David Holmgren was recently interviewed by Oliver Goshey on the Regenerative Skills podcast, where they discussed, among other things, the evolution of permaculture, various cohabitation arrangements, getting around strict regulations, and much more.

You can listen to their conversation here:

https://regenerativeskills.com/david-holmrgren-on-the-hidden-regeneration-potential-of-the-suburbs/

Interview Transcript

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(1m52s) Introduction: The Overlooked Community Element in Permaculture

Oliver Goshey: Welcome back, everybody. Now, I’ve had the privilege of being able to travel to many places around the world to design and manage projects for organisations and clients. And one of the constants that I find, whether it’s getting a natural home off the ground, planning an agroforestry plantation, or even remotely consulting with someone on their dream project, is that the community element is often the most overlooked. Now, time and time again, I’ve seen projects stall or move backwards because they think they just don’t have the monetary or material resources to continue when in fact it’s their social capital, which is lacking. On the other side, I’ve seen the power of collaboration overcome shortages of money and institutional support as neighbours and friends offer their creativity, expertise, or even just emotional support to get past the inevitable hurdles that come up. Despite this, though, there are far fewer resources and courses in the regenerative fields on how to build social capital, involve and connect your community, or how to even apply patterns of nature to organise people and our institutions.

Oliver Goshey: So today we’re gonna continue with this series by going into the source of permaculture study by speaking to the co originator of Permaculture, David Holmgren. So back in 1978, he and Bill Mollison published Permaculture One, starting the Global Permaculture Movement. And since then, David has developed three properties, consulted and supervised on urban and rural projects, written eight more books and presented lectures, workshops, and courses on Australia and around the world. His writings over these three decades span a diversity of subjects and issues whilst always illuminating aspects of permaculture thinking and living. While there are endless things that I could ask David about in this interview, we focus on his newest book, RetroSuburbia, the Down Shifters Guide to a Resilient Future, his 592 page manual showing how Australians can downshift and retrofit their homes, gardens, and selves for resilience into an uncertain future.

(4m2s) Why Focus on Suburbs for Resilience?

Oliver Goshey: In this episode, we talk about why he chose to focus on the suburbs when many people are now looking to abandon them and move to more rural areas. We explore the potential that there is in retrofitting the infrastructure of peri-urban environments that were poorly designed and the source of much wasteful energy and material use. This is a wide ranging conversation that explores the evolution of permaculture, various cohabitation arrangements, getting around strict regulations, and so much more. Now I’ve been excited about this interview for a long time. So with all of this outta the way, here’s David Holmgren. David, thank you so much for taking time to be here. I am really excited to talk about this for a lot of things that we just talked about for a second earlier. Looking at a lot of these aspects of lifestyle design, landscape design and home design that are quite frequently overlooked because they’re not the easy to point to patterns in nature that are often used to illustrate permaculture principles, but clearly have a lot of untapped potential to be leveraged for the type of holistic or sustainable living that so many people aspire to. And so, I first wanted to ask you why you chose to focus your most recent book on the suburbs, because this is where everybody’s trying to flee from right now. It’s where people think that there’s not really much hope of fixing or obtaining the type of lifestyle that they aspire to from permaculture teachings. What caused you to focus on that?

David Holmgren: Yeah, well I suppose going back historically, there’s no doubt that in the 1970s and 1980s in Australia, the early phases of permaculture involved a strong connection to the back to the land movement and that shift to rural design and often on clean slate sites, greenfields, design sites, blank slates, but it was also a huge sort of uptake, especially early on before the Thatcherite Reaganite sort of economic and social revolution in the eighties made it much more unfavourable in the suburbs. But in Australia there was this huge interest in permaculture in the suburbs, and I always saw suburban scale as potentially a sweet point between the density and connectivity that we associate with cities, but also enough space and capacity to modify and control one’s immediate living environment and space to grow food space to store and fabricate materials, small household scale non-monetary economy that we associate with rural areas and rural capacities and lifestyles. And that the potential to retrofit suburbs, even though they weren’t designed for a regenerative future with challenging conditions like climate emergency and resource depletion, and all of the other threats that are unfolding around us, that they have that potential for incremental household led retrofit. Whereas what I saw in the inner cities at higher density, there was a lot more stakeholders. It was a lot more technically complex to retrofit high density residential and other infrastructure, and you have to wait till society is more on board with this common sense in some cases before you can even start. And then in terms of rural environments, the idea of a mass migration to rural areas before we were already deep in these the limits to growth crises that are unfolding around us was unrealistic People adapt in situ short of catastrophic failures of collapses of infrastructure and supply chains. The sort of fleeing from the city on mass isn’t gonna happen. And so people are going to sort of adapt in situ and a lot of that adaption will be around the built environment and the biological gardening. But it very powerfully it’s around the behavioral and living arrangements because that’s where the great flexibility is. And then in that you tap into the knowledge and the skill that people have, the connections in their communities rather than having to start afresh. And I suppose over the decades seeing so many people do the move to the country, I’ve known lots of people who said, wow, actually my suburban garden was more productive than where I moved to in the bush battling the wildlife and often actually more infertile soils and all of the complexities of rural self-reliance that require us to not just maybe large projects are building houses, but also water infrastructure and dealing with natural hazards like in Australia, Bush fire or other hazards that we have to sort of be, do more for ourselves. And that shift, although it can be incredibly empowering for some people, it can be incredibly challenging and difficult because there can be so many learning curves that that people are having to navigate.

Oliver Goshey: Yeah, makes sense.

David Holmgren: So there’s some of the reasons, yeah. Why the reemergence of my focus on the suburbs over the last 20 years in the work leading up to the publication of RetroSuburbia in 2018.

(10m36s) Challenges in Suburban Living: Debt and Car Dependence

Oliver Goshey: For sure. And before we start talking about the specific potentials of different types of retrofits and where there are kind of leverage points to make real change, let’s focus in on some of the real challenges. And we’re still focusing on the suburban configuration of Australia and to a similar state, the United States, Canada, and other places that have mostly developed their infrastructure since the proliferation of cars, right? The larger scale that people can access due to rapid personal transit, right? Where are the real hurdles? The things that are preventing us from living a more sustainable and connected life in these, in these configurations?

