[onoway]

Further to the "dividing Line" thread; it has been a commonplace for generations that large animals cause desertification and we cannot now afford the luxury of eating beef, e.g. as we can no longer spare the land for that purpose. Scientists have slaughtered many hundreds of thousands of large herbivores on every continent in an effort to prevent land degradation and desertification, with remarkable and noticeable lack of success.

What a surprise, turns out scientists and everyone else had it all exactly backwards, almost the ONLY (and most certainly the cheapest by far) way to prevent land degradation and promote permanent recovery is with the (proper) handling and use of large herbivores. Like any other problem it sometimes seems, human hubris has caused the problem which we then blame on anything but ourselves.

We do insist on thinking we can do a better job of managing things than the interdependent systems evolved over millions of years, and need not seriously consider them because it just makes things too complicated. It's so much easier to work on things in isolation.

It's this sort of thing which leads to a strong sense that we are possibly getting way ahead of ourselves with the Genetically Modified bandwagon. The GMO seeds which are supposed to save the world have recently been reported not only to be producing superbugs such as the pesticide resistant corn borer it was designed to thwart but is also producing superweeds which thrive quite nicely when sprayed with the poisons designed to kill them.

This as well as requiring more water to grow in an increasingly drought prone world, and being implicated in millions of tons of healthy topsoil being lost each year as well as the poisoning of water through agricultural runoff into lakes and rivers etc.

Gotta love science. And politics. And Free enterprise. Except of course neither science nor free enterprise is allowed to thrive when it conflicts with big ag or politics....

[awm]

onoway, on 2013-May-18, 19:10, said:

Scientists have slaughtered many hundreds of thousands of large herbivores on every continent in an effort to prevent land degradation and desertification, with remarkable and noticeable lack of success.

Really? This seems quite unlikely to me. Many large herbivores have been killed by hunters, or because their natural habitat has been destroyed. I can't think of any mass slaughters by "scientists."

onoway, on 2013-May-18, 19:10, said:

What a surprise, turns out scientists and everyone else had it all exactly backwards, almost the ONLY (and most certainly the cheapest by far) way to prevent land degradation and promote permanent recovery is with the (proper) handling and use of large herbivores.

Again this seems unlikely. Certainly it's true that im-proper handling and use of large herbivores can accelerate land degradation. And it may also be true that proper handling of large herbivores can prevent land degradation. However, it seems clear that crop-rotation techniques have done a lot to prevent land degradation for decades.

onoway, on 2013-May-18, 19:10, said:

It's this sort of thing which leads to a strong sense that we are possibly getting way ahead of ourselves with the Genetically Modified bandwagon. The GMO seeds which are supposed to save the world have recently been reported not only to be producing superbugs such as the pesticide resistant corn borer it was designed to thwart but is also producing superweeds which thrive quite nicely when sprayed with the poisons designed to kill them.

You seem to frequently confuse the harmless genetically modified crops with the truly nasty pesticides that they are designed to resist. I can easily believe that RoundUp is a nasty poison, and that it can contaminate even crops designed to resist it such that a person or animal eating that product later can get sick. However, this is a problem with RoundUp and not with genetically modified food. In fact virtually everything that we eat has been "genetically modified" by thousands of years of selective breeding. So-called "genetic modification" is just the use of science to accelerate this process, and has never been shown to pose any sort of health risk. I agree that it's a bit dodgy that the company selling RoundUp is the same company selling the genetically modified crops, but the fact is that they were selling RoundUp first and if farmers are going to use that noxious substance regardless the resistant crops seem to be a good idea. Obviously the way patent laws work in this area could use some revision...

onoway, on 2013-May-18, 19:10, said:

This as well as requiring more water to grow in an increasingly drought prone world, and being implicated in millions of tons of healthy topsoil being lost each year as well as the poisoning of water through agricultural runoff into lakes and rivers etc.

Seems to me that desertification and the increasingly drought-prone world has a lot more to do with the way we pollute our water (greatly slowing its natural recycling process) as well as the way we pollute our air (causing/accelerating global warming) than it does genetically modified crops (which, as far as I know, don't require more water than regular crops).

[onoway]

Hmm don't know how to configure this as well as you did, sorry about that!

awm, on 2013-May-18, 19:30, said:

Really? This seems quite unlikely to me. Many large herbivores have been killed by hunters, or because their natural habitat has been destroyed. I can't think of any mass slaughters by "scientists."

