Allan Savory is the Founder of the Savory Center for Holistic Management, Albuquerque, New Mexico (www.holisticmanagement.org) and Chairman, Africa Centre for Holistic Management, Victoria Falls Zimbabwe (www.africansojourn.com).

[For an overview of Allan's great work, see his Keynote Address to the Sustainable Business Symposium]

Allan's comments continued:

I have written a book about what I see as a possible solution. Holistic Management: A New Decision Making Framework published (second edition) 1999 by Island Press.

The book describes why decision making is the root of almost every human problem and goes on to describe a different process of decision making and policy formation that is profoundly simple but difficult. Difficult purely because it is such a new way of thinking.

The development of this approach is a very long story starting when I was a young fanatical conservationist in Africa seeking some solution to the deterioration of our national parks and wild game areas. Cutting through all those forty odd years of struggle to where I am, my thinking today is this.

Poor land has throughout history inevitably led to poor people, social breakdown, abuse of women and children, increasing drought and flooding, malnutrition, disease, violence and eventually genocide and war and ultimately the failure of one civilization after another worldwide. We do not have an exception to this pattern that I am aware of after years of study. Many brilliant people have tried to address such problems over centuries without success so there had to be something we were not understanding.

To ever hope to correct such 10,000 year old problems one has to first understand the cause. Tackling the symptoms can never succeed our common sense informs us.

As I have explained in my book, if one takes the 'known' causes of such situations in Africa where they are in many ways at their worst, the list is long - overpopulation, overstocking with livestock, communal ownership of land (tragedy of the commons), poverty, lack of access to capital, lack of western sophisticated science and extension services, corrupt and inefficient governments and so on. Scientists will argue the hierarchy of this list but not the fact that these are the causes. That these are the causes is universally accepted by all environmentalists, scientists, economists, politicians and people at large and has been accepted for centuries. I am told ancient Hebrew texts blame the nomads for forming the deserts with their overstocking. We have the same certainty about these being the causes as we once had that the world was flat! Like any deeply held paradigm they have over time assumed the power of unquestioned scientific fact.

These causes are almost insurmountable problems to tackle politically or economically. What government can tell people to have fewer children? What government can enforce destocking? In Rhodesia we broke 70 years of peace and shot people for overstocking with livestock. In this country the government shot thousands of Navaho sheep in a vain attempt to prevent it, without success. Thus we seem doomed to go on and on in strife and suffering unable to tackle the greatest problem facing humans.

Some years ago in my struggles to understand I sought a situation with similar weather (low and erratic rainfall) where the opposite practices were universal. If there was a place in the world where there was no overpopulation, no overstocking, private land ownership, abundant wealth, access to capital and western universities and extension service, consultants, etc. then we should find a different result. We should find rivers flowing clear and perennial, springs and sponges flowing, abundant biodiversity and healthy prosperous communities.

I found such a place in West Texas where the opposite of everything blamed for the land degradation (desertification) in Africa exists. In west Texas the rural population is low and falling, they have been destocking for over 100 years till there are almost no livestock left on the land, it is a private land state where people love their land, it is one of the wealthiest states and has access to all western scientific knowledge and universities and so on. When one looks at the result one finds not the utopia expected but sand dunes are forming (as they did in the days when North Africa was the granary of the Roman Empire), rivers only flash flood, underground water is drying up, small towns and villages are totally deserted all over the place - in other words the same result as we are experiencing in Africa. I could have selected any Western state but selected Texas because of the private land ownership. In the U.S. the situation is only masked by our low population almost all in cities and temporary wealth largely from over exploitation of resources (mainly oil) of a vast area of the world.

Another solid bit of data that indicates that our mainstream scientific and management community just have no idea what is causing most environmental and social problems is this. We enjoy in the U.S. the greatest concentration of scientists and wealth ever known in one nation. Despite (or because of) this our greatest annual export is now eroding soil. Eroding soil annually outweighs all other exports - timber, grain, beef, commercial and military products. In addition, flooding (with no significant change in weather) has become our leading weather-related cause of deaths. As you know the only basis of that wealth that sustains nations is the photosynthetic process - green plants and the soils they are part of.

