On Earth Magazine

On Earth magazine
Regenerating the desert (sent to Oasis by post from New York) 30/1/96
The Overseas Agricultural Sewage Irrigated Soils-(OASIS) Project aims to regenerate irrigate and propagate desert areas.
The project echoes the vision of Richard St Barbe Baker, who was interested in fertilizing and irrigating arid areas of North Africa The organisers are hoping to interest the governments of Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Ethiopia, in the scheme.
The driving forces behind OASIS are Andrew Fletcher, Adrian Van Zweden, David Perret Green and Adrian Sanders.
OASIS writes:- The Sahara has not always been a desert; there is abundant evidence of Tropical rain forest from fossilized tree trunks and also of men made weapons. In fact most of the worlds deserts were created by deforestation. But now the process is accelerated. Once it took a thousands of years to create deserts, whilst in recent times five years is enough.
It is possible to reverse desertification. Within desert regions there exists a convection system which at present is continually circulating hot dry air.
In the Sahara for example, the sun recycles hot air drawn from the exposed North Coastline, taken to the Equator and returned. The wind system is also circular.
To break this cycle vast amounts of water are needed preferably waste water, at the North Coast. This would reverse the existing cycle by circulating moist, cooling air, rising and falling as rain in the desert and promoting growth from the night dew and a basis for reforestation.
This effect can be seen in several places around the world such as Morocco where desert reclamation and reforestation was begun forty years ago, and to a lesser extent on the Fuengerola coastline in Spain, where new building, in an otherwise arid area together with new water supplies have led to a wetter local micro-climate, as the water was used for small scale cultivation.