A number of people have been commenting or asking about restoring degraded lands. Preventing degradation is one thing, but given that it’s happened in a lot of places already, how can we begin to put back the processes that have been lost? How long does it take, and can you ever get the land to fully recover?

The simple answer is: in theory, you can restore any land if you have enough labor and money. Even in a place where all the soil has eroded down to bedrock, you could, in theory, cart in truckloads of soil and manure from somewhere else. But who’s really going to do that in a place where people scarcely know where the next meal is coming from?

On the other end of the spectrum, there are some really simple and cheap things that people can do to stop further degradation and start letting the land recover. For example, one could lay down branches or put down rocks where erosion gullies are starting to form. A slightly more involved approach would be to plant grass seeds in small furrows dug into bare soil. Anything that stops water from flowing over the surface of the land is going to help prevent erosion and improve the conditions for grass to grow.

Of course, any restoration effort takes a lot of work and a lot of time. How much and how long depends on how degraded the land is. In some cases, just removing the cause of the degradation (for example, overgrazing) is enough for the land to recover. In other cases, for example where lots of topsoil has been lost, the ecosystem may never recover to what it was before – but it might at least be stabilized and improved to some extent.

I personally find restoration a really interesting subject – first, because it offers some hope and optimism that we can (at least to some extent) reverse our mistakes of the past, and, second, because it presents a fascinating challenge: to understand enough about the ecosystems we live in to know how to put them back together.

Next up: Siva is going to tell you a little about his recent work catching and collaring zebras!

-Corinna