What might become possible if we treat Holistic Management as a living practice rather than something held by an institution?

By Andrea Malmberg

I have been thinking and feeling my way through the future of Holistic Management for years—long before the recent unraveling of the Savory Institute. I have been engaged in several organizations created to carry the work of Holistic Management, and I keep returning to a pattern that is not unique to any one of them: we create an organization to serve the work, and, almost without noticing, the work begins serving the organization.

At a Cowgirl Camp devoted to somatic holistic decision-making, I posed a question: Do I, as an individual, need a statement of purpose?

One woman, who is in the practice of holistic decision-making, answered without hesitation: “You definitely need a statement of purpose!”

This departs from the way a statement of purpose is generally described in Holistic Management, where it applies to an organization formed to do something specific. An agency needs one because it must reflect the public purpose for which it was created; a cooperative might exist to provide business services, market access, and research to its members.

By Maya Weeks

Participating in New Cowgirl Camp loosened something in me that I had been trying to figure out how to loosen up but hadn’t known how. I am a geographer and poet who works on pollution and gender. I was a poet first, and then trained as a geographer to develop research skills in environmental justice to write stronger poetry. And then I became a researcher whose practice involves creative writing. And then an educator who uses all of the above to teach. By the time I arrived at New Cowgirl Camp, it had become clear to me that I needed to integrate land stewardship into my life in a major way.

By Andrea Malmberg

I have come to believe that one of the deepest distortions of the cultures that have evolved in the postmodern era is our growing acceptance of decay before death. We have normalized the slow erosion of vitality as though it were inevitable, accepting prolonged diminishment as the price of care while simultaneously organizing immense systems of medicine, finance, and technology around postponing the final moment of death, regardless of the quality, coherence, or meaning of the life preceding it.

What does it actually feel like to live in alignment with your values?

In Holistic Management, the holistic context is where that work begins. It asks decision-makers to get clear on what they’re managing, what resources they have, and what kind of life and future they’re working toward. It becomes a practical tool for decision-making, used alongside the seven testing questions to evaluate choices across ecological, financial, and social dimensions.

For many people, the hardest part isn’t knowing what matters, it’s actually living it.

This workshop is about that gap.

As spring unfolds across the West, plans are well underway for UVE’s 2026 Ecological Outcome Verification (EOV) monitoring season. This year, we are preparing to monitor 35 landbases across California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, and Colorado, including three new landbases that will receive baseline monitoring for the first time.

By Mackenzie Diven

This week I got the amazing opportunity to visit a Modoc Nation site in Tulelake with UVE. The land was absolutely stunning, spanning around 1,200 acres of mountains, fields, and vast, diverse landscapes. This was truly an eye-opening experience because I never knew this site even existed, and I had never learned about most of the untold Native stories connected to this land.