Episode #264
Allan Savory: Using Livestock To Reverse Desertification

Using livestock to reverse desertification is one of the most contested claims in modern land stewardship, and Allan Savory is at the center of it. In this Real Organic Podcast conversation with host Dave Chapman, Savory argues that desertification and biodiversity loss are accelerating across vast regions, including inside national parks that are managed with mainstream conservation approaches, and he explains why he believes technology and fire alone cannot address the root cause in seasonal rainfall environments. He traces the origin of Holistic Management and “holistic planned grazing,” describing how concentrated animal impact, timed and moved with intention, can restore soil cover, rebuild grassland function, and reverse land degradation, while also challenging institutions to rethink how policy decisions are made to avoid unintended consequences.

Check out Allan’s New Book: Unsavory: African Stories of Wildlife, War, and the Birth of Holistic Management

Our Allan Savory interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

You can subscribe and download episodes of our show through your favorite podcast app, our YouTube channel, or stream the audio-only version here:

Dave Chapman interviewed Allan Savory in South Florida in January 2025:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic podcast. I have the privilege of talking today with Allan Savory. Allan, it’s a pleasure to be here in your home.

Allan Savory 0:11
It’s a pleasure to have you.

Dave Chapman 0:13
Yeah, it’s great. We’re here somewhat to celebrate your new book and, of course, to have a conversation about many things, but your book covers a lot of ground. It is called “Unsavory: African Stories of Wildlife, War, and the Birth of Holistic Management.” I was privileged to read an early copy.

Dave Chapman 0:41
When it started, I thought, “Oh, this is just going to be a nice memoir.” You started school, and it very quickly became much more than a memoir. It is an amazing story. You’ve led an amazing life. I couldn’t help but compare it to my own life growing up on a dairy farm in Pennsylvania. There was very little action compared to your life. You were dealing with many very dangerous animals.

Dave Chapman 1:11
Your job in Africa as a game warden was often to remove dangerous animals because they were killing livestock or people. But it’s also a book about not the birth of ecology, but certainly a time of tremendous development. What year do you call out as when ecology as a study began?

Allan Savory 1:45
I don’t know the year. I don’t have that good a memory. It wasn’t called ecology, but to me, in my mind, it began with Alexander von Humboldt. He was, to me, the first ecologically thinking person, and I don’t mention him much in the book because he was centuries ago, but he’s renowned when you look at all the things named after him today.

Allan Savory 2:18
Then Jan Smuts, his thinking was amazingly ecological. All the people that influenced my thinking are cited in the book, so it was influenced by many people.

Allan Savory 2:34
Dave, you said it wasn’t a normal memoir. You’re right. It’s called a memoir because it’s a memoir of a certain time period. I had many people in my life ask me to write the story of my life or my memoirs, and I declined to do so.

Allan Savory 2:58
I tried keeping a diary at various points in my life, and I never could keep it up. I stopped because in a diary you write, I thought I did this. I did that. This is what I thought. It’s never the other person’s point of view in a diary. It virtually never is. I found that very egotistical. It wasn’t me, and so I could never keep a diary.

Allan Savory 3:25
When I thought about writing my memoirs, I thought, “No, I’m not going on an ego trip. I won’t do it.” That’s why there’s been such a long delay between all these years, because finally friends persuaded me to do so, but only because I could see a purpose.

Allan Savory 3:48
The purpose isn’t to tell my story. The purpose for which I have written about that period is to try to explain to the world why it is that we face this situation we do of global biodiversity loss in free fall, leading to desertification over two-thirds of the Earth’s land, mega fires burning in altitudes and latitudes they never did before, and these leading to climate change accelerating.

Allan Savory 4:37
Climate change, climate has always been changing. Now it’s accelerating. They’re feeding on each other in what nature would call a feedback loop, and they’re spiraling out of control.

Allan Savory 4:51
It is my attempt to explain to people why it was we could never, ever address the root cause of that problem. Unless you address the cause of a problem, you cannot solve it. I try to explain why a way to solve that, not the solution, could never have been discovered by any one person, and certainly not me.

Allan Savory 5:26
It could never have been discovered by any university, any government, any environmental organization, any religion, nor could it have been discovered in any one country. Nor could it have been discovered at any time in history.

Allan Savory 5:48
Discovering a way to address that problem in harmony, without conflict, as humans arose at that period in Africa, that short period that occurred when, as a young man with the new ecology, the science of ecology, I entered the game department at a time when the biggest empire in the world was dying.

Allan Savory 6:23
I was an offshoot of that, brought up and schooled in that, where colonialism was dying, where we had an extremely small population of people actually governing the country of which I was a part, where we were experiencing biodiversity loss on lands we were setting aside as national parks, and where we couldn’t blame oil, gas, livestock, corruption, greed, or anything known to us.

Allan Savory 7:00
All this was happening, and I farmed and ranched in that situation. I unfortunately led a special forces unit in an army. For 20 years, I was engaged in a civil war. I began as a very junior officer. I ended up as one of the leaders of the political parties in the war and active in one of the armies. I got forced into exile.

Allan Savory 7:42
Exile led me to living in the Caribbean, but working into the Americas, and far-sighted bureaucrats in the USDA engaged me to put 2000 fellow scientists and resource managers through training in the work I was developing.

Allan Savory 8:06
It was that exciting period of four years of exile, until I could get back to my country, where we made the biggest discoveries. It was discovered, what I talk about, by literally 1000s of people, but it could never have happened without those circumstances, that situation. That’s what the memoir is about.

Dave Chapman 8:30
Yes, it’s pretty gripping, because as you say it, it’s not just your story, but it’s also the story of your thought and these big questions. You always were drawn to big questions and your attempts to find answers.

Dave Chapman 8:53
The earliest big questions that I remember from the book were the questions of the degradation of the land. As you say, this was land that wasn’t being farmed. This was a wildlife preserve, and it was seriously falling apart.

Allan Savory 9:14
Yes, you’re correct, Dave. I mentioned that I was extremely fortunate. I ended up as a very young man. I’d just turned 21, and I ended up being in charge of wildlife management in an area larger than England, with a staff of some 200 under me. I had Sir Frank Fraser Darling. He wasn’t knighted at that time, but he was one of the world’s recognized top ecologists, and I had him stay with me for six weeks.

Allan Savory 9:58
We slept side by side. We ate side by side. We were in the same camp. We were in the same boats. We were in the same Land Rover. We were walking together. I think we were only apart when we went to the toilet. And if, as a young man, you spend six weeks like that with one of the leading ecological minds in the world, it’s better than a university education.

Allan Savory 10:25
I was desperately worried because I was in charge, even though I was so young. People were expecting answers from me. And I was pointing out to him day after day that we were losing biodiversity, that the soil was eroding, etc. The riverbanks were crumbling. Species were disappearing.

Allan Savory 10:46
These weren’t national parks yet. These were wild areas of Africa that we were setting aside to become national parks, but they were already exhibiting this global problem. So naturally, I asked him day after day, “How do I deal with this? What do we do about this?” And he had no answers.

Allan Savory 11:10
But I was a very persistent young man, and one night he told me to shut up. He said, “You’re boring me. You will not shut up.” I called him FD, for Fraser Darling, and I said, “FD, I have no intention of shutting up. This is my country. This is my people. This is my future. I have no intention. I intend to find answers.”

Dave Chapman 11:41
Allan, was it clear to you that this was a relatively recent process? In other words, this is the way the land is. It’s always eroding. Species are always disappearing. Was it clear to you that something was going on that was changing?

Allan Savory 11:57
Nothing was clear to me. I had a typical university education. What I was seeing was almost the reverse of everything I was taught. So what I was taught and what I was seeing were not matching, and I was beginning to seek answers.

Dave Chapman 12:20
FD was not able to give you those answers.

Allan Savory 12:23
Absolutely not.

Dave Chapman 12:24
Was he able to guide you in a direction to find answers?

