#drylands

Part 1 of a 3 Video Series

In this episode we see the incredible work that Brad Lancaster and his community are doing to make the Dunbar Spring Neighborhood in Tucson a cooler, more pleasant and human-friendly place to live by using plants as infrastructure and creating a food forest using native plants that are adapted to deal with the desert heat perfectly because they evolved there.

When Lozirians mean to say something’s lost for good, then “it’s gone to the Empty Lands”. Most of Lozir is dry to say the least, but the Lozirians consider only the inner lands to really be a desert, with no known water sources or inland seas like Sawa and Gdera have. It is notoriously difficult to map and so, unknown indeed. “A map of the Empty Lands would be either very useful or very…

This is a must-read, in its entirety, for anyone concerned about “desertification,” for anyone who’s ever referred to deserts, grasslands, prairies, etc., as “empty” space, and, for anyone in favor of “reforesting” these lands or advocating covering them with enormous solar farms, you - you gotta read it at least twice, maybe even read the book the article’s author wrote.

Our most common conception of deserts and arid lands is that they are ruined wastelands with little value, aberrations that need to be repaired and improved. Up to 70 percent of global arid and semiarid lands are frequently claimed to be suffering from varying degrees of ‘desertification’1 — despite the term having no agreed-upon definition or standardized measure. This problematic notion of the drylands — which constitute about 40 percent of the earth’s landmass — informs both knowledge about, and policies in, desert regions.

Academic research, however, has shown for more than 25 years that estimates of desertification have been significantly exaggerated and that most of the world’s drylands are not being invaded by spreading deserts caused by deforestation, burning, and overgrazing, as is often claimed. That hasn’t stopped the misconception from fueling a multimillion-dollar global anti-desertification campaign driven by perceptions of a looming crisis.

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The most significant environmental problems that have resulted from the drive to repair drylands and to extract value include salinization from overirrigation, inappropriate “reforestation,” the extension of agriculture into marginal lands, and failed range “improvement.” Although these forms of dryland degradation became problems early in the colonial period, they all persist and continue to pose significant problems today. Of the relatively few contemporary cases of serious dryland degradation, the vast majority are found in places with strong political economic forces shaping development, such as capitalist expansion, authoritarian rule, and the developmentalist state.3 These cases are also directly tied to the devaluing and suppression of indigenous production systems and the local knowledge of dryland populations, often based on the assumption that they have ruined the land.

In a very real sense, our old fear of desertification has caused dryland degradation where, for all intents and purposes, none existed before. Some scholars have dubbed this “policy-induced desertification.”

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Although no precise, “universally accepted definition of the term ‘desert’ exists,” most scholars agree that deserts are the arid and hyperarid regions of the planet, about 20 percent of the globe, that typically receive less than 200 millimeters of average annual rainfall.  The semiarid zones, 20 to 25 percent of the land surface, typically receive between 200 and 500 millimeters of average annual precipitation. Annual rainfall averages in these environments, however, are often meaningless given the great spatial, interannual, and intra-annual variability of rainfall. Together, the hyperarid, arid, and semiarid zones are frequently called the drylands. Constituting an estimated 35 to 50 percent of the planet, and home to about 38 percent of the world’s people, the drylands are concentrated in Africa and Asia, Australia, the western United States, Mexico, and the west coast of Latin America.

The range of different environments in these drylands is great, ranging from stony pavements, salt flats, sand seas, desert crusts, and varnishes, to savannahs, grasslands, shrublands, and steppes. The majority of the drylands contain plants (and animals) well adapted to heat, aridity, and drought. Many perennial plants like trees and shrubs have various adaptations, such as losing leaves in the hottest, driest season and very long roots to reach deep groundwater, that allow them to survive and even thrive. Most annual plants like many grasses, herbs, and flowers survive by existing for a majority of their lives as seeds lying dormant in the soil awaiting the next rain. This below-ground biomass, which also includes bulbs, is invisible to the casual observer for the great majority of the time except following adequate rainfall events which may be years apart. Furthermore, many plants, a majority in Mediterranean-like climates, are well adapted to fire and grazing, with some being so dependent that they will actually die if they are not grazed or burned regularly.

... Determining what constitutes degradation in these highly variable systems, though, is an unresolved challenge because defining degradation is highly subjective.  As is increasingly recognized, however, a substantial number of indigenous pastoral and agricultural systems make excellent use of these unpredictable environments with minimal, if any, degradation.  Some of this research also shows that in addition to being more ecologically appropriate, mobile pastoral systems are more socially resilient and economically less vulnerable to climate variability and drought.  This is a vital point because nomads and their livestock have been incorrectly blamed for a very long time for creating deserts like the Sahara.

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Many of these ecological adaptations common in deserts were not well understood in 1927, however, when the French colonial forester Louis Lavauden, working in southern Tunisia, concluded that “desertification … is purely artificial. … It [is] caused uniquely by human action.”5 He, like so many before and after him, believed that indigenous deforestation and overgrazing had created great swaths of desertified land and desiccated environments in and around the Sahara, causing it to spread. As I detail in my book “The Arid Lands,” many governments have shared this belief — one that hinges on ecological myths that have been repeatedly and systematically dispelled — since the colonial period and thus have determined that nomads should be sedentarized, grazing reduced and controlled, and forests “replanted.”

Sand Dams: Transforming Lives in Drylands

Acerca de… Montones de ramas para revegetar.

Lo primero que se nos ocurre para restaurar una zona degradada es plantar árboles. Si introducimos las plantas, que son los productores primarios que alimentan al resto de los seres vivos, el ecosistema empezará a funcionar. Es lo que se suele hacer y lo que suele funcionar en muchos casos (Aunque esto se puede matizar, restaurar es más que plantar árboles y  a veces restaurar no es plantar…