The Grazing Revolution: A Radical Plan to Save the Earth

The Grazing Revolution

The Grazing Revolution

Copyright © 2023 by Allan Savory

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Savory Institute.Org, Inc. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and review and certain noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publisher at:

Savory Institute

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Boulder CO 80302 USA

Second edition ISBN: 9798218059941

First edition published by TED Conferences, LLC in November 2013

First printing of the second edition, 2023

Keywords:  climate change, TED Talk, desertification, grasslands, livestock, herds, biodiversity, soil carbon, carbon sequestration, land restoration, wildlife habitat, ecosystem management

About the Book

This book is a companion piece to Allan Savory's TED Talk, delivered in February 2013 in Long Beach, California. It was re-published in 2023 by the Savory Institute with Allan Savory's updates to the last chapter, Scaling Up.

Watch Allan Savory's talk on TED.com and YouTube.

Contents

About the Book

Preface

1 A Radical Idea

2 Early Mistakes

3 Understanding the Cause

4 The Discovery

5 Implementing the Discovery

6 Successes, Lessons, and Results

7 Scaling Up

Thanks

References

About the Author

About the Savory Institute

Preface

Today, a perfect storm is bearing down on us. It owes its genesis to a trifecta of factors that is overwhelming humanity’s options for a viable future: Our global population, having surpassed 7 billion, is rising exponentially; on every continent outside the polar regions, a process known as desertification is destroying the land supporting that population; and Earth’s climate is changing considerably faster than the scientific community had anticipated.¹

Our society believes that some form of technology will fix climate change, which we typically attribute to greenhouse gases emitted from burning fossil fuels. Certainly technology can provide benign sources of energy to replace fossil fuels. But it will take more than just clean energy to tackle climate change. Our agricultural practices — how we produce and manage the crops and livestock that sustain us — are, I believe, equally to blame. Specifically, these practices — having already destroyed many past civilizations — are largely responsible for the desertification underway around the planet. One statistic bears this out: Each year, the earth loses (to erosion) 75 billion tons of soil, mostly from agricultural land,² which amounts to 10 tons for every human alive today. More alarming is the advancing rate of soil loss, which leads directly to desertification. And according to mounting scientific evidence, it appears that desertification itself is a major contributor to — and not merely a symptom of — climate change.

To give you an idea of the scale at which desertification is occurring, look at this view of the world, courtesy of NASA:

Generally, dark green land is not turning to desert, while the fringes of green outside the high latitudes and the brown are desertifying, even when rainfall is high. Keep in mind that the brown areas also encompass natural deserts, such as the Namib in Southern Africa and the Gobi of northern China, which get almost no rain at all, as well as parts of the Sahara. Over millennia these deserts have been expanding into grasslands and savannas, resulting in failed civilizations. The deep black soils and abundant wildlife of Libya, described in the fifth century B.C. by the Greek historian Herodotus, are now part of the Sahara. The great civilizations of the Middle East — the Phoenicians, Persians, the 100 Dead Cities of Syria — all succumbed to desertification, as did the empires of northern China.³

Human-induced desertification happens when land becomes increasingly dry despite no change in rainfall. Rivers that once flowed year- round run only during periods of heavy precipitation and then quickly dry up. Silt and eroded soil fill dams until they’re no longer capable of storing water. Aquifers are not replenished and water tables drop. Crop yields shrink. Grass and forage for animals, wild and domestic, becomes increasingly sparse. As a result, people who make their living from the land become impoverished. Unremitting poverty leads to social breakdown. Abuse of women and children rises, along with violence, as humans compete for scarce resources and access to land and water. The affected people forsake the land and swarm into cities or emigrate to other countries, creating a host of other social and economic problems.

The large area of brown on the NASA image — from North Africa, through the Middle East, across the former Soviet republics to China and into Pakistan and India — are suffering the symptoms of desertification. It is no surprise that these regions are the most volatile, violent, and unstable in the world. Desertification is equally severe over large swaths of the western United States, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Australia. It won’t be long before nations are fighting wars over water — wars that will likely be greater and more violent than any fought over oil.

This vast environmental change began tens of thousands of years ago, when humans became predators. Research shows that humans had once been more akin to omnivorous scavengers, on equal footing with most other species. But when hominids mastered fire, evolved language and organizing skills, and developed weapons such as the spear, they became formidable predators. This was particularly the case in the grasslands where their prey ran in herds — grasslands whose deep, rich, water- and carbon-holding soils had developed over millions of years thanks to a balance of grazing animals, the predators that fed on them, and infrequent lightning-sparked fires (commonly associated with rain).

Predators hunting in large packs had to isolate a single animal in order to kill it, but humans