Recently a new hot topic has emerged on the global warming scene, but it's not what you think. And it's not even really about global warming--helping reverse climate change is more of a bonus. The issue is desertification, the process of fertile land becoming infertile, which is a much bigger issue than you might think. I mean sure, there's deserts everywhere, the Sahara's always been there, it just has a dry climate, no big deal. What a lot of people don't realize is that the Sahara is constantly growing, and African countries like Mali have less fertile land left every year. Hell, even the region of the Middle East that was named the Fertile Crescent is now basically a dust bowl. But a growing segment of researchers see a solution to stopping and even reversing this widespread desertification in a way that seems totally counterintuitive at first--we need more cows! In short, a lot of ecosystems in the world evolved a dependence between local flora and the grazers that feed on it, and undergrazing can be just as bad or worse for the long-term health of the land than overgrazing. Allan Savory, who's devoted his life to figuring this out, lays it out in this sweet TED talk:
As documentary filmmaker Peter Byck emphasized on Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday, the conversion of desert back to productive land has a global benefit as well--reversing climate change! There's no bigger carbon sink than living organisms, so every acre of land that can become repopulated by plants and the animals they support is that much less carbon floating around in the atmosphere.
It should be noted that there is still scholarly disagreement about how best to implement grazing and/or whether this is all anecdotal bullshit, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and dare to be optimistic about what seems like a too-good-to-be-true solution, and I hope that it stays in the climate change discussion.
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