Pathfinders – Regreened and pleasant land
In what may be an omen of the new Trump incumbency, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket underwent a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ last month. In a similarly unpromising start to the MAGA 2.0 regime, large areas of Los Angeles also underwent their own version of a rapid disassembly as winter wild fires raged along the beachfronts and through the Hollywood hills. When even millionaire celebs’ houses are burning down, you know the world is in crisis.
The LA fires were particularly devastating because of the ‘weather whiplash’ effect. Global warming is disrupting weather systems and rainfall patterns, making wet events in Southern California wetter, and dry events longer. Heavy rain a year or so back resulted in a profusion of new foliage, which then dried out during the subsequent and prolonged drought, creating a mass of kindling just waiting for the next lightning strike or discarded cigarette butt (tinyurl.com/vp6fd9jv).
This weather whiplash effect is being felt around the world, leading in many places to increasing floods and desertification, aided and abetted by human activity including deforestation, industrial farming and overgrazing, soil degradation, building, mining and pollution. It’s estimated that 25 percent of global land will be under threat by 2050. The Gobi desert in Mongolia and China is expanding by around 6,000 square kilometres a year, causing tens of thousands of migrants to flee to the cities. The Sahara, a desert the size of the United States, is advancing by around 48 km a year, exacerbating land conflicts in already poverty-stricken areas. The Thar desert in north-west India, for centuries held back by the natural barrier of the Aravalli mountains, is now blowing dust storms across croplands and into cities as the government have failed to prevent illegal mining of those same mountains.
Capitalism, which cares nothing for consequences, is the real ‘tragedy of the commons’, in which Earth’s common resources are owned and controlled privately and for private gain, to the impoverishment of all. In socialism, where resources would be commonly owned and managed, this unnecessary tragedy could be shunted into reverse. We don’t even need new technology to do it. We can simply apply ancient techniques used by the Egyptians and the Inca to create artificial water-harvesting structures to regreen the land.
Some of this is already happening. One famous regreening project is in the Sahel, the wide strip of semi-desert that borders the southern edge of the Sahara. Contrary to popular belief, it does rain in the Sahara, but rarely, and the water runs off the dry and impermeable ground in violent flash floods, leaving nothing behind. But since 2007, locals have been digging crescent-shaped depressions in the ground to catch the run-off, with deep sinkholes to permeate the sub-soil. The result has been a return of trees – a natural barrier to Saharan dust storms – and lush vegetation. The ‘Great Green Wall’ project runs right across Africa from coast to coast, involves 22 countries, and aims to restore 100 million hectares of marginal land by 2030 (youtu.be/udaihhReGAA).
Look online for stories about regreening deserts. They’re everywhere. Take Ethiopia, birthplace of coffee and once a ‘garden of Eden’ with at least 66 percent forest and woodland cover, reduced by human activity to 3.1 percent by 1982. It stopped raining and the wells dried up, causing droughts and biblical famines. But local community projects have been building micro-watersheds consisting of terraces, deep trenches, check dams and percolation ponds. Since these started, 13 streams have returned, of which 6 now flow throughout the year. Project lead Tony Renaudo put it plainly: ‘If you give nature a chance it will heal itself’ (youtu.be/RBP2uRQk5pQ).
China’s Kubuqi desert project is one of the world’s most successful, where desertification expanding at a rate of 10,000 km2 per year in 2000 has been reversed, leading to a re-greening of 2,000 km2 annually, using only local rainfall.
Also in China, the Loess Plateau had been stripped bare by overcropping and overgrazing, causing soil erosion, flooding, desertification and dust storms. The 35,000 km2 project was explained to local volunteers this way: you need to ‘dress’ the landscape – the hilltops need to wear hats (trees), the hills need to wear belts (terraces), and the valleys need shoes (dams). They regreened the entire area in a decade.
In India, monsoons come for just 3 months, giving farmers a fleeting window to produce just one annual crop, before 9 months of drought. The Paani Foundation project in India’s Maharashtra region hosts an annual Watercup competition to see which village can install the most water-harvesting structures within 45 days. Thousands of villages have participated since 2016, replenishing the water table in just one season and saving an estimated 145 billion gallons of water in 4 years, enabling 2 or more crops a year, creating food security, and ending migration to cities.
The Arvari river in north-west India had been dry for 60 years, with monsoon water simply running off the dry earth. In 1986 they started building water-harvesting crescents as in the Sahel, and by 1995 had restored the river year-round. They’ve since done the same thing with four more dry river systems (youtu.be/Tpozw1CAxmU).
Saudi Arabia has used subterranean water for crop irrigation but this is not sustainable as low rainfall can’t replenish the water table. The west-coast Al Baydha project, begun in 2010, built dams, channels and ditches to direct the floodwater into long-term storage areas, with the result that local vegetation was able to survive a 30-month drought without artificial irrigation (youtu.be/D6Kz_OcOgvE).
These and many other projects are being done now, not thanks to capitalism but in spite of it. What they mostly require is simply the cooperative labour of vast numbers of local people who understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. It’s a tantalising foretaste of what socialism could achieve on a world scale, once the barriers of private ownership and profit-seeking are torn down, and more of us start rolling our sleeves up.
PJS
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Great article, especially the final paragraph and the part about dressing the landscape. Although, it would have been better (in my opinion) if instead of ‘human activity’ you wrote ‘capitalist activity’.