Reversing Global Warming while Meeting Human Needs: An Urgently Needed Land-Based Option

Friday, January 25, 2013

2:00 – 4:00 PM, ASEAN Auditorium

The Fletcher School, 160 Packard Avenue, Medford, MA

Reception to follow

RSVP at http://allansavory.eventbrite.com

Allan Savory, Rancher and Restoration Ecologist, Founder of the Savory Institute and originator of the Holistic Management approach to restoring grasslands, winner of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award, and finalist in the Virgin Earth Challenge

Presented by CIERP’s Agriculture, Forests, and Biodiversity Program with the Friedman School’s Agriculture, Food, and Environment Program and Planet-TECH Associates

Free and open to the public. Convened by the Agriculture, Forests, and Biodiversity Program of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Fletcher;

the Agriculture, Food, and Environment Program of Tufts’ Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy; and Planet-TECH Associates.

First in a Series of “Creating the Future We Want” Events.

While  governments  posture and  dither, a pragmatic  practitioner and intellectual entrepreneur, Allan Savory,has been developing and demonstrating a powerful technique that can reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere immediately while reversing desertification and providing livelihoods and food for millions of people. His applied research based in Zimbabwe on the restoration of grasslands  has  now  been  replicated  on millions  of  acres worldwide. The application of his methods has the potential to significantly reduce atmospheric carbon through an increase in plant growth and soil formation. This process begins immediately and involves no new technologies, only a shift to the Holistic Management practices for livestock that he has pioneered. Major organizations and institutions are now recognizing his work, but climate scientists and governments have yet to incorporate it into their analyses and policy prescriptions.

Seth Itzkan, one of the organizers of this event, spent time in Zimbabwe with Allan Savory and his team in the Fall of 2011.  He has compiled a series of videos on his visit at http://www.youtube.com/playlis…

One of the things which appeals to me about Allan Savory’s work is that his methods make a place for pastoralists among the “bottom billion,” giving them an opportunity to improve their own lives while improving the land and the environment and the climate for us all.  More and more I believe that the solutions to climate change, the solutions to a predatory economic and social system must start by thinking about and working with the poorest first.  Let the relatively rich folks in the USA and the EU fend for themselves.  Start concentrating on the people who live on a dollar or two a day.  After all, if Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina taught us anything, it should be that even the wealthiest of us can find ourselves in emergency housing and situations in which paper money is useless at a moment’s notice.  

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