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.
Really don’t understand the people who automatically jump on this sort of thing as “socialist claptrap, blah de blah de blah….”..
As far as I could see, watching both videos, at no point is this guy advocating anything but taking land which is of no use whatsoever to us in its current state and letting nature do what nature did for countless millions of years before the blip in geological time that’s been man’s existence.
He doesn’t EVEN appear to be saying we should stop that nice, profitable, Western-style intensive farming where the world can tolerate it. Just that we might get some productivity out of the sh*t bits of the world if we try to mimic what the plants and animals would do naturally.
Anyone who’s ever had a garden will know that leaving soil – especially poor soil – to itself isn’t going to work well. So we fertilise it and dig it and things grow better. That’s pretty much what those gazillion herbivores used to do – drop fertiliser everywhere, then dig it in by trampling it.
Only, we don’t want herds of a gazillion wild herbivores wandering through our farmlands and, besides, we found that they’re quite tasty, so we got rid of them over the millenia by either culling them or eating them. Only we didn’t (in fact, couldn’t) then go out and fertilise and dig the millions of square miles they used to live on. It makes perfect sense to let the animals do the work (for virtually no cost) that they do naturally, then eat the animals – especially in the vast areas where modern techniques aren’t viable or cost effective.
The only people who could possibly argue with that are those with interests in intensive farming or tractor production, or those who (for whatever reason) simply don’t want to see any improvement in 3rd world conditions!
It’s so infuriating to find yet again the “environmentalists'”/ Big Brother programs have ironically help destroy the environment: desertification caused by reduced livestock graving, increased forest fires by limiting/banning controlled burns, rabid push for vegetarianism, which has increased heart disease, the stupid food pyramid that greatly reduces meat consumption, vastly increases carbohydrate consumption leading to an epidemic of obesity and diabetes, excessive drug regulations that cost $1 BILLION per drug in compliance costs, the $trillion CAGW fiasco etc.
When will people finally realize that governments’ over regulation of food, drug and environment sectors has hurt rather than helped societies around the world.
Almost without exception, free-market solutions invariably lead to much higher standards of living than do central government controlled solutions.
Reblogged this on Minor contemplations and musings and commented:
A TED talk worth watching…an alternative to carbon trading or cap/trade to help climate change. Bring on the herds of animals to mimic nature.
I saw the long video and, like other commenters here, I was somewhat put off by his certainty that his was the only solution to climate change. But some strutting is understandable after decades of being ostracized for an idea that has been vindicated to some extent (imagine how Wegman would react today).
One commenter asked how grazing herds could regenerate an absolutely barren area? Well, my understanding is that a cow’s digestive track takes about 2-3 days to pass through its contents. Another commenter said there’s seeds and associated organic material to be dunged and urinated to be driven into the ground by hooves to possibly restore the barren area once rainwater hits the area. Excellent point.
I have also read that along the margins of the Sahel/Sahara that locals are tilling soil to minimize erosion and retain runoff and that they are planting drought-tolerant plant species that retain moisture in their roots. As a result, the desert is being driven back. Match that with Savory’s concept, and we may not have a silver bullet for all our climate concerns. But it’s nothing to be dissed lightly.
” Christoph Dollis says:
March 9, 2013 at 9:56 am
“I found the talk an eye opener and it directly contradicts Packy and the IPCC’s claim ….”
Surely we can find a better nickname for the head of the IPCC than “Packy” [phonetically similar to “Paki”]?”
Instead of everyone having to remember all these PC “rules,” just get over it. Lose the thick skin, It’s much simpler and easier for everyone. IOW, don’t take everything so seriously.
I don’t have a problem with Savory’s confidence in the validity of his observations since he is able to own up to horrific mistakes he has made as a scientist. He is passionate about the importance of his work and is an advocate for his concept of land use but who does anything at all if they are not passionate about what they are doing.
Is this “The Most Important Thing There Ever Was?” Who knows. But what he advocates seems harmless enough and could do good.
