The Making and Unmaking of Deserts—The Grazing Paradox
We are a desert-making species.
—Elisabet Sahtouris, evolution biologist
OVER THE PAST THREE DECADES, French filmmaker Yann Arthus-Bertrand has observed the world’s landscapes from above. He’s captured aerial scenes from more than a hundred countries, racking up thousands of hours of helicopter time. These lofty glimpses of nature’s edges and crevices left him in awe of not only the earth’s beauty but also its fragility; this made him an environmental activist as well as an artist. Even when depicting devastation or abject poverty, the images are stunning: In one shot a woman in Burkina Faso picks cotton as nearby a child, naked and with belly distended, rests amid the white fiber as though nestled in a cloud. Another depicts the Alberta tar sands. The whorls of viscous bitumen make a beautiful abstract design, like wood grain.
One aspect of our “altered planet” Arthus-Bertrand has become quite vocal about is desertification, the march of land degradation in dry areas. He has one arresting photo of a caravan of camels making its way across twilit ocher sands, its shadow a ghost train of itself riding the crest of the dune. This was taken near Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, a nation bordering the Sahara that’s been particularly affected by desertification. The caption notes that prior to becoming the capital in 1960, the area was a fertile grassy plain; now a city of more than two million, it has “the desert at its door.”
I met the filmmaker briefly at the United Nations in September 2011, at the first United Nations General Assembly devoted to addressing the topic of desertification. He spoke at the press conference that followed, as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), along with Hifikepunye Pohamba, the president of Namibia, and Luc Gnacadja, of Benin, the executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The presser was sparsely attended, unnervingly so. In the way we have of sizing up our tribe, I glanced around and counted maybe half a dozen reporters. The discussion was as much about the apparent lack of interest in the topic as the topic itself. Gnacadja, a former architect who, particularly for a UN dignitary, gives an impression of youthful affability, began his remarks by saying, “If this were about climate change, the room would be full.”
The UNCCD is kind of a poor cousin among the three conventions established at the Rio Summit in 1992, the other two being the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which receive far more ink and attention. But desertification is hardly a fringe problem. Here, courtesy of the UNCCD, are some sobering facts:
Drylands—the arid, semi-arid, and sub-humid areas with seasonal, often unpredictable rains—are complex, delicate ecosystems that though resilient are vulnerable when land and water are not sustainably managed. Drylands account for 41.3 percent of the world’s land-mass, including 44 percent of land under cultivation. Each year upward of twelve million hectares (thirty million acres) of productive land are lost to desertification; this means an area the size of South Africa is slipping away each decade. With two billion people living in drylands, mostly in the developing world, the loss of arable land is pushing large populations trying to eke out a marginal living into poverty, starvation, and migration. Today 1.5 billion people depend for their food and livelihoods on land that is losing its capacity to sustain vegetation. It’s estimated that half of armed conflicts can be at least in part attributed to environmental strains associated with dryland degradation. Desertification has contributed to the downfall of civilizations: think Carthage, Mesopotamia, ancient Greece and Rome.
Desertification is not a “natural” development—the result, say, of dune movement or shifting sands. It is a man-made process, driven by actions that disturb the life cycles of many plant and animal species that have adapted to dryland conditions. These endeavors include overcultivation, deforestation, poor irrigation design, poor livestock management, and the use of technology ill suited to the landscape. Land degradation is not unique to drylands; actually, most land deterioration occurs in areas you wouldn’t consider dry. The problem is that in drylands the margins that determine adequate rainfall or water scarcity, a good harvest or crop failure, are exceedingly thin. Which means that if you’re in England or the U.S. North Atlantic coast, you can get away with messing things up somewhat without facing immediate consequences; residents of Australia or North Africa lack that luxury. Weather-related events like droughts and floods do not in themselves cause but can intensify and hasten the decline to desert—land that becomes “dirt” with life neither on nor within it.
It’s ironic that desertification might, global-crisis-wise, need to compete for airtime with climate change and biodiversity loss—because they’re all connected. Here’s a hypothetical snapshot of how it plays out: Degraded soils in arid lands lack the capacity to store carbon; whatever carbon is in the soil oxidizes to form carbon dioxide, contributing to climate change. Absent plant cover and moisture, bare ground absorbs heat (if you’ve scorched your feet on hot sand, you’ll know what I mean). If you remove plant cover and litter over one square yard, the soil heats up and the microclimate is altered. Do that over the whole of North Africa or most of Australia, and you’ve changed the macro-climate. The added heat makes any moisture present more prone to evaporate, and want of moisture leaves the soil less than welcoming to microorganisms, the absence of which deprives plants of nutrients and other beneficial exchanges. With the habitat unfriendly for growth, the range of plants that can survive is limited, which then limits the birds and insects that might pollinate or spread seeds. Sparse vegetation means little protection from winds or heavy rains, so these occurrences lead to more soil blowing or streaming away, more carbon oxidizing.
So intertwined are these three—desertification, climate change, and biodiversity loss—that we can consider them manifestations of the same problem: The biological cycles underlying life on earth have been thrown out of whack. We can’t hope to make inroads on any one of them without addressing all of them. However, this is not how it’s usually discussed.
