Forests also have the potential to create their own micro-climates, with clouds and precipitation. (That's why deforestation in the Amazon will possibly lead to desertification in the region.)
Afforestation is far better than cloud-seeding to produce short-term rain. It's self-sustaining, takes carbon from the atmosphere, and creates new ecosystems (or rather, revives old ecosystems, hopefully with native wildlife).
Perhaps Australia - not just a country, but an entire continent! - doesn't have to be so arid.
I don't think that Wikipedia page makes a good job in communicating how controversial and outside of mainstream that theory is.
Here is a 2020 Science article which – while very sympathetic to the possibility of the theory being correct – makes a better job in describing how controversial it is.
The mainstream view can probably be described with some quotes from the review process of one their early (submitted 2010, published 2013) papers:
NOAA's Isaac Held:
"The authors make an extraordinary claim that a term that is traditionally considered to be small, to the point that it is sometimes neglected in atmospheric models and, even when not neglected, rarely commented on, is in fact dominant in driving atmospheric circulations. The effect concerned is that of the mass sink associated with condensation. This term is of first-order importance in some planetary atmospheres, such as Mars, where the total mass of the atmosphere has a substantial seasonal cycle, but for Earth the standard perspective is that the heat release associated with condensation dominates over the effect of the mass loss."
Editor's decision:
"The authors have presented an entirely new view of what may be driving dynamics in the atmosphere. This new theory has been subject to considerable criticism which any reader can see in the public review and interactive discussion of the manuscript in ACPD. Normally, the negative reviewer comments would not lead to final acceptance and publication of a manuscript in ACP. After extensive deliberation however, the editor concluded that the revised manuscript still should be published – despite the strong criticism from the esteemed reviewers – to promote continuation of the scientific dialogue on the controversial theory."
"The theory predicts two different types of coast to contentinental rainfall patterns, first in a forested area one can expect no decrease in rainfall as one moves inland in contrast to a deforested region where one observes an exponential decrease in annual rainfall."
"Life depends on Earth's hydrological cycle, especially the processes that carry moisture from oceans to land. The role of vegetation remains controversial. Local people in many partially forested regions believe that forests “attract” rain, whereas most modern climate experts would disagree. But a new hypothesis suggests that local people may be correct."
Mainstream or not ... people are right, and recent droughts seem to confirm this. The theory may not be right or wrong entirely, however continuing with discounting the role of vegetation will be done at our peril.
It's very tempting to declare these other expenses an exorbitant waste of potential when mega-projects come in so much cheaper: greening Africa ($8bn), using desalination and up-gradient pumping to re-hydrate the Colorado River ($15bn)[4], the large hadron collider ($5bn - $13bn)[5], and James Webb Space Telescope ($9.7bn)[6] to name a few.
It also provides some context when people say something is too expensive. As several others have noted, we don’t tend to talk about expense when we decide to bomb something, only when we’re deciding whether to build something.
It has smaller persistently arid regions than people think, and the corollary is that there are huge intermittently arid regions which spring into visble productive green life.
It also has a giant water system which runs almost the length of the eastern side, far inland from Queensland Channel country to the mouth of the Murray in South Australia, with many tributary rivers feeding in and being fed. It has a giant aquifer.
The thing is that we're looking a 50,000 years of fire driven deforestation and arguing to restore some belief in past verdency ignores what might be the lived reality of these landscapes which are feast and famine and have been for thousands of years.
Modern ag is much less kind, and has caused some massive destruction and topsoil loss and biodiversity loss. But, the goal in Australia wouldn't necessarily be a permanently verdent inland, it would be (I think) to work with what we've got.
Getting rid of millions of feral camels would break some people's hearts, judging by how they romanticise the feral brumbies in the victorian and nsw high country, despite the damage they're doing.
Getting rid of the dingo fence would be a good start: there's more growth outside it than inside.
Well, reforestation of the Australian Outback would be such an awesome geo-engineering monument! Though I wonder about the ethical implications of the destruction of the current desert ecosystem
>Perhaps Australia - not just a country, but an entire continent! - doesn't have to be so arid.
One limiting factor is that the soils are pretty gutless in many areas - as the settlers discovered when they arrived and found that the bushland was highly evolved to survive in those conditions (we have a great diversity of carniverous plants because of this), and farming wound up being much, much more challenging than they thought.
