“Together, nature and organizations, constitute everything humans manage, from our families to governance, with minor exceptions. Management involves complexity, and it is our inability to manage complexity that is the cause of desertification and climate change, and most that ails us.” (Allan Savory)
Allan Savory makes a strong statement to talk about shared values and goals, while avoiding to promote particular actions or interventions. However, these calls for particular actions really dominate the political discourse … Recommendations like “We all must plant trees everywhere!” or “Everyone must become vegan!” are alienating to those who live in a different context and cause push-back, polarization, and conflict. For example, many ecosystems are naturally grasslands – and planting trees there is not a natural option and may even conflict with traditional land uses. The dietary example is also over-general. For those who can access regeneratively grazed beef, this is actually the diet with lowest environmental impact – contrary to what the majority of consumers can access. So why alienate with actions, if we can agree on values and even on criteria to test reality against these values?
Using Allan’s holistic understanding, a better way of communicating may be “We value ecosystems with functioning ecological processes, including the mineral cycle and the water cycle. Depending on our local ecological context, we work on restoring and improving ecosystem functions.” Or: “As consumers, we cherish a diet with low ecological footprint. Depending on our ability to source products and our dietary needs, this could include a low-meat diet and/or a shift to regeneratively grown meat products.“
A larger political implication is that political parties often design programs that target interventions (e.g. increase use of biodiesel) instead of outcomes (e.g. lower overall GHG emissions), and then work with large corporations to role out these programs. The outcomes have been disastrous: palm oil corporations have displaced traditional small holders and logged rain forests for palm oil plantations, which now exude large amounts of soil carbon while Westeners enjoy “low-emission bio diesel”. Or tree planting: good intentions of government programs led to context-inappropriate planting projects in grassland ecoregions that wasted money and water, and even violently displaced traditional land owners!
I am practicing to identify calls for intervention and exercise caution. The question is always: In which context can these interventions be beneficial? In what contexts do negative outcomes prevail? What values do we actually want to accomplish, and can we offer better ways of achieving these values than one particular intervention?
Holistic management was designed for just this decision process. It’s worth learning more about it, in my opinion!
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