Why I am letting you know all this is that eventually I was able to discover what is causing the problems of desertification and the consequent social and economic ills. It was something totally unexpected - the way all humans make all significant decisions (and consequently the way governments and businesses at all levels form policies). This fact of human decision making was the only common denominator in all situations through all ages. I was to come to understand that where we believe humans make millions of decisions in thousands of different ways, we in fact make millions of decisions in one specific way. This decision making is common to a bushman family in the Kalahari and the most sophisticated scientific team.

Once I could understand that humans have a specific way of making decisions and the consequences of such decision making, I began to see that I had hit the tip of a very large iceberg. Human decision making is linear, even in the most collaborative, integrated scientific team. This way of making decisions has been amazingly successful from the first primitive spear in a cave to modern weapons, space travel and genetic engineering (as long as we ignore the longer term effects on our environment and thus society). It is this universal decision making that is (inadvertently) causing so much conflict and tragedy worldwide. I spent much of my life in a protracted guerilla war in Rhodesia in which I played roles from young soldier to eventually leader of the combined white parties in opposition to the rogue Smith government. Some years after the war had ended I was back in the country working with a mixed group of Zimbabweans (as we have become) on a critical policy for the nation. We used the new decision making framework to show how the policy would be formed holistically and the reaction of the group was amazing. This group of about 35 people - black, white, male, female, including folks who had lost loved ones in the war - just fell silent. Finally one spoke up and said 'if only we had known we would never have fought the war.' That war, like the present situation, was brought about by the fact that the people on both sides were unwittingly making decisions and forming their policies using the exact same linear process. The process is faulty not the people. Most people in the world are good and mean well and all want the same things when the chips are down - prosperity, stable families, freedom to pursue their own spiritual values and so on.

I have worked in Pakistan's Baluchistan Province up against Afghanistan, and everywhere I found the same situation as in the arid US - desertification being accelerated by government policies - and every professional person I dealt with was trained in a US university. My report of twenty years ago warned of dire consequences, some of which are now coming about and more will come to pass.

I am tragically going through the same thing in Zimbabwe today where I continue to try to do what I can, although now living in the US and an American citizen. There is not a Zimbabwean who does not acknowledge the need to redistribute land. In September, 1996, I wrote to the President urging him to move on this issue 'before we became another Ethiopia with all its violence,' and offering to assist with forming the policy holistically (he and I know one another from being allies in the long war). Officials blocked the letter. He finally moved on the issue with the objective of redistributing land (all conventional decision making and policy formation is done toward achievement of an objective). I immediately flew to the country and saw some of his Ministers and warned them that this would bring about violence, a collapse of the economy, and the downfall of the government and successive governments. All of this is now coming about with more violence than in the war as families get torn apart, women and children cast out as homes and fields are burnt and people tortured. The same dreadful things would have come about (only more gradually) if the British or US government had formed the policy and compensated every white farmer - it would have come about if the white farmers union (all of whose members agree with land redistribution) had formed the policy because of the decision making process used. I worked with several groups of farmers and officials and showed them how such a policy could be formed holistically (using the holistic decision making framework where policies are not formed toward any objective but rather a national holistic goal as we call it) and within a couple of hours it was apparent that we could settle millions of people on land, not lose a farmer and not cause any violence or damage to the economy. This of course got nowhere as once swords are drawn it is very hard to have any voice of reason heard in the tumult.

Where does one go from here? I may have just caused confusion in trying to address this issue of decision making in so few words. In the final chapter of my book I expressed my great optimism. I did this because all of the ingredients to begin to address our environmental, social and economic problems have only fallen into place in the last thirty or so years of the last millennium. Had we been concerned about these problems in say the Roman times or any other period in history there is nothing we could have done about it. There were critical elements still not in place.

First we did not know what was causing desertification and all its consequences mentioned earlier. (It was not without reason that our major religions all arose about the same time in the same area of the world where civilizations were failing - or that the founders of all our great religions had one common call for harmony, tolerance and peace.) We now know it was our linear universal human decision making.

Second, even had we known, we did not know that the Americas or Australia existed, for example, and that people had already arrived there and were changing the face of those continents. Since scavenging humans killed off most large herbivores, who ate the old leaves and stems shed by grass plants, they have attempted to keep grasslands alive with fire. This leads to not only massive atmospheric pollution but also to increasing drought and flood - desertification.

Thirdly we need to be able to communicate on a worldwide scale with every village and community and the ability to do so has only just been achieved through technology.

