0:00:01.488,0:00:05.057
The most massive

0:00:05.057,0:00:09.992
tsunami perfect storm

0:00:09.992,0:00:13.871
is bearing down upon us.

0:00:13.871,0:00:17.117
This perfect storm

0:00:17.117,0:00:22.285
is mounting a grim reality, increasingly grim reality,

0:00:22.285,0:00:27.235
and we are facing that reality

0:00:27.235,0:00:28.616
with the full belief

0:00:28.616,0:00:31.172
that we can solve our problems with technology,

0:00:31.172,0:00:33.468
and that's very understandable.

0:00:33.468,0:00:37.675
Now, this perfect storm that we are facing

0:00:37.675,0:00:41.185
is the result of our rising population,

0:00:41.185,0:00:43.989
rising towards 10 billion people,

0:00:43.989,0:00:46.633
land that is turning to desert,

0:00:46.633,0:00:49.741
and, of course, climate change.

0:00:49.741,0:00:52.402
Now there's no question about it at all:

0:00:52.402,0:00:54.213
we will only solve the problem

0:00:54.213,0:00:57.725
of replacing fossil fuels with technology.

0:00:57.725,0:01:00.853
But fossil fuels, carbon -- coal and gas --

0:01:00.853,0:01:02.974
are by no means the only thing

0:01:02.974,0:01:07.092
that is causing climate change.

0:01:07.092,0:01:08.975
Desertification

0:01:08.975,0:01:14.301
is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,

0:01:14.301,0:01:16.602
and this happens only when

0:01:16.602,0:01:18.611
we create too much bare ground.

0:01:18.611,0:01:20.617
There's no other cause.

0:01:20.617,0:01:22.635
And I intend to focus

0:01:22.635,0:01:27.541
on most of the world's land that is turning to desert.

0:01:27.541,0:01:32.834
But I have for you a very simple message

0:01:32.834,0:01:37.030
that offers more hope than you can imagine.

0:01:37.030,0:01:39.098
We have environments

0:01:39.098,0:01:42.342
where humidity is guaranteed throughout the year.

0:01:42.342,0:01:44.846
On those, it is almost impossible

0:01:44.846,0:01:47.635
to create vast areas of bare ground.

0:01:47.635,0:01:51.257
No matter what you do, nature covers it up so quickly.

0:01:51.257,0:01:53.004
And we have environments

0:01:53.004,0:01:55.697
where we have months of humidity

0:01:55.697,0:01:57.475
followed by months of dryness,

0:01:57.475,0:02:00.953
and that is where desertification is occurring.

0:02:00.953,0:02:03.009
Fortunately, with space technology now,

0:02:03.009,0:02:04.686
we can look at it from space,

0:02:04.686,0:02:08.950
and when we do, you can see the proportions fairly well.

0:02:08.950,0:02:10.573
Generally, what you see in green

0:02:10.573,0:02:12.428
is not desertifying,

0:02:12.428,0:02:14.734
and what you see in brown is,

0:02:14.734,0:02:19.106
and these are by far the greatest areas of the Earth.

0:02:19.106,0:02:23.891
About two thirds, I would guess, of the world is desertifying.

0:02:23.891,0:02:26.815
I took this picture in the Tihamah Desert

0:02:26.815,0:02:30.519
while 25 millimeters -- that's an inch of rain -- was falling.

0:02:30.519,0:02:33.231
Think of it in terms of drums of water,

0:02:33.231,0:02:35.903
each containing 200 liters.

0:02:35.903,0:02:40.503
Over 1,000 drums of water fell on every hectare

0:02:40.503,0:02:43.377
of that land that day.

0:02:43.377,0:02:45.761
The next day, the land looked like this.

0:02:45.761,0:02:48.584
Where had that water gone?

0:02:48.584,0:02:50.981
Some of it ran off as flooding,

0:02:50.981,0:02:53.928
but most of the water that soaked into the soil

0:02:53.928,0:02:56.209
simply evaporated out again,

0:02:56.209,0:02:58.578
exactly as it does in your garden

0:02:58.578,0:03:01.593
if you leave the soil uncovered.

