I propose that humanity take on a hundred-year project to turn the Sahara into an Amazon. It is human destiny to “have dominion over the earth”, not in the sense of strip-mining the planet, but of creating an ecology even richer, even more diverse and abundant than the natural one that we found. We can do this with one part engineering and nine parts wise stewardship, making small interventions that have ripple effects on the future.
There is some evidence that Native Americans knew how to do it. The reason that the European explorers found in the Americas a fertile paradise is not that the land was inhabited by hunter-gatherers, too backward to have invented monoculture; rather, the American natives had traditional knowledge about managing ecosystems for enriched natural populations of deer and bison and fruit trees, medicinal herbs and fungi, tree nuts and tubers. These grew in self-sustaining ecosystems, with no need of pesticides or fertilizers. They used fire and selective plantings. They asked from help from their gods. We can speculate that they knew which trees grow best together, and how to seed robust forests that would be regenerative and self-sustaining.
The Sahara as we know it — the world’s largest, deadest land area — is only 6,000 years old. Before the Younger Dryas, (12,000 years), the Saraha had forests as well as savannah. It doesn’t take much to tip the scale.
Trees use water but they don’t use it up; they cycle and recycle. Forests cause rain to condense from the sky, and they evaporate water to nourish the next forest downwind. This is a positive feedback loop, a self-reinforcing process. Trees bring rain. Rain nourishes tree growth. Desertification is a downward spiral, and re-greening is an upward spiral along the same exponential pathway. Modest interventions can change a system from spiraling up to spiraling down, and this has been man’s role too often in the past. Modest interventions can re-launch an upward spiral from dry to wet, from brown to green, from sand to topsoil, from desert to jungle.
There is an unacknowledged program of weather/climate modification ongoing on our planet. Because it is secret, it is difficult to know what the purveyors of this technology are up to, or what are their goals. But from what we see, it seems that the technology is not being used to create abundant ecotopias, but rather to destroy productivity. Probably, the technology was developed for the purpose of waging weather warfare, and those who control it seem to persist in that mindset. But, of course, there is far more potential for benefit than for harm in this technology, and the benefit would transcend the kinds of goals that pit humanity against nature. Weather modification can be deployed on a large scale as part of a program of ecological restoration and enrichment. Robust ecosystems are self-reinforcing. Life grows. Our role is only to trigger the natural processes that lead to explosions of new life.
Charles Eisenstein inspired me to think that humans were made for some higher destiny than to be apex predators on a dying planet. Combining the Seventh Generation ethos of Chief Seattle with 21st century Western science and international cooperation on the scale of multinational nonprofits, we could paint the Sahara green.
Brilliantly written; an intriguing topic an outstanding visual image to ponder; and passionately, thoughtfully expressed. Reading it to the last word, I was wanting more. Enjoy and follow Eisenstein, a bonus at the end. You’ are a very talented writer; I’m looking forward to exploring your archives and to new postings. I just joined Substack and haven’t even had time to made a profile. I plan to go through thousands of contacts in my phone to reach out to certain people, with an invitation to connect to me. In addition to writing; I want to make some videos as well. Sometime soon I will become a paid subscriber. Happy snowy weekend brr ⛄️❄️