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This means that there may be a way to change the net water balance in desert areas to enhance plant growth. One effective method is a water barrier(black plasti
by aurizon 5y ago
This means that there may be a way to change the net water balance in desert areas to enhance plant growth. One effective method is a water barrier(black plastic) with a few inches of sand to weight it down. Then every 10-15 feet you make a slope graded round are 5.7.5 feet across and make small hole(3-5 inches) in this plastic and you plant a desert tree in that hole. Next you kill all goats in the area and make them extinct in that wide area.(Goats create deserts by cropping all tree branches/leaves/roots and are felt by many to have contributed to the desertification of North Africa(and other places).
Deserts get some rain - whatever they get is directed to the graded holes and the cover limits evaporation. Drip irrigation to each tree will help it to establish.
The drop in evaporation will add to the retained water budget and tree transpired water will contribute to potential cloud formation and rain as the process is continued. One of the desert elimination projects now underway to plant tree in this area need to adopt these practices over a wide area.
https://www.greatgreenwall.org/about-great-green-wall https://www.greatgreenwall.org/about-great-green-wall
- ghostbrainalpha 5y agoSounds like Liet-Kynes plan to terraform Dune.
- dylan604 5y agoOr, we could just build giant solar farms in the desert to change its climate: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aar5629 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aar5629
- screye 5y agoOne meta question is whether this problem is worth solving at all ? There are places where forests are much easier to grow, and we are cutting them down by the thousands on a daily basis. For carbon capture, it is much easier to densify regions with already suitable conditions than trying to plant a few trees in inhospitable regions. Food is a solved problem in the modern era. High cost agriculture is unsustainable in a global market. If non-mechanized farmers in highly arable places (India) are being priced out, then what hope does harsh desert agriculture have ? Given other 'low hanging fruit' solutions, is the opportunity cost of pursuing such a solution too high ?
- andscoop 5y ago> Food is a solved problem in the modern era. Solved problem? We've hardly even identified the actual problem. As it it stands now farming is an open loop system and input supplies are becoming constrained and expensive. We have killed our soils and the dirt that is left behind requires external inputs to produce current crop numbers. In addition to this, we grow a large portion of our food in the United States in areas with active droughts and impending water shortages. Fortunately there are better ways to do things, I just don't know that we can change fast enough. To address the greater point of your comment though, I agree.
- brudgers 5y agoFor about six thousand years (at least), turning deserts and other marginal terrain into croplands is what tends to distinguish civilizations from non-civilizations: cities being a byproduct of the scale of agriculture activities water movement processes make possible. Which is not me saying it is good or bad. Just me saying ‘it is.’ With the point being it is worth deciding if there is a baby in the bath water. Or irrigation canal so to speak before deciding which moral high ground is rocky and which is silty.
- sbierwagen 5y ago>Food is a solved problem in the modern era. It's "solved" if you can produce synthetic fertilizers from fossil fuels indefinitely.
- Schroedingersat 5y agoAmmonia can be created from sunlight, water, and air. It's the really energy expensive part. Not that we should be continuing current farming practises as they're incredibly destructive in many other ways.
- aurizon 5y agoThe idea is to enlarge the arable/growth area or all those people will die or move and transfer the crowding to another area - which might then get depleted...
- 5y ago
- Melatonic 5y agoOr maybe we just need actual predators of those goats?
- lostapathy 5y agoHumans are predators too!
- Melatonic 5y agoThe problem is humans usually displace or kill the predators at the top of the food chain (since we are the top) which then allows the stuff below it to grow beyond what it should. So for example if something like a large cat was normally hunting these goats it is very possible humans would have been threatened by the presence of the cats (or been annoyed that the cats were killing domesticated animals) and then hunted those to extinction. Very common throughout human history.
- aurizon 5y agoMankind needs a top predator - who walks among them, predation occurs, and population density declines...
- discordance 5y agoI can think of a certain recent virus that fits that description