Listen to David Holmgren in conversation with permaculture educator Morag Gamble, reflecting on the past COP26 global climate conference that took place in Glasgow.

You can watch/listen to their conversation below:

Interview Transcript

(0m0s) Skepticism of Top-Down Solutions & Energy Descent

David Holmgren: The context for me, COP26, firstly, is that I’ve had a long history of skepticism about top down large scale solutions. And I’ve acknowledged that in the permaculture world there’s an ambiguous complementarity between things that are grassroots bottom up and things that attempt to reform systems from the top down.

But because I stand back with that larger civilisational, energy descent perspective, I largely see that the systems at the top are trying to sustain at least the basic building blocks of this continuous growth, materialist industrial civilisation in some form or another. And that the evidence of history suggests that those reforms tend to allow the system to continue for a bit longer, but they don’t actually deal with the fundamental underlying problems and that they sometimes, in fact, most likely entrench the system on its locked in path. And then it runs up against increasing numbers of limits that start accumulating and cascading together, and that that system then breaks in some ways with a series of cascades and new parallel emergent, smaller systems emerge to replace it. And whether that’s in a larger evolutionary sense that very large dinosaurs being replaced by fast moving small mammals or it’s actually part of not just a problem that human civilisations have faced.

So in that larger sense, I’ve never had much faith in those top down structures. But I think now there’s a lot of people can see the limits of those, but then I think that leads to a bifurcation of how people who are trying to bring about positive change from the bottom are drawn in two directions. Those that have put a lot of faith in that structure may then argue for or at least accept ideas of a more emergency control war footing response. And in fact, the advocacy since 2007 for the climate emergency and requiring a war type response is a command and control economy because there’s a loss of faith in the sort of negotiated social democratic argy bargy between interest groups and that there’s no time left for that. Demand for that comes from some established interest groups that can see how they can benefit from that at the globalised level and from the bottom of desperate activists who understand how severe the situation is.

(3m53s) Analysis of the Current Moment: Hitting Limits

Morag Gamble: Can we just pause and maybe just to ask, what is your reflection on where you see us at the moment? What’s your analysis?

David Holmgren: I think we are actually in the process of hitting the brick wall of limits to growth. Of which climate change is the most obvious and one that people are aware of, but that’s the self-organisation within the system to overcome those limits means we’re hitting them all at once. So the resource depletion ones and especially peak oil. But all of the other critical minerals and all of those sorts of things, the geopolitical limits of the world order that was created at Bretton Woods after the second World War, that that’s going through its final phases of breaking down. And most significantly, and fickle and emergent are the global financial systems so that those unraveling are actually happening simultaneously. And so the pandemic is really perhaps might be viewed by historians as really close into that tipping point of that unraveling now.

The complexities of the pandemic I explore in my longer essay, pandemic brooding, brown Tech in new clothing. So I see a lot of people have seen that as a distraction from this larger urgency around climate, but it actually sets up a lot of the logical responses. For how at a broad system, globalised level, we will respond to the climate emergency through a, what I described decades ago in my future scenarios work, a command economy where the government uses the power of corporations, which have the logistical capacity, but actually controls what those systems do around some sense of response to emergency. So we’ve seen quite a model of that emerge with the pandemic. So I see that as likely to segue into the response to the climate crisis. Now, it doesn’t look from top a strong unified version of that has come from the government’s meeting, but we still may see it emerge sort of like apparently spontaneously. The way the response to the pandemic was almost a global universal formula that most countries give or take a few different things all adopted similar approaches. So without making a judgment about how real or important those things are, those emergency, existential threat, immediate need to completely change the way we live are likely to overtake the very modest cautious consensus agreements that we see have dragged through the cop process over the years, but they’ll be overtaken by the emergency itself.

