Running out of Time | Documentary on Holistic Management

there is only one option I repeat only one option left to climate and that is to do the unthinkable on February the 27th 2013 this man went before a worldwide television audience to propose a controversial solution to the greatest environmental threat to the survival of the planet as we know it today his topic was how to halt desertification and reverse climate change he was given a standing ovation his name is Alan savory and he'd waited a long time for this moment a Zimbabwean by birth wildlife ecologist and international consultant Allan savory is a passionately committed conservationist driven by an unshakable belief in an idea an idea so radical it has provoked extraordinary hostility some quarters yet he stubbornly persists in being heard citing compelling evidence to get his message across so what people need to understand is some very basic facts for example we need about half a ton of food per human every year for healthy maintenance of life etc but what we're doing today is we're producing more than 75 billion tons of eroding soil because of agriculture and that is equal to more than ten tons of eroding soil for every human alive today clearly we're going out of business savory is adamant that if we are to survive ideas have to change for most of which is the long-held belief that land degradation is caused by livestock rather it is the way humans manage livestock he argues but simply it is not too many animals on the land that are to blame but too few that are causing the destruction well this is typical of what we tragically have here just miles of country like this people on permanent food aid and every year is a drought it doesn't matter what rain we get I've been watching this for years and it's just like this it's now virtually desert country you see this this is a typical River in the area a bone-dry almost throughout the occasion it'll flash flood off for a storm and that's it and I'm afraid that's typical here typical now of a few cattle wandering past and we're 10 past 12 in the day they're not out grazing they're just wandering around the land they're not with any herd and this is what's destroying the land just too few animals wandering around but the problem is not limited to Africa save recess two-thirds of the world's land is in fact desertified so what is desertification desertification is just a fancy word for land drying up and turning to desert ultimately and there's a good spot to illustrate it it happens because of our practices that make the rainfall that we receive less effective and you see it yeah where soil is exposed any rain soaking into the soil will just evaporate out of it again because this is hot it's hot even to touch now and when high rainfall falls it runs off and you can actually see the runoff and the layer of litter that is swept off that as water runs and there's saying that people have that droughts caused the bare ground is nonsense it's the bare ground that causes the droughts it's the other way around what we're needing to do worldwide particularly where the country is desertified is to make the available rainfall more effective this is not taught in any university of the world and it's well illustrated in this picture this was taken while 25 millimeters or an inch of rain was falling in the Tehama desert and you can see the water running now in terms of drums of water that was equal to 1,250 drums of water on every hectare of land but the next day that land was completely dry and that is the desert vacation process in Zimbabwe it's the tail end of a poor rainy season on this ranch 30 kilometres south of the Victoria Falls called dim Bangor Bay it's been savories home for many years and while he's seen enough bad wet seasons to have learned to accept nature on its own terms he no longer believes he's a helpless victim to vagaries in the weather so the really the aim of what we're doing is trying to make the available rainfall more effective we're out in the rain right now and you can see it where the soil is bare this water is flowing and it's depositing silt or carrying silt depositing it down there where the grassland is where we've got grass plants growing and some litter there's absolutely no water flowing this is all just soaking in and that's what we've got to get and then that water should only leave the soil through growing plants or underground flow in the water to aquifers and in the soil to aquifers and the river how he solved the problem of providing that necessary ground cover we shall see later in the program for now he has a problem with the grasses grown in this paddock he doesn't have enough cattle to graze it and if it is not grazed in the next few months the grass must decay biologically before the new growing season because if it doesn't grassland and its soil will begin to die here's a good spot to show you why we have to get more animals into disparate to get the money and buy the cattle that we need because here you have grass that we did not graze last year and it just kills itself it's change to oxidation you see the different color that is gradual chemical breakdown not rapid biological breakdown and the plants just kill themselves the traditional response is been to use fire however that creates an arguably even greater problem burning one hectare of grassland gives off more and more damaging pollutants than 6-thousand cars and we are burning in Africa every single year more than 1 billion hectares of grasslands and almost nobody is talking about it what are we going to do there is only one option I repeat 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 savory corset holistic management and planned grazing and it works like this cattle sheep and goats are massed into large herds and because they dung and urinate over their own food source the animals have to keep moving which prevents over grazing more importantly however the impact of their hooves breaks up hard ground allowing air and water to penetrate the soil the trampling of old grass provides cover from the drying effects of the Sun and the wind and the animals dung and urine enriched the soil because the cattle are the main tool using their hooves etc to grow the grass they graze everywhere on the ranch so as you look up on these rocky hills you'll see all of that is fresh grass of the season and that's because the cattle are grazed right over the hills and everywhere there's no area where we don't use the cattle at some time in the earth but savory emphasizes without a carefully structured grazing program holistic management simply will not work the whole secret of the success here isn't just using the animals as a tool people think that all you have to do is to bunch the