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.
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.
> "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.
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?
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
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 26.9 ms ] threadThere 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.
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.
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.
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
Sure, you won't convince anyone who has spent a minimal amount of time to learn critical thinking. However, they are a scant minority.