(8m0s) Permaculture Community Response and Urgency

Morag Gamble: So from a permaculture perspective, like the permaculture community, so for decades people have been working locally, whether it be in their own homes or in their neighbourhoods, their communities, and trying to connect with people around the world to raise awareness about these issues, knowing that this was the scenario that we would end up coming face to face with. But this whether this incremental approach that we’ve been taking, where do we go from here? Considering what you’ve just said, considering the urgency of the situation. What is your response? And also, I heard you say before, the declaration of the emergency creates a command response. ’cause I was wondering, should we collectively dec, permaculture declares a climate emergency and have put forward a response that’s collective around that. What are your thoughts on all of that?

David Holmgren: Well, I think the potential to put forward some story, some narrative that actually galvanises people at a larger scale is unfortunately long gone in decades. The breakdown of trust in institutional systems is so far across the board. Then the only mechanisms left are ones that firstly have enormous power and unity from a global level, that the same message is coming simultaneously at people from all sources simultaneously in a flood. And then also that requires that you also use the most Machiavellian tools available to instill fear of existential threat of immediate threat to survival. And radical behavior change that people will experience as incredibly constricting and whatever. And from an ethical point of view, a logistical point of view, those options I see are not on the cards.

What I do see is there’s an enormous potential to accept the progressive loss of trust and loss of delivery of people’s needs from the centralised globalised systems to say people need to consider hedging their bets in their own enlightened self-interest, and there are ways to do that that are actually good for the collective society, good for the planet and good for them. And that to work with that smaller minority of people who are prepared to do that because I see the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions coming primarily from the crushing and breakdown of the global economy rather than organised, planned choice. Now whether that is too late to avoid dangerous climate change or whatever. I think we can see in all sorts of emergent patterns, including the pandemic, that there are mechanisms that can actually just shut large sections of the economy down. Now, of course we have situations where there’s massive financial stimulus appearing to create new money. And a lot of the climate mainstream strategies are predicated on that, that this created money actually creates the end results in the material world, which is unfortunately in the climate activism circles is not understood that this money is actually not real energy or resources. It doesn’t actually exist. And until it is expressed in real physical things, one doesn’t know whether that’s actually possible. Just saying the money is here may appear to be a big stumbling block for people in that world, but it doesn’t mean that that means that that automatically means things can happen. And this is part of those underlying realities.

So the solutions at the bottom I think are much more potent, much more powerful, but they’re still so far against the interests of the established systems because they breed autonomy, independence, relocalisation, that they increasingly become seen as a threat. So unfortunately, I think that what that leads to within circles, Permaculture and kindred circles is a progressive divide where some people take a more radicalised path of autonomy and some people say, no, we’ve gotta throw lot in with the larger scale system.

(14m8s) Technology: High-Tech Centralised vs. Low-Tech Local

David Holmgren: So I’ll give you an example. The advances in technology around renewable energy in the electricity sector have been the greatest technological hope or evidence of some transition pathway, even though that hasn’t translated into the transport area and industrial energy process area. But this idea that everything can be electrified is a very large scale, mainstream industrial push. And people at a practical level are saying that’s where we need to go. So for example, the All electric household, with the Photo Volta panels and our induction foot tops, and everything like that. And that involves technology that none of us can manufacture or maintain, which will all come from globalised corporate production systems. So that means we are a hundred percent dependent on the 24 7 electricity and whatever. So then when we look at other low tech approaches, like something like wood. At its simplest level in a rocket stove or its most sophisticated level in wood gasification, all of those technologies are actually as amenable to everything from the backyard manufacturer through to medium-size businesses within Bioregional communities. Mm-hmm. But they all have problems that they can’t necessarily scale to be instant global solutions. And if they attempt to do that, you end up damaging the environment more by using more pollution or depleting new resources. So that in those two examples of the all electric tech and the low tech that being lured into that world, can see the acceptance of the demonisation of the other. So we see this not necessarily in a planned forethought way, but oh no wood is polluting, damaging to the environment, et cetera, et cetera.

