Alan Savory's Holistic Management Approach

There is only one option. I repeat to you, only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable. On February 27, 2013, this man went before a worldwide television audience to propose a controversial solution. to the greatest environmental threat to the survival of the planet as we know it today. His topic was how to halt desertification and reverse climate change. He was given a standing ovation. His name is Alan Savory and he'd waited a long time for this moment. Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo A Zimbabwean by birth, wildlife ecologist and international consultant, Alan Savory is a passionately committed conservationist, driven by an unshakable belief in an idea. An idea so radical, it has provoked extraordinary hostility in some quarters. Yet he stubbornly persists in being heard, citing compelling evidence to get his message across. So what people need to understand is some very basic facts. For example, we need about half a ton of food per human every year for healthy maintenance of life, etc. But what we're doing today is we're producing more than 75 billion tons of eroding soil because of agriculture. And that is equal to more than 10 tons of eroding soil for every human alive today. Clearly we're going out of business. Savory is adamant that if we are to survive, ideas have to change. Foremost of which is the long-held belief that land degradation is caused by livestock. Rather, it is the way humans manage livestock, he argues. Put simply, it is not too many animals on the land that are to blame, but too few that are causing the destruction. Well, this is typical of what we tragically have here, just miles of country like this. People on permanent food aid, and every year is a drought. It doesn't matter what rain we get. I've been watching this for years, and it's just like this. It's now virtually desert country. You see this? This is a typical river in the area, bone dry almost throughout the year. Occasionally it will flash flood after a storm and that's it. And I'm afraid that's typical here. Typical now of a few cattle wandering past and we're 10 past 12 in the day. They're not out grazing. They're just wandering around the land. They're not with any herder. And this is what's destroying the land, just too few animals wandering around. But the problem is not limited to Africa, Savory says. Two thirds of the world's land is in fact desertifying. So what is desertification? Desertification is just a fancy word for land drying up and turning to desert ultimately, and there's a good spot to illustrate it. It happens because of our practices that make the rainfall that we receive less effective. And you see it here where soil is exposed. Any rain soaking into the soil will just evaporate out of it again. Because this is hot, it's hot even to touch now, and when high rainfall falls, it runs off, and you can actually see the runoff and the layer of litter that has swept off that as water runs. And the saying that people have that droughts cause the bare ground is nonsense. It's the bare ground that causes the droughts. It's the other way around. What we're needing to do worldwide, and particularly where the country is desertifying, is to make the available rainfall more effective. Now, this is not taught in any university of the world, and it's well illustrated in this picture. This was taken while 25 millimeters or an inch of rain was falling in the Tehama Desert, and you can see the water running. Now, in terms of drums of water, that was equal to 1,250 drums of water on every hectare of land. But the next day, That land was completely dry and that is the desertification process. In Zimbabwe, it's the tail end of a poor rainy season on this ranch 30 kilometers south of the Victoria Falls. Called Dimbangombe, it's been Savory's home for many years. And while he's seen enough bad wet seasons to have learned to accept nature on its own terms, he no longer believes he's a helpless victim to vagaries in the weather. So really the aim of what we're doing is trying to make the available rainfall more effective. We're out in the rain right now and you can see it. Where the soil is bare, this water is flowing and it's depositing silt or carrying silt, depositing it down there. Where the grassland is, where we've got grass plants growing in some litter, there's absolutely no water flowing. This is all just soaking in and that's what we've got to get. and then that water should only leave the soil through growing plants or underground flow in the soil to aquifers and the river. How he solved the problem of providing that necessary ground cover, we shall see later in the programme. For now, he has a problem with the grass he's grown in this paddock. He doesn't have enough cattle to graze it, and if it is not grazed in the next few months, the grass must decay biologically before the new growing season. Because if it doesn't, this grassland and its soil will begin to die. Here's a good spot to show you why we have to get more animals and are desperate to get the money and buy the cattle that we need. Because here you have grass that we did not graze last year and it just kills itself. It's changed to oxidation. You see the different colour. That is gradual chemical breakdown, not rapid biological breakdown, and the plants just kill themselves. The traditional response has been to use fire. However, That creates an arguably even greater problem. Burning one hectare of grassland gives off more and more damaging pollutants than 6,000 cars. And we are burning in Africa every single year more than one billion hectares of grasslands. And almost nobody is talking about it. What are we going to do? There is only one option. I repeat to you, only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable, and to use livestock. Bunched and moving as a proxy for former herds and predators and mimic nature. Savory calls it holistic management and planned grazing. And it works like this. Cattle, sheep and goats are massed into large herds. And because they dung and urinate over their own food source, the animals have to keep moving, which prevents overgrazing. More importantly, however, the impact of their hooves breaks up hard ground, allowing air and water to penetrate the soil. The trampling of old grass provides cover from the drying effects of the sun and the wind, and the animals'dung and urine enrich the soil. Because the cattle are the main tool using their hooves, etc., to grow the grass, they graze everywhere on the ranch. So as you look up on these rocky hills, you'll see all of that is fresh grass of the season, and that's because the cattle are grazed right over the hills and everywhere. There's no area where we don't use the cattle at some time in the year. But, Savory emphasizes, without a carefully structured grazing program, holistic management simply will not work. The whole secret of the success here isn't just using the animals as a tool. People think... that all you have to do is to bunch the animals and move them, but people have done that for thousands of years and created the deserts. That doesn't work. The secret to this is a planning process whereby we divide the animals. divide the land up into divisions. Then the people doing the planning follow a set of steps where they focus on one at a time and they bring the information onto a chart. And it has to be put on a chart. And they plot the months that they're planning across the top of the chart. They put the paddocks down here. Then in another step, they put the ratings and they fill in here all the wildlife carving periods. Other factors that have to be borne in mind on the land and when the chart is all prepared, finally they plot the movements of the animals and it's plotted where they'll go. Pierre is the main management herd. of cattle, about 500, plus there are sheep and goats as well, and they're grazing in this block of land following the plan and right now the herders are moving them down towards water and they'll drink it this midday period, lie up for a couple of hours and then the herders will move them out again and continue the grazing in this block that's planned to be raised at the moment. I love this because the cattle herd has done everything we want. They've flattened grass, laid litter, scalloped the soil so that the water, carbon, everything is getting into the soil now. This will rebound immediately. We've used nothing but solar energy and we can do this. day after day after day on different parts of the land, creating the wildlife habitat we need and healing the land. The herd will have covered a lot of ground by nightfall, which begs the obvious question where will it spend the night? Driving 500 