Allan Savory, who has done pioneering work in managing grasslands on several continents, gave a very interesting talk at the TED2013 conference last month. Here are some quotes:

Burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares.

And:

We cannot reduce animal numbers to rest it more without causing desertification and climate change. We cannot burn it without causing desertification and climate change. There is only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable, and to use livestock, bunched and moving, as a proxy for former herds and predators, and mimic nature. There is no alternative left to mankind.

Here is the description of his talk:

Desertification of the world’s grasslands, Allan Savory suggests, is the immediate cause of poverty, social breakdown, violence, cultural genocide — and a significent contribution to climate change. In the 1960s, while working in Africa on the interrelated problems of increasing poverty and disappearing wildlife, Savory made a significant breakthrough in understanding the degradation and desertification of grassland ecosystems. After decades of study and collaboration, thousands of managers of land, livestock and wildlife on five continents today follow the methodology he calls “Holistic Management.”

In 1992, Savory and his wife, Jody Butterfield, formed the Africa Centre for Holistic Managementin Zimbabwe, a learning site for people all over Africa. In 2010, the Centre won the Buckminster Fuller Challenge for its work in reversing desertification. In that same year he and his wife, with others, founded the Savory Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to promote large-scale restoration of the world’s grasslands.

The entire 22-minute talk is worth watching, but if you’re pressed for time, he begins discussing the use of fire and the alternatives at about the 10-minute mark. The video below is more impressive if you click on full screen at the bottom-right after it begins playing.

When Mr. Savory is talking about managed grazing, I don’t believe he is referring to the kind that we are used to in the United States where animals are confined to an area for months at a time. He mentions “bunched and moving” — intensive but of short duration.  It makes me think of a herd of bison, pre-1800, numbering in the thousands or more, moving across the grasslands of the United States. I’m no grazing specialist, so maybe someone with more more specific knowledge can enlighten us.
Thanks go out to Bean