Morag Gamble: And I guess also the other question that’s not being asked in amongst all of that is, well, let’s look at how we could reduce our energy consumption by 80, 90%.

David Holmgren: Yes. So those things.

Morag Gamble: So let’s just keep using what we’re using and continuing as we are, but just sort of shifting how it happens. So it’s those questions of what happens in the middle there. It’s not just there’s, it’s never just an either or is it? There’s a whole suite of different questions that need to be explored and put on the table.

David Holmgren: Yeah. And we know that in the main continuation of the mainstream for the global middle class. There’s not any signals really that reduce consumption, whereas the small, local, and even slightly unreliable solutions are ones that actually encourage and ideologically reinforce a minimum use, simpler or less materialistic way. So those have built into that. Now we know that’s only a very tiny minority of people who have pursued that. But the other way for the centralised system is that when you get complete dependence on your energy supply from centralised systems and all of your money is a hundred percent dependent in some digitised currency, then powers in response to crisis can switch off consumption when needed effectively to control through a rationing system that may be completely sensible and effective, but it will be decided from above. And of course there will be collateral damage and disadvantage and terrible consequences, but they will be able to reduce, not have technologies which maybe allow the system to sort of continue in some way, but in a controlled way where you can ratchet down the consumption because actually people have actually no other choice. And so that whole thing of democratic process, market systems, that none of those apply anymore. The command from above.

So my focus has always been to emphasise that local, autonomous, approach. And the same we can see in food production or in education, in health, in all of the areas that we need to emphasise this local, low tech things. Now that doesn’t mean to say we completely ignore the other solutions, so just to give you an example of something that allows us to span across that world, a new project that we’re starting with forest, forest Research and Development is a hybrid wood gas, electric truck retrofit. Just as a demonstration project. To take an older light truck, a two and a half ton diner truck, take out the petrol engine, put an electric motor in, and have a small battery pack that will allow you to toodle around the bush, go into town maybe depending on half far, town is away, maybe 30 kilometre range at stage one of that project. And then to put a modern wood gasifier with appropriate computer control on the back of the truck, which can charge the battery and allow that truck to run long distance. So what that would do is be a model for how we could take the vehicles that already exist. And retrofit them rather than throwing them all away and then buying these as yet vehicles which are not yet available, where somehow we’re gonna have trucks that can actually do long distance based on giant lithium battery packs or whatever. So we don’t even, the large scale system is not even producing something like that. But there are companies producing the technology at a small scale, and that involves this hybrid of the best of the high tech elements and the best of things that can be manufactured locally. And obviously that stimulates employment skill-based and how we make use of what we’ve already got and build resilience at the same time that we’re radically reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. So I think there’s many things that can cross over between those two worlds rather than saying ideologically one or the other. But we need to be doing those where we maintain and establish for the first time control at the local level. Rather than saying, please, to the largest corporations in the world, save us.

(22m27s) Local Community Autonomy and Connecting with the Excluded

Morag Gamble: Yeah. So what does that look like to you? What does a local community autonomy look like at an organisational level?

David Holmgren: Well, firstly, I think it ends up being attractive or the best option for people who feel excluded or are excluded by geography. So it’s more likely to make sense in rural areas, because as I’ve explained over the years with Brown Tech scenario, the system starts hardening itself against the crisis and it contracts in a geographic sense back to protecting the populations in the cities guaranteeing supply of food in moles and bullies, et cetera, and people who are on the fringes are sort of more left to their own devices or encouraged to come back into the centers where they’ll be looked after. So it’s not just geographic, it’s also at people who are at the conceptual fringes. So obviously people in permaculture networks are part of that. But of course there is now at a psychological level, a new outcast class, which is nothing to do with previous classes. They’re the sort of split off every sector of society, which is the people who are, in the new paradigm, the unclean or the un vaxxed. Suddenly they find themselves, whether they like it or not, without a job, without access to the system or the sense that at any time they would be excluded from the system. So now whether that sort of persists in some way as a result of some pattern or of the pandemic continuing, it’s an example and a model of the sense of excluded, whether those people see themselves as doing that by choice or whether they sort of see themselves as shut out of the norms of society. So I see that as incredible opportunities to a lot more people interested in things like. Now RetroSuburbia strategy, people who might not even believe in climate change that, and I’ve always said, you don’t have to believe in climate change to see some of the common sense in RetroSuburbia.