cattle, sheep and goats to permanent crawls, sited at distant points around the 3,000 hectare ranch every evening, is not a viable option and defeats the basic principle of planned grazing. Savory solution is to have the herders drive the animals into temporary enclosures called predator-friendly crawls. Developed on Dimbangombe, they are made from plastic sheeting, which forms a protective fence that lions and hyenas will not challenge. These crawls move with the herd. While the primary purpose of the crawl is to provide secure overnight shelter for the herd, concentrating a large number of hooved animals in such a confined space for a week provides a graphic demonstration of their impact on open grassland. And there's another bonus. When the herd moves on, this site becomes far more productive than surrounding land. We've had 500-odd cattle in here for a week. This is the overnight crawl, and you can see that that's heavily dunged and trampled, and this is where the chicken coop was. There's a mobile chicken coop that moves with the cattle when this crawl moves, and from that you can see what this soil was like before we put that in, and that will come through to very good grass, whereas this will remain bad. The higher the impact from the cattle, the more the dunging, the trampling, the more grass tends to grow, as long as you don't repeat it too long, as long as it's a short time. Visitors to Dimbangombe come away convinced that here is a simple and economically viable means of improving the livelihoods of rural communities throughout Africa. particularly those reliant on food aid programs. What I want to show you here is this is where we bring the elvenite crawl, but we're bringing it more frequently to this site because we want it as a crop field. And let me show you this is on a Kalahari sand. We selected a very poor soil area, but you can see it's totally covered with manure and litter. And if I dig through this to to try to get to the soil. Okay, now I'm getting to soil and you can see how dark and rich that is. All right, let me show you the contrast with this soil now and what it was like. Now you guys are gonna be amazed at the comparison here. Now that's the soil I picked up in there, the same soil. You see how totally different they are. And this is just sand. You can feel it, you can smell it. Smell the total difference? That we're growing really good crops in now but it's the same poor soil and we're doing that entirely by just using the overnight predator friendly crawl. Now we've come into the area that we treated last year. So this is where you had the cattle last year? Yes, as you can see, you can see them, the maize, stalks etc lying around from the very good yield of crop we got. How much will the crop yields be out of an area like this? When we look at the average crop fields in the community with the traditional agriculture of the moment, over here we're averaging at least five to eight times the yield on these fields. Now this is the field we looked at before the rains and now it's got the crop in it. Unfortunately the crop is small because of two things. First we got half the rainfall we should have had by now. The second baboons got into the field one day and wrecked everything, so we had to replant after Christmas. But the crops, despite that, is looking remarkably good to me. So we're happy with it despite the problems. When Sayuri bought Dimbangombe in the 1970s, the ranch was in a bad state. Its grasslands virtually destroyed and its landscape ravaged by continual felt fires. It's an entirely different story today. When I bought this ranch, the fellow who I bought it from had kept his cattle down in this flare every day of the year and this was so bare that you could see a guinea fowl at 100 yards almost any time of the year. And now I can't see anything a yard from here. It's so well grown up now. Here was conclusive proof. That used properly, holistic management could restore degraded grasslands anywhere in the world. This was the vindication of the years of meticulous research Savory had carried out. He was aware, however, that like any idea, to be truly effective it needed to be put into universal practice. And this meant work. worldwide. He began by targeting Africa. So this is the size of Africa which people have no idea of, even living in Africa. In 1992, Savory and his wife Jody Butterfield set up the Africa Centre for Holistic Management as a learning site for people from all over the continent. Located on Dimbangombe, the centre is tasked with empowering rural communities to manage their lives and natural resources effectively by making decisions that are economically and environmentally sound with the emphasis on acquiring the knowledge and skills to restore water catchments and river flow, Increase forage, livestock and wildlife production, raise crop yields through concentrated animal impact, restore damaged or degraded land, and employ low-stress animal handling. ACHM singled out the nearby Whangae communal lands as the springboard for its plans to spread the holistic management message throughout Zimbabwe and the southern Africa region. I'm director of our program for developing holistic management in communities, bringing holistic management to communities. So that means I've been in charge of developing training materials, a training program, hiring the staff, and making it happen. This program started about four years ago, and we got a large award of almost 5.8 million. managed to do it in about five years to really start to where we're seeing success in communities. We have been working with communities in the past where communities were struggling to understand what decision making using holistic management is all about. What you get is you get a few people in the community wanting to do it but The holistic management concept will require the whole community if it is to work smoothly. When we are doing the training we also make use of the mobilization tool which we call Community Action Cycle. And this is a very powerful tool in bringing communities together. And we have seen a lot of changes in communities in terms of communities being able to be self-reliant and also in terms of the way that they are being treated and the way that they are being treated. You are bringing back their dignity. The major challenges that we've heard are culturally based and mythical, I would like to say. Where people dread to mix their livestock together because of different cultural medicines that they believe each home has and some historical conflicts that each family or each clan has in each community. But we are seeing a lot of improvement and this community is one of them. My cattle are looking very, very healthy and fit. The tragedy of all this is that it doesn't have to be like it is. We could have begun doing what we're doing with the communities now 40 years ago. We would be a long way ahead of it now. Much of holistic management's growing acceptance in these rural communities is due to Alan Savory's total personal commitment. Despite a hectic promotional schedule that takes him abroad for many months of the year, He'll try to find time to drive 50 kilometers to visit a local community where belief in his message is having a profound impact on the lives of thousands of families. Morning, Edison. Hi, Alan. How are you? You're going well. Yeah, I'm doing well. How are you? I'm well, thank you. Thank you so much. Good to get down to see you and the work today. Yeah, things are moving on very well. Good. Exactly, and the community is very, very committed to the programme. OK. Yeah. Innocent Mungkuli should know. As a livestock management specialist employed by the centre to advise the villagers, he is hugely encouraged by this community's decision to abandon their traditional go-it-alone herding practices for the collective holistic management alternative. Well, in a sense I see the cattle are looking better than they were the ones we saw on the road. Yeah, that's very true. There is a very big difference with cattle which are not in the program. Having demonstrated very clearly on the ranch back at our headquarters what can be done, be done. We're now extending that into this greater community of about 150,000 people, but starting with some of the smaller communities and this is one of the starting programs. We're having provided water for the cattle, it is also providing water for the gardens. Innocent here is the man in charge who is coaching and training the people. First of all we constructed a reservoir tank and after that here it used to be a kettle crawl. Then after that we had to put a garden. Then the garden is enabling people to improve their nutrition as well as their income. They're selling