Agriculture is not crop production as popular belief holds - it's the production of food and fiber from the world's land and waters. Without agriculture it is not possible to have a city, stock market, banks, university, church or army. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization and any stable economy.
Ultimately, the only wealth that can sustain any community, economy or nation is derived from the photosynthetic process - green plants growing on regenerating soil.
People and land need healing which is all inclusive - holistic.
If you dig deep and keep peeling the onion, artists and freelance writers are the leaders in society - the people who start to get new ideas out.
The problem of a rising population destroying more than four tons of soil for every human already alive needs to find its way into corporate board rooms if we are to enjoy future financial, economic and political stability.
We need to manage holistically, embracing all of our science and traditional knowledge - all sources of knowledge. We can do that from the household to government to international relations.
The problem with holistic management is it's so profoundly simple, but it's not easy. And it's profoundly simple. You're almost insulting people's intelligence to explain it twice, just about making better decisions of where you want to go in your life, bringing in environmental, social, economic issues simultaneously.
Almost all the knowledge required to produce more food than eroding soil is available today - we just need to use that knowledge within a holistic paradigm - managing agriculture holistically, forming the policies that undergird it holistically.
I spent a lot of my life - 20 years of it - in war, training army trackers and commanding a tracker unit, and then in the Game Department, tracking lions and elephants and poachers. So I've spent literally thousands of hours tracking people or animals, and training others to do it.
Agriculture is the most destructive industry that we have. More than coal mining and other extractive industries.
A good tracker is interpreting all the time, from every little sign, you know? Not just interpreting the age of the tracks but also: Is it wounded? Is it hungry? A good tracker is interpreting a lot.
Hard systems are everything we're using right now - computers, phones, planes, the clothes you're wearing, the room you're in. Everything there involves 100% use of technology and expertise to make it, and nothing we make - including space exploration vehicles and so on - is complex. Everything we make is complicated. Nothing is self-renewing.
Now that we've discovered how to actually develop policies and projects holistically, if we can get the barriers out of the way and release the creativity that's in our universities, our farming organizations, amongst our farmers and land managers, we'll be astounded. As I'd like to express it, the human spirit will fly.
I've often been asked what drives me, particularly through the last 50 years of abuse, and ridicule. What has kept me going is one word - care. I care enough about the land, the wildlife, people, the future of humanity. If you care enough, you will do whatever you have to do, no matter what the opposition.
I was so fanatical about trying to save wildlife... I was unable to accept that we couldn't solve this problem of thousands of years, of wherever humans operated, the environment deteriorated.
People in all walks of life, and especially business, do not want to experience the collapse of cities like New York along with global finance and economy in chaos, but this is what business faces if we continue to attribute climate change to fossil fuels alone.
