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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Fwd: Savory Institute, grasslands and grazing
  • Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2011 00:47:58 -0400



http://www.ted.com/initiatives/aws/changing_our_future.html

1994 article in Permaculture Activist by Peter Bane:
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/PeterBane/Jean_Pain.html
It won an award from the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge:
http://challenge.bfi.org/#2010winner

From the Savory website:
http://www.savoryinstitute.com/our-focus
"Deep paradigm shifts have great difficulty taking hold
unless there exists a simultaneous need. This need has
manifested itself in the form of global climate change,
combined with the broadening recognition that our economic
models, based on the flawed presumption of infinite growth
in a world of finite resources, are inherently
unsustainable.

*Holistic Management* is the paradigm shift that will
address this need. First conceived and developed by
Rhodesian biologist, game ranger, politician, farmer, and
rancher, Allan Savory,
<http://www.savoryinstitute.com/allan-savory/> over 40 years
ago, Holistic Management is driven by a decision making
framework which ensures economic, ecological, and social
soundness, simultaneously, both short and long term.

Savory articulated four key insights which are pivotal to
our understanding of the natural world —insights which
underpin the Holistic Management decision making framework.
Land, grazing, and financial planning procedures complement
the framework, enabling on-the-ground managers to
effectively handle the inherent complexity of stewarding
natural “wholes”.

Our core competency in Holistic Management is the
ecologically regenerative, economically viable, and socially
sound management of the world’s grasslands, rangelands, and
savannas. These environments comprise two thirds of the
planet’s surface area.

Their degradation has been ongoing since the first hominids
discovered the tool of fire, and has accelerated in concert
with the expansion of the human population (with its
associated eradication of most of the world’s grazing and
browsing megafauna, the subsequent replacement with fewer
numbers of more sedentary, domesticated livestock, and soil
degrading cropping practices). This degradation is
characterized by a loss of soil cover (comprised of both
living plants and decaying plant litter), which leads to
less effective water and mineral/nutrient cycling, poorer
solar energy flow, and reduced biodiversity.

This all leads to the loss of previously sequestered soil
carbon (a major source of our existing atmospheric CO2
load), severely degraded land or deserts, and the loss of
food production capacity.

In a natural context, constantly moving, healthy herds of
large herbivores, interacting with their associated
predators, create the disturbance (grazing and animal
impact) necessary to maintain healthy ecosystem processes.
Their presence ensures the continuation of the carbon cycle
(with the all-important step of “decay” accelerated by the
microbes in their digestive tracts), high levels of plant
diversity, and a covered soil surface.

Because the animals are constantly moving to new grazing,
plants (between episodes of heavy grazing) have the chance
to fully recover their above-ground leaf area and restore
carbohydrate reserves in their crowns, roots, and stem
bases. Holistic Management’s expertise is in
re-creating/imitating these natural grazing patterns with
domestic livestock, and regenerating the land in the
process.

After nearly fifty years of practice, we now have successful
Holistic Management practitioners spread across the globe,
from Canada to the tip of Patagonia, and from Zimbabwe to
Australia to Montana."



  • [permaculture] Fwd: Savory Institute, grasslands and grazing, Lawrence F. London, Jr., 03/19/2011

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