Outback Resilience: Australia's Ancient Solutions to Modern Desertification | SLICE EARTH | FULL DOC 

They should take advice of Alan Savoy from the Savoy Institute in S Africa. He rehabilitated hundreds of thousands of hectares that the government had deemed irredeemable. He proved it works time and time again. He used sheep, but cattle, goats, camels and other livestock can be used too. The basic concept is you graze the animals elsewhere, or you feed them on site, then you lock them up tight together at night for about two weeks, until the ground is saturated and slick with muck. Then you move over and repeat. You don't return to those lands to graze until it has sprouted and gone to seed, basically a season. He showed 52% improvement in one year. The lands he improved remained green while all the land around his died, they both received the same amount of rainfall which was minimum. Seasonal streams became permanent, wells were recharged. The results can't be denied, he repeated them over and over again. Australia should try this, start on the edges of the desert and move inward. Use the animals' dung and urine. It's the natural way and it never fails. Ask the farmers to help out with providing muck if they can't get their animals over there. Cover the ground with about 4-6 inches of muck, it's enough to start growth and sequester fresh water, allowing life to begin to grow. Australia also floods a lot. That water could be channeled to dry areas thrrough a series of canals and percolation ponds. If Australia wanted to totem this desert green they would. They know how, it's not even new science. They choose not to, for whatever reason, probably to blame climate change. I'm not sure who decided that climate should never change but it always has. Im not sure mother nature cares about what they say. None of the remedies are expensive or complex logistically. They're quite simple.

The 1st mistake they did is chop down the trees!

You could take almost everything that has been said in the documentary and apply it, directly, to West Texas here in the northern Chihuahuan desert. No doubt one could say the same thing about vast stretches of Africa, Central and South America, and many others.

I stopped at 3:52 to say the original inhabitants also burned the forest so they could hunt better leaving the eucalyptus tree the dominant tree which thrives on burn and regeneration, other deciduous plants didn’t return to some areas but the eucalyptus causes the fires when it’s hot because their leaves give off a haze of flammable gas when super hot.

It’s relevant to note that Australia has always been a desert country. Idiot colonists made it sooo much worse. FYI: first fleeter on one side and indigenous on the other side. 7 generations. Primarily pastoralists who had very bad farming practices. Our family property is heritage listed and has had no stock on it since 1962. The land has finally recovered.

Unfortunately when profit and greed prevail, our environment suffers. About 30 years ago I saw the result of trees being taken out of the soil (in an area that still had much vegetation and sources of free water). There were trees all around the New England area suffering from 'die back.' They were dying from the roots up. Trees and even small shrubs help to keep the land intact and flourishing (and also helps to stop landslides). Once you remove this vegetation, the salt table (which should be way down in the layers of soil) starts moving it's way to the top of the soil. This is what causes those big cracks in the ground. Furthermore, when it does eventually rain, that rain just goes straight through those cracks and the rest slides off the top, so even rain is repelled. On top of this, we have to contend with water in rivers being siphoned off upstream. There needs to be a better way to share the water as it flows from the upper parts of Australia right down to the south. Of course, there's degradation of the land from mining. They advertise that they'll replenish the land when they're done but we've not seen anywhere the amount that needs to be done compared to what has been ruined. Look at the coal seam gas invasion. Are the doing anything to replenish what is taken? Or is the land above going to be too unstable to be used for buildings and the like? Is the land above subject to collapsing? Added to this, there are farmers in the local areas where this mining takes place who are starting to see unusual illnesses in those who live near these sites. When are these 'profit and greed' types going to admit to harming the environment and the people who live nearby? So, to the solutions? * Regrow shrubs and trees around each section of your crops. Better still, plan your crops AROUND existing vegetation. *Add more CARBON into the soil. (Look up 'carbon farming' and 'natural sequence farming' on YT to find some excellent explanations.) *For the home gardener, make sure you start a compost bin and regularly add ready compost to your lawns, pot plants and gardens. There are loads of councils in Australia who will subsidise the cost of a compost bin and some councils give away bags of compost several times per year. *Look into the laws governing the flow of rivers, then start petitioning your national PM to make some changes. Someone here will have to tell us a better solution first! *Look into the requirements for mining near to communities and land and water sources. Petition to have these laws be more than four times the current requirements. Being fair, we do need the value of mining so we don't go broke as a nation but there does need to be better rules in place to keep environments and people safe. Anyone got any better ideas?

