[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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