WHAT IS HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT?
What if we could manage our land in a way that is good for all concerned, including the people involved, as well as the animals, plants and ecosystems?
“When you tie your actions back to the ecosystem that supports you, you are managing holistically. It is literally that simple. I think we over-complicate holistic management.”
--Abbey Kingdon-Smith
“To me, holistic management is a way to think about: How do I--far into the future--create a landscape that will survive me and my children and my great great great. great grandchildren as well as all the biodiversity that we need to make that happen?”
--Andrea Malmberg
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HART HAGAN: You keep using the word holistic management. Can you explain what holistic management means?
ANDREA MALMBERG: It's a framework. The framework starts with looking at the ecosystem processes that Jackie has outlined. But we ask, what is our whole under management? What can we influence? That is super important.
Sometimes we forget things like who makes decisions. And the “whole under management” includes who the decision-makers are and what your resource base is.
The resource base means people, land, animals, and then we also talk about money.
Our holistic context and “under management” has changed almost every year. It shifts a little bit. We ask questions like who do we bring in? When we were struggling in my own business with our processor, we asked ourselves, “What is it that we really need from a meat processor?” We’ve had to change our local meat processor.
We ask, who do we sell our meat to? What weak link do we have? Do I have enough grass? Do I have too much grass? Do I need more animals or do I have so much meat that I haven't sold it?
Then I would have a marketing weak link. This decision making process might seem mundane, but what it leads to is building true lasting wealth. We define lasting wealth as having “solar dollars” more than anything else. So when there are wars and when there is a totally inflationary situation, when you are able to focus your attention on creating solar dollars instead of mining the soil or being totally dependent on government subsidies, it gives freedom to people to be able to survive the ups and downs of this complexity in which we live, the complexity of governments and markets and weather and all that.
So to me, holistic management is a way to think about: How do I--far into the future--create a landscape that will survive me and my children and my great great great. great grandchildren as well as all the biodiversity that we need to make that happen.
WHAT IS YOUR DESIRED QUALITY OF LIFE?
WHAT IS YOUR HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT CONTEXT?
HART HAGAN: So you talked about the health of the land. How do you make the land healthier?
ANDREA MALMBERG: Decision-making.
ABBEY KINGDON-SMITH: Yes. Holistic management often becomes a conversation about grazing, but that is not the, not the real conversation. It’s part of it for sure, but the essence of it is a holistic context. That’s what makes holistic planned grazing not just another grazing program. It defines how the environment must be and how your quality of life must be for you to be the full expression of yourself now and far into the future.
And so it is the only decision making framework that has always tied our actions back to our environment and that goes back to our statement of purpose
We've never done any sort of accounting for our actions to the environment. Holistic management attempts to do that. It's recognizing what is actually there in that we have this environment that supports us and sustains us.
When you tie your actions back to the ecosystem that supports you, you are managing holistically. It is literally that simple. I think we over-complicate holistic management.
Allan Savory is trying so much to simplify this in this last chapter of his life and make this about common sense and cut out the other things. After working with him for seven years, I'm finally understanding some of these things on a deeper level.
HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT CAN OVERCOME THE POWER OF EXTRACTIVE, EXPLOITATIVE SYSTEMS
HART HAGAN: What is it about holistic management that could give certainty amid the uncertainty in the world?
ABBEY KINGDON-SMITH: I feel strongly about this. This is why I have dedicated my life to holistic management and done this work, as the Global Network Coordinator and as a Holder of UVE (Uplifting the Voice of the Ecosystem), I believe that it empowers people. It allows people to tap into their own power. And through that there's freedom.
We are in a place right now where most people are not free. We have very oppressive systems that we've built, very extractive systems. And I think the way that it’s playing out in the environment is just one expression of that.
HART HAGAN: How do these oppressive systems play themselves out in the environment?
ABBEY KINGDON-SMITH: It’s extractive. The whole model is based on coming to a place, taking it over, taking everything you can from it and moving on and leaving this kind of barren wasteland behind you.
Living in a rural area, that’s exactly what happened here.
First, there was an army fort. And there was a Native American boarding school that literally wiped out culture and language here. It attempted complete genocide.
Then they came in for mining. There was a gold rush here. Then there was logging. Now we have a ghost town. And we have these struggling rural economies that don't have jobs, that depend on these larger companies to buy from them.
So all of our resources go outside of our community, instead of having a thriving local economy. If I look around my area, I'm surrounded by ranches that sell to Cargill. And so these big trucks come in, they haul all the cattle out of this valley and they go somewhere else. We're trying to develop local food systems and be more resilient.
HART HAGAN: Wendell Berry said, “Without strong local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.” If that's true, then the converse is, if you have a strong local economy then the people have power, and the land has a voice. So you can help bring that to your region.
ABBEY KINGDON-SMITH: That's our intention. That's absolutely our intention. And we do it by practicing in our own lives every day and designing our business, in how we hire and how we work together. We don't want this to be something that happens somewhere else, or at only a global level.
This is happening in our own households in our own lives and our own business. But that is what we're here to do, that's our whole purpose.