0:03:01.593,0:03:05.059
Now, because the fate of water and carbon

0:03:05.059,0:03:08.617
are tied to soil organic matter,

0:03:08.617,0:03:12.544
when we damage soils, you give off carbon.

0:03:12.544,0:03:15.370
Carbon goes back to the atmosphere.

0:03:15.370,0:03:19.475
Now you're told over and over, repeatedly,

0:03:19.475,0:03:22.475
that desertification is only occurring

0:03:22.475,0:03:26.124
in arid and semi-arid areas of the world,

0:03:26.124,0:03:30.099
and that tall grasslands like this one

0:03:30.099,0:03:33.731
in high rainfall are of no consequence.

0:03:33.731,0:03:38.308
But if you do not look at grasslands but look down into them,

0:03:38.308,0:03:41.019
you find that most of the soil in that grassland

0:03:41.019,0:03:45.310
that you've just seen is bare and covered with a crust of algae,

0:03:45.310,0:03:48.428
leading to increased runoff and evaporation.

0:03:48.428,0:03:52.414
That is the cancer of desertification

0:03:52.414,0:03:56.950
that we do not recognize till its terminal form.

0:03:56.950,0:04:02.262
Now we know that desertification is caused by livestock,

0:04:02.262,0:04:05.046
mostly cattle, sheep and goats,

0:04:05.046,0:04:07.863
overgrazing the plants,

0:04:07.863,0:04:11.982
leaving the soil bare and giving off methane.

0:04:11.982,0:04:14.222
Almost everybody knows this,

0:04:14.222,0:04:17.057
from nobel laureates to golf caddies,

0:04:17.057,0:04:19.688
or was taught it, as I was.

0:04:19.688,0:04:23.158
Now, the environments like you see here,

0:04:23.158,0:04:26.022
dusty environments in Africa where I grew up,

0:04:26.022,0:04:28.942
and I loved wildlife,

0:04:28.942,0:04:32.334
and so I grew up hating livestock

0:04:32.334,0:04:34.362
because of the damage they were doing.

0:04:34.362,0:04:37.646
And then my university education as an ecologist

0:04:37.646,0:04:40.734
reinforced my beliefs.

0:04:40.734,0:04:46.010
Well, I have news for you.

0:04:46.010,0:04:49.294
We were once just as certain

0:04:49.294,0:04:51.574
that the world was flat.

0:04:51.574,0:04:55.519
We were wrong then, and we are wrong again.

0:04:55.519,0:04:57.694
And I want to invite you now

0:04:57.694,0:05:03.948
to come along on my journey of reeducation and discovery.

0:05:03.948,0:05:06.519
When I was a young man,

0:05:06.519,0:05:09.414
a young biologist in Africa,

0:05:09.414,0:05:13.831
I was involved in setting aside marvelous areas

0:05:13.831,0:05:16.350
as future national parks.

0:05:16.350,0:05:19.777
Now no sooner — this was in the 1950s —

0:05:19.777,0:05:22.945
and no sooner did we remove the hunting,

0:05:22.945,0:05:26.426
drum-beating people to protect the animals,

0:05:26.426,0:05:28.319
than the land began to deteriorate,

0:05:28.319,0:05:32.565
as you see in this park that we formed.

0:05:32.565,0:05:34.888
Now, no livestock were involved,

0:05:34.888,0:05:38.520
but suspecting that we had too many elephants now,

0:05:38.520,0:05:42.785
I did the research and I proved we had too many,

0:05:42.785,0:05:46.369
and I recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers

0:05:46.369,0:05:50.421
and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain.

0:05:50.421,0:05:54.205
Now, that was a terrible decision for me to have to make,

0:05:54.205,0:05:57.064
and it was political dynamite, frankly.

0:05:57.064,0:06:00.189
So our government formed a team of experts

0:06:00.189,0:06:02.830
to evaluate my research.

0:06:02.830,0:06:05.237
They did. They agreed with me,

0:06:05.237,0:06:07.148
and over the following years,

0:06:07.148,0:06:13.039
we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage.

0:06:13.039,0:06:16.779
And it got worse, not better.

0:06:16.779,0:06:19.278
Loving elephants as I do,

0:06:19.278,0:06:22.884
that was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life,

0:06:22.884,0:06:25.612
and I will carry that to my grave.

