Vegan alert: Mass herds of meat animals will save the planet and reverse climate change.

Before and after pictures will stun you.
Massed herds of grazing animals moved to mimic nature will heal grasslands and stop desertification.

This is bigger than fossil fuels for climate change and the fix is cheap.
Big government not required.

Before is on the left, after is on the right less than ten years later.
In the second pair of photos, the broken branches are made by elephants that have returned.
In the third pair, the audience broke into spontaneous applause. Even with the arrow marking a hillock, you would hardly know it is the same place.

Desertifying lands

Some humid lands always bounce back but marginal land with seasonal rains turns into desert unless the plant growth is composted in time for the next season. Marginal land is all the sandy areas on the world map above.   Ten thousand years of small herd pastoral exploitation (goats, cattle and sheep) and accelerating deterioration in the last hundred years created most of these conditions.  Parklands set aside in the US and South Africa went downhill faster when cattle or elephants were removed. 

Fierce predators bunched grazers into massive herds.  Those herds chowed down the fresh growth, churned the soil, left dung and urine and litter on the ground and then moved on because the food was used or soiled for that year.  As kids we walked barefoot and know for a fact that bare ground is burning hot in July and grass is quite cool.  Multiply those little hot patches by billions and we have climate change.   Mimic the massive moving herds,  capture the seasonal rainfall, and transform the lands. Climate change is reversed and living plants and animals repopulate the land.   Fifteen million hectares have already switched to this grazing method.

The notes are abstracted from Alan Savory's TED Talk.   This is affordable hope for a cooler green world.

We used to have buffalo.