Planet Earth is Dying — and Not Because of Fossil Fuels, With Allan Savory (Part 1)

How to Be More Like Bob Bowdon

Summary:

Alan Savory’s main point is that the danger we face is the widespread desertification of land due to mismanagement, not just climate change caused by fossil fuels. He emphasizes that:

1. Desertification: Much of the world’s land is turning into barren desert, a process exacerbated by the loss of biodiversity.
2. Mismanagement: Historically, overgrazing by too many animals was believed to be the primary cause of desertification. However, Savory argues that the real issue is poor land management practices.
3. Essential Role of Livestock: Rather than reducing livestock, Savory advocates for using them in a way that mimics natural processes. Properly managed livestock can help restore grasslands by preventing overgrazing and promoting healthy soil.
4. Global Ignorance: There is widespread ignorance and lack of attention to the importance and impact of desertification. Most people and institutions are not recognizing or addressing this critical issue.
5. Agriculture and Civilization: Agriculture is the foundation of civilization, and without addressing the degradation of agricultural lands, we cannot sustain our societies.

Savory warns that failing to adopt better land management practices, including the strategic use of livestock, poses a significant threat to the planet’s ecosystems and humanity’s survival.

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Full Transcript:

In 2013, a biologist named Alan Savory recorded a TED talk about how much land on planet Earth is being turned into barren, lifeless desert every year. That video has now been viewed millions of times. Fossil fuels—carbon, coal, and gas—are by no means the only things causing climate change. Desertification, a fancy word for land that is turned to desert, is also a significant factor.

Fortunately, with space technology, we can now observe it from space. Generally, what you see in green is not desertified, and what you see in brown is. These are by far the greatest areas of the earth, about two-thirds I would guess.

Savory explained that as a young biologist in Africa, he had been taught to believe, and did believe, that deserts were expanding mostly because of animals overgrazing the land. Suspecting that we had too many elephants, he did the research, proved we had too many, and recommended that we reduce their numbers to a level that the land could sustain.

Now, that was a terrible decision for him to have to make, and it was political dynamite. The government formed a team of experts to evaluate his research; they agreed with him, and over the following years, they shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage. It got worse, not better. Loving elephants as he does, that was the saddest and greatest blunder of his life, and he will carry that to his grave. We were once just as certain that the world was flat. We were wrong then, and we are wrong again.

On later studying national parks in the United States, Savory observed the same trends he’d seen in Africa. When he came to the United States, he got a shock to find national parks desertifying as badly as anything in Africa, and there had been no livestock on this land for over 70 years. American scientists had no explanation for this except that it is arid and natural.

In the TED Talk, Savory built to a dramatic crescendo about the very future of planet Earth. “What are we going to do? There is only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable and use livestock, bunched and moving as a proxy for former herds and predators, to mimic nature.” The main defense against pack-hunting predators is to get into herds, and the larger the herd, the safer the individuals. Large herds dung and urinate all over their food and have to keep moving. It was that movement that prevented the overgrazing of plants, while the periodic trampling ensured good cover of the soil.

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Here’s my conversation with Alan Savory:

“I have to tell you, my senses immediately begin firing when I hear a theory that undermines conventional wisdom. You know, I would say appeal to authority is my favorite form of sophistry to debunk. And so, to me, it combines so many things: logical error, arrogance, coercion, and often self-interest masquerading as objectivity. So, I’m like, checking all those boxes.”

So let’s get to it. “I’ve long been fascinated by deserts and why they exist. For example, you can look at a map of Egypt knowing that there are 110 million people in the country and then find out that almost the entire country is desert except for the Nile River, the Nile River delta, and some areas right along the Mediterranean. And so, nevertheless, nearly the entire country is sand, and I’ve always been just fascinated by why more evaporated moisture doesn’t just blow over, cause rain, and produce grasses and vegetation in a place like the Sahara and so many other places.”

So, let’s talk about it. Your 22-minute TED Talk has been viewed by nearly nine million people now, and it’s about the subject of reversing desertification, which is not a term I think most people are familiar with. I had not heard of it before. Reverse desertification does not mean having your tiramisu before your salad. It, in fact, applies to turning deserts into grasslands.

