Africa is building a Great Green Wall to prevent expansion of the Sahara (opens in new tab)

First saw this a few years ago.

Permaculture - from forest to farm | Clea Chandmal

https://youtu.be/KI3haUOkP-I?si=v_z8xCOKzwLO-May

IMO this is one of the most succint and clear explanations of why permaculture is so important - because it tries to mimic nature, which has had (m|b)illions more years to evolve and create much more intelligent and efficient growth, energy conversion, creation and destruction processes than we stupid and arrogant humans have had in the few tens of thousands of years (at most) that we have been doing agriculture, or should I say, monoculture or even better, stupidiculture.

Looks like Millison is with Oregon State University

https://workspace.oregonstate.edu/osu-permaculture-design

> It seems like this idea relies on a long term low wage workforce willing to live on subsistence agriculture.

I think that is already the population. What the attempt seems to be is to create a green belt that prevents further desertification of semi-arable land that they are already subsistence farming on, because if the desert keeps moving, these people will cease to exist.

Captialistically/economically, there is questions as to whether these people should continue to subsistence farm, but if they want to, and it can help keep the desert at bay, then I say more power to them.

I believe the intent is that the local climate and soil will be sufficiently altered that no laborious long-term upkeep is needed. So its not rewilding per se, but its also not purely agricultural project and parts of green wall afaik are completely non-agricultural. That also highlights the fact that the implementations of green wall projects have been very varied, there is no single formula that is applied everywhere.

But yes, it is ambitious project and there indeed are lot of questions on both short-term feasibility and long-term outlook. As is natural for a project of this kind, the financial aspect is especially messy.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/07/africa-g...

Senegal has one of the worlds highest fertility rates. They have a surplus of labour, and slowing desertification is a way of improving their ability to both subsist and grow their economy until they can drive wages up.

Note how the video points out how it is causing more people to have reasons to stay in villages that's otherwise get depleted of young people. If that continues, it will have a significant long term benefit for the growth of Senegals economy.

Land improvement is the easiest value creation. Turning unusable desert land into arable land creates huge long lasting benefits. The land has huge value increase. If the people doing the work are deeded the land, they become well off. They are incentivized to maintain the land.

Some of the trenches are there to solely produce biomass. They don’t don’t go into it in the video but it hints to me that they are trying to change the soil.

Now the ground is hard dirt and water runs off. The half moons capture water and makes it possible to grow a tree.

Roots will loosen the soil, and combined with biomass from the bushes in the trenches you can imagine there’s a path towards changing the composition to something more arable in the traditional sense.

To me it sounds like the editable crops are a carrot to keep the locals working toward a much longer term goal.

>It seems like this idea relies on a long term low wage workforce willing to live on subsistence agriculture.

It's a labour intensive, make work program that accepts the reality that there's going to be 100s of millions to billions of Africans who will be stuck in subsistence agriculture for the rest of their lives. You can incrementally improve new workforce over time as society develops, but people who get left behind generally get left behind. Ultimately, their labour is cheap, and need something to do. Maybe you can replace 1000 workers with a piece of specialized heavy machinery that's cheaper, but then you'll have 999 idle hands.

   >> there is a LOT of manual human labor

same reaction. someone bring power shovel diggers.

Also it should be combined with the other Great Green Wall projects, the most successful being "just plant trees" to shade the crops and keep the area cool and humid.

There is no particular reason to expect Africa to do better in the near future. Russia and Iran are making large plays and helping dictators kick out the western supported governments (which were already corrupt, but making small strides to less corruption). I see no hope for most of Africa to do better. (note that I said most - There are 54 countries in Africa - several of them are doing very well - I hope this trend continues and spreads)

edit: looking closer, it looks like this might be in one of the few countries that might actually do better. Though that also helps as people who are doing better have time to invest in this. time will tell.

> It seems like this idea relies on a long term low wage workforce willing to live on subsistence agriculture.

There are some who are content with low wages and a simple life of living off the land. Shouldn't technology make this even easier, buy making low cost education available to their kids and making more affordable healthcare possible?

>Fascinating video, but still it worries me how sustainable this is.