Fourthly we lacked the technological sophistication to even know for example there was carbon in the atmosphere or that there was such a thing as the ozone layer in the stratosphere.

Finally we had no unifying factor that was not a human enemy. If we look at humans we only unify for prolonged periods in war against a common enemy. As soon as the war is over we fall back to squabbling. We unite and will give, or risk, our lives for a total stranger in natural disasters but they are short-lived. Now finally we are passing through the denial phase about global climate change and this issue will finally unite us as one human species regardless of culture, religion, color, sex or any other superficial issue for hundreds of years (or we will not survive as a species).

Since 1984, when we finally broke through with holistic decision making (up till then we had some incredible results but longer term they failed and we could not gain consistent results), we have consistently seen three things where people make decisions holistically as opposed to in the normal linear manner - greater harmony amongst people, greater prosperity, and, where land is involved, measurable improvement.

Now we are spreading the training in this process to a number of countries with encouraging results. In all countries however we face the same problem that forces us to only work with grassroots. That problem is how to get new knowledge accepted by bureaucracies that today control or influence almost every aspect of our lives. If you have read the research of John Saul or Lord Eric Ashby and others you will realize that bureaucracies are almost watertight to new knowledge. Normally it takes up to 200 years to get new thinking accepted institutionally. It took the Catholic Church over 300 years to accept that the earth was not the center of the universe and it took the British Royal Navy 199 years to accept that lemon juice would stop scurvy (the Merchant Navy took another 70 years). Nothing has changed. We have known for over fifty years, since first discovered by a Frenchman, that it is time of exposure of grass plants to grazing animals that leads to grass plants being overgrazed rather than number of animals, but not one university, government agency, livestock or environmental organization's bureaucracy has accepted it yet.

In the early 80's I was engaged to put some 2,000 American professional people from our main land management agencies through Holistic Management training. As mentioned in my book they found every U.S. resource management policy they studied to be faulty. One group stated they "could now recognize that unsound resource management was universal in the U.S." Nothing changed in any agency.

So knowing what we have experienced and what the research confirms, we now concentrate on families and small communities making change one by one. And we try, wherever we can, to work with bureaucracies. I cannot see us putting things right till we have people at the grassroots level making decisions in their lives and businesses that are holistically sound - simultaneously socially, environmentally and economically sound both short and long term. And governments (at all levels) forming policies holistically.

Two years ago Richard Rominger as then Deputy Secretary for the USDA had me conduct a day long workshop in Washington. The workshop he titled "how to use our human resources for resource management rather than litigation." He and his party are now out and we have to start again at ground zero and so it has gone on for years.

I only formed this non-profit Center for Holistic Management at the urging of a few senior people in USDA during the Carter administration. I was at the time a political exile and not even an American. They felt the development of Holistic Management was crucial to the future of the US (their words) and that the only way to secure its development was through the formation of a non-profit organization. We had agreed that if they saw merit in the process, following the training of the 2,000 people they would form a government center for the continued development of the process so I could return home. However, those officials open to new thinking were facing (as was I) incredibly opposition from the universities, government agencies, environmental organizations and livestock organizations that knew of the work. They believed a government center would not survive the political pressure. They were right, as we had no sooner created the Center than the Reagan administration came in and all government personnel were banned from training in Holistic Management. I mention these struggles to get new thinking into bureaucracies because even within them there are many good people who are struggling with the same failings of modern society and the fact that democratic bureaucracies now dominate world events and progress.

What you are doing is wonderful in just getting the thoughts of enlightened people out and connecting them. Only when there is a ground swell of demand for change can it happen in any democratic society. Eric Ashby who studied how new knowledge gets into democratic society used America and Britain as his case studies. He concluded that it can only come in through grass roots (never the leadership) and it took 100 to 200 years. We have a long haul ahead of us, but it is people like you who help speed the process. And hopefully the Internet is going to help shorten such periods when new thinking has to pass through the minefield of conflicting views, institutional and personal egos, apathy, etc.

On our web site you can pick up a paper about the 'triple bottom line' - an important concept as some US corporations try to do the right thing in their practices and policies. Tragically at the moment they are not going deeper than trying to prevent pollutants and do some other social changes but that will not be enough. They are not addressing the root cause of corporate America having done, and continuing to do, so much harm worldwide that so alienates people. Today we are paying the price of the policies of the oil companies that developed the Saudi state and generally have so offended decent people in many poor countries.

