[MUSIC PLAYING]
[APPLAUSE]
ALLAN SAVORY: The
most massive tsunami
perfect storm is
bearing down upon us.
This perfect storm is mounting a
grim reality, increasingly grim
reality.
And we are facing that
reality with a full belief
that we can solve our
problems with technology,
and that's very understandable.
Now this perfect storm
that we are facing
is the result of our
rising population, rising
towards 10 billion people,
land that is turning to desert,
and of course, climate change.
Now there's no question
about it at all.
We will only solve the
problem of replacing
fossil fuels with technology.
But fossil fuels-- carbon,
coal, and gas-- are by no means
the only thing that is
causing climate change.
Desertification is a
fancy word for land
that is turning to desert,
and this happens only when
we create too much bare ground.
There's no other cause.
And I intend to focus on
most of the world's land
that is turning to desert.
But I have for you a
very simple message
that offers more hope
than you can imagine.
We have environments
where humidity is
guaranteed throughout the year.
On those, it is
almost impossible
to create vast areas of bare
ground, no matter what you do.
Nature covers it up so quickly.
And we have
environments where we
have months of humidity
followed by months of dryness,
and that is where
desertification is occurring.
Fortunately, with
space technology
now, we can look
at it from space.
And when we do, you can see
the proportions fairly well.
Generally, what you see in
green is not desertifying,
and what you see in brown is.
And these are by far the
greatest areas of the Earth.
About 2/3, I would guess, of
the world is desertifying.
I took this picture
in the Tihamah Desert
while 25 millimeters-- that's
an inch of rain-- was falling.
Think of it in terms
of drums of water,
each containing 200 liters.
Over 1,000 drums of water
fell on every hectare
of that land that day.
The next day, the
land looked like this.
Where had that water gone?
Some of it ran off as flooding.
But most of the water
that soaked into the soil
simply evaporated
out again, exactly
as it does in your garden if
you leave the soil uncovered.
Now because the fate
of water and carbon
are tied to soil organic
matter, when we damage soils,
you give off carbon.
Carbon goes back
to the atmosphere.
Now you are told over
and over, repeatedly,
that desertification
is only occurring
in arid and semi-arid
areas of the world,
and that tall grasslands like
this one, in high rainfall,
are of no consequence.
But if you do not
look at grasslands
but look down into
them, you find
that most of the soil in that
grassland that you've just seen
is bare and covered
with a crust of algae,
leading to increased
runoff and evaporation.
That is the cancer
of desertification
that we do not recognize
till its terminal form.
Now we know that desertification
is caused by livestock, mostly
cattle, sheep, and goats
over-grazing the plants,
leaving the soil bare,
and giving off methane.
Almost everybody knows
this from Nobel laureates
to golf caddies, or was
taught it, as I was.
Now the environments like you
see here, dusty environments
in Africa where I grew
up-- and I loved wildlife.
And so I grew up hating
livestock because of the damage
they were doing.
And then my university
education as an ecologist
reinforced my beliefs.
Well, I have news for you.
We were once just as certain
that the world was flat.
We were wrong then,
and we are wrong again.
And I want to invite
you now to come along
on my journey of
re-education and discovery.
When I was a young man, a
young biologist in Africa,
I was involved in setting
aside marvelous areas
as future national parks.
Now no sooner--
this was the 1950s--
and no sooner did we
remove the hunting,
drum beating people to protect
the animals than the land began
to deteriorate, as you see
in this part that we formed.
Now no livestock were involved.
But suspecting that we
had too many elephants
now, I did the research, and
I proved we had too many.
And I recommended that we would
have to reduce their numbers
and bring them down to a level
that the land could sustain.
Now that was a terrible
decision for me to have to make,
and it was political
dynamite, frankly.
So our government
formed a team of experts
to evaluate my research.
They did.
They agreed with me.
And over the following years,
we shot 40,000 elephants
to try to stop the damage.
And it got worse, not better.
Loving elephants as I do, that
was the saddest and greatest
blunder of my life, and I
will carry that to my grave.
One good thing did
come out of it.
It made me absolutely
determined to devote
my life to finding solutions.
When I came to
the United States,
I got a shock to find
national parks like this one
desertifying as badly
as anything in Africa.
And there'd been no livestock
on this land for over 70 years.
And I found that
American scientists
had no explanation for
this except that it
is arid and natural.
So I then began looking
at all the research
plots I could over the whole
of the western United States
where cattle had been
removed to prove that it
would stop desertification.
But I found the opposite.
