Precious Phiri, Founding Director of EarthWisdom Consulting Company, from "Restoring Ecosystems to Reverse Global Warming" conference in Washington, D.C. September 26, 2015.
14. What is Holistic Management?
• DECISION making framework offering:
• low cost,
• high ecology solutions to food security, biodiversity loss,
desertification and climate change
15.
16.
17. The First Insight: Manage as a
whole
17
State, Nation, Universe, Etc.
Local
Community
Farming Cooperative
Work
Family
Other whole
Other whole
Other whole
You
24. 10/23/15 24
Community Action Cycle
Act
Together
Evaluate
Together
Explore Land
Restoration
Issues & Set
Priorities
Plan
Together
Prepare to
Mobilize
Prepare to
Scale Up
Organize the
Community
for Action
Program Team Community
Community outreach
Recognizing the essential role that animals play to grassland health, and new practice called Holistic Management is using livestock as a proxy for wild herds. What are the specifics?
The concept of holism tells us that each of us is a whole unto ourselves. And we are, in turn, part of other wholes.
You could start at the tiniest microscopic level—a bacteria that exists within your body is part of a whole—and expand out to our families, or farms and business, that are part of a community in a state, province or region of a country on the planet earth.
No whole stands alone, independent of others—many wholes, in fact, overlap.
As part of the decision making process, we need to think about the various wholes we are associated with:
think about the people who are involved in making decisions, and the people who influence decisions.
clarify what resources are available to us (land, equipment, clients, etc.), and
know what money we have access to.
This step we refer to as defining the whole under management
Exercise:Each of us represents a whole that is part of many other wholes. Using the "wholes within wholes" figure on page 1 of your guide, diagram or write out what are some of the wholes you are part of and connected to.
And finally, the takeaway I am most encouraged by is that this innovation presents a new face of climate heroes. People who are actually making a difference, restoring land and putting carbon in the ground. Village herders, doing what they’ve always done, only now doing it in a way that is restorative and offers promise for our future.
And finally, meet the climate heroes of tomorrow. Village herders, doing what they’ve always done, only doing it in a way that is restorative.
is restorative, and provides promise for reversing global warming.
restoring grasslands and reversing global warming by putting carbon in the soil, we it wants to be.
In addition to politicians, technologist, and business people, we can now bring into the fold common people, village herders, doing what they have already done, but now doing it in a way that’s restorative.
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Lets quickly see this again. The only tool used in this restoration effort was livestock. No irrigation. No seeding. No artificial fertilizer. No fossil fuels. No change in rainfall.
In five years there is reversal of desertification.
Now let’s look at a river example. This is an aerial view. The blue star toward the bottom is the historic high water point for the river during the dry season, and elephants bathed in there. But after 9 years of restoring the land through changed livestock management, there is now year round surface water 1.5 kilometers upstream. These new pools provide watering points for the cattle and the ranch no longer runs the water pumps in the dry season.
Imagery 2012 Cnes/Spot Image,DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, Map data 2012 Google
Here’s how it looks from the ground. We are driving upstream with the river on our left.
Here’s new surface water, 1.5km upstream from the previous dry season high water point.