And one of Allan Savory's insights is that while overgrazing is a real problem and it can be devastating to land, under-grazing also has a negative impact on the land. In other words, what, as I've read, is described as pulsed grazing, a large - relatively large number of animals on a relatively small piece of land and - but not there very long. Basically, the thing to keep in mind is that any time you have animals on land those animals have an impact on the land, and that can be either a positive or negative impact, depending on how those animals are managed.ДЄnd when you manage livestock in a very precise way, then - moving them, as Allan said on that little clip - then they serve as biological accelerators, which means that they're kind of kickstarting and keeping moving the biological processes that bring carbon into the soil.Д¬ONAN: Keep moving them. So you mentioned Allan Savory and his work for holistic management, holistic plant grazing, which is the use of livestock as a tool for large-scale land restoration. But if we look to the soil, then we can actually do something about it. And, you know, us as individuals, we can only watch this happen, and we can only just shake our heads as carbon global discussions just don't seem to go anywhere. I mean, we just.Д¬ONAN: Yeah, the famous hockey stick chart. It just concerns me that when we see these numbers, you know, we look at the Keeling Curve, the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere going up, up, up. And what's so exciting about this is that this is something we can do. So over time, we're talking gigatons of carbon that's gone into the atmosphere from the soil. Then you can understand that you can actually reverse those processes and, by so doing, bring carbon back into the soil. And once you start to understand this and you understand the processes that release carbon into the atmosphere - you know, so the carbon, I mean, it's heavy tillage. So if you look over time, way, and I mean way more carbon has gone into the atmosphere from soil, from the way we treat the soil compared to the burning of fossil fuels. So the thing to realize is that while we think about this as a sky thing, that it's all about all the fossil fuels that we're burning and all that spewing into the atmosphere is actually also a ground thing. Well, let's look at excess CO2 in the atmosphere. It almost allows for a radical reframing of our problems such as, as you mentioned, climate change.Д¬ONAN: And really though, the soil is the key to all of the many different problems we have, including climate change and carbon dioxide and the various other problems? And in the process of all my research, I found that when you look at our situations, our various situations, from the standpoint of the soil, everything turns around. Soil is a hub for so many of our environmental, economic and social crisis, and for solutions. SCHWARTZ: Oh, well, it's actually amazing. Great to be here, Neal.Д¬ONAN: And at the same time, cows can both bury the carbon and restore the topsoil. Journalist Judith Schwartz profiles the work of Allan Savory, among others, in a new book called 'Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth' and joins us now from Northeast Public Radio in Albany, New York. Email is You can also join the conversation on our website. We'd also like to hear from skeptics, too, 80.

We want to hear from farmers and ranchers today who use holistic management, also sometimes known as intensive grazing. There is no other alternative left to mankind.Д¬ONAN: Allan Savory calls this holistic management. ALLAN SAVORY: There is only one option, I repeat to you, 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. In a February TED Talk, an activist and visionary named Allan Savory argued that properly managed herds of ungulates - cows - can bury huge quantities of carbon and restore our topsoil at the same time.ДR.

And that number will continue to rise as we continue to burn fossil fuels in our cars and power plants unless we can find someplace else to put all that carbon. Last month, for the first time in millions of years, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million, a scary milestone on the route to a warmer and more unstable climate.

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