0:06:25.612,0:06:28.084
One good thing did come out of it.

0:06:28.084,0:06:31.460
It made me absolutely determined

0:06:31.460,0:06:36.940
to devote my life to finding solutions.

0:06:36.940,0:06:41.025
When I came to the United States, I got a shock,

0:06:41.025,0:06:43.493
to find national parks like this one

0:06:43.493,0:06:47.724
desertifying as badly as anything in Africa.

0:06:47.724,0:06:49.728
And there'd been no livestock on this land

0:06:49.728,0:06:52.452
for over 70 years.

0:06:52.452,0:06:54.378
And I found that American scientists

0:06:54.378,0:06:57.292
had no explanation for this

0:06:57.292,0:07:00.252
except that it is arid and natural.

0:07:00.252,0:07:03.612
So I then began looking

0:07:03.612,0:07:06.863
at all the research plots I could

0:07:06.863,0:07:09.566
over the whole of the Western United States

0:07:09.566,0:07:11.767
where cattle had been removed

0:07:11.767,0:07:14.639
to prove that it would stop desertification,

0:07:14.639,0:07:16.472
but I found the opposite,

0:07:16.472,0:07:19.294
as we see on this research station,

0:07:19.294,0:07:23.018
where this grassland that was green in 1961,

0:07:23.018,0:07:28.031
by 2002 had changed to that situation.

0:07:28.031,0:07:32.750
And the authors of the position paper on climate change

0:07:32.750,0:07:35.303
from which I obtained these pictures

0:07:35.303,0:07:41.122
attribute this change to "unknown processes."

0:07:41.122,0:07:45.116
Clearly, we have never understood

0:07:45.116,0:07:47.800
what is causing desertification,

0:07:47.800,0:07:50.848
which has destroyed many civilizations

0:07:50.848,0:07:53.540
and now threatens us globally.

0:07:53.540,0:07:55.993
We have never understood it.

0:07:55.993,0:07:58.112
Take one square meter of soil

0:07:58.112,0:08:00.815
and make it bare like this is down here,

0:08:00.815,0:08:03.994
and I promise you, you will find it much colder at dawn

0:08:03.994,0:08:06.798
and much hotter at midday

0:08:06.798,0:08:10.468
than that same piece of ground if it's just covered with litter,

0:08:10.468,0:08:12.082
plant litter.

0:08:12.082,0:08:15.119
You have changed the microclimate.

0:08:15.119,0:08:17.218
Now, by the time you are doing that

0:08:17.218,0:08:22.806
and increasing greatly the percentage of bare ground

0:08:22.806,0:08:26.831
on more than half the world's land,

0:08:26.831,0:08:30.061
you are changing macroclimate.

0:08:30.061,0:08:32.650
But we have just simply not understood

0:08:32.650,0:08:36.636
why was it beginning to happen 10,000 years ago?

0:08:36.636,0:08:39.286
Why has it accelerated lately?

0:08:39.286,0:08:41.253
We had no understanding of that.

0:08:41.253,0:08:44.678
What we had failed to understand

0:08:44.678,0:08:48.501
was that these seasonal humidity environments of the world,

0:08:48.501,0:08:51.397
the soil and the vegetation

0:08:51.397,0:08:57.189
developed with very large numbers of grazing animals,

0:08:57.189,0:08:59.813
and that these grazing animals

0:08:59.813,0:09:05.205
developed with ferocious pack-hunting predators.

0:09:05.205,0:09:09.097
Now, the main defense against pack-hunting predators

0:09:09.097,0:09:11.438
is to get into herds,

0:09:11.438,0:09:15.430
and the larger the herd, the safer the individuals.

0:09:15.430,0:09:20.261
Now, large herds dung and urinate all over their own food,

0:09:20.261,0:09:23.261
and they have to keep moving,

0:09:23.261,0:09:25.178
and it was that movement

0:09:25.178,0:09:27.982
that prevented the overgrazing of plants,

0:09:27.982,0:09:30.381
while the periodic trampling

0:09:30.381,0:09:32.901
ensured good cover of the soil,

0:09:32.901,0:09:36.013
as we see where a herd has passed.