The word desertification and its association with droughts and barren landscapes makes us think that we’re dealing with a “just add water” situation: that all those benighted regions need is a good dose of rain and the land would burst into tulips and daffodils. But if we were to reduce the problem to its essence, desertification is really about soil: soil losing its “aliveness,” the wherewithal to sustain life.
One reason desertification does not rank higher in our awareness is that it’s often thought of as a third-world problem. It happens over there, in regions we’re unlikely to visit, places many of us haven’t heard of let alone be able to pronounce. It’s the kind of thing we’d read about on what used to be called “the Africa page” in the newspapers, shake our heads in momentary pity, and think Thank God I don’t live there, assured that something like that could never happen where we live. In fact, the continent with the highest proportion of its dryland areas classified as severe or moderately desertified is North America, at 74 percent. In the European Union, another region you might think immune, thirteen countries suffer some degree of desertification.
While working in the United States in the early 1990s Allan Savory, the African wildlife biologist and rancher who developed the planned grazing framework called Holistic Management (its application is generally called “Holistic Planned Grazing”), made this observation: Most experts on desertification attribute its development to overpopulation, overstocking of livestock, cutting down too many trees, poverty, war, lack of education and/or technology, and the overexploitation of shared resources. In West Texas, where Savory was working, none of these factors was present. The rural population was declining, as were livestock numbers, while mesquite trees grew undisturbed. There was no war, no dearth of money, technology, or education. Nor could one blame the “tragedy of the commons,” since all the land was privately owned. Yet West Texas was desertifying as rapidly as anything he’d seen in Africa: Sand dunes were forming, rivers were drying up, and the water table was dwindling.
Clearly something else was going on.
When it comes to desertification, few have done as much innovative thinking about it, or been as roundly criticized for it, as Savory. A key idea underlying Holistic Management—that grazing animals can serve as a tool for preventing or reversing the desertification process—has offended many scientists and academicians, even as thousands of practitioners attest to the improvements it has brought to their land. Here was someone outside the agricultural and scholarly mainstream who did his research in the open air and presented his improbable-sounding conclusions in plain language. Many footnote-laden articles and spirited diatribes (including more than a few that have landed in my inbox) have been devoted to the cause of proving Savory wrong. So far the best these folks have been able to do is agree to disagree with him.
Knowing the polarizing figure he is, I was surprised when I met Allan Savory in New York—where his ideas would be the topic of a Deepak Homebase conversation—to encounter a slight, older man with alert eyes and a gentle manner and who had a way of pausing an instant before committing a thought to speech. I even felt a tinge of familiarity upon hearing him talk. It was the accent: My husband, Tony, is from South Africa, and it still touches his speech. As a child, Tony was a keen observer of animals and wanted to be a game ranger when he grew up. Of course he knew of Savory’s work long before I did.
The evening with the Deepak Chopra folks was a bit odd. The live-cast panel discussion was held in a showroom at ABC Carpet & Home; the chairs and sofas we sat on—all contemporary and very stylish— bore price tags. The “curated conversation,” I felt, veered too much into the metaphysical to be informative. I could swear I saw Savory grimace when talk turned to a shift in higher consciousness.
But the appearance at such a venue was yet another sign of Savory’s changing fortunes in terms of how his ideas are received. In 2003 he was given Australia’s Banksia International Award “for the person or organization doing the most for the environment on a global scale,” previous winners of which include Rachel Carson and David Attenborough. In 2010 his Zimbabwe nonprofit, Africa Centre for Holistic Management (ACHM), won the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Prize, a prestigious award granting $100,000 to a project with “significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.” Also that year ACHM received a $4.8 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to expand its work in Africa. In recent years he’s presented at numerous international events, including UNCCD’s Land Day 2011 in Bonn, Germany. In a phone interview, UNCCD’s Luc Gnacadja called Holistic Management “a game changer” for addressing desertification. There’s even a bit of glam, as actor Ian Somerhalder, star of Lost and The Vampire Diaries, has announced plans to make a documentary about Savory. Somerhalder told E! Entertainment News, “The goal of the movie is to win Allan Savory a Nobel Prize for agriculture, which has never been done.”
Let’s zero in on what Savory discerned about the process of desertification, and how the means to address it may be contrary to what we might think. First, how his ideas evolved.
Savory grew up in Bulawayo, Rhodesia, in a family with long roots in colonial southern Africa. As Sam Bingham wrote in The Last Ranch: A Colorado Community and the Coming Desert, Savory was “the distilled essence of British colonial history,” raised “amid more pith helmets and khaki than one could find in a shelf of Kipling.” In the mid-1950s, after completing a degree in biology and botany at the University of Natal in South Africa, he worked for the Colonial Service in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). As a wildlife ranger—at twenty, he was the youngest ever taken on for this position—his task was to stop poachers and kill rogue elephants and man-eating lions. He mentioned this to me so casually that I had to pause and repeat, “Man-eating lions?” Apparently, with people living in proximity to lions and the habitat of the big cats and their prey under stress, lions may hunt humans. Once a lion has killed and eaten a person it must be killed, since it will have developed a taste for our kind. The most dangerous man-eater Savory encountered had done in thirty-five people.
