Dr. Don Nelson, a beef specialist in the Faculty of Animal Sciences at Washington State University, recently directed a $2.7 million project on integrated farming systems funded in part by the Kellogg Foundation. Through this project, Don pioneered some of the first university-based research and development on holistic resource management in agriculture. In his work Don integrates resource management with personal development, financial management, and community development. This is a tall order by anyone's standards.

At the time of the interview, the project was just coming to the end of its four-year life span. Part of the project involved an educational/training component for agriculturists covering decision-making processes, goal setting, biological planning and monitoring, land planning, financial wealth generation, and policy analysis.

Holistic resource management is a decision-making and planning model that in large part originated from the work of Allan Savory and his book Holistic Resource Management 1 Don has taken Savory's work to a new level in this project. The decision making and planning have revolved around agricultural careers and farming practice. What is particularly significant about this model is its attempt to tackle planning in a more holistic manner than is often the case. For instance, planning is done to simultaneously address goals related to quality-of-life, to a sustainable land base, and to economic modes of production. In other words, planning and later testing under this model revolve around interdependent goals involving people, land, and money. Instead of focussing on profit as the exclusive concern, this model encourages planning on a wide front beginning with quality-of-life goals and making subsequent goals subsidiary to the quality-of-life goals.

As an example, the George family has been running a dairy farm for several years and as well has been experimenting on their fields with canola crops. The family has been concerned with the use of pesticides and the continual application of more and more fertilizer to maintain an economically viable crop. Using the holistic resource management model, the George family has indicated that one of their quality-of-life goals is to spend time together as a family playing music, camping, and preparing and eating meals together. Under the goals for the land base, the George family has indicated that they wish to improve their soil by developing healthy water and mineral cycles, by making optimum use of the solar energy on their fields, and by moving beyond the canola monoculture to a more complex and diverse community of crops. The family plans to underpin these goals through profit from crops grown on their fields.

Once the goals are identified, major decisions about life on the farm are subjected to a set of tests that help to determine whether to proceed. Suppose the George family was considering the purchase of a new combine to speed up the efficiency of grain removal and delivery. The decision whether or not to go ahead with this purchase would be tested, using specific criteria, against the quality-of-life goals, the goals for the land base, and the goals for production.

Dr. Geoff Peruniak is Associate Professor of Psychology at Athabasca University and Co-ordinator of a new certificate program in career development. He joined Athabasca University in 1979 and has participated in many innovative projects in education and staff development over the years.

Geoff has been actively pursuing a holistic approach to psychology and education in his field work and in his writing. In the fall of 1999, he returned from a study leave in the Department of Continuing and Distance Education at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College where he was exploring connections between career development, community, and the land base.

Geoff spoke by telephone with Don Nelson in his office at Washington State University in the summer of 1998. The interview begins with a discussion of Don's project and moves on to consider specific aspects of holistic resource management.

Aurora:How was the holistic resource management project funded and organized?

Nelson:This project was funded through a grant from the Kellogg Foundation under a national initiative called Integrated Farming Systems. They have funded 18 different projects across the U.S. Ours is the only one focused on holistic decision making. We have a $1.062 million grant from Kellogg for a four-year project plus an in-kind match from two primary collaborators, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and Washington State University. This brought the total value of the project to $2.5 to $2.7 million. It was a fairly significant commitment of resources.

Aurora:How did you get interested in this project?

Nelson: The project has been in evolution over a period of years. I guess it was a journey on my part. I was in the agricultural industry for about 15 years before I came to work here at Washington State University in May of 1989. I worked in a lot of different positions, one as general manager for a large family ranching corporation where I dealt with the board of directors and with second and third generations who had very little background in agriculture. There were a lot of people challenges there.

I then became Executive Vice-President for the American International Charolais Association in Houston. I quickly found out I wasn't in the cattle business, but in the people business. I needed to develop the skills and abilities to bring diverse groups together to create some shared vision. They had to be willing to put aside some of their differences for the greater good. From there I went to the National Cattleman's Association where I was Vice-President Policy Co-ordination and that message was brought home even louder because I was dealing with a lot more politics in a much larger group of people and diversity of issues.

Aurora:So you were a kind of facilitator between various interests.

Nelson:That's essentially it. In order for me to be successful, I had to develop the ability to get people to work together to produce some desired outcomes and not get bogged down in disputes, confrontations, petty differences, stereotypes and the kind of stuff you seem to run into no matter where you are.

