[Scpg] [HD-L] Allan Savory Events Reminder 12/13 (Sat.) SLO

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

Hello all,  from wfrancis at calpoly.edu

Just a reminder about the Allan Savory events we will be co-hosting tomorrow
from 2:30-9:00 p.m. at the Davies, 5015 Jesperson Rd. SLO CA (details 
copied below
from my previous post).  Below that, I have copied Allan Savory's direct
response to some of the concerns and many interesting points Chris had raised
after I sent out the first announcement.  I don't recall Allan's response ever
making it to the listserve.  Apologies for any double postings.

Events will unfold pretty much as described below, though I would point out
that the afternoon session will be much more informal than the evening
presentation.  More time will be alotted for questions and group discussion on
specific projects in the afternoon.  Allan will give a more formal 
presentation
on Holistic Management as a decision making process in the evening.

Hope you can join us for either, or both - Hunter wfrancis at calpoly.edu



******************************************************************************
[ORIGINAL INVITATION...]
I would like to let you know of a wonderful opportunity to learn about a 
unique
decision making model, Holistic Management, with its chief creator and leading
spokesperson, Allan Savory.  The SARC will be co-sponsoring an event on
Saturday, December 13th, which will give people the opportunity to meet Mr.
Savory and hear about his inspirational, international work at an informal
community gathering.

Two back-to-back events have been planned at the home of Bill and Phyllis
Davies (5015 Jespersen Rd., SLO).  All are welcome to attend either or both.

Saturday afternoon, December 13, 2:30-5:00 p.m.:
An intriguing look at Mr. Savory's work in the US, African and other
international ecosystems.  The program will be of interest to all ages.
Holistic Management has been used by agriculturists around the world to
understand and manage natural resources more effectively.  Its application has
often resulted in a remarkable regeneration of disturbed environments.  Mr.
Savory will share some of the “hows” and “whys” of these success stories, and
the Davies will share their first-hand experience with examples they saw on
their recent trip to Africa.  Potluck refreshments will be served.

THEN...

Saturday evening, December 13, 5:30-9:00 p.m.:
A more specific talk on Holistic Management as a decision making process that
can be used by any group decision making body ­ whether a farm, business,
organization or even a family.  Exciting examples of local applications of
Holistic Management will be shared over a potluck dinner ­ including a
presentation by Cal Poly faculty involved with the development of the SARC’s
(our!) “holistic goal” using Holistic Management under the guidance of Animal
Science Professor Rob Rutherford.

Hope you can join us for any or all of this exciting series of events.

If you are coming in the afternoon, please bring healthy refreshments.
Dinner guests please bring:  A-E bring a Salad;  F-T Main Dish;  U-Z Finger
Deserts.

DIRECTIONS:  (5015 Jespersen Rd.)  Take Buckley Rd (South of the airport) to
Jespersen Rd. (turn to go South).  Go about ½ mile just over the crest of the
first hill.  Turn right onto the paved driveway between the pine trees, just
beyond three black mailboxes/bow.

MORE INFO ON ALLAN SAVORY:
“Allan Savory recently received the prestigious environmental Banksia Award
for making, significant contributions to the betterment of our environment on
a global level.  Past winners include Rachel Carson and Sir David
Attenborough.  Allan Savory has developed what is widely believed to be an
entirely new decision-making framework through which all people, regardless
of their location, industry or circumstances can make decisions that are
simultaneously environmentally, socially and financially sound in both the
short and long term: Holistic Management.  Holistic decision making puts
people back in control of their destinies and restores a sense of direction in
difficult times.  Many thousands of families and businesses around the world
are now successfully using this new framework to radically improve their
quality of life while simultaneously regenerating the resource base that
sustains them.”


************************************************************************
ALLAN SAVORY'S RESPONSE TO CHRIS
[Chris' comments Allan was responding to are in brackets], for clarity...

Chris,
We do not know one another, but you obviously share my deep concern for the
land and life dependent upon it otherwise you would not be taking all the
trouble that you are to look into my work.

I can only guage your level of comprehension of Holistic Management from your
emails I have seen.   I am not sure if you have read my book or not "Holistic
Management. A New Framework for Decision Making" 1998.  If not it might help.
I will send you a copy if you promise to read it!

I have made some comment below that might help.