vegetables? Yes, they are selling. Philip, what can you tell me from your... So plan now is happening? Now we are on paddock number five, the Kekung. Then from where do they go? What does the plan show? They've got the plan then from paddock five we'll be going to paddock six. So paddock six is down here. This is paddock six. And then from there? Then from paddock six then we'll be going to paddock seven. That is seven. That is the area where we'll be. This is where the cattle have been crawled for about a week or so and up until yesterday on this portion of the field and now they will plant crops all over the field but get three to five times the yield on these areas where we put the crawls overnight. The community is very very excited, even personally as the field officer. I am very, very excited because there is a very high adoption of the method by the community. Really this is bringing a very big change to the community. When this program was introduced in the community, then it was something new to us. because we could not even understand it to start with. But after exercising what we were taught to do, grazing together, we experienced that there was a very big change. Amiabu, the keg, the way how they look, there's a very big change than previous. They taught us everything. Now we don't have any cow dying because they taught us how we should keep them and I'm sure at the moment when these five cows I'm having now they will increase and I'll have money to buy more which is something very good the holistic management what they did. We have quietly learned a lot. We are doing everything on our own. Oh mama, we are going to win. Oh mama, we are going to win. Oh mama, we are going to win. Oh mama, we are going to win. Canela, oh mama, we are going to win. This program has taught us to manage our livestock productively. We used to struggle with water, but now we have a water tank that supplies all the water we need for our livestock and gardening project. Okay, so about two to three years ago these women here could not feed their families for the whole year. They could only do it for three to four months in a year, but now we have food all year round. The present government of Zimbabwe has seen the results of what we're doing up here and become very supportive. They've formed a permanent... committee of heads of ministries to try and spread the knowledge. around the country and what we are going to be doing shortly is recommending that in all schools we begin with the kids very young and giving them the basic environmental literacy and understanding of why livestock, too few livestock, destroy the people's lives, water etc and how we can rectify all of this by running many more animals but properly managed. This crop field here is Regina's field which she treated using Animal Impact. And if you can just take this, look at this one, today is the 6th of March. This was planted on the 14th of January. And look at the crop right on the other side which is much older but still looks very unhealthy. And this is the same lady who fed all of us today. In 2010, the Africa Center for Holistic Management won the Buckminster Fuller Challenge for its work in reversing desertification. In that same year, Alan and Jody, with other partners, founded the Savory Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to promote large-scale restoration of the world's grasslands. Today, holistic management is practiced by tens of thousands of people in countries across the globe. It's reliably estimated that up to 16 million hectares, or 40 million acres, are under holistic management worldwide, with the largest impact on the ranges and grasslands of the seasonal rainfall environments. That's about two-thirds of the world's land surface. It's a powerful endorsement of the seeds of an idea that grew out of the African bush half a century ago and still has its roots there. What we're doing here is a small part of our global operations. Institute is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, and they run the global effort from there. And then part of our strategy to get this to go to scale worldwide because of the seriousness of climate change desertification is to have locally led, locally managed learning hubs around the world. And this was the first of the hubs on which we're modeling others from 10 different countries, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Turkey, the UK, Ireland. United States, etc. So there are many countries getting involved. So underlying all our training... The last time I counted we trained people from 21 countries, I think just here. Matt Rales and Katrina Fowler are Americans from Maryland, where they grass finish beef cattle. They're here to see first-hand the reversal of desertification in action. I can't believe it's taken us this long to get here. It's exceeded my expectations beyond imagination. The grass is even thicker and more diverse than I was ever expecting. And at this hub we can accommodate 30 or more people and we have continuous trainings going on, big parties, small parties. Coming here and we have training materials, the textbook I wrote, the handbook that Jody Butterfield wrote and many other training materials and increasingly because of the scale of the problem globally we're going into internet training, self-help, more and more things and we are aiming to establish a hundred learning hubs around the world. where people are learning, teaching each other in their own language, own culture, self-led virtually, managed locally, formed locally, and so it's a strategic move we're taking on a global scale now. I'm going to take what I've learned from here back to the United And do the best I can to get as many animals managed holistically under planned grazing as we can. And try to scale this kind of management as great as we can. Sally Nicol is a South African business owner from Johannesburg. Two months ago I had no interest in climate change and I discovered managing holistically and it has completely changed my life. It's completely changed the way I think about the environment and about what is possible and about how we are connected to the land. And yesterday I met a woman who had used... used her livestock and her neighbours'livestock, she put 15 animals together and impacted her crop field. She then got borrowed seed from her neighbours and she has grown without fertiliser the most healthy crop of corn or milis that I saw in that entire area. I'd never seen anything like it. So this is one of the most remarkable women in this community. She lost her husband in 2011, left her with eight kids. Now she lost one last year. She has seven to take care of. The program has helped her feed her family. It has helped her take care of her cattle. It has helped her even have enough food for the whole year. Days end, Fine Savory relaxing back home with Jodie, his wife of 32 years, who has played an active role in the development of holistic management. I was born just south of here in Bulawero. and grew up in the country. My home was a 45,000-acre garage about 25 miles down that way, and my kids were brought up there. My father, I buried his remains in the... the river and my sister and my eldest son here are buried here and my youngest son so it's very much just home to me and this is the way I like to live here amongst the game I don't actually like living in a house at all we have another home in New Mexico but when we're out and live there and we tend to jokingly say that's Jodie's home and this is mine I love it no I do love it and And all my life I've been a person who likes to live outdoors. I grew up hunting, fishing, doing all those things with my dad. And I've just loved this. It's just, it's heaven. All the dramas seem to happen when I'm away. Yeah. That's when the elephants will be over there or coming in at night or wild dogs will chase a bush buck and kill it right outside my window. And I'm always here alone when that happens. One day watching a dog. Walking out of the kitchen, three lions chased a kudu right there in front of the river. It's just this incredible drama I get to see every day. Although it seems we're remote living in a bush camp like this for six months of the year as we do, thanks to technology we can keep in touch. Everything here is just solar powered, operates off batteries down here. But we've got a satellite connection and get some broadband. Right now. Right now, Jody is on a Skype call to Daniela Howell, our CEO in Boulder, Colorado. So routinely we're holding conferences with people around the world. I have to set up one tomorrow morning to speak to people in Switzerland before I go to London at the weekend. But although it's not all that efficient always, we manage. The dawn of a new