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Africa is building a Great Green Wall to prevent expansion of the Sahara

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Re: Africa is building a Great Green Wall to prevent expansion of the Sahara

#61

Post by sparrowInHand »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #14
sparrowInHand wrote: post #7

I abhor these projects, because they are seasonal- as in dependent on outside funds and thus hyper-fragile. Also usually propped up by colonizers, to detract from some ressource extraction destruction. Same with wildlife preserves. One bad coup with corrupt politicians, one recession in the west - and its all gone, poached and ruins. Its worthless feel good photo OP, monetary potemkin zoos and forrests, providing the…

I dunno, maybe watch the video and get your answers from the people who literally answers them in the video? They're not "planting trees", they're basically just running the normal progression of how sand forests develop at a faster, but still slow enough to take years, rate. Nothing particularly "it'll never work" or "it won't survive" about that.

Its literally in the video, the scenery they drive by - goats and goat deforrested landscape.. but hey, ignore reality

Re: Africa is building a Great Green Wall to prevent expansion of the Sahara

#63

Post by nickserv »

macspoofing wrote: post #13
legitster wrote: post #4

Fascinating video, but still it worries me how sustainable this is. This isn't a "rewilding" process - there is a LOT of manual human labor going into supporting very low yield agriculture. It seems like this idea relies on a long term low wage workforce willing to live on subsistence agriculture.

>Fascinating video, but still it worries me how sustainable this is. What was shown in the video looks like a "mickey mouse" operation, akin to a local tree planting effort to combat climate change. For this to make any difference you can't have people digging "half-moons" at a rate of 1 person/1 half-moon/1 day - that does not scale in any meaningful way. You need to do this kind of project at an industrial scale, w…

The idea here is to do things in a sustainable way for the local population. What you're describing is the exact opposite.

Re: Africa is building a Great Green Wall to prevent expansion of the Sahara

#64

Post by bluGill »

krmboya wrote: post #57
bluGill wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These people right now don't have good options. Get them enough food locally and they no longer need to chase all over trying to find enough work to afford food. In turn that means they can send their kids to school and those now educated kids can in turn apply modern things. Some of that is those kids - the ones who don't love farming - leave to better jobs in the city, while others - those who love farming - apply…

Can you expound a bit on sustainability of modern farming techniques? It has always been my understanding that modern farming is reliant on a large industrial outlay and global trade for things like fertiliser and pesticides. And that it also affects the soil in a way that is hard or impossible to reverse (extraction of certain nutrients that cannot be easily replenished naturally)

This is a very complex question.

Traditional farming is not sustainable because they don't have pesticides and so once in a while your whole crop is destroyed and your whole village starves to death. Some traditional practices slowly destroy the soil over time.

Fertilizers like nitrogen (one of the largest fertilizer uses) are needed for the best yields, but modern farming creates enough as on farm to be sustainable without the addition at lower yield levels.

However when a crop leaves the field it takes away some things like sulfur, potassium, and that needs to be replaced for the next crop. I'm considering this a failure of modern transport to bring those back and not modern farming - but this should feel like a meaningless distinction.

When I say modern farming is sustainable I mean that modern farming is building up soil over the decades. While we need to replace anything actually removed with the crop, the soil is getting better year after year.

Re: Africa is building a Great Green Wall to prevent expansion of the Sahara

#65

Post by macspoofing »

bluGill wrote: post #32
autoexec wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't have people digging "half-moons" at a rate of 1 person/1 half-moon/1 day - that does not scale in any meaningful way. It'll get harder to maintain that pace as heat increases too. There'll be fewer and fewer hours that people can work outside. Rising temperatures will bring more heat-related illnesses and injuries. Considering the amount of ground they want to cover bringing in machinery to speed things u…

You don't need to dig them constantly. In a few years your village has enough, and now you just need to maintain them which takes less time and so can be done in the cooler parts of the day. And these green places will be cooler than the desert so even in the heat of the day the whole is cooler. Of course as the village population grows you send the "young men" out to the edge and have them dig a few more half-moons…

If you want to treat this as a nice community project, akin to a community garden - great! Just don't think that this makes ANY difference on the macro scale of solving the encroachment of the Sahara, in the same way that a set of community garden initiatives would not solve, in any way, the problem of feeding a huge urban population. For both those things, you need things done at a massive industrial scale. If you want to feed a largely urbanized population of 350 million, you need industrial-scale agriculture, backed by a massive transport and distribution network. If you want to hold back the Sahara by creating a green wall spanning thousands of kilometres, and hundreds of kilometres deep, that is likewise a massive industrial undertaking.

