David Holmgren was recently interviewed by Ann Stanley on the Local Food Connections programme on 3CR radio.
In the interview, David discusses the Reading Landscape documentary that was recently launched at a private premiere in Castlemaine, and that is now available to stream online.
You can listen to David’s conversation with Ann below:
Interview Transcript
(00:00:00) 3CR Podcast Introduction
Intro:
(00:00:38) Local Food Connections Intro Song
Intro Song:
(00:01:04) Welcome and Introduction to David Holmgren
Host: Welcome to Local Food Connections, where we discuss the power of locally grown food to connect us more strongly with our communities and the lands we inhabit. We acknowledge that we live, work, and eat from the stolen lands of the Kulin Nation, and we pay respects to elders past and present, and to all those who manage this land for millennia before us.
Host: I’m Ann Stanley. Today I am chatting with David Holmgren, co-originator of the Worldwide Permaculture Movement, a radical approach to the design of our biological, physical, and social environments. David is featured in the recently premiered film Reading Landscape, a collaboration between himself, the Late Dan Palmer and filmmaker Dave Meager.
Host: The film shows us how to restore a natural relationship known to indigenous people, but lost to most of us with the land that sustains us. And that’s going to be the focus of our conversation today. So welcome David.
David Holmgren: Pleased to be here with you, Ann.
Host: Lovely to have you. Before we speak about the film, I just want to refer to your book, RetroSuburbia.
(00:02:09) Defining Permaculture: Resilience and Universal Ethics
Host: In which you describe permaculture as a design system for resilient living and land use based on universal ethics and ecological design principles, as well as the worldwide movement, which is active in the most privileged and the most destitute communities and countries. I wonder if you would explain how permaculture works whether the community’s practicing it are privileged or not, and even destitute, just as a way into permaculture because it relates to that idea of local solutions.
David Holmgren: Yeah, I think permaculture has been attractive to many people for all sorts of different reasons, and there’s all sorts of different entry points. Some of those entry points have come from people battling against the bad things happening. And then realizing partly for their own sanity and wellbeing, but partly of the limitations or the perceived lack of success of some of those efforts that focus on a positive relationship to nature, a positive relationship to self and community, how do you build that world we want by modelling it at the small scale rather than saying, oh, how do we design this new global complex system from first principles? Because one of the things that informed permaculture from the beginning is systems thinking, especially ecological systems. And one of the premises of systems thinking is that complex systems that work evolve from simple systems that work. And the systems at a small scale, at the household, the personal, are inherently easier to get going despite the structural impediment. Then trying to, from the top down, design a new world order. Yeah, there I use that sort of term. So I think that’s one thing that attracted people, but also in many other places in the world, people came across permaculture and heard something that connected to their local traditional indigenous common sense. That they weren’t hearing from modernity generally, which was telling them you need to throw away all the things from the past and learn from us, the affluent world. And so permaculture was one of the messages that rather than here, we’ve got this completely new idea. So here’s something that actually builds on, resonates with, reflects, if not all, then parts of what people’s various traditions that have come from.
(00:05:33) The “Two-Thirds World” and Connection to Place
Host: David, can I just interrupt and ask, did I hear you in the film? I saw the film at Castlemaine a couple of weeks ago. Did you use the idea, did you say something about the two-thirds world implying that most people are already living in a more common sense, old-fashioned sort of a way?
David Holmgren: Well, yeah. I used the two-thirds world to reflect the large number of the, the majority of the world’s population that either live in rural areas or have come from rural areas and or have come from a connection to place, which is embedded in tradition, often language of that place, and where they have existed to a significant extent in the non-monetary economy. Non-monetary household and community economies. Whereas in the one-third world, some of that is several generations back. In the case of Anglo Australians, the convicts and soldiers who came here were the first de-cultured people on the planet. Uh, you know, from the proto-industrial city of the first industrialised nation. So, I don’t want to suggest that all of Athat is completely lost for those people in that world. Of those past elements or to romanticise those things, but they are resources that we can rekindle. And that is, that is definitely part of what we are doing in permaculture generally, but in the skill of reading landscape. It’s getting us over the blocks we have about how we know anything, how we do anything.
(00:07:35) What is “Reading Landscape”?
Host: Okay, so let’s get right onto reading landscape. And I’m just left with this lovely idea that, well, two-thirds of the people are halfway there, so, and the rest of us are only a few generations away from a more proper way of living on the earth without romanticising it. But so just tell us, David, what is it to read a landscape, what do we mean by that, or what do you mean by that?
David Holmgren: Yeah, well it’s a complex term and it obviously comes from the literacy that we can read information through symbols and signs and the patterns of construction of language, and learn an enormous amount from that process. We’re so familiar with that as literate people. And also beyond that, it’s connecting to the dominant sense, that of sight. Especially in our culture. And I can say personally that for me, I’m also a very sight-dominated person. I’m a bit of an auditory dummy. But of course, reading landscape actually doesn’t mean just the visual sense. It means all the senses, all our innate animal, not just human, but animal capacities to attune to our environment, observe and interact with it and consequently survive and thrive. That that basic capacity has been dulled and disabled in the modern world. And that’s, I suppose then in that sense, landscape is everything from the normal way we would think of it as the macro through to the horizon. But also down to the micro. So I saw a photo on your podcast of a farmer smelling soil that is reading landscape.