Allan Savory 12:28
We ended up great friends, and he pointed my nose in the right direction. He left me his personal copy, which is right here on the shelf behind me, inscribed by him, of Sir John Russell’s “Soil Conditions and Plant Growth,” and said, “Look at the soil.” He pointed my nose in the right direction.

Dave Chapman 12:29
What did you find when you looked at the soil?

Allan Savory 12:42
Oh, it went way beyond that. Don’t forget, this is happening in the oceans, and they’re not soil. It went way beyond that. But he pointed me to the basics, literally, as I pursued that and began to look at it. Let’s take agriculture, because without agriculture… or let me define agriculture first.

Allan Savory 13:26
As we speak, I think many people in our orbit think of agriculture as crop farming, production, saving a soil, etc. This is not quite correct. In my mind, agriculture is the production of food and natural fiber from the world’s land and waters, oceans, everything. Right now, 98% probably of our Earth is engaged in agriculture, and so that’s what it is.

Allan Savory 14:02
If we think about agriculture – and I was in a panel discussion just last week with experts on the future of cities – and if we think about that, I asked them, I said, “What is the foundation of every city? Because civilization is city-based,” and they could not tell me. I pointed out that the foundation of every civilization is the same. It is agriculture.

Allan Savory 14:37
Without agriculture, you cannot have a church. You cannot have a choir. You cannot have a town, a village, a government, a university, an army. Any business in the world is impossible without agriculture. It is the foundation of civilization. That’s where I see it.

Allan Savory 14:59
As I say, understanding that, and the ecological sciences behind that, was what really Sir Frank Fraser Darling pointed my nose just in the right direction.

Dave Chapman 15:17
The land that you were looking at that was eroding so badly was not land that was being farmed in any active way, as I understand it. What was happening was not a result of agriculture, was it?

Allan Savory 15:32
Absolutely not. But as we speak, Dave, if we were back in my home in Zimbabwe, where I spent half the year, you would find us surrounded by over 30 national parks in Zimbabwe and the surrounding countries: Botswana, Zambia, etc. Now, those national parks – and we take people to them, often to see – represent some of our worst examples of biodiversity loss, crumbling riverbanks, dying forests, everything that is happening to the world. They are examples of it.

Allan Savory 16:18
There are no livestock. There is no farming in those. There is no agriculture. There is nothing; the things we blame. There’s no fossil fuel production. There is no mining. They’re not declining because of poaching. Poachers can never cause that. They’re not due to any corporate greed or corruption.

Allan Savory 16:49
They are managed by the best of knowledge we have in the Western world – by our big environmental organizations and their professional people and the governments they collaborate with, by the World Wildlife Fund, the IUCN Africa Parks, The Nature Conservancy, you name them.

Allan Savory 17:10
They’re all in agreement with the management of those, but I take people there now to see exactly what’s happening on a world scale. What is left to blame?

Dave Chapman 17:30
I’m right there with you, asking Fraser Darling, “What is to blame? What are we doing wrong here? What’s happening?”

Allan Savory 17:37
That’s why I wrote the memoir to explain to people, because I’ve had such difficulty and such opposition. That is why the book is called “Unsavory,” because I’ve been saying, in one way or another, the same things for, I don’t know, 50–60 years? It gets a little tiring.

Dave Chapman 18:00
Okay. I just want to say that you talk about very serious issues in it, but it’s also incredibly exciting stories of your interactions with wildlife in Africa. But to go back to that point where you’re a young man and you’re trying to understand this, what were some of the solutions?

Dave Chapman 18:23
Most famously, you had a solution, which was the common belief: that there were too many animals on the land and it was being overgrazed.

Allan Savory 18:35
At the end of the day, as we are now and as I wrote in my textbook, the third edition, which was dated 10 years ago. It boils down to two new discoveries that, as I say, couldn’t have been done by one person, etc.

Allan Savory 19:04
Now, those two discoveries have met with such opposition – opposition that would have destroyed anybody if they weren’t, as I was, determined to give my life if I had to. I was not prepared to stop no matter what was thrown at me. I made that decision myself.

Allan Savory 19:35
These two concepts arose from thousands of people, but I was the person leading the orchestra, as it were, and orchestrating and keeping it focused. These roused such opposition that I call the book, Unsavory. I’m known to many as a charlatan and a snake oil salesman, etc. Why would that happen? It took me a long time to understand that – some of it I explained in the book.

Allan Savory 20:18
Why the battle to understand? I’m reminded of it as I speak now, I walked on the land in Texas once, when I was first here as an exile, with a very respected, wonderful man, a professor at Texas A&M, Jim Tier. He was a wildlife professor. Jim and I walked on the land, and at one point he stopped, and I never forgot it.

Allan Savory 20:52
He said, “Allan, either you are wrong and we will not be able to dig a hole deep enough to bury you in, or you are right, and the world will not be able to build a monument high enough.” I said, “Jim, which is it? What do you think?” He said, “I’m sitting on the fence.” Well, Jim died on the fence, and that has raved on.

Allan Savory 21:26
Trying to understand that myself, I realized there are two types of discovery. It took me a long time to realize that. There are things that people discover that are new, and everybody knows they’re new. We discovered radio or whatever it is.

Allan Savory 21:46
When these things are discovered, there’s often argument, discussion, and testing using the scientific method. We test in every way we can. That’s what science is about. Then, after a decade or shorter, or whatever, the idea is accepted by society and our institutions, and the world moves on, and Nobel Prizes are given, and we all applaud. Okay, so that’s taken place, and we all know that.

Allan Savory 22:19
Then I realized, but there’s another type of discovery. That’s a discovery that some people in society can see: “Wow, this is new. It’s exciting.” But our institutions and our experts, who are all employed by institutions, know it’s not a new discovery. They know it’s wrong. Those types of discoveries, so far in history, have never been accepted by society and institutions until decades or a century after the death of the people who discover it.

Allan Savory 23:07
Sadly for all of us, the work we do and the way to solve this issue amicably and in harmony involves two new discoveries of the second type. That’s why I’ve been so unsavory, and why the book is called that.

Dave Chapman 23:28
I want to hear the two discoveries, and then I want to go even further back. But let’s go with the two discoveries first.

Allan Savory 23:37
All right. There are two discoveries; they were discovered in the wrong order. But that doesn’t matter. The first was a discovery by me, not by other people. That was a discovery in the 1960s, when I realized that I could not – and we could not. I was working with top American ecologists: Professor Ray Desmond, Professor Marsman, etc.

Allan Savory 24:06
I realized that we could not reverse the biodiversity loss and the desertification in the national parks in Zimbabwe and about two-thirds of the world using only the two tools humans had, which were technology and fire. There was no other tool, and it is impossible to solve that ecological problem with fire or technology.

Allan Savory 24:40
I realized that, and I realized we had no option. We had to open our minds to using livestock as a tool. Then I had to work out how to do that, because every way in which livestock has ever been run throughout the history of the world had led to a loss of species, and in two-thirds of the world, where rainfall is seasonal, had led to desertification.

Allan Savory 25:14
That discovery, the world’s universities, environmental organizations, ranching organizations, and cattlemen’s organizations knew was wrong.

Dave Chapman 25:27
It was their belief that you could not use livestock to renew the land, to bring life back to…

Allan Savory 25:36
No, more than that. It was their belief that livestock were causing it. It still is. Look at the vegans, George Monbiot, people like that.

Dave Chapman 25:50
It was also your belief at one point, and that was the common knowledge then; it’s the common knowledge. Just to give people something to chew on: how did you use that knowledge to try and heal the land? Was that the elephants?

Allan Savory 26:08
No. As you said, rightly, and so I’ll just confirm: it was my knowledge. It was what I was taught at university. Like everybody, as an ecologist, I was taught that. It was my belief, because I could see it – the land overrun with cattle and donkeys and turning to desert. I’ve got pictures of me as a kid in the dust with the animals, so I knew it.

Allan Savory 26:37
But that’s why I said when I discovered that we could not solve the problem with technology or fire, only animals could solve it. The only animals that we have control over, to the extent we do, are livestock: camels, sheep, goats, etc. So we would have to use them. At that point, nobody in the world knew how to do that. I didn’t.