Lion trapping in the wild led to an important skill: tracking. “I went out with native trackers, but all too often they would lose the track on getting close,” Savory says. “Finally I realized: they were afraid of finding the lion. So I knew that in order to do this work I was going to have to learn to track myself. If you’re going to follow a lion, it does no good to just shoot any lion. You need the one experienced with killing people, because it will do it again.” He learned to read the land, to peruse his surroundings for tiny clues—a disturbed leaf, a piece of grass at a slightly unnatural tilt, a broken spiderweb—as to what animals might be fleeing or on the prowl, interpreting the signs to try to understand what was going on. The next time a native tracker said he lost the track, he’d be able to do it himself. “Liebenberg wrote of tracking as the origin of science,” he says, referring to the South African author of The Art of Tracking, adding, “It could well be true.”
As commander of the Tracker Combat Unit during Zimbabwe’s long war to gain independence, Savory also spent thousands of daylight hours looking at the ground and subsequent nights reflecting on what he saw. “At night we couldn’t light a fire because then we could be found,” he said. During the dark nights at camp sleeping on the ground—“never the luxury of a tent”—he pondered and tried to interpret all he’d observed during the day. Why was it easier to track people over land devoted to certain purposes and harder over others? What were the variations in soil exposure, litter, and plant life, and what caused such differences? He also began to understand that the greatest danger to wildlife was not poaching but habitat destruction—the same thing that ultimately threatened humans. He reasoned that if a few animals were killed by poachers either to feed their families or to sell, the animal population bounced back. But it couldn’t bounce back once habitat was destroyed.
Savory was stationed in areas to be set aside as future national parks, in the Zambezi and Luangwa Valleys. He recalls: “I was looking at the habitat all the time and saw that it kept getting worse. Some land was healthier. This was mostly in pristine wild areas where herds of buffalo, elephant and other game along with large numbers of lions and other predators still existed. But even there it was deteriorating. I began to speculate that we game rangers and biologists were greater dangers to the animals than the poachers. This was not a popular statement.”
One way the wildlife service sought to protect the land in order to create a preserve was by “resting” it: removing and resettling the local population. “We lied like good bureaucrats,” says Savory. “We said this was because there was sleeping sickness in the area, though the population had been living with that for centuries. As the land got protected, it deteriorated. We were starting to lose species like bush-buck and nyala and large areas of reeds and rambling fig bush were disappearing. There seemed no conceivable explanation for this except that there were too many animals. Like most scientists I interpreted the data I gathered on land degradation to fit my beliefs. I concluded that there were too many elephants.”
Privately, Savory was still asking the question: Why, paradoxically, did wildlife habitat lose vitality—showing signs like erosion, bare soil between plants, patchy growing patterns with some spots overgrazed and some overgrown with fibrous, woody vegetation, all indicative of incipient desertification—even as the game rangers took strong measures to protect it? In his official capacity as a research officer in the game department, he felt compelled to act and so, in a move that pains him to this day, he wrote a report recommending the culling of elephants.
“The idea of culling large numbers of animals in preserves was shocking to the government,” he says. “They formed a committee of respected ecologists to verify my reports and inspect the worst areas. I brought the people into the field with me to see the condition of the land and so we went ahead and shot thousands of elephants.”
The result? Says Savory: “The problems got much worse.”
Desperate for answers, while consulting at a ranch he chanced to pick up a South African farming magazine from the coffee table. He read a piece by a botanist with an unusual but apparently successful sheep-grazing method that revived land—and was causing a row. He was intrigued enough to drive five hundred miles to Middelburg in the Eastern Cape to meet John Acocks.
The older man attributed the area’s degrading land to domestic animals’ tendency to selectively graze, eating the grasses they preferred until only the shrubby, less tasty plants were left. This was in contrast with wild roaming herds, as each of several grazing species would favor different plants. To counter selective grazing, Acocks devised a system that concentrated the animals so they’d eat everything in one spot, after which he’d move them to another. This was contrary to the widespread belief that unless sparsely placed in minimal numbers, domestic animals were bad for the land. In one corner of a paddock under Acocks’s supervision, Savory dropped to his knees and dug his finger in the soil. As he later wrote in Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making, “Here I saw domestic livestock could do to the soil what I had seen with large herds of buffalo. The surface was broken; litter lay everywhere; water was soaking in rather than running off; aeration had improved; and new seedlings grew in abundance.” Savory could tell this patch had been trampled, which clarified a few points for him: Healthy soil is contingent on the actions of the animals that live on the land; livestock could be made to act upon the soil as wild herds had done; and animal disturbance could benefit as well as harm a landscape.
The next piece of the puzzle arrived in the form of a book called Grass Productivity by André Voisin, a French scientist. Voisin made the observation that overgrazing is determined not by numbers of animals but by length of exposure. In other words, one cow grazing a field at will can do more damage than, say, an entire herd that nibbles on the grass for a brief time and then moves away. In the former case, edible grasses are bitten to the ground; in the latter, the grasses have a chance to recover. Savory realized that managing for time was important, as was managing to ensure for the high physical impact of hooves. In this way he began to integrate the work of Acocks and Voisin together with his own observations.
