He loved elephants, but he did it to save the land. Then he found it made desertification worse instead of better, and devoted the rest of his life to figuring out why. These are his conclusions and proposed solutions. He and his team have restored desertified grazing land on several continents by increasing grazing herds instead of decreasing them, with careful rotation and movement. It sounds a lot like what Joel Salatin does with his moveable fences and frequently moved cattle herds. It's also a good deal like the restoration of cool oases from hot desert that is described in Gaia's Garden, a favorite permaculture resource in the Texan99 household.
The before-and-after shots are like something out of a dream of Paradise. These are results he's achieving on poor lands with poor people.
H/t Watts Up with That, who's more excited about this than I've ever seen him.
10 comments:
This is a highly provocative talk. I like it.
He gets slapped in the face with his error on desertification, but cannot make the leap in his mind that he might just be wrong on climate change.
True. I'd think that if someone noticed he'd just had to junk the entire causative mechanism for something that complicated, he might rethink whether the highly disputed projections (or even measurements) are exactly right.
It's hard to argue with those before-and-after pictures, but even after I watched the longer 58-minute version, I was frustrated by an inability to figure out what they'd done, other than rotate the herds on pasture. My husband was jazzed enough to order the guy's rather expensive book, so we'll see what he says there. There must be a tricky introductory period when you have to provide a lot of outside feed and water to the herd?
We're always bringing in truckloads of cow manure here, to make up for our lack of onsite poop. I once read a fascinating book called "Humanure," but we haven't had the courage to put its proposals into practice. The county agents would go crazy, anyway.
Inquiring minds have limits Ma'am.
It appears to me it's the rotation of the herds that's doing the work. Pruning back the grasses, adding manure and then moving on, allowing the plants to regenerate. I read Pollan's book, and that seemed to be the heart of Salatin's method.
And Russ has a real good point. Now there might be climate change going on, but if it is, it's the Sun's fault more than it's people's.
I'm inclined to forgive the climate change point. He's got an answer for it -- if carbon is the problem, the increased foliage will capture enough carbon to bring us to pre-industrial levels.
So let him have that. He can be the guy who fixed it. It doesn't hurt us, and future science can sort it out. For now, we can fix the land, save herding cultures whether African or cowboy, and eat all the damn meat and dairy we want.
Sounds like a win to me.
I've been watching videos about this today from the National Resource Conservation Service and from Salatin. The trick seems to be to confine the cattle where you want their manure to be concentrated, but also to move them when they've eaten the forage down to a certain level. For really damaged land, you feed them in one area during the day and confine them on the bare ground at night.
Well, that makes sense. Their dung will contain seeds, after all.
This guy is a joke, and a bad one at that. He advised the killing of 40,000 elephants, and says "oops, my mistake, but trust me this time on the biggest question the world has had to face".... NO WAY. He does not have the "magic bullet" -- his technique is a little gimmick. It may work in some very specific cases as a good land use model, but it's not going to save the world. He has a savior complex and a guilt trip going on and he's distracting people from real work on climate change. Don't buy his book or his theories. He's an arrogant egghead colonialist-mindset attention-hound who needs to just be ignored. We really need a carbon tax to reduce greenhouse emissions, and we need to work toward that, not toward a gimmick that promises red meat for saving the world.
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