day and it's raining again. But it's only a passing shower, not heavy enough to raise the level in the river in front of Savory's camp. However, something will have happened to this water on its journey downstream. We've now come up higher in the catchment of the river that flows past my camp. Now you can see the water in the pool is muddy, you cannot see half an inch under the water, and that's flowing down here. As you look here... You can see how much soil has been washed away from this perennial grass and it's cutting. Now by the time this gets to our camp now we are seeing clear crystal clear water unless it very high rains up here. What's amazing to me here is because we've made the rainfall more effective soaking into the soil less surface flow so that the soil really absorbs the rain is that this remained clear after we had 50 millimeters or two inches of rain two days ago only a kilometer above this. Now had we come here a few years ago that simply would not have been possible. This would have flowed far more strongly muddy water and then settled over the next day or two. This time it remained clear right throughout and hardly rose at all. Now we've joined a river of about the same size coming off the neighboring land, National Parks hunting lands, and you can see where the flood water has reached this year. And the vehicle, in fact, would be underwater where we are. 50 meters from the river and all of these millions and millions of gallons of water that rushed down here should have soaked into the land to keep rivers flowing aquifers etc it won't that River will go dry this year this pool on the Dien Gombe River has never gone dry though it is the driest it has been in 15 years It won't rain for another three months, and as this is the only surface water in the area, Savory is preserving it for the hundreds of elephants and buffalo that water here, and making other arrangements for the domestic livestock. While Dimben Gombe was primarily concerned with regenerating the land and wildlife, Savory found that this could not be achieved without using cattle as the main tool of wildlife and land regeneration. Today, this 3,000 hectare property is also home to a large population of wildlife fully integrated with the livestock through the grazing planning. What I want you to see now is where we're preserving bare ground for the wildlife. Otherwise we'll begin to lose some of the wildlife and here you see it. Wildlife and this whole project are a critical part of it, not just because of my passion, but because it takes funds to run this sort of operation, and we've been completely unable to get any support or financial support from environmentalists or environmental organisations. And the bulk of the funding that supports us and all this work has come from the hunting. So we are safari hunting at the same time. And that literally has been what has supported most of this work. This is a hide or blind that we constructed for people to sit in and watch the game coming to the bear area and take pictures and so on. And we had an amusing incident where we had some guests in here and when we came back there were three lions sitting on the top and very terrified. ...guests in here which we thought was very amusing but they didn't. There's one large animal, however, that visitors do like to meet. It's a fine ewe. You want some for me too? Oh, oh, okay. Her name is Dodjoua and we found her as an orphan. She's about 15 years old now and she's very, very gentle, very sweet. We have people with her all the time. All day and very close to her at night. Because she's still at a size where the lions could kill her. This must be one of the last unspoiled places on planet Earth. Manapur's National Park in the Zambezi Valley is so special, it's been declared a World Heritage Site. The surreal light filtering through the trees of the forest creates a distinctive cathedral-like atmosphere for which the park is renowned. One of the most prolific of those trees, the Phaedherbia albida, is in danger of dying out. Nobody knows why, yet they are growing in Alan's Savory. Maize Garden. For all my life almost, they have not been regenerating at all. And people say it's because we've built dams and we're not getting the flooding. Well here we are far from alluvial soils. We're on a Kalahari soil. And this is a Pheidopia albida that has established with the cattle grazing that we're doing. And is now freely growing, showing that it was nothing to do with flooding or any of the things we were saying. And again, I think it's the build-up of the soil structure that is affecting this. Savory is so convinced that managing holistically applies to all environments that he's embarked on a project to see whether he can save the teak trees in a nearby national forest. So this site that I'm photographing for our record now is the first site that we've put the cattle crawl overnight where we hold them on the sand, on the Kalahari sand, much like we've done all the other sites. over the ranch but this being the first on the sand to see what happens because these Kalahari sand forests are in bad trouble without the teak trees regenerating and we want to see if by using the animals we can get the teak trees regenerating as we are getting with some other species. Many years ago this superficially would have looked good on the hills in the growing season, but down in the valley there was heavy overgrazing, a lot of bare ground, and now you can only see bare patches right at the water points we've provided for wildlife, and we're getting mufflo and sable and elephants and everything coming here, and you can sit from this point and see them. Every bit of this has been made possible by the cattle used as a tool. Savory could well argue he's proved conclusively that holistic management works. Yet, 50 years after he first expounded his theory, it is still being dismissed out of hand by a state. What is very disappointing is that although this textbook has been out for over 20 years, we're writing the third edition now, there's a Spanish edition, and it was sent out like all textbooks are, for review to all sorts of organizations, and environmental organizations, universities, etc. wouldn't even review it, and yet the textbook is in use in more than 20 universities and colleges, when I last counted up. People often ask me, how have I kept going despite all the abuse and ridicule, rejection, and people claiming it doesn't work. And it just comes down to one word, I believe, and that is caring. If you care enough, you can do it. about your country, wildlife, the people. You'll do whatever you have to do to keep going. I realize it's not personal. It's happened to every single scientist, without exception, that I'm aware of in the history of the world. of the world. That opposition, the research shows, does not ever die down based on facts, evidence, anything of that nature. It only dies down and institutions change when the views of society overall begin to accept it. In other words, when public opinion changes. And that's why 20 minutes of talk on the TED talk has literally done... more to advance this knowledge worldwide than 50 years of struggling against official opposition has done. And that's because the TED Talks are not about the TED Talks. ...has already gone to well over two million viewers and is still going up by thousands a day. It's been very rewarding. We have a long way to go, but at least we can say it can happen in a very challenging environment, politically, economically, and if it can work here, it can work anywhere. I would say to any detractor of holistic... management, first and foremost, come and see this here at the Africa Center with your own eyes. Come and see the reversal of desertification and the recreation of surface water. The second thing I would say is understand what you're detracting from. look into what managing holistically and holistically planning grazing has done all over the world. Of all the communities where I've worked over the past 30 years or so, and that includes Asia, Latin America, Africa, many countries, this is the program that I think is the most sustainable of all of them because it really touches to the core of people's livelihoods, people's lives, people's... social existence, it brings together so many of those pieces that many other programs don't. It's common knowledge today that biodiversity loss, climate change, loss of soil, poverty, violence rising, all these things are threatening civilization as we know it. Now While it might have been argued 30 years ago, today I don't believe any scientist would argue that management needs to be holistic, embracing all science, all sorts of knowledge. But if we're to have a hope, it has to be done now.