Another issue that would only be discovered later was that the trees in Australia kept the water table low. A couple of years after the deforestation and farming of a plot, the water level would rise, bringing with it salt from deep underground and depositing it on the surface. Effectively this permanently destroys the soil. Not only that, but i believe that the water also disappears a while after wreaking all this havoc. This is just something from a vaguely remembered lesson so i might have forgotten some detail.
Apparently a big part of the solution is introducing a bit of organic matter into the desert soil which is one of the factors to kick start the process. I don't know much about it, but that's my understanding.
Surprised to see no mention of the book Greening the Desert by Rakesh Hooja, given they appropriated the title for this article.
The book is a deep look into a successful permaculture endeavor in India. It talks about all the hard parts related to permaculture. That is, not the planting, not the irrigating, not the carefully lunar-timed execution of the pagan cow-horn-manure fertility ritual, but the social and political factors involved in getting a lot of different people on board with a long-term, large-scale, and risky agricultural project.
Completely different landscape but “Rewilding” by Isabella Tree goes into quite a bit of detail about similar challenges in the U.K., for e.g. neighbouring farms being unhappy about them letting grow plants they consider weeds, having to remove carcasses of large animals due to agricultural regulations etc.
My PDC (Permaculture Design Certificate) instructor was of the opinion that Permaculture focuses on designing ecosystems for the benefit of people. While he had a preference for native organisms, he was against using chemicals or efforts to eradicate so-called invasive species. He instead promoted us to find the beneficial properties of the invasive species. For example, in the US North East, Japanese Knotweed is an invasive species, yet has incredible healing properties such as being rich in Resveratrol.
A principle of Permaculture systems design is that organisms act to benefit the ecosystem. So called weeds, like dandelions, remediate the soil & also have strong nutritional properties.
A good 2 volume set is "Edible Forest Gardens" by Dave Jacke. He details the lifecycle of an ecosystem from grasslands all the way to mature forest from growth back to a cycle from a "growing forest" to "mature forest" as disruptions such as fire occur.
I spent quite a bit of time embedded in the Permaculture movement and have heard all these arguments before. I have read all the key Permaculture texts (both volumes of Edible Forest Gardens, Mollison's original Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, and many more).
They do not mesh with ecological science.
The problem with Permacultrure is that if you pay attention to the design system, it's effectively a return to pre-science individualistic naturalism. It's entirely based on individual personal observation, and removes a lot of the checks against personal bias that science introduced to improve upon individual naturalism.
Thus it's entirely possible for a Permaculturist to observe invasive species doing useful things for their ecosystem and completely miss all the damage they're doing. It's easy to see the the squirrels who use the Honeysuckle for cover and the birds eating its berries and completely miss all the Lepidoptera species that would be eating the plants the Honeysuckle displaces, and all the birds that depends on those species for protein. This is what Permaculturists consistently miss, but the ecological science is very clear about. Invasive species do far more harm to their biospheres than good.
So when Permaculturists discount controlling those species they are failing to do the very thing they claim to be attempting to do: build healthy ecosystems.
All too often with Permaculture it's much worse than just writing off the need to control invasives. I have seen Permaculturists become so obsessed with designing novel ecosystems that they even introduce invasive species.
The goals of the Permaculture movement - building a society that exists in harmony with the natural world and is thus not only sustainable, but regenerative - are sound. Many of the ideas - building agricultural systems that act like ecosystems - are good and worth exploring. But the methods and approaches taught by Permaculturists in PDC courses are deeply problematic.
Thank you for sharing this (novel-to-me) viewpoint. I've been attracted to permaculture by the calm-but-optimistic tinkering that so many content creators in that space espouse.
Is there a good starter resource you would point to as being more in line with modern ecological science? Thinking about my yard as an environment in the local ecology makes yardwork/gardening feel like it matters (much more than my terrible tomato yields, at least).
> Invasive species do far more harm to their biospheres than good.
I mentioned that there's a preference for native species. One of the principles taught is "the problem is the solution". If there are going to be invasive species or undesirable plants such as weeds anyways, why not use them? It's a pragmatic approach vs going to war with an animal or a plant.
> So when Permaculturists discount controlling those species they are failing to do the very thing they claim to be attempting to do: build healthy ecosystems.
I've heard criticism of using herbicides/pesticides to control the so called invasive species, where the intervention causes harm to the ecosystem. Rather than using pesticides, think of harnessing natural processes to benefit people & create a balance.
