How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change | Allan Savory

I would eat dog if it wasn't raised as someone's pet. Actually I just got back from Vietnam, and I'm pretty sure I ate both dog and cat at some point. Didn't bother me because they didn't raise them as pets. They raised them with the intention of eating every little bit (without wasting any part of the animal, I might add). You can grow fond of plenty of the animals that we eat on a normal basis, pigs in particular. We also have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals which can lead to attachment. Factory farming is indeed a huge problem, because it requires so much fossil fuel, grain, and antibiotics, and destroys the land and causes global warming. But the fix is not to stop eating animals, the answer is to go back to the roots of the ecosystem and actually raise more animals. Ever heard of Alan Savory? Check it out. [VIDEO]

Reminds me about this TED talk [VIDEO] where Allan Savory speaks about the behavior of herbivores with/without predators and the impact on flora. Fascinating, really. I hope the day will come when we understand the biosphere of this wonderful planet we live on.

> It's very hard to get the general public to reduce animal product consumption. That's because animal proteins and animal fats are vital nutrients the body needs. It's also the most efficient method of transport for these nutrients; industrially grown crops cause far more damage than pastured livestock. [LINK] [VIDEO]

Would like to see them try and do this, get the ground a bit more fertile and planting native grasses perhaps to get it going somewhat? [VIDEO]

But those are often desert. And desertification could (in part) be caused by overly protecting the area (e.g. not allowing cattle). Good video to watch: [VIDEO]

We can manage grassland and savanah. Grasses exudate a lot of their sugars (carbon) into the ground feeding the microbes. Holistically managed grassing is all about timing the regrowth and recycling the nutrients and fibers through the cow. The prairies are amazing ecosystem pumping carbon into the ground when properly managed. The knowledge is available, but this ted talk only has 2 million views. [VIDEO]

I've been watching waay too many youtube videos about reforestation, agriculture and land management recently and I think I've learned a little from it (links at the end). We no longer have the number of massive herds of animals that used to roam the plains/savannahs grazing, pooing and to a lesser extent escaping from predators. This has meant that the grasslands are no longer trampled on and "fertilised". This has caused the grasses to die back, the soil to degrade, to not hold water and to turn to desert. (see the sahara, the outback, parts of china and the usa). Subsequently we've tried to be really careful with the land and not over graze it etc. which tends to have the opposite effect than what is desired. Now I also looked into reforestation because I thought trees were the answer. Grow trees sequester carbon etc. But it turns out the cost of doing this £/$ and water (desalination) would actually be outweighed by both the albido effect (green trees absorb more sunlight than deserts that reflect it back) and that trees don't really grow fast enough to have the impact required. Getting back to the grasslands, it turns out that when you intensively drive a herd over grasslands the grass initially dies back but the root system expands, the plant grows quickly and sequesters carbon into the ground. It actually builds soil and traps carbon and it does it faster than previously thought. The ground is also more permeable to water so when big storms come it actually soaks up th

> This view ran counter to a lot of conservationist thought, as well as a great deal of evidence. Grazing has been blamed for turning vast swaths of the world into deserts. But from Creque’s perspective, how you graze makes all the difference. This is the idea behind this fantastic TED talk: [VIDEO] We're largely focused on high-tech ways to "fix" the Earth, but the Earth has known how to do it since forever. Finding ways to use her own intelligence seems like a great idea.

There's the classic variety which uses per-industrial practices to farm. This is indeed cute but hopelessly ineffective. And there's the modern variety which uses data and science driven approaches to farm while minimizing resources. E.g. watering and fertilizing based on drone observed growth patterns and other readings means you can use a lot less. Managing the soil in sane way that preserves it rather than destroys it gives you better yields and also improves water retention. Fighting parasites and pests is a lot easier if you understand the dynamics of their ecosystems and e.g. use predatory insects to counter that. Teaching small farmers some basics about how stuff works might help them improve their yields and put a stop to really destructive practices like burning forests to create land that is briefly usable for farming before it turns into desert. Things are definitely changing. 'Modern' mono-cultures are based on the state of the art fifty years ago when it was acceptable to just blindly plow, fertilize, and spray many acres of land without even bothering to measure the impact. It works, for a while, but it is not long term sustainable and there is a lot of farm land turning into barren desert world wide due to decades of mismanagement, abuse, and exploitation. The notion that you need to spend a lot on fertilizers, misc. poisons, genetically modified seeds and machines to plow (aka. destroy the soil) your land in order to farm is maybe a bit outdated. In the US, st

