Our grasslands are turning into deserts, but there’s a surprising way we can save them
EDITOR’S NOTE — Dr. Peter Tsigaris is a professor of economics at Thompson Rivers University. He has kindly agreed to submit a series of articles on important global and local issues, providing links to background information.
By Dr. PETER TSIGARIS
Recently, I had the pleasure to watch a 20-minute TED talk by Allan Savory, a grassland ecosystem pioneer. It reminded me of our grasslands and what can happen to them from climate change and human interference.
Dr. Peter Tsigaris.
Savory gives a powerful talk about grasslands and their transformation into deserts. Desertification is the term used to describe this conversion.
According to Savory, it is happening to most of the world’s grasslands. This change causes further climate change and it creates irreversible damages to many societies that depend on grazing.
In our area we are surrounded by beautiful grasslands that provide us with many ecosystem services. Services that yield direct value such as provision of fresh water, fish, spiritual and recreational every year.
Grasslands provide us with indirect value for regulating services such as flood prevention, water purification, soil control erosion, carbon sequestration and storage, pollination and others.
Finally, grasslands provide an option value for future use, a bequest value for future unborn generations to use, and an existence value to maintain the habitat for plants, animals and species that are at risk.
All these ecosystem services are collective benefits we get as a community. With climate change and continued human interference we could lose these extremely valuable ecosystem services.
What can we do to stop this process? Allan Savory introduces a startling solution to the problem that can not only protect grasslands but even transform the desserts back to grasslands.
http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Alllan Savory’s biography can be found at: http://www.savoryinstitute.com/about-us/our-team/allan-savory/ where he admits he made errors and had failures in the past.
However, his out of the box holistic management and planned grazing approach to solve a world mega problem has received international recognition from the Buckminster Fuller Challenge in 2010. According to the Buckminster Fuller website the award is given to a person for “Winning solutions are regionally specific yet globally applicable and present a truly comprehensive, anticipatory, integrated approach to solving the world’s complex problems.” The award is decided by famous system thinkers for sustainability. For more information on the award please check: http://bfi.org/challenge
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Cattle that grazed according to Savory’s method needed expensive supplemental feed, became stressed and fatigued, and lost enough weight to compromise the profitability of their meat. And even though Savory’s Grazing Trials took place during a period of freakishly high rainfall, with rates exceeding the average by 24 percent overall, the authors contend that Savory’s method “failed to produce the marked improvement in grass cover claimed from its application.” The authors of the overview concluded exactly what mainstream ecologists have been concluding for 40 years: “No grazing system has yet shown the capacity to overcome the long-term effects of overstocking and/or drought on vegetation productivity.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2013/04/allan_savory_s_ted_talk_is_wrong_and_the_benefits_of_holistic_grazing_have.html
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/03/17/adam-merberg-on-grazing-and-allan-savory-and-ted/
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Thanks JC. This is very good information and exchange.
Yes, I agree solutions should never be not be taken for granted. Any solution that is being proposed to solve serious problems should be put under the microscope and be scientifically tested for its successfulness before it is being implemented. This is the scientific method. The problem is complex and scientific scrutiny must be used to test effectiveness.
What worries me and hence the write-up is the magnitude of the problem and also to stress that grasslands provide many benefits to us at a very small cost in terms of allocating scarce resources to produce these benefits. In other words, protecting grasslands is good economics. Protection of grasslands has a very high benefit-cost ratio. When it is being converted to another use (i.e,, open pit mining) the value of the ecosystem services the grasslands provide must be considered.
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