Perhaps a Little Understanding Will Help

The link below is to a TED Talk by Allan Savory.

It is, I think, one of the most important Talks to ever hit the Internet because, once you consider its ramifications it explains a LOT of things that just never seemed to make sense before now.

At least, to me.

Like the true causes of war, overpopulation, and human migration. Like why our planet is dying. Like why overpopulation and climate change are not really the problem.

Why they are, in fact, only symptoms of the problem.

Allan Savory is a biologist who became concerned with "desertification". He wanted to understand why so many parts of the world were turning into deserts. Why half the planet was dying at an unprecedented rate.

It isn't due to "climate change", although climate change certainly exists. The real problem is what drives climate change. And that turns out to be something I never expected.

Overpopulation is not too many people. It's too many people for a given area to support.

War is what happens when the have-nots decide to share with the haves, or when the haves decide not to share with the have-nots. If no one needed to share, there wouldn't be any have-nots.

Mass migration is what happens when people decide they would rather live somewhere else than die where they live.

Climate change is the sum of a very large number of local ecological catastrophes. The macro-climate is just the sum of all the micro-climates. By way of analogy, "disease" is just the sum of all the infected cells of an organism.

I think one element of overpopulation is a human instinct to breed as fast as possible when conditions are inhospitable., just to improve the odds that at least some of the offspring may survive. That's a very common tactic in nature. If there were no deserts--if the entire earth was green and bountiful--there would be no need for crisis breeding. Then (and only then) perhaps humans could live in balance with nature.

 

Was at MSU when the whole green revolution was just starting and have a masters degree in Agriculture from it. Problem is many sided, with modern tech and its inputs, we can grow 100 bushels of wheat with less than 1 hour of total labor, soil prep, planting, spraying, harvesting, in 1800 it took about 300 hours of labor to grow 100 bushels of wheat. One problem is how do the people who used to put the 299 hours in growing the wheat earn enough money to buy the wheat produced with the 1 hour and the machinery. The cotton picker and sprays created Detroit, both the 1930's car capital, and the present 3 rd world model. Share cropper and his family could only plant, hoe and pick so much cotton and often farmed 10 to 20 acres total, which also had to grow food for the family and the animals. A study of modern cotton farm with 3500 acres of cotton, which with fertilizer, sprays, modified seeds, and machine harvesting produces several times as much cotton per acre as those of the 1880's share cropper farm, had a husband and wife working full time and 3 additional workers for about 9 months of the year. This same technology and such has taken vast areas in Asia and destroyed the rivers and lakes, and made the non irrigated land into a desert. Even if his concept is true, don't see much chance of it being implemented other than McDonalds having hired herders moving their vast contracted cattle over the land given to them by the government and still no solution to the moving of 95 % of the peasant farmers into the new "urban" areas. The population of the Mexico City urban area was about 6 million in 1960, and about 22 million today and still increasing. Without massive food from the now "modernized" agriculture and imports, most would be dead in 90 days. No chance of his concept really being tried out as the climate change people, like the Luddites who came before them, are true believers in a new religion and are not about to let facts interfere with their beliefs.

 

in the video he did not talk about overpopulation he talked about improving lands by emmulating nature with moving large herds of animals to restore the land. in some cases they increased the animal production to feed people over 400%. The mistake the ecologist made years ago was assuming overpopulation in the herds caused desertification. The gentleman in the video talks about being one of the ecologist who OK'd destroying 40,000 elephants in Africa and in doing this the desertification got worse.

This same thing happened in the USA with the destruction of the buffalo herds.

This video had nothing to do with over population. Watch the video. it a good talk. And I have to admire someone who owns his mistakes and makes corrections accordingly.

The mistake is when 'man' thinks he knows more than God and nature.

 

It all comes down to the best use of resources. All we can do is all we can do.

One third of the world is desert. If we greened it there would be food for everyone.

But we all know that's not going to happen within the next hundred years, if at all.

If the poop well and truly hits the prop, the grids go down and commercial food transport stops, I think 90% of the world population would be dead within 30 days.

