the.com/desertification
Land's slow resignation letter: too tired, too dry, to keep being useful.
means The process by which fertile or semi-arid land degrades into desert, usually through drought, overgrazing, deforestation, or poor farming combined with climate shifts.
from A 20th-century scientific coinage, built straightforwardly from 'desert' plus the Latin-rooted suffix '-ification' (from facere, 'to make'). It entered wider use as ecologists and colonial foresters in the early-to-mid 1900s studied land degradation in Africa's Sahel region, and gained global currency after major droughts in the 1970s pushed the term into policy and UN usage.
- main culprit
- overgrazing and bad farming, not just drought
- scale
- loses farmland roughly the size of Costa Rica yearly
- irony
- often strikes fertile land, not actual deserts
- fix exists
- regreening with native trees can reverse it