"This is not a doomsday talk": Allan Savory

Discussion in 'The big picture' started by matto, Jul 8, 2013.

  1. matto

    matto Junior Member

    Joined:
    Sep 4, 2009
    Messages:
    685
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    16
    Address by Allan Savory: First International Conference of the Savory Institute, Boulder, Colorado June 2013
    I thank all of you attending this our first gathering and conference for doing so, and in particular those of you have travelled from at least 10 countries I believe. I would like also to pay tribute to the people responsible for the formation of the Savory Institute, which was not formed by me. They have achieved more progress in last 3 years than we did over the past 30 years.
    The purpose for which they formed the Savory Institute was to “get the holistic framework into international consciousness to avoid tragedy beyond imagination” As I noted in a recent TED talk almost all that is not fairly dark green is desertifying.
    Let’s look briefly at our global situation.
    Agriculture is the key to everything; without which we cannot have a church, university, business, company – or even an economy, city or explore space. It is the very foundation upon which all human endeavour rests but we treat it as simply dirt.
    Agriculture is the production of food and fibre from the world’s land and waters. It is not just crop production as many believe. Fisheries, forestry, wildlife and more are agriculture.
    While agriculture made all we enjoy today -including our cell phones, comfortable cars and television – possible, it has also already destroyed many civilizations in all regions – both green and brown – in the NASA picture above.
    Agriculture today is producing far more eroding soil than food. We need to produce every year about half a ton of food per person. We are achieving this by producing 4 tons of eroding soil per person every year according to soil scientists. I believe these figures are largely from croplands. If we include the vast desertifying lands the figure could well be 8 to 10 tons or more of destroyed soil for every human alive today. And we expect the population to rise toward 10 billion.
    Do we seriously think we can feed them at the cost of 80 -100 billion tons of soil destroyed every year?
    Agriculture today is causing global expansion of man-made deserts – annual burning of billions of hectares of the world’s grasslands – periodic burning of millions of hectares of tropical and other forests. Massive loss of biodiversity. Vast destruction of ocean life – silting of continental shelves.
    Agriculture is decreasing the effectiveness of rainfall over most of the world’s land destroying the greatest reservoir of both fresh water and carbon in the world (the soil). Causing poverty, social breakdown, urban drift to cities, violence, wars and climate change.
    In summary – agriculture is without doubt the most destructive practice we have – more so than any coal mining, oil or other extractive industry. And what is most dangerous is that climate change is highly likely to continue even after we develop benign forms of mass energy as we must with urgency. I doubt any informed person or scientist could argue these points I have so briefly covered. As the astronauts would say “Houston, we have a problem!”
    In my view the entire issue of agriculture and climate change should have been put on a ‘war-footing’ many years ago. I certainly did in my mind long ago. I understand many of you do not like using a war analogy – but for several reasons I believe it is appropriate.
    The dangers facing us are greater than all the wars ever fought and long ago I wrote that “We are facing the greatest, and if lost the last, ‘war’ humans would ever fight – the struggle to live in harmony with ourselves and our environment.”
    What does putting agriculture and climate change on a ‘war-footing’ mean? Paul Gilding in his book “The Great Disruption” expressed it well – it means that point at which every one of us recognizes our backs are to the wall and it is no longer what we want, or would like to do, but what we have to do. At that point any action against our common interest is regarded as treasonable.
    How did we land in this dire situation and when? The answer is that it began a very long time ago – some continents and islands longer than others – depending on when humans arrived with language, organization, spear and fire followed by the domestication of plants and animals. It has been a growing problem for thousands of years that has now assumed global proportion.
    Earlier things happened gradually over thousands of years. Ordinary people like you and me – not my fellow scientists – observing, discussing and learning developed all the domestic animals, grains, vegetables, fruits that made civilization possible. Despite the slowness of change many civilizations were, as we know, overwhelmed by agricultural destruction of their environment.
    Studying the failure of past civilizations Rebecca Costa (The Watchman’s Rattle) wrote, I believe correctly, that those past civilizations did not fail simply because the agriculture did – they failed because their societies could not address the complexity of rising population and deteriorating environment. They turned, she states, increasingly to faith and sacrifices while shelving the problems for future generations until overwhelmed.
    Seems little has changed today other than the scope of the problem. Things are happening faster now for many reasons amongst which are population growth, exploding technological advances and our modern educational system.
    John Saul, studying the worsening situation following the Age of Enlightenment or Reason, concluded that our division of fields of knowledge into silos each with it’s own language and experts is a major concern. To quote Saul:
    “The reality is that the division of knowledge into feudal fiefdoms of expertise has made general understanding and coordinated action not simply impossible but despised and distrusted.”
    Whatever the reasons, major national and international actions today that make no sense have increased dramatically. For example. It makes no sense to produce oil to grow corn and use 40% of that corn to produce fuel?
    It makes no sense that oil companies are investing more than $600 billion a year exploring further fossil fuel reserves and not a dollar I am aware of helping us produce more food than eroding soil.
    The reality is that we are in our present situation. There is no point in apportioning blame as every one of us is responsible to varying degrees. What we need to do is face reality and begin rapidly working our way out – beginning with the most obvious and greatest danger to the future of humanity agriculture and desertification.
    I have heard it said that if Christopher Columbus had waited for the approval of a committee he would still be in the harbour. The world is leaderless as we face such grave dangers and if we wait for some politician, university, large NGO or international agency to lead, we too will never leave harbour.
    We will not be led out of our situation by some dynamic leader or grand plan but by each and every one of us beginning to act.
    Floods never start as floods, but as drops of rain hitting dry earth, then damp earth then beginning to flow until there is a flood. It is up to each one of us to be those drops of rain that lead to a flood of changed behaviour.
    This is not a doomsday talk. I am pleased to tell you that the Savory Institute, being very aware of all I have said, is leaving harbour by launching a global strategy to address the most pressing immediate needs. A strategy that offers people, and organizations, around the world an opportunity to become those drops of rain gathering till together we offer great hope for all of humanity.
    Your being here I take to mean you will be amongst those first rain drops.