animals and move them but people have done that for thousands of years and created the deserts that doesn't work the secret to this is a planning process whereby we divide the land up into divisions then the people doing the planning follow a set of steps where they focus on one at a time and they bring the information onto a chart and we put it on a chart and they plot the months that they're planning across the top of the chart we put the paddocks down here then in another step they put the ratings and they fill in all the wildlife carving periods other factors that have to be borne in mind on the land and when the chart is all prepared finally they plot the movements of the animals and it's plotted where they'll go here is the main management herd for of cattle about 500 plus there are sheep and goats as well and they're grazing in this block of land following the plan and right now the herders are moving them down towards water and they'll drink it this midday period lie up for a couple of hours and then the herders will move them out again and continue the grazing in this block that that's planned to be grazed at the moment okay I love this because the cattle herd has done everything we want they flattened grass-blade litter scalloped the soil so that the water carbon everything is getting into the soil now this will rebound immediately we've used nothing but solar energy and we can do this day after day after day on different parts of the land creating the wildlife habitat we need and healing the land the herd will have covered a lot of ground by nightfall which begs the obvious question where will it spend the night driving 500 cattle sheep and goats to Furman and crawls sited at distant points around the 3,000 hectare ranch every evening is not a viable option and defeats the basic principle of planned grazing savory solution is to have the herders drive the animals into temporary enclosures called predator friendly crawls developed on dim bangkapi they are made from plastic sheeting which forms a protective fence that lions and hyenas were not challenged these crawls move with the herd while the primary purpose of the call is to provide secure overnight shelter for the herd concentrating a large number of food animals in such a confined space for a week provides a graphic demonstration of the impact on open grassland and there's another bonus when the herd moves on this site becomes far more productive than surrounding land 500 cattle in here for a week this is the overnight crawl and you can see that that's heavily domed and trampled and this is where the chicken coop was there's a mobile chicken coop that moves with the cattle when the scroll moves and from that you can see what the soil was like before we put that in and that will come through - very good grass whereas this will remain bad the higher the impact from the cattle the more the dung in the trampling the more grass tends to grow as long as you don't repeat it too long as long as it's a short time visitors to dim pangong be come away convinced that here is a simple and economically viable means of improving the livelihoods of rural communities throughout Africa particularly those reliant on food aid programs what I want to show you here is this is where we bring the overnight crawl about we're bringing it more frequently to this site because we wanted there's a crop field and let me show you this is on a Kalahari sand we selected a very poor soil area but you can see it's totally covered with manure and litter and if I dig through this to try to get to the soil okay now I'm getting to soil and you can see how dark and rich that is let me show you the contrast with this soil now and what it was alike now you guys are going to be amazed at the comparison yeah now that's the soil I picked up in there the same soil you see how totally different they are and this is just sand you feel it you can smell it smell of total difference that week going really good crops in now but it's the same poor soil and what we're doing that entirely by just using the over night predator friendly crawl now we've come into the area that we treated last year so this is where you had the cattle last year yes as you can see you can see them the maize stalks are set for lying around from the very good yield of crop we got so what will the crop yields be out of an area like this when we look at the average crop fields in the community with the traditional agriculture at the moment over here we're averaging or at least five to eight times the yield on these fields now this is the field we looked at before the rains and now it's got the crop in it unfortunately the crop is small because of two things first we got half the rainfall we should have had by now and second baboons got into the field one day and wrecked everything so we had to replant after Christmas but the crops despite that it's looking remarkably good to me so we're happy with it despite the problems when say reported in Bangor B in the 1970s the ranch was in a bad state if grasslands virtually destroyed and its landscape ravaged by continual felt fires it's an entirely different story today okay now when I bought this ranch the fellow who I bought it from had kept his cattle down in this flower every day of the and this was so bare that you could see a guinea fowl at a hundred yards almost any time in the earth and now I can't see anything yard from its well gir enough now here was conclusive proof that used properly holistic management could restore degraded grasslands anywhere in the world this was the vindication of the years of meticulous research savory had carried out he was aware however that like any idea to be truly effective it needed to be put into universal practice and this meant worldwide he began by targeting Africa in 1992 savory and his wife Jodi Butterfield set up the Africa Center for holistic management as a learning site for people from all over the continent located on dim Bangor be the center is tasked with empowering rural communities to manage their lives and natural resources effectively by making decisions that are economically and environmentally sound with the emphasis on acquiring the knowledge and skills to restore water catchments and River flow increase forage livestock and Wildlife production raise crop yields through concentrated animal impact restore damaged or degraded land and employ low stress animal handling a CHM singled out the nearby Wanga communal lands as the springboard for its plans to spread the holistic management message throughout Zimbabwe and the southern Africa region director of our our programs for developing holistic management in communities bringing holistic management to communities so that means I've been in