I guess I don’t want to replicate the TED Talk. People can go there, and the link will be in the description of this video. But can you quantify the desertification rate we’re seeing around the world? To what degree are fertile lands being turned into deserts?

“No, I can’t quantify it. No scientist can. And I explained in the TED Talk that we only recognize it in its environmental degradation. It’s biodiversity loss. Without the loss of biodiversity, turning to deserts caused by humans doesn’t happen. So it’s a symptom of the loss of biodiversity, and we’re getting that globally now. We’re getting it in the oceans, everywhere. It’s one of the biggest issues we face.”

Okay, so when that reaches the terminal form, we don’t recognize it until that form as desert. So it’s a very unfortunate term that is used, but it’s a very old problem. It would have begun around about, oh, at least 100,000 years ago, and it’s been slowly getting worse and worse. Now, there’s just enormous ignorance about it and the importance of it.

“But if you could elaborate a little on what your sense is that it’s getting worse, what makes you say that it’s getting worse?”

“Well, because I’ve seen it in my own lifetime, and most people’s lifetimes, and it’s been measurable right where you are in Texas. Bob Steer, who used to be a professor of range management at Angelo State when I lived there briefly when I was in exile, first coming to America, alerted me to the published data, USDA data, just looking at the stocking rate of cattle. That’s the number of cattle that can be carried per acre or the number of acres to carry one cow. And Bob pointed out to me, and they had the figures, that the stocking rate at the turn of the century, in other words, 100 years before the early 1980s that I’m talking about, looked like science fiction. It was so high compared to the stocking rate in 1980 in Texas. That’s a direct measure of the inability of that land because of the loss of diversity of life and volume of biological life to carry land. So the data is there in chunks like that.”

“We’d had 10,000 years of extremely knowledgeable people bunching and moving their animals, but they had created the great man-made deserts of the world. Then we’d had 100 years of modern range science, and that had accelerated desertification as we first discovered in Africa and then confirmed in the United States, as you see in this picture of land managed by the federal government. I see a lot of people misconstrue what you say. It’s almost become a bit of an industry on the internet to oversimplify your points, and I’m sympathetic to that. But is it fair to say that you’re categorizing the eras into sort of the pre-human era, then this 10,000 years to which you refer in which farmers were not necessarily doing land management in a way that was sustainable, but then the last hundred years of modern times in which things have gotten much worse? Is that a fair way to kind of separate our timeframe?”

“It’s a good attempt, yes. People are mocking my words and imitating them all around the world without listening carefully, unfortunately. What’s really frightening today is that if you look at the biggest issue facing the world, we’ve got our best minds engaged in space exploration, exploring space to colonize space, spending trillions of dollars, etc., but no animal, including humans, can live without habitat.”

“In that whole discussion, if you go back over centuries, you find humans acknowledged desertification because it was so obviously destroying civilizations. But they attributed it and blamed it on too many sheep, goats, camels, etc., overgrazing by too many animals. And that observation and belief became scientific certainty, never to be questioned.”

“If I could interject, that was your belief at one time. You believed that too many animals was part of the problem.”

“Yes, and I was taught it at university. It became a valid scientific fact, but it was actually based on just an observation and belief. Now, that I talked about at COP 26, I had a great sharing of it by many, many people on social media, and uniquely, for the first time in my life, in over two years, I haven’t had a single criticism of it. It’s a 12-minute talk, but I’ve had the total world and the media ignore it. So I don’t know what’s going on in the media. Investigative reporting, is it dead? What’s happened to investigative reporting?”

“Well, there are, of course, multiple strategies for rejecting a point of view you don’t want. You can trash it or you can ignore it. They’re both means to the same end, arguably. Make sure that view doesn’t get out.”

“Well, that’s tragic because it’s happening with every university, every new paper, every reporter. They’re choosing to ignore it, and yet to me, I believe that’s profound. The survival of humanity depends on acknowledging that human management is what is causing the problem. Without agriculture, we cannot have an orchestra, church, university, bank, or any business or economy. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization. Almost our entire planet is engaged in agriculture. Ocean life and tropical forests are being decimated, and man-made deserts are expanding. We are producing 20 times as much dead, eroding soil every year as food we need for every human alive today. If we look at these national parks or those in New Mexico where I lived for 40 years, we see the canaries in our mind dying wholesale. This we cannot contribute to climate change: fossil fuels, greenhouse gases, livestock, deforestation, corporate profiteering, greed, corruption, poaching, hunting, or excessive animal numbers. None of which is the cause of the problem. The cause is the management dictated by the policies of environmental organizations, governments, and international agencies.”

