> "It's always struck me as puzzling, why people in suits and ties in capital cities seem to think that the pastoralists don't understand very well how to manage these lands," Barrett said. "
The kind of ridiculous comment only an economist/business professor would make.
The agriculture equivalent of pastoralists also used to use slash and burn techniques to grow crops destroying and depleting massive troves of land. It was people in lab coats, suits and ties who figured this was wrong, found better alternatives and then passed policies and laws to switch to those better alternatives.
The appeal to folk wisdom is one of the most annoying rhetorical tactics and its use here only serves to undermine the credibility of the findings.
There's a guy in New Zealand I met who spent the last 30 years rewilding what was previously agriculture herding land. He said his biggest frustration with land owners wasn't the push back on what he was doing, but the ignorance as to what could be achieved. Every single person he spoke to told him explicitely if the land was left to go to nature, it would be nothing but gorse and it was a waste of good grazing land. The actual result was a return of native rain forest with levels of species diversity that were almost 60% of untouched rainforest, which is pretty incredibly in such a short amount of time.
There is a reason Ad Hominem attacks are extremely popular. We are wired to accept them. It's a well known vulnerability in the base version of the barely functional wetware operating system most humans use.
Sure, you won't convince anyone who has spent a minimal amount of time to learn critical thinking. However, they are a scant minority.
Climate change has an effect of course. But stopping land from turning into desert starts with giving vegetation a chance instead of hungry sheep destroying anything green. Some grazing is OK. But overgrazing destroys the land. Once the vegetation is gone, the soil erodes and it no longer absorbs what little rain comes down.
There are some land restore projects in the middle east where the primary action was simply keeping the sheep from eating anything green that sticks out above the soil with simple fences. That seems to work and can restore barren landscapes in a few short years. Some studies in e.g. Jordany and the UK (places like Scottland should be covered in atlantic rainforest instead of being grazed into a barren landscape) and elsewhere seem to indicate that keeping sheep away for a while gives plants and trees a chance to re-establish themselves.
Trees are really vulnerable in their first few years and a tasty snack for grazing animals that without natural predators can strip the land of anything green in no time.
Overgrazing can be a problem, but undergrazing can be just as big of one.
Healthy pasture requires a certain rhythm/ amount of hoof traffic to stay healthy.
It's why land restoration in the (US) Midwest/West tends to do much better if it includes a reintroduced (managed) grazing component.
And why even wild pasture in Africa typically has a cycle of trample and/or natural burn as part of it's life cycle.
This may or may not apply to previously forested land, depending on what's in-situ, but grazing should be seen just as much as a positive requirement, as overgrazing is seen as a detriment/negative.
Now if your goal is reforestation instead of just healthy pasture or other sustainable ecotype, that's different .
But don't assume just because land can sustain forest, that forest is the 'natural' ecosystem. See: the US history of pasture vs forest. There's more forest now than there was pre-euro settlement.
Much like exercise and muscles or immune systems and exposure. Life thrives on just the right amount of tension or stress . Sedentary is equivalent to tomb.
Is the biggest threat for most things, giving the right timeframe. It won't be tomorrow, nor next year, but it will be more in the scale of decades for many regions than by the end of the century.
Very true, but weather has changed quite a bit due to Climate Change. Of course many people in the US still do not think the Climate is changing.
Where I am, snow is a very rare event, usually it was not rare to have a little snow at the start of October. Now, we are lucky to see any snow in time for Sanata Claus :)
Last year was the first time the local lake froze and stayed frozen for decades, we were able to walk safely on it all winter. It was not that cold, but all winter it was below 32F (0C), but we never went much below 20F (-7C). In the past we would regularly go a bit below 0F (-18C). Now, it is usual we get a few days of temps in the 50sF (10C) every couple of weeks.
Even with this, I know many neighbors who say there is no climate change. With our lily livered politicians, we all know nothing will ever be done to avoid Climate Change here in the US.
On the other hand the change has been much slower than expected.
In the late 1980s there were predictions that snow would entirely disappear in the UK (or at least England) by the end of the century and children would grow up never seeing snow.
We still have heavy snow every few years, and some snow most winters.
I would be curious if you have any source for this. I spent about 30 minutes looking through google scholar looking for studies from the 1980s which included snow projections under climate change to no avail.
I even got an account to a british newspaper database website [1] to try to find popular discussion of this claim. I was unable to find anything in maybe 10 minutes of looking.
In the late-80s there were also well-publicized predictions that Jesus would return to earth. There's always some crackpot who gets it wrong that one can point to years later as a counter-example ("In the 70s, Time magazine predicted an ice age!"). But what was the general consensus? Without looking it up, I doubt the consensus was nearly that dire.
