#allansavory

The holistic context is fundamental to the management of anything complex and will guide the decisions and actions you take to achieve your goals and objectives.

While only those actually managing land can implement the changes necessary to reverse the desertification process and regenerate carbon-storing grassland soils, they will need the support of the rest of us, including policy makers, to do this effectively.

The discovery of the brittleness scale and the vital role of herding animals and their predators in maintaining the health of the more brittle environments showed why these environments were prone to desertification.

A fundamental belief, embraced throughout the world, holds that the presence of too many animals causes overgrazing, over trampling, and the resultant destruction of land (...)

As bare ground increased and the environment deteriorated in response to the lack of herd effect, we attributed it to overgrazing, which we in turn blamed on too many animals. As a result, we decreased animal numbers and thus increased the bare ground and the deterioration.

In brittle environments, relatively high numbers of large herding animals, concentrated and moving as they naturally do in the presence of pack-hunting predators, are vital to maintaining the health of the lands we thought they destroyed.

I became convinced that the disturbance created by the hooves of herding natural wild animal populations was vital to the health of the land, and that humankind had lost this benefit when we domesticated cattle, horses, sheep, and goats and protected them from predators.