TED lectures are a neat idea. Somehow they have managed to legitimise thinking outside the box and I suspect we don’t fully appreciate how important this is.
Most ideas that stick come from our current paradigms for anything really new must be pretty special to succeed in a society dominated by commerce and naturally conservative mind-set. So ‘good on ya’ TED.
About a decade ago I met Alan Savory on one of his trips to Australia to promote his ideas on holistic management. It was an interesting encounter [for me at least] that took me back to my time in Zimbabwe in the late 1980’s and then to thoughts of what it must have been like to both wander through the bush and the corridors of parliament in the time leading up to Zimbabwean independence in 1980 as Alan Savory had done.
He claims in his book that it was a combination of his science training, days on end tracking in the bush, and his time in politics that brought him to understand the importance of intensive, timed grazing by larger herds for the health of our grazing lands. Now he has extended his idea as a solution to two huge global issues: desertification and climate change.
Check out his TED lecture, it starts slowly but is worth persisting to the punch line.
Alloporus 