charge of developing training materials a training program hiring the staff and making it happen this program started about four years ago and we've got a large award of almost five eight five point eight million and we've managed to do it in about five years to really start to where we're seeing success in communities we have been working with communities in the past where communities were struggling to understand what decision making using holistic management is all about what you get is you get a few people in the community wanting to do it but the holistic management concept will require the whole community if it is to work smoothly when we are doing the training we also make use of the mobilization to which we call community agency con and this it's a very powerful tool in bringing communities together and we have seen a lot of changes in communities in terms of communities being able to be soft land and also in terms of bringing back their dignity the major challenges that we've heard are culturally based and mythical I would like to say where people dread to mix their life start together because of different cultural medicines that they believe each home has and some historical conflicts that each family or each clan has in each community but we are seeing a lot of improvement in this community is one of them Michael alig they're very very healthy and faith [Music] tragedy of all this is that it doesn't have to be like it is we could have begun doing what we're doing that the communities now forty years ago we would be a long way ahead of it now much of holistic management's growing acceptance in these rural communities is due to Allan savory's total personal commitment despite a hectic promotional schedule that takes him abroad for many months of the year he'll try to find time to drive 50 kilometres to visit a local community where belief in his message is having a profound impact on the lives of thousands of families mourning innocent that's in value I'm well thank you thank you so much good to get down to see you around the work yeah things are moving money very well exactly and the commenter's are very very committed to the program yeah innocent man Cooley should know as a livestock management specialist employed by the center to advise the villagers he is hugely encouraged by this community's decision to abandon their traditional go it alone herding practices for the collective holistic management alternative well since I see the cattle are looking better than they were the ones we saw on the road yeah that's very true that is a very big difference we could get Lee which I met in the program having demonstrated very clearly on the ranch back at our headquarters what can be done we're now extending that into this greater community of about a hundred and fifty thousand people but starting with some of the smaller communities and this is one of the starting programs where having provided water for the cattle it is also providing water for the gardens innocent here is the man in charge who's coaching and training the people first of all reconstructed areas of orange and before after that yeah it used to be a kettle a kettle crawl then after that was to put a garden and then the garden is enable people to have to improve their nutrition as well as their income by selling veggies yes they're selling what can you tell me from your plan now is happening No [Music] number five the captain and then from where do they go that what did they plant then from part of five will be going to part of six so far the six down here this part of six and then from there then we from part of six then we'll be going through paddock seven but that is seven this is the area where we'll be this is where the cattle have been crawled for about a week or so and up until yesterday on this portion of the field and now they will prompt crops all over the field but get three to five times the yield on these areas where we put the crawls overnight the community is very very excited even personally as the field officer I am very very excited because there is a very high adoption of the method by the community really deserve this really this is bringing a very big change with the community when they this program intro was introduced in the community then it was something new to us because we could not even understand it to start with but after exercising what we were taught to do present together we experienced that there was a very big change I'm Mia Buda cabin the way all day look there's a very big change than previous they taught us everything now we don't have any cow dying because they taught us how we should keep them and I'm sure at the moment when these 5 cables I'm having now they will increase and I have money to buy more which is something very good the holistic management what they did we have quietly lentil Lords we are doing everything on our own [Music] this program has taught us to manage our lives to productively we used to struggle with water but now we have a water tank that supplies all the water we need for our livestock and gardening project okay okay so about two to three years ago these women here could not feed their families for the whole year they could only do it for three to four months in a year but now we have food all year round the present government of Zimbabwe has seen the results of what we're doing up here and become very supportive they've formed a permanent committee of heads of ministries to try and spread the knowledge around the country and what we are going to be doing shortly is recommending that in all schools we begin with the kids very young and giving them a basic environmental literacy and understanding of why livestock to few livestock destroy the people's lives water etc and how we can rectify all of this by running many more animals but properly managed [Music] this crop field here is Regina's field which she treated using and my impact and if you can just take this a look at this one today's the 6th of March this was planted on the 14th of January and look at the crop right on the other side which is much older but still looks very unhealthy and this is the same lady who fed all of us today in 2010 the Africa Center for holistic management won the Buckminster Fuller challenge for its work in reversing desertification in that same year Allen and Jodie with other partners founded the savory Institute in Boulder Colorado to promote large-scale restoration of the world's grasslands today holistic management is practiced by tens of thousands of people in countries across the globe it's reliably estimated that up to 16 million hectares or 40 million acres are under holistic management worldwide with the largest impact on the ranges and grasslands of