As Max Wilbert points out in an insightful story entitled, Plows and Carbon: The Timeline of Global Warming, a crucial factor that to a large extent is being overlooked in the climate debate is the importance of healthy grasslands.
Writing for the Deep Green Resistance News Service, Wilbert stresses the timeline for global warming did not begin with the onset of the industrial revolution. This is not a 200-year timeline, says Wilbert – it goes back 8,000 years to when cultures began to be based around cities and agriculture.
Wilbert says that restoring grasslands could be one of a number of strategies for survival.
He writes:
If the destruction of grasslands and forests signals the beginning of the end for the planet’s climate, some believe that the restoration of these natural communities could mean salvation.
Beyond their beauty and inherent worth, intact grasslands supply a great deal to humankind. Many pastoral cultures subsist entirely on the animal protein that is so abundant in healthy grasslands. In North America, the rangelands that once sustained more than 60 million Bison (and at least as many pronghorn antelope, along with large populations of elk, bear, deer, and many others) now support fewer than 45 million cattle – animals ill-adapted to the ecosystem, who damage their surroundings instead of contributing to them.
Healthy populations of herbivores also contribute to carbon sequestration in grassland soils by increasing nutrient recycling, a powerful effect that allows these natural communities to regulate world climate. They also encourage root growth, which sequesters more carbon in the soil.
Just as herbivores cannot survive without grass, grass cannot thrive without herbivores.
Check out the full story at Deep Green Resistance News Service.
Max Wilbert is a talented photographer with some excellent photographs available through MaxWilbert.org.