David Holmgren: Well, I think the first would not be actually around infrastructure, but it’s actually around debt because that drives the cycle of often in a household, two partners, often as parents of children both working away to pay the mortgage and that locks people in to an extent on commuting and takes them away from the ability to navigate the day-to-day intimate requirements of the sort of home non-monetary economy and whether that’s looking after children or feeding the chickens or watering the garden or doing little things that can work in with a working day when you have a home-based lifestyle. But that absence and that commuting lifestyle and of course that is often then locking people into car dependence. So I suppose I have been very aware that for more than two decades, that information technology was one of the positive wildcards in our future. The commute was not actually essential for huge numbers of people, but it took until the pandemic to sort of break this spell that everyone was under all institutions and businesses that no, everyone’s gotta come into the office. And obviously that made us aware of the divide between those who could work digitally and those who couldn’t. But I still think there’s huge capacities for home-based lifestyles. For example, the miniaturisation and reduced cost of tools, say for carpentry or metal working, means that a lot of people in a suburban garage even have if maybe poorer quality than professional quality tools that would, in a poorer country, would support someone in a garage based home manufacturing or repair business, whereas 50, or let alone a hundred years ago, the sort of scale of tools, the large cast iron thickness, for turning rough sawn timber into milled timber compared with modern, small, amazingly cheap machines, even when you actually look at the higher quality professional components. So this miniaturisation of tool manufacturing, let alone people talking about 3D printers and all the latest iteration of manufacturing potential. So the possibilities of one off small scale, both manufacturing and repair, especially repair and retrofit activities. So there’s possibility that a lot of livelihoods could be more home-based, can overcome that, those impediments to the need to commute. But the challenges of course, of people on that treadmill of debt, which is related to the bubble economies of ridiculously perpetually inflating apparently real estate values, which is a sort of a curious thing that sort of appears to defy the laws of gravity, which is of course another larger contextual issue in which people are working.

(15m21s) Housing Bubbles and Opportunities for Cohabitation

Oliver Goshey: Yeah, we really seem to be in the throes of it once again, kind of brought on by the pandemic where everyone’s looking to move out of urban centres now, seeing them as more of a risk than they used to be. And also the commoditisation of real estate. It becoming more of a financial instrument than a place where you live and tend, and that has really changed the way that especially people of lower income and young families can access their own property. And I know for myself in the past, it has been a real barrier for feeling that I can do any sort of retrofits or make any changes to the place because I don’t have decision making power. Right. And that goes back to what you were saying about debt being one of the biggest inhibitors for the transformation of these areas that have so much potential and where do you see the opportunities to move away from that? Because I know you write a lot about different living configurations in the same space that we used to have, just maybe a couple of people.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I think the first one is the recognition historically that in tough times, depressions and other challenges, average household size tends to increase more people living together, sharing for, because of the efficiencies of economies of scale, and in some cases for just household security in difficult times. And most of those larger households tend to be extended family. But there’s all sorts of other configurations and my understanding that, especially in the United States since the global financial crisis, there’s been in some areas this reversal of household size getting smaller and smaller to it actually going back the other way, and this is actually one of those measures of difficulty, and you could say that historically leads to crowding and all of the other disadvantages, but because we have the largest buildings, the largest residential space in history in terms of number of square metres per person, there is a lot of, if you like, fat in the system and opportunities for more people to share, or more people to be using their spaces more effectively. So that what I mentioned previously of breaking the commuting spell and being a home more home-based lifestyle massively increases the number of hours of occupancy. So effective, efficient use of those buildings. And that means also reduced costs of living because it’s not so many people on the run eating takeaway food and traveling costs, and also not so exposed to the lures of consumption that are constantly there in the mobile city lifestyle. But I think the relationships when people are not owners to building creative relationships with those who do own. And that’s of course one of those thing, one of those patterns is the people taking in a household border, taking in someone who’s actually sharing house with you who is not family and not an owner and navigating that asymmetric power relationships that are inevitably there, but they’re also relatively intimate relations. And I think that there’s been a reluctance both on the part of mostly young people who are not owners and older people who are owners to sort of accept the things they need to sort of give up a bit for, older owners give up some of the sense of privacy and complete control over one’s space. And accept the issue that there can be conflicts and that you can navigate those and the confidence that you as an owner are in actually a very powerful position. But you need to get over the distaste that most, so many middle class people, especially in societies like Australia, feel, oh, we’re all equal, aren’t we? No, we are not. And having to sort of deal with, look at the end of your tenancy, I would like you to leave. This is not working out for me. That is very distasteful of actually having to exercise power over someone you actually know very well. And so, but that is reality. That is the economic reality. And we should face that reality and deal with it at personal level, at the other level. Young people often, oh no, I can’t do anything because I don’t own it. And what I used to say to people when I was young, when they said, why do you do all this work on different projects, other people’s property, and I’d say. Look, what I take away in my head from the experience of doing things is more valuable than the asset improvement that I’ve left behind. So that thing of engaging with others, and what that means is whether that’s in a sort of more intimate relationship in a household, or whether it’s actually where you as a renter know personally the owner and you deal with the owner without the middleman, without the real estate agent because the function of the real estate agent is to keep the parties apart and in fear of one another and exercise that control in the middle. Now, that’s not universal for all real estate agents, but it seems to me it’s the pattern of the industry, so that it’s actually that holding that central space that, oh no, you can’t dig up the lawn and put a garden in there, because I’ve told the owner that it will actually reduce the value of their property. Whereas if you actually have a direct relationship with an owner, often sometimes those things can be navigated because there are people who actually do want something sort of different. And finding those direct connections between owners and occupiers, I think is some of the huge opportunities to get past some of these blockages.

(22m17s) Maintaining Community Connection in Times of Flourishing

Oliver Goshey: That makes a lot of sense. And it’s played out a few times in my life. I’ve traveled around the world and lived in a lot of different configurations. And much like you said, especially for younger people, we find ourselves in a tenant role, whether in a co-housing situation, renting a room, or. There are a lot of different configurations that people are trying out these days. Some with more access to influence the living environment and some with less. Yeah. And do you see that there’s much potential in breaking this cycle of everybody coming back together and realising the necessity of connection only in times of scarcity, and then as soon as they start to have more resources, more power, and more flexibility, they quickly forget that again and start to separate. Are there ways of holding on to this connection even as we enter into times of flourishing as well?

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, let’s, I see historically, that is a fairly strong pattern. For example, I mean the greatest intentional community movement in the world was really probably the kibbutz movement, which really ended up founding a nation state. But by the 1970s, although the kibbutzniks were the elite of Israeli society, the lure of the city and once the country felt more comfortable and not under immediate threat of being demolished by its neighbours, the flight of people from the collective life of the kibbutz to the more autonomous life of the city was sort of very hard to resist. Maybe it was in 1970, the kibbutz has got television and they started to see Dallas and other Phoenix. And so there’s a very interesting historical example there of obviously Israel became a more powerful and affluent country, and that need for the sort of collective living sort of attenuated, I suppose I see the future is not so much one of likely material an energetic abundance, but we will have to learn community abundance and spiritual abundance, if you like, non-material. And that, I mean, these are some of the oldest lessons in history that the challenges will allow us to develop a rich life, but that will be dependent on the quality of our relationships, at the individual level, at the household level, at the neighbourhood level, and in larger community sense. And that will keep us in that glue of interdependence where I need to resolve difficult things with people because I am interdependent. We are interdependent on each other rather than I am a completely autonomous person apparently in the bubble of the technosphere that provides all my needs, which of course is what has led to the atomisation in society where we can get all our needs through monetary and digital interactions and that don’t actually really, apparently depend on any other person. Well, I think the future, whatever its form, will require more and more interdependence between people and that has the potential to reverse the catastrophic levels of loneliness and depression and other things that are clearly symptoms of that, but it’ll also require us to navigate a lot of better skills in communication and conflict resolution and all of those things.

