Sltldr: “They’re just throwing away money, planting trees in the desert for them to die.”
The Great Green Wall is a top down, big government intervention that has little to no local buy-in and isn’t sustainable without continued big government funding.
Not surprisingly, the funding has mostly dried up, and so has the land.
There are some youtube creators who frequently cover the great green wall, like Andrew Millison. I’ve noticed that lately the videos seem to cover the failures more. You need tons of local buy-in to make anything work.
One problem is that in many places, they have a culture of herding animals, and if nobody is there to stop them, they see these areas growing grasses and saplings, and what do you think they’re going to do? Of course they send their animals in to graze and end up destroying all progress.
Part of the original reason for desertification is because humans are always actively killing everything green.
To make any progress against migratory grazing wild animals and herders, they need to create systems especially with them in mind, so that they have somewhere they can graze without causing great harm, and they need locals to enforce it.
That being said, they’ve spent tens of billions on this problem, and although the article is pessimistic, the truth is that you can’t give up just because it’s harder than expected. Even the article estimated something like 10% success iirc. It’s not impossible, and failure will be devastating in the long term. If you believe in protecting the environment, then you have to keep spending and learning through failures until you succeed.
If it was easy to fix, we’d have already fixed it.
Not the main point at all of this article, but: “The price tag was also massive: the United Nations estimated that $33 billion would be needed to complete the Wall.” Still less than the US spent on the Iran War in less than a month.
America is always complaining about being broke but always finds the money for war.
Musk can cover that with some shit from his pocket. Do it and send him an invoice
deleted by creator
> “alt tl;dr”
> proceeds to say nothing in the actual article that doesn’t mention executive salaries or China
Tankies really love to just say shit, don’t they?
You can read about it here (open-access) if you don’t want to listen to someone make shit up about an article and instead read about the good things China’s initiative is doing.
Edit: Answering marxismtomorrow’s very serious and not-at-all ableist question below: I’m autistic. This is devastating to my case, and I formally retract all the arguments I’ve made here in light of this grievous oversight on my part.
deleted by creator
Reminding people that this method DOES IN FACT WORK, when the article heavily suggests it is the method, not the people performing the method, that is the problem seems valuable to me.
Oh, so you just don’t know or care what a “TL;DR” is. Very cool. (It’s a summary, by the way.) Above, I’ve provided an open-access article highlighting the accomplishments (I’m not saying that snarkily like in scare quotes) of China’s GGW initiative.
deleted by creator
…Yes, I provided an alternative summary.
Oh, yeah, I remember the time someone provided a summary of Tom Sawyer, and when I thought it was lacking, I gave an “alternative summary” which was a crappy, nakedly biased opinion of elements not even in the book and mostly focused on how Huckleberry Finn is a way better character in his book. That’s how summaries work.
deleted by creator
If you don’t understand direct on topic comparisons just say so.
Do I need to point you to an actual definition of a “summary”? I’ve been chalking it up to tankie bad-faith, but at this point, I’m wondering if it’s just aggressive tankie stupidity.
“With the additional information?” Okay, I’m back to assuming bad-faith over illiteracy. Motherfucker, 1) that’s outside the boundaries of a summary, and more importantly 2) none of what you said is in the article. Like that’s not a summary. That’s not even an analysis. A “TL;DR” isn’t “here’s my shitty opinion on this topic not at all explored in the article.”