to the greatest environmental threat to the survival of the planet as we know it today. His topic was how to halt desertification and reverse climate change. He was given a standing ovation. His name is Alan Savory and he'd waited a long time for this moment. Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo A Zimbabwean by birth, wildlife ecologist and international consultant, Alan Savory is a passionately committed conservationist, driven by an unshakable belief in an idea.

An idea so radical, it has provoked extraordinary hostility in some quarters. Yet he stubbornly persists in being heard, citing compelling evidence to get his message across. So what people need to understand is some very basic facts.

For example, we need about half a ton of food per human every year for healthy maintenance of life, etc. But what we're doing today is we're producing more than 75 billion tons of eroding soil because of agriculture. And that is equal to more than 10 tons of eroding soil for every human alive today.

Clearly we're going out of business. Savory is adamant that if we are to survive, ideas have to change. Foremost of which is the long-held belief that land degradation is caused by livestock.

Rather, it is the way humans manage livestock, he argues. Put simply, it is not too many animals on the land that are to blame, but too few that are causing the destruction. Well, this is typical of what we tragically have here, just miles of country like this.

People on permanent food aid, and every year is a drought. It doesn't matter what rain we get. I've been watching this for years, and it's just like this. It's now virtually desert country. You see this?

This is a typical river in the area, bone dry almost throughout the year. Occasionally it will flash flood after a storm and that's it. And I'm afraid that's typical here.

Typical now of a few cattle wandering past and we're 10 past 12 in the day. They're not out grazing. They're just wandering around the land. They're not with any herder.

And this is what's destroying the land, just too few animals wandering around. But the problem is not limited to Africa, Savory says. Two thirds of the world's land is in fact desertifying.

So what is desertification? Desertification is just a fancy word for land drying up and turning to desert ultimately, and there's a good spot to illustrate it. It happens because of our practices that make the rainfall that we receive less effective. And you see it here where soil is exposed.

Any rain soaking into the soil will just evaporate out of it again. Because this is hot, it's hot even to touch now, and when high rainfall falls, it runs off, and you can actually see the runoff and the layer of litter that has swept off that as water runs. And the saying that people have that droughts cause the bare ground is nonsense.

It's the bare ground that causes the droughts. It's the other way around. What we're needing to do worldwide, and particularly where the country is desertifying, is to make the available rainfall more effective. Now, this is not taught in any university of the world, and it's well illustrated in this picture. This was taken while 25 millimeters or an inch of rain was falling in the Tehama Desert, and you can see the water running.

Now, in terms of drums of water, that was equal to 1,250 drums of water on every hectare of land. But the next day, That land was completely dry and that is the desertification process. In Zimbabwe, it's the tail end of a poor rainy season on this ranch 30 kilometers south of the Victoria Falls. Called Dimbangombe, it's been Savory's home for many years.

And while he's seen enough bad wet seasons to have learned to accept nature on its own terms, he no longer believes he's a helpless victim to vagaries in the weather. So really the aim of what we're doing is trying to make the available rainfall more effective. We're out in the rain right now and you can see it. Where the soil is bare, this water is flowing and it's depositing silt or carrying silt, depositing it down there. Where the grassland is, where we've got grass plants growing in some litter, there's absolutely no water flowing.

This is all just soaking in and that's what we've got to get. and then that water should only leave the soil through growing plants or underground flow in the soil to aquifers and the river. How he solved the problem of providing that necessary ground cover, we shall see later in the programme.

For now, he has a problem with the grass he's grown in this paddock. He doesn't have enough cattle to graze it, and if it is not grazed in the next few months, the grass must decay biologically before the new growing season. Because if it doesn't, this grassland and its soil will begin to die.

Here's a good spot to show you why we have to get more animals and are desperate to get the money and buy the cattle that we need. Because here you have grass that we did not graze last year and it just kills itself. It's changed to oxidation.

You see the different colour. That is gradual chemical breakdown, not rapid biological breakdown, and the plants just kill themselves. The traditional response has been to use fire. However, That creates an arguably even greater problem. Burning one hectare of grassland gives off more and more damaging pollutants than 6,000 cars.

And we are burning in Africa every single year more than one billion hectares of grasslands. And almost nobody is talking about it. What are we going to do? There is only one option.

I repeat to you, only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable, and to use livestock. Bunched and moving as a proxy for former herds and predators and mimic nature. Savory calls it holistic management and planned grazing.

And it works like this. Cattle, sheep and goats are massed into large herds. And because they dung and urinate over their own food source, the animals have to keep moving, which prevents overgrazing. More importantly, however, the impact of their hooves breaks up hard ground, allowing air and water to penetrate the soil. The trampling of old grass provides cover from the drying effects of the sun and the wind, and the animals'dung and urine enrich the soil.

Because the cattle are the main tool using their hooves, etc., to grow the grass, they graze everywhere on the ranch. So as you look up on these rocky hills, you'll see all of that is fresh grass of the season, and that's because the cattle are grazed right over the hills and everywhere. There's no area where we don't use the cattle at some time in the year. But, Savory emphasizes, without a carefully structured grazing program, holistic management simply will not work.

The whole secret of the success here isn't just using the animals as a tool. People think... that all you have to do is to bunch the animals and move them, but people have done that for thousands of years and created the deserts. That doesn't work.

The secret to this is a planning process whereby we divide the animals. divide the land up into divisions. Then the people doing the planning follow a set of steps where they focus on one at a time and they bring the information onto a chart.

And it has to be put on a chart. And they plot the months that they're planning across the top of the chart. They put the paddocks down here. Then in another step, they put the ratings and they fill in here all the wildlife carving periods.

Other factors that have to be borne in mind on the land and when the chart is all prepared, finally they plot the movements of the animals and it's plotted where they'll go. Pierre is the main management herd. of cattle, about 500, plus there are sheep and goats as well, and they're grazing in this block of land following the plan and right now the herders are moving them down towards water and they'll drink it this midday period, lie up for a couple of hours and then the herders will move them out again and continue the grazing in this block that's planned to be raised at the moment.

I love this because the cattle herd has done everything we want. They've flattened grass, laid litter, scalloped the soil so that the water, carbon, everything is getting into the soil now. This will rebound immediately. We've used nothing but solar energy and we can do this. day after day after day on different parts of the land, creating the wildlife habitat we need and healing the land.

The herd will have covered a lot of ground by nightfall, which begs the obvious question where will it spend the night? Driving 500 cattle, sheep and goats to permanent crawls, sited at distant points around the 3,000 hectare ranch every evening, is not a viable option and defeats the basic principle of planned grazing. Savory solution is to have the herders drive the animals into temporary enclosures called predator-friendly crawls.

