A challenge we face with sustainability is deciding how to invest our time and energy when the returns and the future are uncertain. In this 4.5-minute video, Holistic Management International Board Director Sallie Calhoun and I discuss how HM empowers us to balance the Holy Trinity of people, planet and profits, while taking into account that we may choose a new life or career direction. The HM methodology is widely applicable and the skills travel, while whatever we’ve invested in our land leaves it healthier and more valuable for the next stewards.
While our current paradigm monetizes land resources mostly through resource extraction or sale, Holistic Management draws on natural cycles and skillful wildlife and domestic livestock management to improve the health of our lands and everything living on it. Production value increases and is sustainable. Native ecosystems flourish, as do livestock. Climate change is ameliorated. Farmers, ranchers and other land resource managers can make a good living and sleep well at night. With HM, the possibility of the land staying in the family or undeveloped is a viable option.
And Holistic Management systems can be applied to our business, our personal lives, our non-profits, etc – not just land.
Figuring out how to keep enjoying this.
An interesting thing about Holistic Management is that it works within our current paradigm, and simply does it better, more sustainably and healthfully. No accident that health and holistic share the same root: whole (from which comes the word “holy” also).
I like wholes. I’m signed up. In late February our center Clear Sky will host the first Holistic Management event in our region, after a resounding endorsement by BC’s Lieutenant Governor, former rancher and Holistic Management practitioner Judith Guichon when she visited in 2013.
Why do I care? Clear Sky (where I live) is located in a grasslands ecosystem, home to more than a third of BC’s endangered and at-risk species. And grasslands comprise less than 1 percent of BC’s land base! The Bull River Valley we live in has the world’s highest concentration of Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep and ospreys. While it’s estimated that there are less than 250 American Badgers in BC (not because they all got chased south of the border), we see them regularly here. We’re part of the Flathead Bioregion, considered the biodiversity jewel in the Crown of the Continent (“It’s like a coral reef on land,” a local biologist told me.) There’s value under our feet and all around us. Holistic Management is helping us to learn how to take better care of it and how we can work with it to take better care of ourselves too. We know it must be possible to support a healthy land base and generate healthy profits. Sounds wholey.
This video is the third in a series of interview clips with former Holistic Management board chair, 7000-acre Paicine Ranch co-owner and business woman Sallie Calhoun.
Learn about Profitability, Native Grasses and Carbon Sequestration in this four-minute video with Calhoun.
Watch this three-minute video with Calhoun for more on how sustainable grazing management a lá Holistic Management sequesters carbon.
Our retreat center, Clear Sky, will host an Introduction to Holistic Management course with consensus-builder and HM teacher Jeff Goebel on 26-28 Feb., 2015 outside Cranbrook, B.C. Register here.