Sltldr: “They’re just throwing away money, planting trees in the desert for them to die.”
The Great Green Wall is a top down, big government intervention that has little to no local buy-in and isn’t sustainable without continued big government funding.
Not surprisingly, the funding has mostly dried up, and so has the land.
There are some youtube creators who frequently cover the great green wall, like Andrew Millison. I’ve noticed that lately the videos seem to cover the failures more. You need tons of local buy-in to make anything work.
One problem is that in many places, they have a culture of herding animals, and if nobody is there to stop them, they see these areas growing grasses and saplings, and what do you think they’re going to do? Of course they send their animals in to graze and end up destroying all progress.
Part of the original reason for desertification is because humans are always actively killing everything green.
To make any progress against migratory grazing wild animals and herders, they need to create systems especially with them in mind, so that they have somewhere they can graze without causing great harm, and they need locals to enforce it.
That being said, they’ve spent tens of billions on this problem, and although the article is pessimistic, the truth is that you can’t give up just because it’s harder than expected. Even the article estimated something like 10% success iirc. It’s not impossible, and failure will be devastating in the long term. If you believe in protecting the environment, then you have to keep spending and learning through failures until you succeed.
If it was easy to fix, we’d have already fixed it.
The other issue is that not all climates are suitable for growing trees (at least with current methods and technology). Yes, human efforts can shift things a bit more in the forest direction in marginal cases but if there is no rain there will be no trees in the long term. And, unfortunately, due to carbon emissions, most of the earth is getting less suitable for trees, not more.
Some of this greening the desert stuff relies on optimism that flies in the face of basic ecology.
I mean, it’s true that not all climates are suitable for growing trees, but the Sahel area’s climate is historically suitable for growing trees, and according to again some videos I recently watched, there are actually still trees in those areas, but they look like bushes because they’ve been cut down or pruned poorly. A lot of them can be repaired just through careful pruning.
In some areas I’m sure this is true. But remember that we’re are no longer living in the historical climate. Marginally suitable for trees in the past may mean no longer suitable today. And even more so with another few decades of warming.
Smaller projects would be better to start with so we can establish what works and where. That’s why these mega-projects usually fail.
But by the same token, what is unsuitable for trees today doesn’t have to be unsuitable a decade from now. Plant growth affects the climate. Retaining moisture, stabilizing day-night temperatures, retaining topsoil, changing surface albedo, triggering cloud formation, etc.
Ideally a mega-project is thousands of small projects being attempted at once in a way that is useful even if only a fraction of them work. Those 10% of places that worked could be used as a jumping off point for further efforts in the region, and in all cases people learned valuable agriculture skills they can take with them for the rest of their lives.
You’re making a good point. This is one of the reasons why flood and fire insurance is skyrocketing. Our historical models are no longer able to accurately predict future risk.
Not the main point at all of this article, but: “The price tag was also massive: the United Nations estimated that $33 billion would be needed to complete the Wall.” Still less than the US spent on the Iran War in less than a month.
America is always complaining about being broke but always finds the money for war.
They’re like a drug addict, always broke but somehow finding the money anyway.
Musk can cover that with some shit from his pocket. Do it and send him an invoice
This is Africa’s green wall.
Eighteen years later, vast amounts of money have been spent, yet most of the planned Wall remains no more green than Abdi Guelleh’s barren field. What began as one of the world’s most ambitious ecological undertakings has in many ways devolved into a cautionary tale of poorly planned projects, lacking in local participation and entangled in a labyrinth of opaque financing.
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> “alt tl;dr”
> proceeds to say nothing in the actual article that doesn’t mention executive salaries or China
Tankies really love to just say shit, don’t they?
You can read about it here (open-access) if you don’t want to listen to someone make shit up about an article and instead read about the good things China’s initiative is doing.
Edit: Answering marxismtomorrow’s very serious and not-at-all-ableist question below: I’m autistic. This is devastating to my case, and I formally retract all the arguments I’ve made here in light of this grievous oversight on my part.
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Reminding people that this method DOES IN FACT WORK, when the article heavily suggests it is the method, not the people performing the method, that is the problem seems valuable to me.
Oh, so you just don’t know or care what a “TL;DR” is. Very cool. (It’s a summary, by the way.) Above, I’ve provided an open-access article highlighting the accomplishments (I’m not saying that snarkily like in scare quotes) of China’s GGW initiative.
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Alternative summary feels intentionally misleading, when it’s clear your intention was not to summarise but start a discussion on a related tangent (which is appreciated).
…Yes, I provided an alternative summary.
Oh, yeah, I remember the time someone provided a summary of Tom Sawyer, and when I thought it was lacking, I gave an “alternative summary” which was a crappy, nakedly biased opinion of elements not even in the book and mostly focused on how Huckleberry Finn is a way better character in his book. That’s how summaries work.
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If you don’t understand direct on topic comparisons just say so.
Do I need to point you to an actual definition of a “summary”? I’ve been chalking it up to tankie bad-faith, but at this point, I’m wondering if it’s just aggressive tankie stupidity.
“With the additional information?” Okay, I’m back to assuming bad-faith over illiteracy. Motherfucker, 1) that’s outside the boundaries of a summary, and more importantly 2) none of what you said is in the article. Like that’s not a summary. That’s not even an analysis. A “TL;DR” isn’t “here’s my shitty opinion on this topic not at all explored in the article.”