Elephants in Africa, sheep herds belonging to nomadic tribes in the middle east are just two examples of scientific culling in the interests of slowing down/stopping desertification. Unequivocal failure. They also fenced off hundreds of acres from free range in the western US

Again this seems unlikely. Certainly it's true that im-proper handling and use of large herbivores can accelerate land degradation. And it may also be true that proper handling of large herbivores can prevent land degradation. However, it seems clear that crop-rotation techniques have done a lot to prevent land degradation for decades.

While mismanaging herds can and have most certainly cause problems, preventing herbivores access to grazing land has apparently always led to further degradation and desertification. Look up what happened to the lands in the US after the animals were prevented access to it...it got worse and worse, with diversity dying out and water becoming scarcer if not disappearing altogether.

People who have managed large herds of herbivores properly have restored land abandoned as virtually sterile without doing anything else. Creeks and rivers long dry have come back into flow. Aside from projects using equally unorthodox methods such as in the Greening the Desert project with Geoff Lawton, this has ONLY happened when large herds of herbivores have been returned to the land under proper management.

Crop rotation has slowed down the degradation process as has such things as cultivating across slopes rather than up and down, but the soils are still considered to be disappearing and becoming less and less healthy. Industrial ag farmers are relying more and more on chemicals to get any crops at all.


You seem to frequently confuse the harmless genetically modified crops with the truly nasty pesticides that they are designed to resist. I can easily believe that RoundUp is a nasty poison, and that it can contaminate even crops designed to resist it such that a person or animal eating that product later can get sick. However, this is a problem with RoundUp and not with genetically modified food. In fact virtually everything that we eat has been "genetically modified" by thousands of years of selective breeding. So-called "genetic modification" is just the use of science to accelerate this process, and has never been shown to pose any sort of health risk. I agree that it's a bit dodgy that the company selling RoundUp is the same company selling the genetically modified crops, but the fact is that they were selling RoundUp first and if farmers are going to use that noxious substance regardless the resistant crops seem to be a good idea. Obviously the way patent laws work in this area could use some revision...


On another thread I posted a link to an independent study with results showing that when GM foods were tested over several months, they showed massive health impacts on experimental animals.Most GM foods have never been tested for more than 90 days and even arsenic poisoning might not demonstrate obvious results in that time unless in massive doses, but over time even miniscule doses of arsenic become increasingly problematic and end up lethal just the same.

You seem to confuse genetically modified with naturally occurring hybrids and they are entirely different. No matter how many millions of years pass, no jellyfish gene is going to find its way naturally into the DNA of a potato. Scientists have put them there now, so that farmers can tell when the crops are stressed for water as the GM potato plants fluoresce. These plants are NOT approved for food, but the genetic material has escaped and has been found in potatoes intended to be sold for food. This is just one example. Escape of experiments into the wider world has happened before with serious and irreversable consequences.

Roundup is indeed a nasty herbicide which is not at all the mild/safe chemical it has been advertised as being, so we agree on that, anyway.

Seems to me that desertification and the increasingly drought-prone world has a lot more to do with the way we pollute our water (greatly slowing its natural recycling process) as well as the way we pollute our air (causing/accelerating global warming) than it does genetically modified crops (which, as far as I know, don't require more water than regular crops).

There are several reasons and one of the biggest one is that the way land is cultivated now it cannot absorb water very well. Thus, land which is compacted from heavy machinery, semi sterilized by chemicals and prevented from having anything on it except selected crops does not absorb much of the rainfall that does happen. We are not now seeing the erosion gullies so much but the water is not reaching the aquifers, or even deep into the soil, it's simply evaporating back into the air from the bare land mandated by industrial ag. This has been demonstrated quite dramatically with side by side plots of land in Africa and elsewhere.

Thus you get land which alternates between flooding and drought. Even in North America we are beginning to see this and our agricultural lands are hundreds if not thousands of years younger in terms of usage (with few exceptions) than Asia, Africa and Europe. Australia has been battling floods and drought for a number of years in recent history.

It also leads to the poisoning of waterways by the chemical runoff, and nobody is arguing that that isn't a severe problem.

Farmers in Australia who have changed their management aren't experiencing the same problems with flooding/drought as their neighbors. Australian scientist Bill Mollinson has led the way into a much more sustainable approach to raising food crops which is rapidly being adopted there and increasingly elsewhere as well.