(26m39s) The Value of Early Communal Living Experiences

Oliver Goshey: Yeah. And it seems to be the type of skillset that if you develop at an early age out of necessity or just because that was the culture around you, it’s much easier to bring forward regardless of how your economic situation may change in your lifetime. And the opposite also seems to be quite a challenge if you were not raised that way. If you go into a situation where you’re forced to live more intimately with your community, with your neighbours, with even your family, it can be quite a learning curve to get back to that. And I personally was very fortunate to grow up in a family with a lot of kids. I’m the oldest of five and Okay. Maybe that’s not a ton of kids, especially by historical standards, but it’s a lot more than my peers.

David Holmgren: Exactly. And it’s, that is an asset. And it’s, it’s one of the downsides of what’s happened with small families. And even though we can say, well, that’s been a benefit in the overall demographic transition to constantly escalating populations in many countries, the idea of every family being a single child family is not really so good as there being somehow more children together navigating that, and whether that’s because they’re, they’re in some more shared blended households or whether it’s, there’s more people with quite a few children and not many and some people with no children. Those living experiences are definitely an asset in moving into that, being able to navigate ambiguity and issues that arise.

(28m28s) Building Communication Skills for Intimate Living

Oliver Goshey: Well, it’s interesting that you bring up that configuration specific multiple households living under the same roof and different family and all their kids kind of together, because those actually were my earliest years I was born in Japan to a missionary family, and that was exactly the configuration that we kind of moved around in until we moved to the United States where my father’s from when I was seven. And I think that that kind of informed and made me comfortable with other ways of living than most of the people in the United States and in the suburbs, which we eventually moved to. And I see a lot of people, especially depending on their political leanings, idealising that lifestyle. But when they don’t have reference to it, and they find themselves in, let’s say, eco villages or intentional communities, missing big parts of the communication skills and the patience and the simple tolerance for living that close to people. And to be honest, like I could use a lot of improvement in that. I seem to have lost a lot of that patience that I had when I was younger, so I’m not faulting anyone. But have you seen either activities or exercises or ways of building that type of understanding, communication skills and patience that’s required to live a more intimate and communally focused lifestyle?

David Holmgren: Yeah, well, there’s no doubt that the Intentional Communities movement has thrown up a lot of experience, wisdom, and processes for dealing with decision making, collective decision making and conflict resolution. And we referenced some of those in RetroSuburbia. And some of the people who we’ve worked closely with over the years such as Glen Oker, who was at the common ground community that we were quite strongly involved with and her lineage of work and other people connected to the intentional communities movement. But I think there’s also many examples of where just the inspiration that we see in a lot of certainly in Anglo-American societies of different ethnic groups, which are actually much more familiar and comfortable with extended family interactions and relationships with multi-generational families. But it’s interesting, the cover of RetroSuburbia, as an example, that’s two sisters and their husbands and their kids in a two bedroom house in Melbourne that they don’t have much debt on and live home-based lifestyle. Well, a woman in the front, she works as an integrated pest management expert actually. So she works away from home. The cargo bike is actually a thing that’s manufactured in a workshop in the backyard, and the other guy’s a potter and the other sister is a full-time mom at home. And that synergies at Hie Farm was a sort of an incredible example when we met them of what RetroSuburbia is about. And I suppose that sometimes something like that where there’s a couple of sisters or brothers who are actually very close and they then forming relationships around that sort of existing cell rather than the usual idea that, okay, there’s a two partners who’ve come together and then a household sort of clusters around that. And whether that’s friends or part-time people, I suppose We’ve had patterns over the years with our own immediate family and volunteers and interns, and then a home office where the people who work in this office two days a week are actually at meals with us. So there’s these different things about the way the number of people who might live together, but also how much the house and the property is a centre for other activity, because that then can create community, which is not actually completely the living under one roof together. And so that brings in that whole neighbourhood and network community where there’s more things being done at that space, rather than necessarily say in the public domain. So people are used to navigating and in some ways it’s just like having lots of people to dinner or for a barbecue or kids coming and doing stuff and kids in the neighbourhood, self-organising. That of course is some of the things that we’re trying to stimulate in RetroSuburbia. That whether it’s taking down the fences between the backyards or just psychologically opening up that space. So people recolonise the street and the neighbourhood. And of course children let free range as they were in previous generations. Naturally do that. Gluing together a community as well by their their own less regulated activities in the public space and that then draws in what might be more separate, busy household adults into that that greater connection.

(34m35s) Global Inspirations for Communal Living

Oliver Goshey: Yeah. And all of these things that you’re talking about are really revolutionary for the way that suburbs were designed and sort of intended from inception. But I’m sure you’ve seen from your travels as I have from mine, that this is not at all uncommon in most parts of the world. I mean, the example that you used of having two couples and all of their kids in a two bedroom house, and I’ve seen that configuration and a lot tighter, like single room houses with extended family, grandparents and aunts and, and that not being strange at all and not even necessarily only related to poverty. Either I can think of like in Morocco where even in larger houses with multiple rooms, oftentimes everybody would sleep in the the living room, the family room together. And the the way that their houses are designed, there’s actually couches built into the walls all the way along. And grandparents and grandkids or the whole configuration often will spend time just in that room in order to interact. And the all of the different tasks that come to what was often broken down to home economics in a schooling sense, is just a regular part of life and taken as the the baseline way of interacting and supporting oneself so that all of these tasks are not outsourced, especially to people outside of this sphere of trust and and confidence. And I’m wondering, do you have any other specific examples that you have highlighted in the book or that you’ve drawn inspiration from from places outside of the suburbs that we’re talking about now.

David Holmgren: Yeah, well, I think the that’s very true in terms of the life in other parts of the world. But I suppose I’ve introduced that through the migration story to the affluent immigrant countries like the United States and very much like Australia and have interpreted that through storytelling. So before the RetroSuburbia book, for a decade or more, I was telling this story of Aussie Street for houses and how they change and the people in them change from the 1950s through the decades up to the present and on into the future of the through into the Great Depression of the 2020s. So it’s a sort of a positive story in a context of historical lineage and in a sense telling our own history of the suburbs. And so that story, of course, is drawn from my own and other people’s childhood experiences, and includes the difference of migrants, Italian at one end, and Dutch migrants in the in the street who and all the different characters. And then we’ve retold that story in written it down for the first time in the as a chapter in the RetroSuburbia book, but more recently we’ve turned it into a kids book called Our Street, which is the story told from the perspective of one of the children in each of the the decades and seeing that change. So part of that allows us to see that even over living memory, there’s been a huge difference of patterns and the suburbs as people see as a snapshot in the modern world, is not actually a fixed thing. And that so many of the models of what we need to do actually exist in the recent past. We can pick and choose from some of those things. We don’t have to adopt all the social values and the technologies of the 1950s. But there are many aspects about the way that life was without romanticising that, that are actually incredibly appropriate and capable of happening today. And so that’s partly the retro in RetroSuburbia. Obviously it refers to the very practical retrofitting to make fit for new purposes. But it’s also that retro in in a sense of fashion style or harking back to some past that was positive. So we’re unashamed about that. It’s a very deliberate way of of portraying that and owning that history. And that we can reclaim some of these things, like what I said about children free ranging. I mean, we know the psychological damage that’s been done by this clawing control of children’s lives and the the data on ranging territory which has collapsed and how people have succumbed to this paranoia and fear projected by the media, which then becomes self-fulfilling of how dangerous it is to for children to be out on their own. And this enormous, what appears to be this unstoppable suffocation and of children that almost everywhere people, older people comment on as a bad thing and feeling sorry for for children today and say, well, why don’t we just reject that pattern and move back the other way? So, and and reclaim it. That we can, and we can do that in a design sense where we say, yep, we’ll take that pattern, or what was done by our grandparents. But yeah, we know won’t necessarily be using the technology or some of the other social values or attitudes there were, whether it’s to the role of women or or whatever. In that process. So that that picking through our cultural heritage and so we can design new patterns that are intentional and that are fit for purpose in the, as we find itself. So I I’ve found that through storytelling has been one of the best ways to communicate that.