The centrality of timing helped Savory understand why the land set aside for animals deteriorated: The human population living in the bush had been keeping the animals “wild.” The local people used to beat drums to protect their gardens along the river, and had muzzle-loading guns to hunt and safeguard their crops. He explains: “When these lands became protected as future parks the game became more sedentary. Once we removed the people, animals came along to the rich soils by the water and they could linger all day in the shade of the trees. In the parks we had big sturdy trees for shade, plenty of nutrition and water. There was no one banging drums or shooting rifles, just biologists and binoculars and tourists with cameras. The animals stayed. They were there too long. They needed to be moving.”
When Savory realized that livestock were the best tools to reverse the very land degradation they were blamed for causing, he faced a dilemma. For thousands of years pastoral people had herded livestock with great knowledge of their animals and land, yet had caused the great man-made deserts. And for the last hundred or so years range scientists had developed a host of different rotational grazing systems, only to see desertification increase—as Savory had himself observed on ranches and at research stations. How, then, were livestock to be managed? It had to be in a manner that could account for the daily complexity of livestock needs, wildlife, crops, other uses of the land, and variable weather. Because no one had ever pursued such an approach in the biological or range science fields, he looked to other professions for ideas. Of these, military planning in battlefield conditions offered the most hope.
He turned to Britain’s Sandhurst military college, whose planning process had been used by the Rhodesian army. “I took the simple aide memoire, a military planning idea, and adapted it to planned grazing of livestock integrated with wildlife, cropping and other land uses, and to accommodate constantly changing weather and other conditions, such as a fire sweeping across the land,” he says. “This rapid planning process had been refined over hundreds of years in which men are trained to simply concentrate on one small part of the situation at a time, and to develop the best possible plan right now in simple steps, each building on those before. All that had to be added was to record each step on a grazing chart because the military had not needed to address time, volume of forage, sizes of land, behavior of animals and more. This planning process results in the many different factors having a bearing appearing on the chart over the months planned, then allowing the moves of the livestock to be plotted so that the animals are in the right place, at the right time, for the right reasons and with the right behavior. The military is geared to stressful conditions just as farmers are always stressed.”
In the 1960s and ’70s over many trials and, as he admits, much error, Savory worked to develop a model for land restoration using livestock. During this time he also ran a consulting business and a farm and game ranch, formed an elite tracking combat unit during Rhodesia’s long civil war, and served in the Rhodesian parliament, where he led the opposition to Prime Minister Ian Smith’s racist regime. In 1979, after being denounced by Ian Smith as a traitor and threatened with detention, he went into exile; years before, a Molotov tossed into Savory’s house had burned the home to the ground, so he knew that having enemies wasn’t something to take lightly. He moved to the United States and with his U.S.-born second wife, Jody Butterfield, formed the nonprofit Center for Holistic Resource Management in 1984. A separate organization, the Savory Institute, which more directly addresses land restoration and reversing desertification internationally, was founded in 2009 to ensure what Savory considers the most important aspect of his work: using the holistic framework to address the social, economic, and environmental complexity facing governments and international agencies in forming policies, laws, and regulations germane to agriculture.
Virtually by definition, Holistic Management has a lot of moving parts, but Savory’s pivotal insight was that grasslands, grazing mammals, and pack-hunting predators evolved together. So if domestic herbivores can be managed such that their behavior mimics that of their wild counterparts, the grasslands—the African savanna or the U.S. prairies and plains, terrain that represents about 45 percent of all land world-wide—will regain the state of wild land: healthy, diverse, and resilient.
For one, the grasses need to be grazed and trampled by the herd effect of bunching animals. Animals eat plants and stimulate their growth during each growing season; the act of grazing and the trampling of animals during the non-growing-season when the above-ground parts of the plants are dead cycles dead plant material back to the surface. This allows sunlight to reach the low-growing parts as well as covering the soil between plants with litter so essential to maintaining the effectiveness of the available rain. The animal urine and dung provide fertilizer as well as the impulse to move on, as an animal will not feed where it has dunged.
Another key is herd behavior. Say a herd of antelope (could be zebra, wildebeest, giraffe, or gazelle; sheep, deer, bison, or caribou) is happily grazing. At some point a predator mob—a pride of lions or a pack of wild dogs; in the United States we’d have wolves—comes on the scene. The antelope stand in a cluster as their main defense against pack-hunting predators, and it’s this frequent “bunching” that’s so important. The bunching and moving gets repeated across the terrain, leading to the continual defoliation of plants and trampling of litter and soil. This, in turn, ensures both soil cover and the establishment of new plants. The regular movement means that a broad swath of plants get a good nibbling but none are overgrazed. Nor are they over-rested, which would result in accumulated dead plant material that blocks sunlight and hinders new growth. Instead, the herd’s trampling— which seems to completely trash the area, with flattened plants and hoof marks everywhere—drops plant residue onto the ground where the microbes can get to work decomposing it. Without this, the dead growth would oxidize, killing grass plants when sunlight can’t reach the ground-level growth points that are out of grazing harm. At the same time, the soil underneath the plants would dry out, initiating the slide toward wasteland. Here, the organic litter helps retain moisture for plants to draw upon. The pounding of hooves also pushes seeds onto the ground where they can germinate.