Combine compacted soils which don't refresh aquifers or absorb to any degree into the soil with the fact that the chemicals required to spray the GM crops (often several times a season) are highly concentrated and need to be diluted with water, often a large amount of water. This was one of the issues which led to the banning of GM crops in a large area of India after farmers were literally having to deepen or dig new wells every couple of years after switching to GM crops, and one of the issues directly arising out of GM seeds which led to a whole lot of farmer suicides there.

[FM75]

onoway, on 2013-May-18, 19:10, said:

...

We do insist on thinking we can do a better job of managing things than the interdependent systems evolved over millions of years, and need not seriously consider them because it just makes things too complicated. It's so much easier to work on things in isolation.
...
Gotta love science. And politics. And Free enterprise. Except of course neither science nor free enterprise is allowed to thrive when it conflicts with big ag or politics....

"Common Knowledge' or 'Common Sense" are motherhood and apple pie terms. If we can accept that knowledge (sense) is even close to the classical bell curve distribution (I say close because the bell curve is centered about zero, which is silly with respect to things like knowledge which can't be negative), then we should be able to accept that "accredited individuals" may be wrong as much as 20 % of the time. A passing score on many types of accreditation exams - Pilots, motor vehicle, license to sell securities, etc. is 80%.

That said, let's consider what "better job of managing things" means. The statement continues with "It's so much easier to work on things in isolation." This part is most certainly true. In fact, it is the most vexing part of trying to solve problems. We have been trained to "keep everything else constant", which works nicely in linear systems. It is exactly the "isolation" problem that can contribute to failure to solve problems that are not linear (dependent on only one independent variable). "Keeping everything else constant" has become ingrained in our (science) educational system. But most of the world is not linear. Most significant real world problems in fact have some sort of "feedback" that violates linearity and independence.

Let's return now, to the "better job of managing". What does this mean? It rolls off the tongue nicely. But it assumes that the meaning of the phrase is both obvious and incontrovertible. Here we see an example of the root cause of the difficulty of solving problems. Problems are hard to solve, primarily because it is so hard to define the problem precisely - as in this example. What makes solving problems like this so difficult is trying to find the solution, before the problem is well-formed.

""better job of managing things than the interdependent systems evolved over millions of years"...

I am not sure what the role of this phrase is. On the one hand it simply could be taken to be an unshaken (we take this on faith, so no argument can win) belief in God. If that is the nature of the quote, then there is really no useful purpose in discussing the topic further, if you are or are not of that "faith".

On the other hand if it is the "evolved over millions of years" part, then it is perfectly reasonable to question the time frame. If "millions of years" is the time frame, then the last few generations are either unimportant - and AGW is not something to worry about, or the millions of years of evolution may no longer be relevant. but only the last few generations are.

In my opinion, each is a simplification, that may not be particularly useful.

[GreenMan]

onoway, on 2013-May-18, 22:33, said:

There are several reasons and one of the biggest one is that the way land is cultivated now it cannot absorb water very well. Thus, land which is compacted from heavy machinery, semi sterilized by chemicals and prevented from having anything on it except selected crops does not absorb much of the rainfall that does happen.

This is largely a matter of till vs. no-till agricultural practices, not crops vs. cattle. There are tons of things wrong with how land is farmed today, but a lack of large ruminants is not one of them.

And you can't talk about the effects of cattle on ecosystems without recognizing that the deforestation in the Amazon is being primarily driven by ranchers burning the rainforest for pasture. There, the cattle are the reason for the ongoing devastation.

[mike777]

GreenMan, on 2013-May-18, 23:44, said:

This is largely a matter of till vs. no-till agricultural practices, not crops vs. cattle. There are tons of things wrong with how land is farmed today, but a lack of large ruminants is not one of them.

And you can't talk about the effects of cattle on ecosystems without recognizing that the deforestation in the Amazon is being primarily driven by ranchers burning the rainforest for pasture. There, the cattle are the reason for the ongoing devastation.

to be fair I will not blame the cattle but something else is going on here....

I don't know all the issues but I do wonder what about private property laws stopping deforestation?

In other words these forests are not privately owned and there are no laws that are enforced/

Please note how this is the same theme repeating itself....does someone with money real money make the decision who owns these tracts of land or does someone who does not have any I mean any money at risk make the decisions?

You must I repeat must allow for failure.

[mike777]

onoway, on 2013-May-18, 22:33, said:

Hmm don't know how to configure this as well as you did, sorry about that!