“Now that management—”

“Let me reframe a second, if you don’t mind. You’ve never argued that I’ve heard; you’ve never argued that humans caused deserts in all cases, right? Wouldn’t you say the Sahara was there for two million years, that predated human civilization, so it’s not as if humans are always the cause of deserts?”

“Alright, Bob, we’re digressing slightly, but that’s okay. No, I have never ever said that humans cause the deserts, the natural deserts. The Gobi, etc., where there’s no rainfall, they’re natural. But they were very small, and they still are small. What I’m talking about is the man-made desertification, a symptom of biodiversity loss. Now, you mention the Sahara Desert. I don’t know what the original size of the original desert there was, if there was any. I don’t know.”

“But what we do know—”

“Well, it was an ocean at one point. They have found fossils of aquatic animals there from more than two million years ago. So something did it, but it apparently wasn’t humans.”

“No, it was humans. Because what I do know—”

“I mean, two million years ago there wasn’t a human change that made that turned the Sahara from a sea into a desert.”

“No, and that didn’t turn it into a desert. That turned it into a sea into a savannah. Now, we have, in recorded history, pictures, Bushman paintings, writings in recorded history. We have knowledge that the bulk of the Sahara was supporting hippos, giraffes, cheetahs, gazelles, all sorts of animals, and that these were being run with livestock. There are pictures of livestock in some of the paintings. That’s in modern times, virtually, and it was savannah. So it was that it now today is a vast, vast man-made desert.”

“For those who don’t know, the core of your argument is that rather than get rid of livestock, we should use livestock to mimic what wildlife used to do. And that has to do with eating and creating dung, eating the grasses rather than letting them just sort of biodegrade through the sun. It’s healthier for the land management if livestock eat the grasses. Rather than getting rid of livestock, we should encourage using livestock to mimic what wildlife did.”

“Bob, I go far further than that. It’s not a case of livestock can be used; it’s not a case of encouraging the use of livestock. God damn it, we’re not going to survive. They are absolutely essential.”

“But if I may just simplify, maybe oversimplify it for your instincts, but for a layman audience, if you argue, correct me if I’m wrong, that if grasses are just allowed to decay, that covers the ground and it prevents new vegetation from forming in a healthy way. So people realized that was not a good way to make soil fertile, so they then started burning the dead grasses as a way to get rid of it, to clear it so that new vegetation could come up. And you’re saying that’s not ideal either. That also causes deserts to form. You opt for this other way, this third way. So neither letting the grasses just decay on their own nor burning them, but rather having livestock eat them. That is the way to not just stop desertification but actually turn deserts back into fertile soil.”

“Right, we’re getting there, there slowly. Let’s go back to it. You’re mentioning grasses. Now here you have to draw a distinction. When I was trained at university, we were taught that desertification was only happening in very low rainfall areas, 200-300 mm of rain, whatever. I then began to find that some of the areas desertified badly that I was working in in Marb, the apparently original Garden of Eden according to the Quran, I’m told. The parts there of the catchment, the rainfall was 40-50 inches. How the hell can you call that arid? So that was part of the things that I was discovering along the way, that this wasn’t just occurring in arid areas. And then I realized it was occurring where the atmospheric humidity was very disrupted.”

“In other words, if you take the rainfall of London and the rainfall of Johannesburg, they’re about the same. But around London in the UK, you cannot, no matter what you do, it doesn’t turn to desert. There’s no technology you can use, no fire you can use that’ll expand the bare soil between plants to 80-90% bare soil between plants over millions of hectares of the UK. You cannot do it; nature fills the vacuum. So resting the land to recover, it recovers. So rewilding in Britain, sure it recovers. And so do the oceans, so do lakes, so do wetlands.”