Allan Savory 27:03
I talk about it in a TED Talk that went to nine million viewers. I looked at all the professions. I looked at the sciences, businesses, everything – nobody had ever solved a problem like that. Then, naturally, perhaps because I was an officer fighting in a war for 20 years, I looked at military training and how they had solved similar, difficult, very complicated problems over 1,000 years of experience.

Allan Savory 27:38
I simply copied the military thinking to solve that problem. That is today what we call holistic planned grazing. It’s never failed us; it’s unlikely to ever fail because it’s got literally 1,000 years of incredibly bright minds and experience behind how you do that.

Dave Chapman 28:01
Was that one of the two discoveries.

Allan Savory 28:07
Yes, that discovery was that we had to use livestock, and then I worked out how to do it. I didn’t discover that planning technique; the military academies of Europe worked that out over 1,000 years, roughly. I have no claim to it. I credited them. That’s why, in my textbook, I credit Sandhurst Military Academy for that.

Allan Savory 28:39
Coming to the second one, when I was forced into exile, we were having amazing successes – astounding. I had taken the project deliberately with all the officials involved. We had selected the worst land we could find in Rhodesia.

Allan Savory 29:04
Lloyd Swift, who headed an American delegation of scientists to report on the desertification of the six British and former British territories in Africa, was there. I was actually with him down at that area when he told me the land was technically beyond reclamation with all the know-how of the United States, and he told all of us that.

Allan Savory 29:37
We later selected that exact same land to see what we could do with holistic planned grazing, except the word “holistic” wasn’t in the name at that time. Having selected the worst land in the country, I called it an advanced project. I did not call it a trial, because if it failed, people would say, “The trial failed.” I called it an advanced project. It was internationally observed.

Allan Savory 30:12
The reason I called it that was because I intended to push the envelope and go to ridiculous extremes and see if I could cause failure. On that land – the worst we had in the entire country – I trebled the stocking rate within their first year.

Dave Chapman 30:33
This was land that had livestock on it, not wild animals.

Allan Savory 30:37
Yes. It was livestock on a big ranch. It’s mentioned in the memoir. I went to three times the stocking rate, which every scientist in the world said was impossible. Within a few years, we were producing five times as much meat per acre as any of the surrounding control areas of 200,000 acres. That was an international trial. So yes, this process worked.

Allan Savory 31:15
If I come to the second part of your question – what was the discovery – tragedies happen in our lives, and we see them as tragedies at the time. For me, to lose my country was one of those tragedies. I was broke. The government had seized everything they could of mine, and I had escaped with my life. That’s the story in the memoir. I went to live in the Caribbean and work into the Americas.

Allan Savory 31:47
At about that time, I was beginning to see some of my big successes with five countries I had been working in were beginning to show signs of failure. So clearly, the problem was not solved yet.

Allan Savory 32:13
Americans had been watching the work I was doing in Africa, and when I was in exile, far-sighted bureaucrats in the USDA – Don Sylvester, Ray Margo, just to mention two of them, and one professor at Angelo State University, Bob Steger, I mentioned another – were far-sighted and open-minded.

Allan Savory 32:42
They, particularly the first two I mentioned, ended up heading an interagency committee of all the government agencies managing resources in America: the Bureau of Land Affairs, Soil Conservation Service, Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and later the World Bank joined.

Allan Savory 33:16
An interagency committee commissioned me and paid me handsomely over two years to put 2,000 people through training in the work that I was known to be developing. That became the most exciting period of my life. Never had a young ecologist trying to solve these problems had the opportunity to work with 2,000 professional scientists.

Allan Savory 33:44
Because I had begun to see failures, I wanted everything questioned. In the training sessions, I did. I devoted one hour every day after the first day to nothing but criticizing me, my work, everything I’d said, taught, or believed. One hour was “anything goes.” We’d do nothing else but find the flaws. Towards the end, we couldn’t find any more. Towards the end, we realized we’d broken through with a second discovery.

Allan Savory 34:24
That’s why I say “we,” not “me.” It could never have been discovered by me alone – that second one. That discovery, again, I talk about in my textbook and in the other book. That discovery was again known to be wrong by almost everyone. Everyone in the world knows that we make decisions in thousands of different ways. Everybody knows that; they’ve known that for centuries. Everybody in the world knows.

Allan Savory 35:00
When you look at scale, at governments and so on, they develop policies in many ways. Their whole libraries are full of it. Their whole universities, schools of policy, etc., and so everybody knows there are many ways of doing that.

Allan Savory 35:16
What we discovered was that that was not true. What we discovered was that all humans, no matter what culture, no matter what period in history, throughout all time we’ve been humans, make every conscious decision exactly the same way. That was known to be wrong, and we discovered it.

Allan Savory 35:42
What we discovered was that the policies which govern our lives at scale, our economy at scale, and our resource management at scale – all our policies – are developed by every single government in the world in exactly the same way. That was what was causing the problem. Not a lack of knowledge, not livestock, not fossil fuels, not any of the things we’re blaming.

Allan Savory 36:13
But you see those two discoveries: that humans make decisions exactly the same way, and all governments develop policy exactly the same way – and that is causing the problem. This man has to be a snake oil salesman.

Dave Chapman 36:34
I have many, many questions, but let’s start just with that one. What is the way in which everybody makes decisions the same way?

Allan Savory 36:46
Correct me if I’m wrong, and anybody who sees this interview, correct me if I’m wrong. I’m talking about a conscious decision. If my hand touches a stove, I pull it away. I don’t think, “Oh, it’s burning, I better pull it away.” I’m talking about a conscious decision. Have you, Dave, not made every conscious decision in your life for a reason?

Dave Chapman 37:17
I guess so.

Allan Savory 37:18
Thank you. What was the reason? Was it to meet a need you had, to meet a desire you had, or to solve a problem you faced?

Dave Chapman 37:44
Well, I would think all three.

Allan Savory 37:48
No. One of them.

Dave Chapman 37:50
One of them has to be the one?

Allan Savory 37:51
And no other. Okay, we’re all the same. I did the same. Would you agree then, that when we meet our needs, desires, or solve a problem, the way we make the decision is to base it on one or more of possibly many factors – things like past experience: What have I learned from past experience? What research results, friends, advice, expert advice, cultural norms, compromise, fear?

Allan Savory 38:38
I could go on and on. From one or more of these many factors, you make the decision and take the action for that reason. It’s the same for all of us, and sadly, that was causing the problem.

Dave Chapman 39:02
As opposed to?

Allan Savory 39:05
We will never change that. That’s why my textbook was called Holistic Management, not holistic decision making, because we will never change that, and I don’t think we ever should. I will never change it. I’m always going to make my decisions to meet my needs, my desires, or to solve problems, and I’m always going to listen to friends, advice, expert opinion, look at research, work within the law, etc.

Allan Savory 39:38
What we didn’t realize was that we lived in a holistic world, that our lives are tied to our life-supporting environment indivisibly, and to our economy. We talked earlier: we can’t even have a city or a church without agriculture. In that, to make our management actions for these reasons, we didn’t have a context for it.

Allan Savory 40:13
But we couldn’t have a context because everybody’s context is different – in their life, it’s unique to them, their culture, etc. There was something missing. That was the hardest thing to discover, and that emerged gradually and with great difficulty over the two-year period. What we needed, we had no word for it, because it was a new concept. It’s not in any philosophy in the world; it’s not in any religion in the world; it’s not in any branch of science in the world.

Allan Savory 40:52
Here we were trying to discover a thing that didn’t exist. What that turned out to be, I had to give it a name. I called it “a holistic goal,” tying everything together: our lives, our economy, our life-supporting environment.

Allan Savory 41:10
That, after a short while, turned out to be another of my mistakes. I’m not free of mistakes constantly, and so at the Savory Institute, where we center that trying to keep this knowledge developing, we had to change that to a holistic context. So it’s not a context, it’s not holistic; it’s a new concept, which is a holistic context, one word, if you like.

