In the 1970s, as farmers and ranchers began to demonstrate just how effective livestock could be at restoring degraded land, they started to see that if they focused only on land restoration, they couldn't achieve lasting change. They also had to keep a steady eye on the financial soundness of their efforts, and maintain a level of well-being for the people involved. As the complexity of monitoring the environmental, financial, and social needs emerged, a decision making framework was born to manage this complexity.

Management must be holistic to achieve lasting change. Without surveying the impact of your decisions on the entire picture, you ignore outcomes that might undermine the vision that you created in the first place.

It was only after creating the Holistic Management Framework did we notice the similarities between what was being used by land managers and what was also being used by all tool-using animals in nature:

• We have an objective
• We recognize that to achieve our objective we must use one or more of the tools available to us
• We decide on which tool(s) to use, and how to use it to meet our objective