Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Our Planet’s Destiny Lies in Its Pastures

cattle-pasture

A couple of times in the past we’ve written about the work of biologist Allan Savory, a Zimbabwean wildlife ranger turned rancher whose land management of Southern Africa’s dry savannahs attempts to mimic the wild herds that the captive ones supplanted. As Judith D. Schwartz wrote for us in 2012: Savory developed a land management process, holistic management, that challenged the conventional belief that grazing can only harm land. The key, said Savory, was to manage livestock to mimic the behavior of wild herds, intensively grazing (and defecating on and trampling upon the ground) and ... Read More

Just Planting Trees Won’t Stop March of Deserts

USDA map of world desertification

Attendance was sparse at a press conference following last fall’s first ever U.N. General Assembly devoted to desertification, as the loss of fertile land in dry areas is known. “If this were about climate change, the room would be full,” Luc Gnacadja of Benin, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, began his remarks to the press. On the 20th anniversary of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, where the desertification convention was established, it remains a poor cousin to other groundbreaking treaties set up at ... Read More