will be fires so that every inch of the country is burnt.
This’ll be of interest to Paleo lifefestyle fans. Here on WUWT a comment mentioned conventional nutrition advice (low fat) as being another pseudo-science — that was a few years ago and it got me to try Paleo — and it is similar to this in that, you can either follow nutrition expert advice to keep doing harder what isn’t working, and end up demoralised and feeling guilty, or discover a key to how nature works, which works and works quickly. Lierre Keith (ex-vegan) wrote in The Vegetarian Myth about what if we just returned the industrial monoculture to pasture and grazing and humans ate the animals we’d evolved to eat? Wouldn’t it be sooo interesting if what turned out to be healthy for humans re. diabetes and obesity, also turned out to work for the environment?
If this is truly a good idea, and it certainly appears to be, then it shouldn’t need the bogeyman of manmade climate change to sell it. Stopping desertification, making areas habitable again, and providing food for people sound like excellent goals of their own.
ScottD says: “Now that I think about it most ruminates (cows, buffaloes, etc) have developed a symbiotic relationship with grasses.”
ruminate [ˈruːmɪˌneɪt]; vb
1. (Life Sciences & Allied Applications / Zoology) (of ruminants) to chew (the cud)
2. (when intr, often foll by upon, on, etc.) to meditate or ponder (upon)
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003
You mean ruminants.
I watched this video several days ago, as a good friend of mine posted it on his Facebook. I was impressed and was sure I could find more about Allan Savory if I did a search on WUWT. Well I did the search and came up dry.
But lo and behold this morning the Allan Savory presentation appears on WUWT. I am starting to regain my faith in mankind. Thanks Anthony and Allan Savory, and my professor friend at WWU.
Surely we can find a better nickname for the head of the IPCC than “Packy” [phonetically similar to “Paki”]?
I don’t know whether you intended it that way, but it sounds inappropriate. You might not hear them, being American, but the same phase is often considered to have racial overtones in, for example, Canada, Australia, and especially the United Kingdom.
This whole story is like one giant DUH!
I am not saying this Alan is correct but I have ALWAYS been skeptical of most of the widely held beliefs preached by scientists regarding the environment. We spent 50 years fighting fires in North America only to discover that fires are important to the health of the that ecosystem. Now the forestry service spends much of their time burning forests in order to restore health.
The message or takeaway is that in many complex situations scientists STILL DO NOT UNDERSTAND FULLY what is going on. When it comes to nature we need to be wary of scientists making strong statements and preaching with total conviction. They are USUALLY WRONG when they simplify things too much!
Alan was equally convinced that killing 40,000 elephants was the right thing to do – so how can we trust him when he now says the exact OPPOSITE with equal conviction!
Nature and climate are more COMPLEX than simple one dimensional high school simpleton rules. Just as you do NOT control climate through CO2, you do not control desertification through herd control. Nature is NEVER so ridiculously simple.
I have personally observed that spreading animal manure over the soil is great for increasing plant yield. Perhaps I should do a TED talk? Oops – it appears some humans have already figured this out 1000’s of years ago and any farming and gardening book will mention this simple fact.
WHY DO PROPELLERHEADS HAVE TO REDISCOVER WHAT EVERY ORDINARY PERSON KNOWS AND THEN MAKE IT SOUND LIKE THE HOLY GRAIL?
Scientific PRIESTS are so very tiring and boring and WRONG.
ferd berple;
2. 1 hectare of desert = 6,000 cars.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yup, that was one of the many major indicators that this guy is full of it. Once the grassland is in a healthy state, it sequesters precisely zero co2. The new growth each year is off set by decomposition (even if it is further up the food chain due to the grass being eaten by animals, it still eventually decomposes at about the same rate it is being produced).
So the only CO2 being sequestered is during the transition from desert to healthy grassland.
So let’s run that number again and ask the obvious question:
A one time sequestration that = 6,000 cars for:
a) 1 year?
b) 1 month?
c) 100,000 km?
d) 5 km?
What?
What total bull.
John F. Hultquist says: March 9, 2013 at 9:05 am
The following site provides a short statement and then 6 links to critiques of Holisitic Resource Management – also known as the “Savory grazing method.” Bottom line: They say it is crap!
http://www.publiclandsranching.org/htmlres/myth_grazing_solution.htm
You may well be correct John, I see quite a few reasons why it may not be quiet so simple (eg – feeding the initial mob in desert conditions, and dealing with (ie carrying feed to or selling) increased herds in times of true drought (which always have and will occur).
… .but I really have to worry about a critique in which the main objection on the subject page is based on an irrelevancy – surely it is a matter of trialling this management rather than simply saying “We are different, so it won’t work here!”
Eg; Quote: “….this theory has been roundly criticized for presupposing that the vegetation, soils, and wildlife that live on western grasslands and deserts are fundamentally the same as the African Serengheti(!)….”
And a from group which clearly has its own preconceived attitudes, ideas and agendas:
The Greenies will have an answer for this: “But what about all the methane those cattle are releasing! We’ll just be trading one greenhouse gas for another!”
Of course, what about those gigantic herds of Bison on the American plains or the gigantic herds of the Serengeti that used to be there before man releasing methane?
Agreed. So which warmist blog will step up and join us in a funding race for this?
Not sure how many baseball bats upside the head it’s going to take to wake up the eco-cultists,but this should help with a few.But remember,you’re fighting the Agenda 21 genocidists,the power/money, hungry,the psychotic,and the just plain stupid.The latter do not live in reality,so are easy dupes for the former. Still a ways to go.
