e l e v e n
Paying attention builds soil as well as soul.
Allan Savory is an ecologist and rancher born in Rhodesia, now known as Zimbabwe, in 1935. Early in his career, Savory was concerned with the rapid desertification prevalent in the semi-arid regions of the world. Working with the Rhodesian government, he regretfully advocated for the culling of elephants, basing his recommendations on the prevailing wisdom that overgrazing was the primary culprit for desertification. The soils in Rhodesia became worse, and Savory was devastated by his role in this pointless killing of wildlife. He set out to find a solution to the desertification crisis, and he came to conclusion that astonished him – the answer was not less livestock, but more.
In short, Savory discovered that the grasslands of Africa had once supported vastly more grazing animals that they do currently while maintaining a healthy ecology. What humans had inadvertently disrupted was the complex and crucially important relationship between grazing animals and their predators. When predators are present, grazing animals herd together in tight packs for safety, and in doing so their concentrated trampling, defecating, and urinating brings a fertility boost to the land. Without predators, grazers spread out. This leads inexorably to more bare ground, bare ground that cannot retain as much water or nutrients, and this gradually turns healthy grassland into desert.
Savory began experimenting with increasing the density of cattle or sheep, moving the livestock regularly to mimic the actions of a herd being harassed by predators. The results were almost miraculous – degraded landscapes rebounded in short order. Savory’s method of Holistic Land Management is not just a means of protecting soil, it has profound implications for climate change. Healthy soil is by far the best and most natural means of carbon sequestration we know of. Soil, like soul, requires proper digestion, and in the world’s grasslands it is a balanced relationship between grazing animals, predators, and legions of microorganisms that keep digestive process humming.
We pay attention and open ourselves up to astonishment so that we can course correct, so that our behaviors are not overly governed by expediency, dogma, or unthinking fealty to tradition. Consider Savory’s radical and yet ecologically common sense realization in relation to the soil-killing, soul-removing practice of clearing untold acres of rain forest for industrial corn and soybean farming. Here, the model of monocultural megafarms has been hastily grafted from the former prairies of Iowa and Illinois to an ecosystem with utterly different qualities and characteristics. And therefore the re-animating of the world occurs case by case, river by river, tree by tree, grasshopper by grasshopper.
