UnSavory: African Stories of Wildlife, War, and the Birth of Holistic Management

In the wild heart of Africa, one man’s fight to save the land nearly cost him everything. In the late 1950s, Allan Savory was a young biologist in a corner of Southern Africa where the bush reverberated with trumpeting elephants, bellowing hippos, and the politics were as dangerous as the wildlife. Over the next three decades, he would become a soldier and tracker in a brutal civil war, a member of Parliament fighting to end it, and an exiled ecologist challenging the world’s most sacred environmental beliefs. Savory’s insistence that livestock—not their removal—could heal degraded land sparked both breakthroughs and outrage. Branded a heretic, pursued by political enemies, and scarred by personal loss, he pressed on, convinced the future of humanity depended on restoring our life-supporting habitat. UnSavory is the untold story behind Holistic Management—woven through encounters with man-eating lions, political betrayal, and a lifelong battle with the “common sense” that destroys the natural world. It is a front-row seat to Southern Africa’s turbulent history and one man’s stubborn, improbable quest to change the fate of the earth. About the Author Allan Savory (b.1935) is the author of Holistic Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environment. Savory and his wife, Jody Butterfield formed the Africa Centre for Holistic Management and co-founded the Savory Institute. Savory and the Africa Centre are recipients of the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s Challenge award for work that has “significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.” Savory also received Australia’s 2003 Banksia International Award for “the person doing the most for the environment on a global scale.” His 2013 TED Talk, How to Green the World’s Deserts, has received more than nine million views.