Holistic management

Holistic management (from ὅλος holos, a Greek word meaning all, whole, entire, total) in agriculture is a systems thinking approach to managing resources that was originally developed by Allan Savory for reversing desertification. In 2010 the Africa Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe, Operation Hope (a "proof of concept" project using holistic management) was named the winner of the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge for "recognizing initiatives which take a comprehensive, anticipatory, design approach to radically advance human well being and the health of our planet's ecosystems."

The idea of holistic planned grazing began in the 1960s when Allan Savory, a wildlife biologist in his native Southern Rhodesia, set out to understand desertification. This can be seen in the context of the larger environmental movement. Heavily influenced by the work of André Voisin and the ineffectiveness of mainstream rangeland science of the time, Savory concluded that the spread of deserts, the loss of wildlife, and the human impoverishment that always resulted were related to the reduction of the natural herds of large grazers and even more, the change in behavior of those few remaining herds. could be substituted to provide important ecosystem services like nutrient cycling when mimicking those uniquely coevolved grasses and grazers. But managers had found that while rotational grazing systems can work for diverse management purposes, scientific experiments had demonstrated that they do not necessarily work for specific ecological purposes. An adaptive management plan was needed for the integration of the experiential with the experimental, as well as the social with the biophysical, to provide a more comprehensive framework for the management of rangeland systems. None of these sources of knowledge could be understood except in the context of the whole. Holistic management was developed to meet that need.

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