Holistic management

Many people point to burning fossil fuels and raising livestock on grazing land as leading causes of a warming climate and of soil and land decline. Allan Savory, an ecologist who grew up in Zimbabwe, challenges that view in this book. He argues that how grazing is managed matters more than whether animals graze at all, and that badly planned herding is a central cause of the damage.

Savory lays out Holistic Management, a framework for making decisions about land, livestock, and money together rather than in isolation. It is aimed at ranchers, land managers, and anyone who works with ecosystems, and it draws on his fieldwork on rangelands. The book explains how to plan grazing so that land can recover and hold more water and carbon.