In the holistic planned grazing process livestock are used as a tool to reverse the biodiversity loss that leads to desertification – a potential contributor to climate change. Yet, critics argue that livestock grazing, in almost all circumstances, is a net contributor to climate warming.
Join us in a key debate on this controversial topic between a founder and leading proponent of Holistic Management (Allan Savory) and a prominent critic (George Monbiot). The event will be chaired by Professor EJ. Milner-Gulland, Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity at the University of Oxford.
Allan Savory
Allan Savory began his career in the 1950s as a research biologist in Central Africa where the loss of biodiversity in game reserves and national parks alarmed him. Reversing it became his life’s focus and led to a significant breakthrough that became known in 1984 as Holistic Management. He is the author of Holistic Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environment, Third Edition (Island Press, 2016), and numerous papers and articles. He has been honored by The Weston A. Price Foundation (Integrity in Science), the Buckminister Fuller Institute (for his work’s “significant potential to solve some of humanity’s most pressing problems”) and the Banksia Foundation – Australia (for “the person doing the most for the environment on a global scale,” He is president of the Savory Institute.
George Monbiot
George Monbiot is an author, Guardian columnist and environmental activist, whose current research focus is on the global food system. His best-selling books include Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life, Heat: how to stop the planet burning, and Out of the Wreckage: a new politics for an age of crisis. George was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2022. In the same year, he became an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. George’s latest book, Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet (shortlisted for the James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation) draws on astonishing advances in soil ecology to explore pioneering ways to grow more food with less farming.