From the National Cattleman's Association I went back to Texas and was on the faculty of a program at Texas Christian University which had a program that used a systems approach to ranch management. Then I was Chief Executive Officer of a branded beef company in Texas which was a new start-up company with a new product. That was also co-ordination and systems approach. I just kept moving. I guess I became a life-long learner in a continual quest for new knowledge and information to help me become more effective and help other people be effective. When I came to Washington State University, one of my responsibilities was Co- ordinator of the State Integrated Resource Management project. It had six ranches as co-operators when I came to work here.

Aurora:What is Integrated Resource Management?

Nelson:It's the step between disciplinary specialization and holistic management. It is integrating whole ranch planning or whole farm planning, but it involves a team of people who have different areas of expertise and come together as a team to develop a plan to make an organization, ranch, farm, or whatever it is, successful.

Aurora:Were these experimental farms?

Nelson:No, they were private enterprises, family ranches for the most part.

Aurora:And what was their link with the university?

Nelson:They agreed to be co-operators in a project where data collection would take place. They would provide data as well as try to develop new ways of doing things, implementing them, and monitoring the impacts over a five-year period.

Blending Holistic and Strategic Management

Aurora:So it was a collaborative venture.

Nelson:Yes, it was. As I started working with those six ranches, they said this program has to be expanded to include more people. It has to be more inclusive. So, based on my prior experience at Texas Christian University and their ranch management program, I put together a series of four-day workshops called Strategic Ranch Management. This was a team approach to whole ranch planning. It included not only the physical facilities, but also a lot of emphasis on the people part.

Aurora:Had you run into Alan Savory's work at this time?

Nelson:I had been introduced to it through reading and talking to people, but I really didn't get deeply involved in it until early in 1990. I went to my first workshop training and got turned on, and as a result of that took a series of workshops and became a certified educator with the Centre for Holistic Management.

Concurrently, I was integrating more holistic principles into the Strategic Ranch Management program so that really it was becoming a holistic approach to management of human, physical, and natural resources. Over a four-year period I did nine four-day workshops around the state and probably had 180 ranchers and some agency people go through the training. I was getting very positive feedback and encouragement from participants to move to the next level to include more people and get into more depth as far as holistic decision making.

Aurora:What topics or themes did you explore in those workshops?

Nelson:We looked at whole ranch planning, which includes management of physical resources and financial resources, the social aspects, enterprise analysis, enterprise planning, application of technology, and setting up systems so people could measure the things they needed to measure to see if they were making progress to where they wanted to go.

Aurora:Had you started with the quality-of-life statements at this stage?

Nelson:No, we didn't in the first part of those Strategic Ranch Management programs. We integrated them later as I built in more holistic management. The heart of holistic management is the holistic goal that you use to test all your actions and monitor your progress. Quality of life is the first of a total of three components in that goal.

Aurora: What were some of your goals for the holistic resources management project?

Nelson: I was looking at how to become more effective in achieving my vision of helping people become more effective in developing their capacity to create their own futures.

One of the problems with a linear education system and technology development that develops "best management practices" that you're supposed to follow in almost every situation is that no two situations are the same. No two days are the same. People need a system or a way of processing information or a model that is flexible enough that they can determine where they are at any point in time and then adjust in a direction that they are focusing on through this vision they have created for their own particular situation.

Aurora:You are really talking about their whole life.

Nelson:That's right. We apply holistic decision making, leadership development, and consensus building to all phases of people's lives. We have seen these principles be internalized by participants and change the way they function with their families, their community, their organizations, and the operations they manage. There has not been one individual associated with this project, whether manager, administrator, participant, co-operator, contributor, or visitor, who has not been impacted by the experience.

Aurora:In some of your writings, is this what you mean by transformational change instead of merely adding things?

Nelson:It's something I hoped would happen, but I didn't realize the extent to which it would happen and the modeling that takes place. In other words, people model new behaviors that are obvious to other people that attract them. This creates a positive energy and that attracts other people. It's kind of like Bud Williams, the animal behavior man, who says that in trying to herd cattle, if you can create good movement, it will attract good movement. I think there is an energy field there that does that.

Shifting the Paradigm: Focus on Long-term Impacts

Aurora:What were the major problems you faced once the project was underway?

