This TED talk realy talks to me. From the description:
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.
Hi Richard,
Thanks for sharing this. I listened to the TED talk by Mr. Savory, and was encouraged by his proposal that the desertification/climate change problem has a workable solution available. It remains to be seen how widespread the implementation of this solution will be, and how some of the social and political structures all over the world will have to change to accommodate populations living on a large portion of the world’s land returning to a nomadic lifestyle. High tech and nomadic societies would seem to have a hard time mixing with each other unless some serious concessions were made on both sides. Nomads are notoriously independent and most “high tech” societies are dependent on large, powerful institutions having a relatively stable, controlled environment to function in. They are built on the premise of man using technology to free himself from being controlled by nature. The momentum these institutions develop can be very hard to stop, since we grow used to the comforts that they provide to our daily lives and resist seeing any link to the impending costs. But if we continue ignoring the warning signs, nature will eventually correct things with or without our co-operation.