This is the kind of dynamic that had occurred in that trampled spot Savory saw on that South African farm, and why the soil was healthy. Albeit in a small corner of a single plot, the sheep on that farm had acted on the ground in a way that built soil. Savory says the decrease in populations of wild predators in many of the world’s grasslands has been hugely detrimental to the state of the land, since it’s the cheetahs, hyenas, and wolves of the world that keep the grazers bunched and continually moving. In the absence of predators, however, moving groups of livestock according to a planned schedule can approximate the effect on the land.
One of the tenets of Holistic Management that’s left many in the scientific and ranching communities scratching their collective heads is the notion that more rather than fewer cattle is better for the land. Yet Holistic Planned Grazing typically doubles or even quadruples carrying capacity while improving the land and storing carbon.
The planning process à la Sandhurst military college is not a one-off. Ongoing monitoring ensures that moves planned months in advance are still appropriate given varying seasons and conditions; should anything drastically change, like fire burning over a large area, replanning takes place immediately. It’s a continual process of studying the land, adjusting for evolving conditions, and revisiting the plan. One benefit of this model, Savory likes to point out, is that it involves minimal cost; much of the work is in the planning.
Today some ten thousand land managers are practicing Holistic Planned Grazing on more than forty million acres around the world. Interest has spread beyond the ranching community to nonprofits, government agencies, and municipal leaders seeking ways to protect and restore land and watersheds as well as climate change mitigation. The Holistic Management decision-making model can be applied to other processes that benefit from planning, such as governing a town (the mayor of Buena Vista, Colorado, Joel Benson, is a Holistic Management educator and brings this approach to local governance), running a business (see: Buena Vista Roastery, the café Benson runs with his wife, Laurie), and setting personal life goals.
By the way, Savory, who splits his time between Zimbabwe and New Mexico, has always hated cattle. As someone whose heart was with Africa’s wild game, he saw domestic cattle as intruders and wanted them off the savanna. After he came to understand their potential role in ecological restoration, however, he decided that he “loved the land, wildlife, rural communities, and humankind more than I hated livestock.”
That was the breathless-encapsulated-speed-writing description of Holistic Management. If this were a class, this is the point where I’d pause, glance around the room to make unobtrusive eye contact, and ask, “Are there any questions?”
Now let’s zone in on a few points that relate to improving soil:
1. Disturbance. In our everyday lexicon the notion of “disturbance” has a negative connotation, so it’s counterintuitive to consider it a healing mechanism for land. But land doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and what outwardly looks like disruption or turmoil can serve as a biological and ecological stimulant, triggering important processes. With bare or degrading soil, periodic animal impact creates opportunities for life to find its way in: a loosening of soil that frees up oxygen for microorganisms, and allows a seed to embed in a moist spot. By contrast, without the occasional disturbance the soil surface caulks over so that water can’t infiltrate. Upon grazing, grass roots respond by dying back (to be broken down as organic matter, thus keeping carbon in the soil) and shifting plant energy toward producing more leaves and then growing new roots. All these effects promote photosynthesis, biodiversity, and retention of moisture and carbon, thereby nipping the desertification process. Land needs disruption at a certain degree and regular intervals—a rhythm similar to that of game in the wild.
2. Decay. When we consider the basic life cycle—birth, growth, death, and decay—that last piece, decay, often gets short shrift. Yet, says Savory, “it is a living process essential to the maintenance of all environments, including grasslands and rangelands.” He also notes that each year plant material amounting to billions of tons dies in a compressed few months in seasonal rainfall environments (whether high or low rainfall). Since grass plants don’t drop their dead leaves as trees do, these remain as part of the plant even as they wither away. Plant matter that dies during prolonged dry periods doesn’t rapidly decay biologically but instead breaks down gradually through chemical and physical processes—oxidation and weathering—which can take a very long time and lay waste to many of the perennial plants that form the basis of healthy grasslands by preventing the full spectrum of light reaching new growing points each season. This does not occur where the atmospheric humidity is high throughout each year and microorganism populations are always high, breaking dead material down rapidly and biologically. In other words, humid areas are friendly to microbes, and biomass breaks down swiftly. Seasonably dry areas, however, need help from herbivores. Their chewing and digesting, their symbiotic relationship with the particular microorganisms that reside in their gut, break down the plant fodder as it moves through the various digestive stations/ stomachs and, ultimately, out in a form that fertilizes the soil. Abe Collins refers to a grazing animal’s digestion system as a “biological accelerator,” in that it hastens the decaying process, the breaking down of a plant into its constituent nutritional parts. The older, rougher forage that wouldn’t sit well in the bovine gut would be crushed by hooves into soil-covering litter, an action that kick-starts the process of decay by other means. In a sense, desertification can be thought of as an affliction of the decaying process: This is where the cycle gets stuck.
3. Brittleness. Among Savory’s contributions to our understanding of desertification is the concept of brittleness. This term refers to the distribution of humidity throughout the year in an environment. The relative brittleness of a place—a tropical rain forest would represent the non-brittle extreme while a true desert is most brittle— determines the type of management the land needs in order to stay vibrant. Brittleness is usually described according to a 1 to 10 scale, with 1 the most non-brittle and 10 the most brittle. The assigned number can serve as shorthand for how a given area responds to fire, resting, and animal impact.
