by Jeff Goebel

Note: Jeff Goebel has been facilitating and teaching Holistic Management for many years. His website is http://aboutlistening.com

If you don't have a Java-enabled browser (for example, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or later) you probably can't play here. Most of these simulations are Java applets, requiring your browser to load about 1 megabyte of Java libraries to run the model.

by Allan Savory

NOTE: At the Yakima meeting of the WSU/Kellogg project in January 1997, Allan Savory gave the keynote speech from which the following is excerpted.

I see you--holistic management practitioners--as the leaders in the last battle mankind will ever face. I think the greatest battle is this battle to live within the means of our environment and live in harmony with our environment.

Our human way of making decisions, I am afraid, has not left a good track record. We're all in this together, and we've got to find out.

by Peter Donovan

This article first appeared in the Puget Consumer's Coop Sound Consumer.

In a designated wilderness, I met a hiker on the trail. Horseback, I was the natural target of his wrath at seeing a couple of cowpies back down the trail. The sight had ruined his experience of the landscape. From what he had read, and from camping once on an overgrazed streambank, he knew that cows were bad.

The grandfather of the man who owned the cattle had killed the last wolf in the county. He knew that wolves were bad.

by Peter Donovan (1997)

NESPELEM, WASHINGTON--The Colville Confederated Tribes are facing the same problems the rest of the world faces: the increasing difficulty of sustaining ways of life on a deteriorating resource base, and the resulting conflict. In response, the Colvilles are changing something so fundamental that most people aren't aware of it. They are changing the way they make decisions.

by Peter Donovan (1997)

In eastern Washington, the Colville Confederated Tribes are facing the same problems the world faces: the increasing difficulty of sustaining ways of life on a deteriorating resource base, and the resulting conflict. In response, the Colvilles are changing something so fundamental that most of us aren't aware of it. They are changing the way they make decisions.

Lennox Louw, who raises cattle near Vryburg, South Africa, believes that being proactive, making a fundamental choice, is a must.

"Most people don't make any decisions, never mind holistically. Just get them to make a decision. Then go on from there."

Growing up on his father's ranch in Namibia, he learned from some Bushmen. "For them it's the whole that's most important, not the parts. There is nothing negative in nature for them. It all has a place. A snake -- they are afraid, and they leave it. They don't try to eliminate it."

According to the U.N., 70% of the world's dryland areas are desertifying. How and why this happens, why most fixes fail. Links to methods that work.

The word desertification was first used in 1949 by the French geographer Andre Aubreville to describe the change in North and equatorial Africa from productive savanna forest, grasslands, and shrublands into unproductive desert. Compared to the 2000 slump in tech stocks or the September 11, 2001 attacks, desertification is not an issue for most North Americans.

So holistic thinking and action is the new way. Have we been doing it wrong all these years, and do we need to throw out everything we've learned?

No. Many people, when they hear about the benefits of managing wholes, sense a criticism of the tools of thought and decision making that they have been trained in or have absorbed. And it is certainly true that the technology and economic prosperity that has been created for much of the world by "mechanical" thinking has enabled growing numbers of people to see the ecosystem and human life in a more holistic way.

by Wilma Keppel

Summary: Two methods for setting goals you're likely to achieve, and will like once you attain them.

Imagine you were shopping for a house, and told the realtor only this: "I do not want my house to have six rooms. It should not have a spiral staircase. And I hate stucco, so it shouldn't have that." What are the chances you'd get shown houses you wanted?