So the, in a lot of ways, the climate emergency will become less and less relevant as a message. To people on the outside, even though they’re more likely to actually suffer in different ways, especially those on the geographic fringes, the consequences, the direct consequences, as opposed to the indirect consequences of the climate emergency. So people on the inside of the system and think of that largely as a geographic thing in the cities, will not experience so much of the direct effects of climate change, the effects will be all indirect and they won’t necessarily recognise them as that. It’ll be through the financial system, through the command and control economies through all of the different restructuring of work. So we can think of this in terms of like, for example, the bushfire hazard. Yes, there’s some effects, smashes, smoke engulfing cities, but the real direct effects are people in rural areas. So that response to the direct emergency and the need for autonomy and self organising capacity. Rather than reliance on whether the cavalry will arrive in the air with all the water bombers and whatever, will become more and more important to people who are outside of that system. So I think the difficulty is to, from my point of view at the moment, there is huge opportunities to extend permaculture solutions to new excluded groups. As long as we don’t have an ideological or social editing that says, ‘Oh no, those are bad people. We don’t deal with them. We don’t talk to them.’ And then the other thing that’s very important is to maintain the connections across the gulf with people who are working inside the system because that will become structurally harder and harder to do. But that is important as well. So that is a very difficult psychological balance. And one of the great opportunities is of course, people who find themselves through their work or whatever. Seeing themselves and understanding themselves with more inside of the system, how they can work to, at the very mill minimum, tolerate those other radical fringe strategies as part of a flourishing of diversity, of not putting all our eggs in one basket. But more than that, actually having solidarity with those groups. But using one’s position, for example, the advocacy that there should be at the highest levels that community based, local business, non-corporate, not large scale use of, for example, wood energy in rural environments should be encouraged rather than demonised. Whereas the tolerance and understanding of people outside the system on the solutions that people are pursuing inside the system, is more one of just maintaining personal communications and contacts and learning what’s happening inside the system and understanding those perspectives, the people on the outside can’t significantly do anything to further support those working inside. In that way, the support needs to be the other way. And we can think of this as a bit like the first world people actually supporting activism that is happening, been happening in the harsh realities of the fringes of the third world, and those in that fringe might understand what those of us have been doing trying to bring about change in the global middle class. But we don’t expect support from them. The support needs to be the other way.

(30m47s) Permaculture Action Plan: Next Steps

Morag Gamble: Well, thank you so much for those thoughts. My mind was pinging in many moments as you were saying that, of really starting to land some really important concepts there that I’m gonna try and pick out some of the key threads too and put down below are some of the key points that you just made there. What I would really love us to do maybe is just like a final sort of coming together as sort of like. Okay. Permaculture action plan 1 0 1. Next steps, if we could just kind of articulate them in a clear way, what would be, say three or four key things that you would like to encourage people within the permaculture community or supporters or associates of Permaculture community to be thinking about and doing?

David Holmgren: Mm-hmm. Well, I think talking to people who have very different demeanors, very different perspectives. And they may be the person next door. They may be someone at work, someone where there is some other point of contact that is not around the climate emergency. So actually, while that may be some larger overarching thing to understand those connections with people who are feeling alienated, disenfranchised, angry or fearful about what the future holds. And to see that we have some positive energy and I’ve just had an experience of that, of actually being in the March of perhaps over a hundred thousand people against the new severe emergency powers that the Victorian government is attempting to implement.