Anthony – this is jaw-dropping and revolutionary. Who knew such a simple solution could address so many problems (poverty, hunger, carbon emissions). Great find – hope you will continue to follow and report on this.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power are experts at desertification. Look at how efficiently they have dried up the Owens River Valley in Eastern California. Would like to know Dr. Savory’s perspective on water diversion and the impact on the land and associated ecosystems. A fertile Owen’s Valley could provide food for hundreds of thousands of people, both with livestock and crops.
Excellent !
Thanks Anthony
Now, what did you all do with Gail Combs? She is MIA (ª¿ª)
Jens Raunsø Jensen,
The paper you referred to does not say Savoy is wrong. They state there is a lack of large scale experimental data. That does not mean he is wrong. Finally, if his methods are actually nonsense, people will soon tell him due to their own experiences.
Referring to the video:
I don’t accept the hypothesis of creature-cause desertification or overpopulation by humanity.. What I heard was a using fear-mongering hyperbole like “Flat-Earth” and the usual pejoratives to hype his views.
He’s just an old coot stuck in a narrow-minded rut.
Its the sun stupid.
Deserts are natural. They always have been, Arctic deserts, equatorial deserts.
Irrigation of the desert view from space:
http://holeintheclouds.net/sites/holeintheclouds.net/files/good_morning/12jan/irrigation-sm.jpg
The myth of overpopulation:
He’s just an old socialist spouting his spin on Global Warming, which there hasn’t been, for the past 18 years.
Let’s not get carried away – it’s not panacea for all desertification. Why not read a second opinion
http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=26965
I don’t buy the bit about goats. To say that goats are the solution to desertification is just plain goddamn wrong. Cattle I can believe; sheep, hmmm, maybe. But eat-everything-down-to-the-ground-and-then-dig-for-the-roots goats? Not in a joke.
I think you missed the forest for the trees, and in a big way.
It [the CO2 cycle)] isn’t his area of expertise. I kind of doubt that he thinks fossil fuels are as big a deal as others do. That’s the impression I got watching that video.
That said, burning anything, whether grasslands, forests, or fossil fuels is polluting to air quality and no one disputes that. But Allan Savory is right when he says degrading the quality of land has led to the degredation and downfall of civilisations that depend on the land.
By bringing up the CO2 sequestration of turning desert into grassland that, according to scientists he’s asked about it (because, and I repeat myself, it isn’t his area of expertise — he’s a biologist and makes no pretence otherwise) is a way of selling the idea to people who are, possibly wrongly, focused on it.
Even if CO2 isn’t the main driver of climate change, and I agree with you that it isn’t, it can only help to treat the land in a way closer to how the ecosystem evolved — which certainly included large herds of grass eaters.
And yes, of course deserts are natural. But it isn’t ideal to continually expand the size of them either, especially as we’re dependent on food.
Finally, meat is higher-quality food. We evolved as hunter-gatherers and while our ancient ancestors did a certain, limited amount of farming at some warmer latitudes, the bulk of their diet was still hunter-fisher-gatherer based. Having more protein and healthy natural fats in the human diet is a boon to humanity.
The current relative overconsumption of grains and sugars is a major plague upon it, causing rises in diabetes and other illnesses in the west.
I’m all for better land-management practices.
Very interesting and enjoyable. Listening to Dr. Savory’s talk elicited two confllicting thoughts. First, the tenor of Dr. Savory’s presentation (humble, sincere and anything but “in your face, I’m the expert and don’t you dare question me”) is a breath of fresh air compared to Michael Mann and his ilk.
Second, when Dr. Savory was young and a student he knew the answer to the cause of desertification. As he aged and studied the issue he came to the conclusion that what as a student he knew to be true was in fact not true. Now he knows the true and only answer. I agree that he’s probably more correct now than he was in the past and what he now believes is likely to be right; but his past experience should, in my opinion, temper his conviction that he now knows the “only answer to mitigating desertification”.
Other than this minor criticism, I was thoroughly impressed. Thank you Anthony for bringing his talk to my attention.
Good talk (other than the ‘carbon-in-the-atmosphere-problem’ nonsense).
And a sobering reminder that, almost without exception, when mankind tries to “fix” something in nature it gets messed up. Also a reminder that starvation/poverty are not the result of a lack of resources, but of mismanagement of resources.
There is a good discussion in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, if memory serves, about some ranchers/farmers in the US who have started using planned livestock grazing to increase soil productivity, with excellent results.
This article would be enhanced by applying “The Watts Standard Technique”.
That is: Find the nearest long-term stations for every single point-of-interest mentioned by Dr. Savory. Graph temperature and rainfall.
The dramatic long-term park shots and ‘research station’ shots should be interesting.
ref. Gary Pearse, 9:01 am:
Hi Gary, What’s your point? You talk about people haters at heart !
I have also worked in Northern Nigeria for two years and are quite familiar with the issues and conditions there. And I have worked with land development and poverty alleviation in semi-arid areas in 25 countries of Africa and Asia for years and could tell a rather long story about that.
You and many others here on this blog prefer to subscribe to the preaching of a person who can not document his findings and test of his theories. It is my experience from meeting such guys that somebody claiming to have a unique solution to the “worlds problems” is a demagog and that’s exactly how I evaluate Mr Savory. Greening the deserts of the world – my ***.
regards … jens