(41m22s) Leveraging Past Wisdom for a Future of Less

Oliver Goshey: Oh, that certainly makes sense. That’s one of the best ways to communicate anything. And I really like what you’re talking about, about how the infrastructure of of the past and many of the ideas and the ways of life can inform the way that we move towards a future of less material and less energetic wealth. And it seems like we have a unique privilege and opportunity right now to do that for some more existential reasons, like wanting to take care of the planet and such because we do seem to be headed quite quickly towards a future where that is not optional. And those who use the resources right now in order to shift the infrastructure and the patterns in order to meet that future where those will not be quite as abundant, will be very far ahead in the transition. That will become very necessary. And you’ve outlined really well in the book how to start to do that on small properties and especially within homes, which. We were talking earlier is one of the parts that’s most often overlooked, especially in permaculture design principles. Maybe partly because it’s considered zone zero and everybody starts learning their permaculture design courses out in the garden starting from zone one on out. Yeah. But that much like the concentration of information and and materials in a cell, that is also the concentration of our lifestyles and holds the most opportunity for energy savings, material efficiency, and use of time and other resources, as effectively as possible. What are some of the ways that people can start to make meaningful changes without huge upheavals to move their lives in that direction, given the kind of incompatible infrastructure that they’re probably starting from?

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well that’s very true. And of course, RetroSuburbia is organised as virtually three books, the built. Biological and the behavioral, and the built environment of course involves issues of water supply, water harvesting and reuse, wastewater reuse, energy efficiency and heating and cooling and all of the other sort of aspects of built systems. But often those, what we inherit evaluating those can be a thing where people fall between two stools, of that there’s at one extreme, there’s. This house has always been a good place to live. It’ll be fine, no matter what the future delivers. A sort of naive, ignoring of, oh, what will gas prices be? Or where does my water come from? All of those really basic questions of just taking those things for granted through to the other level of, oh, this place is useless. We can’t do anything here until we go somewhere else. And the RetroSuburbia real estate assessment tool that we’ve developed as a a spreadsheet, which is in the book, but also downloadable from the RetroSuburbia website is a sort of a checklist, in the context of Southeastern Australia. Cool temperate Mediterranean climates, but adaptable to other places of a checklist of both the built and the biological. Characteristics of a property in suburbia to score where its good points are and where its difficult points are, and that can help identify what are the things that can be improved on. And and some of the classic ones are sort of quite simple retrofits, for example, in relation to waste management, not just reducing water use, but the critical importance of safely recycling human waste for its fertility to impact really power up backyard food production that the simple technology if you like, of a P bucket in a in a toilet, and then diluting that to safely put out what is 80% of the nutrients in human waste in what’s. Basically a sterile form, safe to dilute on the garden. So that’s a behavioral change that is a very sort of simple thing. And then the next level up is a compost toilet. Whether the sort of bucket systems that we show in the book, or a slightly more elaborate ones made based on retrofitting the wheelie bin, the classic plastic 200 litre rubbish bin that seems to be a a universal technology everywhere in the world. To sort of, yeah, add to doing something without that may not actually be legal, but when done in appropriate way is completely safe and appropriate. So things like that right through to my favorite one, of course, in cool temperate climates is the attached solar greenhouse, and ironically can be so often done where a property is facing away from the sun in a cool temperate climate. And the back of the house, which is often laundry, bathroom bedrooms, can be partially enclosed with a solar greenhouse addition, which helps heat the house. As well as creating a growing space, a halfway inside outside space and sometimes can be done either. In areas where even heritage regulations prevent modification at the front of the house or even done with the social license from the neighbours without actually getting a regulatory approval, because it’s it’s more like some simple pergola structure that’s sort of a a small addition, but it transforms the thermal performance of the house and the potential to more efficiently use the building. So there there’s sort of some of the ones, we also talk about wood energy, of safe and minimal polluting ways of burning wood as it being a supplementary energy source that in many places where people are completely dependent on reticulated natural gas or electricity for their energy needs. Finding those ways of reconnecting to sort of more simple, basic ways of doing. Of course, because we’re in Australia, the whole rainwater tanks and water harvesting, of course, they’re a part of sort of a vernacular technology here that whereas to some extent, permaculture in coming from Australia has introduced some of those ideas to other places, including in the Mediterranean, where a lot of houses don’t even even have gutters. So, oh gee, how do you collect the water off the roof? Or, and is it safe to drink? And all of those questions. So of course we’ve written about those things in an Australian context and there’s very good websites now for helping model, how much water you can get and reuse and what’s the optimum size of of tanks and all of those things to sort of make that design process a little easier for householders. So there’s some of the, some of the things we focus on.

(49m28s) Permaculture Principles in Home and Landscape Design

Oliver Goshey: It’s so fun for me to hear you talking about all of these things because it was my window into eventually getting into landscape design and regenerative agriculture and restoration was through the home. My first passion was natural building. I started in construction and engineering before I made these transitions and hearing how you apply the permaculture principles that you helped to establish with Bill Mollison to the built environment is, has been a huge inspiration for me that eventually morphed into understanding the ecology of the natural world much better. And it’s still something that I love. And here in Spain, because my partner and I have been looking for a while to move out of the apartment where we are, even before the pandemic came, we have been searching for old houses in rural areas for the last two and a half years since I moved here. One of the big. Conclusions or understandings that I have come to here not having much reference to it before. This is how infrastructure reflected the lifestyles of how people lived back when. And having older folks from these small towns take us on tours of these semi dilapidated properties where they didn’t have central heating. And it does still get pretty cold in the winter, but the whole bottom floor was just for animals. And there was feed troughs still there, and there were small sleeping quarters for the people who tended those animals. And the the sleeping spaces, the living rooms were just above that to make use of the heat coming off of the animals while they were down in the pens. And so many other aspects of the things that we are now trying to retrofit our infrastructure, which was built for an energy abundant and transportation rich existence, goes to show that it is all. Essential parts of the infrastructure and the architecture of not only individual housing, but the entire town configuration. The streets are a whole lot more narrow and houses were taller in areas that got really hot so that they were always in shade, that they would channel air through. I mean, we could think back, I give the reference before to the houses of Morocco and the Riad configurations, usually with water features in the centre. That would be the water that you would use for all functions, but also channeling air through cooling it down and raising it up. Convectively in the middle.

