The libertarian kid I was friends with when I was a freshman in college was one of the founders of Palantir and then a key architect of OpenAI. Nice kid but I always found his political ideas incoherent and a bit disturbing... seems like I was right?

May be? There would be no way to know. The paper has only 14 references, and with 11 co-authors you would think they would have been able to get at least one of them to check their references to see if they were related to the topic.

Anyway, I'm puzzled why Nature thought this muddled and mis-citing editorial was worth publishing, and why they didn't send it to a reviewer who would have caught these referencing errors.

and instead think strategically about how trees and other aspects of nature can be utilized in specific contexts to achieve specific goals, and then empower local governments to use those strategies.

What then can we learn from China's experience that might be applicable abroad? It seems from my reading of the article that lesson is that we should back away from grand narratives about "great green walls" ...

There is nothing wrong with doing this - actually it sounds like a great idea - but I don't see how it "halts desertification" - its just a local intervention that is targeted to address local infrastructure needs.

for example, using trees to halt the movement of sand dunes that threaten solar installations

Drilling down to the details of the examples they give in the article, it seems that most of them are not actually successes of ecological transformation, rather they are examples of strategic and expensive deployment of trees to protect specific pieces of modern industrial infrastructure

my very outsider's view of China is that China has had millenia of conflict with migrant pastoralists from the arid interior, who have often threatened the stability of the Chinese state. So it seems like the desire to get rid of the desert might actually be a program of social control?

I suppose there could be some macro atmospheric effect of trees that could increase precipitation to the point of converting a desert, but what are the conditions under which we'd actually want this to happen?

I suppose there could be some macro atmospheric effect of trees that could increase precipitation to the point of converting a desert, but what are the conditions under which we'd actually want this to happen?

This makes no real sense to me. My social scientist understanding of the term desert is that it refers to an ecosystem with a severe water deficit.

I had a hard time figuring out what the Great Green Wall was trying to accomplish. The objectives described seem to me to be incoherent. Its presented as some kind of ecological intervention to "hold back deserts" by planting trees.

Its a bit hard to tell, and I think I might be at risk of making the same mistake the authors make of mischaracterizing China's experience, which I know very little about.

So its pretty clear that the paper mischaracterizes the literature on India - but are its broader claims about the lessons from the Great Green Wall useful?

(although I'll say that they are plausible, and I've never really read much about desert restoration in India - I'm not even sure there is much of it going on? but I quite possibly haven't paid attention as I've never spent time in the desert parts of India).

I know of no study of restoration in India that comes to the conclusions they mention

Our paper contains no data or analysis pointing to the reasons for failures, and contains no mention of coordination or water budgets (both of which are unlikely to matter in the restoration programs we study).

Our paper is about temperate and sub tropical forest restoration which aims to restore habitat, support livelihoods, and reduce soil erosion in mountains (which it shows was unsuccessful)

Limited effects of tree planting on forest canopy cover and rural livelihoods in Northern India - Nature Sustainability Large-scale tree planting programmes have been implemented or planned for areas around the world suffering from deforestation, but this study presents evidence that such efforts may not necessarily de...

would love to read this study about desert restoration failures, so I looked up the reference provided for this paragraph and...
Its a citation to Coleman et al. 2021, a paper for which I'm the senior author. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I suppose aligning water budgets and grazing controls would be important - that sounds fascinating!

Why do Foresters Plant Trees? Testing Theories of Bureaucratic Decision-Making in Central India There is growing awareness of the problems of applying blueprint approaches to public sector management in developing countries, however scholars lack…

This sounded pretty fascinating to me - I've never studied desert restoration in India, and my research on forest restoration hasn't found coordination to be a problem although I've pointed to other reasons for restoration failures (i.e. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"This fragmentation blurs accountability for restoration outcomes and makes it difficult to make sure that choices about planting align with water budgets, grazing controls and long-term aftercare."

"And a lack of coordination can hamper long-term strategy. In India, for instance, responsibilities for desert restoration are spread across the government departments for forestry, irrigation, agriculture, rural development and energy."

First, let's talk about what they have to say about India. One paragraph addresses India directly. It states:

especially if the diverse local contexts of "deserts" are not attended to (which circles back to my first concern).

The first and narrower concern is that the article seriously misrepresents my work in India. The second concern, more broadly, is that the idea of "keeping deserts at bay" is incoherent, and that the lessons discussed in the paper are at risk of being seriously misapplied...

Can China’s Great Green Wall shape efforts to keep the world’s deserts at bay? Grand anti-desertification schemes often fail when trees die and funding dries up — yet one project has broken the mould.

I have two serious concern about this new commentary in Nature on the lessons that can be learned from China's "Great Green Wall." www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I see that @daeganmiller.bsky.social reposted this and wonder if he is planning to go back to college to become a catholic theologian HVAC technician?

Wasn't it always premised on a flawed understanding of what a desert is and what roles trees could play in changing ecosystems?