Things like Japanese honeysuckle, Russian olive, autumn olive....
The Sustainable Movement is basically a short term fad when you are talking about humans and their effect on the earth. I see no evidence of it having any real effect YET. Some body is going to have to fhin the herd of humans because there are limits of what can be substained.~gdmoolie said:Interesting talk. I don't personally believe that humans have a true picture of how ecosystems and climate actually change over time, or how to "fix" it, but that's just me.
I read a series of books about the Cariboo-Chilcotin region of BC a few years ago that were written by Richmond P Hobson Jr.--he was an American who moved to the area in the early 1930s to start up a large cattle ranch with a friend. During the course of his time ranching, he noted that the area that had started out as vast grasslands became dense forest over his lifetime. I believe he felt it was a natural process, but he was just an observer. Certainly his observations run a bit counter to modern theories about climate change, as do the prevailing beliefs during my childhood in the 1970s when we were all told that the earth was entering another Ice Age.
I currently live on the Rocky Mountain foothills edge of what used to be the short grass prairie, and know a little about the bison herds and their migration patterns prior to the arrival of Europeans. The bison traveled in a wide circular migratory pattern throughout the short grass prairie of the US and Canada, followed by the groups of hunter-gatherer native people who relied on those animals. This pattern remained unchanging for thousands of years, based on the verbal history of those people groups and the evidence at human sites such as the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (a UNESCO World Heritage Site just south of where I live). If the pattern didn't change for those thousands of years, my personal assumption is that the ecosystem and climate also didn't change during that time.
Since the arrival of Europeans, the introduction of non-native crops and animals (cattle and sheep) to the area, the short grass prairie has changed--not much of it remains. I've visited bits of it, and it is beautiful, but doesn't function in the old way anymore because the cycle of life has been broken by huge grain farms and large tracts of cattle ranches, so it doesn't contain all of the old plant species anymore. Humans have permanently changed what was, and there's no viable way to get it back.
Non hunter-gatherers rely on changing the landscape (by farming and ranching, by damming and bridging, by building roads and communities, by overfishing and overhunting--in so very many more ways) in order to adapt it to their needs, and this process of change forever alters the land and its natural processes. The land only repairs itself when left to its own devices--as evidenced by the aftermath of events such as Chernobyl. We've done horrible things to the earth (Hiroshima & Nakasaki atomic bombs, Seveso chemical plant disaster, Bikini Island and other nuclear test sites) that we have no way to clean up and we can only hope the earth can repair itself over time.
These are just some of the reasons why I personally believe that people really don't know anything or know what they are doing at all when it comes to the earth and its ecosystems and climate patterns. In the case of Allan Savory and the theories he postulates in this video talk, his life experience is short (compared to the history of the earth, and even the human impact on the areas where he grew up in Africa) and he himself acknowledges that he has made grave errors in the past.
We as humans just don't have enough history on this planet to understand all the cycles the earth has gone through over time. And I think we'd be pretty arrogant to say that we have the "right" answers to how to change things for the better. Or that we even know what is "better" than what we currently have now.
I personally think we'd all (as humans) be best off to tread lightly on the earth and not be so greedy for its resources--kinda the whole "self sufficient" mindset that this particular forum is all about, or my own family's version "living life in a sustainable fashion"
I don't know anything about any "movement", I just know that any land I've ever lived on has responded better to light use and organic treatment than my neighbors' land has responded to hard treatment and over application of chemicals. I'm a child of hippies and old-school thrifty grandparents, I believe we need to treat the earth with respect. And it's been a long time coming.~gd said:
