David Holmgren talks to Dustbowl Diatribes co-hosts Spencer Hess and Laurie Johnson about the analysis and predictions in his book Future Scenarios, his assessment that we are still in the “Brown Tech” energy descent scenario, and the implications for society moving forward.

Dustbowl Diatribes is a podcast of the Maurin Academy and features conversations and interviews regarding the relationship between economics, politics, religion and our environment.

Interview Transcript

(0m0s) Introduction: Spiritual Growth and Societal Challenges

Intro Voice: I think that just as we’re living in a nuclear age, we have grown so tremendously in scientific knowledge. It doesn’t seem too much to say that men can begin to awaken to the fact that they haven’t grown enough spiritually and haven’t recognised their spiritual capacities. Once something like eating is death, then you’ve struck at the very heart of life. The enemy of the older radical theories may have been the ruling class, but today the stakes of whether we will reform ourselves into a new kind of human being, a new kind of society, whether we will find selves worth being—the stakes of it are simply life itself.

Intro Voice: As modernity has created promises that it has no ability to keep, what this means is that we’re a society stuck in the impossible situation of being alone together. What was understood as emancipation has proved to be a form of isolation. It is important to understand that what I’m telling you is not simply a cultural history. It’s a description of the story that shapes every single person that you know. This is why there is a rise in mental illness. It’s absolutely concurrent with the disembedding of the individual, because individuals can’t constitute themselves; by the very nature of the case, subjectivity cannot sustain its own weight. We need others to tell us, but we’ve been given an ethical mandate by the Enlightenment that tells us that that’s immoral, that nobody should constrain us.

(1m59s) Introducing David Holmgren and His Work

Dustbowl Diatribes host: Welcome back to Dust Bowl Diatribes. We have here today a special guest, David Holmgren. He is the co-founder of the Permaculture Concept following a publication of Permaculture One, which he co-authored with Bill Mollison in 1978. David is a globally recognised leading ecological thinker, teacher, writer, and speaker, promoting permaculture as a realistic, attractive, and powerful alternative to dependent consumerism. Some of his other key publications include Permaculture Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability and Future Scenarios, how Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change, which you published in 2009 and which we’re hoping to focus on today. This publication and its website have left a lasting impression on both of us for sure. In 2018, he also published Retro Suburbia, the Down Shifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future. So we’ll put the URLs to his websites, including future scenarios in the show notes below. So welcome David, and is there anything you want to add about yourself before we get going?

David Holmgren: Well, just to say, I suppose I am still the gardener and the practical person around Medora here, but I like to keep things balanced between the conceptual and the practical, otherwise, people like me tend to, their head drifts off into the clouds of obstruction. So doing that and being involved in the seasonal cycle of abundance and all of the downsides and limitations of working with nature are important in grounding my work.

Dustbowl Diatribes host: Yeah. I think we agree it’s important to actually practise, to be there. It’s just as important as the theory. But, this Future Scenarios book really did impress me. And you’re very good at theory too.

(4m23s) The Genesis of “Future Scenarios” and Energy Descent

David Holmgren: Yeah, well, I suppose, Principles and Pathways was quite a surprise for many people already used to two decades, more than two decades of permaculture teaching activism and practice around the world, in deepening the perhaps the theoretical basis of permaculture. And future scenarios really, I suppose starting about five years after that book was published, but really indicated in that book this deeper exploration of energy descent scenarios because so little of discussion of the future was focussed in that area. And I’d already been honest and straightforward in principles and pathways in using the word energy descent to characterise human futures and the logic of why permaculture was so focussed in the biological and the behavioural change rather than as much as mainstream sustainability in the tech change area that, it was sort of natural that food and agriculture were the most important thing once you have that energy descent lens. So to explore that further was also wanting to give permaculture activists and practitioners and teachers a little bit more of, to the extent anyone can do this, the over the horizon radar sense of what is the context we’re going to be working in in the future? Or what are the possible contexts that work, was initially published free online and and still is there. Actually, I think that the book’s out of print.

Dustbowl Diatribes host: It was actually Chelsea, I got a copy recently.

David Holmgren: Ah, right, right. Yeah. Oh, very good.

(6m44s) The Infeasibility of Techno-Explosion as an Energy Solution

Dustbowl Diatribes host: Could you explain just a bit more for our viewers, why ’cause I know they are going to ask, why is it that what you call techno-explosion is really something that you kind of just disregard? For instance, a lot of people will say, well, I have high hopes for nuclear energy, right? Or a combination of wind and solar and nuclear. And we can sort of wean ourselves off of fossil fuels and keep growing. You argued that this was not possible. That we, the way I read it was you couldn’t get as much energy, even from a combination of those sources as you could, as we have been getting from fossil fuels and therefore descent is kind of inevitable. Could you explain a little bit more why we can’t rely on these others?

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I suppose there’s several levels to understand that. Firstly, in the history of energy transitions, in spite of the fact that those energy transitions from wood to coal, to oil, to an extent, to hydro, gas and nuclear, at least as far as gas, maybe not nuclear, certainly hydro just added to the layer cake of energies we were using. None of them replace the energies we’re using. There is a slight downturn in the post-war period in the total global use of wood, but immediately you hit the oil crisis of 1973, wood use goes up again. So there’s no replacement in modern history of energy sources by adding new energy sources. All we’ve done is add to the previous ones, and that’s where the energy sources are denser, more powerful, more usable at lower costs. So the idea that some combination of nuclear and renewable would replace fossil fuel is certainly inconceivable, especially with the timelines involved in energy transitions, which even when they’re accelerating with positive feedback, because of the richer source of energy that takes 50 to a hundred years to make any impact. And in that time, the radical depletion of the fossil fuel base pulls the rug out from under the system. So the next issue, which is really interesting is there’s been so many decades, really since the 1950s, the belief that these other energy sources would be, allow this huge growth. And so nuclear in 1950, the chief advisor to the Australian government on nuclear power, Sir Ernest Titterton said that by 1980, nuclear would be so cheap, it would be free, there would just be a service fee. And obviously we would have the full electrification, which is now being talked about, based on nuclear, it didn’t happen. Nuclear turned out the net energy returns on nuclear when properly analysed through holistic mechanisms like Howard Odum’s energy accounting show it’s sort of similar to coal. And that’s give or take either enormous containment of waste costs or just more cancers. It doesn’t sort of really matter, how you include or don’t include the costs overall are there in maintaining a really complex system like nuclear. And of course there’s all sorts of suggestions about different forms of nuclear technology that could in the future. Renewable, the growth in renewable has been extraordinary by any measure, but it is infrastructure front heavy. You have to sort of build all the systems and then over some lifetime they pay themselves back, hopefully. So what that means is you need a massive increase in materials and energy use to make a true transition to renewable, mind-boggling in its scale. So that all has to be funded upfront and by funded. I’m not really talking about money, I’m talking about the energy. And that energy will come from fossil fuel. So in terms of a climate context, that it actually involves a huge increase in burning of coal in China to make solar panels, if you want to sort of simplify it down. And also a massive increase in mining and mining becomes enormously energy intensive as the quality of the ore bodies that are being mined go down. So all of those things are happening at the same time that conventional oil, the really big powerhouse of the world is actually has ticked over and is in terminal decline. And it’s being replaced by energy sources that are actually more energy intensive. So some of the symptoms that, ironically economists look very glowingly at about energy transition, like the huge increase in investment and employment in the energy harvesting industries, they look at that as very positive. That’s actually a sign of lesser net energy because it’s society putting more of its resources back into energy harvesting, and that is a sign of, oh, there’s less money for everything else. So all of the symptoms and experiences of energy growth, right down to more autonomy and less living in households and being dependent on community, non-monetary resources as well as all of the technology, there’s more and more of that has got to be focussed back on just getting energy. And that’s a sign of a poorer society. So I liken it to a peasant farmer who is cultivating his field and the soil texture is being damaged or declining, and he is having to hoe twice as much to get the tilth in the soil, to grow his grain crop, to support himself and his family—twice as much economic activity before the same return. So those would be this time for the transition, the unproven aspects. But I think there are other factors about whether that future is desirable, which is another issue once you come to terms with the weight of evidence of it not being likely. There’s the other issues of what would it look like if humanity had a source of energy to replace fossil fuel. And the trouble is also, and this is really the last point relevant to your question, that’s complex answer, is that we don’t just need a replacement for fossil fuel. We need a massively more powerful source of energy. And the reason for that is in the history of past energy transitions as we start to reach crises from overuse of energy and damaging our environment and damaging and transforming our social structures, we need more energy to compensate for that damage. So for example, with industrialisation and the flood of people into the early industrial cities, all of the previously existing social mechanisms for looking after people in whatever way they existed in village culture, the job for the village idiot, doing something sort of informal social welfare systems all collapsed as a result of industrialisation. And they had to be replaced progressively through reforms. The poor laws, the work rights and social welfare eventually, which has actually become a huge cost in society. But that became one of the things that had to be done to deal with the adverse effects of this huge growth. So similarly, we have enormous environmental debt, damage to our soils, all sorts of things that theoretically if you have enough energy, you can in some way deal with that. But if you just have replacement energy, that in itself is actually not enough. You need something way bigger and that even looks more unlikely. And just even at the financial level, the global financial system can’t keep perpetuating this faith from the future that that wealth will exist, because that’s what the financial system is saying. There is this giant wealth. It exists in the future that justifies this existing debt. And when that fails, of course, although that’s a virtual system, so it doesn’t have the reality of energy and materialism, it has these enormous consequences if that faith, that that energy and resources aren’t there. That going away has been a lot of my work since future scenario is trying to understand to the extent that anyone really can, what the implications of that are.

(18m9s) Holmgren’s Four Energy Descent Scenarios

Dustbowl Diatribes host: And so in on your website and in your book, you put forward like four primary energy descent scenarios and kind of lay out what those look like. Could you kind of give us a gloss on what those would be?

David Holmgren: Well, at the time when I was doing that work, it’s nearly 20 years in the gestation of the future scenarios work. I saw that the decline in conventional oil production, the peak and decline of that and the onset of climate change as being the two most powerful driving factors. And that the combination of uncertainty about the rate of decline of oil and the rate and severity of onset of climate change created for possible combinations. And if you like, the most benign that I saw as a roughly a 2% decline per annum, post peak of conventional oil production, combined with a relatively slow and benign onset of climate change, and I called that Green Tech. And then the similar slow decline of oil, but a more rapid onset of climate change, I called Brown Tech. And on the other side of the equation I saw the possibility for a 10% per annum decline rate in oil, which is actually catastrophic economically, and would create something that people would more probably use the term collapse to describe rather than a decline. And that in one scenario, that massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would contribute to a relatively moderate onset of climate change, and I call that scenario Earth Steward. And then the, if you like, the worst case scenario where there was that industrial unravelling because of oil’s fast decline, and yet the climate mechanisms were still driving things to radically harsher climates, I called that Lifeboat. So they had varying degrees of combinations, which were not primarily around public choices or policy choices that were sort of really the dynamics of systems that people would have to adapt to. Now, in that time, since, I mean, the scenarios were set as being something that would come about over the following 10 to 40 years and that I would represent some sort of not steady state, but a sort of like a post-crisis state. So that the crisis itself is not the energy scenario, it’s what comes after that. And I think we can say, at least in the timelines that I was looking at, neither of the two more severe scenarios have come about. And I think the, in characterising those, the Green Tech one has a lot of the elements of what people would currently see in the world. But there’s also the grinding economic contraction and a situation where agriculture and other land uses are relatively booming economically along with renewable energy infrastructure. So what that does is tend to shift the power from city centres to regional economic power. There’s a relative difference. ‘Cause firstly, if the climate is relatively stable, then agriculture can sort of work. And if the net energy coming from fossil fuel is going down, relatively speaking, the wealth from agriculture and forestry and all other uses of nature are going up as a proportion. And so that’s shifting the wealth in the same way that renewable energy, because it’s distributed through the landscape. Whether it’s solar panels or wind turbines or many other, they’re not concentrated at holes in the ground. So that tends to, in some way or other, distribute the wealth that’s coming from that activity. So my emblematic photo with of that was a photo I took in 94 in Germany with a wheat field and wind turbines in the background. But that sort of regional shift of power is sort of also the end starting to the end of deglobalisation because in all these scenarios there’s a peaking and the ending of the globalisation process. Not that all global things end, but that that acceleration in that direction means. And I think the Brown Tech scenario is closer to what people would see we have because that involved more on rapid onset of climate change. And without getting into all the debates about the climate science, the consensus is that that onset has been perhaps more rapid than a lot of the models thought. And that’s certainly been, there’s been no decline in the carbon dioxide supposedly being the cri prime contributing factor. So that has meant that agriculture is actually not doing as well and certainly the growth of production worldwide is tended to come to an end. And certainly we’ve seen that oil has declined slowly. But in top of that, the substitutes in shale oil and all of the other ones have managed to compensate to a significant degree. Now, the shale oil in the United States is the biggest one that many of us didn’t sort of get, how big it would be. And the reasons for that are quite interesting. But also Iraq, it added a huge amount. There were all those untouched oil fields just sitting there waiting to be developed. And in spite of the chaos and war of Iraq, Iraq has actually produced and exported a lot of that oil. So actually the invasion of Iraq did work in that sort of sense. And so what’s curious about the Brown Tech scenario is that it tends to become more city centric, which is counterintuitive for many of us involved in permaculture and globalisation because like in the Green Tech, there’s still the wealth and infrastructure for centralised systems, but the climate is starting to make things unfavourable at the geographic fringes. So what the system does is start to armour itself. And so for example, in Australia with increased bush fires, the authorities in this scenario, I imagine started switching off the power to remote areas and encouraging people to relocate into cities. So what the system is characterised is a sort of a top down constriction where the power has shifted, drifted down from the global, back to the local, back to a more local level, but actually at the level of the nation state. So there’s this increasing power at the nation state, but the nation state is unused to exercising power because that’s been outsourced to corporations and the market. And so you get a reemergence of a what is called a command economy, where the government decides what to do, but it depends on the corporations to actually do a lot of it, and it does it in response to crises. Some of those crises are directly weather crises or things like that, but a lot of them are sort of driven by the political environment. So it was in an essay in 2013, I suggested it appeared we were moving into some version of my Brown Tech scenario. And I think the other more severe scenario is not that they can’t come about, but they could come about to a sort of like a second stage crisis in the future where I suggested the Brown Tech scenario would tend to segue into the Lifeboat. The Green Tech scenario would tend to segue into Earth Steward. And so if that happened, that is more of a true energy descent, whereas a direct shift from the world we’ve been in to my Lifeboat or Earth Steward scenario was so severe that most analysts would describe it as more of a collapse of society. So this distinction between energy descent and collapse may be semantics. And certainly I’ve been classified by the French collapsologists as a collapsologist, as they say. But I like to make that distinction between energy descent collapse because of the millennialism thinking in especially the western Christian lineage of either this move to some material heaven of progress or the collapse and Armageddon as the ending of the world. So this extreme bifurcation of thinking that we’re susceptible to.

(30m6s) Permaculture as a Response to the Brown Tech Scenario

Dustbowl Diatribes host: So, you sort of answered the question I was going to ask next, and which is, thank you for that, that you’re still, you’re still thinking that we are headed towards, or are in this Brown Tech scenario. And that still seems very plausible to me as well. Two part question, really. Like, I have a lot of students who really still seem to want to hang on to this somehow, technology and one of the things that I look at in my class is literally the Orbital Reef, right? That Amazon, CEO is all about off-sourcing into space. So, to and I have a unit on permaculture and I feel like they should be focussed more on the permaculture unit. But they’re really jazzed up by the Orbital Reef. So if, what do you say to them? How do we today get people interested in permaculture? Can you explain kind of what permaculture is as an answer to the Brown Tech scenario?

David Holmgren: Yeah. So, well, firstly, permaculture is a design system for resilient and regenerative land use and living. So it’s concerned with both the production side of the equation, how we provide our fundamental material needs from a working relationship with nature. But then also how we organise ourselves in households, in economic units of small business and larger structures and political structures from informal ones in community through to larger structures of nation states, but always starting with the most basics and building that up rather than trying to say, how do we reorganise the system at the top? And that cascades down because there’s no evidence in evolution of complex systems that work that, firstly designing a large scale system from scratch ever actually works. Large scale complex systems that work evolve from simple systems that work and the changes we need are much more fundamental, if you like, revolutionary, in how much different they are rather than the mechanism of change. That we have to start with the simple and model those things at the most basic. And so our basic relationship to nature of providing for our material needs is the focus, the first focus. And that’s why food and agriculture come central. Even though in modern economies, only 2% of the population are currently involved in that. So we can see the patterns of a lower energy societies in the past and the past in the modern discourse of progress is never as interesting ’cause it has all these sort of problematic aspects to it. Whereas somehow the future is projected as to not have any of those. And that’s what I find is very interesting about the faith in aspects of the techno explosion future, including all the different ones that there are, most of which involve some sort of avoiding the limits of this planet by moving offshore. So I think this comes to the question of what does it mean to be human? Because what if we look at what we’ve already done with effectively free energy from fossil fuel. And if any of these schemes are possible, they all depend on much greater net energy. None of them can be achieved with lesser net energy unless there’s some sort of tiny, small version of it for some tiny elite, but some sort of new techno feudal version, which is one of the possible evolutions out of my Brown Tech scenario. So for example, the computer technology and communications we are using, the idea that we can keep having that incredibly cheap and accessible to people means that there must be economies of scale to match that, which means it’s millions and even billions of items. And we’ve seen that with global manufacturing. If we are managing a world where there isn’t the resources, what happens is an elite may be able to continue to maintain the technology we have at enormous cost per unit item. The laptop I’m sitting at might cost the equivalent of a million dollars if only there’s only a market for a thousand of them in the world. So this is, there’s a whole lot of things that we do currently that are inherently tied to gigantic scales to make them viable. And we have that now where there’s virtually one company, one factory, which is making the highest level integrated circuits in Taiwan. There’s an attempt underway where your government and new taxpayers in America are attempting to replicate all of that in the United States. No one knows whether it’ll work, whether what they’ll make will be junk. But this idea that we actually have virtually one factory that makes all of this stuff because the economies of scale are actually almost necessary at that level. But more important than that is the question, this question around what does it mean to be human? Because if there is this possibility of the net energy to do all these things, and it’s pretty clear that we will transform ourselves into the machine and become the machine, or the machine become us, and that everything that we recognise as human will disappear. And so that’s that question to ask people that how far we are already down that path and the idea that we’re, oh no, we will use the technology with some sort of wisdom to maintain what we think is important. There’s no evidence, not just in the human historical use of energy and resources, but actually in nature because when nature is fed a new source of energy, it’s both a toxin that damages things, but it also progressively powers things up into a new form. And according to system ecologist, Howard Odom, this is the Maximum Power principle, which is really a fourth law of energy that this growth and evolutionary change is unstoppable. And the idea that we’ll say, oh no, that doesn’t comply with human values. Sorry if the energy’s there, it’s like a new life form. And instead of aliens taking over, the machine takes over. And literally some hybrid between biology and silicon technology is what exists. And of course, a lot of the people who are actually pushing this at the highest levels, people like Ray Kurzweil in Google and others, that’s what they are looking forward to, that they will be downloaded into the machine and become eternal. And of course, every philosophical and spiritual tradition in the world has taught us that that materialist hubris is a false path. So I’m sure you have your own philosophical and perhaps spiritual take on that perspective. But I think asking people what you’re talking about is not a brighter version of what we currently have. It’s a world transformed beyond comprehension. And I think that’s of course one of the damaging things that’s happened from the disconnection from nature and people becoming more and more embedded in the technosphere, that that’s where they naturally see salvation. But to experience being human in community and in nature, reminds us we have other possibilities. And so I think that’s from the desire end of what do we want? But of course the main point of the future scenarios work is try and say these forces are at work. These will generate all sorts of different possibilities. We will have to adapt to those. And I’ve often said that if the techno explosion future was to come about, then permaculture would be in the dust bin of history as completely irrelevant. And that even in the techno stability world, which is the sort of mainstream sustainability view of some steady state, that it would remain as a small, relatively fringe thing, whereas in energy descent, whether it’s called permaculture or not, it becomes normalised as an adaptive response to circumstances because of like survival. Yeah. And selection that people who do well at that and who go into that positively and, oh, this is actually a good future, however difficult that is, will actually thrive. And obviously that will prevail by whether it’s biological replication or whether it’s by other people copying. And that’s happened in past historical times where people have looked at other people who do different things. That’s turned out to be more adaptive and end up copying them or not and dying out like the Scandinavian farmers looking at the Inuit people around them, when they had settled in Greenland in a favourable climatic period and continued to grow grains and died out the Inuit people.

(42m38s) Understanding Attraction to Techno-Optimism vs. Energy Descent Realities

Dustbowl Diatribes host: So I guess to me this raises a kind of educational question that, to Lori’s question of why are so many of her students seduced by the tech explosion accelerationist, no, we’ll just do aquaculture in space and it’ll all be good. Versus the more austere like, well, what happens if we just have to keep like trudging along and figuring it out as things get slowly worse and harder? I guess I’d be interested to hear how much of it do you think, not that you could like clearly quantify this, but how much do you think is that there’s just this human need to just believe that like, everything’s going to be fine and let’s not get too apocalyptic. And how much of it is to understand how these big, like super personal systems work, whether it’s like climate or global capital that’s like created all of these monopolistic economies of scale that then filter down and we perceived to just be like, well, I just go to the store and I got a new Mac and it was a thousand dollars. And that’s just how it costs. And they’re not seeing how well that only works ’cause millions of people are doing exactly what you’re doing. Because I think part of what’s so hard to talk about when we’re talking about system change is these systems don’t function like how people perceive their life to be working. So I don’t know. That was, that was a little bit of a rant, but what do you say to all that?

David Holmgren: So I think the issue of humans being attracted by novelty and progress is certainly fairly true. But I think there’s also, in past history people had different ways of understanding the world. We regard the ancient Greeks as, in some ways the origin point of Western civilisation and their view of the world was, it was originally created perfect and it progressively declines with time. And that a good life was led by passing it on in as best condition as possible. They didn’t find that depressing. And it’s interesting that it actually more conforms with the second law of thermodynamics than our modern, supposedly scientific society, which believes in this perpetual sort of progress idea. So the, that construct is quite deeply embedded, but it’s not necessarily inherently human. And that seems to be pretty true because through vast stretches of culture and society, especially in many long surviving indigenous cultures, almost maybe to the extremity in Australia, that continuity of the lineage from ancestors into descendants is more important than what’s the new trick? So I think that’s the first thing to recognise that humans are extraordinarily flexible and can come to all sorts of different adaptions to different types of circumstances and perceive something as positive and empowering. And I think the, if you like, dark aspects or negative aspects of energy descent that people do, modern people do find really depressing and challenging that, all of those things about being realistic. There’s another side that all the spiritual traditions teach us that in the internal space, that growth in some form is always possible. That that, being positive is actually beneficial and that all of these internal processes end up having a direct effect on the actual material context or how it’s experienced. But the material context sort of shifts people. It’s, if you like, harsh realities, shift people into a stronger focus in the inner world. And all the spiritual and philosophical traditions basically teach us that because we’re all going to die, everything decays. I mean, those realities are there in any case, but the modern world has sort of like papered them over so much. So I think that’s that’s one level. But I think the other level is, which is can be risky, is the alerting people about danger in the future and the need to act. And of course there’s a great danger in motivation around fear, but there’s also a functional aspect of us seeing the danger coming towards us and doing something. Now you can say, okay, well that can lead to all sorts of responses that might be counterproductive. But I think it’s a tight balance in in those things. So some of the aspects for me that is happened in recent years since I wrote the future scenarios work has really strongly consolidated wherein the Brown Tech scenario. So understanding what that actually looks like, because it does, it the deep drivers of resource depletion and climate change, or more generally environmental breakdown, are not the things that actually people perceive affecting their lives. They might be the deep drivers, but the way that expresses itself is quite surprising and, in some ways counterintuitive. But, in my observation, it’s also quite empowering to see, ah, those patterns are at work so that there’s less the angst and division about, oh, what’s happening is bad because of those bad people over there. Because I think that’s a great danger.

(50m20s) Misrecognising Energy Descent: The Brown Tech Reality

Dustbowl Diatribes host: Could you expand a bit on how people, in your estimation, how people are misrecognising energy descent?

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I think what the primary response of the system is to deal with effectively failure of the market to provide the answers that that’s failing more and more. And that governments are realising, oh, we are the government, we are in charge. As happens in all great crises, the buck stops with the government or the expectation the government will save us. And governments are not very capable now of even responding. They depend on the corporations, but they’re sort of getting on top of things and saying, okay, the corporations will do this, this, and this. So this is this great power struggle that’s happening in the world. There’s still the globalists who are trying to hold things together at the global scale, but are resorting to stronger and stronger military things trying to hold it together at that scale. And then another set of power structures which are saying, no, that’s failing. We’ve gotta be moved back to the nation state and we’ve gotta put things in place. What that will allow us to survive as a nation. And what that means is there’s this response to crises where governments are basically saying, here, we will save you from the crisis, but you need to climb into this tighter strait jacket of constraint, ultimately a rationed economy. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s explained as because of climate change, resource depletion, but unlikely to be explained in those terms. It’s more likely to be explained by evil foreigners or evil people within our society that it’s their fault that we have to do this. But whatever, it’s a tighter and tighter straight jacket. And that most people will tend to choose that security and greater constraint and some minority, bigger or smaller will go no way and choose freedom and autonomy, but with greater risk and possible adverse legal sanction. And what that does is create this divide in society where decisions come towards people. And I think Covid was emblematic of this. And one person in a family or in a group or in a workplace goes, oh, I’m doing that. And another person goes, I’m doing that. And then they find themselves increasingly separated by some gulf of being inside the system or outside the system. So the way long before Covid, I portrayed it in Australia was our supermarket duopoly, which is one of the most centralised in the world. Two companies controlling 95% of the food retailing in the country. That as the supply to those, due to climate natural disasters or geopolitical oil embargoes or it doesn’t matter what it is, the government guarantees the supply of food in the supermarkets guarantees the allocation of the fuel, fuel to the trucking fleet. But you’ll need your Australia ID card to go to the supermarket. And if you don’t have that, then you are out in the feral food system of grow your own farmer’s markets and barter and exchange. And that in my imagining, 80% of Australians probably more actually, would accept that. And a smaller proportion would go for the autonomy and that this sort of creates this sort of divided society asymmetrically divided and in different places that according to the culture of the country and everything, that could be quite different in how that is so that there becomes a more, dare I say, religious faith, that the system will look after us and a belief in it because of an urgency of a sense of existential threat. And the system armours itself in an attempt to protect or maintain what it can. And that would tend to be city centric. So there’s a geographic aspect to this. The city versus the countryside, but also a conceptual, where you’re either in the system or you’re outside of the system. So another example would be something like home birth, for example, of a fringe thing where in an ideal society, yes, a lot of people would be autonomous and give birth without the medical system, but the medical system is there to back them up. But in the sort of world I’m seeing is that, you’re either in this system or you are completely outside of it and you don’t have access to it. And so that’s a structural dynamic that emerges, not due to, because the people running things are nasty or evil. It’s just an organisational structure and there’s a tension within the system that at one level it would like people to go away and look after themselves. ‘Cause the system’s under stress at all sorts of levels. So if it has less people to look after or whatever, good, but the system actually needs everyone as consumers. For example, the health system for very complex medical interventions, it actually needs enough patients coming through the system to justify the very expensive technology. So there’s this tension of the system needing everyone to be in the system versus go away and look after yourself. So these conflicting messages coming through the political structure as well, amplifying what people’s own responses are. But we moved to, from a command economy to a rationed economy, and it is controlled from the top down, but that at the fringes, a shadow economy develops, perhaps driven by, primarily by people who don’t trust that, but forced to work at a lower level of resource, but with more direct local resources. And that could go on for a long time. The trouble with the Brown Tech scenario is the armouring of the system is actually creating a lock in that prevents adaption at the larger scale. And so it sets up the possibility further down the track of a second phase, which is more of a collapse of that system and the rebuilding from the from the fringe. But that system could become locked and armoured like that for quite a long time. And for people being reasonably successful, the smaller number of people being part of the relative privileged within that could continue to experience that. Oh, the world’s all going on as usual, while the underclass within that system gets larger and larger and more and more in the in the straight jacket, with people falling out of it sort of periodically. So I think, I think that’s the sort of structure of what we’re actually experiencing, perhaps in different countries in different ways.

(1h0m1s) Right-Wing Nationalism and the Shift to Nation-State Power

Dustbowl Diatribes host: In this context, how do you see the rise of right wing nationalism and populism? How is that, like, does that fit into what you’re talking about? Sounds like to me, like it does.

David Holmgren: Well it does, but I think it’s an attempt to reestablish the system at the lower hierarchical level at the nation state level. Whereas there’s also those trying to establish it at the global level. So that’s what I think is this main fight because what’s mostly seen as right-wing popularism, is actually has some similarities around the world of each nation can do things themselves rather than the rules based international order, that there’s a proper way of doing things. So, for example, I tend to see people like Trump and Orban in Hungary as not just driven by disenfranchised, failing middle class is at the bottom. But there’s also quite significant powers that that actually see the global project as actually failing and are moving to sort of reestablish national level power, which is one of the deep signs of energy descent because if net energy available to humanity is rising, then that should mean that organisational complexity can keep moving up to higher and higher hierarchical levels. So institutions like the IMF and the World Bank and the UN would be gaining strength. Whereas it seems to me there’s a battle to sort of try and maintain those, but they’re actually in more and more dysfunctional and creating more and more disorder. The attempt to do that. And that’s one of the things that’s actually driving the right wing nationalism. So I have less worry about the right wing nationalism causing the really severe nation state conflict, like ultimately nuclear war. I think that’s actually more risk from what’s happening at the global level of trying to maintain the global level. It’s hard to say, but I know that the empire that we all live under, the Western Empire, in my opinion, is rapidly unravelling, the US led empire. And I think what’s happening with the BRICS, countries of Russia, China, India, and now Saudi Arabia, Turkey, all of these other countries are joining it. People in the west are completely ignorant about how this power shift is happening to the previously developing countries. The resource rich countries, and they all have sort of different views politically, but they all agree that each nation controls its own affairs. So they all reject this sort of universal global order, and I think it’s unlikely that China, let alone Russia will emerge as an equivalent of the West and when the west goes down, control the world because I think the net energy is not there to support it. So I think we are actually, this is the irony is that this is relocalisation as we’re experiencing it. It doesn’t look like the relocalisation that those of us imagine and or actively working to encourage and develop. Now, that doesn’t mean to say that that work isn’t valid and important, but also need to recognise there’s this power structure between globalist and nationalist, happening. So I see as those systems are falling apart. They’re producing more and more bads and disservices and less goods and services generally. But I don’t have the, I think the view that the right wing populism is the rapid path to fascism is actually a misunderstanding of fascism because at its fundamental one, we sort of move away from all a term of abuse, really, like racism or something. And so what is fascism? I think Mussolini’s definition about this strong national central power combined with corporate power and that that is what is attempting to be cemented at the global level. And then there’s others who are trying to do it more at a national level. And you could say, yes, it’s fascist. I mean, that’s what I believe. China is a fascist state, but I also believe the United States is increasingly a fascist state. But it’s very difficult to use that word, because it’s just become a term of abuse. So I think that is like a little bit the essence of what governance, the emergent governance in the Brown Tech scenario. And that doesn’t mean to say all of the positive things that many of us are involved with can’t thrive and grow. But I think they will be doing it in the shadow of this system.

(1h6m45s) Local Activism, Permaculture, and Finding Common Ground

Dustbowl Diatribes host: And then so how, so given, given that wider, like international and national context, how do you think it’s helpful to perceive more local and permacultural activism? Because it seems to me at least from like the local food scene in America and specifically I’m in the Midwest, what people tend to do is, again, to speak in general strokes. If they lean towards the right, what you do is you pick the aspects of nationalism that you like and the aspects of internationalism you like, and then you kind of like identify with that. And then vice versa, people that lean toward the left, they, they take the slices from both that they like. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have the easy flow of goods, but also the a stable welfare state and grants and subsidies for the kind of localism we want. And to me it encountering these arguments as a kind of like intellectual schizophrenia where maybe this would be nice at an abstract level, but none of this exists and we’re just, we’re just, whatever we think we’re doing, we’re just Republicans or Democrats at the end of the day. Again, I’m not doing a great job of formulating the question, but that’s my, that’s my experience. Does that ring true with your experience and what do you have to say?

David Holmgren: Yeah, I think it’s a little bit less intense in Australia than what my perception is of it in the US, but I think the positive frame, I’ve talked about a lot of things which are sort of inevitably very dark and negative. And I think the positive things that are, I’ve expressed in a lot of my RetroSuburbia, public talks, I said, you don’t even need to believe in climate change to see a whole lot of the positives in my RetroSuburbia work and strategies of how we live, survive and thrive by adapting in situ and connecting to neighbours and whatever. And so that means in local communities, connecting with people who have completely different understandings of the world and that it’s not necessary to actually come to a shared understanding of what is going on in the world because the nature of the world is such, there’s a thousand different voices all with their own explanations. The key thing is what do we have in common? What do we need to do at the most practical level? And that, in that sense. Someone who is an environmental activist and someone who is a right wing disaffected, early adopter prepper as their sort of losing faith in the system actually have a lot in common to share. And I used to say in working on an informal public land management project here next to Medora in the nineties without legal approval or funding, that I sort of called an anarchistic, unfunded, unapproved version of the Australian land care. But without the paperwork and the poisons of environmental restoration that that was a project that came out of a synergy between myself and a fourth generation local. And if I could be described as a university educated, left wing, ex-urban greenie, he could be described as a right wing libertarian, uneducated working class redneck. And as long as we didn’t talk about the Gulf War or Muslim immigration, this was in the early nineties, then we got along famously ’cause we were both obsessed with trees and tree planting. Now, that relationship with that man has continued in this community. And you could say that probably both of us, our ideas about the world have in a small way influenced each other. And we find actually more and more in common in our views. So I think that is a sort of a microcosm of a general process that happens. And it could be that some people might stand back and younger people say, oh, Holmgren’s turning into a sort of a right wing social conservative or something in his old rage. And I don’t want to deny those processes that happen through aging and the process of people living in community where people of very different values are actually part of your social circle. Whereas the world we’ve come from in the urban and then accelerated by the internet is that we all exist in network communities. And that unfortunately, those network communities, including permaculture, have this corrosive effect on geographic community. So in the permaculture world, I’ve seen it seed all over the world and spread through the sort of the global networks, fantastic process and thing. But that’s also tended to encourage the people who are most capable at the local community level, whether that’s with their skills, whatever, their facilitation tend to be drawn up into the global networking and this depletion at the bottom as we move towards, naturally towards, oh, where our like-minded circle is. And of course, being invited to speak with you. All of those things are very encouraging and rewarding. Whereas in the local community, all of us are just other members of the community. Certainly in Australia it can be different in other countries. Sometimes in places like Germany, local people who have some sort of international recognition, have this huge status. In Australia, we have the tall poppy syndrome that no one is better than anyone else, so don’t think you’re better than anyone else. And that levelling is really important, and has value that prevent the development of ego and also. That search for where is the commonality is much easier to achieve when we actually are face-to-face or we know someone or we economically in some way depending on them. So in that sense, I see rural communities, and the rural mentality, is really important. But in RetroSuburbia, I push that down to another level because often in our networks I’ve seen that there’s this dynamic between the individual and the community and this tension and balance between those things. And forgetting that we are almost all of us live in households now, whether that’s a traditional family or whatever it is, that the household is the basic economic unit of society. And that that’s something that I think the left has been a bit blind to, and but it’s actually quite strong in the right. And I think that’s one of the strengths that come from the right, and that’s one of the things of my RetroSuburbia work, that households are the immersed, fundamental economic and organisational and cultural unit of society. And I use the word household deliberately to rather than family, to accept that there’s many different ways in which a household is constructed. But we know economically that in past economic downturns, people have survived by clustering together in larger households. And my prediction was that they would tend to be extended multi-generational family households by default. And my understanding is that’s already happening more so in your country than mine, that in response to harsher circumstances, people are actually forced back together. ‘Cause it’s just way more efficient. Cooking for five people is way more efficient than cooking for two, let alone one. And so this recognition that that unit is actually the building block of society is one of the, I think, blind spots on the left, which tend to go straight from the individual to the community. How do we organise ourselves in communities? That is really important, but it seems to me it needs to build from the bottom up, from the individual through the household, through other small forms of small organisation like small business and in various initially informal and also formalised community responses. And my permaculture colleague Ian Lillington, many years ago in talking about intentional communities designed eco villages, said, well, in Hepburn, we live in an unintentional community. There’s all these people here and we have some sort of relationship and we have to sort of muddle through that. So I think those processes offer huge opportunities and I think a lot of them can happen in the shadow of the larger systems without appearing to be an obvious threat or challenge to those larger systems and therefore not attract the heavy fist or foot, even if they are actually quite subversive. So my RetroSuburbia work is effectively economic treason because it’s encouraging the rapid development of the non-monetary household and community-based non-monetary economy. And that will result if it happened on any scale, a radical decline in GDP. And so there is difficulty in getting traction with some of those ideas at a larger scale, even though it actually makes perfect adaptive sense. And this is perhaps another aspect where I’d advocate for the right, having this self-centred. Personal and collective household interest thing that on the left there’s been this long tradition that if you gain from your activism, that’s really suspect because we’re supposed to sacrifice ourselves for the cause. And yet this permaculture really is a form of enlightened self-interest. And that fundamental survival need is, is this good for me? And that it’s not necessarily a tension, a dichotomy between if it’s good for me, does that mean it has to be bad for others? Now, how do we construct something which is good for me, and that that is that permaculture principle of obtaining yield. Yeah, this works, let’s keep doing that, and that it’s actually part of some larger, if not beneficial, at least benign and not destructive in what it’s doing in the wider world. And I think that that difference with starting at the centre of the self and even, to care for people is to care for the self in and community because we actually have power to do something at that level. So even though that seems quite counterintuitive to the left, how do we sort of imagine the whole world first, develop a framework of what’s needed and then move back down progressively? So, I think there’s benefits and truths in ideology from both those divides. But I think the way to sort of bring things together is at the quite close and local level. And hopefully that can happen in many, many places and affect the larger whole as a result, or at least provide an insurance against the worst scenarios of, the sort of civil war or like the petitioning of British colonial India between Muslims and Hindus and, many, many other examples in the world that are obviously, we want to avoid. But I think we avoid that at that personal, local level building that trust across these boundaries.