For grasslands that have been converted to cropland, no-till farming is reversing soil depletion and desertification. No-till farming can only be done on large scales with genetically modified crops. GM crops are also opposed by “environmentalists” or “greens”. They are in denial about the benefit of GM crops.
CO2 affects the water vapor/heat concentrations in our atmosphere and that, my friends, does cause an increase in overall global temps as well as an increase of severe weather ( the dynamics of increased energy from heat and water vapor) that we are witnessing now, as well as having been documented for the last several decades.I’m at a loss as to why that is such an incredibly difficult fact for so many to accept. Ignorance? Fear? Compensation by those in the fossil fuel industry? Burning massive amounts of fossil fuels releases massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Never before has our earth has such a *rapid* increase of CO2 in such short of a time. The short time beginning precisely when the industrial revolution began and fossil fuels increasingly burned. 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.
A word or two of background on Dr. Allan Savory from a contemporary, compatriot and fellow exile might be of interest. Allan is not some brand new zealot with a theory. For more than forty years he has been the world’s foremost authority on the nurture and resuscitation of ranch land and the optimisation of ranch water usage. I cannot conceive of any cattleman who has ever consulted him arguing with that. It is a tragedy that he and his methods are not more widely known among the general public. His position on desertification follows quite naturally from his “Savory System” of ranch management.
I can’t imagine that he has ever applied his mind to AGW but if he has he has got that badly wrong. . He is more a practical man rather than an academic and his teaching has always been empirically based. These days he has a web site and an ‘institution’ but certainly in his younger days he never enjoyed the backing of a powerhouse sponsor and he is not a natural or a successful self publicist. He was universally esteemed within his home country but did himself no favours when he went into politics at the end of the ‘sixties, an endeavor for which few are suited. His mention of the elephant culls strikes me as a populist appeal – a little like ‘let’s save the poor polar bears’. One can ranch the white rhinoceros and the Nile crocodile and a few other large animals with no great difficulty, but you can’t do that with the elephant. He goes where he likes and cannot be fenced. Put a concrete wall between him and his planned water hole for this evening and he and his impi, perhaps three hundred strong, will go straight through it.There are solutions but short of NASA going into hibernation and donating its funding to the cause, and declaring, say, Louisiana as a reserve for Zimbabwean elephants with no right of human abode, it is difficult to see an ideal answer.
Somebody above mentioned British colonial rule and it might be thought that Britain should have funded elephant conservation. From the arrival of the Pioneer Column in 1890 the British Government did not govern Rhodesia for one day and it did not fund the country’s needs. The country first came under British government law in December 1979. That culminated four months later with ‘one man, one vote, once’
.
Having said all that, when it comes to grassland, Dr. Allan Savory has no peer. He and I were born within days of one another and I don’t think that either one of us will be making much of an impact in future.
I too am of the same generation, come from the same country and encountered him in politics in the 70’s in the Rhodesia Party.
I think you mistake the reason for including the elephants in the presentation. His point, I think, was that what he and so many of us were taught was incorrect. All of the science up to that point was the consensus but he found over time that it was mistaken. It was not a polar bear moment.
Like others here I don’t think he believes in the CO2/Thermageddon story but he recognises that the debate is fierce and it would be a distraction from what he is saying. To me he is really advocating a more profitable, less damaging method of livestock farming. He says that if it is adopted it would lead to less desert and a better food supply. Farmers are hard headed types and would only implement the system if it made them more money ( or smaller losses ).
Savory is not a snake oil salesman, rather a genuine guy who is trying to share what he has learned in the belief it will make things better for many rather than worse.
Too slow. And too many delusions of his own that he used emotionally.
Biodiversity is not the issue he is discussing. Many arid regions are very bio-diverse places with creatures that adapted over ages. Their adaptation is not because of man or man’s influence on the earth. The reference the gentleman making the presentation is stumbling around, yes stumbling, is total biomass not biodiversity; and yes every lush forest/farmland has more biomass than an arid region. You could possibly relate the total biomass to the total content of water.