Brittleness should not be confused with dryness or amount of rainfall. Land can receive lots of rain and still be brittle. What matters is how that rain is distributed throughout the year. Brittle landscapes have long dry spells, with the year divided into wet and dry periods. At Savory’s Zimbabwean ranch, for example, the dry season lasts eight months. My husband marvels at the fact that Johannesburg and London have the same annual rainfall—twenty-four inches— and yet he vividly remembers moving from South Africa where the sun was always shining to England where it always rained. Johannesburg’s rain comes in brief, intense bursts whereas London’s is doled out steadily but frugally. When I’d asked Peter Donovan about his cross-country trip for the Soil Carbon Challenge, he remarked on the change upon crossing the one hundredth meridian through the Great Plains, how as he traveled east he could observe the switch from a dry environment to one with higher moisture. This was the shift from brittle to non-brittle. Once into non-brittle territory, Donovan told me, the piano in the bus started to go out of tune.
According to Savory, some two-thirds of the world’s landmass has seasonal rains and thus falls on the brittle side of the scale. Since it lacks continual moisture to keep insects and microorganisms happy, this land is vulnerable to desertification. Without occasional disturbance and a means to kick-start the process of decay, the land will likely degrade. In brittle landscapes, rest is also damaging. In low-brittle areas—like London, or where I live in Vermont—resting land doesn’t cause trouble. The humidity when it’s above freezing ensures that organic matter keeps cycling.
The brittleness scale also explains why farmers and ranchers can do everything they’re supposed to do and still see the land mysteriously deteriorate. The problem is that the conventional approaches to agriculture that we rely on today were developed in non-brittle environments. Taking a farming model that worked fine in, say, Sweden or Scotland, and applying it to land in southern Africa, Israel, or the American Southwest, has been disastrous to the land’s long-term viability. In chapter 2 we saw how quickly land degraded in Australia, where much of the terrain is highly brittle, when it was farmed as if it were an extension of Europe. A brittle environment needs animal impact to help it along: to remove and recycle dead plant growth and to crack hard soil surfaces to allow for the flow of air and water. Likewise, it depends on ruminants’ guts to perform functions of decay that moisture would take care of in non-brittle areas.
The centerpiece of Savory’s work and the demonstration site for Holistic Management is the sixty-five-hundred-acre Dimbangombe Ranch near Victoria Falls in northwestern Zimbabwe, home to the Africa Centre for Holistic Management. The Dimbangombe story begins in 1992, when Savory donated land he had purchased in the 1970s to form a nonprofit Holistic Management learning site and social welfare organization to benefit the local population. (A larger parcel of land owned by Savory is now the Kazuma Pan National Park, part of the five-nation Transfrontier Conservation Area.) The ranch is a collaborative project between the Savory Institute and a local nonprofit group; the board of trustees includes all five of the local tribal chiefs. It borders more than a million acres of communally owned land. In this region everything depends on the rains that come between November and March; after that it becomes progressively hotter and drier until the next rainy season. Since both parcels have the same soils and rainfall, the communal lands serve as a convenient “control” to highlight Holistic Management’s effect on the landscape.
The name Dimbangombe means “the place where the people hid their cattle in the long grass.” The local population struggles with poverty, HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, the breakup of families and communities as men and young people seek work elsewhere, and the relentless deterioration of their land. In this hot, dry region, “the rains are not what they used to be” is a frequent refrain. But Dimbangombe looks as though it’s been smiled upon by the rain gods. It has lush, varied grasses and flowing rivers and streams, graced with reeds and water lilies. Grasses stand waist-high where not long ago ground had been bare. The thriving livestock herds—cattle and goats, some four times the number per acre as neighboring lands, even in drought years—run with their wild counterparts, including sable antelope, buffalo, elephant, waterbuck, reedbuck, kudu, and warthog. Lions, cheetahs, leopards, wild dogs, and hyenas have returned to keep the wild game moving while herdboys (the Southern African equivalent of “cowboy”) tend the livestock. They avoid using fencing, which is damaging to wildlife. And the livestock are run in a predator-friendly manner using “lion kraals,” or portable panels, so that none of the lions needed to keep wildlife populations healthy have had to be killed.
Thanks to the renewed flow of the Dimbangombe River, now a mile longer than before the implementation of Holistic Management, elephant herds no longer have to travel to the one permanent pool that had been their sole water source. Women who used to walk as much as three miles a day for water are beginning to see the benefits as rivers show the first signs of returning health. Now that people are using livestock for cropland preparation according to their grazing plans, crop harvests are averaging three to five times their past yields. In Savory’s words: “Cropland preparation here involves very concentrated trampling, dunging and urinating on the land by tightly bunched animals over a short period of time—only a few days so that trampling does not begin compacting lower soil layers as occurs the longer the trampling. Farmers then plant the maize and other crops directly into the soil without further treatment—fertilizing, plowing, etc. And the women have no need to physically move manure from home pens to fields.”