Allan Savory 41:43
When we make decisions exactly as we do today, we will make many decisions that aren’t very serious. Should I wear this shirt or a khaki shirt today? Should I shave today or not? You’re making decisions all the time in your life.

Allan Savory 42:03
But when you make every significant decision towards the management of your life, we now just make sure that it’s in line with how we want our lives to be, based upon our life-supporting environment that will support our great, great, great, great-grandchildren 1,000 years from now.

Dave Chapman 42:28
You’re proposing that we not be crazy. You’re proposing that we, I would have to say, make sane decisions.

Allan Savory 42:39
Not saying “decisions,” just make decisions that don’t lead to unintended consequences in our lives. I mentioned World Bank people. In some of the training I did, there were nine World Bank people. I remember wonderful guys, incredible open minds, because their training as economists is so broad. They first made me aware of the joke – they talk about, or jokingly refer to, the law of unintended consequences. It’s just universal today.

Allan Savory 43:18
If we just look at America – in its policies, it launched a war on weeds. I’ve been watching that for over 40 years. It’s cost over a billion dollars every single year. It has not killed a single weed species in a single state; it has poisoned the rivers, poisoned the environment, damaged the economy, damaged farms, damaged towns, but we just keep doing it. It’s an unintended consequence.

Allan Savory 43:59
I have watched America, and one of my specialties in my life was guerrilla warfare. I’ve watched America, in its policies, wage a war on terror. What did it do? It spread terror.

Allan Savory 44:19
I’ve watched America, in its policies, wage a war on drugs. Did it stop drug use in America? No, it increased it. It spread violence to neighboring countries. It spread violence across to Europe. But we’re still doing it. Unintended consequences.

Dave Chapman 44:44
This is because the decision was made not in a holistic context?

Allan Savory 44:50
Absolutely it was made to address a problem: drugs, weeds.

Dave Chapman 45:02
If we talk about the scientific method as it’s normally practiced, it’s not holistic. It’s analyzing, dividing, and trying to study more and more discrete parts and become an expert at those parts. It’s like trying to study a soil microbe outside of the soil, where perhaps it can’t even live. In order to understand it, you have to see the context it’s in. Is that correct?

Allan Savory 45:39
No, that’s not correct; not what I’m saying. I hope people listen to me very carefully, because in my unsavory reputation, I’ve been accused by many academics and professors and so on of being anti-science. I’m not anti-science; I’m not anti-research; I’m not anti any of that. In fact, I would not be alive and talking to you today if I was.

Allan Savory 46:08
I have had a rough life, as you learned in the memoir. I have been shot twice. I have had many of the diseases of Africa, but I’m talking to you today. I’m only alive because of reductionist research – science. I would be stupid to be opposed to that. I am not.

Allan Savory 46:35
Let me try to go deep into that. I recently had 10 people on a short two-day training with me. They were all well educated. I think two or three had PhDs or master’s degrees. I asked them three questions.

Allan Savory 46:59
I asked them, “What is the scientific method?” They answered perfectly: We develop a hypothesis, we test the hypothesis in every way we can, and we prove or disprove the hypothesis. They answered it.

Allan Savory 47:15
I next asked them, “What is the peer-reviewed process?” They answered it perfectly. I then asked them, “What is science?” And they couldn’t answer. The first two that I’ve just mentioned are not science. We’ve got a serious situation.

Allan Savory 47:40
The first two are not science. They are, first, a way that we establish whether an idea or a concept is true or not. The second is a way that publishers decide what to publish. The second actually blocks science.

Allan Savory 48:04
What is science? Science is our endeavor to gain knowledge, to understand nature, the universe in every way possible, starting with observation, logic, questioning, debate, discussion, and, if necessary, testing, etc. That is what science is.

Allan Savory 48:36
A fellow called Lieberman, and I mentioned him in the memoir, actually wrote a book tracking the origin of science. I spent an unfortunate 20 years of my life tracking people in a war. As an ecologist, it was better than any university could have ever educated me in science.

Dave Chapman 49:02
Why was it better

Allan Savory 49:09
You talk to farmers, many of them. Today, overall, generalizations are always wrong, but overall, most farmers feel that they’re not regarded as experts. Other people – universities, government – these are the people that dictate our policies and tell us everything. I try to restore the confidence of farmers.

Allan Savory 49:40
I try to do so by saying to them, “Well, let’s look at every plant and animal that was domesticated, without which we couldn’t even have agriculture or a city. What universities developed those? What scientists developed those?” The answer is none.

Allan Savory 49:54
Those were delivered by illiterate people sitting around campfires, tracking animals, trying to support their families, learning, learning, learning, and they developed every plant and animal that we domesticated. We haven’t domesticated any since.

Allan Savory 50:17
Since we’ve had scientists, we’re losing crops, we’re losing varieties. We’re killing the diversity of agriculture. Who were the better scientists – the illiterate people around campfires, or the university-trained people who cannot tell me what science is?

Allan Savory 50:39
Farmers need to restore their own confidence in themselves. They are wonderfully observant, and we need to get us all working together. We need scientists; we need research; we need reductionist research, but not in management. It’s when you go to management that we strike a problem.

Dave Chapman 51:02
I still need to go back, but you keep tantalizing me so. You talk about management as being of great importance in your thinking – how we manage things – and holistic management is the key to everything. Do I get that right?

Allan Savory 51:32
Yes, I believe so.

Dave Chapman 51:35
Can you give me an example of holistic management that, in your mind, is an example of successful management?

Allan Savory 51:50
I can’t really, because I can give you many examples of people doing wonderfully well, because what they’re managing are the only three things that humans manage: their lives, financing their lives, and managing the economy, and through that, managing nature to produce food, energy, music, art, or anything else.

Allan Savory 52:16
Humans only manage those three things. Everything else we produce, we don’t manage. There are many individuals – I, for example, do my best to do that, but even I cannot manage holistically, truly; I can only do the best I can.

Allan Savory 52:35
The reason I can’t is because I cannot fully manage my life and my family life, and my economy – the economy to sustain my life, like any farmer – and then I cannot manage anything in nature – the land I’m associated with in Africa, or anything like that – to produce food or anything, because I’m operating in a world in which global finance is driving environmental destruction. I can only do the best I can.

Allan Savory 53:12
Picture it like the Zambezi River flowing towards one of the biggest waterfalls in the world, the Victoria Falls, where I live. I’m in the river, and I’m swimming very hard upstream, and there are many others doing the same, and we’re doing wonderfully well. Sadly, the current is taking us down to the falls.

Dave Chapman 53:39
This is, one might say, the tragedy of our lives: that we are swimming upstream against a very strong current.

Allan Savory 53:49
And why is that? That is what we found a way to deal with.

Dave Chapman 53:57
Okay, can you give me an example of that?

Allan Savory 53:59
Let me try to do that. We manage our families and our communities. We finance them, and then we manage nature to produce food, cars, cell phones, or energy – electricity from whatever. That’s what we do.

Allan Savory 54:23
Beyond the community, how do we manage anything? We can only do it, and should only do it, by organization. That means forming an organization – an institute, a company, a nonprofit, a church, whatever it is. We form an organization.

Allan Savory 54:52
We have to have them, but we are managing those organizations to produce our food or whatever at scale. There lies a problem, because organizations are legal entities. They are legal structures for compliance, for compiling capital – pulling together capital, etc. They are for the purposes we form them, but they’re not human.

Allan Savory 55:30
They have no organization – yours, mine, or anyone else’s. They have no feelings, are not human, and have no common sense, these human qualities. You may say, “Well, that doesn’t matter much. We can get around that.”

Allan Savory 55:52
Let me describe something that happened to me recently. I think I mentioned it to you, where I was having coffee with two young fellows back in my own country, well educated, sons of wealthy people, and they said to me, “Allan, we’ve watched you all our lives in this country, and we’ve seen that the message you put out is so simple, so clear, but you’ve had such opposition. You must be doing something wrong.”

Allan Savory 56:24
I said, “Yes, I obviously am. I’ve had hundreds of people tell me that, but I’ve had nobody tell me how to do it right. I’m seeking that, if somebody can tell me how to do it right.” I said, “But what about you guys? How are you doing?” He said, “We don’t understand you.” I said, “Well, how are you doing?” They again reiterated that they didn’t understand me.

