The American Prairie Reserve and Wild Sky Beef are adding diversity and complexity to the Northern Great Plains. They are looking to free up the movement of animals, increase plant diversity, and be more tolerant of predators. They have the means to incentivize their neighbor ranchers toward this end. I recently was invited to be on a panel at their Living with Wildlife conference and I dropped the ball. This blog is about the message I wish I would have conveyed.

Our highest marginal reaction moment happens, when we find and eliminate a logjam. Make it a point to set time aside at the beginning of your planning cycle, each year, and root out your logjam(s). Often unrecognized for a long time, logjams lurk beneath your consciousness sucking creativity, money, and our social influence. Often, one finds the logjam in the last places we would ever look - the sacred or the obvious. How can we rethink logjams and look at this most potent component of the planning process differently?

Eric spoke and a firmament opened; that rare epiphany that shifts the reality beneath your feet.

Andrea and I were at our friends 78th birthday party and conversing over slow-cooked elk and good wine.

I don’t remember what drew the revelation from Eric, “We often fail to consider the consequences of risk. Low consequences mean little risk, while significant consequence means great risk."

My good friend and hired man of 20+ years was Shoshone. He would stand and look at a field for what seemed an eternity before changing the irrigation water. He would pause on the lip of a canyon forever before riding down. He told me his culture ingrained in their people that a mistake meant death. That’s risk of high consequence.

The early adopters of a new innovation are taking a risk. Often they do not have enough information to know the consequences of the multiple risks they are taking.

When at the precipice of the tipping point for a new innovation, many risks have been clarified by those who were first. In today’s environment, the world faces high consequences if we don’t empower decisions at the soil surface.

Monitoring provides us with information. We can use it, or not. The health of our landscape, reflects our past behavior. We cannot expect different results unless we change our behavior.
My wife got very sick, lost 50 pounds in a few weeks and had no strength. She used walking poles to get across the yard and when she fell, she could not get up without my help. I had to lift her into and out of the bathtub. She did not like that feeling of dependency and worked hard to understand and treat her ailment.
Monitoring her daily nutrition, her leading and lagging indicators, guided her way back to a functional life.
Many of us live on landscapes that are less than functional. But we do not see an urgency to help them stand up. In fact, we inadvertently keep our heel on their throat.

I grew up in Nebraska’s Sandhills. Great production and lightning storms brought the ever-present danger of wildfire. When I was about 8 years old, there was a perfect storm of a highly productive summer and electricity in the air. We were heading home from the hayfield when the first smoke drifted up from the southeast. We already had our gunny sacks and shovels on board so my dad headed SE to see if we could help.

We are going through a lot of great changes around here. Holistic Decision Making makes me take a breath so I don’t get caught up in the excitement. I like change. I’m prospective. That is why I am a Holistic Management Practitioner. My professional life as a rancher has coincided with the Endangered Species Act. My culture resists the ESA and saw it as a bad thing on any level. My introduction to HM turned that perception upside down. It brought curiosity and interest in life.