Allan Savory
Background
Discussed in "The Regenerative Ranching racket": <https://medium.com/@unpopularscience/the-regenerative-ranching-racket-fe6cce917a42>
and "How Big Ag Bankrolled Regenerative Ranching": <https://jacobin.com/2022/03/big-agriculture-funding-regenerative-ranching-amp-grazing-soil-carbon>
Rhodesian War
By his own recollection, Allan Savory fought for "two decades" in Rhodesia's counterinsurgency war against Black liberation.[1]
His memoir: <https://pitchstonewaters.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Selous-Scout-story-Savory.pdf>
Tracker Combat Unit
See TCU
According to Judith Schwartz, author of "Cows Save the Planet,"[2] Savory credits his tracking skill with enabling him to develop The Savory Method.[3] Her article exploring this connection in 2015 is illustrative of how his promoters whitewash his history of waging white supremacist counterinsurgency warfare and its connection to his environmental proscriptions, describing his interest in the Rhodesian military with terms like 'passion' & 'romance,' while highlighting his 'renowned success' in Rhodesia's campaign against Black liberation as an expert military tracker and commander.
The Rhodesia Party
September 1972, Reuters interviewed Allan Savory as the new "moderate" right-wing Rhodesia Party was being formed. Savory defined the party as 'opposed' to 'petty racialism' through denying that Rhodesia was ever racist prior to Ian Smith's government:
"We are not extremists in any form, right or left. We regard ourselves as moderate, average Rhodesians who are determined to do something about the current drift in the country towards more and more petty and unnecessary racialism which we do not believe is characteristic of Rhodesia or has ever characterised Rhodesia."[4][5]
USDA
1980-1982 Training
From 1980-1982, the USDA Soil Conservation Service established an Interagency Committee for Savory to provide "holistic management" training to "some 2,000 officials, scientists and academics participated from the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Natural Resources Conservation Service, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, World Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and from western land-grant universities."[6][7]
This program was established by the initiative of Ray Margo and Don Sylvester, the latter of whom played a foundational role in establishing the first U.S. Savory Center (today known as Holistic Management International) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. From 1984 until his retirement 1989, Sylvester continued to arrange trainings for USDA officials, academics, and others after the official Interagency Committee had dissolved.
1989 Report
April 1989, "Future Directions in Agriculture Policy: Report to the President and Congress" ft. Allan Savory, Center for Holistic Resource Management, and Katherine Reichelderfer, USDA[8]
2013 TED Talk
According to Savory, the TED Talk he delivered in 2013 was a breakthrough which enabled him to "present his message to the masses." Delivered in March, by August of 2013 it had been seen by over two million people.[9]
2013 Australia Tour
Building on the momentum of his TED Talk, in August of 2013 Allan Savory delivered a series of high-profile lectures in Australia, coordinated with Soils for Life and the former Commander in Chief of the Australian Military, General Michael Jeffery.[10]
Together, they delivered the inaugural Bruce Ward and George Gundry Legacy Lecture(s) on August 6th.[11] Bruce Ward had been instrumental in disseminating Allan Savory’s ideas to thousands of people in Australia since the 1990s, and George Gundry was a student of his and an influential holistic management practitioner and educator in his own right.[12][13]
American Grassfed Association
On June 23 , 2014[14], Allan Savory was one of three featured speakers in the American Grassfed Association (AGA) Ranch Day line-up.[15] The event was held at the Flying B Bar Ranch near Denver, Colorado, which directed attendees to visit the website of the Savory Institute for more information, or to buy tickets.[16]
Schumacher Center
In 2015, Allan Savory delivered the annual E.F. Schumacher Lecture at the Schumacher Center for a new economics. He was introduced by John Fullerton of the Capital Institute)[17] and Grasslands Llc, whose work with Savory began when Fullerton shared with him an essay he had written on Schumacher.