There are several reasons and one of the biggest one is that the way land is cultivated now it cannot absorb water very well. Thus, land which is compacted from heavy machinery, semi sterilized by chemicals and prevented from having anything on it except selected crops does not absorb much of the rainfall that does happen. We are not now seeing the erosion gullies so much but the water is not reaching the aquifers, or even deep into the soil, it's simply evaporating back into the air from the bare land mandated by industrial ag. This has been demonstrated quite dramatically with side by side plots of land in Africa and elsewhere.

Thus you get land which alternates between flooding and drought. Even in North America we are beginning to see this and our agricultural lands are hundreds if not thousands of years younger in terms of usage (with few exceptions) than Asia, Africa and Europe. Australia has been battling floods and drought for a number of years in recent history.

It also leads to the poisoning of waterways by the chemical runoff, and nobody is arguing that that isn't a severe problem.

the problem in India is govt laws that prevent local farmers from selling directly to stores and govt stopping refrig....storage. in other words the problem is govt.

Farmers in Australia who have changed their management aren't experiencing the same problems with flooding/drought as their neighbors. Australian scientist Bill Mollinson has led the way into a much more sustainable approach to raising food crops which is rapidly being adopted there and increasingly elsewhere as well.

Combine compacted soils which don't refresh aquifers or absorb to any degree into the soil with the fact that the chemicals required to spray the GM crops (often several times a season) are highly concentrated and need to be diluted with water, often a large amount of water. This was one of the issues which led to the banning of GM crops in a large area of India after farmers were literally having to deepen or dig new wells every couple of years after switching to GM crops, and one of the issues directly arising out of GM seeds which led to a whole lot of farmer suicides there.

the problem in India is govt laws that prevent local farmers from selling directly to stores and govt stopping refrig....storage. in other words the problem is govt.

again it is people without real money at risk who make these decisions...not the farmers and the local store owners....the same theme.

You must again must allow for failure.

[Winstonm]

mike777, on 2013-May-19, 01:45, said:

to be fair I will not blame the cattle but something else is going on here....

I don't know all the issues but I do wonder what about private property laws stopping deforestation?

In other words these forests are not privately owned and there are no laws that are enforced/

Please note how this is the same theme repeating itself....does someone with money real money make the decision who owns these tracts of land or does someone who does not have any I mean any money at risk make the decisions?

You must I repeat must allow for failure.

Or, to put your views another way, does an elitist determine ownership or does democracy prevail?

[blackshoe]

Winstonm, on 2013-May-19, 07:36, said:

Or, to put your views another way, does an elitist determine ownership or does democracy prevail?

Hm. So, in your view, if a man buys a piece of property with his own money, his neighbors get to take it away from him by vote? Yeah, that's fair. It's certainly democratic.

[blackshoe]

onoway, on 2013-May-18, 22:33, said:

Australian scientist Bill Mollinson has led the way into a much more sustainable approach to raising food crops which is rapidly being adopted there and increasingly elsewhere as well.

This can't be right. He's one of them evil scientists!

FM75, on 2013-May-18, 22:54, said:

(I say close because the bell curve is centered about zero, which is silly with respect to things like knowledge which can't be negative)

I take your point, but I don't think a bell curve is necessarily centered about zero. It depends, I think, on what you're measuring.

"It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so." - Will Rogers

[hrothgar]

blackshoe, on 2013-May-19, 08:25, said:

Hm. So, in your view, if a man buys a piece of property with his own money, his neighbors get to take it away from him by vote? Yeah, that's fair. It's certainly democratic.

It's called eminent domain here in the US.
(In England, they call it "compulsory purchase")

Admitted, this isn't done by plebiscite, but the but the basic principle holds true.

I'm not aware of any countries that don't have such regulations on the books...

[blackshoe]

Eminent domain arose from the feudal idea that all land belongs to the king. We don't have a king.

The fact that "everybody does it" doesn't make it right.

[hrothgar]

blackshoe, on 2013-May-19, 08:35, said:

Eminent domain arose from the feudal idea that all land belongs to the king. We don't have a king.

I think that you are confusing the root of the word with the underlying concept.
Eminent domains dates back at least as far as ancient Greece and Rome.
I'd be shocked if there aren't earlier examples in China, Egypt, Babylon ...

This all predates feudalism by millenia.

Quote

The fact that "everybody does it" doesn't make it right.

I couldn't care less what you think is "right" or "wrong".

You have a set of beliefs that are antithetical with living in a civilized society.
I suspect that the only thing that keeps out of of jail is that you don't believe in them strongly enough to act upon them.