Allan Savory 56:49
I said, “Well, by the look of you, you’re Christians, and growing up in this culture, I believe you are.” They said, “Yes, we are.” I said, “Well, what did your founder have to say? Wasn’t it very simple? Wasn’t it about love and caring?”

Allan Savory 57:04
They said, “Yes.” I said, “Yes, and for 2000 years, or whatever it is, haven’t millions and millions and millions of families and individuals been capable of love and caring?” They said, “Yes.” I said, “What happened when you went to scale and formed churches?” I said, “You’ve had well over 2000 churches formed. They’ve been going to war with each other, fighting each other.”

Allan Savory 57:34
I said, “The Holocaust was carried out by Christians through the Nazi Party. They didn’t do it. The Nazi Party did it. I said, ‘You’re not doing any better than I am.’ We have a problem. Institutions are not human, and we treat them as human. We have to find a way to solve that, and I believe we have, but it’s difficult to make people understand it in explanation alone.”

Dave Chapman 58:13
Okay, slow this down. We face a problem, which is that we inevitably create institutions – or they are created – I don’t know quite how that happens. In order to live together, we band together, and we have large forces that seem to control our lives.

Allan Savory 58:43
Hang on, Dave, you do know how it happened? Earlier, you were telling me that you and a partner formed the Real Organic Project. That’s an organization. The Real Organic Project is not you; it’s an entity. You do know how they’re formed? People form them for a purpose, usually because there’s a big issue to deal with.

Dave Chapman 59:06
Are you saying that they inevitably become part of the reason we can’t address the problem that they were formed to address?

Allan Savory 59:15
Because the moment you go beyond community, you have to form an organization – be it an environmental organization, a church, a government, or whatever it is.

Dave Chapman 59:30
By community, you mean a very intimate group of humans who relate to each other as essentially an extended family.

Allan Savory 59:37
Yes, I read an excellent book. I forget the authors, but it was the Vermont papers and how Vermont was one of the good examples of a democracy functioning, but it could only function up to a certain size.

Allan Savory 59:54
They tried to express it with examples, like when the policeman stopped you for speeding. He first said, “Oh, hi, Dave. I saw your kids at the ball game, and how’s your wife?” and chats with you, and then says, “I’m terribly sorry. I’ve got to book you for speeding.”

Allan Savory 1:00:10
When it starts getting impersonal, it starts to be dysfunctional. We shouldn’t dwell on that, because it’s happened to every church. It’s happened to every environmental organization. Every organization is not immune, and it’s well known in science. It’s called wicked problems – problems that we’ve been unable to solve for centuries.

Allan Savory 1:00:38
Academics do the research and establish that we have wicked problems in organizations, and then they go on to publish their papers and do nothing about it. I, through the life I had and struggling to understand, read the papers and started to try to find a way to solve it.

Dave Chapman 1:01:04
Before we hear the solution, do you think E. F. Schumacher was on the right track with “Small Is Beautiful”?

Allan Savory 1:01:12
Yes, he was. I love that. But when you take many smalls to scale, I could use Christianity as an example, or any religion, it starts stopping being small is beautiful because it’s now run by an organization.

Dave Chapman 1:01:32
Do you think that that progression is inevitable?

Allan Savory 1:01:36
So far it has. That’s why it’s called a wicked problem. That doesn’t mean an evil problem; in the jargon of systems science, it means a problem almost impossible to solve. Not every one of those is an institutional problem. They involve what they call complexity, and so let’s take desertification.

Allan Savory 1:02:00
We had desertification occurring over 1000s of years. It would have begun round about 50,000 years ago, and then gradually got steeper and steeper, along the curve. No nation could solve that, and many civilizations are found under desert sands today, which were former highly productive savannahs. We couldn’t solve that.

Allan Savory 1:02:28
In the 1960s, I was able to solve that by realizing, “Oh, my goodness, humans have tried to solve this problem for 50,000 years using only two tools.” We have a tool using animals. You can’t even drink milk unless you go to a cow and suck with your mouth, unless you use technology.

Allan Savory 1:02:51
We have a tool using animals. I realized, “Oh my god, we can’t solve this problem using technology, even science fiction technology, or fire.”

Dave Chapman 1:03:04
You say that you were able to solve this problem of desertification, so you have an example of that.

Allan Savory 1:03:13
Yes, which did not involve an institution. That is an example of a wicked problem. Nobody could solve it. Then in 1960, okay, we solved that one.

Dave Chapman 1:03:26
How did you solve it?

Allan Savory 1:03:28
By discovering that we had to use livestock and then working out how to use livestock. That reverses desertification.

Dave Chapman 1:03:38
Could you explain how to use livestock to do that?

Allan Savory 1:03:41
Yes, I could. What I had to look at at that time was how humans have handled livestock throughout history. They’ve herded them, pastoralists, etc., and then we got modern science. We got fencing, we got grazing systems. I realized that the pastoralists and agro-pastoral societies had all led to desertification, but it had been very gradual. It took a thousand years or more.

Allan Savory 1:04:20
I realized that and picked it up in Africa and then confirmed it in America. When we got modern range science and rotational and other grazing systems and fencing, we accelerated it. In Texas, taking an example in America, the level of desertification achieved in 100 years was greater than in Africa in 1000 years under pastoralists. So all that happened was we accelerated it.

Allan Savory 1:04:55
Trying to solve that problem, how the hell were we to do it? That is where I mentioned earlier to you. I then said, “Well, I have no resources. I’m a lone consultant. I better look at what other people have done to solve complicated problems like this.”

Allan Savory 1:05:15
That’s when I looked at every business school, every profession. I could, to say, “how have they solved problems as complicated as this?” There was only one profession that had, and that was the military. They had started off fighting battles in a square, artillery on the left, cavalry on the right, bashing away at each other. They’d learned that was stupid, and they don’t fight wars like that anymore. They plan them, etc.

Allan Savory 1:05:49
I was an officer in the army. How were we taught to plan? How were we taught to plan in immediate battlefield conditions, when you don’t know what the hell is going on? You’re losing men, bridges are being blown behind you. You don’t know what’s happening. You don’t know what the enemy is doing.

Allan Savory 1:06:06
But if you say to someone, “Leave it to me. I’m a very experienced soldier, I’ll do the right thing,” you’d fire that guy as fast as you could. The worse it is, the more you’ve got a plan. I faced that and said, “How did they solve this?” They solved it in a very simple way. It’s called an aide-mémoire.

Dave Chapman 1:06:27
It’s called what?

Allan Savory 1:06:30
aide-mémoire, French word. I just simply took my aide-mémoire as an Army officer and said, “Oh, my goodness, I could use that. We could solve this problem that way.” It did. I developed the aide-mémoire.

Allan Savory 1:06:46
All I had to do was say, “Okay, military have solved that, but battles are how they planned in immediate battlefield conditions – I stress immediate battlefield conditions – but they’ve never faced the problem of a long time,” because immediate battles last for an hour, half an hour, a day, two days, a week. They don’t last for a year, two years, but farmers have to plan for a year or more in dry areas.

Allan Savory 1:07:18
I needed some way to solve that. Okay, why don’t I use a piece of paper? Because on a flat piece of paper, I can express three dimensions: time, area, and number.

Dave Chapman 1:07:31
Allan, that’s how you came up with a solution. What was the solution?

Allan Savory 1:07:38
The aide-mémoire to what is today called holistic planned grazing process.

Dave Chapman 1:07:46
What is the essence of that?

Allan Savory 1:07:47
The essence of that is, it’s too complicated, so don’t try. Yes, because take you and me. Can either of us, or anybody listening to us, if we stand at a roadside and motorcycles, cars, and bicycles are coming by, can you count all three? Count the total and count the number of bikes, motorbikes? Can you do it? I can’t. No, neither can any farmer or rancher. So don’t try. It’s too complicated.