In the lecture, Allan Savory re-iterated his long-held position that Indigenous stewardship is to blame for millennia of environmental degradation:
How are we to use livestock to mimic those animals of the past? What do we have to guide us? We have had ten thousand years of pastoralists, whose whole culture is tied to their animals. That is their life. They are extremely knowledgeable about their environment and their connection to the environment, yet the way they handle their livestock—herding them, moving them, bunching them—had led to the formation of the great man-made deserts of antiquity in the Biblical Lands. They had done it slowly over ten thousand years, and when we look at the pastoralists of today still practicing those methods, like the Masai and Samburu in Kenya, the land is still turning to desert under pastoralism.
As the "solution" to this "problem," Savory designed his method of livestock management based on European military planning:
I found what I was looking for in military thinking. For over 300 years in Europe, military leaders fighting battles had to manage extremely complicated circumstances that were changing all the time and had to work out how to come up with the best possible plan right away. Why reinvent the wheel? I looked at how they had done it, and it made sense. They had taken very complicated immediate battlefield situations, divided them into little segments that the mind could cope with one at a time, with each step building on previous steps till they did indeed come up with the best possible plan right away. I’m not going to improve on that. Who’s going to improve on that?
He then promoted this method as infallible:
I designed it, did it, and it worked. It worked immediately because it had 300 years of experience behind it, and I can say to you with all sincerity that I am not aware of a single failure in now over fifty years if people do it this way.
And "using (livestock) as tools" as the only way to reverse desertification & climate collapse:
it is possible to reverse global man-made desertification contributing to climate change. What makes it possible is adding livestock in as a tool. I’m not saying it will be easy; I’m saying it’s possible. Without livestock, it is not possible[18]
Kiss the Ground
In the 2020 regenerative agriculture documentary Kiss the Ground, Allan Savory attributes poverty & violence in the Global South to rising populations & poor land management[19]
White Oak Pastures
According to Allan Savory, scientific evidence against his methods is irrelevant because Holistic Management "cannot be peer-reviewed." He has made this argument several times, perhaps most recently on Twitter in March of 2021[20] in response to scientific evidence showing that the beef supply White Oak Pastures provides for General Mills was heavily greenwashed. [21] White Oak Pastures is a "frontier founder" of the Savory Institute Land to Market program, which falsely advertised WOP's products as "carbon-negative beef."[22]
Sources
- ↑ https://savory.global/tony-coote-memorial-lecture/
- ↑ https://thefern.org/author/judithshwartz/
- ↑ https://thefern.org/2015/11/allan-savory-and-the-science-of-tracking/
- ↑ https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/220020/
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20150208151441/http://www.itnsource.com/shotlist//RTV/1972/09/25/BGY508210357/?s=rhodesia
- ↑ http://www.rangemagazine.com/features/summer-15/range-su15-sr-cows_save_world.pdf
- ↑ https://savory.global/tony-coote-memorial-lecture/
- ↑ https://www.google.com/books/edition/Future_Directions_in_Agriculture_Policy/OaTvAAAAMAAJ
- ↑ https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/nation/-using-livestock-to-restore-vegetation-to-arid-land-/news-story/462fe26dffaea97e654b4691e0aa5524
- ↑ https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/nation/-using-livestock-to-restore-vegetation-to-arid-land-/news-story/462fe26dffaea97e654b4691e0aa5524
- ↑ http://mfn.org.au/files/HM%20Conference%20Flyer%20and%20order%20form.pdf
- ↑ https://newmerino.com.au/alan-savory-goes-mainstream/
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20200113094015/https://www.theland.com.au/story/3591935/a-man-who-loved-the-land/
- ↑ https://www.americangrassfed.org/aga-ranch-day-to-feature-allan-savory/
- ↑ http://www.americangrassfed.org/aga-ranch-day-speaker-line-up-announced/
- ↑ https://www.flyingbbar.com/events/
- ↑ https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/greening-the-desert-holistic-management-in-the-era-of-climate-change/
- ↑ https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/greening-the-desert-holistic-management-in-the-era-of-climate-change/
- ↑ vimeo.com/465503465
- ↑ https://twitter.com/allanrsavory/status/1368586780790906885?s=21
- ↑ https://plantbaseddata.medium.com/the-failed-attempt-to-greenwash-beef-7dfca9d74333
- ↑ https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/climatecollaborative/mailings/1633/attachments/original/PPT-FINAL-Regenerative_Mapping-min_compressed.pdf?1579205603; p. 41