the seasonal rainfall environments that's about two-thirds of the world's land surface it's a powerful endorsement to the seeds of an idea that grew out of the African bush harvest century ago and still has its roots there what we're doing here is a small part of our global operations the savory Institute is headquartered in Boulder Colorado and they run the global effort from there and then part of our strategy to get this to go to scale worldwide because of the seriousness of climate change desertification is to have locally led locally managed learning hubs around the world and this was the first of the hubs on which we're modeling others from 10 different countries Mexico Chile Argentina Turkey the UK Ireland the United States etc so there are many countries getting involved the last time I counted we trained people from 21 countries I think just here met rails and Katrina Fowler our Americans for Maryland where they grass-finished beef cattle they're here to see firsthand the reversal of desertification in action I can't believe it's taken us this long to get here it's exceeded my expectations beyond imagination the grass is even thicker and more diverse than I was ever expecting and at this hub we can accommodate 30 or more people and we have continuous trainings going on big party small parties coming here and we have training materials the textbook I wrote the handbook that Jody Butterfield wrote and many other training materials and increasingly because of the scale of the problem globally were going into internet training self-help more and more things and we are aiming to establish a hundred learning hubs around the world where people are learning teaching each other in their own language own culture self led virtually managed locally formed locally and so it's a strategic move we're taking on a global scale now I'm gonna take what I've learned from here back to the United States and do the best I can to get as many animals managed holistically under plan grazing as we can and try to scale this kind of management as great as we can Sally Nichol is a South African business owner from Johannesburg two months ago I had no interest in climate change and I discovered managing holistically and it has completely changed my life it's completely changed the way I think about the environment and about what is possible and about how we are connected to the land and yesterday I met a woman who had used her livestock and her neighbor's livestock she put fifteen animals together and impacted her crop field she then got borrowed seed from her neighbors and she has grown with without fertilizer the most healthy crop of corn or Millie's that I saw in that entire area I'd never seen anything like it so this is one of the most remarkable women in this community she lost her husband in 2011 left here with eight kids now she lost one last year she has seven to take care of the program has helped it feed her family it has helped it take care of her kettle it has helped her even have enough food for the whole year days end find savory relaxing back home with Jody his wife of 32 years who has played an active role in the development of holistic management I was born just south of here in Bulawayo and grew up in the country my home was a forty five thousand acre Raaj about 25 miles down that way and my kids were brought up there my father I buried his remains in the river and my sister and my oldest son here are buried here and my youngest son so it's very much just home to me and this is the way I like to live amongst the game I don't actually like living in a house at all we have another home in New Mexico but when we're out and live there and we tend to jokingly say that's Jody's home and this is mine I love it no I do love it and all my life I've been a person who likes to live out of doors I grew up hunting fishing doing all those things with my dad and and I've just loved this it's just it's heaven well the dramas seem to happen when I'm away it's when the elephants will be over there and or coming in at night or wild dogs will chase it bush buck and kill it right outside my window and I'm always here alone when that happens one day washing out of the kitchen Three Lions chased a kudu right there in front of the river is this incredible drama I get to see every day well though it seems were remote living in a bush camp like this for six months of the ER as we do thanks to technology we can keep in touch everything here is just solar powered operates off batteries down here but we've got a satellite connection and get some broadband right now Jody is on a Skype call to Daniella Hal our CEO in Boulder Colorado and so routinely we're holding conferences with people around the world I have to set up one tomorrow morning to speak to people in Switzerland before I go to London at the weekend but although it's not all that efficient always but it met we managed the dawn of a new day and it's raining again but it's only a passing shower not heavy enough to raise the level in the river in front of savories camp however something will have happened to this water on its journey downstream we've now come up higher in the catchment of the river that flows past my camp now you can see the water in the pool is muddy you cannot see a half an inch under the water and that's flowing down here as you look here you can see how much soil has been washed away from this perennial grass and it's cutting now by the time this gets to our camp now we are seeing clear crystal clear water elicits very high rains up here what's amazing to me here is because we've made the rainfall more effective soaking into the soil less surface flow so that the soil really absorbs the rain is that this remained clear after we'd had fifty millimeters or two inches of rain two days ago only a kilometer above this now how do we come here a few years ago that simply would not have been possible this would have flowed far more strongly muddy water and then settled over the next day or two this time it remained clear right throughout and hardly rose at all now we've joined a river of about the same size coming off the neighboring land national parks hunting lands and you can see where the flood water has reached this year and the vehicle in fact would be underwater where we are and we are 50 meters from the river and all of these millions and millions of gallons of water that rushed down here should have soaked into the land to keep rivers flowing aquifers etc it won't that river will go dry this year this pool on the D and gamba River has never gone dry though it is the driest it has been in 15 years it won't rain for another three months and as this is the only surface water in the area savory is preserving it for the hundreds of