As you can tell no not enough water holding practices are used

Two things, firstly the man blamed a rising water table for the salinity, but rather it was erosion due wind and water, as well as collapsing healthy soil biomes that cause the surface to drop closer to the salty water levels. Harvesting rainwater thru small frequent catchments made from onsite materials will dilute the salts and reverse biome collapse. Much Australia's agricultural products actually land in Asia, rather than the US. The farmers and ranchers would do well to follow Mark Sheperd's methods of growing biome- appropriate food-and feed-producing, polycultured shrubs, vines, trees in an alley cropped system that alternates with perennials, grasses, and annuals. This mimicks the most productive food system known, the savanna. The weeds, fertility, pests etc are managed by diverse livestock. This does more to rebuild soil, and appropriate soil moisture. It eliminates costly inputs and substitutes them with black line, profit-making management systems. The livestock are healthier, their products more nutritionally complete, the soil rebuilds, there is more climate resiliency built-in, there is more food security, the farmer had more economic resiliency, etc. This system is called restoration agriculture. The other side of using this is that it adds market diversity, too. Asians are very adaptable about foods, so the international market is there for novel food systems. Australia is full of permaculture innovators the government just needs to support education regarding these better methods (thinking of Lawton, Andrews, and Mollison, to name a few... Should be added that droving is reasonable provided they stop overgrazing. Eating the grasses to where they are less than several inches tall is a no-no and harms soil as well as the ability of the feed to recover quickly.

And New Zealand is mountainous with many rains and waterways that wash away topsoil unless secured by native bush

You have no trees, you have no rain

Trees used to stop evaporation and slow and cool wind now it heats up on farming country

37:00 Right on dude. The PROPER application of science to a problem. The problem is many decades ago the science was in mass production failing to understand what that can do to different environments, or to say it another way, what the environment will end up doing to that land being used for mass production. You have to figure out how to work within that natural system. Getting away from Australia and into tropical lands I see a lot of people starting to apply permaculture because it makes sense to do that there. I've seen tours of people's properties and it's absolutely wonderful and rich and full of life. Instead of chasing nature out, the agriculture was incorporated into that natural environment, and done properly it enriches the life there. These are the kinds of people I respect the most, those who figure out how to work within a natural system to provide benefit to themselves via farming and ALSO the natural system. This is sustainable agriculture.

Its a pity the recent floodwaters couldn't have been diverted into the desert through the mountain ranges

Farina was built to service the Central Australian Railway not as an agricultural town, when the railway pushed north so did a lot of the population, it was used as a stock loading area for many years and when the railway was rerouted further to the east in the mid 1980s that was when the town was left to decay. Now the friends of Farina are in the process of restoring buildings. There is now an amazing Bakery (opening in the winter months) a year round camp ground and a productive cattle farm.

Coming from New Zealand and having travelled around Australia I have always been fascinated at how they farm, or make that attempt to farm, in much of Australia. At some stage there must be a reckoning to say that farming is just not viable in certain areas. This was a point made by their PM years ago. And while I realise that the farmers do not want their stock starving to death but they do and I find that abhorrent. Sorry. Here you would be prosecuted in court.

And still they're clearing Queensland's brigalow belt.

Salinity is not irreversible

The Native Australians (Aborigine) knows how to live in the most extreme conditions in Australia.

Finally, listening to one if not the oldest culture on planet Earth. 🤔 Might have been a good idea from the beginning. 🧐

Thirty seconds of video of the ruins of the houses showed me that those people were doomed to fail; they're not designed for hot weather. If they didn't know how to build for the environment it's hard to believe they understood how to live in the ecosystem.

Living in an environment with no water and rain is insanity

Still they got millions of feral rabbits, camels, emus and kangaroos. That's lot of meat.

If you let your rain run off it doesn't soak in

😂Australia was aridified after the first Homo sapiens arrived around 50-60 thousand years ago. They caused the extinction of of over 90percent of fauna including megafauna that previously were vital in cycling nutrients maintaining the vegetation and ecosystems that maintained hydrology. Australian ecosystems eventually stabilised under deep Aboriginal management but everything was destabilized and further degraded again after the next human invasion by Europeans. I have described this in my book 'Ecoagriculture for a Sustainable Food Future' based on my PhD thesis looking at human impacts on Australian ecosystems since the Pleistocene. Dr Nicole Chalmer

Permaculture & Biochar can improve the soil & capture moisture to turn not only Australia but any dry land area into an oasis!

