Book: Ground Breaking – Soil Security and Climate Change
Practical solutions for agricultural management, enabling the restoration of landscape, climate and community. Zero carbon emissions alone won’t stop global warming. Agricultural land use is turning the world’s breadbaskets into deserts. But the depleted soil that feeds us all today might yet save our civilisation.
In Western Australia, the rabbit-proof fence presents the world’s largest study of contrasting land management within the same vast region. The ‘Bunny Fence Experiment’ is strong evidence that clearing and cropping is a major reason rainfall dropped by 20% in the Wheat Belt between 1976 and 2002, and continues to drop. Ground Breaking explains how modern farming methods deplete the soil and influence our climate: exporting heat waves, dust, and fire south-eastward in Eastern Australia and north-westward in Western America.
It presents solutions too: managing land use to reduce bare ground, restore the small water cycle and sequester carbon in the soil
Posted on 14 Sep 2023
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 savior for our civilisations.
Ground Breaking has the solutions too: manage land use, sequester carbon in soil, reduce bare ground and increase bush corridors.
Available from: 4 Sept 2023
Author(s): Philip Mulvey & Freya Mulvey
ISBN-13: 978 1875 7035 62