Host: Yes. Yep. So it’s really what you’re saying about what’s been dulled, isn’t it, is the five senses. And although we’re talking about reading, and it’s almost just a metaphor, because this is not about literacy at all, is it? In the sense of it’s not about using language to, using words really to talk about the landscape as much as feeling it through the senses.
David Holmgren: Yes. And a lot of it is basic pattern recognition. And the other analogy that I use is that of course we can also talk about reading people. And that skill, which is attending to body language, all sorts of complexities that are just different to what people say. And some people are very good at that and some not so good. And similarly with reading landscape, we can all have, we all have some capacity to read landscape. So in teaching this on permaculture design courses, I show a wind-pruned tree on the coast, pruned by salt wind. Ask what is happening in this environment. And of course, most people can recognise, oh, that’s a tree close to the coast. And then we unpack that and find deeper and deeper things in that photo, deeper and deeper possibility. So that rekindling of that ability for me sort of began at the permaculture journey and I became galvanised around it, dealing with the actual practicalities of being a permaculture designer and the realities as a consultant of having to come onto a piece of land and give people advice, often on the basis of a one, one-day visit. Which is, of course, enormously challenging and in some ways conflict with the slow and steady immersion in something that we should do before we act. But that skill in being able to quickly appraise the landscape, at least within the bioregion of my familiar work, oh, that means this, that means in this season, this, that tree, all of those signs in the landscape that can tell us something were essential. The core skill actually to attempt to even this process that my co-originator set in place of the idea of permaculture being a cadre of designers who would go out and transform the landscape back in the sort of the idealism of the late seventies, early eighties.
(00:12:52) Practical Application: Observing Sun, Wind, and Orientation
Host: I’ve just got a, I’m going to give you a really concrete example and I’ll ask you to talk about observing and interacting and the idea of taking a longer term view, even just a year-long view of your landscape. When not we moved to our current house. So I looked out the back door and I saw a lovely sunny spot. And I thought, great, I’m going to grow vegetables there. And so I imported a whole, there was no soil there. It’s rocky and imported a whole bunch of garden soil, which was a bit rubbish. It wasn’t even compost, just garden soil. And I bunged in a few plants. Then I did a PDC after that and many other failures. And realised that that little bit of sunny bit in my backyard is only sunny for about half an hour a day on about four days of the year or something. I’m exaggerating. So can you talk to us about the importance of just even in a suburban house, orienting yourself to your landscape? And how that, with the wind and the sun and everything else.
David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I suppose some of the basics of reading landscape that we try to instil through some culture design processes is that mandala in the head. The compass of where am I, where’s north? Because that’s the centre of the arc of the sun for us in the Southern Hemisphere and for those of us in Northern Australia, oh, it’s roughly overhead all year and it doesn’t make much difference. But in the temperate zone, it makes this huge difference to everything. The, so having that pattern sort of built into you when you walk around. It’s not just sort of there as a utilitarian thing when you need to make decisions. It’s your whole orientation in the world. Because, and that’s why people who have that skill when they go to the Northern Hemisphere, I found myself getting completely lost all the time. Is south, but because it moves from a right-handed world where the sun comes up at your right and moves through the sky to the left to the opposite. And that’s incredibly confusing. Whereas people who don’t have that mental mandala don’t get as confused. Yeah, exactly. Which is really interesting. But I suppose that ability to do that means that’s an example of how you can shortcut that need to observe over a long period, which builds up a complement of experience. And I don’t specifically call that reading landscape. Like if you live for long enough, you’ve seen enough things from experience and making mistakes. But is there a possibility of contracting that process by some things where we can see, oh yes, that means this.
(00:16:16) The Importance of Diverse Skills and Collaboration
Host: I’m going to interrupt again. Sorry. I’m really struck by some of the things you’re saying, it’s making me realise that we really do need each other because, you talk about having that you’ve got a strong visual sense and a strong sense of orientation to the north and south, et cetera. I’ve got neither of those, but I’ve got very good auditory senses. So we really do need each other, don’t we, to the, the best way to design your permaculture plot or whatever is do it with someone else or with a few other people who’ve got complementary skills.
David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, all the people who are birders, their primary skill, if they’re good at what they do is auditory. Because you’re actually hearing the bird song, just identifying what the bird is. But what it’s talking about, at the best level.
Host: Are you there, David?
David Holmgren: Yep.
Host: Oh, sorry. I thought you just cut out. No, you just stopped talking. Sorry.
(00:17:24) Deeper Connections: Psychological and Spiritual Restoration Through Landscape
Host: Okay, so we’ve got another five minutes left or so. Just, would you, I know this is difficult, more difficult to talk about, but if we put food and survival aside, how can reading landscape deepen our relationship with the land? And how can this, do you think, restore us psychologically and even spiritually?