[onoway]

blackshoe, on 2013-May-19, 08:35, said:

Eminent domain arose from the feudal idea that all land belongs to the king. We don't have a king.

The fact that "everybody does it" doesn't make it right.

There are all sorts of laws everywhere that determine what someone can do with his/her land, from community associations saying that everyone has to have the same types of flowers (or none) in the front yard or only certain colours of paint are allowed on the house, right up to the government deciding it wants to widen the road (or make a new one right through your living room).

In Canada at least, and I can't imagine it's much different anywhere else, if some resource company decides it wants to access the oil or whatever it thinks might be under your land, unless you own the mineral rights, and very few people do because governments figured out pretty early that this was in effect a good way to sell land twice, the outfit that buys those mineral rights is entitled to move equipment needed to look for and/or develop them onto the land. Most companies try as a matter of good community relations to negotiate something with the landowners but when push comes to shove the owners can't stop them. Basically what a landowner "owns" is a few inches of topsoil and even use of that is restricted and controlled.

The US may not have a king but try telling the Cherokee that land ownership means anything at all if someone with more influence wants the land. Or the people now who are trying to stop fracking from happening in their area, or trying to stop a pipeline from crossing their land.

To be fair, all of this often comes as an unpleasant shock to new property owners who grew up thinking "a man's home is his castle" .

[onoway]

mike777, on 2013-May-19, 01:49, said:

the problem in India is govt laws that prevent local farmers from selling directly to stores and govt stopping refrig....storage. in other words the problem is govt.

again it is people without real money at risk who make these decisions...not the farmers and the local store owners....the same theme.

You must again must allow for failure.

NO it is NOT. Please remember that farmers are forced to sell their crops back to the seed company, they cannot sell it directly to the consumer by agreement with the seed company. It was that the farmers had no money to dig new wells and what they had managed to grow had not provided sufficient income to buy the chemicals and seed and fertilizers etc as well. These were farmers who were experienced, and new wells every two years were something they had no reason to expect would be needed. So they were going bankrupt and losing land that had been farmed with some success by their families for generations, land lost because they had believed big ag was going to give them more prosperity. They had nothing TO sell to stores or anyone else and had in effect lost their ability to provide for their families.

Anyone who has farmed for more than 3 months knows about allowing for failure. We prop up unsustainable systems of farming which will eventually fail with government subsidies and insurance programs and all sorts of other financial wizardry paid for by taxpayer dollars. It's only delaying the inevitable and will end up costing more and more as the soil breaks down and/or is lost. The cost of food in the store is only a fraction of what you are really paying for it.

How long do you think food will stay 'cheap" when only 4 companies control the world's seed and fertilizer supplies as well as the buyers markets? Especially when countries are now subscribing to making laws which restrict the sales and growing out of seed to approved, government certified varieties, not only of big commodity grains but even the veggies you can grow in your garden? Seeds which rely on fossil fuels?

[onoway]

GreenMan, on 2013-May-18, 23:44, said:

This is largely a matter of till vs. no-till agricultural practices, not crops vs. cattle. There are tons of things wrong with how land is farmed today, but a lack of large ruminants is not one of them.

And you can't talk about the effects of cattle on ecosystems without recognizing that the deforestation in the Amazon is being primarily driven by ranchers burning the rainforest for pasture. There, the cattle are the reason for the ongoing devastation.

Just one study, which found typical results:
In conclusion, we found that all of the characteristics of the nitrate reducer community (size, structure, and activity) were affected by the tillage system. While the use of direct seeding is more sustainable because it improves the soil nutrient status and allows farmers to cut costs and save time and fuel, we showed, along with previous studies, that it also can favor N losses. In the highlands of Madagascar, nitrate reduction activity was stimulated by combined organic and mineral fertilization but not by organic fertilization alone.

If you want the study I can give you the link.

Nitrate fertilizers are generally manufactured from petrochemicals, to wit, natural gas.They did not look at what running properly managed herds of herbivores would do. It isn't just the manure which is important, that's the simplistic way of looking at it.

Aside from that, there's a whole lot of land which cannot be utilized very well in any other way except by herbivores. Land which is abundantly supplied with rock for example, or which is steeply sloped. The latter can sometimes be terraced but that's both highly expensive to establish and generally fairly labour intensive as terraces in such places don't easilly lend themselves to mechanical management.

