Allan Savory on Desertification

Wildlife Biologist, Allan Savory, explains the connection between climate change and desertification.

Transcript: Climate change and desertification are feeding on one another now, and you’re hearing often said that climate change is causing desertification. No, it’s the other way around. Agriculture, in its full—crop production and the non crop production parts of it: forestry, fisheries, wildlife, etc. because agriculture is the production of food and fiber of the world’s land—that is causing climate change just as much as fossil fuels, I believe, maybe even more. And it’s more dangerous because even when we find the alternatives to fossil fuels, it will continue. So what’s happening is this sort of feedback loop where desertification, agricultural damage of soils, is leading to climate change and then climate change is feeding back and making that worse. But we’ll only break it by dealing with the agricultural problem.