>Of course as the village population grows you send the "young men" out to the edge and have them dig a few more half-moons at a rate of one/day.

Uh huh - because that's what young men want to do, dig ditches for no wage or subsistence-level wage.

What's going to happen is those who can, will simply leave.

Re: Africa is building a Great Green Wall to prevent expansion of the Sahara

#66

Post by bluGill »

macspoofing wrote: post #65
bluGill wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to dig them constantly. In a few years your village has enough, and now you just need to maintain them which takes less time and so can be done in the cooler parts of the day. And these green places will be cooler than the desert so even in the heat of the day the whole is cooler. Of course as the village population grows you send the "young men" out to the edge and have them dig a few more half-moons…

If you want to treat this as a nice community project, akin to a community garden - great! Just don't think that this makes ANY difference on the macro scale of solving the encroachment of the Sahara, in the same way that a set of community garden initiatives would not solve, in any way, the problem of feeding a huge urban population. For both those things, you need things done at a massive industrial scale. If you w…

Africa has a large population living on subsistence level wages. The large number of people scales very well right now.

> because that's what young men want to do, dig ditches for no wage or subsistence-level wage.

It is an investment - see that bare desert over there, work off energy by digging it. Then when they "grow up" they discover that bare desert is their land to farm and their time was really a good investment in their future and gives them a good remainder of their life, and their kids a chance for an even better life.

Those who can will leave (unless they love farming), but today the majority don't have any better place to go. Stay in the village at the edge of the desert and dig in these green places means a better life than going to the city and trying to find a jobs (remember these people don't have skills in demand in the city either, other than their ability to dig ditches in the city, at least in the desert they can take ownership of the land they make better and have a farm.)

Ideally in 50 years Africa will improve conditions and industrial scale farming will take over, sending 98% of the people (there decedents) to a city where they work not as basic labor but as skilled labor (doctors, engineers...). However they are not in this position now and this looks like a step on the path to getting there.

Re: Africa is building a Great Green Wall to prevent expansion of the Sahara

#68

Post by dumbomon »

silverquiet wrote: post #21
macspoofing wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Fascinating video, but still it worries me how sustainable this is. What was shown in the video looks like a "mickey mouse" operation, akin to a local tree planting effort to combat climate change. For this to make any difference you can't have people digging "half-moons" at a rate of 1 person/1 half-moon/1 day - that does not scale in any meaningful way. You need to do this kind of project at an industrial scale, w…

If the Titanic is going down, it's going down, but if rearranging the deck chairs gives you something to do to relieve the anxiety, then I guess you might as well (my life may resemble this particular metaphor). I read William Langewiesche's travelogue where he crossed the Sahara overland after being a pilot who flew over for a few years. He said that the locals are rather fatalistic about living in such a massive an…

Wait is there direct correlation between emissions and the expansion of the Sahara? My understanding was it started forming way before the European Industrial Revolution (any literature on topic would be awesome)

Re: Africa is building a Great Green Wall to prevent expansion of the Sahara

#70

Post by dumbomon »

sparrowInHand wrote: post #61
TheRealPomax wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, maybe watch the video and get your answers from the people who literally answers them in the video? They're not "planting trees", they're basically just running the normal progression of how sand forests develop at a faster, but still slow enough to take years, rate. Nothing particularly "it'll never work" or "it won't survive" about that.

Its literally in the video, the scenery they drive by - goats and goat deforrested landscape.. but hey, ignore reality

The goats are the stars in this thread
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