Developed on Dimbangombe, they are made from plastic sheeting, which forms a protective fence that lions and hyenas will not challenge. These crawls move with the herd. While the primary purpose of the crawl is to provide secure overnight shelter for the herd, concentrating a large number of hooved animals in such a confined space for a week provides a graphic demonstration of their impact on open grassland. And there's another bonus.

When the herd moves on, this site becomes far more productive than surrounding land. We've had 500-odd cattle in here for a week. This is the overnight crawl, and you can see that that's heavily dunged and trampled, and this is where the chicken coop was. There's a mobile chicken coop that moves with the cattle when this crawl moves, and from that you can see what this soil was like before we put that in, and that will come through to very good grass, whereas this will remain bad.

The higher the impact from the cattle, the more the dunging, the trampling, the more grass tends to grow, as long as you don't repeat it too long, as long as it's a short time. Visitors to Dimbangombe come away convinced that here is a simple and economically viable means of improving the livelihoods of rural communities throughout Africa. particularly those reliant on food aid programs. What I want to show you here is this is where we bring the elvenite crawl, but we're bringing it more frequently to this site because we want it as a crop field.

And let me show you this is on a Kalahari sand. We selected a very poor soil area, but you can see it's totally covered with manure and litter. And if I dig through this to to try to get to the soil.

Okay, now I'm getting to soil and you can see how dark and rich that is. All right, let me show you the contrast with this soil now and what it was like. Now you guys are gonna be amazed at the comparison here.

Now that's the soil I picked up in there, the same soil. You see how totally different they are. And this is just sand.

You can feel it, you can smell it. Smell the total difference? That we're growing really good crops in now but it's the same poor soil and we're doing that entirely by just using the overnight predator friendly crawl.

Now we've come into the area that we treated last year. So this is where you had the cattle last year? Yes, as you can see, you can see them, the maize, stalks etc lying around from the very good yield of crop we got.

How much will the crop yields be out of an area like this? When we look at the average crop fields in the community with the traditional agriculture of the moment, over here we're averaging at least five to eight times the yield on these fields. Now this is the field we looked at before the rains and now it's got the crop in it.

Unfortunately the crop is small because of two things. First we got half the rainfall we should have had by now. The second baboons got into the field one day and wrecked everything, so we had to replant after Christmas.

But the crops, despite that, is looking remarkably good to me. So we're happy with it despite the problems. When Sayuri bought Dimbangombe in the 1970s, the ranch was in a bad state.

Its grasslands virtually destroyed and its landscape ravaged by continual felt fires. It's an entirely different story today. When I bought this ranch, the fellow who I bought it from had kept his cattle down in this flare every day of the year and this was so bare that you could see a guinea fowl at 100 yards almost any time of the year. And now I can't see anything a yard from here.

It's so well grown up now. Here was conclusive proof. That used properly, holistic management could restore degraded grasslands anywhere in the world. This was the vindication of the years of meticulous research Savory had carried out. He was aware, however, that like any idea, to be truly effective it needed to be put into universal practice.

And this meant work. worldwide. He began by targeting Africa. So this is the size of Africa which people have no idea of, even living in Africa.

In 1992, Savory and his wife Jody Butterfield set up the Africa Centre for Holistic Management as a learning site for people from all over the continent. Located on Dimbangombe, the centre is tasked with empowering rural communities to manage their lives and natural resources effectively by making decisions that are economically and environmentally sound with the emphasis on acquiring the knowledge and skills to restore water catchments and river flow, Increase forage, livestock and wildlife production, raise crop yields through concentrated animal impact, restore damaged or degraded land, and employ low-stress animal handling. ACHM singled out the nearby Whangae communal lands as the springboard for its plans to spread the holistic management message throughout Zimbabwe and the southern Africa region. I'm director of our program for developing holistic management in communities, bringing holistic management to communities. So that means I've been in charge of developing training materials, a training program, hiring the staff, and making it happen.

This program started about four years ago, and we got a large award of almost 5.8 million. managed to do it in about five years to really start to where we're seeing success in communities. We have been working with communities in the past where communities were struggling to understand what decision making using holistic management is all about.

What you get is you get a few people in the community wanting to do it but The holistic management concept will require the whole community if it is to work smoothly. When we are doing the training we also make use of the mobilization tool which we call Community Action Cycle. And this is a very powerful tool in bringing communities together.

And we have seen a lot of changes in communities in terms of communities being able to be self-reliant and also in terms of the way that they are being treated and the way that they are being treated. You are bringing back their dignity. The major challenges that we've heard are culturally based and mythical, I would like to say. Where people dread to mix their livestock together because of different cultural medicines that they believe each home has and some historical conflicts that each family or each clan has in each community.

But we are seeing a lot of improvement and this community is one of them. My cattle are looking very, very healthy and fit. The tragedy of all this is that it doesn't have to be like it is.

We could have begun doing what we're doing with the communities now 40 years ago. We would be a long way ahead of it now. Much of holistic management's growing acceptance in these rural communities is due to Alan Savory's total personal commitment. Despite a hectic promotional schedule that takes him abroad for many months of the year, He'll try to find time to drive 50 kilometers to visit a local community where belief in his message is having a profound impact on the lives of thousands of families.

Morning, Edison. Hi, Alan. How are you?

You're going well. Yeah, I'm doing well. How are you?

I'm well, thank you. Thank you so much. Good to get down to see you and the work today. Yeah, things are moving on very well. Good.

Exactly, and the community is very, very committed to the programme. OK. Yeah.

Innocent Mungkuli should know. As a livestock management specialist employed by the centre to advise the villagers, he is hugely encouraged by this community's decision to abandon their traditional go-it-alone herding practices for the collective holistic management alternative. Well, in a sense I see the cattle are looking better than they were the ones we saw on the road.

Yeah, that's very true. There is a very big difference with cattle which are not in the program. Having demonstrated very clearly on the ranch back at our headquarters what can be done, be done. We're now extending that into this greater community of about 150,000 people, but starting with some of the smaller communities and this is one of the starting programs.

We're having provided water for the cattle, it is also providing water for the gardens. Innocent here is the man in charge who is coaching and training the people. First of all we constructed a reservoir tank and after that here it used to be a kettle crawl. Then after that we had to put a garden.

Then the garden is enabling people to improve their nutrition as well as their income. They're selling vegetables? Yes, they are selling.

Philip, what can you tell me from your... So plan now is happening? Now we are on paddock number five, the Kekung. Then from where do they go?

