Healthy Land. Healthy Food. Healthy Lives.
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JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021
Creating Community Resilience BY ANN ADAMS
A
s we enter into 2021, we continue to face numerous uncertainties and find our world vastly changed from the beginning of 2020. It is a time that requires us to question assumptions and to adapt. In November, we partnered with the Quivira Coalition and the American Grassfed Association on the 2020 REGENERATE Conference, and we had over 350 participants registered for the event. It was a new opportunity to learn how to create and curate an interactive virtual conference as we figure out how to be socially connected while physically distant. This skill is needed to build our global community whether we are dealing with a pandemic or considering our natural resource footprint on the planet. The theme was “Creating Resilience in Times of Uncertainty.” The panels provided a diversity of opinion on the challenges we face and the work we must engage in to address those challenges. Through it all, all the conversation focused on what it meant to INSIDE THIS ISSUE A key component of Holistic Management is to understand how ecosystem processes function so you can better manage for improved ecosystem health by mimicking natural processes, thus increasing production and minimizing costs. Learn more how Grass Nomads on page 7 and Alderspring Ranch on page 2 mimic nature.
In Practice a publication of Holistic Management International
NUMBER 195
be resilient and the importance of diversity for creating resilient systems. One definition of resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb change while still maintaining its basic structure or function. I believe what we have seen in the last 9 months is just how broken so many of our systems were. Living life on a razor’s edge is something many people had been experiencing long before this pandemic emerged to whisk back the curtain of denial and illusion. So now we must focus on creating and recreating social, economic, and natural resource management systems that will actually serve all our communities in ways that are just, equitable, and regenerative. To do so, requires compassion and understanding of this complex web of life. It will require more of us than we have yet had to give. It will seem difficult because this time of great change will feel uncomfortable, requiring us all to question our assumptions and biases about people (including ourselves), agricultural practices, markets, and so much more. I believe that the only way we can succeed in creating these just, equitable, and regenerative systems is to embrace what has been the knowledge of all our ancestors if we go back far
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enough in time. It was in our indigenous roots from which we all sprung whether we are Incan, Roman, Hohokam, Celt. Puebloan, Aborigine, Persian, Inuit, Chinese, or some combination of the hundreds of civilizations who have called Earth home. It is the knowledge that our actions must stem from the belief that “I am because we are. We are because I am.” Community must serve individuals and individuals must serve the community—including our natural community of plants, animals, birds, and organisms, who in turn serve us. It is so important we engage in gatherings like the REGENERATE Conference where we have the opportunities to connect and learn new ideas with people we may not ordinarily speak with or listen to. It is only in working to create “civil discourse” across the various lines we have drawn around ourselves and our communities that we can discover the mutual challenges we face, the common values we hold, and the potential answers to creating a world of diversity, opportunity, resilience, and hope.
Mimicking Nature
Wayne KnightHMI’s New Executive Director!
See page 18.