[ExI] Greening the Sahara

[Dan]

--- On Thu, 7/16/09, Brent Neal <brentn at freeshell.org> wrote:
> On 16 Jul, 2009, at 14:39, Dan wrote:
>> Any ideas on how to do this?
>> 
>> An idea I had was to cover strategic swaths of it with
>> dark material, thereby causing its daytime temperature to
>> rise causing the air to rise faster pulling in more moist
>> air from the costs. Once rainfall is higher, it seems the
>> greening would take care of itself.
>> 
>> Any thoughts on this?
> 
> Geoff Lawton, of the Permaculture Institute, was able to
> reclaim desertified/degraded land in Jordan. An adaptation
> of his methods would work, presuming that you started in the
> Sahel and started reversing the desertification process.
> 
> Without organic matter in and on the soil to collect the
> moisture, the greening will not take care of itself
> efficiently. You get more bang for your buck by finding ways
> to concentrate and retain that moisture.
> 
> There's a video on YouTube of an interview with Lawton.

I'll have to look this up. Thanks for recommendation!

Prima facie, though, I'm thinking this would be slow and take a long, long time. Warming up the desert would quickly draw in moist air, increasing rainfall. (I reckon the problem then would be keeping this rainfall high and then making sure the water doesn't just runoff and away from the desert area.)

Regards,

Dan