What does the plan show? They've got the plan then from paddock five we'll be going to paddock six. So paddock six is down here.

This is paddock six. And then from there? Then from paddock six then we'll be going to paddock seven. That is seven.

That is the area where we'll be. This is where the cattle have been crawled for about a week or so and up until yesterday on this portion of the field and now they will plant crops all over the field but get three to five times the yield on these areas where we put the crawls overnight. The community is very very excited, even personally as the field officer. I am very, very excited because there is a very high adoption of the method by the community.

Really this is bringing a very big change to the community. When this program was introduced in the community, then it was something new to us. because we could not even understand it to start with.

But after exercising what we were taught to do, grazing together, we experienced that there was a very big change. Amiabu, the keg, the way how they look, there's a very big change than previous. They taught us everything.

Now we don't have any cow dying because they taught us how we should keep them and I'm sure at the moment when these five cows I'm having now they will increase and I'll have money to buy more which is something very good the holistic management what they did. We have quietly learned a lot. We are doing everything on our own.

Oh mama, we are going to win. Oh mama, we are going to win. Oh mama, we are going to win. Oh mama, we are going to win.

Canela, oh mama, we are going to win. This program has taught us to manage our livestock productively. We used to struggle with water, but now we have a water tank that supplies all the water we need for our livestock and gardening project.

Okay, so about two to three years ago these women here could not feed their families for the whole year. They could only do it for three to four months in a year, but now we have food all year round. The present government of Zimbabwe has seen the results of what we're doing up here and become very supportive.

They've formed a permanent... committee of heads of ministries to try and spread the knowledge. around the country and what we are going to be doing shortly is recommending that in all schools we begin with the kids very young and giving them the basic environmental literacy and understanding of why livestock, too few livestock, destroy the people's lives, water etc and how we can rectify all of this by running many more animals but properly managed. This crop field here is Regina's field which she treated using Animal Impact.

And if you can just take this, look at this one, today is the 6th of March. This was planted on the 14th of January. And look at the crop right on the other side which is much older but still looks very unhealthy.

And this is the same lady who fed all of us today. In 2010, the Africa Center for Holistic Management won the Buckminster Fuller Challenge for its work in reversing desertification. In that same year, Alan and Jody, with other partners, founded the Savory Institute in Boulder, Colorado, to promote large-scale restoration of the world's grasslands. Today, holistic management is practiced by tens of thousands of people in countries across the globe.

It's reliably estimated that up to 16 million hectares, or 40 million acres, are under holistic management worldwide, with the largest impact on the ranges and grasslands of the seasonal rainfall environments. That's about two-thirds of the world's land surface. It's a powerful endorsement of the seeds of an idea that grew out of the African bush half a century ago and still has its roots there.

What we're doing here is a small part of our global operations. Institute is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, and they run the global effort from there. And then part of our strategy to get this to go to scale worldwide because of the seriousness of climate change desertification is to have locally led, locally managed learning hubs around the world.

And this was the first of the hubs on which we're modeling others from 10 different countries, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Turkey, the UK, Ireland. United States, etc. So there are many countries getting involved. So underlying all our training... The last time I counted we trained people from 21 countries, I think just here.

Matt Rales and Katrina Fowler are Americans from Maryland, where they grass finish beef cattle. They're here to see first-hand the reversal of desertification in action. I can't believe it's taken us this long to get here. It's exceeded my expectations beyond imagination. The grass is even thicker and more diverse than I was ever expecting.

And at this hub we can accommodate 30 or more people and we have continuous trainings going on, big parties, small parties. Coming here and we have training materials, the textbook I wrote, the handbook that Jody Butterfield wrote and many other training materials and increasingly because of the scale of the problem globally we're going into internet training, self-help, more and more things and we are aiming to establish a hundred learning hubs around the world. where people are learning, teaching each other in their own language, own culture, self-led virtually, managed locally, formed locally, and so it's a strategic move we're taking on a global scale now. I'm going to take what I've learned from here back to the United And do the best I can to get as many animals managed holistically under planned grazing as we can. And try to scale this kind of management as great as we can.

Sally Nicol is a South African business owner from Johannesburg. Two months ago I had no interest in climate change and I discovered managing holistically and it has completely changed my life. It's completely changed the way I think about the environment and about what is possible and about how we are connected to the land. And yesterday I met a woman who had used...

used her livestock and her neighbours'livestock, she put 15 animals together and impacted her crop field. She then got borrowed seed from her neighbours and she has grown without fertiliser the most healthy crop of corn or milis that I saw in that entire area. I'd never seen anything like it. So this is one of the most remarkable women in this community.

She lost her husband in 2011, left her with eight kids. Now she lost one last year. She has seven to take care of.

The program has helped her feed her family. It has helped her take care of her cattle. It has helped her even have enough food for the whole year.

Days end, Fine Savory relaxing back home with Jodie, his wife of 32 years, who has played an active role in the development of holistic management. I was born just south of here in Bulawero. and grew up in the country.

My home was a 45,000-acre garage about 25 miles down that way, and my kids were brought up there. My father, I buried his remains in the... the river and my sister and my eldest son here are buried here and my youngest son so it's very much just home to me and this is the way I like to live here amongst the game I don't actually like living in a house at all we have another home in New Mexico but when we're out and live there and we tend to jokingly say that's Jodie's home and this is mine I love it no I do love it and And all my life I've been a person who likes to live outdoors. I grew up hunting, fishing, doing all those things with my dad. And I've just loved this.

It's just, it's heaven. All the dramas seem to happen when I'm away. Yeah. That's when the elephants will be over there or coming in at night or wild dogs will chase a bush buck and kill it right outside my window. And I'm always here alone when that happens.

One day watching a dog. Walking out of the kitchen, three lions chased a kudu right there in front of the river. It's just this incredible drama I get to see every day. Although it seems we're remote living in a bush camp like this for six months of the year as we do, thanks to technology we can keep in touch.

Everything here is just solar powered, operates off batteries down here. But we've got a satellite connection and get some broadband. Right now. Right now, Jody is on a Skype call to Daniela Howell, our CEO in Boulder, Colorado.

So routinely we're holding conferences with people around the world. I have to set up one tomorrow morning to speak to people in Switzerland before I go to London at the weekend. But although it's not all that efficient always, we manage. The dawn of a new day and it's raining again. But it's only a passing shower, not heavy enough to raise the level in the river in front of Savory's camp.