I have rambled way too long but it is Sunday morning and as good a way as any to spend it! Keep up your good efforts and don't despair, and whatever happens never ever even dream of giving up.

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Suzanne's comments continued...

And who knows but that this most unusual presencing of many of us to one another might speed up that 100 or 200 year projection. Now, it feels absolutely urgent that we take a leap. So at the same time as I know there is a fundamental law that acceptance is a necessary virtue, any passivity that accompanies that feels like a luxury that no longer can be afforded. So, while deep acceptance of the possibility of one's own death and the possible disappearance of humanity is a spiritual requisite, there's a one-two to that, where a high action alert is sounding that needs to be heeded along with non-attachment to whether any results are produced. A tricky edge.

On the action front, there could be a playing field for your wisdom now such as has not been available before. It sounds like you have the key to a treasure. Your whole life work could have been for now. Doesn't it happen that way, where you struggle for a long time at a snail's pace and then there's a quantum jump where a new reality is born overnight?

I saw in the report from a client about your work that "it truly provides a framework for saving our world." My God, this is too good not to bring it to the fore. I am not in your field, so I can't think specifics about that, but I can encourage you to look to some different expectations about what could be open for you now.

Is there any way that you could see that I could help? I'm involved in one attempt being made to use a group design process, which has abut 30 activists participating – I don't know yet if it's going to work well, and everything like it that I've been involved in hasn't worked well. However, I wonder if you could come into this and actually work your process with this group (I can't think my way through on this, but maybe you can). Here's what they invited: "Invitation to an online explorations of 911 alternatives...This will be an experiment in collective intelligence and will have results to offer to the larger world...Those results will be up to you, assisted by a very responsive online technology. Part of the experiment will be ensuring that there is plenty of opportunity both for expressing your full diversity AND for working together towards shared understandings and creative options. As far as I know, although the technology involved is not new [Allan – it's called WIKI], this particular process we're using has never been tried before."

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Allan replies:

The full comment I made, and from which someone passed you that quote, is attached. This comment was made on our general listserve and many people obviously passed it on.

Out of the blue yesterday, I had a phone call. This was from a retired senior army officer who had met me in the Cayman Islands 20 years ago. I lived there when exiled. At the time he talked to me a lot about the war I had just come out of. Somehow he had tracked me down and called. He wanted to know if the government had approached me to discuss the situation because they have so few people here who have lived and fought through such a long guerilla war and played a role from young soldier to eventually leading one of the parties in the war till exiled. Small world it is. He said he is involved at some level and would like to see if he can get my views heard.

I passed on my comment to him. And he replied that while agreeing with almost everything, he felt it still had to be called a war and he gave a few reasons why he felt this. I pass on my response for your interest.

No problem with us calling it a war for world peace and justice, or some such thing that gets the American mind to accept that the problem is serious enough to evoke a war footing mentality (and with it the costs and commitment). By calling it a war against terrorism, we have enabled the other side to also call it a war against us. By calling it a struggle for world peace and justice (or similar name that takes the moral high ground) it is hard, if not impossible, for the other side to say they are waging a war or jihad (struggle) against world peace and justice. This point is vital to success.

If you look at the Rueters article http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13121, you will see that many NGO's that work in the impoverished countries (as we do) see the point and dangers of further unleashing corporate abuse on the world's poor. This is perhaps the biggest thing we are paying for. I know it is not the US alone but the world perception is that the US is the leader in the corporate world and corporate abuse. That is why we would have to lead other western nations into the war or struggle for world peace and justice.

Thought that might interest you.

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Suzanne replies:

I have this sense that if many good people are rubbing up against each other, just a little energy from each will create a field. Then we'll see what to do – or what emerges.

I think you are just right in your new comments – you are a very articulate, clear thinking person.

Here's something I just wrote to Joe Simonetta, from the World Business Academy, who had somehow found my Website. His sent me his writing, How to Eliminate Terrorism, which is prefaced by this:

"This piece, which I've attached, outlines how business can help to eliminate terrorism. Business has both the answers and the means to accomplish this. Sustainable global prosperity is achievable. Business knows what needs to be done. Does it have the wisdom and the will to do it?"