Again, it's the approach of going to war against a plant or animal. Anecdotally, I saw a grad student cheering to videos of divers spear fishing Lion Fish in the gulf & telling me that we need to eradicate the invasive Lion Fish from the Gulf. Did the spearing kill all of the Lion Fish? Did the problem go away?
In the West, we have this obsession with war & interventionalism and it carries over to natural ecosystems. Dumping chemicals in an attempt to eradicate an invasive species seems counter productive. Modern institutional science emphasizes measureables, while being blind to the broader context. The herbicides may achieve the measureable of reducing the observed biomass of a particular species, but at what cost? Is institutional science effective enough to imagine & measure all of the costs?
> I have seen Permaculturists become so obsessed with designing novel ecosystems that they even introduce invasive species.
I agree that could be a problem if done in a large scale. I was born on Maui, which had a mongoose introduced in a misguided countermeasure to snakes, which were not present in the islands when the Mongoose was introduced. Several natural Hawaiian song birds went extinct around that time. Others were reportedly hunted to extinction for their feathers to make the feather cloaks for the Ali'i. There have been escaped pets, like the Burmese Python in Florida, which multiply.
Even before people, invasive species were introduced into ecosystems with birds, migrating animals, the wind, etc. Somehow, the natural systems adjust.
Humans & global transport have accelerated this. Question is, do we spend our money & energy on intervening to create this utopia of what once was or do we adjust to the new circumstances & use our energy to create diverse natural ecosystems that benefit people? Is the pristine static set of ecosystems that we imagine a long term viable reality?
> But the methods and approaches taught by Permaculturists in PDC courses are deeply problematic.
The problem is the solution...as they say. Would it be better to have acres of lawns & sprawing centralized factory farms connected with a global shipping system, which spreads invasive species all over the world, setting aside small preserves for Nature? Or would it be better to regionalize & diversify food production using natural systems? People have to eat. Our current system of factory farming has done damage to billions of acres of land & watersheds. Before modern agriculture, civilizations, such as those who lives in the Amazon designed ecosystems that fed millions at the height of it's civilization. And we still benefit from their work via the Amazon Rain Forest, much of which grew from intentional ecological design with techniques such as building Terra Preta. I'm going to speculate that the people of the Amazons introduced invasive species during the process. Perhaps these principles can scale to green the deserts & feed the people of the region, as the OP demonstrates.
These articles always seem strange to me. There was another story a few years ago, also from Jordan if I recall correctly, where some member of the royal family did some permaculture thing with some Western group. Great success, look at all the plants, amazing, greening the desert and all that, fancy YT videos, and they were celebrating some anniversary.
Now here's another one, and they're creating a forest on 250sqm.
It feels like they're starting over and over, but either there's other successful projects "next door" which the articles never really mention, or the other projects were shut down or failed some time before. Did they? If so, why?
The same thing happens in Saudi Arabia where they had some amazing results by (oversimplified, yes), digging some swales and putting some rocks on steep hills. The grass was coming back, trees were growing. And that's it, cut, no more info. You'd think that this would be naturally adopted by each neighboring community immediately, and the whole desert would be greened in no time. But somehow it isn't. Why?
These countries are fairly autocratic, and obviously these projects have the blessing of the rulers, or they wouldn't happen, and surely the rulers would love to have the forests restored and the desertification stopped and all that, and it makes for great photo ops, too. Why then, don't they decree these projects to happen at scale?
I'm not saying it's all bullshit, maybe it's just journalists who need a new story every other years, but these are, to me, obvious questions, that I'd answer if I was writing an article about these things, and it's suspicious that they aren't being answered, ever.
I think it isn’t a trivial thing to scale, people need skills. Geoff Lawton himself was inspired by the 2000 year old Green valleys in Morocco which alas appear to be threatened:
But they've been doing it for some 15 years, right? With those types of success, I'd expect the map to look like those virus-spreading maps where it starts somewhere and then expands to all directions at exponential speed.
That it doesn't hints at there being some issue. Do you need to tend to each plant constantly with someone who has learned some special skills and that doesn't allow for scaling?
The advantage to having trees instead of desert seems so obvious, I can't see why everyone isn't jumping on it, unless there's some not-talked-about problem that limits these projects to touristy projects and YT filming locations. And with the amount of money that's going around for environmental projects in the developing world, I can't imagine that it's about lack of funding.
I guess the economic vested interests that have to be dealt with. From what I understand if there's a large amount of sheel and goat agriculture that eat so much vegetation there's little chance to survive, and if that is how people earn their living they'd need to be won over, or have some other way of making a living.
