> "It's always struck me as puzzling, why people in suits and ties in capital cities seem to think that the pastoralists don't understand very well how to manage these lands," Barrett said. "
The kind of ridiculous comment only an economist/business professor would make.
The agriculture equivalent of pastoralists also used to use slash and burn techniques to grow crops destroying and depleting massive troves of land. It was people in lab coats, suits and ties who figured this was wrong, found better alternatives and then passed policies and laws to switch to those better alternatives.
The appeal to folk wisdom is one of the most annoying rhetorical tactics and its use here only serves to undermine the credibility of the findings.
There's a guy in New Zealand I met who spent the last 30 years rewilding what was previously agriculture herding land. He said his biggest frustration with land owners wasn't the push back on what he was doing, but the ignorance as to what could be achieved. Every single person he spoke to told him explicitely if the land was left to go to nature, it would be nothing but gorse and it was a waste of good grazing land. The actual result was a return of native rain forest with levels of species diversity that were almost 60% of untouched rainforest, which is pretty incredibly in such a short amount of time.
This is the guy for context - it's a very interesting video that really highlights the impact that over-grazing has: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VZSJKbzyMc
In certain ecologies and certain population densities "slash and burn" works, in others it doesn't.
Translation to the global south works sometimes and sometimes it doesn't work.
There is a reason Ad Hominem attacks are extremely popular. We are wired to accept them. It's a well known vulnerability in the base version of the barely functional wetware operating system most humans use.
Sure, you won't convince anyone who has spent a minimal amount of time to learn critical thinking. However, they are a scant minority.