Push back the desert!

Here’s some hope for humanity right here. In this TED talk, Dr Allen Savory explains his ideas on reversing desertification, learnt in the African bushveld.

While his views have not gone unchallenged, (not least by Ralph Maughan here) they do make sense at first blush. Savory maintains that far from exhausting a land’s nutrients, intensive livestock farming actually helps to preserve the moisture and nutrients in the soil until the next rainy season.