Allan Savory
![Allan Savory](/assets/img/authors/allan-savory.jpg)
Allan Savory
Allan Redin Savoryis a Zimbabwean ecologist, farmer, soldier, exile, environmentalist, international consultant, and president and co-founder of The Savory Institute. He originated holistic management, a systems thinking approach to managing resources. Once a staunch opponent of livestock, Savory would come to favor using properly managed livestock, bunched and moving to mimic nature, as a means to heal the environment, stating "only livestock can reverse desertification. There is no other known tool available to humans with which to address desertification that...
NationalityZimbabwean
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth15 September 1935
CountryZimbabwe
Agriculture is not crop production as popular belief holds - it's the production of food and fiber from the world's land and waters. Without agriculture it is not possible to have a city, stock market, banks, university, church or army. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization and any stable economy.
Now that we've discovered how to actually develop policies and projects holistically, if we can get the barriers out of the way and release the creativity that's in our universities, our farming organizations, amongst our farmers and land managers, we'll be astounded. As I'd like to express it, the human spirit will fly.
I spent a lot of my life - 20 years of it - in war, training army trackers and commanding a tracker unit, and then in the Game Department, tracking lions and elephants and poachers. So I've spent literally thousands of hours tracking people or animals, and training others to do it.
I was so fanatical about trying to save wildlife... I was unable to accept that we couldn't solve this problem of thousands of years, of wherever humans operated, the environment deteriorated.