It's even more narrow than that. Grazing policy is radically different between the country of Mongolia and the province of Inner Mongolia (China), both part of the historic region. The latter is overgrazed to a much more substantial degree than the former, which has relatively intact social structures for maintaining somewhat healthy grasslands.
grass, like many many life forms, exists in narrow climatic environments, which for grass is governed (mainly)by there bieng insufficient rain for trees, and in some special cases, too much wind for trees.
much of modern pasture is artificial in that tree's have been eliminated and mowing and other continued maintenance kills off tree seedlings, which if stopped results in spontainious re-forestation.
grass dies off when it gets too hot and dry, or becomes weak and prone to damage from live stock or other mechanical damage and then errodes.
in any case climate is most definitly what creates different ecological nitches, forest, grasland,desert, rainforest, tundra, muskeg, etc ,etc
I’m tired of the threats of warming climate. Is there any chance nature can adapt quickly enough to shrug off the effects? On a slow enough timeline, I know it’s possible. But how quickly can the process happen? How many generations are necessary?
There’s no chance nature can adapt at the current rate of change. Eventually the rate will settle down and nature will catch up, but I expect a lot of pain and suffering in the meantime.
And you can find loads of different sources showing the same. Search for yourself.
So now, as a rational person, you should consider the source that told you different and be angry that they were lying to you. And you won't trust that source again, right?
However if you go further back in time (50 million years or so) it seems possible that the Earth was hotter than today, modulo all uncertainties and approximations needed to get to these figures: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
Which may be fine for the Earth in general, but perhaps not for the human civilization and agriculture we have built over only the last few thousand years.
What is 'the science'? If you're not in agreement with 'the science', you're simply wrong. Why can't those mavericks that you find in almost every every discipline understand this and learn to accept 'the truth', the consensus?
> "It's always struck me as puzzling, why people in suits and ties in capital cities seem to think that the pastoralists don't understand very well how to manage these lands," Barrett said. "
The kind of ridiculous comment only an economist/business professor would make.
The agriculture equivalent of pastoralists also used to use slash and burn techniques to grow crops destroying and depleting massive troves of land. It was people in lab coats, suits and ties who figured this was wrong, found better alternatives and then passed policies and laws to switch to those better alternatives.
The appeal to folk wisdom is one of the most annoying rhetorical tactics and its use here only serves to undermine the credibility of the findings.
There's a guy in New Zealand I met who spent the last 30 years rewilding what was previously agriculture herding land. He said his biggest frustration with land owners wasn't the push back on what he was doing, but the ignorance as to what could be achieved. Every single person he spoke to told him explicitely if the land was left to go to nature, it would be nothing but gorse and it was a waste of good grazing land. The actual result was a return of native rain forest with levels of species diversity that were almost 60% of untouched rainforest, which is pretty incredibly in such a short amount of time.
This is the guy for context - it's a very interesting video that really highlights the impact that over-grazing has: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VZSJKbzyMc
In certain ecologies and certain population densities "slash and burn" works, in others it doesn't.
Translation to the global south works sometimes and sometimes it doesn't work.
There is a reason Ad Hominem attacks are extremely popular. We are wired to accept them. It's a well known vulnerability in the base version of the barely functional wetware operating system most humans use.
Sure, you won't convince anyone who has spent a minimal amount of time to learn critical thinking. However, they are a scant minority.
Climate change has an effect of course. But stopping land from turning into desert starts with giving vegetation a chance instead of hungry sheep destroying anything green. Some grazing is OK. But overgrazing destroys the land. Once the vegetation is gone, the soil erodes and it no longer absorbs what little rain comes down.
There are some land restore projects in the middle east where the primary action was simply keeping the sheep from eating anything green that sticks out above the soil with simple fences. That seems to work and can restore barren landscapes in a few short years. Some studies in e.g. Jordany and the UK (places like Scottland should be covered in atlantic rainforest instead of being grazed into a barren landscape) and elsewhere seem to indicate that keeping sheep away for a while gives plants and trees a chance to re-establish themselves.
Trees are really vulnerable in their first few years and a tasty snack for grazing animals that without natural predators can strip the land of anything green in no time.
Overgrazing can be a problem, but undergrazing can be just as big of one.
Healthy pasture requires a certain rhythm/ amount of hoof traffic to stay healthy.
It's why land restoration in the (US) Midwest/West tends to do much better if it includes a reintroduced (managed) grazing component.
And why even wild pasture in Africa typically has a cycle of trample and/or natural burn as part of it's life cycle.
This may or may not apply to previously forested land, depending on what's in-situ, but grazing should be seen just as much as a positive requirement, as overgrazing is seen as a detriment/negative.