Not from hunger so much as from a desperate universal combat for anything edible.

A few areas will escape unscathed. During the Great Depression, the San people wandering the Kalahari desert were largely unaffected. They just weren't part of the system. The few living in towns went back to the desert.

But in the meantime some places can be made into better places, even if it's just a few acres at a time. And for a few years.

 

Agree UncleMorgan, if you have some thing to help get thru the tough times and keep your head down, there is always a chance, but I don't think standing on a bridge waiting for the FEMA convoy to bring food is going to be a viable choice. Have a Dr who was German, said that if not for comfrey, other wild foods, several year old grain left in their barn, and a very wise and determined grand mother, he would have died in 1946 in Germany, but by 1950 things were at least getting back and a few years later he was in medical school. I know this, if you die, things don't get better for you on this world, some still argue about the next, but that is above my pay grade. Still think best advise I have ever heard about prepping, is "STAY AWAY FROM CROWDS". YMMV

All ecosystems have developed over thousands of years and often a very small change, introducing earthworms into a forest for example will destroy one system, with ginsing and mocousin flowers etc, and favor a different system. Then we in our wisdom charge in and introduce changes and expect them to work. The buffalo were destroyed, could not have fences, cattle ranches, private property and farms, with 20 million herd moving thru twice a year and eating and flattening everything. Was it a viable long term solution, in another couple hundred years we will know.

 

Animals tend to migrate, people do not. They use the resources in one areas then branch out to use more.
Migration allows lands to recover.
Even though it may appear to us we are replenishing what we take, we are not. Why some things may appear that way as we see ocean of wheat fields and corn, however the reality is other resources will dry up, sooner then we realize.
So why us, why now? This actually has occurred before, imagine if you will had the USA not become a thing?
We would have a average population of people and still vast resources. In Europe people died and nutrition was difficult so life was not so sturdy, when we expanded out we migrated and allowed several hundred years of prosperity world wide. But as always greed allowed the process to speed up using resources up by wasting what is yielded. So then we set the structure for what we have now.

 

Hmmm...what I take away from this discussion is that the root of the problem is 'man.' I would not be surprised, some day in the near future, when our world population gets to 10 Billion, that some elites simply decide there are too many mouths to feed, not enough resources to go around and the major portion of the population simply are consumers not producers - so - they will cull the herd, probably with some sort of genetic virus or etc. no reason to damage the infrastructure or agriculture with war, simply little germ...

 

Food and Water will be the things of greatest value right behind the ability to defend and hold Food and Water reserves and production. Kind of scary when you think about it, but right now globally around 35,000,000 people produce the majority of the food for 7.7 Billion people. Nothing can go wrong with that kind of ratio. Throw in the number of arable acres being lost to development yearly, the number of food producers declining yearly, the global population growing yearly......... Mother Nature has a way of culling populations when they exceed what she allows them. Mother Nature is not nice or humane.

 

Kind of odd, the air I breathe and the water I drink has been recycled for most likely at least hundreds of millions of years, but the oil that is pumped out of the ground, made into plastic, thrown into a landfill, is gone. Mother nature has a way of handling population inbalances and loss of resources. Not nice, land turns to desert, rabbits get weird diseases, war breaks out for what is left, etc. In the end there is a new balance that is sustainable, might not have humans in it, but we forget Roman empire depended on wheat from Egypt and North Africa to feed the mass of their urban population and the army. For what ever reason, most of the area is now desert and feeds no one beyond its population.
I have read that in many dryer regions of the world, if it were not for termites, the surface would be covered with cellulose and nothing would grow. The termites and grazing animals convert the cellulose that plants can not use, into waste products that can be used. The herd of cattle that is used in the presentation is recycling cellulose into its basic elements and the urine is supplying nitrogen and many trace elements. The system was in perfect balance, or it would have changed until it was. He in a left handed sort of way has said that we should try being the apex predator instead of the lion and live with nature. The major problem with that so far is that we have developed no system to keep our numbers in check, and in nature the lion population is optimized thru a process developed over a long time.