Please believe me that I do not have any great commitment to Holistic
Management and if you or any other person can come up with a better way of
saving our public lands, private lands, national parks, wilderness areas, 
rural
communities and families, cities and nations I will adopt it tomorrow and urge
the closing down of our center.  I seek only that elusive better world that 
has
somehow been out of our grasp for thousands of years.  So far the use of the
holistic framework is proving encouragingly successful in all situations where
it is actually used.   And so far despite my urging scientists world wide to
let me know of any aspect of the process that is not scientifically sound none
have done so apart from the early ones that helped us refine the process.  And
where I have had a great many scientists (including some of my greatest 
critics
and skeptics) treat Holistic Management as a hypothesis and asked them to work
in teams to find ways to cause this hypothesis to fail in practice, they have
been unable to do so.  These groups have always ended in frustration a couple
of hours later saying that the only way it fails is if it is not practiced!  I
was hoping that we could find at least ways to make the process fail in 
theory -
  as we would then know that at some point we can expect failure in practice.
If we do get a failure in practice we will have to go back to the drawing 
board
and continue seeking some means of dealing with complexity in management.

Anyway see if the comments below do help at all.

Allan.

From: Chris <refugee at pronet.net>    [Chris' comments BELOW are in brackets]
Reply-To: refugee at pronet.net
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 20:02:03 -0800
To: wfrancis at calpoly.edu, hd-l at slonet.org
Cc: caucus at omnipost.com, infodavies at earthlink.net, indymedia at omnipost.com,
Hopedance at aol.com
Subject: Re: More on Holistic Management .............

[I had also received the Gretchen Blank and Savory letters but I was waiting
for a response from a note I sent to Bill Marlett before responding.]
 >If you do get a response I would be interested as I could not get one.

[I haven't heard back from him but I can comment on some of the issues raised
without waiting for his reply. Because of the number of issues raised in the
response from wfrancis, I will reply with two or more posts.  First, I
recognize that the 12/13 event featuring Mr. Savory "will be on
HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT (HM), not grazing practices." ]
 >Although I will not be going into any specifics of how to handle 
livestock if
used in the management of any situation, I will cover why it is essential to
understand that with the 'tools' available to humans for the last million 
years
it was impossible to prevent the degradation of most of the world's lands
(including public lands in the US).  The conventional decision making 
framework
used by humans of all ages and cultures for the last million years in all
situations from caves to households, from caveman to current sophisticated
scientific team has some flaws in it.  Thus we find our decison making
framework is ideally suited to what systems thinkers call hard 
systems.  But we
also now realise that there are flaws in this framework that lead to the
problems we are experiencing world wide with soft and natural systems.  People
who think HM is about cattle always miss the point and get into endless
arguments.  People who get the profoundly simple concept of the two decision
frameworks we now have understand how and when to use any tool - technology,
fire, rest in either form, animal impact or grazing - without conflict.   You
probably are not aware of the fact that I hate livestock and was more violent
than any environmentalists here. But as the science became more clear to me I
finally came to realise that I loved land and wildlife more than I hated
cattle. And so my attitude changed and now there are cattle, goats, pigs and
donkeys healing the land that used to be mine alongside increasing numbers of
elephants, buffalo, lions, kudu, zebra, giraffe and all the fine animals that
were dying out due to land degradation under our best efforts while we were
unknowingly using the conventional decision framework.  A framework with which
we now know it is simply not possible to reverse the degradation of such
seasonal rainfall lands.  It is easy to reverse degradation in perennially
humid lands with the conventional framework as long as one ignores social and
economic realities.

[That is why I wrote in my post that I was offering "A few cautionary notes
about Holistic Management when it is applied to livestock grazing."]
 >As mentioned, if you can find any flaws in the process here please do let me
know.

[Specifically, most of the objections are raised when Holistic Range 
Management
(HRM) is used on PUBLIC (as opposed to private) lands.]
 >First, there is no such thing as Holistic Range Management - ranges and land
are not manageable with any framework we have learned. Land is so tied to the
mind of the managers that they are inseparable as also is the economic
environment - thus we have learned that to succeed we need to manage land,
culture or people and money as one indivisible entity or whole.

[That said, if Savory's version of holistic management doesn't work when
applied to livestock grazing, one might question whether it works when applied
to other problems, i.e., is there a problem with the decision making 
framework,
with the follow-up management or both?]
 >Holistic Management does work as mentioned in any situation - at least 
that is
our experience to date.  And particularly so where land, culture and money are
managed together whether the land be public or private is 
immaterial.   Also as
mentioned, although we cannot find any further flaws at the moment with the
framework, we are aware of many problems with  practice.  Wherever people do
not practice it we see failure and always we see this blamed on the process
although it was not used.  This is what I think you the late Joy Belsky, Bill
Marlet and others keep referring to.   Joy and others were also commonly
refering to failures in land management that I experienced in the years 
leading
up to finally breaking through with Holistic Management.