Nelson:Two things binding us were traditional ways of thinking and short-term economic considerations. In the university we have been trained, especially in the technical areas, in a very reductionistic linear manner: if you study the parts, you should be able to put them back together and understand the whole. But it doesn't work that way.

There is a big paradigm shift in how we approach things, and as a result we face institutional barriers, both within universities and from the agencies and service providers with which producers have to work. They are continually bombarded with maximizing production and with technology and products they can use to do this. They are looking for quick fixes and short-term economic viability, rather than long-term impacts on the underlying resource–people–and the creation of unintended long-term results.

We have hundreds of thousands of examples around the world of where the short term has been successful but a mess has been created down the road.. If you look at nuclear power, weapons, and all the sites that EPA [The Environmental Protection Agency] is trying to deal with, nobody set out intentionally to create those kinds of horror stories. It was because nobody ever looked far enough ahead.

Aurora:And you're saying the same thing was happening in the farming field?

Nelson:Yes, because a lot of crop farmers were farming the government program rather than farming the natural system. That led them in directions they shouldn't have gone.

It's not that people are not interested in doing something different, they just don't know what alternatives are out there. Our program created an opportunity for people to entertain new ways of looking at the world so that they could change some of their underlying beliefs and assumptions, and that would result in behavioral changes and new strategies and actions for implementation.

Aurora:Were people who had just come through crisis particularly attracted to what you were doing?

Nelson:In some cases, but in other cases there were people who just have a natural curiosity and seem always to be open to new ideas. They have come to the recognition that what they're doing is not sustainable on an individual and societal basis, and some changes have to be made somewhere along the line. I was looking for people who were not satisfied with the status quo. I wasn't recruiting people who weren't ready to change.

One thing we asked in return for the training investment that we were going to make over this four-year period was that participants agree to serve as role models, mentors, and teachers. That didn't mean necessarily in a formal classroom setting but in any situation where a teachable moment occurred. They had to be willing to make the effort to expose this information to others. This has been very powerful. Stephen Covey talks about three-person teaching where you teach me something and I turn around and teach it to someone else. Well, this has probably gone to the fourth and fifth level, in some cases.

As in any group, you have some who are extremely committed and enthusiastic and effective. On the other end some are still with us, but you wonder how much they are really getting out of it. Then you have the big group in the middle who have made some changes but still have a long way to go.

Aurora:Well, you are talking about major change here.

Nelson:Yes, I guess I've done a lot of learning, reading, and thinking about dealing with complex adaptive systems. One of the books that really helped me was Complexity 2 [Mitchell Waldrop]. It's about complex adaptive systems and new physical principles that depart significantly from Newtonian physics. A lot of changes are subtle over time, so you have to be aware of where you started from to be able to monitor change. Sometimes what initially appears not to have had much impact, a year or so down the road all of a sudden can have a real significant impact.

Quantitative Measurement and Qualitative Results: Bridging the Gap

Aurora:Funding agencies often have short-term thinking, whereas what you are doing may not show up for a longer time. Does this focus on quantitative measures force you into a more reductionist mode?

Nelson:I am intentionally trying to avoid that trap. That is one thing about holistic decision making. If I stay true to the process, that won't happen because I will be looking at not only economic viability but the underlying ecological soundness and the social acceptability of what we're doing.

We just had our site visit by Kellogg, which normally they do much earlier in a project. This worked to our advantage because we had a long enough period of time for changes that would not have been obvious at the end of the first year. But one thing we were told was that although we had accomplished a tremendous amount, we needed to show tangible results that could be quantified–something to take back to the board of trustees that would say, "Look, this is what happened as a result of putting seed money into this project. Further, this will be sustainable after the Kellogg funding is gone." We now have an internal evaluator who is working on developing some new ways of evaluating impacts in a way that we can report back to the Kellogg Foundation.

Aurora:You mentioned the incredible enthusiasm for and transformational power of some of the ideas as people tried them out and saw that they not only worked, but they felt better about it. Is there not a tendency to leave behind those particular indices because they don't fit in that measurable category?

Nelson:That was one of the concerns early on. Kellogg had what they called cluster evaluation, which was a set of questions to collect data from all 18 projects to get an overview of the total impacts of this initiative. They wanted everything in quantifiable terms, and so much of what we were doing was qualitative. We felt some of these qualitative factors are where the weak link is. They will take us from where we are to where we want to go.

