#65 Allan Savory - Our Collective Need to See the World Holistically

On this episode of Death in The Garden, we’re sharing the interview we did with Allan Savory, president and co-founder of the Savory Institute, an organization created to regenerate grasslands by training and connecting global practitioners in how to holistically manage their land to restore biodiversity.

Last April, we had the opportunity to travel to Zimbabwe to film promotional material for Allan’s memoir. You can sign up for the pre-sale list to be notified when the book comes out. We had the opportunity to read a proof copy before our trip, and it was absolutely fascinating to have a window into the life and context that birthed holistic management.

In this interview, we discuss the basic ideas around a holistic context, ecological concepts such as desertification, and the ways that we misunderstand ecology by imposing human concepts, such as competition, on the natural world. We also discuss some fascinating critiques of conservation, and the importance of human beings in environments. We discuss the role of death and killing in the continuation of life, and the importance of moral courage. We also tackle issues such as honesty in science, the fallibility of scientists and the problems of academia, bureaucracy, and institutional science. Most importantly, we talk about our desperate need to change our management strategies from reductionistic to holistic.

If you haven’t seen Allan’s TedTalk, we really can’t recommend it enough. This video was probably the single biggest impetus for beginning our journey into the creation of Death in The Garden. Holistic management, and the idea of holism in general, inspired us to see the world as one whole ecosystem that we are inextricably connected to, entangled in a web of relationships. This radically shifted our view of life after being enculturated in the Western, reductionist, mechanical worldview that the dominant culture presents as fact.

You can learn more about Allan’s work at the Savory Institute’s website, and you can contribute to their end-of-year campaign if you have the means.

Thank you as always to our paid subscribers who continue to make this project possible, and for Allan Savory and Jody Butterfield for giving us the opportunity to come out to Zimbabwe and work on this project.

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