Author(s): Philip Mulvey, Freya Mulvey

Land management

Practical solutions for agricultural management, enabling the restoration of landscape, climate and community.

Reaching zero emissions alone won't stop the Earth heating up.

There's another factor at play, even bigger than rising greenhouse gas levels: agricultural land use, and it is turning the world's bread baskets into deserts. In south west Western Australia, the 'Bunny Fence Experiment', the world's largest study of two contrasting land uses in the same vast region, showed strong evidence that clearing and cropping was the reason why rainfall over the Wheat Belt has dropped 20 per cent in the lifetime of some of us. This book tells of how what farmers do exports heat waves, dust and fire, south and south-eastward in Eastern Australia and north and north-westward in Western America.

You'd be forgiven for thinking there ought to be a law against it, but our lawmakers don't even acknowledge that under the air and the plants, there is anything but bedrock. Soil, the depleted carbon sink that still manages to feed us today, might as well be a vacuum in law, but it could be a saviour for our civilisations.

Ground Breaking has solutions too: manage land use, sequester carbon in soil, reduce bare ground and increase bush corridors.