In several places we’ve used the metaphor of the artist standing before a blank sheet in order to inject a sense of drama and romance into tasks that will probably keep your hand on the calculator and your nose in the paper longer than you ever thought you could bear. Certainly any good management, not just Holistic Management, requires a lot of organizing, planning, and monitoring. But painters and poets don’t really enjoy much drama and romance in their day to day work. Most grind out their lives in risky, low-status toil, and they die broke far more often than ranchers and farmers do. Nevertheless, the comparison holds in other ways. In the blood of all who take responsibility for blank pages or pieces of land runs the desire to bring forth from them something altogether new and of lasting value.
Who knows why? A hundred times you’ve heard faded men in faded denim say, “I don’t know why I stay in this business”—though you know that leaving the bone-grinding labor on their land would kill them in no time at all.
Because you do know why, you’ll compose a land plan worthy of your art that will sustain you and others who live from that art. You will create it from a fresh map, unencumbered by the roads, fences, ditches, and other clutter you inherited or built without forethought. Your land will become what it ought to become.
We’ve already hinted at the material benefits of planning. Too many people forfeit those benefits by clinging without reflection to what always was. A little bit of patient planning may return hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years in savings and increased income from fewer roads, water points, and fences; better livestock handling; greater wildlife productivity; reduced losses from weather and predation; and a host of other factors.
There is a bigger reason for planning, however.
While theologians debate the immortality of the soul, you can walk around and get your boots muddy in the ages of the earth, which compared to your short life might as well be immortal.
Then again, you aren’t sure, are you?
No other living planet has yet been found in space, and ours is very small. We tax it sorely with our bombs, wars, fumes, and fires, our cutting down and building up, our teeming cities and plundered fields, our grasping and our greed.
And that is why you will sit down with your planning sheets, your computers, and your maps, and do your work—so that when the paintings in their galleries and the poems on their shelves have gone to dust, the earth, your piece of land, will abide.