Andrew Millison, the creator of the linked YouTube video, has an interesting channel where he essentially showcases applications of / advances in ecological technology (i.e., permaculture.) I take some solace in the fact that his videos get millions of views; suggesting that permaculture / ecological design principles aren't some fringe-y thing any more.
> As of 2023, the Great Green Wall was reported as "facing the risk of collapse" due to terrorist threats, absence of political leadership, and insufficient funding. “The Sahel countries have not allocated any spending in their budgets for this project. They are only waiting on funding from abroad, whether from the European Union, the African Union, or others.” said Issa Garba, an environmental activist from Niger, who also described the 2030 guideline as an unattainable goal. Amid the existing stagnation, a growing number of voices have called for scrapping the project.
Africa is building a Great Green Wall to prevent expansion of the Sahara - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39466851 - Feb 2024 (68 comments)
Morocco also has similar and several walls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moroccan_Western_Sahara_Wall
If there is money and resources to build and maintain such walls, there should be more will and good intentions to build green walls which are more useful.
There seems to be a certain amount of dissent.
"Mass tree-planting programs in the desert often cause lasting damage to the ecosystems they are purportedly trying to repair." https://www.noemamag.com/if-the-desert-was-green/
"Israel’s Yatir Forest has been hailed as a green refuge in the Negev that is helping fight climate change. But some Israeli ecologists now contend that it has wiped out important desert ecosystems and shows that forestation projects are not always an unalloyed environmental good." https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-israel-questions-are-raise...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/20/our-bigg...
Like how the Sahara feeds the Amazon rainforest. https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasa-sat...
i.e. greening your land might lead to browning mine.
The Great Green Wall is more open in that anyone can contribute to its construction. All you need is a shovel and some seeds.
I can plant a hundred trees, keep them up for a year, and find a hundred tree stumps in two. I genuinely would like to know where on the spectrum this is:
- This is a fools' errand
- This requires constant upkeep and detailed construction
- This requires mild upkeep
- This is self-sustaining, can be done with a shovel + seeds, and once started, is self-sustaining, with the forest turning the Sahara green
Personally, I'm in favor of the use of technology to affect the planet, but it seems to me that the public reception to these ideas is mostly around who's doing the deed. Often, when someone in a rich country proposes something like this, the argument will be something about capitalism. However, when a poor country does it, despite it also being about wealth at the end of the day, it's lauded. Now again, I'm totally in favor of all these efforts and totally understand why people do it. It's just a duality I've noticed; and I'm not sure what to think about it.
There isn't some "human interventions good/human interventions bad" duality. Some are good some are bad. We should stop doing to bad things and do more of the good things. We should continuously audit for new effects caused by our actions are adjust accordingly to achieve the best outcomes for human life.
And is increasing desertification one of earth's natural processes or is it an effect of technology, specifically technology we've used to pull massive amounts of carbon out of the ground and add it to the atmosphere?
Not trying to be hostile, just questioning some of your assumptions.
And desertification is a natural process, see the Middle East or the Sahara itself, but perhaps accelerated by human impact.
Without a strong local stake, the only projects that work are resource extraction projects. These have a tendency to create dependencies, and strong political instability.
There's also the fact that many technocratic proposals from rich countries never progress past first order thinking: "Trees missing, add trees here". Again, a function of skin in the game - rich nations overwhelmingly operate on a form of capitalism that prioritizes short term wins, and they're not around for the cleanup after that. This is why you want a local stake - not due to theoretical arguments around capitalism or colonialism, but because you want to make sure the people who own the consequences are part of the process. Which usually leads to better outcomes.
Agriculture prevents a lot of earth's natural processes and has been doing so for millennia. We, as humans living in a relatively advanced civilization prevent earth's natural process just by living an urban area. I really don't see your point.
I mean it's literally just planting trees, grasses, and shrubs. This isn't dumping a cargo ship of iron filings into the sea or putting a solar sail in front of the sun, it's putting seeds in the ground. If you want to call that "technology" I suppose it's technically true, but it's almost laughable.
Should Africa's desert be preserved to feed the Amazon? That's a question humanity seems ill equipped to answer.
This seems like a very large leap of reasoning to "logically" make.
My understanding is that Saharan dust clouds carry phosphorus across the Atlantic, which nourish the Amazon.
It doesn't follow that Africa stopping the expansion of the Sahara will kill this cycle. The Sahel has historically been used for agriculture (with periods of massive drought in between) and preventing the Sahara from expanding into it does not mean erasing the rest of the Sahara.
Math. Stopping the Sahara from expanding doesn't change how much dust and sand are going over to the Amazon, it just caps it at the current amount.