David Holmgren: Yeah, exactly. And there are so many inspirations for the way that people built for comfort and functionality. Before all of this abundance was available as an inspiration for how we might be able to update and return to a simpler way without having to bring in so much energy and destroy so many resources in order to live comfortably. Yeah. Well certainly the inspiration of the evaporative cooling and ground cooling is something that we’ve done in our built from scratch, passive solar house, but also showed how that can be retrofitted for cool cupboard storage in kitchens, which are not a replacement for a fridge, but incredible, really reduce the need for refrigeration from just having air ground and evaporative cooling, ducted through a cupboard, which is of course an adaption of those systems that that you were talking about. And I think it’s, you may also be interested in the theory I have going to the Mediterranean in the late nineties of why are even in rural areas, the houses small and two, and even three stories and all of the the sort of reasons you gave. There’s also another one, I believe, of the limiting technology with traditional materials was roofing materials. And in a lot of places it is of course terracotta tiles made on someone’s leg a thick, heavy piece of clay all interlocked. And that required a very heavy roof structure. And whether it was that, or in some places, even stone building a small building under that roof, and having all those functions stacked was more. Efficient than a a larger building. Whereas I would see some of the breakthroughs of modern technology that in the 19th century that led to corrugated iron roofing like we have in Australia as a vernacular roofing system. Which even though when I showed photos of my house to French ecological building designers in 94, they said, oh, this is an industrial materialising. Oh, well in Australia it is vernacular architecture, but that allowed large roofs and then water collecting in tanks that could be made with the same material. And and so that recognizing that transformation of design limitations that come with particular things that change the context, and make possible different design. Configurations, whereas, yeah, traditional materials, all of those fantastic qualities of of natural materials. But we hybridise those things. We have all walls of adobe and roofs of corrugated iron on lightweight spanning truss structures.

(55m23s) Vernacular Building and Creative Reuse in Permaculture

Oliver Goshey: Yeah, I’ve I’ve seen pictures and schematics of your home. It’s really wonderful. And I also love the admission that vernacular building has transformed over time. And some of my early natural building teachers talked about how in urban environments, the most natural or common materials around you are actually gleaned from the waste stream and not harvested from the earth or taken from cutting down new trees, but using things like urbanite, which is discarded pavement. Yes. And the other things which tend to have quite a long lifespan, and if we’re throwing them out. It’s like that’s a bigger waste than trying to switch entirely over to just natural materials. And there’s also a recognition that there is real value in these. We’re not gonna have them forever and to use them appropriately sparingly, but in the correct applications is really important. And not to negate that just because it’s not natural based on some sort of pretentious ideas of what natural is.

David Holmgren: Well, this is of course a key theme in permaculture. When I think about projects around the world, yes, there’s sometimes good examples of ecological gardening and farming and sometimes of a good ecological building. But the creative reuse of what already exists is almost one of the most universal characteristics in permaculture projects. And it’s tapping in. To that aspect that there is so much waste, so much available materials that people in the past didn’t have. So I remember when we were setting up my mother’s property in Southern New South Wales in the late seventies, and I built a stainless steel sink as an outside garden sink. So you wash the veggies before you bring them. And I thought, why didn’t everyone have this? Like, this is so useful. And then I thought, well, 50 years ago people might’ve been thankful to have a sink in their house. Whereas even by 1979 I could go to the local tip and and get a perfectly good stainless steel sink for relatively few dollars. And of course, that. Super abundance in most countries has become sort of obscene throwaway, where you can get these things for less than their scrap metal value. So that opportunities to do things like making wicking beds out of what were perfectly good baths. That in a sense the waste of modern society is a sort of a huge opportunity for creative reuse. And that opportunity depends on skill, serendipitous and re responsive design, which doesn’t suit corporations and large organisational structures at a very large scale, but is perfectly queued to things being done at a small scale because those resource streams change and there needs to be that adaption. So I think there’s no shortage of resources in the world. There’s a shortage of skills. To make use of all those resource.

(58m45s) Applying Permaculture Principles to the Built Environment

Oliver Goshey: And so as one of the co originators of the permaculture concept and really pioneering the ethics portion especially, I’m wondering how you apply these concepts, which are often illustrated through natural processes and patterns to the built environment. Where are the correlations, the analogs, and the Yeah, the the conversions that people can make for what seems like an unnatural environment?

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I suppose the, if we think of the design principles starting with observe and interact, which is. Absolutely essential for any animal that survives in the natural world. And we need to relearn that. In a sense, it’s unlearning, unschooling, the idea that we have to have all this knowledge poured into our heads or told by some one else, or receive some expertise that we can’t observe and interact. And what we find with any house, even one that is poorly designed, it needs to be managed for thermal comfort, responding to the climate and the patterns of that are not very complicated, but they involve the person interacting with the built environment rather than just switching on the air conditioner or switching on the heater. And of course, in a passive solar house, if you don’t manage those things, it actually doesn’t work if you don’t open the blinds. Everything at the the right. Time. So we can think of that. And if we look at passive solar design itself, as an example of the principle of catch and store energy, the principle itself we see in nature everywhere because energy and all useful resources are not seamlessly available in an on demand way. Sunlight comes during the daytime and comes during the warm seasons and not at night and not so much in the in the winter. So the pulses of nature of capturing solar energy through photosynthesis and storing it in carbohydrate, in wood, in in structure, which is then used by both those plants and then animals is actually a universal pattern in nature. But in the human world, where becomes so used in the modern. Things to getting a seamless supply of just in time supply that we don’t treat things that way. And a passive solar house or putting clothes out on the line when it’s sunny and windy to dry is taking advantage of things when they are happening and having ways of storing that value so it can be available when that’s not there. So the built environment reflects those same principles or should reflect those same principles. And again, storing water in in rainwater tanks. For periods when water is not available. Rather than expecting every house to have a beautiful mountain spring just sort of behind it, which would be nice. But, and the substitute for that is of course town water, which just always is there, isn’t it? And you just turn the tap on, unfortunate that it’s full of chlorine and other things.

Oliver Goshey: Well, I think it’s wonderful that you mention that

David Holmgren: because I, I’m very fortunate in the the property that I’m moving to later this year actually has two mountain streams right behind it that feed the house.

Oliver Goshey: It’s like, yes.

