For our civilization that never collapsed we are traveling to Japan, the year is 1603 and a series of wars has resulted in the seizure of power by the military dictatorship of the Tokugawa Shogunate. This period of Japanese history known as the Edo period would last all the way to 1867. The Edo era was a period of peace, and prosperity with the Japanese population explosively expanding. The irony of this peace is that it put pressure on Japanese forests. during the first 50 years of the Edo period competition between regional Daimyo (feudal lords) to show their status and wealth put pressure on the timber industry so they could build bigger and more elaborate castles and manors. The feudal lord system in this era of Japan also created considerable incentive for regional Daimyo to harvest their timber. This was a very effective practice for increasing short term revenues, because the timber could be sold for a hefty profit, and then cleared land could be farmed for increased tax revenue from the peasants. These short sighted land management practices came to a head in Great Fire of Meireki in 1657, after hurricane force winds and drought created a recipe for disaster. 65% of the city of Edo was burned and over 100,000 lives were lost. It seems that perhaps, 50 years of greedy land management had started to break down the Japanese forest biotic pump. This is usually the point at which a civilization doubles down on their short sighted land management and keeps deforesting in order to make up losses from the disasters created from that same deforestation. However, for the Tokugawa Shogunate, this was not the case. Perhaps it was the nature based Shinto belief system or the foresight of some wise leaders, The Shogunate implemented a robust series of forestry laws.
first restrictions on clearing forest were put in place. In order to make up for the lack of expansion in agricultural lands, they decided to implement multiple technologies in order to get more out the land they were currently farming. They implemented a series of double cropping growing multiple crops at different times of year on the same pieces of land. they brought machines and systems to make farming more efficient. They started utilizing fertilizer to restore fertility to rice fields each season. Guidebooks were published in order to spread these new agricultural techniques throughout feudal Japan.
A policy of selective logging was implemented so that Forest could be sustainably harvested without destabilizing the entire system with clearcutting. In addition, the Shogunate frequently spied on the the Daimyo’s in order to make sure they were not cheating the strict system against clearcutting and logging. By the late 1600’s, an extensive sets of incentives promoting reforestation were implemented encouraging the land owners to plant huge tracts of pine, fir and juniper. While some of these tracts were harvested for timber, the area remained an intact forest because of the world’s first selective logging regulations. Japan seems to have narrowly avoided the deforestation feedback loop that lead other civilizations beneath the sands.
In the Modern era, as fossil fuels deplete and industrial nations collapse under their own weight it will be a matter of when, not if, people will be thrown back to depend on the land and what it can grow and feed once again. If we are to avoid the trap of destroying our own “biotic pumps” in a desperate bid to feed a massive population, how can we restore forest, ecosystems and biotic pumps in the modern era. Of course we need to conserve the remnants of forest which survive thousands of years of human activity. But can we restore what was once lost? Lets go to the extreme, can we take degraded useless land and restore it into a vibrant lush paradise compared to what it once was? Skeptics have assumed since it took thousands of years for forest and ecosystems to develop that it would take thousands of years to re-establish them. Examples from around the world show that we can restore forest with a little bit of “terraforming” from mankind in timescales as short as a decade. Lets travel the world to find out what some of the incredible feats of terraforming different nations and people have accomplished.
We travel to the current Juggernaut of economic power in the modern world, China. Not only has China seen dozens of civilizations and dynasties sink beneath the deserts, but as home to huge populations for thousands of years they have put immense pressure on their lands. The Loess Plateau, an area the size of France, northwest of Beijing, for an example of the greatest terraforming project ever conducted. The loess plateau is a heavily degraded landscape, without plant root structure to hold the hillsides together rains have dug out deep gullies eroding hillsides(above).
In the 1970’s this region was one of the poorest regions of China. With farmers having no hope of making a living they migrated to east coast cities driving one of the most massive migration patterns in modern history. Together with international experts and the Chinese government, heavily influenced by the massive sandstorms that impacted Beijing, the Chinese government sought terraform this entire region. The first step to healing the damage in the Loess Plateau was to stop the erosion. The first rule of terraforming for environmental restoration is to slow the rate at which water moves across the land. The slower the water moves, the less soil and earth it carries with it, the lower the rate of erosion. Once erosion is brought down below a threshold, planting can begin so that vegetation can stabilize these hillsides and areas with their root structure. The first thing the Chinese government did was to start terracing hillsides, this is a very old but important technology for stabilizing hillsides against erosion.
