"I just want to say how much I appreciate this community ..." (ten-year reflections)
I just want to say how much I appreciate this community, and the entire global network of people working in soil and soil health and, particularly, (those) working on the climate side. And, as it's been ten years now that Soil4Climate has been an organization, it's given me a lot to think about, and to be grateful about ... I'm grateful to all of you who have helped propel this narrative that soil is the skin of the Earth and it has an essential role in regulating the climate, and that regenerative agriculture, including regenerative grazing, will be fundamental parts in how we both regulate the climate to our needs while also providing the food that we need to survive, both ... Ultimately, we're in a partnership with the land and the climate ...
And this is what Holistic Management is all about. It’s about establishing that partnership. It evolved out of grazing and land, but what Allan Savory has discovered is that it's so much more than that. It's about how we work within complex systems. So there's a whole sort of systems dynamic to this, which we can get to. And that's part of where I'm coming from in the first place, because I studied engineering in college, and I took thermodynamics, and the whole systems stuff, and emergent behaviors from complex systems, and order out of chaos.
That (systems theory) was part of my upbringing anyway. Even before I was an environmentalist, and even before I knew about climate, let alone grazing, I was interested in systems, and emergent behavior from systems, and so this is all sort of a complete cycle, if you will, from where I started from ages ago anyway, as a freshman in college. So, what we're looking for now in the future, is a holistic perspective of our relationship on this planet, and how we manage the energy flows of the planet, and how we produce food while managing those energy flows.
And soil is the largest ecosystem type on the landed surface of the Earth that we can manage or be partners in, and the largest ecosystem type within soil is grasslands. And regenerative grazing is an essential part of keeping grasslands healthy and producing food while mitigating global warming.
So we have to be focusing on regenerative grazing, and as Allan Savory says, … “When the management is holistic, the agriculture will be regenerative.” So that's where we're really trying to go, is toward a holistic management of the whole system.
So, anyway, more, more to say about all of that, but the key point is that thank you, you're a hero for believing that this is even important. It is. It's really important.
And I think on Sundays I'm gonna try to have a regular session on Sundays, where we, where we can call in and, you know, have sort of group meetings and webinars about this.
Okay, love you. Take care.