Allan Savory 1:08:23
What they worked out was you break it down into very simple components that you can focus on, and you can do that. If I broke that problem down and said, “Let’s stand and count the bicycles first. Let’s now have them go by and count the motorcycles next. Let’s have them go by and count the cars next.” You could do that, and then you could total them and know the total.

Allan Savory 1:08:50
That’s what we do. We break it down into very simple pieces, and each one is easy to do, no matter how exhausted or tired you are, and each one builds on the one before. At the end of just playing this little game of going one step at a time, at the end of the day, the plan emerges, which couldn’t have emerged.

Dave Chapman 1:09:18
But I’m still asking, what was the plan that emerged? I understand that you are interested in teaching the process of solving the problem. I understand that. It’s very nice that you’ve actually come up with a fairly simple way of teaching that.

Dave Chapman 1:09:36
But I’m curious about what was the plan that that process came up with, where you say, “We solved that wicked problem.”

Allan Savory 1:09:45
Go to a battle situation that’s done in a thousands different battles, and the officers in that battle plan their immediate action to the best of their ability. These are all different, so you’ve got thousands of different branches. What was the plan? It wasn’t the same. It was different in every place. It’s totally unique.

Allan Savory 1:10:06
When you come in, as academics do, and teach people a grazing system or whatever, it’s the same everywhere; it can’t work. That’s why all grazing systems fail. But André Voisin discovered that. He studied grazing systems and rotations in Europe over the last 200 years. He found they all lead to loss of biodiversity.

Allan Savory 1:10:40
They did not lead to desertification in Europe because the climate is too mild and too humid. You can overgraze every single plant on a field in Europe. I’ve been on one. I’ve been on a field where one of Cromwell’s battles was fought. I promise you, every single plant was overgrazed, but we were down to one species of grass left, and you couldn’t put your finger on bare ground. You were touching a plant.

Allan Savory 1:11:12
The only place I could put my finger on bare ground was by a little gate, where about a meter wide, a bare beaten zone where the sheep went through the gate. That’s after how many centuries? If you did that same thing in Zimbabwe, Texas, or Arizona, please believe me, you get a desert.

Allan Savory 1:11:35
And because I showed that in the TED talk, I showed the US government plots put in to prove that if you stopped the overgrazing, the desert would recover. They proved the opposite. Every single plot turned into desert. But the papers had been published.

Allan Savory 1:12:00
The Navajo sheep had been shot that they wanted to shoot. Thank God they left the plots. I went with government officials over two years, finding every plot we could and looking at it. Every single plot had turned to desert or was turning to desert, but that went against our beliefs, so it wasn’t seen.

Dave Chapman 1:12:26
But you also saw a place in Zimbabwe where the opposite was happening.

Allan Savory 1:12:33
No, not in Zimbabwe. I mentioned it in the book. I was constantly looking for what I think somebody once called positive deviance, and where the aha moment came for me, when I firmly believed that livestock were the cause of the problem.

Allan Savory 1:12:55
I was on public record in my country saying that I was prepared to shoot bloody ranchers because they were raping the land. I was more violent than any vegan. I stress that. With that belief, I was looking for solutions.

Allan Savory 1:13:19
I coined the words “game ranching.” I was working with American ecologists on that. We believed that if we could get rid of the livestock, we could save it with wildlife. We were wrong. We didn’t know that yet, but I wasn’t seeing the results we were expecting. I was desperate for knowledge.

Allan Savory 1:13:39
I read a Farmers Weekly magazine on a coffee table of a friend’s ranch, and there was an article by a fellow called Jon Acox, who I didn’t know, a modernist. The article was, “South Africa is understocked and overgrazed,” and it caused a furor. I said, “Well, that’s different thinking.”

Allan Savory 1:14:06
I picked up a telephone. I called Acox. I said, “Can I come and visit you?” He said, “Yes.” I traveled 2,000 miles, I think it was, to see him. I was broke. I couldn’t even afford a jersey. I could only afford the fuel for my vehicle. I took my food in the vehicle. I was that broke as an independent scientist trying to solve this problem.

Allan Savory 1:14:37
When I saw Jon and talked to him, he talked about what he was doing. It was a nonselective grazing system. I could see flaws in it, but I hadn’t come to argue; I’d come to learn.

Dave Chapman 1:14:50
What does that mean, “A non selective grazing system”?

Allan Savory 1:14:55
You had developed a grazing system in which you put the sheep or the cattle in a paddock and you leave them there until they’ve grazed every single plant equally, and then move them to the next one. You took 16 paddocks to do this, and so it was called nonselective. Then there’d be no competition between the plants. They’d all grow equally, and you wouldn’t lose species.

Allan Savory 1:15:26
I listened, and I said, “Can I see a farm on which you’re doing this?” He introduced me right then to the Howells, Len and Denise Howell. They said I could come and stay with them, and I did. Thank God I could stay in the bed and borrow a jacket, because it was snow and winter, and I’d never been in that in my life.

Allan Savory 1:15:38
They took me out on the land, and as we went around, they showed me they were very excited about what they were seeing on the land, and it was impressive. Plants were growing beautifully. Then we stopped, and I got out to open a gate, and I glanced over to one side – the gate was near a corner of a paddock – and I just rushed over there and got excited and got down, looking at the ground, etc.

Allan Savory 1:16:07
They came over and said, “What are you so excited about?” I said, “This is what I’m looking for.” I said, “Look at this patch.” We were in winter, dry and everything. I said, “But look. Look at the color, even of the dry grass. Look at the density of plants. Look at the cover of the soil.” I was digging my finger into it. I said, “This is what I’m looking for.”

Allan Savory 1:16:27
I said, “What happened here?” They said, “Nothing.” I said, “Come on. Come on. What happened here?” They said, “Well, it is a corner and the sheep crowd in there with their backs to the snow.” We need animals. That’s when the aha moment came. I’ve been wrong. The whole world has been wrong. We need animals and their behavior.

Dave Chapman 1:16:57
Allan, before the first time that I interviewed you, I wrote letters to a number of fairly famous grazers in America: Gabe Brown, Glen Elzinga, Francis Tickle, and others. I said, “Look, I’m going to interview Allan, and obviously a lot of people in academia think he’s a Charlatan. What do you think?” They all said, “We follow his advice, we believe in it. It works.”

Dave Chapman 1:17:46
These are people not in a brittle, dry environment; they’re all North Americans. I went, “Okay, so whether anyone understands Allan or not, there’s something in there that is working.” These are some of the best ranchers in America, and famous for their success, not for their failure. I always take everything with that in the back of my mind – that what you do has worked for many people.

Dave Chapman 1:18:22
That’s important. If it never worked for anybody, that doesn’t mean you’re nuts; it just means you haven’t worked it out yet. But you have worked a lot of things out that actually were very helpful. You have a reluctance to talk about that, which is perplexing to me – reluctance to talk about, “Well, we did this, and this is what happened. It worked.”

Allan Savory 1:18:48
I thought I was talking about that.

Dave Chapman 1:18:49
You did just now. I appreciate it, because that gives somebody a chance to go, “Okay, you did that, and this is what happened.”

Allan Savory 1:18:58
Yes, Dave. To me, if people read what I wrote, not what others wrote afterwards about me or for me or anything, if you read what I wrote, or if you listen to any of my podcasts, or my talks, or my blogs, I’ve been saying the same thing, one way or another, for nearly 70 years. I don’t know how to say it more simply.

Allan Savory 1:19:28
What we have is we’re facing a difficulty that is hard to understand. But having trained thousands of people, I have never, ever found that ignorance blocked learning. I have never experienced that. All I have experienced that blocks learning is two things, and only two. One is our ego, and the second is what we already know, which makes it very difficult.

Allan Savory 1:20:09
I’ve been talking to adults. By the time we’re adults, we have egos. By the time we’re adults, we know a lot that blocks our learning. That makes it very difficult. I don’t know how to solve that. I mentioned a little earlier that something that we were talking about was getting a bit complicated, and I don’t want to explain it. Let me explain why I said that.