Thousands of locals using both hand tools and heavy equipment started the daunting task of terracing hillsides in an area the size of France. Once these hillsides were terraced during the dry parts of the year, then they were planted with multiple shrubs, grasses and types of trees. When the rains came the newly stabilized hillsides were able to keep and absorb the water to drive plant growth rather than have the rain run off in a flashflood of mudslides. As a result these dry terraced hillsides are thriving.
Once established the hillsides were able to provide multiple food crops and silviculture including apple trees. This allowed the locals to start thriving after the terrible poverty of the 1970’s. Today the results of this projects are nothing short of incredible, and should be emulated and envied by all nations of the world.
All the water that falls on the Loess Plateau ends up in the Yellow River. One of the biggest obstacles to development for China were huge untamable rivers which would change course as sediment would build up, causing flooding that could kill and displace millions. With places like the Loess Plateau being transformed and stabilized, the result is billions of tons of mud and sediment no longer pouring into the yellow river, making it cleaner and more predictable. With a predictable stable river comes the possibility of hydroelectric dams, and bountiful energy and prosperity for the entire river basin. One thing to understand with the Loess Plateau project is that it had nothing to do with the biotic pump. This project stabilized the area by allowing the water that did end up in this drainage basin to be stored and utilized by the ecosystem and people there. This terraforming project solved the issue of storage of water, but did not focus on the flow of atmospheric moisture. If the Loess plateau could be connected to the Pacific Ocean by areas of continuous forest, then it is a possible a new rainforest along with new weather patterns could be born. Today China receives up to 80% of its water across the boreal forest biotic pump of Russia with moisture originating in the Artic and North Atlantic.
Okay, Okay, so incredible restoration projects are possible if you have a super powerful government and a ton of money. What is one person to do about any of this? One person you say? For our next story we will travel to Burkina Faso for the story of a single human being who stopped the Desert. Burkina Faso is in the Sahel Region of Africa South of the Sahara where inhospitable desert can shift 100 miles south in a single bad dry season. This is an area on the edge of hell, with people who sit on the desperate knifes edge of starvation at the whim of the nature.
I want to introduce you to a very wise man, an illiterate farmer from West Africa, Yacouba Sawadogo, known worldwide for the documentary “The Man Who Stopped the Desert.”
Most people who live on the edges of the Sahel, move south when their land dries up and gives out. The millions of people who live there are caught in a desperate cycle of destroying vegetation for cooking fuel just to survive. this is an apocalyptic feedback loop where the advancing desert creates desperation, and desperation destroys vegetation advancing the desert, most people try to migrate away from this cycle of death and suffering. Yacouba Sawadogo, tried a different approach. He closely observed the natural cycles of the land, the way the water in particular would either run off or evaporate. Everything Yacouba Sawadogo did was to try and keep the very little water the fell on his farm and in the soil. His community thought he was crazy at first, he dug out bowls of earth on his farm over and over every day. Then he started filling those bowls with any sort of organic material he could find, ash, twigs, leaves, branches, even manure. The manure and wood litter attracted termites who would tunnel into the soil creating areas for water to hide and allowing oxygen to flow through the living soil. Planting different trees in these wholes with this method has allowed his farm to turn into a 62 acre forest visible from satellite. It is known as the Forest of Wisdom and Sawadogo’s methods have spread like wildfire in the area with water tables rising as much as 16 ft to 60 ft in some areas from people utilizing these Zai holes.
So if one man against the desert can perform miracles and help save his community, by working with nature and not against it, then anything is possible. I spend a lot of time talking about the calamities that await humanity if we remain ignorant of the the biological systems we depend on. Many times science goes through revolutionary phases where technology isn’t realized to its full potential until decades after the fact. They say science advances one funeral at a time. With the study of the principles of ecology, hydrology and groundbreaking discoveries like the biotic pump I think we are about to enter the golden age of Terraforming and nature-like technologies. We can use the technology encoded in the DNA of biology to live with ecosystems rather than fight against them. Forest can become more than a resource on a logging companies balance sheets and become an advanced technology, a biological pipeline key for sustaining water to a region. In theory, if we could terraform an area into a rainforest, providing for a stable flow of water, we could plan hydroelectric dams to sustain advanced civilization far into a future devoid of fossil fuels. But that’s enough speculation, I want to hammer home the power of ecology to transform a landscape better than any industrial project could ever dream of.