[Click here to read my conversation with Joe.]

As we do what you say and "lead other western nations into the war or struggle for world peace and justice," it's the corporate community that would have to act. Simonetta calls it "enlightened self-interest" for them to do that. I wonder if they will be able to see it that way...yet.

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Allan replies:

Joe Simonetta is absolutely right in saying in effect that the lead needs to be taken by our captains of industry and commerce. If my suggestion of an expanded and more rounded out National Security Council was ever adopted, it is just such views that would play a more central role in policy – rather than being on the fringe as they now are.

There are a number of corporations that have begun to try to do the right thing through working with the Swedish group The Natural Step (TNS). Not sure if you are aware of them. There is a paper on our web site that was presented by me to a major sustainable business conference in the Northwest a couple of years ago. In that I was talking about businesses making decisions in their own enlightenned self interest - that is one of the main features of Holistic Management that builds on the fact that all humans will only make decisions in their own self interest.

Corporations I know would fear loss of profits in working with communities and acting ethically, but the reverse I believe is what they would experience and there is already some evidence of this in the case studies of TNS.

At the moment, as I point out in that paper, the most ethical and well intentioned businesses believe that they are being socially and environmentally responsible if they curb the pollutants from fossil fuels. I point out how that does not go far enough. All those countless businesses that failed with past civilizations had no modern pollutants as we had not yet discovered coal and oil! The connection to the environment is what is weak and where we can help them. It is also where our military colleges are weak - I doubt they ever see the connection between degrading land and violence.

I am afraid it is the same with the well-meaning people working with sustainable/organic agriculture. As I have pointed out to them many times, what they define as organic or sustainable agriculture is no different from the agriculture that has already destroyed more than twenty civilizations. These are the reasons that it is so vital for people to begin to understand how to make decisions holistically. Where I was much condemned for my views on this over many years, it is pleasing now to find there is hardly a scientist not saying we need to think and manage more holistically. That is progress at last.

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Alan shares a communication with one of his colleagues:

Highlight: "Over most of the world's lands we will not reverse biodiversity loss, desertification, poverty and mounting violence without dramatically increasing utilization and production as you so well know now. I was in Pakistan on Afghanistan's border twenty years ago warning of the dire consequences of their land management policies only to be as usual ignored by FAO. All Pakistani officials I deal with were trained in US universities and as my guide throughout my trip Dr Zahoor informed me, they were Muslims and in their religion you just do not question your teachers! Then later in 1984 in North Yemen I was doing a job for World Bank and again found what I reported was totally outside the comprehension of the institution and thus ignored although I had trained several World Bank officials who continue to support our work but say they cannot change their giant bureaucracy. In times of war there is a slight chance that one might get new knowledge into society as egos, agency turf battles and other blockages are swept aside. We must be alert to this opportunity and I hope all our Certified Educators are and looking for every opportunity to further knowledge.

What a different situation we would be facing today if Bush had advisors who understood such matters generally military people and Special Forces operatives do not. What a difference if they had been able to persuade him to use the situation to not only hunt down Bin Laden, but announce that America was mounting and leading a 'war for world peace and justice' in which we were going to address the root causes of poverty, violence and terrorism ruthlessly, and on a war footing in terms of seriousness and funding. Who would mount a jihad against that?

"Everett Roger's book, Diffusion of Innovations, mentions the Soil Conservation Service in the U.S. as an agency that is particularly skillful at imparting knowledge to farmers. I could see and understand that, as they are a well-funded agency with access to many resources as part of government and they are imparting knowledge they have developed themselves to individual farmers. My question to Everett was "Have you, or anyone you know of, researched how individuals impart new knowledge (outside the prevailing paradigm) to institutions such as the SCS?" He said he had not and did not know of any who had. To me that is the great problem we have to somehow address. Imparting new knowledge to individuals seems to be the only thing that works till there is a ground swell.

All the research I have read indicates no greater problem than getting new knowledge into society at large and in particular into bureaucracies – not to individuals. This is why new knowledge just seems to have to grow through grassroots till there is a critical mass, following which bureaucracies and democratic leaders follow as Lord Eric Ashby so well described in Reconciling Man and the Environment in which he looked at British and American society over the previous 200 years as his case study. This pretty well matches what we have experienced over many years in all countries. Here we have gotten through to many individual ranchers, academics, environmentalists and individuals working with international, state and national government agencies – but not yet to any institutions that I know of – cattle ranchers organizations, environmental organizations, universities, World Bank, UN, state or national government agency (including the SCS now called Natural Resources Conservation Service).