Allan Savory 1:20:41
If I had a bicycle, nobody in the world had ever known of a bicycle, but I developed one, and I start explaining to you that I’ve got this bicycle. It’s got narrow tires. You balance on a seat. You’ve got a crossbar that you can steer the front wheel. It’s got these two wheels, and you pedal like hell, and actually the faster you go, the more steady you are, the more balanced you are, etc.

Allan Savory 1:21:13
The more I explain that, the more you would say this man is a snake oil salesman. He’s a charlatan. Hence the name “Unsavory.” The more I try to explain, the more people can’t understand. But if I had a bicycle and you visited me, I could almost guarantee within half an hour you’d be riding the bicycle, because I never explained it. You just did it.

Allan Savory 1:21:43
If I could wave a magic wand, tomorrow I would work with a world leader and just work with them and their experts and just develop policy in the interests of citizens. Just do it. If I explain it to them, I get branded crazy.

Dave Chapman 1:22:06
It’s always a challenge to think new thoughts, to think of things that are not what everybody knows.

Allan Savory 1:22:17
No, I don’t think that’s a challenge, Dave. If you do that, and you come up with new things that everybody sees as new, you won’t have much problem. That’s how we progress. But if in doing that you come up with something that everybody knows is wrong, yes, you’re going to have a problem like I’ve had, and Galileo, Copernicus, and Semmelweis had.

Dave Chapman 1:22:43
Semmelweis was the one I was thinking of closer to our time.

Allan Savory 1:22:47
Yes, and not as much resistance. He wasn’t burnt at the stake, but he did die in a mental asylum.

Dave Chapman 1:22:56
That’s right. He lost his whole career.

Allan Savory 1:22:58
In Semmelweis’ case, he went insane; in my case, and I’ve said this for years, thank God I was already insane 50 years ago. I’ve been able to keep going.

Dave Chapman 1:23:14
Semmelweis’ revolutionary and terrifying idea was that doctors should wash their hands before an operation.

Allan Savory 1:23:22
Because they were gentlemen and experts and gentlemen don’t have dirty hands.

Dave Chapman 1:23:28
Now, of course, to not do that would be considered horrifying to people in the medical establishment.

Allan Savory 1:23:36
You make a good point, which made my mind flash back. A couple of times in Texas, large meetings of academics were set up. I was invited to them, and they were traps designed to destroy me. I didn’t know this the first time, but I watched with amusement what happened. The second time, I knew what was going on.

Allan Savory 1:24:02
I accepted the invitation to address a large group of academics. As I was flying there in my own plane, which I had in those days, I was thinking, “Oh my goodness, I don’t want to go through this again. I’m sick of it. I’m going to have to do something different.” So I did.

Allan Savory 1:24:25
There was an auditorium with perhaps 50 people in it. I was introduced, and they all knew who I was because the meeting had been arranged specifically for them to hear me speak about holistic management. I went to the podium and said, “I’d just like to correct that. Before I do anything, how many of you in this room believe holistic management will work?”

Allan Savory 1:25:08
No hands went up. I said, “How many of you think it wouldn’t work?” A few hands came up. I said, “No, no, just be candid. How many of you think it wouldn’t work?” Virtually every hand went up. I said, “Thank you. For that reason, I have no intention of talking about it. Instead, I’m going to tell you a story.”

Allan Savory 1:25:31
I told them a story about UFOs that had been seen for a long time. I said, “Those were us. We came from Mars. We didn’t come to talk to you because we didn’t know your language, and we were worried about your diseases. We’ve solved that, and I’ve been sent to talk to you about what happened on our continent.”

Allan Savory 1:25:57
I described our continent turning into desert and losing biodiversity. I said, “What we did was open our minds to all science. We developed a way of managing it.” I never used the words holistic management or holistic planned grazing. I simply described what we had done and said, “It saved our planet. I’ve been sent to talk to you about it because we see similar problems here.”

Allan Savory 1:26:35
At that point, I asked, “How many of you think that would work?” Virtually every hand went up. I said, “Thank you. That was holistic management.”

Dave Chapman 1:26:48
Allan, as we talk about swimming up the Zambezi against the strong current – we mentioned it earlier, before we started the interview – it’s a nice analogy, but it’s not easy swimming upstream.

Allan Savory 1:27:10
You’re telling me that?

Dave Chapman 1:27:11
I am.

Allan Savory 1:27:13
I’ve tried to do it.

Dave Chapman 1:27:15
That’s right. You said it can get lonely, that there aren’t a lot of people swimming upstream with you, but there are many people going down the current, going the other way. It seems like quite a challenge to try to reverse that.

Dave Chapman 1:27:34
You see the need for that as a species. If we are to survive a bit longer on this planet, we need to bring more people to swim up that stream. Is that fair?

Allan Savory 1:27:52
Yes, and science is logical. Science being logical, I think every scientist in here, if not in there, knows that if you have a problem, you have to address the cause of the problem. I think every parent knows that. Every human knows that. I think you and I know that.

Allan Savory 1:28:22
What we need to do is talk about the cause of the problem, see that we’ve understood it, and recognize that there is a way to solve it in harmony, without conflict, without blaming, because nobody is to blame. I would like us to do that, but it is proving very difficult.

Allan Savory 1:28:49
You are one of many incredible people in an agricultural movement that began by being called organic, then sustainable, and now regenerative. I think you can trace that whole movement back to two people, Bob Rodale and myself.

Allan Savory 1:29:15
Bob came up with a term, and I said we needed a new agriculture that could actually sustain civilization. I said at the time, and there was a video produced of a lecture I gave at New Mexico University by a fellow called Roger Brown, in which he wanted me to talk about agriculture.

Allan Savory 1:29:37
I said, “No, I will only talk about sustaining civilization,” because I said, “Throughout history, when we have been unable to feed our cities, we’ve abandoned them, and we’ve sustained our families and our communities by reverting to agroforestry and pastoralism.” I said, “We can’t do that again.” The whole of global civilization is threatened, so I want to talk about that, and that’s where the regenerative agricultural movement arose.

Allan Savory 1:30:12
We mentioned earlier that there are somewhere over 700 organizations now carrying that idea forward. Few know the origin of it, and how many in that 700 are talking about the cause, or addressing the cause of why agriculture throughout history has destroyed more civilizations than armies?

Allan Savory 1:30:44
Why agriculture today is the most destructive industry we know – more destructive than coal, oil, or fossil fuels. How many of those 700 organizations are even talking about that? None. That is what I’m grappling with.

Allan Savory 1:31:06
I would love to get us all together and just talk about what is causing the problem, because we can pull together. Nobody’s to blame. It was the way we were managing and are managing, and it’s so easy to change.

Dave Chapman 1:31:27
Yes, several times in this conversation, you have said that it isn’t easy to change in our lives or in our world.

Allan Savory 1:31:37
No, I’ve said certain things are not easy to change – ideas that are known to be wrong. How to address the global issue of biodiversity loss, leading to consequent desertification, and to climate change accelerating out of control. The way to deal with that is easy if we do it. If we explain it, people get confused.

Allan Savory 1:32:09
I have proposed that we just do it with a case study that is internationally observed, so that everybody can just watch as people work together: institutions, the people in the institutions, and develop policy at scale in agriculture. If what comes out of it, people like we can do it, and every country can do it, and it will start a domino effect around the world, because as we talk, not a single world leader knows what to do.

Allan Savory 1:32:52
Every single conference on biodiversity, desertification, or climate ends in chaos and confusion. If I was a world leader listening to that professional advice, I wouldn’t know what to do. I’ve suggested a very simple way, “Let’s just take one country and one case and just do it and see what happens.”

Allan Savory 1:33:19
If I’m wrong, we will have wasted a year. We may have wasted a couple of million dollars. If I am right, how will you put a price on it? We will save billions of lives. We will save tragedy beyond imagination as, globally, civilization collapses. Shouldn’t we try that?

Dave Chapman 1:33:52
I would love to try it.

Allan Savory 1:33:57
I will you support that?

Dave Chapman 1:33:59
Sure. I’ll support that.

