Soil Security and Climate Change
Practical solutions for agricultural management, enabling the restoration of landscape, climate and community.
Reaching zero emissions alone won’t stop the Earth heating up.
There’s another factor at play, even bigger than rising greenhouse gas levels: agricultural land use, and it is turning the world’s bread baskets into deserts.
In south west Western Australia, the ‘Bunny Fence Experiment’, the world’s largest study of two contrasting land uses in the same vast region, showed strong evidence that clearing and cropping was the reason why rainfall over the Wheat Belt has dropped 20 per cent in the lifetime of some of us.
This book tells of how what farmers do exports heat waves, dust and fire, south and south-eastward in Eastern Australia and north and north-westward in Western America.
You’d be forgiven for thinking there ought to be a law against it, but our lawmakers don’t even acknowledge that under the air and the plants, there is anything but bedrock. Soil, the depleted carbon sink that still manages to feed us today, might as well be a vacuum in law, but it could be a saviour for our civilisations.
Ground Breaking has the solutions too: manage land use, sequester carbon in soil, reduce bare ground and increase bush corridors.
Key Learnings:
Ground Breaking aims to broaden the discussion around what remains the most pressing problem of our time: what is causing climate change?
Rapid Solution is possible, but it requires a whole–of–government approach.
New planning systems need to be introduced and funded, like town planning, but rural planning instead. It has been done once before when addressing the problem of acid sulfate soil.
Sequestering carbon together with other practices restores soil security and increases the small water cycle.
Thereby decreasing the impact of climate change both by removing GHGs from the air and by reducing the heat from the land.
GHGs are not the only cause...and may not even be the main cause.
The root problem is heat, not greenhouse gases (GHG). In Ground Breaking we explore how heat regulates the Earth’s temperature, of which greenhouse gases are but one, albeit important, component.
Anthropogenic Climate Change is happening.
It is very apparent when measured by temperature, precipitation, extreme events, major fires and stream flow that anthropogenic climate change is occurring and started to accelerate from about the 1920s, well before world wide average temperature changes were detected.
Anthropogenic climate change is undeniably happening, but are we addressing the wrong problem?
Climate change is a grave issue affecting us all and collectively we can do better – we must break new ground.