You can listen to the interview David Holmgren did for the By Design program on Australia’s ABC Radio National
Interview Transcript
Fenella Kernebone introduces the show and mentions an upcoming segment with landscape architect Costa Georgiadis before introducing David Holmgren.
(0m0s) Introduction to Permaculture Principles
Fenella Kernebone: Hello, Fenella Kernebone with you and happy holidays to you. Welcome to the first of our summer specials right here on ByDesign. Fabulous to join you. And during this season of festivity, today’s show is all about sustainability.
Whether it’s mass produced or handmade. Today, our panel puts the focus squarely back on sustainable design.
I’m sure more than a few of us have thrown out food throughout the year. Limp looking parsley, mouldy oranges, eggs we forgot to cook. In fact, Australians throw away over 7.9 billion dollars of food every year. That’s tons of edible stuff that ends up in landfill. And like me, if you’re living in the city, a lot of the food we buy is either trucked in or even imported, which means more and more fossil fuels and energy is being used.
So how can we do it better? How can we get more out of life using Less. Well, one movement that has had a huge impact is Permaculture Permanent Agriculture, an entire design philosophy that aims to guide us towards a sustainable future. And my first guest today is the co-founder of Permaculture David Holmgren.
So permaculture, how exactly does it work? What are its basic principles?
(2m5s) Definition and Levels of Permaculture
David Holmgren: Well, permaculture can be understood really at three levels. Firstly, it’s a design system for both sustainable living and land use. And so it’s a conceptual, that’s the conceptual level. And people often think of it more at the toolkit level, of its strategies and techniques for more self-reliant and sustainable living. Which might involve everything from growing our own food to doing a home energy audit, looking at our connections in the community and reducing our dependence on far away, complex and environmentally impacting things that sustain us.
Fenella Kernebone: Okay. So it’s much more than simply planting a veggie patch in the backyard then it’s it’s a much bigger picture than that, isn’t it?
David Holmgren: Yeah. Permaculture suffers in a way from actually being absorbed into the mainstream mindset of Australia as a sort of a cool form of organic gardening, which is an incredible success story really for something that you could say is a very radical approach to how we need to change everything in the way we design our society from first principles and the ABC Gardening Australia program has been a big contributor to that absorption of permaculture thinking into the Australian mainstream, but it also has tended to result in people thinking that’s just what Permaculture is.
(3m42s) Origins of Permaculture
Fenella Kernebone: Sure. Just briefly, can you touch on the origins, David, of permaculture, because I mean, you started it in the late 1970s with your mentor, your colleague Bill Mollison. So what was happening in the environmental movement at that time?
David Holmgren: Well, permaculture One was published in 1978, and I regard that as the peak of what I call the first wave of modern environmentalism. And that came out of work that Bill and I did in the early to mid 1970s influenced by things like the limits to growth report of 1972 and the oil crises of that time and the last great global economic recession. So there was a huge interest in what today we would call sustainability and permaculture was a design response to that focusing on, well, what do humans really need? And identifying that, well, actually the most significant and complex thing that we need to do is actually to feed ourselves. And therefore we looked at the design of agriculture and how we feed ourselves as the number one focus in a whole design strategy.
(4m54s) Global Spread and Local Adaptation
Fenella Kernebone: It’s interesting. I mean, it started off with both of you in Australia led from Tasmania and now it’s global. There are projects all over the world, David obviously in Australia, but Cuba, Argentina, Africa, but in many ways it changes different meanings in different places, doesn’t it? From indigenous communities to stronger economies. How does that work?
David Holmgren: Well, it definitely does, and I think the genius of that, like I say I am the co originator of the permaculture concept, but I say Bill Mollison is the father of the permaculture movement. ’cause permaculture needs to be understood at that level too. It’s not just an idea that stayed with some obscure Tasmanian academic and some self-taught semi feral colleague of his who was actually a design student at the time, because it went out through the permaculture design course process around Australia and then around the world. And as you say, that’s now in many, many different countries and it has different expressions in different places. So it’s very different in its sort of application, if you are working in a highly damaged, degraded rural environments in developing countries from how we work with the billion or so middle class people to change their dysfunctional behavior habits, but permaculture is working across that spectrum globally.
Fenella Kernebone: But as you say it, it is about how we are doing things where we live, no matter what community you happen to be in. So it is in, no matter what the community is, it’s all about building self-reliance. That’s the key, isn’t it?
(6m32s) Self-Reliance and Relocalisation
David Holmgren: Yeah. Self-reliance and the relocalisation process, which is this positive, not just retreat of globalization, but the redevelopment of all the needs and processes at a more localised level, which is inevitable in what we call the energy descent future. That we’re heading for.
(6m53s) Energy Descent Future
Fenella Kernebone: What’s, what’s an energy descent future? What does that mean?
David Holmgren: Well, I coined this term to use the most honest word in English, to describe a continuous contraction in the energy available to support future generations of humanity that happening over many, many generations in the same way that it’s a mirror of energy ascent, which has happened now for several hundred years based on fossil fuels. So it’s not collapse and the end of the world and it’s not the techno stability green mainstream that we’re gonna do a sort of cool low impact version of what we have. And it’s not techno explosion that we’re going to the stars. It’s an honest recognition that we are at the peak and now we have to deal with how to live with less and more creatively with what we have locally and, and that that’s gonna go on not just an adaption in our lifetime, but over many, many generations.
(8m0s) Opportunities in Energy Descent
Fenella Kernebone: Hmm. And you actually see opportunities for us too in this energy descent future, don’t you? There are positives about this for us.