If one takes a simple case like overgrazing of plants that is so critical to reversing desertification and associated violence, one sees this illustrated. As we know, Voisin discovered about fifty years ago that overgrazing of plants was more a function of time of exposure and re-exposure of plants to grazing, than to numbers of animals. This has been researched a great deal and I have read all the research on the subject I have been able to find for the last fifty years. All research backs up Voisin's discovery and none I have found supports any bureaucracy's position on overgrazing. Thousands of individuals have accepted the new knowledge and used it in management in many countries over the last half century, but to the best of my knowledge not a single bureaucracy has done so – rancher, environmental, university, government or international agency. The research shows that it is likely to take up to another 150 years for this simple fact to be accepted by most bureaucracies. And even when one bureaucracy accepts it there can be fifty years of more before another does so.

It is this that I wished Everett’s book had been able to give us some help with but unfortunately it did not. Nor did John Ralston Saul in his exhaustive studies of bureaucracies written up in his book Voltair’s Bastards give us any solution. Saul merely concluded that anything emerging from any bureaucracy normally had two characteristics – it lacked common sense and lacked humanity, but he gave us no idea how this might be changed. Then Osborn and Plastrik in Banishing Bureaucracy gave us insights into the work in the U.K. and New Zealand that made bureaucracy more responsive to citizens and more entrepreneurial, but no mention of how to get new knowledge into those bureaucracies.

Where Rogers' book helped was in understanding why we saw so many derivations of Holistic Management in the U.S. When I came to the U.S., there were two main management systems in the public arena – in land management people were mainly talking of Gus Hormay's Rest Rotation System and in business the buzz was Total Quality Management. Then the U.S. government formed an Interagency Committee to work with me and had me start teaching professional people from the four main government land management agencies as well as academics from the land grant colleges. Up till the time the Regan Administration banned government people from attending such training we had put 2,000 professional resource managers through Holistic Management training in which, as you know, people have to collaborate in whole situations - families, communities, etc and make decisions socially, environmentally and economically better than we can do with conventional decision making. At the same time we put over 10,000 ranchers and odd environmentalists through the same training. A few individuals adopted Holistic Management and are still involved with us in its continuing development. But suddenly we saw a plethora of new management systems and approaches from professional resource managers - Total Ranch Management, Collaborative Resource Management, Integrated Resource Management, Ecosystem Management, Collaborative Holism, Adaptive Management and I have missed half of them! All caught on that collaboration was essential but missed what they could not grasp - changing the decision-making. And we saw Cell Grazing, Short Duration Grazing from ranchers who thought it was about carrying more cattle but missed or ignored the necessary change in decision making.

I could not understand, until reading Rogers' book, this confusion that swept the Western States as people took my work and changed it to some form of collaborative management, or grazing rotation, that we knew would not reverse the degradation. In his book, and I forget Everett’s exact words, he basically explained that before most people can accept something new they have to give it an identity of their own and rename it before accepting it, etc. The reasons for this are human and thus complex but I believe are mainly associated with personal and institutional pride, ego and self-esteem.

Once, due to Rogers’ research, I understood this phenomenon I took the line of not fighting or resisting it in any way but just accepting that time would gradually bring people back to the original work simple because collaboration, necessary as it is to Holistic Management, will not on its own reverse the loss of biodiversity, land degradation or violence. One has only to look at the many examples where there is total collaboration but deteriorating land to realize this fact - national parks, wilderness areas, private ranches, etc. Tragically in the end, if the environmental degradation continues as populations rise, people do collaborate but in increasingly ethnic groups and increasing violence.

