Re: African deserts

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

John Schinnerer wrote:

> A couple of decades or so of small-scale exploration and experimentation
> in systems that
>spent hundreds and even thousands of years evolving the complexity that we
>observe them to have seems woefully inadequate preparation for
>industrial-scale intervention into those systems.

The point is, though, that we've already intervened in these systems on a
massive scale. Obviously, untouched ecosystems (if there are any outside of
Antarctica) should be left alone. But most desertification and land
degradation was caused by "human-scale, grassroots" uses such as the wood
collecting and grazing that Scott has cited. The industrial damage to, say,
the Amazon is small compared to what humans did prior to the industrial
age, like the clearing and fencing of all of America, the cutting of North
Africa's forests for Roman ships, the desertification of once-green Greece,
and on and on.
   I agree that we don't fully understand exactly how ecosystems function.
But we're not trying to restore degraded ecosystems to their original
pristine state (whatever that is: pre-European America? or pre-native
American-burning America? or pre ice-age America? How would you choose?) we
just want something other than a desert, we just want to jump-start
succession again by restoring a little rainfall and biomass accumulation.
Nature will do the rest. There's a lot of data out there on how to begin:
many large-scale projects done by thousands of restoration ecologists,
grassland restoration of hundreds of square miles by conscientious
ranchers, and we can also evaluate several thousand years of indigenous
land use, such as the regular burning of every major river valley in North
America for most of the last 5000 years. We know a lot about what works,
and we sure know what doesn't. Besides, *we* evolved in these systems, too:
we know quite a bit about them if we just listen. And we couldn't do much
worse than the desert that's already there.
  A bunch of people with shovels can do a lot of good, but they aren't
going to heal 650,000 square km of Somalian desert, not in the real,
political world. I see no reason why we shouldn't work at every scale, from
me with my shovel in my yard to a squadron of D-9 cats swaling a big
demonstration site in Somalia.

Toby