0:09:36.013,0:09:42.241
This picture is a typical seasonal grassland.

0:09:42.241,0:09:45.033
It has just come through four months of rain,

0:09:45.033,0:09:48.715
and it's now going into eight months of dry season.

0:09:48.715,0:09:52.183
And watch the change as it goes into this long dry season.

0:09:52.183,0:09:55.259
Now, all of that grass you see aboveground

0:09:55.259,0:09:59.007
has to decay biologically

0:09:59.007,0:10:02.531
before the next growing season, and if it doesn't,

0:10:02.531,0:10:06.724
the grassland and the soil begin to die.

0:10:06.724,0:10:09.919
Now, if it does not decay biologically,

0:10:09.919,0:10:15.058
it shifts to oxidation, which is a very slow process,

0:10:15.058,0:10:18.013
and this smothers and kills grasses,

0:10:18.013,0:10:21.122
leading to a shift to woody vegetation

0:10:21.122,0:10:24.542
and bare soil, releasing carbon.

0:10:24.542,0:10:29.646
To prevent that, we have traditionally used fire.

0:10:29.646,0:10:35.495
But fire also leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon,

0:10:35.495,0:10:37.886
and worse than that,

0:10:37.886,0:10:40.566
burning one hectare of grassland

0:10:40.566,0:10:43.726
gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants

0:10:43.726,0:10:46.640
than 6,000 cars.

0:10:46.640,0:10:51.033
And we are burning in Africa, every single year,

0:10:51.033,0:10:55.672
more than one billion hectares of grasslands,

0:10:55.672,0:10:59.298
and almost nobody is talking about it.

0:10:59.298,0:11:03.637
We justify the burning, as scientists,

0:11:03.637,0:11:06.550
because it does remove the dead material

0:11:06.550,0:11:09.853
and it allows the plants to grow.

0:11:09.853,0:11:12.949
Now, looking at this grassland of ours that has gone dry,

0:11:12.949,0:11:15.645
what could we do to keep that healthy?

0:11:15.645,0:11:18.669
And bear in mind, I'm talking of most of the world's land now.

0:11:18.669,0:11:23.357
Okay? We cannot reduce animal numbers to rest it more

0:11:23.357,0:11:26.973
without causing desertification and climate change.

0:11:26.973,0:11:30.110
We cannot burn it without causing

0:11:30.110,0:11:32.375
desertification and climate change.

0:11:32.375,0:11:36.360
What are we going to do?

0:11:38.420,0:11:40.810
There is only one option,

0:11:40.810,0:11:43.671
I'll repeat to you, only one option

0:11:43.671,0:11:46.390
left to climatologists and scientists,

0:11:46.390,0:11:49.318
and that is to do the unthinkable,

0:11:49.318,0:11:52.054
and to use livestock,

0:11:52.054,0:11:55.009
bunched and moving,

0:11:55.009,0:11:58.398
as a proxy for former herds and predators,

0:11:58.398,0:12:00.142
and mimic nature.

0:12:00.142,0:12:04.646
There is no other alternative left to mankind.

0:12:04.646,0:12:07.094
So let's do that.

0:12:07.094,0:12:10.464
So on this bit of grassland, we'll do it, but just in the foreground.

0:12:10.464,0:12:13.702
We'll impact it very heavily with cattle to mimic nature,

0:12:13.702,0:12:16.526
and we've done so, and look at that.

0:12:16.526,0:12:19.886
All of that grass is now covering the soil

0:12:19.886,0:12:23.856
as dung, urine and litter or mulch,

0:12:23.856,0:12:27.136
as every one of the gardeners amongst you would understand,

0:12:27.136,0:12:31.497
and that soil is ready to absorb and hold the rain,

0:12:31.497,0:12:36.504
to store carbon, and to break down methane.

0:12:36.504,0:12:38.734
And we did that,

0:12:38.734,0:12:41.504
without using fire to damage the soil,

0:12:41.504,0:12:44.640
and the plants are free to grow.