The adjacent areas have far fewer animals, domestic and wild, and are plagued by dry, barren soils; the plant life is dominated by shrubs, weeds, and annuals as opposed to deep-rooted perennials. In many years, people in the Hwange area, with a population of about 145,000, have depended on international aid for food. ACHM is now working closely with ten communities, as well as promoting Holistic Management education through the Dimbangombe College of Wildlife, Agriculture and Conservation Management and other programs.
Recently, a Zimbabwe government minister visited the ranch. He saw the river and was told that it’s now flowing through the dry season higher up the system than it’s been known to before. The minister said, “What witchcraft is this? You must have had a lot more rain because how else can water appear where it has not existed in a hundred years?” The head herder, who is illiterate, was able to explain to the minister how increasing the livestock and planning the grazing to mimic nature had caused the water to flow again—as he explained, the hooves of the animals make the rainfall effective again, the way it was in the past.
The transformation has taken time. As Jody Butterfield, co-founder of the Savory Institute and director of its Southern Africa programs, recalls, “Each year things got better and better. Gradually over the years the grass was thickening up and the ground would close in, covered with plants. Then we started noticing, ‘oh, the wetlands are expanding along the upper reaches of the river.’ We started seeing sedges and reeds growing many yards up from the riverbanks and could now see a huge swath that was becoming wetland. In the past few years especially, it’s been quite dramatic.”
Butterfield and the others at ACHM were able to watch the land degradation process in reverse as desert was slowly unmade.
Holistic Management is one reason for the transformation. The other, which also has huge implications for reversing desertification, is that Savory, Butterfield, and staff minimized grass fires.
In Africa and many places around the world, fire is the chief means of clearing decaying plant material and promoting fresh growth—functions Savory says grazing animals are uniquely equipped to do better. Controlled fires do play a role in land management in certain ecosystems. But Savory says that in Africa fire is often the default response, to the great detriment of the land and its wildlife. Poachers also may torch the grass to obliterate their tracks, and these fires can get out of hand as well. Grassland and woodland fires can go on for hundreds of miles, turning skies dusky gray as far as can be seen.
“Africa is burning to death, many parts of it,” he says. “Over 809 million hectares [nearly two billion acres] of grasslands are burned annually. The reason we’re burning them is that there are not enough herbivores to keep the grass alive. This while people continue to believe we have too many cattle and, in particular, too many elephants.”
From a desertification standpoint, these uncontrolled, often uncontrollable fires present several problems. They destroy litter and leave exposed soil. This makes any rainfall less effective, which leads to desertification. Rain that soaks into the soil largely evaporates over subsequent days, up to 80 percent. If rain arrives in large storms, most of the water simply runs off as flash flooding. Fires also encourage fire-dependent plant species over the more diverse, soil-enriching grasses that animals eat; kill microbial life; damage air quality; and not only release huge amounts of carbon dioxide, but by destroying plant life also remove potential carbon dioxide sinks. According to French research quoted by Savory, a 1.5-acre fire puts out more, and more damaging, atmospheric pollutants per second than four thousand cars. Many fires burn thousands of acres for several days, making grassland burning a major cause of climate change and desertification. A NASA Fact Sheet identifies Africa as the “fire center” of the planet.
At Dimbangombe, they put in regular firebreaks as a barrier against bushfires. The lion kraals have also turned out to be useful breaks to fire when moved along boundaries.
To return to the government minister’s comment, no witchcraft was invoked to bring the rain. Nor did Dimbangombe receive more rain than its neighbors. What’s important, Savory says, is not the amount of rain but to create land conditions that enable whatever rain falls to be effective: to keep that rain in the soil where it gives rise to plant growth, biodiversity, the amassing of soil humus, and the recharging of aquifers. In short, the antithesis of desertification.
You may be wondering: What about trees? Since trees hold the soil, store carbon, offer shade and shelter, and provide food and fodder, won’t tree planting stop encroaching deserts? Well, Savory says, it depends.
Trees cannot survive in every landscape. “At a conference, an agro-forestry technique harvesting water and growing trees was presented as the answer to Niger’s [desertification] problems,” says Savory. “I asked what percentage of Niger has the 600 mm (24 inches) or above annual rainfall required for the trees being planted. The answer was 11 percent of the land. In Kenya, where they would mandate a certain number of trees per hectare on croplands as the solution to desertification, the cropland areas are 9 percent.” In many countries there’s but a small portion of arable or irrigable land. After that, he says, “there’s the rest that no one wants to talk about.” Savory says it’s this land (about 90 percent of the land in many countries that is not cropland), over which grass that stores more carbon than trees and supports livestock and provides more soil-covering litter, that “holds the key to our future.”
Agroforestry, which involves combining trees and crops together, holds promise as a cropping practice where rainfall is adequate. Still, Savory says, “even here people would achieve more healthy land if livestock and crops were integrated through Holistic Planned Grazing” to build on the synergistic benefits. Similarly, variations like Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR), a reforestation technique used in Africa in which trees are sprouted from live tree roots or stumps, can be effective in certain regions, but only when carefully and appropriately applied. Savory is concerned that since tree planting sounds like a good, noncontroversial idea, governments and NGOs might rally around that when the money could be better used to focus on the far more vast areas of grasslands with rainfall too low to provide full soil cover with trees.