David Holmgren: Oh, absolutely. It’s a bit like the mining industry rubbing its hands with glee when commodity prices go up. Well, it’s quite reasonable for permaculture people who’ve been committed to this, like myself, over a lifetime to see huge opportunities in a world where resources are more expensive and more unreliable, and where there’s rewards for self-reliance rather than it just being a sort of an ideological thing that sort of people with strange ideas do it, it becomes normalised as just sensible adaption to reality.
(8m42s) Permaculture and Suburbs
Fenella Kernebone: On By Design I’m speaking with author, writer, speaker, educator, and of course, the co-founder of Permaculture David Holmgren. And we’d love to hear your thoughts about permaculture, your stories as well. What are you doing in your town? What do you think about these energy descent future. Are there positives? What about in your suburb or in your area? I’m curious about how permaculture principles have transformed your lives. And all the links, of course, are on our website. David, maybe we can come back to our cities. I was talking to Brendan Gleason and we were talking about transition towns. Here on by design. And we also talked about the future of suburbs where, well, a lot of us actually live in suburbs and a lot of the time they’re being described as these major threats to sustainability. But you have a very different view than this, don’t you?
David Holmgren: Yeah. We see the spread out suburbs, which are obviously designed around cheap energy and car transport and all of those sort of things that everyone can see is quite dysfunctional as highly suited to retrofitting for the low energy future because separate houses in streets often have surplus garden space around them. So it’s possible to grow food, it’s possible to collect water, it’s possible to retrofit the buildings incrementally without waiting for the whole of society to agree that that’s necessary. And then we also have surplus space in those houses that are filled with things and not people that are amenable to redeveloping home-based lifestyles and livelihoods. Kick the cars outta the triple garage and set up a home workshop. And the roller door on the front is your street front because this is actually how we are going to adapt to the energy descent future because we have no plan from above. All we have is complete denial. So it is gonna be this sort of bottom up incremental ad hoc adaption. And it is actually much easier to do that sort of process in the suburbs than it is in multi-story buildings where not only do you have to get the agreement of all of the strata. Yeah. And all of the much bigger regulatory structures. So we see the suburbs as a huge opportunity in that sense.
(10m57s) Starting Points for Suburban Permaculture
Fenella Kernebone: Or can, can you give me a really easy starting point? I mean, how, how do we start? Maybe you’re living in a suburb and you’ve got a bit of garden space. I mean, what do you suggest? What’s a good point to start?
David Holmgren: Well, the things that are already taking over the grassroots interest in sustainability instead of just the light bulb sort of stuff. People, there’s a huge interest in growing food in the backyard because food is the most important thing we need every day. And that’s the most easy thing that people can do at home. The other things are making the connections in your community of who else is doing these things and making those connections at the local level, where you can carpool and share resources. And rebuild those local community connections. And of course, transition towns is a big part of the way that’s being expressed. And it’s no surprise that transition towns, which started in Britain, which is already down the energy descent path actually came out of permaculture activism. Of course.
Fenella Kernebone: So, so basically you are saying to get in touch with our local farmer, for example, an urban farmer, maybe even grow things yourself, trying to transform that space, that empty space into something that you can actually use and essentially to eat, essentially.
David Holmgren: Well that’s the interesting thing. There’s people who are making that connection to farmers through community supported agriculture and similar box scheme networks. And then there’s people who are actually growing in their backyard, becoming good at it, and becoming micro farmers themselves, wanting to, in fact producing surplus boxes of veggies and becoming the urban farmer as well as of course, public space, urban farmers at places like Sir City Farm in Melbourne, in Melbourne, and similar places. So a lot of these initiatives that we’re familiar with in other ways. I wouldn’t say that permaculture is the only source for those, but if you actually look at the background of the people involved in a lot of these things, it’s actually, permaculture has been a big influence on that over the last 20 years.
(13m11s) Challenges in a Robust Economy
Fenella Kernebone: I mean, some, some of these ideas, though, I know this has been going on for 30 years, but they do require a radical shift in how we live. So my question is, is it a tough sell? Considering that our economy here in Australia is so robust. It’s fueled by consumerism, by buying things what will happen.
David Holmgren: Well, it is difficult here. If you go to the United States or Europe, there’s less problems because the economy is in contraction. So we’re in this sort of schizoid state here now where we’ve got this booming economy. Things from overseas are cheaper and cheaper, but people feel really uneasy about more debt and all of those sorts of things. So there’s forces pulling people both ways, but this is yeah. The exact issue that I set on a workshop in 2006 in Western Australia. How do you convince people in a boom economy like Western Australia that energy descent is a real thing to plan for.
(14m7s) Biggest Challenges and Money
Fenella Kernebone: Mm. What do you then see as the biggest challenges, I suppose, in our struggle to control our resources today?
David Holmgren: Well, ironically, after a lifetime of focusing on the biological basis for existence and then the energetic basis, I’ve now become more and more interested in money. Ironically, after ignoring it for most of my life, because on the downside of the energy peak, it’s actually the bubble economies that can unravel so fast that become almost the most important thing in shaping the immediate future. So that bubble economy is, of course, is actually falling apart right now. So a lot of the mainstream sustainability strategies assume we have a growing and steady economy. Permaculture works from the basis that we can adapt and do these adaptions in an ad hoc way from the bottom up. And we’ve been doing that essentially for 30 years without the support of government and corporations. So I’m not saying that we’ve got all the answers, but there’s a lot of people out there who are modeling and have been modeling how creative responses are gonna happen.
Fenella Kernebone: David, it’s really fantastic to talk to you and to hear about Permaculture and about its history and about its application today. Thank you for joining me on By Design.
David Holmgren: Thank you.
Fenella Kernebone: David Holmgren is an ecologist ecological design, engineer and writer, and is known as one of the co originators of the Permaculture concept with Bill Mollison. And you can find links on our website at ABC net au slash radio National.
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