As we see on this
research station
where this grassland that
was green in 1961, by 2002
had changed to that situation.
And the authors of the
position paper on climate
change from which I obtained
these pictures attribute
this change to
unknown processes.
Clearly, we have
never understood
what is causing
desertification, which
has destroyed many civilizations
and now threatens us globally.
We have never understood it.
Take one square meter
of soil and make it bare
like this is down here,
and I promise you,
you will find it much colder at
dawn and much hotter at midday
than that same piece of
ground, if it's just covered
with litter, plant litter.
You have changed
the microclimate.
Now by the time you are doing
that and increasing greatly
the percentage of bare ground
on more than half the world's
land, you are
changing macroclimate.
But we have just
simply not understood,
why was it beginning to
happen 10,000 years ago?
Why has it accelerated lately?
We had no understanding of that.
What we had failed
to understand was
that the seasonal
humidity environments
of the world, the soil
and the vegetation,
developed with very large
numbers of grazing animals,
and that these grazing
animals developed
with ferocious
pack-hunting predators.
Now their main defense
against pack-hunting predators
is to get into herds.
And the larger the herd,
the safer the individuals.
Now large herds dung and
urinate all over their own food,
and they have to keep moving.
And it was that movement that
prevented the overgrazing
of plants, while the
periodic trampling ensured
good cover of the soil, as we
see where a herd has passed.
This picture is a typical
seasonal grassland.
It has just come through
four months of rain,
and it's now going into
eight months of dry season.
And watch the change as it
goes into this long dry season.
Now all of that grass
you see above ground
has to decay biologically
before the next growing season.
And if it doesn't, the grassland
and the soil begin to die.
Now if it does not
decay biologically,
it shifts to oxidation,
which is a very slow process,
and this smothers and kills
grasses, leading to a shift
to woody vegetation and
bare soil releasing carbon.
To prevent that, we have
traditionally used fire.
But fire also leaves the
soil bare, releasing carbon.
And worse than that, burning
one hectare of grassland
gives off more and more damaging
pollutants than 6,000 cars.
And we are burning in
Africa, every single year,
more than one billion
hectares of grasslands,
and almost nobody
is talking about it.
We justify the
burning as scientists
because it does remove
the dead material,
and it allows the
plants to grow.
Now looking at this grassland
of ours that has gone dry,
what can we do to
keep that healthy?
And bear in mind, I'm talking
of most of the world's land now?
We cannot reduce animal numbers
to rest it more without causing
desertification
and climate change.
We cannot burn it without
causing desertification
and climate change.
What are we going to do?
There is only one option.
I repeat to you, only one
option left to climatologists
and scientists, and that
is to do the unthinkable,
and to use livestock,
bunched and moving,
as a proxy for former herds
and predators and mimic nature.
There is no other
alternative left to mankind.
So let's do that.
So on this bit of
grassland, we'll
do it, but just
in the foreground.
We'll impact it very heavily
with cattle to mimic nature,
and we've done so,
and look at that.
All of that grass is
now covering the soil
as dung, urine, and
litter or mulch,
as every one of the gardeners
amongst you would understand,
and that soil is ready to
absorb and hold the rain,
to store carbon, and
to break down methane.
And we did that without using
fire to damage the soil,
and the plants are free to grow.
When I first realized that we
had no option as scientists
but to use much vilified
livestock to address climate
change and desertification, I
was faced with a real dilemma.
How were we to do it?
We'd had 10,000 years of
extremely knowledgeable
pastoralists, 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,
and as you see
in this picture of land managed
by the federal government.
Clearly, more was needed
than bunching and moving
the animals.
And humans, over
thousands of years,
had never been able to deal
with nature's complexity.
But we biologists and
ecologists had never
tackled anything
as complex as this.
So rather than
reinvent the wheel,
I began studying
other professions
to see if anybody had.
And I found they we're
planning techniques
that I could take and adapt
to our biological need.
And from those, I
developed what we
call holistic management and
planned grazing, a planning
process.
And that does address all
of nature's complexity
and our social, environmental,
economic complexity.
Today, we have a young woman
like this one teaching villages
in Africa how to put
their animals together
into larger herds, plan their
grazing, to mimic nature.
And where we have them hold
their animals overnight--
we run them in a
predator-friendly manner,
because we have a lot
of lands, and so on--
and where they do this
and hold them overnight
to prepare the
crop fields, we're
getting very great increases
in crop yield as well.
Let's look at some results.
This is land close to land
that we manage in Zimbabwe.