It made my heart swell to see people with such love for the land. And yes that man is correct in feeling like a child when walking next to someone whose linage walking that same earth is over 50,000 years old! Receptive to the wisdom. That made me smile ❤

How long will it take us humans to understand that the environment we live in is a reflection of ourselves, of our state of mind. If fertile land is turned into a lifeless desert, it is because there exists a desert in us ourselves already, our hearts have dried up, our minds are empty, the pursuit of profit rules supreme. Greed is a deadly disease, not a virtue.

Even Hobart is in warmer latitudes than southern France.

We took and took and never gave back

We know this all too well. Interesting is the future when all deserts in Australia have disappeared. How a desert is slowly transformed you can see at SEKEM in Egypt or Israel and China and Africa. There is a secret not acknowledged by science. It is the fact that planting trees attracts rain. Today it cannot be denied anymore.

Perth is planning for it never to have rain again, already getting a fraction of what it had.. damn

This video harps on the plight of the farmers and livestock. The farmers and the livestock were the prime cause of the desertification issue.

The wild camels , rabbits problem, could have been easier solved if Australians started to eat them, and export the over supply as delicious bio products . No chemical food supplements, antibiotics etc in their food.

As an Australian and as someone who has watched the land get drier and drier, it just astounds me that 99% of farmers aren't trying new ways of doing things. I personally know farmers, stubborn as mules who will always do things the way they've been done. Until one day, the top soil will just be dust. Look at Peter Andrews and how he's been trying to change rural NSW and QLD - that's the way of the future 🙌

The wildlife has been in crisis for a long time We starve our dingoes And leave Brumbies with no water We have the longest fence in the world to keep all the other animals in the desert, we keep dingoes out on a sandy island to try and find a lizard on the beach, no-one is allowed to feed them its illegal, we think they are murderers, but that's bloody questionable We are sick and its horrifying

Can we please have documentaries without constant music?

Top viewing, What can be gleaned from this story is not dissimilar to the Egyptian story, once an Eden savanna, now desert, unearthing township remains…camels the lot… The earths environment knows where to plant, encouraging only enough ppl & animals for all to remain viable, listening to nature & the indigenous is where it’s at, these ppl doing 🤙

plant trees...and there are many many experiences of people who have created paradise in desert

What a glorious world it would be if all the ranchers were reborn as cattle and the cattle reborn as judges and jurors.

Should have taken a look at the awesome permaculture projects in Australia

I'm not a farmer or a expert but I saw a video about Allan savory about holistic planned grazing Management in Simbabwe and other areas. It worked but "every grass has to be decayed biologically until the next rainy season is coming ". He uses lifestock to graze the land but not over grazing it. They poo and pee on the soil and break up the hard soil to let rain soak in instead of running or evaporatoring of

Time to rewatch ‘Walkabout’! 😮

Good approach by scientists to grow the drought resistant plants to change soil pattern

Most of the desertification occurred after the Biblical Flood and the break up of the continents. Climate change has been an on going problem ever since. However, the aborigines that migrated there after the Flood, and not 40 thousand years ago, did an excellent job at maintaining a balanced environment. It is true that the arrival of Europeans made the situation worse.

Here in Michigan we are blessed not only with the Great Lakes but with many glacial lakes as well. I’m close to Lake Superior but I live nearer to a Glacial lake that’s 13 miles long with plenty of fish. It also has beautiful islands scattered throughout. Some are private islands compounds. One even has a float plane . That private Island is huge with many buildings.

"300 of [Richard Kinnon's] cows died from starvation and thirst." No, Richard Kinnon made 300 animals suffer a cruel and inhumane death. He doesn't deserve to be a rancher, nor own the land he's destroyed.

Australia's desserts can be the answer and help solve the continuous global warming and rising sea level,, using desalinated water, Australia should build lakes and water reservoirs in different parts of Australia's vast dessert with irrigation systems,,turning them into an arable lands, rainforest and habitable region in the southern hemisphere..

I think if we were all responsible as citizens in an ecozone, for the health of that zone as our first priority of government as the ancient people did, we would heal in one generation. Use the principle and hone the practices. It's about changing how we live and relate to land. Maybe?