0:12:44.640,0:12:46.904
When I first realized

0:12:46.904,0:12:49.386
that we had no option as scientists

0:12:49.386,0:12:52.146
but to use much-vilified livestock

0:12:52.146,0:12:57.393
to address climate change and desertification,

0:12:57.393,0:12:59.628
I was faced with a real dilemma.

0:12:59.628,0:13:01.353
How were we to do it?

0:13:01.353,0:13:05.917
We'd had 10,000 years of extremely knowledgeable pastoralists

0:13:05.917,0:13:07.865
bunching and moving their animals,

0:13:07.865,0:13:11.532
but they had created the great manmade deserts of the world.

0:13:11.532,0:13:15.411
Then we'd had 100 years of modern rain science,

0:13:15.411,0:13:18.670
and that had accelerated desertification,

0:13:18.670,0:13:20.843
as we first discovered in Africa

0:13:20.843,0:13:23.507
and then confirmed in the United States,

0:13:23.507,0:13:25.626
and as you see in this picture

0:13:25.626,0:13:28.987
of land managed by the federal government.

0:13:28.987,0:13:30.888
Clearly more was needed

0:13:30.888,0:13:32.977
than bunching and moving the animals,

0:13:32.977,0:13:36.547
and humans, over thousands of years,

0:13:36.547,0:13:40.933
had never been able to deal with nature's complexity.

0:13:40.933,0:13:43.317
But we biologists and ecologists

0:13:43.317,0:13:46.286
had never tackled anything as complex as this.

0:13:46.286,0:13:48.925
So rather than reinvent the wheel,

0:13:48.925,0:13:53.061
I began studying other professions to see if anybody had.

0:13:53.061,0:13:55.533
And I found there were planning techniques

0:13:55.533,0:13:59.305
that I could take and adapt to our biological need,

0:13:59.305,0:14:02.002
and from those I developed what we call

0:14:02.002,0:14:05.312
holistic management and planned grazing,

0:14:05.312,0:14:07.111
a planning process,

0:14:07.111,0:14:10.806
and that does address all of nature's complexity

0:14:10.806,0:14:16.055
and our social, environmental, economic complexity.

0:14:16.055,0:14:18.719
Today, we have young women like this one

0:14:18.719,0:14:21.087
teaching villages in Africa

0:14:21.087,0:14:24.023
how to put their animals together into larger herds,

0:14:24.023,0:14:26.727
plan their grazing to mimic nature,

0:14:26.727,0:14:30.768
and where we have them hold their animals overnight --

0:14:30.768,0:14:33.027
we run them in a predator-friendly manner,

0:14:33.027,0:14:35.349
because we have a lot of lands, and so on --

0:14:35.349,0:14:37.543
and where they do this and hold them overnight

0:14:37.543,0:14:39.348
to prepare the crop fields,

0:14:39.348,0:14:43.332
we are getting very great increases in crop yield as well.

0:14:43.332,0:14:44.949
Let's look at some results.

0:14:44.949,0:14:49.173
This is land close to land that we manage in Zimbabwe.

0:14:49.173,0:14:52.717
It has just come through four months of very good rains

0:14:52.717,0:14:56.227
it got that year, and it's going into the long dry season.

0:14:56.227,0:14:59.262
But as you can see, all of that rain, almost of all it,

0:14:59.262,0:15:02.369
has evaporated from the soil surface.

0:15:02.369,0:15:06.171
Their river is dry despite the rain just having ended,

0:15:06.171,0:15:09.691
and we have 150,000 people

0:15:09.691,0:15:13.441
on almost permanent food aid.

0:15:13.441,0:15:17.937
Now let's go to our land nearby on the same day,

0:15:17.937,0:15:20.777
with the same rainfall, and look at that.

0:15:20.777,0:15:23.482
Our river is flowing and healthy and clean.

0:15:23.482,0:15:25.969
It's fine.

0:15:25.969,0:15:31.287
The production of grass, shrubs, trees, wildlife,

0:15:31.287,0:15:34.143
everything is now more productive,

0:15:34.143,0:15:38.248
and we have virtually no fear of dry years.

