Countries at risk of losing 20-30% or more of their arable land over the next decades are not threatened by reduced profits they are threatened by famine, starvation and huge population shifts.
But this has nothing to do with preservation efforts, if anything preserving dry subhumid and semi-arid natural habitats can prove to be a good barrier to prevent further desertification countries like Israel and Spain have been doing quite a bit of work in those areas.
Wanting to preserve an existing natural environment and habitat to many species is not antithetical to not wanting to lose arable land to needless man caused or at least accelerated desertification.
Is this claim based on any evidence or research?
"Countries at risk of losing 20-30% or more of their arable land over the next decades are not threatened by reduced profits they are threatened by famine, starvation and huge population shifts."
I say - that is bullshit. Belarus lost more than 20% of arable land and around 30% of forest land after Chernobyl accident in 1986. It suffered literal hell in social sphere after the USSR was ruined by its elites in 1991. But just 20 years later, by imposing special 17% tax on all businesses that was used to recover arable lands and forest lands from radionuclide contamination, balanced social policy and successful research in agriculture, it is doing just fine!
It is HOW you deal with loss of arable land that matters. 2008 - Syria. They stupidly dug deeper wells until exhausting their precious ground waters to nothing. Result - 2 mln former farmers filled favelas of large Syrian cities. At the same time, same area, same problem - Israel invested into desalination tech and plants and successfully kept its agriculture running.
It is not lost per se that causes famine and social shifts, it is right or wrong policy of the society that does it. We are humans - we can change things. But not 'saving deserts' or 'save beavers'. We are damn good at saving ourselves when we are together. Like Jews.
I think your arguments against desertification have some merit. But then what's the argument pro desertification (from people who want to keep deserts desert)? Shouldn't you want to NOT preserve deserts, and instead turn them into arable land? It certainly seems more useful to me.
This isn't about "pro-desertification" it's about having negative effect on natural habitats that otherwise have no negative impact on human civilization.
Also I would like to point out that Okanagan is not a desert it's a dry subhumid tundra, preserving it in it's current state would actually combat desertification.
Israel was trying to fight the creeping dunes for decades, it finally figured out that actually trying to convert them into arable land early own was one of the causes that increase desertification, once it realized that it adjusted its policies and now keeping arid and semi-arid regions and building "natural" barriers that prevent the dunes from creeping is its main environmental policy and so far it's been working as the dunes have been receding by as much as 2 meters per year.
But the general argument isn't for "pro-desertification" it's just against unnecessary environmental change, Okanagan is not a desert it's a pretty good arable valley overall wanting to preserve the natural habitat and not fill it with vineyards isn't really a hard argument to make.
You can say that we can and should screw over every piece of land to get everything we can from it, but most of us can agree that we should preserve what we have left and find ways to better exploit in less destructive means the land we've already taken over and if at all possible try to reverse some of the damage we have caused.
I'm really trying to understand why would you think just stripping and entire habitat and doing pretty much nothing with it is somehow useful just so you could grow a few grapes in Canada.
> why would you think just stripping and entire habitat
Again, you completely misunderstood my position. I'm not making a comment on deserts, or this deserts specifically.
I'm making the following comment: "it seems to me that certain people (which I've just learned includes you) seem to believe that any change to any environment is necessarily bad"
I'm not an environmentalist, and again I don't understand how you define "good or bad", you seem to operate on so basic/childish terms that I'm honestly starting to suspect your engagement is nothing more than clever quasi trolling.
We have very little ability to gauge the true impact of environmental changes so far we've learned that for the most part any manmade or man accelerated change has in the long run an adverse effect on humans and the planet as a whole.
There is no conflict between humans being the geoengineers they are trying to stop adverse changes to their global habitat that can threaten them, while wanting to preserve natural habitats that serve as a home to countless other species.
Most people think nature is pretty nice, and well pretty pretty, screwing it over needlessly especially considering that every time we do it gets worse for us is what most of us by now came to define as "bad" because it has a negative effect on our civilization.
On the other hand if you say make an argument that we found the cure for cancer but to make it we need to harvest every blue belly turtle in the planet and cause the species to go pretty much extinct I don't think many people including me would have much of a moral objection to it since while I do feel bad for the blue belly turtle (I made this species up, it might exist but i don't know :)) the positive effect on human civilization is most likely going to outweigh any negative effects the extinction of this turtle will have on the environment.
Well, you SHOULD understand. I'm speaking in term of "loss of lives over the long run". Your words. More "loss of lives over the long run" is the bad alternative, when an alternative exists of less "loss of lives over the long run", which is the good one.
You seem to be writing your responses as if I were claiming that "it's ok to trash the environment", or something, which is not true (see my other comments in this thread).
Your post says that someone must be either "all for deserts" or "all against deserts." It's unclear why people seem to want to force this false dichotomy.
The dichotomy that I'm pointing out is not that people are "all for deserts" vs "all against deserts", you misunderstood my position. I'm pointing out a false dichotomy which is "all for environmental preservation" vs the position that "all environmental conditions are irrelevant".
Again this is like being "pro-bear" but not wanting a bear to come out and maul your children at the playground.
And one good way of ensuring that the bears don't come out and play is by not destroying their natural habitats.
I don't know what false dichotomy you are trying to point out but it doesn't exist, no serious preservationist or environmental scientists saying "all for X".
We want to preserve what we can do not cause further needless destruction and degradation in the biodiversity of our ecosystem.
Many environmental problems including desertification are cause by us destroying natural habitats including deserts.
If you have a desert more or less contained in its "natural" state providing a habitat to multiple species do what you can to preserve it.
If you have man accelerated desertification that is threatening to turn your arable land into sand dunes within the next 5 decades you should do what you can to slow it down, stop it, and then reverse it.
The only way of fighting desertification seems to be now to actually try to revert the damage you've done to the natural barriers and local environment in the first place.
Sand dunes that have had migration patterns of barely a CM per year now migrating at rates of a few meters per year are not a "natural" state.
One, to conserve current state of nature because it is worth something - see UNESCO Natural Reserves, etc
Two, because profits would be threatened by change. (Look at the constant work to keep the island Sylt from moving, for example)