Aurora:It seems a major challenge to begin new ways of thinking when you are still dealing with agencies that may have some of those characteristics of the very ways you're trying to change.

Nelson:That is a challenge, and sometimes you wonder how effective you're being. But over time I've seen some movement, like here in the university. This is because they're seeing changes take place in people and they're getting feedback, not from us directly, but from people who are participants or who have been impacted by the project. That's one of the things about transformational change–pressure typically comes from the outside, not from the inside, to cause an institution to change significantly.

Aurora:How did the overall project affect you?

Nelson:I'm not the same person. One thing I like about Covey's approach is that you have to take personal leadership before you can be effective in leading others. Because of my intensity and enthusiasm, I probably was not a very good listener. I would listen with the intent to reply rather than with the intent to understand. If you're trying to build trust, respect, and collaboration, people have to feel they are being heard and that their viewpoints are valued. I'm probably not where I need to be, but I'm a lot better than I was five years ago.

Death of the Expert Model

Aurora:Those of us in universities particularly struggle with that one.

Nelson:Yes. But all knowledge does not reside in the universities; there is a lot of indigenous knowledge out there. Because of my experience in industry, I really believe that the expert model is dead. Instead, we have to look at collaborative learning situations. When people face challenges, those in that entity we call the whole have to come up with the answers themselves. They need to become independent. They need to take responsibility and be accountable. They can exert a tremendous influence over creating their own future.

Because of the increase in the breadth of my reading and seeking new information, I have come way out of my discipline and technical training into the dynamics of ecosystems, human dynamics, management, and leadership. In other words, I'm looking for anything that is going to help me help others to create a positive future. That has been a mind-expanding experience.

Aurora:That's probably how we ended up talking, because I think when you start doing this holistically you do start to look outside your field.

Nelson:Well, that's the only way. It's not like interdisciplinary study where soil scientists, reproductive physiologists, economists, and a rural sociologist come together as a team to deal with an issue by looking at it through the eyes of their discipline without really understanding the other disciplines, the interdependencies, and the interrelationships. You have to take individual responsibility to become conversant and understand where your information fits in the total picture.

Aurora:Kind of like visiting other cultures.

Nelson:That's exactly right. Another big learning experience has been working with native Americans. Even though in some cases I do not subscribe to the viewpoint, it has expanded my understanding of different ways of looking at how we fit into this world.

Aurora:Did your criteria change in terms in how you would evaluate what was successful in the project?

Nelson:I don't know. I'm sure it has evolved. One of the things I say pretty routinely now is that one of the greatest untapped renewable resources in the world today is human capability. If we tap into that, who knows what's possible?

In our groups we talk about worst-possible outcomes and best-possible outcomes, and the recognition that these are both possible outcomes inherent in any and every situation. We can influence the outcome by what we focus on. When people say something is impossible, it shuts their minds because if it's impossible, we don't need to direct any energy to it. We need to work on things that are possible. One way to get people beyond that is to ask them to list all the reasons something is impossible. Then you say: "OK, these are all the reasons that it's impossible. But if it was possible, how would we do it?" Then people say: "Well, if we didn't have all these other problems, maybe we could start doing this and this and this." The mental process is amazing.

It goes back to Thomas Kuhn's and Joel Barker's 3 works on the scientific revolution of the paradigm shift and the basic paradigm-shift question: "What is impossible to do today that if it were possible would fundamentally change the way you do business?" People easily agree that what we take for granted today, 10, 15, or 20 years ago was impossible. But somebody had to think it was possible to move from that point to where we are today. All things are created twice. They are created mentally before they can be created physically.

Aurora:We were talking about some of the criteria for evaluating change and how we don't really often know what we're going to be facing.

Nelson:We also don't really appreciate the power that we can exert to create a specific outcome. Unconsciously what we focus on, we tend to create. I can't point to a lot of scientific data that show levels of significance, but I know it's there.

Individually we know very little. Collectively we know more. If we can come together and share what we know and create a vision of where we want to go, then we can learn together in terms of how we're going to get there. It becomes a collective wisdom that we have. We're building on each other's creativity and ideas and experiences and diversity.

An Holistic Perspective on Soil

Aurora:Talking about vision, the word holistic keeps coming up. Could you explain what it means to you and provide an example that would explain what you have in mind with this term.