0:15:38.248,0:15:43.743
And we did that by increasing the cattle and goats

0:15:43.743,0:15:45.668
400 percent,

0:15:45.668,0:15:48.798
planning the grazing to mimic nature

0:15:48.798,0:15:51.219
and integrate them with all the elephants, buffalo,

0:15:51.219,0:15:54.806
giraffe and other animals that we have.

0:15:54.806,0:16:00.528
But before we began, our land looked like that.

0:16:00.528,0:16:05.945
This site was bare and eroding for over 30 years

0:16:05.945,0:16:08.714
regardless of what rain we got.

0:16:08.714,0:16:12.332
Okay? Watch the marked tree and see the change

0:16:12.332,0:16:15.985
as we use livestock to mimic nature.

0:16:15.985,0:16:17.447
This was another site

0:16:17.447,0:16:19.825
where it had been bare and eroding,

0:16:19.825,0:16:22.529
and at the base of the marked small tree,

0:16:22.529,0:16:26.817
we had lost over 30 centimeters of soil. Okay?

0:16:26.817,0:16:28.426
And again, watch the change

0:16:28.426,0:16:31.276
just using livestock to mimic nature.

0:16:31.276,0:16:33.407
And there are fallen trees in there now,

0:16:33.407,0:16:38.364
because the better land is now attracting elephants, etc.

0:16:38.364,0:16:42.020
This land in Mexico was in terrible condition,

0:16:42.020,0:16:43.974
and I've had to mark the hill

0:16:43.974,0:16:48.161
because the change is so profound.

0:16:48.161,0:16:53.886
(Applause)

0:16:55.721,0:17:00.658
I began helping a family in the Karoo Desert in the 1970s

0:17:00.658,0:17:03.626
turn the desert that you see on the right there

0:17:03.626,0:17:05.560
back to grassland,

0:17:05.560,0:17:09.082
and thankfully, now their grandchildren are on the land

0:17:09.082,0:17:10.925
with hope for the future.

0:17:10.925,0:17:13.722
And look at the amazing change in this one,

0:17:13.722,0:17:16.434
where that gully has completely healed

0:17:16.434,0:17:21.013
using nothing but livestock mimicking nature,

0:17:21.013,0:17:25.238
and once more, we have the third generation of that family

0:17:25.238,0:17:28.518
on that land with their flag still flying.

0:17:28.518,0:17:31.086
The vast grasslands of Patagonia

0:17:31.086,0:17:33.162
are turning to desert as you see here.

0:17:33.162,0:17:36.222
The man in the middle is an Argentinian researcher,

0:17:36.222,0:17:39.866
and he has documented the steady decline of that land

0:17:39.866,0:17:43.342
over the years as they kept reducing sheep numbers.

0:17:43.342,0:17:48.190
They put 25,000 sheep in one flock,

0:17:48.190,0:17:52.139
really mimicking nature now with planned grazing,

0:17:52.139,0:17:56.482
and they have documented a 50-percent increase

0:17:56.482,0:17:59.950
in the production of the land in the first year.

0:17:59.950,0:18:02.990
We now have in the violent Horn of Africa

0:18:02.990,0:18:06.446
pastoralists planning their grazing to mimic nature

0:18:06.446,0:18:09.942
and openly saying it is the only hope they have

0:18:09.942,0:18:13.110
of saving their families and saving their culture.

0:18:13.110,0:18:15.186
Ninety-five percent of that land

0:18:15.186,0:18:18.846
can only feed people from animals.

0:18:18.846,0:18:20.957
I remind you that I am talking about

0:18:20.957,0:18:25.398
most of the world's land here that controls our fate,

0:18:25.398,0:18:28.454
including the most violent region of the world,

0:18:28.454,0:18:31.406
where only animals can feed people

0:18:31.406,0:18:34.710
from about 95 percent of the land.

0:18:34.710,0:18:39.844
What we are doing globally is causing climate change

0:18:39.844,0:18:43.140
as much as, I believe, fossil fuels,

0:18:43.140,0:18:46.676
and maybe more than fossil fuels.

0:18:46.676,0:18:50.351
But worse than that, it is causing hunger, poverty,

0:18:50.351,0:18:53.348
violence, social breakdown and war,

0:18:53.348,0:18:55.756
and as I am talking to you,

0:18:55.756,0:18:58.906
millions of men, women and children

0:18:58.906,0:19:01.308
are suffering and dying.

