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> Here are the facts ... California is naturally combustible. One thing that bothers me about many write ups about nature is there often is this fallacy that r
by maerF0x0 5y ago
> Here are the facts ... California is naturally combustible.
One thing that bothers me about many write ups about nature is there often is this fallacy that returning to what was is the most ethical course of action. Why not take more radical action and aim to make California less dry?
Projects like Greening the Desert[1], Allan Savory on reversing desertification etc. suggest we could actually just create a non dry tinder California that wouldn't need either controlled burns nor megafires. In short the game is making the land retain far more water and allowing it accumulate until the region is entirely revitalized.
[1]: https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/ https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/
[2]: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertification_and_reverse_climate_change https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertif...
- richk449 5y agoEvery time I hear these types of comments, I think that someone read the first Dune book, but not the rest of the series. In this case, it’s a bit too on the nose.
- maerF0x0 5y agoI have been meaning to read those books. I have not read the first one either though. It's just the logic doesn't work out for me. Just because something was doesn't mean something ought. So why is that seemingly always the presumed right path to pursue. Why do we always look to just make nature static to what it was 100s or 1000s of years ago?
- joe_the_user 5y agoI don't think you understand the link you're sharing or the article. Undoing desertification restores a pre-existing ecology. All we have in California is a fire-based ecology, there's nothing else to restore. Some part of California are desert but these aren't the parts that are burning, what's burning is poorly managed woodlands that actually need more open space.
- pas 5y agoAllan Savory is at best a very stubborn misleading self-deluded crackpot. His ideas simply don't pan out. He shows his fancy power point slides over and over and sells his snakeoil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory#Praise_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory#Praise_and_critic...
- maerF0x0 5y agoHuh, i read what you linked and it's mixed. I'm not trying to imply he's right about climate change, but more about ecosystem change (rebuild soil, retain water)
- pas 5y agoThe important part is that he claims that holistic grazing helps to make land (and thus the whole regional ecosystem) amazingly productive, but this simply fails to replicate. It's bad science, but it unsurprisingly refuses to die, because people like steak, a lot of people had enough of them damn' treehuggers, some people just see the nice pictures cow dung on the African grasslands, and intuitively feel that it "makes sense". (I felt too years ago.) And it does, but the attached grandiose claims don't. I was in a bit of a hurry, but now with one more search I found one of my older comments about the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19797102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19797102