I'm a Data Engineer in a different continent so armchair farming is no doubt insulting.
But these things don't seem to be common knowledge, so much comes from studying how rain falls on the land, how to slow it down so it can penetrate into the soil, and raising the groundwater level which can take years.
These systems work. They scale (which is not surprising when you think about it, they are made of four-billion-year-old self-improving nano-technology that optimizes for exponential reproduction at all levels simultaneously, aka "life".)
If there's one systemic problem it's that Permaculture is diametrically opposed to extractive economic systems. (E.g. modern agriculture is/was more akin to mining than ecosystem design.) Monsanto (just to pick on them) has no place in a tessellation of ecological small-holdings.
Another factor is that many Permies elect to charge money to teach Permaculture, and even the main textbook "Permaculture: A Designer's Manual" has been scarce on the ground and hard to get for years. I think it's a little better now? You can order it online and get it delivered.
I think Permaculture et. al. would have spread faster if people taught it for free (and made money from selling the surplus they developed on their Permaculture farm, eh?)
These days it has reached "critical mass" and the concepts of applied ecology are rolling out all over. You can search the Youtube for videos of massive projects in India, for example.
I'd understand completely if they were up against regular western-style industrial farming operations: I can farm this land traditionally, the soil is okay, there's money to be made, it works, that new idea is a risk, who knows what the future will bring, and oh Monsanto mailed me a coupon, how nice.
But they're up competing against the desert. Who has a commercial interest in keeping the desert the way it is, besides some tourist industries around the pyramids in Egypt? Shouldn't it be trivial to convince people? "Hey, you have this land that is a desert where nothing grows, would you like to turn it into a food forest that'll feed you and offer you shade and make you loads of cash?" might induce some skepticism initially, but when you can point to their neighbor who's had a huge success with it, shouldn't everyone just jump on it?
Are these desert-projects commercial and they're asking for large fees to work on them? That'd make sense to explain why they aren't spreading like wild fire, but at least from the videos most of them seem like friendly plant hippies that get a huge kick out of restoring land, so I don't know -- is that just a sales pitch?
I was reading a book about the genesis of, I want to say the Nature Conservancy.
These folks had done the numbers and they realized that Pacific Gas & Electric (the company that supplies most of the electricity in California) could meet their growth targets by improving efficiency rather than opening new plants. Literally the company would make more money by building fewer power plants and everyone would have enough energy. A classic win-win situation. The PG&E execs just wouldn't listen. They had to taken to court, sued, to even begin to look at, let alone understand, the economic and technical advantages that were being presented to them. That's how strong the "building new power plants is what we do" culture was at PG&E.
Frankly, you're preaching to the choir. I dream of buying a few acres of desert land in e.g. NE California or Nevada and building a Permaculture food forest from scratch. I have a couple of obligations that make it unrealistic. I have no idea what people with actual capital and ability are waiting on really.
The entire article reads like some sort of religious parable. It hits all the woke undertones. Man bad, nature good. Man kill nature. But one woman will save nature. Give birth to forest. Almost ready for a Hollywood movie.
I've seen Dubai growing grass in the desert, and it literally requires almost always on sprinkler. They can grow trees too, but they water them daily. Which necessitates taking water from the ocean, and desalination. Which requires tons of energy and chemicals, and industry. Which costs tons of money. So keeping a tree, might be similar costs to what keeping a horse is here. All of it requires lots of money, and cheap labour from developing countries. Skinny malnourished men, from some poor village in India, and Pakistan working in scorching heat in the middle of the day.
So yes they can they can grow trees in the desert, because every time you fill up with gas, they get a large cut from the oil, and thus the money to grow them.
So you filling up your car, grow trees in the desert. Reality.
Well yeah, there used to be palm trees growing in Edmonton. Doesn't mean you can grow them now in -30 degree modern day Winter. Wind patterns change over time, and so does level of participation and temperatures a region receives. Not really surprising.
I'm not sure about Iraq, but if you're getting months of 40+ degrees daily and almost not rain, you're not growing a forrest without a source of water. Sorry.
A single peach tree in California typically requires about 25 to 40 gallons of water per week during the summer months.
Trees, grass and shrubs might be costly to kickstart but they retain water in the soil and that kind of thing compounds. It’s obviously an effort to kickstart the greening of a desert.
Better outcome would be had by planting diverse dessert-adapted plants and trees at locations were the landscape protects them, so they form "islands" of recovery without needing human intervention.
