PS If you have links to the BLM videos mentioned at the end of the episode, I would love to see that as I've been focused on understanding the opportunities for regreening in the context of BLM grazing allotments.
Hi Alpha, In the last few days, I listened to your conversations with Rodger Savory and Andrew Millison and I'm captivated by the question of the minimum scale of regeneration required to improve precipitation. I'm curious if you have a sense from the totality of your conversations to date what the state of the art is in predicting the impact of regreening on precipitation. With enough data and computational power, are we at a point where we can make meaningful predictions that would have value in deciding where to intervene at regional and continental scales? When listening to Rodger Savory's proposal to focus in the Imperial Valley on a single site at 150,000 acre scale, I'm immediately thinking this is of limited value. I suspect the common refrain we'll hear from land managers is "this will not work in my context." To overcome that headwind, I'd much prefer to see 150 trials at 1000 acre scale covering a wide variety of contexts occurring in parallel. If a large number of small trials are happening in parallel across a plethora of contexts, the successes stand a better chance of spreading to neighboring areas when more land managers are within X distance of a trial. There is the opportunity to be very strategic in how the geographic distribution of trials is defined. And what hypotheses are being tested with each trial, from ecological, social, and economic point of views. The development and testing of social influence strategies never seems to receive enough attention, and at the end of the day, if we can't find a way to articulate pathways toward greater abundance for the land stewards we're seeking to influence, our theories are of little value. Thank you again for your work. I look forward to hearing your reflections.
PS If you have links to the BLM videos mentioned at the end of the episode, I would love to see that as I've been focused on understanding the opportunities for regreening in the context of BLM grazing allotments.
Hi Alpha, In the last few days, I listened to your conversations with Rodger Savory and Andrew Millison and I'm captivated by the question of the minimum scale of regeneration required to improve precipitation. I'm curious if you have a sense from the totality of your conversations to date what the state of the art is in predicting the impact of regreening on precipitation. With enough data and computational power, are we at a point where we can make meaningful predictions that would have value in deciding where to intervene at regional and continental scales? When listening to Rodger Savory's proposal to focus in the Imperial Valley on a single site at 150,000 acre scale, I'm immediately thinking this is of limited value. I suspect the common refrain we'll hear from land managers is "this will not work in my context." To overcome that headwind, I'd much prefer to see 150 trials at 1000 acre scale covering a wide variety of contexts occurring in parallel. If a large number of small trials are happening in parallel across a plethora of contexts, the successes stand a better chance of spreading to neighboring areas when more land managers are within X distance of a trial. There is the opportunity to be very strategic in how the geographic distribution of trials is defined. And what hypotheses are being tested with each trial, from ecological, social, and economic point of views. The development and testing of social influence strategies never seems to receive enough attention, and at the end of the day, if we can't find a way to articulate pathways toward greater abundance for the land stewards we're seeking to influence, our theories are of little value. Thank you again for your work. I look forward to hearing your reflections.