While at a conference in Israel, Savory visited the site of an anti-desertification effort in the Negev desert. “They were spending 10,000 Euros per hectare to plant trees on water being channeled off the desert,” he says. “They were doing this in the Nabatean civilization over 2,000 years ago right there. It failed then as it is failing now. And while this is being done, the Bedouin pastoralists who could be being taught to use greatly increased sheep numbers to reverse the desertification are suffering cultural genocide due to unnecessary livestock reductions.”
Another factor to consider, says Savory, is that “trees, although they play a vital role in ambient carbon cycling to sustain all life, do not store excess carbon from fossil fuels, fires and soil destruction in the way well-managed grasslands do so, safely.” Soil, particularly the soils of perennial grasslands, can lock up carbon for long periods of time whereas trees can burn, get chopped down, and die of multiple causes, all of which release carbon dioxide. As we saw in chapter 2, with proper management perennial grasslands can sequester increasing quantities of soil carbon. Says Savory: “Everybody talks about the need to plant trees, but trees can’t take in all that carbon, nor do they have the ‘pulsing’ root systems associated with grazing that effectively move carbon to soil life for centuries.”
Not that simply switching from planting trees to sowing grass is the answer. “Planting grass cannot reverse desertification because it does not address why the original grass plants died in the first place,” says Savory, pointing to the hundreds of thousands of acres of grass plantings in the western United States that were failed attempts to address desertification. The only way, then, is for it to work biologically. Which means focusing on the biological cycles that hinge on the soil—and correcting the practices that initially made the rainfall less effective. To Savory, soil cover is the key: Remove pack-hunting predators and large herbivores stop bunching; annually dying grass plants begin oxidizing, which exposes soil and kills new grasses; rainfall becomes less effective, leading to desertification as a manifestation of biodiversity loss and contributing to climate change. Again, one process as opposed to three distinct problems.
In Burkina Faso, Yacouba Sawadogo, a peasant farmer, has revived a traditional technique to restore lifeless soil with great success. Yacouba, whose mud-hut-to-Capitol-Hill story is featured in the documentary The Man Who Stopped the Desert, sought to improve soil on his family farm after years of drought devastated his region. He started in the early 1980s by digging zai pits into dry, capped soil in order to collect rainwater, and expanded them to hold more water. He then placed a bit of manure in each hole to stimulate microbial activity and give his millet, sorghum, and sesame seeds a better chance to grow. Over several years he continued to refine his methods, laying stones in contour patterns in a way that slows flowing water so it has a chance to seep into the ground. He added termites to the manure to speed up microbial decomposition. The termites played roles that earthworms might elsewhere: digesting organic material; aerating and turning the soil; enhancing water infiltration.
Termites, infamous for wreaking havoc on wooden structures, have their ecological niche. Dutch geographer and agroforestry consultant Chris Reij explains: “Termites are a pest risk during extended drought periods, but that risk is reduced in the zai as these pits also harvest and concentrate rainfall and runoff. The termites are vital for improving the structure of the soil and this increases infiltration. Termites can also draw upwards plant nutrients that are too deep to be reached by the crop roots. Their advantages outweigh the disadvantages.”
Soon tree saplings began to appear in the zai pits amid the crops. At harvest, Yacouba cuts the millet stalks at twenty inches so that the remaining stalks protect the young trees from browsing by livestock. He nurtured these trees, and today a thirty-seven-acre forest of varied indigenous species grows on his land. Yet there are always some fields reserved for crops to supply grains for his family. While he’s created a forest, Yacouba made an effort to share his ideas. Word spread, not just to nearby villagers but to scientists and aid organizations. And eventually the media: In 2007 Mark Dodd, then a cameraman with the BBC, learned of Yacouba from a friend who had been to Burkina Faso on vacation (and said: “There’s an interesting man who lived down the road . . .”). Dodd headed down to Yatenga Province to see for himself. “It’s a small town in the northwest of the country,” Dodd told me on the phone. “People only stop there on their way to Mali. I went to Yacouba’s farm and eventually he turned up on his moped with an ax over his shoulder—that’s what he uses to dig the zai pits.” As the film ends, Yacouba, long the village pariah for his “mad” ideas, is revered throughout the province and, in 2009, travels to Washington, DC, to share his story with policy makers.
Yacouba’s model addresses both the need for soil disturbance (digging the zai) and decay (via manure/compost and termites). The area receives more rain than the land Savory typically works in, which meant that the trees could thrive. At the same time, the condition was such that the soil was barren with a hard crust; nothing was growing there. “This soil would not improve even if it were untouched for fifty years,” says Reij. “Digging planting pits is among the few ways this soil can be made productive. Digging disturbs the soil and the use of manure combines water and fertility.”
Reij has visited Yacouba and was impressed by what he’d been able to create from seriously degraded land. To him, the beauty of the project is that it integrates trees and croplands and relies on the natural generation of trees, as opposed to plantings. The trees decrease the wind speed, he says, which helps protect the crops. The point is that creative common sense combined with an understanding of land function can yield results.