Now if your goal is reforestation instead of just healthy pasture or other sustainable ecotype, that's different .
But don't assume just because land can sustain forest, that forest is the 'natural' ecosystem. See: the US history of pasture vs forest. There's more forest now than there was pre-euro settlement.
Much like exercise and muscles or immune systems and exposure. Life thrives on just the right amount of tension or stress . Sedentary is equivalent to tomb.
Is the biggest threat for most things, giving the right timeframe. It won't be tomorrow, nor next year, but it will be more in the scale of decades for many regions than by the end of the century.
Very true, but weather has changed quite a bit due to Climate Change. Of course many people in the US still do not think the Climate is changing.
Where I am, snow is a very rare event, usually it was not rare to have a little snow at the start of October. Now, we are lucky to see any snow in time for Sanata Claus :)
Last year was the first time the local lake froze and stayed frozen for decades, we were able to walk safely on it all winter. It was not that cold, but all winter it was below 32F (0C), but we never went much below 20F (-7C). In the past we would regularly go a bit below 0F (-18C). Now, it is usual we get a few days of temps in the 50sF (10C) every couple of weeks.
Even with this, I know many neighbors who say there is no climate change. With our lily livered politicians, we all know nothing will ever be done to avoid Climate Change here in the US.
On the other hand the change has been much slower than expected.
In the late 1980s there were predictions that snow would entirely disappear in the UK (or at least England) by the end of the century and children would grow up never seeing snow.
We still have heavy snow every few years, and some snow most winters.
I would be curious if you have any source for this. I spent about 30 minutes looking through google scholar looking for studies from the 1980s which included snow projections under climate change to no avail.
I even got an account to a british newspaper database website [1] to try to find popular discussion of this claim. I was unable to find anything in maybe 10 minutes of looking.
[1] https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/search/results/198...
EDIT: I will also drop this citation for the general question of whether change is happening slower than previously predicted https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
In the late-80s there were also well-publicized predictions that Jesus would return to earth. There's always some crackpot who gets it wrong that one can point to years later as a counter-example ("In the 70s, Time magazine predicted an ice age!"). But what was the general consensus? Without looking it up, I doubt the consensus was nearly that dire.
to rangelands in Mongolia. It doesn't apply to the US.
It's even more narrow than that. Grazing policy is radically different between the country of Mongolia and the province of Inner Mongolia (China), both part of the historic region. The latter is overgrazed to a much more substantial degree than the former, which has relatively intact social structures for maintaining somewhat healthy grasslands.
grass, like many many life forms, exists in narrow climatic environments, which for grass is governed (mainly)by there bieng insufficient rain for trees, and in some special cases, too much wind for trees. much of modern pasture is artificial in that tree's have been eliminated and mowing and other continued maintenance kills off tree seedlings, which if stopped results in spontainious re-forestation. grass dies off when it gets too hot and dry, or becomes weak and prone to damage from live stock or other mechanical damage and then errodes. in any case climate is most definitly what creates different ecological nitches, forest, grasland,desert, rainforest, tundra, muskeg, etc ,etc
I’m tired of the threats of warming climate. Is there any chance nature can adapt quickly enough to shrug off the effects? On a slow enough timeline, I know it’s possible. But how quickly can the process happen? How many generations are necessary?
There’s no chance nature can adapt at the current rate of change. Eventually the rate will settle down and nature will catch up, but I expect a lot of pain and suffering in the meantime.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/2000%2B_...
nature will adapt. There have certainly been bigger extinction events that life bounced back from. The problem is wether WE can...
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No we're not. Here is a graph that shows global temperature increase https://berkeley-earth-wp-offload.storage.googleapis.com/wp-...
And you can find loads of different sources showing the same. Search for yourself.
So now, as a rational person, you should consider the source that told you different and be angry that they were lying to you. And you won't trust that source again, right?
However if you go further back in time (50 million years or so) it seems possible that the Earth was hotter than today, modulo all uncertainties and approximations needed to get to these figures: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
Well yes, and if you go back even further, to a few billion years ago, the entire surface of earth was glowing magma.
But I'm kind of thinking more recent history than that :)
Which may be fine for the Earth in general, but perhaps not for the human civilization and agriculture we have built over only the last few thousand years.
Absolutely!
Humans have existed for only 200k years and I'm not sure primates let alone hominids even existed 50 million years ago. So irrelevant to our survival.
Do you have a source for that fact?
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What is 'the science'? If you're not in agreement with 'the science', you're simply wrong. Why can't those mavericks that you find in almost every every discipline understand this and learn to accept 'the truth', the consensus?
Why do you want to eat bugs?
Insects require very little amounts of water for the amount of protein they produce for consumption.