Allan Savory talks about the use of intensive grazing as a method for combatting desertification in Africa [0]. Herd fertilize while eating grasses that would otherwise fall into senescence and create pockets of erosion. [0] [VIDEO]

This Ted talk gave me hope to reverse climate change and seems plausible: [VIDEO] Does anyone know / have experience whether this actually works?

If you let ruminant livestock graze in a carefully managed pattern instead of feeding them grain (grown and transported from miles away), it improves the land and reduces the amount of pollution: [VIDEO] Cattle are not very efficient at converting grain to protein. It’s about 7:1. Pork is 2:1, in comparison. Poultry is close to 1:1.

Number of serious scientists claim quite the opposite, that cattle grazing is the only solution to stop the erosion and turning land into deserts [VIDEO]

Glad to see this, a great related TED talk by Allan Savory that introduces why this is true can be found here [VIDEO]

We have got to organize geoengineering efforts before the ocean currents stop. What I'm worried is a sudden shift in climate that kills billions of us, in an event that occurs within the next 10-30 years. Release of methane hydrates trapped in ice and methane bursting out of the tundra scares the hell out of me. Cooperation from governments is necessary to actually implement it, but I think it is a mistake to try to rely on those institutions. Why do I think this? Our government bungled development of reusable rockets for decades until SpaceX came along and just did it. You can quibble about how much NASA provided in seed money, but that's really not what I'm trying to get at here. My second example for why we can't rely on the government is the way the Coronavirus pandemic played out. We watch the slow-moving train wreck from January onward. Every single one of our institutions failed us! In fact, many of those institutions prevented individual action, with respect to testing: [LINK] Finally, I think Allan Savory is also part of the answer. [VIDEO]

It's true that methane has a much greater impact, but only in the short term. Long term, CO2 is much more dangerous. The methane that cow produces is recycled as it circulates through the atmosphere -> plants -> cows -> atmosphere cycle. Fossil fuel burning on the other hand is not. It's released from the ground and there's no way for it to get back there. Nothing is ever black and white and to think that eliminating the animals as the food source would solve the problem is naive. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]

It is a too large field for one to research alone, but I am familiar with the effort to track global leaf area and desertification. So here is my small contribution to the discussion: 2013: "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." [VIDEO] 2014: Global Greening Is Firm, Drivers Are Mixed - Harvard "Evidence for global greening is converging, asserting an increase in CO2 uptake and biomass of the terrestrial biosphere. Evidence for these trends comes from firm empirical data." [LINK] 2016: Greening of the globe and its drivers - Nature "Satellite records from 1982–2009 show a persistent and widespread increase of leaf area (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing leaf area (browning)." [LINK] Elevated CO2 as a driver of global dryland greening - Nature "Recent regional scale analyses using satellite based vegetation indices such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), have found extensive areas of “greening”" [LINK] Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth' [LINK] "Prof Judith Curry, the former chair of Earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, added: "It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called cont

When the herd eat grass it stimulates grass growth and grass is a huge carbon sink. there is a cool ted talk about this. [VIDEO]

> I'm not entirely convinced by this argument. It’s been proven by Allen Savory and others, you can check his Ted talk here [VIDEO] Even if lab grown meat is the next best thing since sliced bread it would be a complete climate disaster to not continue, and expand, holistic cattle farming.

Thanks for some info to catch up on. I've seen another step described where you bring in a mobile chicken coop a few days after the cows have departed to eat the insects that arrived to eat the poop. Also keeping the cows a little while means they eat up all the "weed" plants and not just the tastier stuff —"eat your vegetables" type of thing—while if they free graze they only take the best tasting grasses and move on. How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change | Allan Savory (TED talk) [VIDEO]