    The first prong of our strategy is to begin reversing desertification of the world’s vast seasonal humidity mainly grassland environments.

    Continue reading at https://milkwood.net/2013/07/08/thi...onference-of-the-savory-institute/#more-13678
     
  2. Unmutual

    Unmutual Junior Member

    Joined:
    Feb 28, 2012
    Messages:
    599
    Likes Received:
    3
    Trophy Points:
    18
    This is the part that I find important. Governments won't do what's right because of centralization, palsy and the stranglehold of corporate interest. While NGOs do perform important reactionary work, they are generally not proactive. It's our fault. It's our problem. It really is up to us as individuals to fix things in our small area of influence.
     
  3. Pakanohida

    Pakanohida Junior Member

    Joined:
    Feb 27, 2011
    Messages:
    2,984
    Likes Received:
    20
    Trophy Points:
    38
    Let me cut through the red tape, adopt Permaculture world wide, and start planting NON-GMO trees.

    I don't mean to appear condescending, but the time to talk IMO was the 1930's through 1970's. Now it is up to people to just start doing what is right via Permaculture & it's ethics in order to help the web of life.

    Hence why I am practicing Permaculture as best as I can like a Hummingbird.

    [video=youtube_share;IGMW6YWjMxw]https://youtu.be/IGMW6YWjMxw[/video]
     
  4. eco4560

    eco4560 New Member

    Joined:
    Feb 9, 2009
    Messages:
    5,925
    Likes Received:
    9
    Trophy Points:
    0
    Love that clip!
     
  5. andrew curr

    andrew curr Moderator

    Joined:
    Jun 1, 2010
    Messages:
    1,194
    Likes Received:
    4
    Trophy Points:
    38
    nice one paka!
     

Share This Page

-->