HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT: KEEPING THE BIG PICTURE IN MIND, WITH RODGER SAVORY
Land managers trained in Holistic Management are responsible for millions of acres worldwide. Here’s how it all started.
HART HAGAN: My guest is Roger Savory, who is an ecologist, a consultant to landowners and an authority on something called Holistic Management.
Today, we're going to talk about Holistic Management.
Roger, what is holistic management?
RODGER SAVORY: Holistic management is a different method of making decisions.
It's a different method of making decisions based on Jan Smuts, who wrote a book called Holism and Evolution.
In 1927, he told the world's experts that we would not understand the world until we realize that it functioned in wholes and patterns and spirituality. When we step back and look at the world again through different lenses, we realize that it really does function in wholes and patterns, and that humans have a deep spirituality. When we understand the wholes and patterns and stop thinking linearly, then we have more success in management.
HART HAGAN: How was Holistic Management developed?
RODGER SAVORY: It's been a long journey. Jan Smuts came up with the idea of Holism and Evolution in 1927, but you have to look back at who Jan Smuts was.
When he was 16 years old, he was a Boer General fighting the world's greatest empire, the English Empire. As a sixteen-year-old Boer General-- excuse my French, but--he kicked the British’s butt up and down South Africa.
He pioneered the commando troops. He lead guerrilla forces behind enemy lines and attacked the British rail systems all the way down on the cape, thousands of kilometers from where the actual battle was. So he was a brilliant tactician and thinker.
He was educated in the United Kingdom at top British universities. And when World War I came around, he was so respected by the British that they actually made him an English General. So imagine taking your enemy from the last war and making him your general in the next war. You only do that if you have a deep level of respect for the general. After World War I, he was instrumental in creating the League of Nations.
He was the one who said, if we ask Germany for reparations, I guarantee there will be another war within 20 years. Well, they didn't listen to him. He was just a young man and exactly as predicted, within 20 years, we were in war with Germany again.
During World War II, the British made him a Field Marshal. He was Field Marshal Jan Smuts, and at the end of World War Two, he was such a famous and well-loved field marshal that New York City gave him a ticker tape parade at the end of the war.
Now, how is it that the man who was so famous has been forgotten by history? It's just amazing.
The next thing he did was he created the United Nations after World War Two.
So a really deep thinker. He was a farm boy growing up. He understood nature. He understood people and he was just a deep thinker. So Holism and Evolution is what we respect him for, but you can see all his thinking was military.
He was a lawyer by profession--law, military strategy, biology--and he was able to think about everything together. I think he was one of those really deep thinkers that the planet has every now and again. I think the one 2,000 years earlier was called Jesus.
So Jan Smuts came up with Holism and Evolution in 1936, then my father Allan Savory read his work and was obviously very impressed.
Allan was special forces military, a Member of Parliament in Rhodesia, trying to bring a civil war to an end, also grappling with biological issues. And when Allan read Holism and Evolution, he saw the connection.
Then Holistic Management developed from this idea that we need to understand the whole to understand the parts. Then when looking at the complexity of how to manage these complex systems, the British military system developed it at Sandhurst for Battlefield planning in chaos. And stuff like that was adapted into Holistic Management in what was called the Holistic Grazing Plan.
These grazing planning charts are identical to what the British military used for 800 years to conquer the world. So it's a very good method of getting the chaos of battle. These guys are attacking from here. These guys have run out of raw materials. We need fuel. We need ammunition. We need troops moved. How do you put all this complexity into one plan so that all your generals and everyone understand it?
That was Step 1 and then there was the understanding of the need for managing finances. So then Holistic Financial Planning was developed.
As Holistic Management has progressed, since about 1984, it has never stood still. It's a work in progress as we think more deeply about it and think about what it means.
So what is holistic management today? It's nothing more than a decision-making framework. We make all our decisions based on the quality of life we desire and the future landscape description, how we would like to be in the future to allow our great-grandchildren to be living the same high quality of life, socially, economically, and environmentally. And because humans think linearly we have to try and think about numerous things simultaneously.
In a nutshell, all holistic management is, is a different way of thinking and managing our resources and our lives.