What was shown in the video looks like a "mickey mouse" operation, akin to a local tree planting effort to combat climate change. For this to make any difference you can't have people digging "half-moons" at a rate of 1 person/1 half-moon/1 day - that does not scale in any meaningful way. You need to do this kind of project at an industrial scale, with large amounts of heavy machinery and thousands of skilled professional workers - especially since they are discussing creating a "Green Wall" across thousands of kilometers at a width of hundreds of kilometers.

#TeamTrees: Africa Edition. Sustainable isn't concerned when emotional, idealistic hype push math, reality, and science aside. Fix the climate first with extreme net negative carbon capture and sequestration. Then we can fix the soil with large herds of herbivores stomping grassland and improving fertility.

They could perhaps send there criminals, prisoners.. this kind of people.. have them man the green wall.

Universities all over the world are asking that question - and have been for centuries. They have come up with some great answers over time. It takes years for farmers to learn - agriculture (like science) advances on the death of old people who continue their unsustainable practices to the grave - but things are overall much better than the past and getting better.

Yeah there's a lot of that even in the first Dune book. The Fremen's leader is an ecologist and they're explicitly collecting water and preparing to change the entire world to be greener and more livable.

The linked channel has a lot of good videos it, and Mossy Earth is another. They aren't going to make you an expert by any means, but they provide good introductions to various projects that are underway doing ecological restoration. They're nice introductions to the topic.

Very cool to see he's using prickly pear cactus. I'm currently working on a project for regreening arid regions in California using prickly pear on degraded water-restricted former agricultural fields. The prickly pear really is optimally suited for regenerating desert landscapes because they are one of nature's great survivors of extreme conditions. Furthermore, they can produce impressive biomass yields which helps drive significant amounts of carbon underground which helps to structure the soil and feed the soil microbiome / establish mycorrhizal networks for other plants to be subsidized with. Plus all parts of the prickly pear cactus are edible, the fruits are delicious (great at reducing LDL cholesterol too). They are prickly as a mfer tho, my goodness, watch your hands! Plus in the America's they are native and so have natural biological controls in these ecosystems that help prevent unwanted runaway growth. Lots to love about prickly pear!

Also a Geoff Lawton video called something like greening the desert.

A lot of his stuff (including that desert video) can be found here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39472378

I hate to be negative, I do, but Shaun Overton is a fool. He's wasting an enormous amount of money, energy, and time to achieve approximately nothing when he could do so much more if he expended those resources on a non-idiotic project. It's his time and money to waste, but it hurts to see it when he could really do a lot of good with it instead. His heart's in the right place.

Magical thinking. It ain't gonna happen.

What?

Lol

You didn't watch the video, clearly. They're incredibly simple projects that help permanently convert land from desert to arable. They're not dependent upon the outside for anything except directions, as the only tools needed are what the people already have, a pickaxe and shovel. Once started it can continue on with nothing but locals who want to take more land back from the desert.

Nomads, landmines, buzzwords, you're just looking for edge cases where this fails, and that's not helpful. If it works for 80% of the land they look at, that's mre than good enough.

> I abhor these projects, because they are seasonal- as in dependent on outside funds and thus hyper-fragile. Also usually propped up by colonizers, to detract from some ressource extraction destruction.

It depends on the institutional experience of each country. There's a reason this initiative is being done in Senegal instead of neighboring Mali.

WFP funding is fairly consistent and less whimsical ime. It's private donors like the Gates Foundation that tend to be flaky, as they only answer to the whims of the Gates family.

Programs like the WFP, WB, IMF, ADB, USAID, etc need to be auditable as significant amounts of public and private money are invested, leading to demands from multiple donors, compared to family foundations or smaller non-profits.

> How does it prevent building up resentment, when obviously a green landscape is more important to the foreigners, then the starving locals? > How does it solve the hard problem of exponential mankind vs civilizational allmende protection? > How do the plants survive in the climate change storms yet to come?

I plan on using this set of questions next time my girlfriend says we should do something I don't want to do.

> I abhor these projects...

Jeesh.

I dunno, maybe watch the video and get your answers from the people who literally answers them in the video? They're not "planting trees", they're basically just running the normal progression of how sand forests develop at a faster, but still slow enough to take years, rate. Nothing particularly "it'll never work" or "it won't survive" about that.