To Avert Catastrophe on the Roof of the World / Tibet is the High Ground

Eco-art by Helen Mayer Harrison & Newton Harrison

Excerpt:

In 30 to 60 years, the seven major rivers flowing from the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau and through Asia, nourish- ing billions of people in ten countries, will alternately flood and experience drought due to rising temperatures and rapid glacial melt. The impact on ecosystems, economies and societies in this 2.5 million sq. km. plateau, the world’s highest, will be profoundly catastrophic, including severe species loss and desertification.

Our initiative, a bio-cultural plan based partly on research from Chinese and Indian climate scientists, proposes nothing less than an ecological redesign for the Tibetan plateau and along the principal rivers. The aim is to create a diverse forest/savannah ecosystem whose root systems sequester and release the waters formerly controlled by snow cover and glacial melt. Added benefits: pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, regenerating topsoil, and stabilizing a carbon sink, as healthy forests and vast savannahs do naturally.

Our research is partly climatological, but mainly paleo-ecological, studying whole systems that lived, in prehistory, under the same climatological conditions, and it will point towards a methodology for restoring the biodiversity that will dwindle due to climatological stress. We aim to recreate pure water reserves and reduce floods, possibly leading to great economic advantage.

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison are professors emeritus, University of California at San Diego and adjunct professors, University of California at Santa Cruz.

theharrisonstudio.net

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