“But now when you come to the bulk of the world’s land, like Texas where you’re living, that rainfall is very seasonal. And where I live in Africa, I’m surrounded by some 30 national parks. We get all of our rain in about four months, and then we get about eight months of damn dry, right? And it can be extremely dry. Now, our grass will grow in that four months, and like it’ll grow in the United States or the wetter parts of Texas or wherever. It’ll grow well; ours will get 10-12 feet high. Now, when the rains are over and the atmospheric moisture dries off and the soil moisture begins to dry, that grass in those parts of the world, which is about two-thirds roughly of the world’s land, that grass now begins to oxidize, to break down chemically because the animals have gone that used to cycle everything biologically.”

“Now, if you go to England or the west or the east coast of America or northern parts of California as opposed to the southern parts, it doesn’t oxidize. It breaks down and crumbles. So I came up with the term ‘brittle’ and ‘non-brittle’ environment. In many environments in the world, including the whole of the Amazon forest, which is relatively small compared to the two-thirds of the world I’m talking of, if you pick up a dead stem of a twig or a grass at the end of the year and it’s been dead for six months or so, and you crumple it in your hand, it’s like crumpling wet tissue paper. You don’t hear a sound; it’s non-brittle.”

“If you come to the part of Africa I’m in, you can pick up a grass stem, a twig from a tree, from a leaf, anything that’s laid on the ground or been dead for six months. And if it’s dead, you crumple it up; you can hear it crumpling up. It breaks, it crackles, it’s brittle. They’re different environments. So there wasn’t an awareness of that. I coined those terms way back in the ’70s or ’80s.”

“So instead of biologically rotting, which happens in a humid environment around London or Washington or whatever, where the dead vegetation rots, what happens is the dead vegetation here begins to rust. Rusting is oxidation. So if you come to my home, which is thatched with grass, if you look at it, we put the thatch on the roof. If you look at the inside, it is a yellow color of the dead grass of the year when we cut it. And you can look 20-30 years later; it’s still that same color, and it hasn’t broken down at all. If you look at the outside where the sun is shining, five years, four years, three years later, it’s become black, and it’s chemically breaking down. And it seals the surface, and that’s why a thatch roof lasts for 40-50 years or more.”

“The point being that the moisture leaves the grass or the plant material, and it doesn’t quickly break down. It stays around and covers the land and would cover sunlight from getting to potential new vegetation.”

“Yeah, a simple way of looking at that is to look at trees and grasses. Trees grow, and shrubs and weeds grow. The growth points are up here, and they grow, and they have their leaves in the growing season everywhere. Then if you get the rains ending and you’re going into a cold period, a non-growth period, or a dry period as it is with us, etc., now the leaves fall off a tree, and we call it fall. The tree is actually cutting off its own leaf if you study it. And they fall onto the ground where they can now rot or oxidize, doesn’t matter. But they’re down on the ground, and they will tend to rot because they’re on the surface of the ground.”

“Rotting in a wet way, in my mind. But go ahead.”

“Yes, well, they’ll break down. They’ll break down and continue the cycle of birth, growth, death, decay. Now, the following growing season, the tree will grow because the light reaches the growth points. Now, if you look at a perennial grass, if it’s growing in the wet areas of America or the world or the Amazon, it’ll grow as high as it’s going to grow in the growing period. And when it dies, it will die and it’ll stand. It doesn’t graze itself; it doesn’t remove its own leaf, so it just stands.”

“Now, it either has to rot and decay fast biologically because there is enough humidity, enough microorganisms, that biological breakdown or rotting takes place, or it’s in the more erratic areas like west Texas or my part of Africa or Arizona or whatever. And now it just stands. There isn’t enough humidity; there isn’t enough micro life up above the ground surface to break it down biologically. It stays there, and it stops the sun, and it oxidizes, and it blocks the sunlight reaching the growth points which are out of harm’s way of grazing animals because they co-evolved with animals over billions of years.”

“Let me ask you about the debate you had at Oxford University against a man named George Monbiot. It seemed to me there was something of a debate over what the debate was. He presented the real goal not so much about regreening deserts but as if the real goal were reducing carbon, as if that was our main problem. To me, it’s analogous to a discussion I had recently about statins, the drugs to lower cholesterol. Instead of the real health care discussion being on how do we reduce heart attacks and strokes, for many medical professionals, they treat reducing LDL cholesterol as the real goal, which is a proxy for the real goal. Or about fixing public education. Instead of the real goal being kids learning more, some people want to make it more about how do we spend more on schools, as if that’s a proxy for kids learning more.”

