Keeping Management Proactive

Abstract

A FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF HOLISTIC MANAGEMENT is that success requires planning—and successful planning requires implementation (of course), monitoring, controlling, and replanning. Holistic Management makes this point in many ways and contexts, and earlier chapters in this handbook have repeated it. In any situation you manage, you should be monitoring to make happen what you want to happen—to bring about desired changes in line with your holistic context. Monitoring developments in the ecological sphere, however, deserves its own treatment because much of what we do as land managers may lead to unanticipated effects. Anytime you plan to alter ecosystem processes in any way, assume you could be wrong because the land is more complex than humans will ever understand.