0:19:01.308,0:19:04.020
And if this continues,

0:19:04.020,0:19:07.814
we are unlikely to be able to stop the climate changing,

0:19:07.814,0:19:12.861
even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels.

0:19:12.861,0:19:17.097
I believe I've shown you how we can work with nature

0:19:17.097,0:19:19.553
at very low cost

0:19:19.553,0:19:22.049
to reverse all this.

0:19:22.049,0:19:24.481
We are already doing so

0:19:24.481,0:19:28.477
on about 15 million hectares

0:19:28.477,0:19:31.109
on five continents,

0:19:31.109,0:19:32.736
and people who understand

0:19:32.736,0:19:35.026
far more about carbon than I do

0:19:35.026,0:19:38.084
calculate that, for illustrative purposes,

0:19:38.084,0:19:40.878
if we do what I am showing you here,

0:19:40.878,0:19:44.903
we can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere

0:19:44.903,0:19:48.237
and safely store it in the grassland soils

0:19:48.237,0:19:49.863
for thousands of years,

0:19:49.863,0:19:54.859
and if we just do that on about half the world's grasslands

0:19:54.859,0:19:56.213
that I've shown you,

0:19:56.213,0:19:59.913
we can take us back to pre-industrial levels,

0:19:59.913,0:20:01.554
while feeding people.

0:20:01.554,0:20:04.326
I can think of almost nothing

0:20:04.326,0:20:07.851
that offers more hope for our planet,

0:20:07.851,0:20:10.099
for your children,

0:20:10.099,0:20:12.755
and their children, and all of humanity.

0:20:12.755,0:20:16.060
Thank you.

0:20:16.060,0:20:24.172
(Applause)

0:20:24.172,0:20:29.160
Thank you. (Applause)

0:20:37.521,0:20:39.241
Thank you, Chris.

0:20:39.241,0:20:42.587
Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have,

0:20:42.587,0:20:44.684
and I'm sure everyone here has,

0:20:44.684,0:20:48.412
A) a hundred questions, B) wants to hug you.

0:20:48.412,0:20:50.171
I'm just going to ask you one quick question.

0:20:50.171,0:20:53.855
When you first start this and you bring in a flock of animals,

0:20:53.855,0:20:57.231
it's desert. What do they eat? How does that part work?

0:20:57.231,0:20:58.222
How do you start?

0:20:58.222,0:20:59.861
Allan Savory: Well, we have done this for a long time,

0:20:59.861,0:21:03.479
and the only time we have ever had to provide any feed

0:21:03.479,0:21:05.248
is during mine reclamation,

0:21:05.248,0:21:07.562
where it's 100 percent bare.

0:21:07.562,0:21:11.918
But many years ago, we took the worst land in Zimbabwe,

0:21:11.918,0:21:15.012
where I offered a £5 note

0:21:15.012,0:21:17.031
in a hundred-mile drive

0:21:17.031,0:21:19.151
if somebody could find one grass

0:21:19.151,0:21:21.141
in a hundred-mile drive,

0:21:21.141,0:21:23.927
and on that, we trebled the stocking rate,

0:21:23.927,0:21:27.703
the number of animals, in the first year with no feeding,

0:21:27.703,0:21:30.359
just by the movement, mimicking nature,

0:21:30.359,0:21:35.134
and using a sigmoid curve, that principle.

0:21:35.134,0:21:37.605
It's a little bit technical to explain here, but just that.

0:21:37.605,0:21:41.317
CA: Well, I would love to -- I mean, this such an interesting and important idea.

0:21:41.317,0:21:43.309
The best people on our blog are going to come and talk to you

0:21:43.309,0:21:45.941
and try and -- I want to get more on this

0:21:45.941,0:21:48.893
that we could share along with the talk.AS: Wonderful.

0:21:48.893,0:21:52.429
CA: That is an astonishing talk, truly an astonishing talk,

0:21:52.429,0:21:55.205
and I think you heard that we all are cheering you on your way.

0:21:55.205,0:21:58.197
Thank you so much.AS: Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chris.

0:21:58.197,0:21:59.427
(Applause)