Our March/April cover story generated a passionate debate among our readers.
to read Jason Mark's letter from the editor with his thoughts on Allan Savory.
Before he became known as an apostate ecologist, Allan Savory was a soldier. Born in Zimbabwe to a family of British colonials, he commanded an elite government unit during the country's long, brutal civil war. He and his squad—men handpicked and trained by him—spent much of the 1960s fighting communist guerrillas in the veld, the savannas and grasslands where antelopes, elephants, and lions roam. It was hard, isolating, dangerous work. And it prepared him for the decades he has spent battling environmental orthodoxy, first as a farmer and rancher in Africa and then as an agricultural consultant in the United States.
Savory's apostasy is based on a controversial idea: that we need more cows—not fewer—grazing on the world's grasslands, prairies, and deserts, the arid and semiarid two-thirds of Earth's land surface where soil is especially susceptible to drying out and eroding as the climate warms and droughts worsen. This ruinous process is known as desertification, and it is estimated to be degrading an area the size of Pennsylvania worldwide each year. It ends with soil that has turned to dust.
Stopping desertification is Savory's obsession. He watched it spread across southern Africa over the course of decades, spawning poverty and migration, which contributed to war. Savory's big claim is that the science about desertification is wrong, notably the idea that cattle grazing always contributes to degradation in what he calls "brittle" landscapes. After laboring for years in relative obscurity, Savory eventually built up a significant international following. Today, according to Savory, tens of thousands of farmers and ranchers across the globe, managing some 40 million acres of land, adhere to his philosophy.
Savory's ideas catapulted into the mainstream in 2013, after he stood on a stage at the
TED conference in Long Beach, California, and offered his grand theory about livestock. Savory told the audience that cows offered "more hope than you can imagine." The 22-minute talk was titled, ambitiously, "How to Fight Desertification and Reverse Climate Change." The presentation garnered millions of views—3,746,905 as of this writing—and quickly became notorious among scientists who study the ecology of grazing.
Savory's theory goes like this: Cows that are managed in the right way can replicate the beneficial effect on soil of the native herds that once covered the planet's grasslands. Wild herds lived in fear of predators, and for protection they traveled in tight bunches, moving quickly. If we keep cattle moving across the landscape to mimic this behavior, and if we preserve the ancestral grazer-soil relationship—the animals churning the soil with their hooves, fertilizing it with dung and urine, stomping grass, creating mulch, stimulating plant growth—we can re-green the arid lands and, at the same time, encourage soil microbes that eat carbon dioxide.
Savory's vision, in part, follows some of the emerging science of what's called soil carbon sequestration. With more grass and better topsoils, we can use biological processes to capture and store the carbon that drives global climate change. The most commonly recommended strategies for what's called "carbon farming" are adopting no-till or low-till methods; boosting soil organic matter with additions of compost; and better managing crop rotation, especially through the use of cover crops. Savory puts a twist on the idea by adding livestock to the mix and recommending that ranchers increase the number of cattle per acre.
In his TED Talk, Savory claimed that by deploying his method of "holistic management and planned grazing" to "take back" just half of the planet's arid grasslands, humanity could accomplish a stunning feat: the reduction of atmospheric carbon to preindustrial levels. "There is only one option—I'll repeat to you, only one option—left to climatologists and scientists," he told the audience, "and that is to do the unthinkable, and to use livestock, bunched and moving, as a proxy for former herds and predators, and mimic nature. There is no other alternative left to mankind."
The presentation offered a remarkable win-win vision: more cattle, more hamburgers to feed a growing population, more profit for stock growers. In the process, the planet gets healthier land that acts as a sink to absorb carbon, and climate change comes to a halt.
The audience erupted with cheering and whistling, and when the noise subsided, TED host Chris Anderson took the stage and told Savory that it was "an astonishing talk." Twitter echoed with the good news. Michael Pollan tweeted, "Eat MORE meat?" Discover magazine said it was "one of the most thought-provoking" TED presentations of the year.
Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, pronounced it "moral progress in climate change."
After Savory's breakout performance, the attention and the accolades kept coming. In 2015, Savory was the central subject in an episode of the PBS documentary series A New Wild. The series' host—M. Sanjayan, a well-respected researcher who is a senior scientist at Conservation International—visited Savory's Zimbabwe ranch and came away impressed. "Allan's results are spectacular," Sanjayan told PBS viewers, and "could revolutionize the way in which we live on the plains." Sanjayan continued: "Cows or wildlife, it actually may not matter that much. The message is an extraordinarily powerful one, and it could be the best thing—the absolute best thing—that conservation has ever discovered."
When I
met with Savory last fall at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico—from where he oversees the Savory Institute, a worldwide nonprofit enterprise—he had the same militarily erect posture that I'd seen in the TED video. It was the bearing of a man much younger than 81. His eyes were gleaming, lively, and critical, but his voice was soft, his manner reassuring, and his face handsomely weathered. We sat in his den next to a fireplace ornamented with the artifacts of war: a shrine of bullets and bayonets, worn rucksacks, old rifles. He compared himself, by sly inference, to Galileo. "For years we believed in a flat world, and now we know we're in a round world," he told me. "Now we're in another big paradigm shift. From reductionist management of the land to holistic management. From a mechanistic view to a holistic view."
Two hours later, things were not as pleasant. I'd come prepared with literature critical of his ideas and had been citing it. He rolled his eyes in exasperation and shook his head. He turned to his wife, Jody Butterfield, who is also his frequent coauthor and who had walked in to say hello. "Well, this is taking so very much longer than expected, because Chris"—he shot me a mischievous grin—"is just totally steeped in the conventional crap about cows, and I've had to go over and over this with him." Butterfield smiled and accepted this statement by saying nothing.
The counterevidence I had been referencing says this: When there are too many cows in places with intermittent or little rain, where the vegetation is brittle and the soil fragile, the animals spell trouble. Overgrazing denudes the soil and produces erosion, which leads to a landscape where plants can't revive and grow. At least 8.4 billion acres on the planet are grazed, and 73 percent of that land is suffering from some form of land degradation, according to the International Journal of Biodiversity. The problem is perhaps worst across arid lands where plants evolved with almost no exposure to large grazers, such as in the mountainous west of the United States—where Savory happens to live.
Cattle grazing produced such a transformation in the environment of the American West that its introduction, in the late 19th century, has been compared to a geologic event. Cattle have been implicated in the eradication of native plants, the loss of biodiversity, the pollution of springs and streams, the erosion of stream banks, the exacerbation of floods that carry away soil, the deforestation of hardwoods, and, in the worst cases, a reduction of living soil to lifeless dust. Two centuries of grazing on the Colorado Plateau catalyzed the most severe vegetation changes in 5,400 years, one study concluded. "The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years," wrote the late environmental historian Philip Fradkin, "has done more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and subdivision developments combined."
Savory agrees that grazing as historically practiced has been disastrous. But this is only because stock growers and herdsmen have been ignorant of holistic management. "It was reductionist grazing they practiced, nothing of the holistic," he told me.