elephants in Buffalo that water here and making other arrangements for the domestic livestock while dim ban Gumby was primarily concerned with regenerating the land and wildlife Savery found that this could not be achieved without using cattle as the main tool of wildlife and land regeneration today this 3,000 hectare property is also home to a large population of Wildlife fully integrated with the livestock through the grazing planning what I want you to see now is where we're preserving bare ground for the wildlife otherwise we all begin to lose some of the wildlife and here you see it well life here on this whole project are a critical part of it not just because of my passion but because that it takes funds to run the sort of operation and we've been completely unable to get any support or financial support from environmentalists or environmental organizations and the bulk of the funding that supports us and has done all this work has come from the hunting so we are safari hunting at the same time and that literally has been what has supported most of this work this is a high door blind that we constructed for people to sit in and watch the game coming to the Bay Area and take pictures and so on and we had an amusing incidence where we had some guests in here and when we came back there were three lands sitting on the top and very terrified guests India which we thought was very amusing but they didn't there's one large animal however that visitors do like to meet okay name is dojo and we found her as an orphan she's about 15 years old now and she's very very gentle very sweet we have people with her all day close to at night she stood at the size with his could killer [Music] this must be one of the last unspoiled places on planet earth mana pools National Park in the Zambezi Valley is so special it's been declared a World Heritage Site the surreal light filtering through the trees of the forest creates a distinctive cathedral-like atmosphere for which the park is renowned one of the most prolific of those trees the fade her BIA albedo is in danger of dying out nobody knows why yet they are growing in Allan savory's Mays garden for my life for most they have not been regenerating at all and people say it's because we've built dams and we're not getting the flooding well here we are far from alluvial soils we're on a Kalahari soil and this is if I do a BIA Alberta that has established with the cattle grazing that we're doing and it's now freely growing showing that there was nothing to do with flooding or any of the things we were saying and again I think it's the build-up of the soil structure that is affecting this savory is so convinced that managing holistically applies to all environments that he's embarked on a project to see whether he can save the teak trees in a nearby National Forest so this site that I'm photographing for our record now is where the first site that we have put the cattle crawl overnight where we hold them on the sand on the Kalahari sand much like we've done all over the ranch but this being the first on his hand to see what happens because these Kalahari sand forests in bad trouble without the teak trees regenerating and we want to see if by using the animals we can get the teak trees regenerating as we are getting with some of the species many years ago this superficially would have looked good on the hills in the growing season but down in the valley there was heavy over grazing a lot of bare ground and now you can only see bare patches right at the water points we've provided for wildlife and we're getting Buffalo and sable and elephants and everything coming here and you can sit from this point and see them every bit of this has been made possible by the cattle used as a tool savory could well argue he's proved conclusively that holistic management works yet fifty years after he first expounded his theory it is still being dismissed out of hand by established thinking what is very disappointing is although this textbook has been out for over twenty years we're writing the third edition now there's a Spanish condition and it was sent out like all textbooks are for review to all sorts of organizations and environmental organizations universities etc wouldn't even review it and yet the textbook is in use in more than twenty universities and colleges when I last counted up people often often ask me have I kept going despite all the abuse and ridicule rejection and people claiming it doesn't work and it just comes down to one word I believe and that is caring if you care enough about your country wildlife the people you'll do whatever you have to do to keep going I realize it's not personal it's happened to every single scientist without exception that I'm aware of in the history of the world that our position the research shows does not ever die down based on facts evidence anything of that nature it only dies down and institutions change when the views of society overall begin to accept it in other words when public opinion changes and that's why 20 minutes of talks on the TED talk has literally done more to advance this knowledge in worldwide than 50 years of struggling against official opposition has done and that's because the TED talk went has already gone to well over 2 million viewers that is still going up by thousands a day it's been very rewarding we have a long way to go but at least we can say it can happen in in a very challenging environment politically economically and if it can work here could work anyway I would say to any detractor of holistic management first and foremost come and see this here at the Africa Center with your own eyes come and see the reversal of desertification and the recreation of surface water the second thing I would say is understand what your detracting look into what managing holistically and holistically planning grazing has done all over the world of all the communities where I've worked over the past 30 years or so and that includes Asia Latin America Africa many countries this is the program that I think is the most sustainable of all of them because it really touches to the core of people's people's livelihoods people's social existence it brings together so many of those pieces that many other programs don't it's common knowledge today that biodiversity loss climate change loss of soil poverty violence rising all these things are threatening civilization as we know it now while it might have been argued 30 years ago today I don't believe any scientist would argue that management needs to be holistic embracing all science all sorts of knowledge and but if we're to have a hope it has to be done now we're running out of time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Savory Institute