David Holmgren: Well this is, this is one of the reasons I came to the conclusion I thought, why in the Mediterranean, in so many places, they’re not, these. Sophisticated water harvesting and storage systems that we take for granted in Australia. And in a lot of places, especially in geologically young landscapes, there is, yeah, fresh mountain springs of quite drinkable water. Whereas in Australia, often there isn’t the groundwater, or if it is, it’s salty, or completely unusable. And so what we find historically is where resources are abundant or the environment is relatively benign, people don’t develop very sophisticated solutions or design solutions where the problem is really severe, you’ll get the most sophisticated solutions. And then as the environment changes in other places, sometimes those more sophisticated vernacular technologies can be become appropriate. In other environments where they weren’t needed in the past, and we see this also with the efficiency of building design, the English lineage of building design, because most healthy people didn’t die of freezing to death in England. English building methods that we inherited in Australia weren’t. If you go to Germany, the built quality of traditional houses was so much higher because you die in the winter if you don’t. And of course, yeah, there are many places in North America where you need those more sophisticated building systems, but we can bring those more sophisticated ways to places and make life a lot less miserable as well, where it’s not so extreme.

(1h4m34s) Adapting Design to Local Conditions vs. Homogenised Modern Building

Oliver Goshey: No, it’s exactly as you said, and it’s it’s one of the first things that I learned from natural building that it’s a weird phenomenon that houses look the same almost anywhere you go now, at least within newer developments. And that is entirely due to the fact that it’s easier to import all of the energy required to make it. Livable and comfortable than it is to adapt the design, which oftentimes are just recycled architectural plans that were made in one place and broadly applied everywhere else. Whereas if you look just a little while back, or even at some of the newer constructions that are informed by place and more sustainable materials, the configuration and the design of homes and living spaces and and all of the built environment are very different from the damp and tropical areas where houses are up on stilts so that air can move through and prevent molding to the highly insulated and very pitched roof systems of areas that get tons of snow. And there’s there’s tons and tons of gray area in between there, especially from. Dealing with high temperatures and high winds, all the challenges. There are really creative and vernacular examples of how to deal with those in an elegant and resource effective way from from very recent history as well. We don’t have to go that far back.

David Holmgren: Yes. Well, we can see that in Australia, in Northern Australia, in Darwin, which is of course 10 degrees south of the equator, in the the monsoon tropics, subject to cyclones. And all the houses in Darwin used to be lightweight up on stumps. All of that pattern, minimal thermal, mass open, open structure. And then after Cyclone Tracy devastated. Darwin. In the 1970s, the building regulations became much stronger and the easiest way to meet those building regulations was concrete block structures on slab with air conditioners. There were some architects who refused to go that way, who continued with the tropical pattern, but with appropriate steel bracing, rods and other modifications that were necessary to meet the very high wind loadings, but still have a completely open house with the capacity of shutters to deal with those wind damage. But the tragedy is that most of the housing stock in Darwin and other cities like that without air conditioners, those buildings are uninhabitable.

Oliver Goshey: Yeah.

David Holmgren: Absolutely. Which is a tragic, apart from the embodied energy being greater in a lot of those building methods that may have some relevance in Southern Australia, but yeah, are completely inappropriate in the tropical north.

(1h7m40s) Evolution of the Permaculture Movement

Oliver Goshey: Well, look, I’d like to pivot for a second here and ask you some of the questions that I’ve actually been saving up and wanting to ask you for a long time, if you’ll indulge me. So yeah, you’ve been at the centre of the Permaculture movement really since it began and have been instrumental in its conception. And I’m wondering how do you feel about the way that it has evolved over time? Do you feel that it still represents the origins and the intentions that you and Bill had at the inception? Or has it really strayed and morphed into something that you couldn’t have seen from back then?

David Holmgren: Well, I think it has evolved and and morphed enormously. And I think both Bill and myself sort of contributed to that. But it was, it was largely a result of it becoming a worldwide movement. Really initially through Bill’s brilliance in crafting the Permaculture Design course as a a mechanism for extending the ideas more than would’ve happened just with books and the occasional lecture or demonstration site. So I think that has meant it’s interacted with other movements and ideas, contemporaneous ideas, and been enormously as strengthened by that process. But you can also see how. Make the critique that, for example, the recognition that was at the core of permaculture, that the problem of agriculture, the most important activity on the planet by which we provide our food that we need to do every year, whereas, to some extent we probably have enough buildings on the planet if we learn to use them properly and and look after them, whereas we have to grow food every year. And the enormous destruction that that represented, especially in the modern forms and recognizing that a lot of that was our overdependence on annual plants and the huge potential for perennial plants and trees, tree crops, to have a greater role in making agriculture more ecological, sustainable, and also still very productive. And that. Keep that focus in permaculture just on that problem, which itself is a multi-generational problem. And that permaculture sort of morphed and became a theory of everything in a way, a sort of design solutions to the the world. And the critique can be made of, oh, where are the examples where permaculture has contributed to that original great vision? And you can see work of people like Mark Shepherd, within Permaculture as an example of the expression of that. But of course, some of that work is sort of also built on people who were quite outside the permaculture movement, who at a similar time, focused their whole lives on this research that of course governments weren’t interested in doing is how do we make. The potential of tree crops into something that can rival corn, soybeans, grains in providing the the staple basics of the world. So I I think mostly that broadening out of the scope of permaculture design has been a positive thing, and it’s allowed a lot more people to relate to the thinking behind permaculture because they’ve been able to do it, whether it’s through intentional communities or ecological building or complementary approaches to health and many sort of other fields. I think that’s been largely positive. But I also see there’s. Some blind spots that have developed in adopting some extreme expressions of contemporaneous ideas that have strayed away from what I’d see as underlying values, especially around the the notions of disadvantage and disability and identity politics. That although those things are real in the same way, that class and those differences of power are immense realities that must be recognized and dealt with. Permaculture has always been about creating the world we do want, and looking at where are the opportunities to improve something rather. Focusing constantly on all the things that are stopping us becoming something better or doing something better. Because that projection, that those are the things and that they have to change before we can be enabled. I don’t think actually even help the most disadvantaged, disempowered people because they further accelerate that sense that we can’t do anything. And it’s this oppression of whatever class of people or system that is doing it to us. So breaking out of that, and even if it’s an illusion, even if we are incredibly oppressed, to never give that oppression, the power over us. And and rather than stridently objecting to it, it’s in a sense almost like. Studiously ignoring it. So I think I do have some concerns about where the elements of social justice elements of disability and the rights culture haven’t always contributed to positive directions. Even though of course, my own political and historical lineage on the left is always recognized. Those things as, yes, this is part of the the world in which we work and we seek to change in whatever way we can. But I suppose as one of the founders, it’s inevitable that one becomes to some extent, discontented. At some aspects of of the way permaculture has been expressed, but mostly I am just incredibly grateful for all the energy and amazing creativity that people have done with these ideas and made it what it’s.

(1h15m12s) Inspiring Evolutions and Indigenous Wisdom in Permaculture

Oliver Goshey: Well, let’s, let’s explore into that a little bit deeper, and I think you stated that really tactfully. I could see some of the examples that you were referencing without having to mention, and I’m wondering on the other side of it, what are some of the emergences and the evolutions that have come from permaculture and environmental learning and teaching from other parts of the world that have inspired your own work and helped to bring it to heights that perhaps you couldn’t imagine from before?