Nelson:We can talk about thinking as linear, then interdisciplinary, and then systems. Systems still implies that you've got a number of parts that have been put together and interact with each other, like a car, to produce something. That's still pretty mechanical and linear. But when you are dealing with a human body, you cannot dissect it. You can talk about the parts, but the body will not function without being a whole body.

Margaret Wheatley 4 talks about systems and wholes in a way that is consistent with holistic management: "A system is an inseparable whole. It is not the sum of its parts. It is not greater than the sum of its parts. There is nothing to sum. There are no parts. A system is knowable only as itself. It is irreducible. The connections are impossible to understand by analysis."

We talk about living soil. From a holistic perspective, we look at that living soil as if it functions as a whole. We know very little about everything in there, but just because we can't quantify or identify it, doesn't meant that it isn't functioning. Once you destroy one element in that system or that whole, it impacts everything else.

That's one of the things with endangered species. Who knows what species are important and not important? That's the arrogance of humans. There's no way for us to know. From a rational, prudent standpoint, we need to be very careful, not necessarily to preserve, but not do anything that will have a negative impact on future potential. The basis of holism is that things function as wholes. That's where I really like the book Complexity, because it takes some of these new physical principles and applies them to living systems and organizations.

Aurora:And this is a different form of thinking than the man versus nature arrogance that we've inherited.

Nelson:That's very European. The Europeans, the white men, and the churches taught the dominion of man over nature. The native Americans I've worked with perceive themselves as an integral part of nature. Everything else needs to be cared for because they're not superior. They're stewards in this process. That's a very different take on where we fit into this universe.

Aurora:You're talking about what I think of as spirituality, intuition...those ways of thinking that have been suppressed with our mechanization and metaphors coming out of that whole area. Is spirituality mentioned at all?

Nelson:Spirituality is integrated. For instance, Covey's habit number seven is "sharpen the saw." It refers to renewing the four dimensions of your nature: emotional, spiritual, physical, and mental. Spirituality is much broader than just what church you go to. Spirituality is feeling a connection and inspiration from nature and just recognizing the complexity of life.

Typically our education and economic business systems deal with a logical left brain.You are not supposed to be this intuitive, creative, artistic, feeling individual. You're not supposed to show emotion. That's unprofessional. I say that's bullshit because if you act unemotionally, you've got all kinds of problems. You have to deal with the whole person. Then you go to the next level and deal with whole ecosystems. You deal with whole communities. You deal with diversity, randomness, interactions, the things we know, and the things that are unknowable.

Aurora:Isn't this too much to put into a training session?

Nelson:That's one of the advantages of having four years. At the end of a session, I asked one of the participants what he thought about the experience. He said, "I feel like I've been drinking from a fire hose." It is overwhelming. You plant seeds that cause people to reflect and see things differently. And then they interact with each other and build relationships, and this builds over time. You almost feel like you've been infected with a virus that's taken over your body. You see the world differently. It's simple, but it's not simple because it's not a quick fix. It affects different people different ways, but there seems to be some commonality in terms of the depth of perception, responsibility, accountability, sense of purpose.

Aurora:In a sense, the 10 courses you put together don't do justice to what you're really talking about.

Nelson:That's the vehicle. The more I got into this, the more I saw that we were looking at building capacity in people. It was a life changing experience. It made people shift from a feeling of hopelessness to one of being hopeful, being connected, and caring about other people. That sounds kind of funny coming from an animal scientist, I guess.

Aurora:It sounds like a religious conversion almost.

Nelson:It's spiritual, I wouldn't call it religious. It's based on values. It's based on integrity and compassion. Those are fairly universal concepts and principles, regardless of being religious or non-religious.

Aurora:Describe the impact of your project on the participants.

Nelson:When we had our final exit meeting with the Dean of Agriculture, he said it was pretty obvious that the project had tremendous impact on the participants. He said the multiplier effect was unknown, but I believe it's at least 10-fold. Those 158 participants probably impacted at least 1,500 to 2,000 people.

For example, we have six project participants in a little town called Colville, about 80 miles north east of Spokane. It's a town of about 2,500 people with mining, timber, agriculture, and tourism. It is depressed and going through a lot of stresses and strains. Those six participants got together 50 people in the community and did a three-day training session in holistic decision making. As a result the public works department in the county became interested in the financial planning aspects, and then got involved in team building and shared visioning. The public works folks incorporated the process as a way of doing business in their department. About 100 people in the community attended a session where we used a consensus process to look at economic development in the community.