 

Oh Bandit......ever the optimist.

 

That is what UN Agenda 21 and 30 are all about. Herding people into cities. To be managed.

 

Ha ha termites create more green house gas than mankind. Now what.

 

Nature can be very kind, as long as you stay in it's rhythm. Summer can be nice and a time of pleanty. Winters harsh and lean times. Learn the rhythm and prosper.. Oh, and except the occasional bump in the rhythm!

 

The Termite problem. Termites produce more CO2 each year than all living things combined - Ice Age Now

 

One of the things I took away from this video was that if we want global warming to stop before earth turns into another Venus, we should start greening the deserts.

Plants take CO2 out of the air and put the carbon back in the ground.

In the geological history of Earth there have been many local Ice Ages, but there has never been a global Desert Age. Until perhaps now. Maybe our first one will be our last.

The immediate value of this video is that any farmer that wants to swap a hardscrabble living on barely arable ground for a prosperous living on rich soil can do so in just a couple of years.

Why free range one cow on a hundred acres when a little applied knowledge will let far more cattle range on lush pasture?

Why pump out the acquirers when the rivers can be brought back?

If we put all of humanity into cryopods and froze them for 5,000 years, they could be decanted into a lush, balanced, and bountiful world--where they would immediately start making the same old mistakes all over again.

Why don't we just skip the cryopods and start correcting our mistakes? That way we could save a cool 4,950 years.

Just like in everything else, one monkey has to show another monkey how to get the biggest bunch of bananas.

Education is the key, and in the short run nothing beats proving by outdoing.

Start living better by living smarter and others will rip your ideas off. What could be better than that?

Hmmmm. Just think how much extra money a person could make with a few thousand acres of AZ wasteland if they managed it right.

 

lol @UncleMorgan it takes years to build up soil and if you had a little oasis the diving bands would come and destroy it because yours was the only greenspot in the wasteland.

if you did something like that you would have to figure out how to hide in plain site. That is much more difficult. What Alan did not cover in that Ted talk what how many years it took them to bring back the land.

 

Yah. But if you look at it not from the OPSEC /Survivalist/TEOTWAWKI-tomorrow viewpoint, but from the viewpoint of simply living as well as possible for as long as possible, I think it's worth the effort.

As long as possible may turn out to be quite long indeed.

Not everyone is in a position to green up a few square miles of semi-desert, but I think those who are should.

And the time frame is minuscule: a mere 40 years, max.

That's barely an eye-blink in geological time. That's half of a normal human lifespan, barring accident and disease.

The time span was from 1974 to 2013 in one example. But all of that change did not occur in the last year of that time span. Every year was better than the last, until it finally didn't need to get any better.

We all grow old and die, but Time just keeps on movin' into the future.

In the long run, what matters is what we do with our lives, and what we leave behind.

I'd like to leave a greener world behind, even if I had to buy some arid land and sic my great-grandchildren on it.

 

Around here, just when it was about back to being useful, the greens would come screaming out of the cities with a government grant and donations from some wealthy Californian and use the power of the government to force you to sell the land to protect the pristine wilderness, remove the cattle as nature doesn't like grubby people making money off of things and let it go back to desert. We are firmly committed to killing the elephants or the people, or the invasive species, or whatever the latest buzz theme is.

 

What I have noticed about nature, is that cycles run until they burnout. A wildfire burns until everything it can consume is consumed. The deer population cycle explodes until they starve back and the strong survive. The same with all of natures organism's. Man included.
The efforts to green the desert by do gooders and the UN and associates failed, because they interrupt this cycle. Example foreign aid. The UN drilled many wells in the desert, and little green areas developed. People moved there and let their goat herds expand until all the green within walking distance was consumed into desert again. You want things to balance quit interfering. Yah harsh but nature is harsh. Nature does not care, it just rumbles along. It balances itself by die backs in populations whether plant, animal or whatever organism has exceeded its scope. The more you interfere the farther the pendulum will swing back. If the right one don't get yah then the left one will.