Nice pics of the sand dunes in Texas. Completely natural. Ghost towns? Well, maybe; I sure wouldn’t try stealing anything from any of those houses until one is absolutely positive no one is living there. And no, not everyone who lives in a mostly deserted town is eager for company or vandals. The picture of the overgrazed area in Montana (I think, I’m not going back into the presentation to check) is actually a picture of irrigated land versus the surrounding land, not overgrazed land. When flying over the western states one can look down and see round circles of green. They represent irrigated parcels and either the water is pumped from running water (river, stream) or up from an aquifer.
With enough fresh water, the entire west could be turned into lush farmland. Only the atmosphere is not cooperating with dropping water from the sky. Before the polar caps melt we could drag icebergs across California (and those tiny Sierras, heh) and fill the whole basin with sweet fresh water.
There are a lot of pity pictures with emotive phrasing. Do not trust pictures unless verified! It may not be photo-shopped, but that doesn’t mean they’re true representation of a person’s words.
Ifn’ I was silly (stupid) enough to be president; it seems to me that a president should be far-seeing enough to realize that for America to truly double in size that we would have to seek a way to increase (not necessarily double) America’s arable land. Taking the gentleman’s suggestions as a start is a good idea. My thought would be to seek a good source of fresh water first. I’d also expect the enviro’s to go bananas in protecting the happily arid living creatures like the desert tortoise.
There used to be a film shown on PBS many years ago about a man who collected seeds and planted forests in land destroyed by wars. I thought the film was brilliant as the movie unfolded one realized that the man planting seeds understood ecological niches and biodiversity and that he planted seeds necessary to bring multiple interwoven layers of biology back.
Perhaps it is time for that film to make the rounds again. It was a charcoal/crayon series of drawings that made the film with a narrator.
I have always (or at least for more than a decade) been wary of the “CO2 is the root of all evil” message (just like most people here). My reason for being skeptical is that I feel solid proof is required before vilifying a gas that is vital to most life on this planet.
Mr Savory’s presentation OTOH presents a clear message and I find every step of it easy to follow. This makes much more sense than anything presented by the CAGW crowd so far. PLUS: If it turns out that turning deserts into green pastures did not help, then at least we can walk away feeling good about having more green pastures around (and more meat to consume). Win-win either way.
davidmhoffer says:
March 9, 2013 at 10:02 am
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.
David, I note several angry posts about this. If the results he shows have been achieved by methods he claims, one has to be impressed. He’s remarkable for a start in accepting that the horror of shooting 40k elephants to solve the problem was a mistake – you don’t see that type of confession very much. You seem to be grasping at a straw above and over-hyping it. Certainly if you could green a good part of the 33% desert that makes up the earth’s land area, you would certainly sequester a lot of carbon, first in the grasses, soil and billions of cattle or goats that would be wandering around and then followed by forestation. And, man, even the one shot CO2 at 6000 cars a hectare would cover, what?…. 3×10^9 x 6000= 18x 10^12 cars, which at ~10×10^7 cars made a year would amortize pollution from car production for ~2×10^5 years. In short, re-greening in this way only 1/1000 of the desert would make car pollution neutral for 200 years. Finally, if it just improved food production and cooled a measurable part of any desert, what’s wrong with that?This guy may have a few things wrong, and it can be argued that perhaps the Sumerians already knew all this, it is worthy of evaluation (we forgot what the Sumerians knew and we even forgot that the world was round – well known to scholars 2500 years ago – still Columbus deserves our respect for rediscovering it).
http://www.eden-foundation.org/project/desertif.html
This type of criticism and cynicism is precisely the way the hockey team attacks science that disagrees with them – find a few loose threads and pull the whole garment apart.
The father of my dad’s old prospecting buddy, who was working in the southern Nevada “desert”, maintained that the grass was actually belly-deep to the cows when they first came to the Las Vegas area. He also maintained that it didn’t take the cattlemen long to over-graze the land, which was so destructive to the natural environment that it reverted to sand and sage and not much else.