And there was, in all the demonstrations I’ve been at. Since I was 11 years old, I’ve never seen such a broad cross-section of society. And we were there with a banner that that we made in 2000 at the anti-globalisation march, still very faded, that said permaculture, local solutions to global problems. And I was actually handing out bookmarks, our RetroSuburbia book marks with resources on the back saying some positive solutions as well. And so many people said, oh yes, we need that too. In their sort of anger and frustration about all of the things that are that have happened. Now, that was quite an amazing experience because we had there just a positive message amongst enormous number of angry people shouting sack Dan Andrews and kill the bill and

Morag Gamble: The noose going down the street. I heard as well some kind of hangman’s noose I heard. Oh, yes.

David Holmgren: Well, of course that was the thing that the mainstream media focused on. Yes, exactly. That’s what we heard up here. The, the, and of course the propaganda is got to some extreme level. I think many of the mainstream media said there were thousands of people. Well, they’re out by at least one, possibly two orders of magnitude. And obviously within those groups, in terms of the most organised political groups within that, unlike almost all marches I’ve been to in the past where there’d be the trotskyites and the Socialist Workers party handing out their leaflets, trying to sort of gain from this, like us say, the big anti-war demonstrations. There were the right wing groups. You know, the, and including people who might be described as neo-Nazis, but in fact the vast majority were just really ordinary Australians. And what was absent was any sort of, oh, there was also, you know, the religious people, Christians and Muslim people. There was, with hijabs, all sorts of different people, the Farang gong people, but most people were just ordinary Australians and, but there was sort of no real mainstream environmental or any sort of, because those people are beyond the pale, whereas these people actually are at a point of we need to think again about our sort of trust in the centralised systems. And so whatever one’s position is about the details of the thing that has triggered that, which is of course the Covid virus and the responses to it. You know, there is huge opportunities to connect to people there, including incredibly brave people who’ve actually, nurses of 30 years who are losing, resigning, police officers who are doing the same. So people who are actually going through a process of giving up, shedding a whole lot of expectations, and we know that the positives of permaculture go with the shedding of a lot of the addictions and habitual behaviours and things that are actually dysfunctional, bad for ourselves, bad for the planet. And that they do involve letting go of those while we gain other things. So there are people going through these processes and whatever we think about, what is the logic of what they’re doing? There is things driven by ethical inner considerations. Now, of course, most of Tthat is the anger. Take us back to the world that existed before. And, but I think that is an example of the sort of new possibilities. But those involve challenges and they involve this shedding of biases and prejudices. That I see building up in the environmental mainstream at the same time that we have an ideological description of inclusion. So this contradiction, which is swirling around us is one of the greatest challenges for our ethical response to not just the particular details of Covid, which I see as a minor flurry in terms of serious issues in the world, really the scale of what we are dealing with, with climate and the limits to growth, that this particular thing is just really emblematic of something rather than being so serious and that part of that reality is to see those situations as opportunities for those crises. And of course, that’s how the elites the most powerful see all of these things. Everything is an opportunity to advance their agendas as well. So without resorting to sort of a good and bad evil view of the world, I think there’s very clear that that permaculture allegiance to those at the fringes, the disadvantaged, the excluded, there is a long history of that and that that just actually takes new forms now.

Morag Gamble: Yeah. Thank you David. I think that message of really just opening up the spaces and the conditions that create possibilities for new conversations to happen to, we were talking a while ago about how do you talk outside of the bubble of permaculture to reach, well, here, here is that moment to talk beyond what we’ve talked, where we’ve been talking before. So, I think if there’s anything that you’ve been saying that is kind of like the core message is to start, to really reach out and have those conversations and to take permaculture solutions in new directions and yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time, David. It’s been absolutely fantastic to touch base with you again and to also hear your reflections on what’s just so present in people’s minds right now, both from COP 26, but also what you’ve just been in on the streets of Melbourne. Thank you. Thank you.