Allen Savory, born 1935, is a Zimbabwean scientist, livestock farmer, and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute. One of his life’s missions is to increase the holistic resource management, while helping find resolutions for damage caused to the planet by climate change.

Among the irrefutable damages caused by climate change is land degradation or desertification. In his Ted Talk ‘How to green the world’s deserts and reverse climate change’, Allan aims to reeducate the world about desertification. He seeks to reeducate the world about desertification, what it is, what causes it and ultimately how we can reverse it by working together to repair this damage to our planet.

What is desertification?

As a human race we are currently facing a perfect storm, which is bearing down on all of us. Rising population, climate change, and desertification are said to be the causes of this perfect storm.

Desertification is land degradation process that occurs in drylands. The term ‘desertification’ is another word for land that is turning into desert, because we have too much bareground.

Two thirds of the world are desertifying. There are many parks, gardens, and vast amounts of land that are becoming deserts, even those with high grass. In part, this is due to too much ground being left barren and uncovered, which leaves it vulnerable to evaporation, sun, and erosion.

So what is the cause of desertification?

According to research, Allan says that desertification is caused by livestock, overgrazing and leaving the soil bare and giving off methane, which is attributed to have caused 20% of the planet’s global warming.

Allan explores the concept of reeducation and discovery. Meaning unlearning misinformation that leads to misdiagnosing the cause of desertification and discovering the true cause.

The journey of discovery and diagnosing the increase in desertification, started with Allan’s hypothesis that the elephants in his town were the ones damaging the soil and ground and leaving it bare. With this theory, they took action and over a course of a few years, he and his team shot 40,000 elephants to try and stop the damage. This did not help the problem, in fact it got worse and today, he describes it as “the saddest and greatest blunder of [his] life.”

However, one good thing that came from this experiment, with the hypothesis being proven wrong, he could move on and try find the real solution. Arriving in America, he found a national park desertifying, with no life stock in sight. Many scientists called it a natural occurrence, but Allen felt a step closer to finding the cause of this agricultural tsunami.

Example of desertification of an american national park.

There is a natural grass and natural vegetation cycle that occurs each year. First grass grows during the wet/rainy season and then, it biologically decays in the dry season and the grass begins to die, making way for new grass to grow.

If this natural process does not occur, in Africa we then result in using fire which releases carbon. Meaning burning one hectare of grassland, gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. Across Africa, we burn more than a billion hectares of grasslands per year. Allan has found we can not burn this amount of grass, without causing desertification and climate change.

How do we fix the problem of desertification?

Allan emphasis in his TED talk, that there is only one option left to climatologists and scientists to fix desertification -

“... and that is to do the unthinkable, and use livestock, bunched and moving as a proxy for former herds and predators to mimic nature. There is no other alternative left to mankind.”

He has already begun testing and proving the truthfulness of this hypothesis of reversing desertification using livestock and the result was astounding. He came up with a reversal plan called ‘holistic management and planned grazing planning process.’ This process addresses all of nature’s complexity and our social, environmental, economic complexity.

‘one ecologist says cows are among the few animals left that can save us all from extinction.’

The Holistic Planned grazing planning process has been taught to some farmers in Africa and as they implement it, it helps to ensure that livestock are in the right place, at the right time, and with the right behavior.

What are the global effects on this reversal process?

What man is doing himself, with overpopulation and desertification of land is causing climate change, as much as fossil fuels and maybe more. Which causing hunger, poverty, violence, social breakdown and war, leading to the suffering of many women and children.

We can commit to working with nature, on this low cost plan to reverse the damage caused. We can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the grasslands and heal the planet, so the next generation and one after that one, can inherit a planet that is healing and that has enough healthy ground to produce healthy agricultural foods.

Healed gulley, mimicking nature and using holistic management & planned grazing.

So you’re ready to contribute to macro-climate change and reversal of desertification!

Then come join Growing Hope and support the Mission 2022 movement. When you join, you support us in our mission to plant one food garden per week, in schools in South Africa, all of 2022. Your sponsorship can create more meaning than you could ever imagine possible!

Head over to the Growing Hope website to learn more, so we can start today to reverse the damage caused by desertification and more importantly Leave a legacy of hope for you children and their children, and all of humanity!