Allan Savory 1:34:00
When I said that at COP26, why didn’t you support it?

Dave Chapman 1:34:05
I wasn’t at COP26.

Allan Savory 1:34:06
It went on video, it went on YouTube, and it went to thousands of people. It’s the only thing I’ve ever put out that I never got one word of criticism. The only thing I’ve ever done, but nobody acted. Nobody supported me.

Dave Chapman 1:34:29
I tried to support you, Allan, that’s why I interviewed you right after that, to spread the word that I believe you.

Allan Savory 1:34:36
I appreciate it.

Dave Chapman 1:34:36
I believe that your comments are still on our website.

Allan Savory 1:34:40
Yeah, and we keep trying.

Dave Chapman 1:34:43
We keep trying.

Allan Savory 1:34:44
I am working with a group at the moment, and it’ll come out – a group of concerned mothers. They are in Europe: the UK, Spain, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, India, and several other countries.

Allan Savory 1:34:47
I’m working with them just to see if we can maybe persuade Prince William, the Royal Society, the Royal Foundation, or the US National Academy of Sciences to just join with me and support trying that. Maybe concerned mothers around the world will achieve what others have tried to do.

Dave Chapman 1:35:33
Allan, in your mind, if you were to set up such a trial…

Allan Savory 1:35:39
Not a trial, just do it.

Dave Chapman 1:35:42
Not a trial.

Allan Savory 1:35:46
Don’t try to ride the bike; just ride it.

Dave Chapman 1:35:48
Just ride the bike.

Allan Savory 1:35:49
As I said, the downside of that is minimal. When you look at the billions we will spend just bailing banks out or whatever, it’s trivial, and it may be a year. The upside you cannot put a price on. Why don’t we try it? Is anybody else in the world putting forward a suggestion? No, just a mass of conflicting views.

Dave Chapman 1:36:35
Let’s just say, for example, that I were a multi-billionaire, and I said, “Allan, I will write the check. I want you to do this.” What literally would you do?

Allan Savory 1:36:50
I would find some leader of a country. It could be a dictator, or it could be a democracy. It doesn’t make any difference. I would just find some leader of the country and say, “Here’s this money. Are you prepared to act as a statesman and allow your institutions, your citizens, and your political party to just work with me and let me facilitate and have you develop a policy in your country for agriculture in the interest of all your citizens?”

Allan Savory 1:37:24
If he did so, that would be it. I don’t want any money. I just need somebody to stand up and act like a statesman.

Dave Chapman 1:37:35
But what is it they would be supporting? What would be the agriculture? What would be the bicycle that they’d be riding?

Allan Savory 1:37:42
I think that’s a good question, giving me an opportunity to perhaps make it clear. Let me assume it is you. Let me assume you are the leader of a political party. I don’t care whether you’re a dictator or a democracy. You’re the leader of an institution.

Allan Savory 1:38:05
I would just say to you, “Dave, carry on governing as you’re doing. You cannot take a risk.” Politicians can’t risk. “Don’t take any risk. Govern as you’re doing, because your citizens expect it. Now, please, will you work with me on the side, concurrently, and just let your country know that you’re going to allow your political party and your institutions to work with me to see if you can develop policy in the interests of your citizens,” an agricultural policy we could take almost any.

Allan Savory 1:38:43
But agriculture is an obvious one, “and if you do that, then that’s what we would do.” What would I be doing with you? Your people – I’ll call it your people, everyone – I would be saying to you, “Let’s start by you selecting six to twelve people across your population. They can be from the opposition party, they can be from anywhere, who are not experts in policy development. That’s the only requirement.”

Allan Savory 1:39:22
“You select those citizens. Let them be like a jury. I will work with them. With those that you have the authority and the convening power to do, we would sit and say, ‘Agriculture – who does it concern in this country? Who are the people concerned with it?'”

Allan Savory 1:39:48
Well, it’d turn out to be everyone. I’d say, “Well, we need a new thing called a national holistic context. We need that, and we need it formed by the citizens. So how can we get them represented here?” We can only do so through their institutions.

Allan Savory 1:40:20
Who are all the institutions involved? Well, it’s the women’s church groups, it’s this group, it’s the environmentalists, it’s the universities, it’s the corporations, etc., etc. It would come down to thirty, forty, or fifty institutions. What we want is those institutions to send us their top experts in what they do. I don’t have the convening power; he or she does who leads that nation.

Allan Savory 1:41:01
We would now ask you to invite these institutions to send one or two of their top people to a meeting which will take two or three days. Are you going to refuse? No. When you are invited by the president, the prime minister, or the dictator, you come. That convening power of the top person is vital. When they come, we would talk about things with the facilitators, and the twelve people who are like a jury would be one of the groups.

Allan Savory 1:41:47
We would talk about the need to decide how the people want their lives to be, how they must finance such lives, how they must produce food, energy, and other things, but everything for that nation from nature. We will bring that together with 100% agreement with human beings who are at that. We will talk as human beings, not as institutions.

Allan Savory 1:42:29
We would have a break, and we would let people go home for a month – not too long – and report back to their institutions and say, “This is what we’ve agreed on for our nation. We want our lives to be. Does anybody disagree?” In your families; not the institution, the people. Then report back. If there are any changes, we’d make them.

Allan Savory 1:42:56
Now we have an idea of what everybody, including the political parties in opposition, wants for that nation. Just in those terms, not what they don’t want. On that, we always, every time we do anything like this, get complete agreement.

Allan Savory 1:43:20
Now we would have another session where we would have to disclose and inform people of ecological principles, which are not widely known. The laws of physics and chemistry are widely known. What about the ecological principles? They are virtually as strong as the laws of physics.

Allan Savory 1:43:51
We would just talk about some of those principles that aren’t known today in the public and in our institutions, and expose them to some new knowledge. We would let them go home and say, “We need an agricultural policy that achieves that, not that addresses a problem. That achieves what the citizens want, in the interests of the citizens, not of the institutions.”

Allan Savory 1:44:25
I won’t go further here, but there’s a way in which we get people to understand that their own institutions are legal entities, not humans. That’s why I said it’s easier to just ride the bicycle, not keep explaining it.

Dave Chapman 1:44:46
You have had a number of people go through the training.

Allan Savory 1:44:49
A great many.

Dave Chapman 1:44:53
Have you seen on the other side of that that they were able to come together as agents of change?

Allan Savory 1:45:04
Very little.

Dave Chapman 1:45:05
Why?

Allan Savory 1:45:06
For the reasons we’ve been discussing, we’re adults. We have egos. A fellow, Everett Rogers, wrote a whole book about it, “The Diffusion of Innovation.” Everett lived in Albuquerque. I met him. He and I were on a think tank in Santa Fe and talked about these things, and it’s well known how new knowledge spreads.

Allan Savory 1:45:34
We used to have a saying in the army in Rhodesia: when I give a clear instruction to you and you relay it to one other person, it begins to change. I say to you, “Dave, send reinforcements. We’re going to advance. I need them urgently.” You pass the message on, and it becomes, “Send refreshments. He’s going to a dance. He needs them urgently.” That happens throughout society.

Allan Savory 1:46:09
Yes, I’ve trained a great many people, and since that, what has happened? When I began in America, we had the Gus Hormay Rest-Rotation System, we had Andre Voisin’s Rational Grazing, taught by a university in Vermont, and we had continuous grazing. That was it.

Allan Savory 1:46:38
After I started training government officials and ranchers, within six months, I think we had something like thirteen different grazing systems. “Send refreshments. We’re going to a dance,” and the confusion began.

Allan Savory 1:46:56
Today, how many grazing gurus are there in America? How many grass whisperers are there in America? There were none before the day I started training. That is why we need to address it at scale.

Dave Chapman 1:47:21
Okay. The cameras are going to die soon.

Allan Savory 1:47:25
So will I.

Dave Chapman 1:47:27
We probably should call that a good day. Allan, thank you so much.

Allan Savory 1:47:32
Thank you, Dave, for keeping trying.

Dave Chapman 1:47:36
We keep trying. All right. Thank you.