“So to me, oftentimes by accepting these kinds of proxies as a problem instead of the real problem, you can create serious errors. And they’re often coincidentally areas that benefit an interest group, I’ve learned over time, like the teachers’ unions instead of kids or pharmaceutical companies instead of patients, or alternative energy firms and climate change nonprofits over farmers. What are your thoughts on that? When you hear people pivot to carbon as the real issue, not keeping deserts from expanding, do you find that also to be the wrong question?”

“Absolutely, 100%. That’s just insanity. And it’s not just Monbiot; he’s just a big mouth organ because of The Guardian, very much just a troublemaker. When I put the TED Talk out, he was my main critic. He published a book, Regenesis, where I’m probably the most criticized scientist in it. That’s why I challenged him to a debate. Now, he refused to debate; he just mucked up the debate, used foul language, swore, did anything but debate. Now, my mistake was that I disarmed him as he got into the ring. I should have given him a month’s warning of what I was going to say because I knew what his argument would be. It would be that the cattle are putting out all this carbon and all this methane, and it’s cruel to kill animals. You mustn’t kill animals; you’ve got to have a meat-free diet.”

“So what I did was, when I finished very briefly referring to the TED Talk and the essence of it, I said, ‘Now, before you contribute, let me take it as a given. I know it’s not true, but let’s assume that the world’s lands and oceans can absorb no carbon at all. Let’s assume that all the cattle in the world put out 10, 20 times the methane that they do. Let’s take those as assumptions. Let’s assume that every human in the world becomes vegan. We never kill another animal; we leave them to die and vultures and hyenas to eat them. So we take those as givens. Now, tell me, how are you going to reverse desertification fueling climate change?'”

“And you saw what happened. He came and refused to debate it. He just repeated those arguments, used foul language, and mucked up the whole debate. Now, I would say that to every scientist in the world. I hope every Nobel laureate is listening to me. Let’s assume we can absorb no carbon. Let’s assume livestock put out 20 times the methane. Let’s assume every human becomes a vegan and we leave animals to die. Very cruelly in nature, nature is not humane. They will die of starvation, accident, disease, or if they’re very lucky, in the gentle jaws of a crocodile or a lion, the most humane death there is in nature.”

“Right, so that’s reality. So let’s assume that. Now, what would any scientist in the world do to address climate change being fueled by biodiversity loss and desertification over two-thirds of the world’s land, including in the national parks? And I can’t get a single scientist to answer that. They want to answer the question about carbon, not the question you pose.”

“Sorry, they want to answer the proxy question about carbon rather than the question you posed.”

“Absolutely, that’s self-destructing. To me, that’s institutional stupidity.”

“Just so people at home know, in the photos you presented as evidence, including in the TED Talk and your Oxford debate, you presented photos of a desert area, land that people had applied your techniques to, and then created a more fertile environment, significantly more fertile in the photos. He referred to those as BS, basically. For those at home who want to know what we’re talking about, in fact, I wrote down this quote: ‘Livestock farming, particularly grazing, is the major driver of ecological destruction on Earth.’ How do you respond to that specifically, that he claimed your photos were fabricated?”

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Hey, thanks for watching part one of this episode of “How to Be More Like Bob Bowen” with our guest Alan Savory on a subject relatively important like our survival as a species on planet Earth. If you’ve watched this far, please consider liking and sharing the video, as well as commenting on it and subscribing to our YouTube channel. As I like to say, we need help with the algorithm. But also consider renting part two, in which you’ll hear Allan respond to that question I just posed him about when his debate opponent called his evidence into question in a very public setting. To rent part two, it’s only 9 cents a la carte and even less if you buy what we call the VidaFair grain tokens. They’re equivalent to US pennies when bought by the bushel, as we like to say, which is the $20 clip, but you get discounts by volume purchases of our tokens. Or you can just pay the 99 cents a la carte. Look, we’re just looking for a way to make content monetizable in a fair way, in a way that’s fair to both the content creator and the content viewer, meaning no subscription fatigue. So please visit VidaFair.com and download the VidaFair app. Apart from that, we’ll see you next time. Thanks so much.

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