Managing Climate

We have established that carbon is not the problem with the world environment but rather a major symptom of the problem.  Carbon will be the best gauge to measure improvement or degradation. The root cause of the problem is that human land management has and is catastrophically effecting the global environment by disrupting local hydrological cycles and therefore regional heat dynamics.  These micro changes over millions of hectares are having adverse macro climate effects.

 To address this we now only have one option. To regenerate the health of our soils so they can again infiltrate and retain rainfalls so as to sustain the hydrological processes that naturally cool and ensure our stable climate.    The soil is not just the foundation of all life on the land and basis of our food production but also the means by which nature has regulated the hydrological, heat dynamics and safe climate of the blue planet for over 400 million years. What we do to these soils, their vegetation cover and their hydrology has major consequences; in inducing dangerous climate extremes or cooling them to help restore our safe stable climate. 

 There has been some brilliant work over the past decades by some very clever minds on how to regenerate grasslands and in so doing the soils, hydrology, climate and viability of life over vast otherwise arid regions.  For example, Andre Voison’s and Allan Savory’s work in rangeland management has been validated and used practically over the past 40 plus years to regenerate many of the Earth’s ‘brittle’ at risk regions. 

 In a nutshell Savory’s thesis is that for anything to be sustainable it has to be simultaneously economically, environmentally and socially sustainable.  He established a brittleness scale with true rainforests on the wet end and true deserts on the dry end.  Savory’s thesis is that the more moist environments such as rainforest or aquatics just needs rest and it will regenerate itself. The more Brittle environments which cover 70% of the land mass, often have sporadic rainfall events and prolonged dry periods.  Australia is almost all brittle.  If you provide too much rest to brittle environments they will continue to degrade.  In moist tending environments the microbes to break down and cycle cellulose lives in the environment, in brittle tending environments these microbes live in the stomach of herbivores.

 Naturally functioning brittle ecosystem are maintained by large groups of herbivores are held in tight mobs as that is their only defence against predators.  No predator can enter the herd because they will be trampled.  The predators work around the outside of the herd trying to isolate and rundown prey.  Because the herbivores only form of defence against the predators is to stay in the tight herd they graze down any land they are on, trample the grass, foul the area and then move on in the tight herd.  No animal in the wild will graze on fouled land so there is a period of rest and recovery after the high impact grazing.  Brittle  environments have favoured the evolution of high impact grazing followed by a rest period. 

 While Australia shared similar biodiversity to Africa, 94% of our megafauna has become extinct in the past 40,000 years due to the ice ages, humans use of firestick farming and hunting.  Once the animals were extinct and there was no way of controlling the grass aside from patchwork burning.  The continual burning over thousands of years has oxidised our soils greatly.  A second wave of damage that upset the balance occurred with European settlement.  The continuous set stock grazing by introduced animals changed the balance and caused another round of biodiversity and soil carbon losses.  Australian farmers have confirmed they can increase their soil carbon levels simply with good grazing management that mimics the herbivore predator relationship of high density grazing and rest.  Ecological grazing plans that replace predators with fences can mimic the impact and rest cycles that occurred naturally and help regenerate these soils.

  To restore the hydrology of the planet land managers also need to shift their perspective on weeds.  All living plants repair our landscape. Some plants contribute to the production by being eaten by livestock or harvested and other plants contribute to the environment by providing ground cover, cycling carbon into the soils, breaking hard capped soils with their tap root system and by staying green longer softening the environment.  This second lot of plants are often referred to as weeds and we spend billions of dollars a year in trying to eradicate them mostly without success and to no benefit.  We need to look at the environment as a whole to understand how it should function, it’s a bitter pill to swallow that the weeds we have been told to destroy for generations are the very thing that can provide stability to our ecosystems.  Plants have spread around the globe for millennia, there are plants which could be incredibly beneficial to our environment.  Desertification is a symptom of biodiversity loss.  It is implausible that a plant naturally colonised here in 1777 is a native and one that arrived in 1778 is an exotic, or a weed.  The human burning practices over thousands of years are similarly not ‘natural’, yet have impacted Australia’ floristic bio-diversity and extinctions significantly.

No fire lit by a human being is natural – regardless of how long we’ve been lighting fires for.  While lightning strikes in the beginning of a wet season can naturally start fires these are often limited in size especially where the grass has been eaten by herbivores.  The rain associated with lightning strikes may also limit the damage they do.  We can ill afford to lose more carbon from our soils by annually burning, some 30-120 million hectares of our rangelands  that can instead be bio-converted into bio-fertilizer, soil carbon and protein instead of being lost as carbon emissions to the atmosphere and in so doing desertifying landscapes.  

 The methane debate will no doubt raise itself here with the proposition of running more livestock.  For millennia the earth has supported many more animals than we now do. Despite this methane level remained stable at some 700 parts per billion. This is because when methane (CH4) is released from a herbivore grazing green grass it is mostly rapidly photo-oxidised into H2O and CO2 by hydroxyl radicals formed when sunlight interacts with the transpired water vapour.  Generally green grass can photo-oxidize 100 times more CH4 than that produced by the herbivores grazing that area. Healthy soils similarly contain many bacteria, methanotrophs, that actively oxidize CH4 into CO2 and H20 both of which can then be used to support further healthy plant growth. There is no methane issue from herbivores grazing healthy pasture.

 Soil is a living organism and like all living organisms they must be covered by a skin.  The skin for the soil is the organic litter such as trampled grass.  This litter protects the soil from temperature variations from day to night, takes the energy out of raindrops to prevent compaction and erosion, protects the delicate soil surface from wind erosion, helps retain moisture and provide a seed bed for new grass growth.  And as with any living organism if it loses too much skin it will die.  Every gram of carbon that we add to the soil can allow up to an additional 8 grams of water to be stored in that soil.

 Peter Andrews has a great understanding of the Australian river and creek systems and how they used to function as a series of interconnected billabongs with leaky weirs of marshes to take the water down to the next level.  These rivers were almost always partially filled as the leaky weirs prevented the water from flowing straight out to sea.  The high water levels in the creeks and rivers allowed water to spread sideways across soils on  flood plains and to raise water tables that perennial grasses and trees could access.  As salt water is denser than fresh water this surface water created water lens which held the salt down in subsoils.  Years of soil degradation has allowed this salt to rise to the surface with devastating results.  By rehydrating our river systems we can not only grow more tree life along the river banks but will also hydrate the water table to grow more plant life on the flood plains. 

 As ecosystems function as wholes you cannot introduce just part of an ecology back into a country.  Dung beetles are doing amazing work in the Australian ecology burying thousands of tonnes of fertiliser back into the soil daily, aerating soils and penetrating hard capping.  John Feehan is working around Australia introducing dung beetles suited to specific environments.

In summary farmers globally have to keep more ground cover by managing livestock, let more plants grow to provide a diversity of plants, periodically rest brittle tending environments, slow our rivers and retain water in the soil profile, grow more green matter which can by cycled into the soil to sequester carbon from the atmosphere.  We need to take the pressure off our moist environments such as rainforests and more sustainably manage our extensive but at risk brittle environments such as our rangelands.  This must be done in an economically, ecologically and socially sustainable way.  We can do this over much of the 10 billion hectares or 60% of the world’s brittle land area.  The ecological management of our herbivores is the only tool we have to effectively regenerate and manage these rangelands.

George King

“Coombing Park”

CARCOAR NSW 2791