What the problems are with practice we are gradually isolating and hopefully
understanding.  Increasingly I see the amazing parallel with excercise and
eating less.  It is unquestioned that if people simply eat less and excercise
more they will live longer and healthier lives. Most people would genuinely
like to do so.  But despite the simplicity of this knowledge and a multi-
billion dollar industry promoting it we see people buying excercise machines,
running shoes, etc but a few weeks later they are gathering dust.  Holistic
Management is profoundly simply.  As soon as people understand it and practice
we see almost immediate improvement in their lives and economic situation and
if land is involved we see measurable improvement in land and biodiversity.
There is a step in the process whereby we stop and investigate if we are not
seeing such results within about 18 months at latest as they are routine.  But
as with excercise we find most people simply revert back to using the 
ingrained
conventional decision framework (and if they think it is about cattle they
always to this I find).

It is said by my critics that whenever someone reports failure I simply say
they did not do it properly. As you see this is correct.  And that too is what
those many scientists working in teams on trying to cause failure at least
theoretically found - that the only way to cause failure was not to do it!  So
what we need to find somewhere is a case where someone has shifted their
decision framework and despite this we see failure. That I am seeking as much
as my critics.  Some say I have to be involved for it to work.  Fortunately we
have good evidence that this is not the case.  There are some great successes
on ranches where I have never set foot.

[Perhaps the problems really boil down to differences in goals and values. One
person might think the management is fine because the results are in line with
their goals and values while for another the results fall far short of their
goals and values.]
 >This is the conventional framework - where decisions are formed toward the
achievement of values, objectives, goals, missions or visions.  This almost
always leads to conflict and has nothing to do with the holistic framework.
Although people managing holistically still have goals, objectives and seek
missions or visions the entire process is driven by a totally new concept to
mankind. Something beyond goals, missions or visions that was not in any 
branch
of science or religions of the world.  I had to come up with a name for this
new concept beyond goals and visions that would tie our deepest values and
culture to our life support system and called it a holisticgoal.   Regrettably
because I used the term goal in that people often call it a goal when it is 
not
and cause confusion.

[The “quasi-religious” comment in Raether's article probably reflects the view
of many grazing activists/environmentalists that claims associated with HM
appear to be more metaphysical than scientific. If grazing is responsible for
the destruction of the ecosystems in question, one might reasonably ask how
grazing will be able to adequately restore them.]
 >As soon as people can understand the new insights - brittle environments vs
non-brittle, partial vs total rest of land and that overgrazing has nothing to
do with animal numbers then it becomes clear why we have seen such degradation
of land under grazing with livestock. And why we are seeing such degradation
also in areas devoid of livestock in brittle environments.  And why we see 
such
dramatic improvement of brittle environment lands when managed holistically 
and
many more animals are used simulating nature before humans killed off most of
the large herbivores of North America over 8,000 years ago and tried to 
replace
their role with fire unsuccessfully.

[One should not be surprised that HM applied to grazing on private land may be
getting positive results for three reasons.  First, the baseline condition of
the ecosystems, having been grazed for a hundred years or more, is
often "trashed" to "hammered," and that condition is due to the livestock
grazing. The eroded gullies found on many central coast hillsides as well as
the absence of native grasses and young oak trees testify to that condition.
Second, given the poor management over those many decades, any attention to
management is likely to bring improvements to the land. Third, the goals on
private land are a little different than on public lands. More and more people
want to see their public lands "managed" as fully functioning native 
ecosystems
with their full complement of native species.  They do not want them 
managed as
cow pastures, as both public and private lands currently are.
If Cal Poly has developed an improved system for managing sheep that came out
of the HM decision making process then more power to them. I can only hope 
that
others will use it if they can't get better results doing something else.]
 >If Cal Poly develops any improved SYSTEM for managing sheep and land it will
fail at some point as all management systems fail by definition once one
understands complexity and systems thinking.  Many people try to convert
Holistic Management to some sort of grazing system but always failure will
follow at some point.  I hope Cal Poly are understanding this and that if they
are managing land in a whole situation with sheep they will be using the
planned grazing process associated with Holistic Management.  This planning
process deals with complexity which grazing systems try to avoid but cannot.

