Think Green Live Clean

How many times in the past years have you heard just how terrible livestock is to the Earth? Polluting the atmosphere, overgrazing the grasslands, and destroying ecosystems with their vast presence. But emerging voices are arguing this long standing belief that livestock are the bane of the worlds environmental problems, and instead reminding us that indeed it’s bad agricultural practices that are killing the Earth, and livestock can be our solution.

Allan Savory’s “Operation Hope” is an effort to reverse the desertification that is rapidly spreading across the world’s savannas and grasslands through applying age old animal behaviors to our current world. Although domesticating animals had little effect on the environment in small communities centuries ago, with the human population now nearing 9 billion, “choosing the wrong agricultural technique can have major consequences on global climate and human society.”

Savory’s technique does not simply rotate the herds from one nearby plot of land to another but imitates migration, ensuring the animals do not overwhelm too much vegetation at any time. Central to Savory’s livestock solution is the belief that it’s the loss of biodiversity, rather than “climate change”, that’s creating the widespread desertification pandemic, and a solution that’s proven to work.

“Twenty civilizations have failed due to environmental degradation,” explained Savory, and the degradation in almost all of the cases was due to poor agricultural management. With new technologies that intelligently use holistically applied solutions, we may be one step closer to solving this “10,000-year-old problem.”