We need every idea and bit of knowledge we can gain to beat the clock with environmental deterioration and consequent violence and conflict accelerating as they are - and bureaucracy being our dominant organizational structure today. I believe the tragic events of September 11th will bring all this to a head or give us an opportunity not available in more normal times. I say this because as you know I have for a great many years been pointing out to people that poor land inevitably leads to poverty, social breakdown, violence, increasing drought and flood, blaming, genocide and often war (increasingly this will be guerilla warfare). I have for years felt like a stuck gramophone record and very lonely voice in the wilderness as I tried to get people to see the connection between land degradation and violence. But I was relieved to read recently Roger Kaplan's book The Coming Anarchy in which he gives his views as a reporter who has traveled widely in sixty countries. He links violence, rising religious fanaticism, the breakdown of centralized governments and nation states as well as a return to ethnic grouping and future chaotic guerilla warfare to resource depletion, population rise, land degradation. I would urge you to read his book as it is of interest to anyone concerned with the increasing failure of centralized government and what the future holds. Unfortunately Kaplan has experienced somewhat the same as us - he says when he speaks to military and political leaders about this connection to the resource base and population their eyes tend to glaze over. Have you experienced that!!

By the way Daniel Kemmis has also written a new book, This Sovereign Land that I hope many will read. He hopefully will provoke a lot of thinking and discussion along somewhat similar lines as he, too, talks of the changes coming in the U.S. Western States as large centralized government loses its legitimacy and governance in one form or another shifts to more local and regional communities in a more law abiding and presently wealthy society. Daniel draws attention to the wave of collaboration at local level that is sweeping the Western States and correctly sees this as a constructive move forward, although it does not yet embrace the needed change to holistic decision-making and policy formation that we see as so essential if land degradation, poverty and violence are to be addressed at the root cause level.

Somehow we have to break through on several fronts to avoid worldwide catastrophe. One is of course Holistic Management and policy formation to reverse land degradation, as we now know can be done by people anywhere. The other is to get our scientific brethren and politicians to understand that while excessive population pressures and exploitation are major factors in the degradation of environment and human societies in the non brittle environments of the world and to a degree its oceans, the reverse is the case in the vast brittle environments of the world that cover much of the Middle East and main initial trouble spots. Over most of the world's lands we will not reverse biodiversity loss, desertification, poverty and mounting violence without dramatically increasing utilization and production as you so well know now. I was in Pakistan on Afghanistan's border twenty years ago warning of the dire consequences of their land management policies only to be as usual ignored by FAO. All Pakistani officials I deal with were trained in US universities and as my guide throughout my trip Dr Zahoor informed me, they were Muslims and in their religion you just do not question your teachers! Then later in 1984 in North Yemen I was doing a job for World Bank and again found what I reported was totally outside the comprehension of the institution and thus ignored although I had trained several World Bank officials who continue to support our work but say they cannot change their giant bureaucracy. In times of war there is a slight chance that one might get new knowledge into society as egos, agency turf battles and other blockages are swept aside. We must be alert to this opportunity and I hope all our Certified Educators are and looking for every opportunity to further knowledge.

What a different situation we would be facing today if Bush had advisors who understood such matters generally military people and Special Forces operatives do not. What a difference if they had been able to persuade him to use the situation to not only hunt down Bin Laden, but announce that America was mounting and leading a 'war for world peace and justice' in which we were going to address the root causes of poverty, violence and terrorism ruthlessly, and on a war footing in terms of seriousness and funding. Who would mount a jihad against that?

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Suzanne replies:

You say, "I have for a great many years been pointing out to people that poor land inevitably leads to poverty, social breakdown, violence, increasing drought and flood, blaming, genocide and often war (increasingly this will be guerilla warfare). I have for years felt like a stuck gramophone record and very lonely voice in the wilderness as I tried to get people to see the connection between land degradation and violence...In times of war there is a slight chance that one might get new knowledge into society as egos, agency turf battles and other blockages are swept aside."

Allan – I so appreciate your acquainting me with desertification, and I trust there's a great secret to our survival, which I never understood before, that relates to dealing with that.

You say, "What a difference" it would have been if Bush had used "the situation to announce that America was mounting and leading a 'war for world peace and justice' in which we were going to address the root causes of poverty, violence and terrorism ruthlessly, and on a war footing in terms of seriousness and funding. Who would mount a jihad against that?"

Were this our passion, everything awful would have the best chance of dissipating. It's like there are no piecemeal efforts that will get us out of our implosion. Piecemeal, it will take forever. At least the intelligence of the next reality, where the U.S. absolutely commits itself to the good of the world, is in the wind. Would that Bush were looking for real leaps to get out of this doom-like sentence we otherwise will serve out. Please God a greater intelligence ultimately will prevail.