[RE: http://managingwholes.com/morris1.htm and similar comments:
It is odd to hear people promote the idea that the land needs a non-native
herbivore like the cow to make our ecosystems function properly. Just how did
these ecosystems get along without the cow for millions of years anyway? Fire
suppression is not good for ecosystems either.  The Hollister Hills don't need
cows but they do need native herbivores and fires at natural intervals.]
 >Like you I wish we could bring back those original animals that co-evolved
with the soils and plants in this environment.  Unfortunately the earliest
Americans hunted and burnt something like 80% of the genera (goodness knows 
how
many species) to extinction.  Now we simply have to do the best we can with
what large herbivores are available and we have to understand that changing
their behaviour is critical.  For years I have said that riparian damage by
even wildlife like elk is due to the lack of the original pack-hunting
predators necessary for plant, herbivore, soil relationships.  I was 
pleased to
read this week of new research in Yellowstone where the researchers are
recording less damage to riparian areas since wolves were reintroduced!  They
seem to be concluding that predators were important in plant herbivore
relationships so at last people might believe me.  I discovered this in the
wonderful National Park riparian areas along the Zambezi river that I wrecked
as a conventionally trained biologist over forty years ago.

Personally I would never get into argument with anyone as to whether or not
cattle should be on any land until people concerned have a holistic goal in a
whole situation.  Only at that point can such a decision be made by all 
without
conflict. If anyone tries to sort this out with the conventional framework 
they
end in conflict for the very reasons you outlined above - differing goals and
values.

[When people talk about the return of biodiversity one should ask if they are
speaking of native biodiversity, i.e. increases in the numbers of native
species living on the land. They should also want to know how that increased
biodiversity compares to the pre-Spaniard/pre-cow biodiversity of the 1500's
and before.
The Morris article says that "Ranchers produce water. There should be no rent
for people who are generating wealth with soil surface and vegetation
management." This is the sort of poppycock that causes people to make comments
about HM being quasi-religious. Remember that it was grazing--through soil
compaction, vegetation removal and riparian area destruction, etc.--that
destroyed the water holding capacity of western ecosystems and resulted in 
high
rates of water runoff and erosion. Ranchers have yet to pay reparations for
that damage.  To now credit and pay them for supposedly producing water when
they experience some marginal restoration success with improved management is
ludicrous. Western native ecosystems had their highest water holding capacity
before the livestock showed up.  It was all down hill from there.]
 >I am afraid it was all downhill long before ranchers arrived with 
livestock.
It was all downhill from about 8 or 9,000 years ago when most large herbivores
and their attendant predators were killed out.  There is good reason why
irrigation-based civilizations in North America failed due to land degradation
many years before the Spaniards arrived with the first livestock.  To
understand all this please read my book and learn about those missing insights
that helped us understand such complexity and get beyond simply blaming
livestock while ignoring the degradation in wilderness areas and national 
parks
as well as experimental plots without livestock.

[In the article, Morris says "What has he learned? "You've got to have a goal
and a plan. You need to revisit it to make sure you're getting it done." Yes
that's right--it is absolutely elementary. Of course you need a goal, a plan,
and you have to monitor the results and respond appropriately. That was known
long before HM came along.]
 >Tragically here you are picking up on Joe Morris's error in using the term
goal when he did not mean a goal.  Had he used the term holisticgoal which he
meant it produces a whole new situation. This is, as mentioned earlier,
entirely new to science and mankind.  We have never had any concept that 
linked
our culture and life support system in a manner that would enable humans to
begin to make decisions that were simultaneously socially, environmentally and
economically correct both short and long term.  This simply cannot be done
using any goal, objective, mission of vision.  So in your criticism you are
understandable confusing a holisticgoal with a goal - two totally different
concepts.

Chris I hope this has been helpful.  I don't know where you live but if you 
can
come to the talk it would be good to meet you.  As you probably gather, I have
become awfully tired of a small but vocal group of people who keep attacking
work done by me while I was unconsciously using the conventional framework and
before I developed holistic management. Or they attack what Holistic 
Management
is not.  At the same time I am pleading with all to attack Holistic Management
as I desperately would like anyone to find any flaws in the process that we
have not yet seen.  Please help me find any flaws. I mean it.

Allan Savory
Founding Director The Savory Center for Holistic Management.
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
www.holisticmanagement.org
Chairman
Africa Centre for Holistic Management.
Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.
www.africansojourn.com
www.vicfallsadventures.com

*****************************************************************************


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