But whether that’s true or not, it seems reasonable that a natural (holistic) approach working with rather than against nature would be more productive than our “educated” rangeland and farming practices. If not, we’re a doomed species.
Well, he is probably right. But that wont make any difference.
Bill Gates and Monsanto will find ways to put a stop to this.
Im sorry, but I dont see any reason to be optimistic anymore.
The liars and frauds always win.
Mediaq will demonize this guy, or ignore him, probably both.
As an issue of land management, there is a lot of sense in what he’s putting forward; there has to be some ecological pressure. But he lost me with the CO2/fossil fuel thing.
When the levels of CO2 emissions have been climbing ever upward over the last 17 years and the temperature hasn’t budged, when the fabled hot-spot has not been found and all the models found wanting, I think this man needs a little more re-educating.,
fretslider aka IngSocSucks
Jimbo says:
March 9, 2013 at 10:27 am
Yet Savoy states in the video there’s already 15,000,000 hectares on 5 continents devoted to this approach. I wonder if the nay-sayers require 100 million or 200 million? Seems rather disingenuous. What’s their definition of “large scale”?
Very important video. I think I’d like to hear his viewpoint on soil conditions, i.e. aluminum contaminated soils as found in parts of Africa and Australia, but the talk is brilliant.
Cool. Too bad Willis spoiled the beauty of the cattle drive with his factual account. I’m at the front or I’m not going 🙂 Sort of like the cows at the back of the herd. Poop on my food? I’m going to the head of the line.
So what animal is best for this? Or is it a combination of animals? Cattle, goats, sheep? Which can produce the most food and milk? I think it is goats if my memory serves me correctly.
Another benefit of herds is that they pulverize most of their excrement. So instead of people collecting, drying and burning it you leave it in the soil.
does not know one thing about dairy cattle….
..this is the way we’ve always done it
Paul Westhaver says:
“Deserts are natural. They always have been, Arctic deserts, equatorial deserts.”
–
Did you watch the video? He is reclaiming desert back to grasslands. His method is actually working. To get caught up in his occasional references to climate change is missing the forest for the trees. Only an “old coot stuck in a narrow-minded rut” would be so dismissive of the main point of this presentation because of a few side-issues you don’t like. I think it’s great to see a scientist actually change his mind about an issue like this after reviewing the facts and making actual observations.
This is excellent, Anthony. Way I’m reading it, we do this for even just half the arid lands, we won’t need to give up fossil fuels, we won’t need to devote corn and other crops to eco-fuel production, we won’t starve and we won’t have to give up eating meat. It’s win-win-win-win.
Not quite what I was expecting but very interesting. Thanks Anthony. You are crazy.
Elanor says:
March 9, 2013 at 1:15 am
That’s great, but I see a flaw… How can you graze thousands of cattle in an area with no grass or other such vegetation?
*
You would start with a few head, which would find and eat what’s available (they roam over a large area and there is enough food for them), then add to the number each year – you don’t just bring in thousands in one hit, unless the area is bigger again.
Having already put in my two cents, and now read more of the comments, I’d just like to add that I have no problem with the carbon and global warming climate change message in this talk – it speaks to the warmists who believe that such is an issue, and the solution is the same. Truly a bridge.
Uhmm….. I don’t mean to come off mean, but, the fact that livestock is good for the soil is and has been common knowledge for quite some time now. And that it does “green” a field has been shown for over 100 years.
People, this has been a common practice among farmers for a very long time now. I guess I’m glad people are aware of this now, but I’m aghast, agape, and awed.
It works like this. Farmer has some land….. let’s say 1/2 section. He divides it up into fields. He has cattle. He moves the cattle into one field. He plants various crops according to the season in the various fields. Next year, he moves the herd to another field. Oh, look at the crops grow that the cattle just vacated! Wow! Rinse and repeat.
“But the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still; that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beasts of the field shall eat. In like manner thou shalt deal with thy vineyard, and with thy oliveyard.”
Good heavens!