David Holmgren: Yeah, I think it’s a really important question. And I think the more we understand about landscape in that deep felt sense, the more we feel the lineage of history, and that includes the burdens of history of the past and a sense of us being a part of nature rather than separate from it, which in our cultural lineage used to be separate from it and superior to it. And now it is flipped into separate from it and the destroyer or contaminator of it. And to step back from the judgment, which actually clouds our ability to read landscape at all levels of the fences, that judgment of right and wrong. Now of course, there’s land managers from gardens deciding what to weed out of the garden through to managers of vast pastoral estates. We have to make decisions, make judgments. But when we do that all the time upfront, it actually destroys our ability to actually understand what’s happening and to sit with that. And when we do that, that connects us more to, we are a part of nature. We are just another particularly powerful animal going about doing things and. That for me is really important. Often when we’re reading landscape, we are looking at not just natural ecological processes, we’re looking at the signs of what someone has done in the landscape from where the mower went last year, in changing the nature of the grass through to what people did, the signs of what people did a hundred years ago or impact even thousands of years ago. So this connects us in a nonjudgmental way to the whole of life and the whole of the history of a place. And I could give a simple example of people who were illiterate and you could say, were at the forefront of destroying Dja Dja Wurrung country where I sit in the richest gold region of the world. The gold miners understood because they depended on it that they, they called the Ordovician sedimentary country, the old country. Now, they didn’t know it was 400 million years old, but they knew it came before the volcanic landscapes that sat over the top of parts of it. Which they called the new country. Just an example of how our forebears had to know all of these things and both for survival, but the sense of being natural inland that we are part of it. Now that doesn’t mean we end up making right the right decisions, but it’s a stepping stone, a strong, powerful stepping stone, I believe, to making right decisions much more than the idea of the ideological judgment about what’s good and bad. Because I believe that is actually really history shows there’s huge dangers and dysfunction that come from that of people doing things around good intentions.
Host: Yeah. And with the unintended consequences of good intentions.
David Holmgren: Yeah.
(00:22:03) Navigating Social Dynamics and Conflict Resolution
Host: That we, we can, just getting down to really practical things. There are a lot of permaculture people, they get into conflict with their neighbours. You know, maybe they’re letting too many weeds grow or managing animals in a different way. So what it seems to me that this, this is going to be, this is an ongoing, sort of a difficulty. Do you have anything to say about conflict resolution in those sort of ways?
David Holmgren: I think the whole process, the parallel process that Dan Palmer identified as the structure of his living design process that came out of his experience with Permaculture design and the influence of Christopher Alexander, the visionary architect on his work about reading landscape and reading people were the people context. And the landscape context. And that those are two equally important domains to deeply understand before we act. And both those contexts are changed as we do things. The new thing that we’ve done, it changes the context, it becomes part of the context of what we do next. So gaining the social license for what we do, especially when we work out the social fringes and even the legal fringes. And that applies directly in some cases, to managing plants that are legally declared noxious weeds. For example, legal requirement to remove. Gaining social license of neighbours, I’ve said repeatedly in my RetroSuburbia work is more important than the legal license. True. So that how one navigates not necessarily does conform to what the norms are around you, but considering the interests of and empathetically connecting with where those people are at, so that at the very least they see what you are doing is benign and okay. Even if it’s not what they want to do.
Host: Yep, yep. And that is a sort of a very important and complex navigation that we need to do whenever we push the boundaries, and especially when those are the legal fringes.
(00:24:50) The Importance of Edges and Diverse Skills in Households
Host: Mm. Well, that we’re nearly at the end of the interview and that, what you’re just saying has really reminded me of that idea of the edges. But we can’t talk about that, the importance of the edge. And there is that edge when two, when people in conflict come together, there’s a fertile area there for something new to grow out of that. Yeah. Yeah. So, that’s a, that’s such an interesting idea and I really like that idea about reading people. And again, it reminds me that we need all different people, don’t we, because some people are naturally better at that than others. So, good idea to get involved with some people that are naturals at that if you’re going to have to manage it.
David Holmgren: Yeah. And that my RetroSuburbia work is premised on the basis of those diverse skills that we need close at hand, ideally should be at the household level. Obviously many people are aware we need that at the community level. But to not be isolated in simple households of one or two people, but people with diverse skills, and of course the opportunities for children to grow into the niche which is not being occupied by the adult. And become competent in a domain which is maybe missing in the skill base of the household. So all of those complementarity, we need to sort of bring closer, closer to us.
(00:26:24) Film Access and Conclusion
Host: Mm. Well, David, that’s all we’ve got time for. And thank you so much for joining us today by phone from Hepburn.
David Holmgren: And yeah, just to remind people that the film can be directly accessed through the news item on the Holmgren Design website at the moment.
Host: Yep. So people can see that. So if you are able to, I don’t know. We have that link.
David Holmgren: We’ll, we’ll put that out again. I’ll put that in the, the podcast of this and, uh, we’ll mention it again on the show.
Host: Fantastic. Okay. Thank you David. We have to go now to Latin American update our next show. So thank you so much.
David Holmgren: Fantastic. See you Ann. Bye.
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