You compute were water in the landscape is most likely to exist and assemble, while protected from dust storms. Then you fire a seed shell from a drone towards the location, similar to this.
A alternative approach is to use robots to 3d print sand into a watercollecting structure that supports a plant seeded nearby while it drives its root towards ground water.
You don’t need fancy 3D printers. I remember watching a documentary about a man building a seed bank and reforesting a huge swath of land somewhere in Africa. At first he was ridiculed, fought against but eventually he succeeded. Very simple tools, traditional methods.
Thanks, Google maps is a great idea. Is there a list of these locations with historical images?
The approaches you mention are basically what I'd expect: mass-scale efforts that are hit and miss but will overall result in large effects. I suppose the end goal is different between this and other groups: one is "we need trees, lets plant trees" the other is "we need trees but we also need to repair our relationship with nature and create sustainable projects", and the latter probably has scaling-problems built-in.
I assume there's a lot of unrelated problems doing that in Africa, but North America has deserts too. What's keeping tech-loving tinkerers with a passion for drones and robots from transforming Arizona?
> The same thing happens in Saudi Arabia where they had some amazing results by (oversimplified, yes), digging some swales and putting some rocks on steep hills. The grass was coming back, trees were growing. And that's it, cut, no more info.
You are probably talking about Al Baydha. As far as I understand, the project ran 2009-2016, and last information in Wikipedia is from 2020.
After the PR piece is done, actual work is just superfluos steps. It can only bring unneccesary risks to everyone involved. If it fails, heads must roll, and nobody is interested in that for its own sake.
For a success story take a look at Jordans neighbour, Israel. The pioneers there planted millions of trees in the semi arid wasteland and it is today the only country in the world where desertification is happening in the reverse. What was 120 years ago rocky hills and barren wastelands are now covered in forests and fields.
Possibly more interesting should be the country next to Jordan that has gone from desert, barely producing enough for itself to net exporter of agricultural products.
Still unclear because Israel is not a net food exporter while Saudi Arabia is. Unless we're talking about some other way to slice it (which I was unable to find any data on).
I don't think either country is a net food exporter. The few sources seemingly suggesting Saudi Arabia as a net food exporter are misleading, and lack numbers for a net exporter claim. See, e.g., https://www.foodexport.org/export-insights/market-and-countr... (I initially misconstrued this Google hit because of the context), or the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Saudi_Arabia ("In regards to self-sufficiency, the kingdom produced a limited surplus, sufficient to export some quantities of food.") By contrast, there are many sources with numbers (primarily by value, but much of that seems to be for inputs like grain, etc) showing Saudi Arabia to be a net importer. See, e.g. https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/foodstuffs/re...
That said, it does seem Saudi Arabia's balance of food trade seems very similar to Israeli's. And Saudi Arabia has extensive policies to promote domestic food production.
What "moonshot"? He announced he was funding an XPRIZE for such technology, but I haven't seen anything develop from that.
If Musk ever said anything about carbon sequestration, it was as an uncited reference to others' ideas. He is the human incarnation of clickbait blogspam.
It occurred to me though while attempting to research this that such grandiose and incredulous statements about Musk drive "organic" viral search patterns (as it drove me to do) which could reinforce his standing as knower of things despite him not actually knowing a lot of things.
But i find they do not often communicate of the fragility of the endeavor or outcome. Human society is like a ablative sandstorm that wither the outcome down to zero in the long run. Same goes for wildlife parks. One economic downturn and donations drying up and poachers.
One drought and the nomadic tribes drive there cattle/goat into newly planted, already struggling green.
The project leading person dies and the whole tribe/idea vanishes, the very structure ground to the traditional society, which is basically embracing ecological catastrophe to spread the individuals genes.
My longterm hope for ecological preservation is actually on genetic engineering.
Make treewood give off a awful smell, so its lumber and fireworth goes to zero.
Make it grow strands of kevlar that blunt saws.
Make bushes grow leaves that are poisonous for goats.
Pre spread the bananna fungi, to make burning it down for plantations unviable.
Make djungle-mosquitos reservoirs for bovine diseases.
To touch a nature preserve must be something similar to wishing for death.
Afforestation is far better than cloud-seeding to produce short-term rain. It's self-sustaining, takes carbon from the atmosphere, and creates new ecosystems (or rather, revives old ecosystems, hopefully with native wildlife).
Perhaps Australia - not just a country, but an entire continent! - doesn't have to be so arid.