It has just come
through four months
of very good rains
it got that year,
and it's going into
the long dry season.
But as you can see, all of
that rain, almost all of it,
has evaporated from
the soil surface.
The river is dry, despite
the rain just having ended,
and we have 150,000 people
on almost permanent food aid.
Now let's go to our land
nearby on the same day
with the s rainfall
and look at that.
Our river is flowing
and healthy and clean.
It's fine.
The production of grass, shrubs,
trees, wildlife, everything
is now more productive.
And we have virtually
no fear of dry years.
And we did that by increasing
the cattle and goats 400%,
planning the grazing to mimic
nature and integrate them
with all the elephants, buffalo,
giraffe, and other animals
that we have.
But before we began, our
land looked like that.
This site was bare and eroding
for over 30 years, regardless
of what rain we got.
Watch the marked tree and see
the change as we used livestock
to mimic nature.
This was another site where
it had been bare and eroding,
and at the base of
the marked small tree,
we had lost over 30
centimeters of soil.
And again, watch the
change just using livestock
to mimic nature.
And there are
fallen trees in that
now, because the better
land is now attracting
elephants, et cetera.
This land in Mexico was
in terrible condition.
And I've had to mark the
hill because the change
is so profound.
[APPLAUSE]
I began helping a family in
the Karoo desert in the 1970s
turn the desert that
you see on the right
there back to grassland.
And thankfully, now
their grandchildren
are on the land with
hope for the future.
And look at the amazing
change in this one
where that gully has
completely healed using nothing
but livestock mimicking nature.
And once more, we have
the third generation
of that family on that land
with their flag still flying.
The vast grasslands of
Patagonia are turning to desert,
as you see here.
The man in the middle is
an Argentinean researcher,
and he has documented
the steady decline
of that land over the
years as they kept
reducing the sheep numbers.
They put 25,000
sheep in one flock,
really mimicking nature
now with planned grazing.
And they have documented
a 50% increase
in the production of the
land in the first year.
We now have in the violent
Horn of Africa pastoralists
planning their grazing
to mimic nature,
and openly saying it
is the only hope they
have of saving their families
and saving their culture.
95% of that land can only
feed people from animals.
I remind you that I am talking
about most of the world's land
here that controls
our fate, including
the most violent region of the
world where only animals can
feed people from
about 95% of the land.
What we are doing globally
is causing climate change
as much as, I believe,
fossil fuels, and maybe
more than fossil fuels.
But worse than that, it is
causing hunger, poverty,
violence, social
breakdown, and war.
And as I am talking
to you, millions
of men, women, and children
are suffering and dying.
And if this continues,
we are unlikely to be
able to stop the
climate changing,
even after we have eliminated
the use of fossil fuels.
I believe I've shown you how
we can work with nature at very
low cost to reverse all this.
We are already doing so on
about 15 million hectares
on five continents.
And people who understand far
more about carbon than I do
calculate that for
illustrative purposes,
if we do what I'm
showing you here,
we can take enough carbon
out of the atmosphere
and safely store it in the
grassland soils for thousands
of years.
And if we just do that on about
half the world's grasslands
that I've shown
you, we can take us
back to pre-industrial
levels while feeding people.
I can think of
almost nothing that
offers more hope for our
planet, for your children
and their children,
and all of humanity.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]
Thank you, Chris.
Thank you.
CHRIS: Thank you.
I have-- and I'm sure everyone
here has, A, 100 questions, B,
wants to hug you.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm just going to ask
you one quick question.
When you first start this, you
bring in a flock of animals.
It's desert.
What do they eat?
How does that part work?
How do you start?
ALLAN SAVORY: Well, we've
done this for a long time,
and the only time we have
ever had to provide any food
is doing mine reclamation
where it's 100% bare.
But many years ago, we took
the worst land in Zimbabwe
where I offered a five-pound
note in a 100-mile drive
if somebody could find one
grass in a 100-mile drive.
And on that, we'd trebled
the stocking rate, the number
of animals, in the first
year with no feeding,
just by the movement
mimicking nature and using
a sigmoid curve, that principle.
It's a little bit
technical to explain here.
CHRIS: Well, I would
love t-- I mean,
this is such an interesting
and important idea.
The best people s our blog are
going to come and talk to you,
and I want to get more on
this that we can share, along
with the talk.
That is an astonishing talk.
Truly an astonishing talk.
And I think you
heard that we all
are cheering you on your way.
Thank you so much.
ALLAN SAVORY: Well, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Chris.
[APPLAUSE]
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