Thirsty for the past

To honour the battle against desertification and drought, commemorated on this day every year, Tamsin Harper stops to consider their impact and explains how the reintroduction of our long-lost residents can reverse their effects.

Much of the poverty and famine we face today are a result of the choices we have made in the past. As much as I would love to resolve these issues and see a few Mammoths along the way, we can’t go back in time. However, Beavers and huge herds of cattle could be the time machine we have been looking for.

Desertification is a fancy way of describing the conversion of perfectly good land into desert. While I am all for a good trip to the beach or a marvel at the Sahara, the desertification of land needed to grow crops or just land that has any vegetation at all is a bleak prospect. On desertifying land very little grows, the soil becomes hard and unfertile and in the absence of vegetation the water cycle becomes confused and droughts ensue.

All life on Earth has an insatiable thirst for that sweet nectar of life, water, without which we could not perform even the simplest of tasks. Many of us living in developed cities will never have experienced that moment your kitchen tap runs dry, but in those areas experiencing droughts, it is an ever-reoccurring reality. Across the world, our water comes from natural underground wells called aquifers which are replenished as rainwater soaks into the soil. However, the combination of dry hardened soil caused by desertification and low rainfall can lead to the slow draining of these resources.

You may think that desertification can only occur in dry arid countries, but even those nations that experience periods of heavy rainfall are seeing the effects of desertification. How can this be? Plants act as a major driving force in the absorption of water into soil and they pull water down into the earth to meet their own needs. Without vegetation, land with excessive areas of bear ground become compact like concrete. Heavy rainfall then has two outcomes.

A.) The water sits on top of the hardened soil in the sun and evaporates back into the atmosphere without absorbing and replenishing aquifers.

B.) The water washes over the land building speed until it forms cascading floods.

Many countries are already experiencing the aftermath of desertification, such as, limited drinking water and infertile land which lead to poverty and open the doorway for crime as a result. These issues may seem like a far-off nightmare, but Allan Savory, a Zimbabwean ecologist, estimates that 2/3 of the Earth’s land is desertifying. This means that desertification and the loss of plant life in these areas could be just as responsible for climate change as the use of fossil fuels due to the loss of carbon stored in vegetation. Furthermore, in the UK our water table is steadily decreasing, meaning our aquifers are emptying. This can be attributed to climate change providing us with the fabulously hot summers, that dry out our soils until they crack and splinter, and the increasingly wet winters that wash over our land and flood towns. Desertification may not be too far off for us either.

As always, there is a solution! The reintroduction of old residents and management practices could be our best hope.

One of these solutions is the use of holistic cattle management put forward by Allan Savory in 2013. It involves the use of huge cattle herds that are allowed to graze and trample land before being rotated to neighbouring areas. This may seem counter-intuitive as cattle and overgrazing are often what spring to mind when we think of the destruction of land. Contrastingly, this may be our soil’s saviour. Long ago, cattle moved in huge herds, trampling and grazing land. After long, grasslands would be covered in the excrement of these cattle and apparently even cattle have standards. This forced herds to continuously move in cycles to new clean grasslands. This natural phenomenon meant that the grasslands were not only fertilized but flattened, speeding up vegetation decay in colder seasons, a process that is essential to the future regrowth of the land.

Currently our cattle farmers either hold livestock in battery farms or allow them to graze in small groups with very little rotation. This has led to the overgrazing of land followed by its desertification. If we were to implement the holistic method using it as a proxy for herds of the past, we could once again make desertified land fertile, remove carbon from our atmosphere and all while feeding the world's populations. This method has already been proven to work in Zimbabwe, Mexico and South Africa. Allan Savory believes that if we implemented this method on just half of the grasslands affected by desertification; we could remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to return us to pre-industrial levels!

The final solution I will talk about is the power of reintroduction programmes and the magic of beavers.

Within the UK we experience more and more flooding every winter and yet our water table is decreasing. This reduces the water available for farming and domestic use whilst floods damage towns and wash away fertile soil from farmland. The reintroduction of Beavers has already begun in the south-west but could these big hairy mammals be the medicine our land needs? The answer is a resounding yes!

Beavers create dams across rivers using tree branches and mud. These messy but effective dams slow the movement of water through these rivers and more often than not, cause the minor flooding of the land behind them. This creates structures called beaver ponds which hold water long enough for it to absorb into the soil and down into aquifers. Not only does this slowing of water replenish our water supplies and moisten our soils but it prevents future floods from occurring. This one fluffy engineer could prevent the decimation of towns and farmland, whilst making land more fertile and helping to regulate the water cycle.

Much of our planet is drying out despite increases in floods. As populations grow the fertile land and water available to us declines, but not for long. Scientific research is finding ways to resolve the issues of the present with methods from the past, and while time machines don’t exist, we may yet glimpse a wilder time before industrialisation.

There are plenty of ways that we can help rewild nations and aid the reintroduction of lost species, many of which once played a vital role in the maintenance of our world. So why not support reintroduction programmes like the Cornwall Beaver Project and Rewilding Europe or simply keep an open mind when hearing plans for the return of these charismatic creatures in the future.

I for one look forward to a wilder future!