David Holmgren: Well, I think the ongoing recognition and deepening of the understanding of indigenous wisdom, which was there at the beginning, in the discussions between myself and Mollison about new then new concepts in the scientific literature, like the recognition of aboriginal management of Australia was in fact fire stick farming, which in the 1970s, which it’s very recently, those ideas have finally sort of come to the fore. And and we we’re now reevaluating Australia as perhaps the oldest cultural landscape actually in the world, continuously husbanded landscape in the world. Rather than it being a wilderness in that sense, with a few people wandering around, and the deepening and rediscovery. Of of that knowledge, I think is an ongoing thing, not just in Australia and in other other parts of the world. I think the also the way in which permaculture has been adopted and adapted in many different cultures and societies, especially in the the two thirds world. We associate permaculture by default with the places where there’s websites and sort of projects and in the affluent world. But a huge amount of of permaculture has been really reinforcing a lot of traditional knowledge that people are recovering. In other places. And that combination of simple, modern technologies from the outside, like a a tin roof and a water tank being a transformative technology in in many parts of the the world, that does come that that permaculture often introduces to a a place combined with this rediscovery and revaluing of tradition. And I remember an experience in Israel in 94, despite having sort of really very little experience outside the affluent world, I was asked to sort of give a presentation. Showing our house and property to a community of Bedouins. And I thought, gee, what can I show them that is of any relevant? And of course, I was introduced as famous ecologist from Australia. And anyway, I’m showing photos of our house and there’s this old man getting up at the back and gesticulating and pointing excitedly to the house. And the building we were in was actually made of concrete block. And he’s, I said, what’s he saying? He’s saying It’s a Bedouin house. It’s a Bedouin house. Because he recognized the adobe. And and so if a world famous ecologist from Australia, presumably Rich could live in things that this is our stuff, we can revalue that. So that way in which permaculture is contributed to that. Just recognition and valuing of things that the modern world was really displacing or discounting.

(1h19m32s) Changes in Student Awareness and Skillset Over Time

Oliver Goshey: Yeah, for sure. And as your work as an educator and a mentor I’m sure has evolved over this time as well, have you noticed a change in the level of awareness and skillset or general competence when it comes to understanding of natural patterns that your students come to you with? Has that changed a lot over the years?

David Holmgren: Uh, definitely. I can remember discussions with permaculture teachers about the limitations of some of my own criticisms of of permaculture teaching as it sort of rolled out in the eighties and nineties. And people would talk about. The sort of improvements of both teaching methods and knowledge of of people teaching. And I’d say yeah, but the people who are coming to courses are also so much better informed. And that is so much clearer now that many young people are much better informed and not just from reading books or doing courses or watching something on YouTube, but there’s the sort of generational learning of, oh yeah, I know so and so’s family who went and did this or that in a self-reliance way. And yeah, they ran into these issues or there’s the learning from past mistakes that sort of osmotically developed. And I can remember when I first came to live in this community where I do now 35 years ago, I sort of didn’t really meet many people. I. Who knew about edible mushrooms beyond field mushrooms. And I thought I was pretty knowledgeable ’cause I sort of knew a half a dozen that I could go out and collect. Well, over the decades we’ve had people who are incredible experts, and then people who are growing mushrooms, people who are sharing the property with us here, Nick Ritar and Kirsten Bradley of Milkwood Permaculture. Nick’s a mushroom growing aficionado. And and all of the incredible knowledge that there is about and and a lot of work which has been developed as vernacular, just do it yourself experimentation and then passing that on. So, now in this community, there’s a. Um, half a dozen people I could go to are completely expert in in mushrooms, way above any knowledge I have in in that area. So, I mean, that’s just an example of the the sort of changes and learning that’s that’s been happening.

(1h22m19s) The Double-Edged Sword of Scaling Solutions

Oliver Goshey: Oh, I think that’s a perfect example though because I mean, it’s it’s been only just a handful of years now where mycology as a science has absolutely exploded. And you start to see the emergence of citizen science projects and the ability to grow and cultivate and identify and even genetically map things that we had no access to five or 10 years ago has been amazing. And. Uh, the explosion of understanding of soil science is another one, especially in the agricultural realm, has come so far, so, so, so far in just a very short time. And all of that is contributing to this body of knowledge that people have easier access to than ever. I think we’re in extremely exciting times. And then I think, as well, the permaculture lens offers a context and a wisdom to the application of that knowledge so that it isn’t manipulated necessarily for linear and industrial ends, but can be integrated into a wiser and more complex understanding of the patterns in nature that helped to inform appropriate applications and uses of this new understanding. I think it’s, it’s, it’s a very exciting time to to have access to all of this.

David Holmgren: Uh, definitely. And just to return to the slight black hat aspect, I wrote an essay recently that people can read on my website about how the the solution turns back into the problem. ’cause of course, this permaculture aphorism that the problem is the solution, or at least the problem is the stimulation, possibly the

Oliver Goshey: most overused one there is.

David Holmgren: Yeah. But the reality so often, I is that when we we make two steps forward and we. Find some new ecological solution or rediscover something, and then it’s it’s captured by corporate mentality scaled up and turned back into the same old problem. Uh, again, I mean, we can think of plants, incredible tree crops in the world like palm oil, tropical palm oils. An amazing tree will grow on very poor soils, incredibly productive of oil, but it’s been turned into this complete disaster of these vast monocultural plantations replacing forest and and wetland. And then, yeah, giving a terrible name to the plant, which is actually a really useful tree as part of a a mixed Savannah Tropical polycultural system. And I think that. Uh, what Vandana Shiva calls the monoculture of mind I is more the problem than the monoculture itself. So that is constantly the power of permaculture to bring us back to that ethics and design principles to sort of overcome the inherited dysfunction of of limits of industrial modernity that is always looking for the single big fix. Every problem. There must be one big solution that fixes everything. Well, actually, that might have been. Part of the way the world was when fossil fuels seemed to sort of do everything, but sorry, the future is not gonna be like that. It’s gonna be a future of diverse solutions and context specific solutions. And the more you try and focus on there being one answer, the more you create the problems again. So that essay sort of goes through a lot of those things because it’s not just sort of evil or stupid people in corporations. These are deep sort of cultural patterns that in many cases we’re actually trying to overturn or unlearn.

(1h26m24s) The Nuance of Scaling Regenerative Agriculture

Oliver Goshey: Yeah, that’s such a relevant issue for my own work right now in a startup that is trying to scale the infrastructure for regenerative agriculture in Europe. And yeah, almost by definition of that ambition, we’re missing some of the nuance in what is required for well regenerative agriculture to be actually regenerative. If we start to homogenise the solutions and start to roll it out without taking in the nuance of the context of its applications, the lives that it affects, the communities that it interacts with, then scale is not a solution at that point. And it’s that same way for for so many of these applications. Like you said, once you have a solution, the wisdom and the ethics are required to actually solve things with it.

