Regenerating Jordan’s native forests
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotic_pump
> Perhaps Australia - not just a country, but an entire continent! - doesn't have to be so arid.
Perhaps even Sahel, Sahara and large parts of USA and Asia as well.
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.
https://www.science.org/content/article/controversial-russia...
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."
https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/13/1039/2013/acp-13-1039...
"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."
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/59/4/341/346941
"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.
Sometimes politics just make no sense whatsoever.
Here's some examples of expensive things:
* USS Gerald R Ford aircraft carrier: $13.3 billion [0]
* F-35 jet program (covering expected lifetimes of all aircraft through 2070): $1.5 trillion (> $150 million per aircraft) [1]
* TARP funds during 2007-2010 crisis: $431 billion [2]
* PPP loan forgiveness (during covid): $742 billion [3]
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.
Sources:
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/cost-of-navy-uss-ford-aircra...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191206140954/https://www.thena...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
[3] https://projects.propublica.org/coronavirus/bailouts/
[4] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/11/20/we-need-more-w...
[5] https://en.as.com/latest_news/how-much-money-did-cerns-large...
That draws on the China example and there's some really inspiring content on the site.
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.
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.
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.
A dry, kind of boring read, but useful.
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.
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).
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.
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.
https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/about-us/
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:
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'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.
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?
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.
https://goo.gl/maps/bxpneCxBeMvXMELt9
Also most of these programs are basically wood plantations, that regularly fail and continue existence just as propaganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China)#Criti...
Its overall not very effective.
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.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90504789/these-drones-can-plant-...
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.
https://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2011-09/you-built-what-se...
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?
But that aside: Is it "Nature can't be changed, so it's not worth trying"? "Nature knows best, better not interfere"?
Neither attitude is something I associate with the US, so I'm not sure what the status has to do with them trying or not trying.
I think this is the guy, much respect: https://www.lifegate.com/yacouba-sawadogo-the-man-who-stoppe...
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.
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.
What actually happened was successive waves of deforestation. The same deforestation that made Jordan arid.
Reforestation is a reasonable course of action.
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.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/new-prehistoric-palm-1.39392...
https://www.greenthesinai.com/back-to-the-garden-john-d-liu
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/20/our-bigg...
They also desalinate a lot of water and are actually refilling the Jordan River with desalinated water.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlKI&ab_channel=vprod...
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.
This article is just a lie.
These forests are the size of a average house in the US
Better article explaining what they are doing -
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/in-jordan-the-middle-easts...
What they are doing is important, it's about mental health in cities.
If you truly care about large scale native forests comments by Elon Musk when discussing his CO2 sequestration moonshot are more relevant.
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.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
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.
Its horrific, but the only way.