Secondly, look at land which has simply been left without cultivation or herbivore access. It has become less and less diverse in plant matter and eventually has become pretty much desert. Before we started to indulge in modern ag practices the great plains of the US and Canada had millions of herbivores wandering around and the soil was rich and abundant to a depth of meters. Now it is getting shallower every year, in spite of such things as zero till ..which is for sure better, but basically appears to be just a slower way of reaching the same place.

You cannot blame cattle for the greed and ignorance of man. The Amazon is also being cleared for lumber, are you going to blame the trees for being valuable as timber? Some of the best water in the world has been contaminated by mine tailings in south America. Are you going to blame the minerals for destroying the water? It's an absurd argument.

[Elianna]

onoway, on 2013-May-18, 22:33, said:

Elephants in Africa, sheep herds belonging to nomadic tribes in the middle east are just two examples of scientific culling in the interests of slowing down/stopping desertification.

I know I shouldn't engage, but sources please.

Both that these were motivated by "science", and that it was done in the interests of slowing down/stopping desertification.

[blackshoe]

onoway, on 2013-May-19, 10:04, said:

There are all sorts of laws everywhere that determine what someone can do with his/her land, from community associations saying that everyone has to have the same types of flowers (or none) in the front yard or only certain colours of paint are allowed on the house, right up to the government deciding it wants to widen the road (or make a new one right through your living room).

In Canada at least, and I can't imagine it's much different anywhere else, if some resource company decides it wants to access the oil or whatever it thinks might be under your land, unless you own the mineral rights, and very few people do because governments figured out pretty early that this was in effect a good way to sell land twice, the outfit that buys those mineral rights is entitled to move equipment needed to look for and/or develop them onto the land. Most companies try as a matter of good community relations to negotiate something with the landowners but when push comes to shove the owners can't stop them. Basically what a landowner "owns" is a few inches of topsoil and even use of that is restricted and controlled.

The US may not have a king but try telling the Cherokee that land ownership means anything at all if someone with more influence wants the land. Or the people now who are trying to stop fracking from happening in their area, or trying to stop a pipeline from crossing their land.

To be fair, all of this often comes as an unpleasant shock to new property owners who grew up thinking "a man's home is his castle" .

I'm well aware of how things truly are, although I would say that you're conflating community associations and governments — they're not the same thing. One could argue that when a government is created, the two are very similar - people voluntarily (for the most part) agree to "the rules". But later, one can get out of a community association (just sell your property), but trying to "opt out" of government is likely to get you shot, or jailed, unless you emigrate. That's a much bigger decision than "should I sell my house?"

What European immigrants did to those already occupying the Americas was morally wrong, and most of us today know it. But we can't go back in time and change what was — and if we could, we might not like whatever result the law of unintended consequences would produce.

As for eminent domain, and separate "mineral rights", I say get rid of both. You want the mineral rights, you buy the whole package, and once you buy the whole package, nobody can take it away from you (legally — there's always force).

[hrothgar]

blackshoe, on 2013-May-19, 14:02, said:

As for eminent domain, and separate "mineral rights", I say get rid of both. You want the mineral rights, you buy the whole package, and once you buy the whole package, nobody can take it away from you (legally — there's always force).

Why would you restrict someone's right to purchase land but not the corresponding mineral rights?
Nothing is preventing people from doing that right now.

They choose not to. They are unwilling to pay the price necessary to secure complete right's to their land. (More, generally, if you accept Coase's Theorem, the fact that this isn't available as a product shows that there isn't demand for this bundle)

FWIW, I always find it highly amusing to see how you justify increased regulations as a cry for freedom
(Your objection to to regulations around fractional reserve banking being the classic example)

And the end of they day you don't favor freedom, just the idiosyncratic set of regulations you want to impose.

[onoway]

Elianna, on 2013-May-19, 13:45, said:

I know I shouldn't engage, but sources please.

Both that these were motivated by "science", and that it was done in the interests of slowing down/stopping desertification.

Allan Savory, when he was involved with developing National Parks in Africa, his research supported by other scientists, was reluctantly responsible for culling over 20,000 elephants with the avowed aim of preventing further degradation/desertification of the land. Kruger National Park followed with the same culling of animals, for the same purpose and with the same result. Desertification got worse instead of better and led to his determination to understand what was going on, which eventually led to his developing techniques now beginning to gain traction in a number of countries.

If you want to hear his talk at Tufts it's here http://permaculturen...n-needs-videos/ or you can google a shorter version at his TED talk this spring. If you have the time, the longer talk fills in many of the gaps. In the longer talk he references some of the other instances, but culling animals to prevent stressing the land is a long and until now at least, "accepted" procedure.