Our next wise man we visit comes from Himanchal Pradesh on the edge of the Himilayan Mountain range in Northern India. Mr. A.D. Negi was a Bureaucrat who retired to experiment in the cold desert in the foothills. The government had decided this land was unsuitable for agriculture and marginal for even grazing. Mr. Negi not only implemented methods to allow productive agriculture but grew a 62 hectare forest by all by himself.
We have a desert in China, Burkina Faso, and Northern India becoming forest with a little help and terraforming from one man or millions. But you might say these areas weren’t true deserts like the kind we imagine in Saudi Arabia for instance. Speak of the devil, lets check out the Al Baydha project.
The Al Baydha project started on the red sea coast in Saudi Arabia in 2009 as a pilot project to prove Saudi desert could be restored. This is a place that AVERAGES out to around 3 inches of rainfall per year, meaning some years it may not rain at all. They sought to terraform the landscape with rock terraces and small check damns, driving the water runoff into swale lines. in this way they would maximize the water stored along the landscape, 90% of which runs off into the red sea. In addition they limited grazing from camels and goats so that the area could become established. Multiple years with no rain saw local Saudi’s pressing the project leaders to bring in water trucks or irrigation afraid the date palms, grasses and trees would die. However, leaders of the project knew that if the project could not handle a few years without rain then the project would unsustainable anyway, and the design was flawed so they stood the course. After 7 years of persistence Al Baydha started to bear fruit. It really is remarkable what the project was able to accomplish, in some earth driest terrain. I believe that peoples and governments around the world suffer not from a lack of resources, but a lack of imagination.
These permaculture and desert restoration are impressive no doubt. They expertly use simple and sometimes ancient techniques to restore degraded land by methods which catch and store the little rainfall that does make it onto land. Yet they have barely begun to scratch the surface. Unfortunately, these projects have not sought to restore the biotic pump working their way from the coast to the mountains. For our last example we travel to New Zealand to see the example of how simply changing the way we view a simple weed can restore a forest almost entirely without human intervention.
We travel to New Zealand’s Banks Peninsula, to Hinewai reserve. Hugh Wilson was a curious man who grew up in the farming community of the Banks Peninsula. In Banks, farmers grew standard European crops using traditional modern agricultural methods. Long rows of crops with tractors and fertilizers, and of course chemical herbicides to destroy pesky weeds, in this case Gorse.
Farmers in the Banks Peninsula considered Gorse to be a curse word, a pest of upmost contempt. Mr. Wilson saw something very different in this spikey shrub, potential. So when Mr. Wilson along with a helpful benefactor bought up a large tract of land, they decided to let gorse take over the land, which made the farmers quite angry. They called Hugh crazy, reckless and claimed letting this pest grow wild all over the land would be a threat to their livelihoods. Mr. Wilson had studied the ecology of the land for many decades. In the process of ecological succession, a fast growing aggressive species spreads and takes over the landscape, allowing a foothold for slower growing keystone species like trees to grow. In this case the Gorse was a nitrogen fixer, which restored fertility to the soil and was a ground cover keeping the rocky hillsides from eroding and drying out. Under the 10ft high cover of the gorse, native tree species started to germinate in the soil kept moist out of the rays of baking sun. Eventually the native trees broke through the canopy of the Gorse eventually throwing so much shade that the gorse died out. Over the decades Hinewai preserve was transformed from shrubby hillsides to native forest peppered with ferns and other species. As the native trees grew the water table became deeper and water filled streams started to run through Hinewai all year long. With the trees returning so did the bird which spread the area with native plants and trees through their droppings. After a few decades Mr. Wilson had an incredible hiking destination complete with more waterfalls than he could count.
Interesting how the farmer’s contempt for a pesky weed they could barely control would have them turn Banks into the dry barely farmable land it was becoming. what if they could have utilized this ecological succession process to restore steady water flow in order to keep the land sustainable and productive.
This bias and contempt against nature rather than working with it, is pervasive in todays world of making quick cash and turning a profit at the expense of everything we hold dear. In the next installment we are going to take a quick look at the faith in progress and our preconceived notions at what constitutes “technology.” Join me next time in The Red Sun Rises: The Hersey of Progress.