Ita all bloody flooded now! Highest ever recorded rainfall. People missing in flood water. Two more cyclones forming in the top end, God help us.

I agree, eat the camels and rabbits. Forget eating cows.

Good Documentary.😊

Australia must scope soil and heap up so the man made mountains and lakes are formed. Plant trees on man made mountain and let the dug up pits remain as lakes once filled with rain water that flows down the man made mountain. It is as simple as that to alter the climate and landscapes because the flow of the wind is zigzagged and its temperature is cooled in pits and hot air rushes in to the pit making pit air escaping along the ridges of the man made mountain with trees which will give rain or moist all over and at the surroundings. I like to see it achieved. The work must begin as soon as this comment idea is read, therefore. This idea is for all the countries in the world also.

Burning over Millenia has gradually dried out Australia. As burning is no longer the preferred method of land management in many areas of Australia, these areas are greener and more full of life than ever. An area that is periodically mowed will gradually increase in fertility as the cut vegetation will rot away and build up the soil. A fire will release all energy and fertility into the air, never to return. Fire does release potassium into the food web which is important and the reason why vegetation grows quickly after fire. However there are better ways to release potassium into the environment.

What happened to all the water from the 100-year floods?

You just earned a new subscriber SLICE Earth! *Pam* {Tom's wife}

Fascinating, thank you!

I generally look at these programs with a pinch of salt. However, Google putting a climate warning increased the credibility hugely.

Cows roam along the roadside because they are naturally nosey. There were 20 cattle on the station next to the one I worked on in WA. 100;000 acres and they were always by the only tarmac road through the property.

There definitely are bad aspects of Australia's dry country management historically and in the present - BUT documentaries designed for activism are able to make it appear a whole lot worse- ie..cherry pick footage from; droughts - or drought stricken areas, overgrazed feedlots, then contrast with wonderfully curated "native wonderlands" demonstrating the end of the wet in the Tanami - or something... Australia before colonialism, civilisation and cultural diversification - or conquer, pillage, rape and plunder, however you look at it, was NOT a perfect larder of abundance and plenty across the length and breadth. "Indigenous" settlers - Nomads and unlanded, scarcely survived across much of the terrain (droughts existed then too) - the "dreaming" mapped the waterholes so an initiate may survive harsh times, though to others ("foreign" Natives indigent nations included) the wilderness was a place of scarcity and horror. - Just like in modern times, the bulk of the population was coastal - relying on fish, mussels and fresh water streams to water the garden crops...

That's good tucker

In proper grazing, you MUST rotate. 40 cows to 40 acres is insane some ranges may ought to know livestock for only a few days every year

Mate, they are stations jn Straylla.

It amazes me every time I see something like this, they still think they can farm the land!!! I suggest they look at the Paani Foundation in India. Although it has been tried in Australia with great success.

4:56 where is that place?

Please , show the date , the year . This could be 5 years ago or now . With this extreme land degradation , its important to observe the progression over time, accurately.

The humankind need to learn How to terraforming the desert!

So many animals drying in the sun! 😮 Estes animais precisam ser levados para as ilhas, onde há riquezas abundantes de verde.😢 As the animals recover on the islands, this sad desert is transformed into the paradise it once was.

Farming in desert is perfect idea

De-forestation by domestic goats is the root cause for most of the desertification in North Africa, West Asia, and southern Europe. In Brazil it's cows. In Australia it's feral rabbits and camels. There is an easy solution. There is a continent not far from Australia where protein is so difficult to find that people still eat dangerous bushmeat (Africa). Build meat processing plants to process the rabbits and camels and sell (or gift) the meat to Africa. This will reduce their numbers to a sustainable level

I missed the solutions in this video, there's more info in the comments, thank you to all who replied. There are many regenerative programs currently recovering the land, perhaps more on those would suit this title.

We are addicted to beliving the early Aboriginal way of living and sustaining life can be transferred to today's world It cannot from the founding population of 3000 that arrived in Australia roughly 45,000 years ago increasing to 20,000 it stayed below 20,000 for many millennia to peak at approximately 1.2 million people 500 years ago. That growth spurt was triggered by the arrival of the dingo from Asia some 4,000 years ago whose semi-domestication led to major cultural changes, combined with the adoption of new tools to adapt to changing hunting methods That simple imaginary way of life cannot be adopted by Australia with a current population of 26,638,544 To attempt it would leave the continent a barren burned-out wasteland devoid of animal life

we live with cyclic drought that always breaks ???