However, something will have happened to this water on its journey downstream. We've now come up higher in the catchment of the river that flows past my camp. Now you can see the water in the pool is muddy, you cannot see half an inch under the water, and that's flowing down here.

As you look here... You can see how much soil has been washed away from this perennial grass and it's cutting. Now by the time this gets to our camp now we are seeing clear crystal clear water unless it very high rains up here. What's amazing to me here is because we've made the rainfall more effective soaking into the soil less surface flow so that the soil really absorbs the rain is that this remained clear after we had 50 millimeters or two inches of rain two days ago only a kilometer above this.

Now had we come here a few years ago that simply would not have been possible. This would have flowed far more strongly muddy water and then settled over the next day or two. This time it remained clear right throughout and hardly rose at all.

Now we've joined a river of about the same size coming off the neighboring land, National Parks hunting lands, and you can see where the flood water has reached this year. And the vehicle, in fact, would be underwater where we are. 50 meters from the river and all of these millions and millions of gallons of water that rushed down here should have soaked into the land to keep rivers flowing aquifers etc it won't that River will go dry this year this pool on the Dien Gombe River has never gone dry though it is the driest it has been in 15 years It won't rain for another three months, and as this is the only surface water in the area, Savory is preserving it for the hundreds of elephants and buffalo that water here, and making other arrangements for the domestic livestock.

While Dimben Gombe was primarily concerned with regenerating the land and wildlife, Savory found that this could not be achieved without using cattle as the main tool of wildlife and land regeneration. Today, this 3,000 hectare property is also home to a large population of wildlife fully integrated with the livestock through the grazing planning. What I want you to see now is where we're preserving bare ground for the wildlife. Otherwise we'll begin to lose some of the wildlife and here you see it. Wildlife and this whole project are a critical part of it, not just because of my passion, but because it takes funds to run this sort of operation, and we've been completely unable to get any support or financial support from environmentalists or environmental organisations.

And the bulk of the funding that supports us and all this work has come from the hunting. So we are safari hunting at the same time. And that literally has been what has supported most of this work. This is a hide or blind that we constructed for people to sit in and watch the game coming to the bear area and take pictures and so on. And we had an amusing incident where we had some guests in here and when we came back there were three lions sitting on the top and very terrified.

...guests in here which we thought was very amusing but they didn't. There's one large animal, however, that visitors do like to meet. It's a fine ewe. You want some for me too? Oh, oh, okay.

Her name is Dodjoua and we found her as an orphan. She's about 15 years old now and she's very, very gentle, very sweet. We have people with her all the time.

All day and very close to her at night. Because she's still at a size where the lions could kill her. This must be one of the last unspoiled places on planet Earth.

Manapur's National Park in the Zambezi Valley is so special, it's been declared a World Heritage Site. The surreal light filtering through the trees of the forest creates a distinctive cathedral-like atmosphere for which the park is renowned. One of the most prolific of those trees, the Phaedherbia albida, is in danger of dying out. Nobody knows why, yet they are growing in Alan's Savory. Maize Garden.

For all my life almost, they have not been regenerating at all. And people say it's because we've built dams and we're not getting the flooding. Well here we are far from alluvial soils. We're on a Kalahari soil. And this is a Pheidopia albida that has established with the cattle grazing that we're doing.

And is now freely growing, showing that it was nothing to do with flooding or any of the things we were saying. And again, I think it's the build-up of the soil structure that is affecting this. Savory is so convinced that managing holistically applies to all environments that he's embarked on a project to see whether he can save the teak trees in a nearby national forest.

So this site that I'm photographing for our record now is the first site that we've put the cattle crawl overnight where we hold them on the sand, on the Kalahari sand, much like we've done all the other sites. over the ranch but this being the first on the sand to see what happens because these Kalahari sand forests are in bad trouble without the teak trees regenerating and we want to see if by using the animals we can get the teak trees regenerating as we are getting with some other species. Many years ago this superficially would have looked good on the hills in the growing season, but down in the valley there was heavy overgrazing, a lot of bare ground, and now you can only see bare patches right at the water points we've provided for wildlife, and we're getting mufflo and sable and elephants and everything coming here, and you can sit from this point and see them.

Every bit of this has been made possible by the cattle used as a tool. Savory could well argue he's proved conclusively that holistic management works. Yet, 50 years after he first expounded his theory, it is still being dismissed out of hand by a state.

What is very disappointing is that although this textbook has been out for over 20 years, we're writing the third edition now, there's a Spanish edition, and it was sent out like all textbooks are, for review to all sorts of organizations, and environmental organizations, universities, etc. wouldn't even review it, and yet the textbook is in use in more than 20 universities and colleges, when I last counted up. People often ask me, how have I kept going despite all the abuse and ridicule, rejection, and people claiming it doesn't work. And it just comes down to one word, I believe, and that is caring. If you care enough, you can do it. about your country, wildlife, the people.

You'll do whatever you have to do to keep going. I realize it's not personal. It's happened to every single scientist, without exception, that I'm aware of in the history of the world.

of the world. That opposition, the research shows, does not ever die down based on facts, evidence, anything of that nature. It only dies down and institutions change when the views of society overall begin to accept it.

In other words, when public opinion changes. And that's why 20 minutes of talk on the TED talk has literally done... more to advance this knowledge worldwide than 50 years of struggling against official opposition has done.

And that's because the TED Talks are not about the TED Talks. ...has already gone to well over two million viewers and is still going up by thousands a day. It's been very rewarding. We have a long way to go, but at least we can say it can happen in a very challenging environment, politically, economically, and if it can work here, it can work anywhere. I would say to any detractor of holistic...

management, first and foremost, come and see this here at the Africa Center with your own eyes. Come and see the reversal of desertification and the recreation of surface water. The second thing I would say is understand what you're detracting from. look into what managing holistically and holistically planning grazing has done all over the world. Of all the communities where I've worked over the past 30 years or so, and that includes Asia, Latin America, Africa, many countries, this is the program that I think is the most sustainable of all of them because it really touches to the core of people's livelihoods, people's lives, people's...

social existence, it brings together so many of those pieces that many other programs don't. It's common knowledge today that biodiversity loss, climate change, loss of soil, poverty, violence rising, all these things are threatening civilization as we know it. Now While it might have been argued 30 years ago, today I don't believe any scientist would argue that management needs to be holistic, embracing all science, all sorts of knowledge. But if we're to have a hope, it has to be done now.

Transcript for:Alan Savory's Holistic Management Approach

Transcript for:
Alan Savory's Holistic Management Approach