Views: 470,654

Rating: 4.887145 out of 5

Keywords: grass fed beef, land management, ted talk, regenerative agriculture, rotational grazing, soil health, sustainable food, climate change, savory institute, grass fed, global issues, defending beef, cow grazing, beginning farmer, carbon sequestration, allan savory, holistic management, holistic management grazing, holistic management by allan savory, holistic management international, holistic management concept, holistic management farming, holistic management institute

Id: q7pI7IYaJLI

Length: 47min 29sec (2849 seconds)

Published: Tue May 01 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/kepler456]

Exactly. And considering the way meat is shipped from the Amazon (aka Brazil) to many parts of the world, we could easily have domesticated cows grazing on the grasslands (in regions that are not "wild") and essentially supply the same amount of meat to the world and at the same time prevent these lands from being desertified. When cows eat grass as they are meant to be (against corn products) they produce less methane (fart less) and there are lower chances of ecoli contaminated meat.

[u/pmkenny1234]

I'm curious about how a plan to de-desertify land with cattle would affect greenhouse gas emissions. Since a significant amount of the global greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock, would the CO2 removed from the atmosphere by restored lands offset the methane produced by the livestock? Also, even if it does, would doing this at a grand scale upset the chemical balance of our atmosphere and end up saturing the air with methane?

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I wonder if anyone has actually done the math surrounding this. This idea of domestic terraforming sounds like it could have unintended downstream consequences (not that pumping absurd levels of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere is safe).

[u/EduKehakettu]

Allan Savory is the same man who thought that elephants were to blame about desertification. He killed over 40,000 of them.

https://www.fastcompany.com/2681518/this-man-shot-40000-elephants-before-he-figured-out-that-herds-of-cows-can-save-the-planet

[u/Zackville]

I think the main idea is brilliant. It happens that we don't fully understand the desertification process that occours in our planet. It works like a disease that affects the weakest life forms of the environment until it affects the strongest. Then, the environment start to collapse and the vegetal coverage of soil start do disappear. When this happens, it start to get harder to keep water in soil and to protect it from strong rainfalls that will erode the soil. It's a downfall spiral. I think that instead of focusing entirely on lowering GHG emissions, wich is good, he gives another perspective. What area of the planet is desert and can we restore it to full vegetation with human intervention ? If so, then there is an potential enormous GHG stock in this areas in the form of biomass. Vegetables consume Carbon dioxide, wich is assimilated by the plant in the form of biomass. When plants decompose this biomass start to penetrate the soil and accumulate over there. Is is a very good plan in my opinion and i made some researsh in this topic. the question of holistic managment has it's problems during implementation, but if there is really interest in recovering desertic areas of the planet then this dificult will be overcomed.