Aurora:How did you deal with the issue of whose whole you were going to work with?

Nelson:The holistic management approach is to deal with a series of wholes within wholes. We talk about wholes-under-management. In our case, our whole-under-management is the state of Washington. In a family ranch operation, it would be the primary decision makers in that ranching operation. This kind of management is very aware of who the stakeholders are, whether it's the local community, the bankers, the accountants, whoever it might be.

Aurora:If you were sitting down with a group of loggers and a group of environmentalists, the whole would then be their negotiation and dialogue over where they could compromise?

Nelson:It would depend. The whole has three components: the people, the land, and the money. We need to be as inclusive as we can, but the people who are developing the holistic goal need to be the decision makers. You may want to involve those who have veto power over what you're going to be developing.

Aurora:It's a kind of political process of people deciding what is the whole.

Nelson:It's not an exact science, but it is based on principles such as being inclusive and recognizing that we've got to work with other people. If we bring people in early in a process and make sure we've got the right people at the table, we're much more likely to be successful because there's going to be ownership and commitment and diversity of input. Diversity leads to stability, ultimately, even though it may cause some short-term chaos. That goes back to the book Complexity which talks about the emerging science at the edge of order and chaos.

Aurora:Others might look at the situation of our environmental degradation and the social inequities of prosperity and say, "Don't waste your time tinkering around with individuals. The problem is that we're concentrating wealth and control into very few hands." How do you respond to those criticisms?

Nelson:A couple of quotes from Margaret Mead help keep things in context for me. One is "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has." The other one attributed to her is "If you want to change the system, you've got to start everywhere at once."

Aurora:That sounds holistic.

Nelson:That's why I like it. You say if you try to start everywhere at once you spread yourself so thin you get nothing done. But going back to theories of complexity where a small disturbance in a system produces no apparent effect at that point in time, but feeds back on itself. Over time there are things that are a result of that, almost like planting a seed. Covey talks about the law of the harvest: you can't harvest before you plant.

Another concept in complexity is called emergence, where you have to create a certain set of conditions before you can move to the next level. In terms of this concentration of power, I agree that we are losing the middle class in society, as well as our farms and businesses. Mega- corporations are getting bigger. Middle-size businesses either are not successful, aren't sustainable, or are gobbled up by the big ones. One of the problems is people's inability in these smaller-size operations to access the economies of scale–knowledge, networking, market impact, and other things that are basic economic principles. One way to overcome this is to create collaborative, co-operative, value-added, further-processed situations where individual operations can maintain autonomy and are networked with others interested in creating a win-win situation, recognizing the synergy they can create by coming together.

Aurora:Is this where Ernesto Sirolli's 5 training in enterprise facilitation fits in?

Nelson:That was what really attracted me to enterprise facilitation. Here was a mechanism by which you could present something that would be relevant to somebody who didn't understand the bigger, more abstract concepts, and who could say: "Yeah! That really sounds good. I've got an idea that I would like to make into a business, but I don't know how to do it. I need somebody to help me work through this." It is a way to diversify the economic base in a community and keep that multiplier effect in the community rather than having it exported.

If we look at the challenge of global sustainability, neither Canada nor the US nor anyone else will solve this problem by themselves. We might be able to slow down the degradation, but if we really want to make this happen it has to be done on a global basis. What better vehicle than multi-national corporations who adopt principles of sustainability in the way they do business?

Aurora:It almost makes it impossible for them to do business the way they've been doing it.

Nelson:Some people say you can't do anything about these things, but if nobody ever tries, it's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Somebody has to take the risk and pioneer some new ideas, and accept the fact that you are going to make mistakes. It's a learning process. One of the powers of what we're doing is that we're focusing on creating a positive future, not solving problems.

Aurora:If I asked what aspect of the project was the most rewarding to watch, would I be wrong in assuming that this was it?

Nelson:I think that would be definitely at the top.

 

Update

Professor Nelson is associated with the organization Roots of Resilience. They promote restoration of the world’s grasslands through the practice and the sharing of Holistic Management.

 

Updated May 2018


Citation Format

Peruniak, Dr. Geoff. (1999). Aurora interview with Don Nelson. Aurora: