Allan Savory
Savory Institute of Holistic Management – Zimbabwe, Africa
Allan Savory is a Zimbabwean scientist, livestock farmer, and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute. He originated Holistic management, a systems thinking approach to managing resources. Savory had studied the relationships between animals and the land in the savannah of Africa and advocates using bunched and moving livestock for biomimicry, as a means to heal the environment. He believes grasslands hold the potential to sequester enough atmospheric carbon dioxide to reverse climate change.
According to Savory, he has worked on the problem of land degradation (desertification) as early as 1955 in Northern Rhodesia. He advocated for slaughtering large numbers of elephants up until 1969 based on the idea that they were destroying their habitat. His research, which he claims was validated by a committee of scientists, led to the government culling approximately 40,000 elephants in following years. However, this did not reverse the degradation of the land. He has called the decision to advocate for the slaughter of large numbers of elephants “the saddest and greatest blunder of my life.” believed that overgrazing was caused by leaving cattle too long and returning them too soon, rather than the size of the herd.
After leaving Zimbabwe, Savory worked from the Cayman Islands into the Americas, introducing holistic planned grazing as a process of management to reverse desertification of ‘brittle’ grasslands by carefully planning movements of dense herds of livestock to mimic those found in nature, allowing sufficient time for the plants to fully recover before re-grazing. Savory advocates using high technology to develop alternative energy sources and to reduce or eliminate future emissions. He supports grass fed beef and vehemently opposes industrial livestock production.
Only livestock can reverse desertification. There is no other known tool available to humans with which to address desertification that is contributing not only to climate change but also to much of the poverty, emigration, violence, etc. in the seriously affected regions of the world. Only livestock can save us.
“The number one public enemy is the cow. But the number one tool that can save mankind is the cow. We need every cow we can get back out on the range. It is almost criminal to have them in feedlots which are inhumane, antisocial, and environmentally and economically unsound.”
Book: The Grazing Revolution: A Radical Plan to Save the Earth
Website: 1) https://savory.global/ 2) A Critique
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/holistisolutions
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asavory2018/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allan-savory-b6059016/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AllanRSavory
Video 1: TED Talk
Video 2: Running out of Time
