Reclaiming Africa's deserts using.... bacteria?

[Eclipse Now]

Hi all,

what do people make of this bacteria-desert wall plan for African' deserts?

 

Inhabitat Generating Giant Sandstone Walls to Fight Desertification

 

 

The bacteria plan seems to concentrate on limiting the movements of vast amounts of sand using bacteria to create a sand-wall?

 

 

 

This is their solar city plan... something our last Australian of the year and global warming Author Tim Flannery also seems pretty keen on. (He writes about an Australian inland city called "Geothermia" using our hot rock geothermal and solar thermal energy to power an inland greened desert city).

Inhabitat Sahara Forest Project Converts Desert into Oasis

 

If we can't reclaim African deserts, what chance do we have of Terraforming Mars?

[Essay]

If we can't reclaim African deserts, what chance do we have of Terraforming Mars?

Excellent point!

===

 

I like this idea of using bacteria to speed up the formation of sandstone. Sort of like generating more glomalin!

 

Sequestering CO2 would be another nice side benefit of this process, which they don't mention in the article. It would help counteract all the CO2 we release from using cement.

Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment

...and we'd be using less cement too!

 

I think sandstone is between 10-20% cement, so that would be 10-20% CO2 (by weight of sandstone) sequestered.

 

This idea adds a lot of clarity to part of my fuzzy vision of the future.

Thanks!

~SA

[Eclipse Now]

Well, combining this sand-wall to protect our solar-city from drift, combine the EU's idea of buying solar power from Africa to fund the thing, combine HVDC power lines that only lose 3% per 1000km, and combine the seawater greenhouses, solar thermal desal and other ideas for "greening the desert" with local BIOCHAR sequestration agriculture right smack bang in the middle of the desert, and we have an answer NOT ONLY for powering the EU from renewable power, but economic security for Africa and a new Urban and agricultural heartland for the world, not to mention an enormous Co2 sequestration point!

 

(Woah, that was all one sentence but I was brainstorming and it all sort of oozed out in a "wibbly wobbly" way at once.)

[Moontanman]

So.... suddenly changing the environment in huge areas is a good thing? Many people thought it was a great when they drained all that worthless swamp land to get nice farm land and places to build houses and cities but it came back to bite them none the less. Changing deserts is no less human hubris than the clearing of rain forests or draining of swamps.

[Eclipse Now]

Pfffft, except for the little detail that WE created the vast majority of these deserts through the activities you mention.

 

I of course am all for the protection of biodiversity, and that in many instances means protecting the integrity of the ecosystem that biodiversity lives in. Show me where I said we'd convert ALL the desert into 'Geothermia' and you might have a case. But I for one am convinced there is stacks of damage we HAVE done to the planet that this can help undo, and stacks of damage that we ARE STILL doing (burning coal) that this 'solar city' can undo.

 

The planet as a whole is still losing far too many trees each year, far more than a replaced by farming. That trend MUST be reversed!

[Moontanman]

We did not create the Sahara desert and any wholesale climate or ecological change should be viewed with extreme caution if at all. Back when it was cool to drain swamps or cut forests for new land the argument was always because we knew what was better.

[Eclipse Now]

We did not create the Sahara desert and any wholesale climate or ecological change should be viewed with extreme caution if at all.

We did not create the Sahara, but we certainly added to it's area!

In the vast east-to-west swath of semiarid Africa between the Sahara Desert and the forested regions to the south lies the Sahel, a region where farming and herding overlap. In countries stretching from Senegal and Mauritania in the west to Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia in the east, the demands of growing human and livestock numbers are converting more and more land into desert.

 

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, is losing 351,000 hectares of rangeland and cropland to desertification each year. While Nigeria’s human population was growing from 33 million in 1950 to 132 million in 2005, a fourfold expansion, its livestock population grew from roughly 6 million to 66 million, an 11-fold increase. With the forage needs of Nigeria’s 15 million cattle and 51 million sheep and goats exceeding the sustainable yield of the country’s grasslands, the northern part of the country is slowly turning to desert. If Nigeria continues toward 258 million people as projected by 2050, the deterioration will only accelerate.

Earth Policy Institute Book Bytes - Countries Losing War with Advancing Deserts

 

Or try this...

There are similar concerns about the expanding Sahara on the southern edge of the desert as well. President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria has proposed planting a Great Green Wall of trees, a band five kilometers wide stretching 7,000 kilometers across Africa, in an effort to halt the desert’s advance. Senegal, which is on the western end of this proposed wall and is losing 50,000 hectares of productive land each year, strongly supports the idea. No one knows how long this project would take, but Senegalese environment minister Modou Fada Diagne observes, “Poverty and desertification create a vicious cycle.… Instead of waiting for the desert to come to us, we need to attack it.”

https://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Seg/PB2ch08_ss3.htm

 

 

If we don't take drastic action soon the way Africa is going it will only be able to feed one quarter of its people by 2025.

 

Africa may be able to feed only 25% of its population by 2025

Dated fossil pollen indicates that today's Sahara desert has been changing between desert and fertile savanna. Studies also show that prehistorically the advance and retreat of deserts tracked yearly rainfall, whereas a pattern of increasing amounts of desert began with human-driven activities of overgrazing and deforestation.

 

A chief difference of prehistoric versus present desertification is the much greater rate of desertification than in prehistoric and geologic time scales, due to anthropogenic influences.

Desertification - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Check this out... that's Nouakchott, the Capital of Mauritania.

 

Back when it was cool to drain swamps or cut forests for new land the argument was always because we knew what was better.

 

Forests: What tosh! It was because we thought the world was so big nothing we could do would EVER use up all those forests. There were "no limits to growth". It was because of poverty and needing wood to fire cooking stoves, and not having nice electric or gas cookers. It was because of war and refugees and poverty and expanding populations that the vast majority of forests were cut down, at least until certain countries found other energy sources and were able to let the local forests regrow.

 

As for swamplands, yes, there may have been some wetlands that we thought we knew what was best. (New Orleans, etc). However, ecologists are starting to understand integrated systems far more effectively.

 

One system that we'd have to investigate is the dust storms that blow off Africa feed nutrients into our oceans. If we increased local humidity too much, would some of our oceans lack the nutrients they need to thrive, affecting the fish population? Tough call, because the way the world currently needs fish protein most fisheries are in collapse anyway. If we could feed most African's from their own land, including maybe some inland fish farming and integrated 2nd generation ethanol / aquaculture waste processing / vegetable farming / energy solutions, then we'd feed more Africans, reduce poverty, reduce deforestation that you've mentioned a few times AND reduce global warming.

 

 

Do you not like Africans or something? What have you got against them converting some of the hundreds of thousands of hectares of desertification they've lost each and every year for decades back to usable land?

[Eclipse Now]

What happened?

[maikeru]

Masanobu Fukuoka - Greening The Desert

 

Fukuoka Masanobu's ideas for reclaiming deserts. Old article but useful insights, I think. Don't take him for a simpleton, even if he speaks very simply. ;)

[carlton-temple]

Does anybody know what happened to the plan to recreate the inland sea in the Libyan Sahara with water channelled into it via the Mediterranean? Money I suppose. If I remember rightly technically there were no great problems and the depression where the "sea" would form is practically devoid of inhabitants. Surely restoring this ancient sea would "dampen" potential sand drifting and storms plus re-kick starting vegetation over a vast area. I think the climatologists had a lot of negative things to say about the plan. Without getting the maps out rising sea levels will probably re flood the area anyway sooner or later.