“We’ve made great progress this year regenerating the world’s grasslands, as this report makes clear, but the mountain we’re climbing got steeper. The human population increased, as did Earth’s temperature, and pollution; droughts and floods were even more frequent; the drift toward authoritarian governments increased due to citizen dissatisfaction with the previous government’s policies; and the belief in technology providing the answers to our problems only strengthened. This isn’t happening because people are stupid or because we lack good will. It’s happening because there is a root cause underlying all these problems that is linked to our obsession with technology and our ecological illiteracy, both of which inform the policies developed by all governments. Savory Institute is working to change this.
Our obsession with technology and our ecological illiteracy are a byproduct of the Industrial Age. In a famous TED Talk Al Gore gave more than a decade ago, he illustrated the rise in climate-changing greenhouse gases with a hockey stick curve that matched the expansion of the Industrial Age and our use of fossil fuels. The steepest part of the curve also happened to match the launching of Nobel prizes a century ago that were awarded for the endeavors providing “the greatest benefit for mankind.” The best minds of a century ago saw these endeavors deriving from physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and literature (economics and peace were added later). This resulted in the best scientific minds gravitating to physics and chemistry and it fueled our obsession with technology. Tragically, the new science of ecology was not recognized, when it should have been the most prestigious prize of them all because it is essential for understanding and managing our environment, or habitat, and for producing our food in a way that can be sustained. We are paying the price today with accelerating biodiversity loss and desertification everywhere – including in our national parks – and with agriculture having become the most destructive industry ever. We are attempting to address climate change, not through ecosystem management but mainly through technology – from planting trees on the ground to planting machines in Space.
A little over a year ago the U.K. Royal Society and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences ran a joint workshop to assess the economic value of biodiversity. To understand just how alarming this is, think of the most educated fish in a drying lake discussing the value of water. It’s rather pointless to put a value on something you can’t exist without. Once higher life forms had developed from microbial anaerobic life, they created a shallow earth-covering atmosphere containing 21% oxygen, a percentage that continues to be maintained by biological life. That life is diverse and maintaining its diversity is key to our being able to breathe air that contains 21% oxygen. Decrease the percentage and humans cannot survive, increase it and even green plants burst into flame. So, we cannot put a value on biodiversity, or believe that its place is only in preserves when our existence depends upon it.
I genuinely believe that politicians, and the staff of government agencies, universities and other institutions do not lack the will to tackle the problems that have arisen due to our obsession with technology and our lack of ecological literacy. Most are caring and capable people who simply don’t know what to do to keep that mountain from growing ever steeper. So why not try to do so by developing policies within a holistic context, one which incorporates an ecological awareness and that can help eliminate the obsession with technology. It would also be one that addresses the interests of citizens primarily, rather than the interests of impersonal, often inhumane, institutions, which, although made up of people, take on a life of their own. I believe we can start to overcome this challenge by having institutional policy advisers show up as people first, and representing their institutions second. We have the way to develop such a policy and we will be training facilitators in the process.
My personal desire is to find one government willing to work with Savory Institute to develop a national agricultural policy and to do so in the presence of a group of international observers who report back to their own constituencies and countries on just how effective a policy can be when citizen-led and developed in a national holistic context. It would sure cut down on the precious little time we have to turn things around.
I may be dreaming, but that has never stopped me before.”
Allan Savory
Allan Savory was born 1935 in Rhodesia and educated in South Africa at the University of Natal with a BS in Zoology and Botany. He pursued an early career as a research biologist and game ranger in the British Colonial Service of what was then Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia) and later as a farmer and game rancher in Zimbabwe.
In the 1960s, while working on the interrelated problems of increasing poverty and disappearing wildlife, Allan made a major breakthrough in understanding why his country and the African continent was degrading and why the landscapes were rapidly desertifying and, as a resource management consultant, worked with numerous managers on four continents to develop what is now known as Holistic Management.
Allan identified key insights critical to the regeneration of land, people, and individual and national prosperity. He went on to work as a resource management strategist on four continents, developing sustainable solutions to land management problems. His work and profile led him to serve as a Member of Parliament in the latter days of Zimbabwe’s civil war where, for seven years, he became the leader of the combined opposition parties o the ruling party headed by Ian Smith. Exiled in 1979 as a result of his opposition, he immigrated to the United States, where he continued to work with land managers through his consulting business. The growth of that business, a desire to assist many more people and the need for furthering his work led him to continue its development in the nonprofit world.
In 1992, Savory and his wife, Jody Butterfield, formed a non-profit organization in Zimbabwe, the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, donating a ranch that would serve as a learning site for people all over Africa. In 2009, Savory, Butterfield, and a group of colleagues co-founded the Savory Institute in Boulder, Colorado to serve the world through an international network of entrepreneurial innovators and leaders committed to serving their regions with the highest standards of Holistic Management training and implementation support. In 2013, the Africa Centre became the first of the Savory Institute’s locally led and managed “Savory Hubs.”
Savory’s book, Holistic Management, Third Edition: A Commonse Revolution to Restore Our Environment (Island Press, 2016), describes his effort to find workable solutions ordinary people could implement to overcome many of the problems besetting communities and businesses today.
In 2003, Allan Savory received Australia’s International Banksia Award “for the person or organization doing the most for the environment on a global scale,” and in 2010 Savory (and the Africa Centre) received the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s Challenge award for work that has “significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.” A TED talk Savory gave in 2013 has received 8 million views and in 2014 was voted one of the 50 most intriguing TED talks of all time.