Holistic Management is a decision-making
framework that ensures our decisions are economically,
environmentally and socially sound i.e. the triple bottom line.
Holistic
Management enables you to develop a clear vision of the future you want.
Holistic Management was voted the second best idea
to tackle climate change in the 2009 Manchester report
The significant
problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with
which they were created.
Albert Einstein
Holistic
Management has its roots in environmental
management. But, as it is essentially a decision-making process
it is applicable to people in all walks of life - households, both rural
and urban based businesses, government and educational organisations.
By changing the way we make our decisions, we
can tackle many of the problems we face today.
Watch a clip of Allan Savory,
the founder of Holistic Management, explaining the concept of Holistic
Management and other topics here.
The technology we
wield today has greatly expanded the ways in which we can alter our
environment and that, combined with the exponential increase in our
numbers has magnified our potential for causing damage. Now, more than
ever, we require the ability to make decisions that consider economic,
social and environmental realities, both short and long term.
Allan Savory
"Traditionally,
livestock is kept in paddocks for weeks or months. They nibble away at
the most nutritious plants, giving the noxious weeds an advantage,
destroying biodiversity and profitability.
A new approach,
holistic management, reverses this. The herds are moved from one
small cell to another, as often as every day. The livestock eat
everything in a cell, but over the following months the pasture is
rested and the grass grows back luxuriant and sweet. Cattle are better
fed, less worried by parasites (because the moving disrupts the parasite
cycle), calmer and seemingly happier (perhaps because the animals live
in a more natural herd structure). Farmers are happier, too, because
their workload is more evenly spread and their businesses are more
profitable".
Tim Flannery, 2007 Australian of the Year
A history of Holistic
Management
Allan Savory, ecologist, biologist, game warden, farmer, soldier, politician, renowned environmentalist and
winner of the Banksia International Award 2003,
and the
2010 Buckminster Fuller environmental award is the founder of Holistic Management.
As a young graduate
employed in various Southern African national parks in the 1960's, Allan
realised that the land and wild life he was working with was doomed.
Later, when working in the USA he came to realise that this
deterioration of the African environment was not a result of the
often quoted reasons of overpopulation, poverty, overstocking, lack of
technology, poor extension services etc. Comparable deterioration was
occurring in Western Texas, USA, where the climate was similar to that
of Southern Africa. However, western Texas had a declining
population, the latest technology, sophisticated extension services etc.
The only common denominator between these two situations was the
decisions the human managers of these environments had made.
“Holistic
Management has given us a feeling of control over our enterprise and
future. It has made us aware of how much effect we can have on the
environment be it good or bad.”
Stuart & Angela Shannon, Bonshaw, NSW
