Turning Desert Wasteland Green

Allan Savory has spent 50 years working on a way to turn ruined land green, and Wednesday he was honored for his decades of work when he was named the winner of the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s 2010 Challenge. The award comes with a $100,000 grant that will go to the non-profit Savory helped found, The African Center for Holistic Management International. The challenge rewards big solutions to impossible problems, which describes Savory’s process for reclaiming desertified African land—and in the process, easing poverty and violence, since families can earn a living off the land again. His surprisingly simple solution is to graze livestock in the dense herds of the big game that has been wiped out in the area. The livestock tills the soil with their hooves and fertilizes it with their manure, which helps new plants grow as they evolved to do over millions of years. About 6,500 acres of land has been transformed in Zimbabwe alone.