What puzzles the hell out of me of me is what in the middle of an extreme drought the fncking flies drink????

We arrived 60 thousand years ago.... Droughts have happened wince the dawn of time and if you want to get techinical Australia use to luch all over untill us Aboriginals burnt it out to get the animals to run out easy prey

Regenerative agriculture can restore the desert. Start digging swales.

The Aboriginals burned the country for 60,000 years, which is possibly the reason why it is significantly desert. Also, you can desalinate saline water without using electricity, although disposing of the remaining salt is an issue.

What would happen if we piped all of our sewerage into the unoccupied desert instead of the ocean?

Plant Bamboo... and Sweet Potato and Cassava and Corn and Cotton and Bananas and fruit trees like Mango Pommerac and Cocoa and Coffee etc.

Australia is the Second desert continent after Antarctica. Many of those town in America are gone now. Scales of operation didn't support small producers. It is not England or Europe either!

I am no proponent of the whole climate change agenda, but I will say that the biggest climate change issue is human-caused desertification. If we tackled desertification in a meaningful way, using regenerative land management methods, we will have made huge strides in the fight against climate change and environmental destruction. The crisis is one of land mismanagement more than pollution due to carbon emissions.

What about the salt after desalination of water, sell it?

China converted huge parts of desert into farming land ,but water must be supplied in big quantities, and the only way to do it is desolinasation, which must be done by nuclear energy, and we can create noe horizon in agriculture

Govt policy was to offer land which had to be cleared. It was a govt stipulation on the land. This went on for 150yrs til the mid ''70s. Desertification of the whole continent was well underway due to longterm weather changes which only made land clearing worse. There are still property developers subdividing beautiful lush areas on the East Coast today. Everyday. Climate change is only one factor in the destruction of Australia.

"'Resilience'" there's that word Rose Koire warned us about

I'll tell you where the most environmental damage has happened. The cities. These places are far cleaner and more natural than the citys

There is so many things that are exaggerated or just completely wrong in this doc .

is there a date to this film? can´t find one.

What about digging multiple crescent shaped bunds to collect water. Self regeneration.

All the cattle in semi-arid regions should be replaced by feral camels. Compared with hard hoofed grass pulling cattle, feral camels do sweet FA damage with the soft feet & much more general diet.

After a short road trip in Australia I have seen all of this. We have destroyed so much of the forests and land for farming and housing in this country now crying for drought I don't care about it. Don't get it why we blame petroleum companies only for damage of nature and climate change.

Lesson Number One : NEVER ignore the wisdom of the people who have lived and thrived in harmony with the land for uncounted centuries. This documentary is all true at various levels all over the planet. That's why, slowly but surely, gardeners and farmers are finally rethinking their approach and starting to work WITH the natural processes. No More Man-Made Chemical Fertilizers, pesticides and designer genetically plants for one. Strategically planting a variety of trees and bushes as wind breaks, Enabling the germination of dormant natural pastural grasses and other nutritious forage. Smaller pasture enclosures for rotating and controlling grazing so the livestock can fertilize the ground and the earth and plants can rest. Most important in all this, making sure the soil's microbial concentrations are brought back to sustainable and self-sustaining levels. This is how we must producing food for humans and forage for the animals with flavor and much higher levels of nutritional value once again. ****As for Soil salinity it's a case-by-case problem but not always irreversible. It's not easy but it can be overcome.

Camel meat is pretty good. Start a Camel burger business. A slice of Pineapple on it, Yum! 🤗

Dig borewells use drip irrigation.... Make it a rule ....... Plant only fruit trees .... Or trees for wood .... It can thrive then

we all need to work together to regenerate just like some other countrys are

What would happen if coconut plants were planted, as they can handle sea water conditions?

One thing I never, ever understood is why the hell you would bring western farming to the place but NOT hedgerows.......

I thought I saw a video where a farmer was using syntropic farming to combat this. He even had a pond.

Midnight Oil had it figured out long before the govt noticed the Aboriginal way of surviving.

Those poor animals😢 disgusting behaviour from the farmers. Gotta go small, just for ourselves. Any laws on animal abuse?

In this documentary not once have I seen or heard about the application of "Permaculture", sad! Many bad scenes ARE reversible.