(1h21m53s) Sources of Motivation and Hope

Dustbowl Diatribes host: No, I mean, I’m your question. I mean, this speaks so much to our situation here in the United States. You’ve given us a lot of, a lot of things to think about. I know we need to wind it up pretty soon, but I did want to ask, just what has kept you going over the years? What has given you hope and kind of kept you motivated, even though it is difficult to get through to people that we need to prepare for these changes?

David Holmgren: And, well, I think the grounded working with nature and the positives and the negatives, the things that you have to deal with the animals that come and eat your crops, and the difficult decisions and and even whether you have the power to do things about stuff, accepting those sort of things provide a constant reality check. I think there’s no doubt, I’ve been blessed by the inspiration of how many people around the world have taken permaculture and done positive things with it. Even if, as one of the cranky old power originators, I obviously sometimes look at things with a permaculture label and have a scepticism about that. It’s a baby that’s alive and off by itself, doing its thing in the world. Totally independent of its creation now. And in between those two extremes in our local and regional community, sort of a sense that there are a lot of threads, whether they’re called permaculture or whether they frequently have other names, and sort of kindred ideas of elements coming together while also the very realistic recognition that these could be just discretionary fluff in larger processes and forces. But that balance between being realistic about the state of the world and living with rose tinted glasses in a nurturing world that to some extent reinforces your values, even though that involves in the local community, that that constant dealing always with people who have quite different understandings of the world and appreciating their understandings. So I think all of those things, I’ve been very blessed and therefore I feel I also have a role to look at some of these dark things while and help inform people. But I also recognise that it’s very important psychologically for people to survive by putting their effort into positive work and not get too obsessed with that. Because that can be a, of course, the spiral down. And I think I’ve had that privilege. So, and support so I can deal with those things more. And hopefully that is a bit useful to others.

Dustbowl Diatribes host: I think so. And, we really appreciate you taking the time to be with us and actually, I’m sure I speak for Spencer too. We hope that we can have you back again sometime in the future too. But this has been amazingly informative, so we really appreciate it.

David Holmgren: Well, thanks. But people who are interested, there’s a lot of series of essays on the website that are all more accessible these days in form, a bit like Medium or Substack, but I’m not on any of those other platforms, but there is quite a lot of my thinking in around these sort of larger issues there and can see the sort of things we’re in bulk with through that.

Dustbowl Diatribes host: Okay. We’ll make sure that all that gets into our show notes too, so people should just be able to look down there and click and be able to find those resources because yes, you have done a great job of putting that out there. There’s no shortage of information for people, so we just need to get them to that. Yeah.

David Holmgren: And, I commend you for the work I see you are doing and continuing with. Yeah. Different, all sorts of different perspectives and contributions to how we sort of muddle through these futures and I think the potential to survive and thrive.

Dustbowl Diatribes host: We hope so. Yeah. Thank you very much for all the work you’ve done. Just personally for me, I mean, I’ve taken a PDC course and we try and see how we can incorporate permacultural ideas and techniques into everything we do. So just thank you personally.