David Holmgren: And that’s actually one of the reasons that I didn’t mention about my focus on RetroSuburbia because. We do know that it’s a limited number of people who can creatively work from ethics and principles and design process and patterns to getting refined effective design solutions. Most people work by, there’s something that works. I’ll copy that. And in suburban landscapes, often there’s a replication of soils, of building types of things that to a certain degree, the the copy solution yet that works there. I can copy that. Is actually possible. So we can get a scaling by viral replication, not quite in the way we can, in the sort of online virtual world. And yes, the soil can be just a little bit different there just down the street a bit and everything is a bit different, but it’s not quite as the extreme complexity of large scale agriculture in complex landscapes where the history of the the land, the people and what has been done and the the systems are all inevitably sort of unique. So I think it’s no accident that the first. Industry to be industrialised was textile manufacture. And there were huge improvements in in productivity as a result of that. And the patterns were basically replicable across the world. The last important industry to be industrialised was actually agriculture. A lot of it only in the mid 20th century, because it’s so site and situation specific, everything is not as amenable to the sort of industrial agricultural extension system. Here’s the the proven patent and just copy this and understanding that the agricultural practitioner, the innovator is an integral part of the landscape and the production. System that what they do and who they are is very much part of it. It doesn’t mean to say we can’t do things at large scale, and it doesn’t mean that we can’t copy elements and and patterns from one place and situation to another. But we can make big mistakes if we think there’s a a set pattern that can be done everywhere.

(1h30m10s) Upcoming Documentary: Reading Landscapes

Oliver Goshey: Yeah, yeah. Very well said. Now, I, along these lines know that you focus so much on the observation, the data gathering and the understanding part before working into design and applications of things. And as I understand, you’ve got a documentary coming out fairly soon about pattern understanding and observing reading landscapes with Dan Palmer. Can you tell me a bit about that?

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, it’s, it’s been a a passion for me reading landscape from. The early days of when I worked in New Zealand, shortly after working with Bill Mollison with a colleague Haikai Tane, who I regard as in a lot of ways, my second mentor in Permaculture, when we were setting up permaculture in New Zealand in 1979. And I just realised this, the path I’d already been on of observing things and learning from direct observation rather than just receive knowledge or having been in a place for long enough to say yes. I remember when that happened. So to be able to see the signs in the in the landscape and it became, for me, this is the core skill for a permaculture designer, especially in the fields where I was working, where most of the work was one day onsite advisory work for people doing the back to the land thing. And could I sort of intervene? Where should house sites be? Where should the basic land allocation, dams for water supply? And there wasn’t complex databases of information. The people were new to the land. There’s often not other reference points and you’ve gotta digest a lot of observation very quickly and deliver that to people, which is really a contradiction of the need to. Slowly observe something, over a long period. So that that was a sort of a core skill. And then I went on to sort of try and how do we teach this, how did I learn it? And to some extent, that’s a very difficult problem because, and working with Dan Palmer in more recent years, he identified, he observed me reading the landscape and started to feed back to me some things that Oh, right, okay. Yeah. And that, that accelerated this whole interest in communicating those skills. And that was the beginning of this project, which has led to a documentary mostly shot in in Central Victoria, reading landscapes from the backyard scale to the the broad acre. Scale and where we’ve got most of the footage though, there’s there’s talk about further elements before, before the film’s. Really, so I’m really excited, and see it very much in the context of course of the work. Dan Palmer has contributed through his making Permaculture Stronger blog and a book he’s working on, on design process because I still think permaculture design process is a bit the black box at the heart of permaculture, and not just permaculture, but the design professions generally, and how does this actually work? How do we design and how do we, how do our design methods actually reflect nature’s self-organised design processes rather than a mechanical. Assembly line, industrial model. And of course there’s references to that through back to the work of Christopher Alexander and others through the patent language ideas. And and of course that’s part of what we’ve tried to do with RetroSuburbia that that a lot of the book is actually written, is really as these repeating patterns that are refined solutions to recurring dilemmas that are that occur in in any design process. And that, not that those are sort of building blocks that can be assembled into a whole design, but they, that pattern understanding can help us start with what we have and begin to. Differentiate what’s there. And of course, with natural landscapes much more than the built environment, it’s a deep understanding that we have to recognize that every place is already a whole place before we do anything with it. It has a history and a lineage that we need to unearth in a sense through almost like archeology. And that’s also part of acknowledgement of the power of place and culture and people that have been inhabited that place before. So it’s part of that sort of indigenous and vernacular, traditional knowledge of respect for country and thinking of it as alive and carrying all the the spirits of the past. ’cause it literally does have all those things, all the things that have happened in the past, whether it’s. Decades through to millions of years ago are still present in the in the landscape.

(1h36m10s) Finding David Holmgren’s Work and Resources

Oliver Goshey: Oh, that’s marvelous. And can you tell our audience how they can find more of your resources, your work, and where they can get in touch with you?

David Holmgren: Uh, yeah. Well, um, the holmgren.com.au site has all my essays and information and reference of course to our books. And the specifically, there’s a site, retrosuburbia.com, which has all the information, not just about the book, but the case studies behind the book and further information and essays and. Of course the book can be accessed as a an online form there. But we are, our partners are gradually getting the distribution systems, which all work outside the Amazon and other monopoly controllers of the book trade. So we try and live our ethics and values through our our business processes in that for supporting small business and and readers directly in what ways. We can, I just mentioned one of the things we’ve done here at Melliodora is run tours of the property for decades and we’re about to put that online so people have access to that of in sort of a a platform where people can access it in bites and chunks, which people haven’t been able to do with the tyranny of distance in the in the past.

Oliver Goshey: Fantastic. Really wonderful stuff. And be sure to share with me too once the documentary is ready. I would love to share that around. Yep. David, it was such a pleasure to finally get to talk to you. Uh, I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time and this has been really valuable. Thank you so much for your time and I’ll be in touch again soon.

David Holmgren: Great to talk to you.

Oliver Goshey: Thanks once again to David Holmgren. I’ll be posting all the links that he has mentioned on the show notes for this episode on the website where you can also find all the previous episodes from the last five seasons for free. Now, before we wrap this up, remember that these episodes are only the beginning of the ongoing conversations happening around these topics on the Regenerative Skills Discord server. It’s always free to join and it’s also the easiest way to get in touch with me directly. So if you’re interested in helping to guide the direction and focus of this show in the future, or just get some feedback on your own projects and have some questions answered, it’s all happening there. So join the growing community of Earth Regenerators on the forum by signing up through the link on the website or through our link tree on Instagram. Now, in the next episode for this series on Building Strong Communities, I’ll be speaking with Charles Marohn, a fellow Minnesotan engineer and land use planner, and the author of Strong Towns on how the dysfunctional design of cities and communities can be rethought to improve our lives and wellbeing. So be sure to subscribe to this show wherever you stream your podcast from. Now, that’s our show for this week. And as always, don’t forget to keep taking those little steps every day towards a regenerative future. And I’ll be right by your side along the way.