David was recently interviewed by Patrick from Artist as Family. As they write on their blog:
“Our conversation ranged from the personal to the geopolitical, dark green ecology to bright green billionaires, pandemic constriction to war construction, the role of energy in shaping culture to the gaming of the progressive liberal media.”
You can watch the recording of their enlightening conversation here:
References:
Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren
Future Scenarios by David Holmgren
Crash on Demand: welcome to the Brown Tech Future by David Holmgren
History from the future: a prosperous way down by David Holmgren
RetroSuburbia: the downshifter’s guide to a resilient future by David Holmgren
Pandemic Brooding: Brown Tech in New Clothing by David Holmgren
Shades of Green (Lifestyle) Awards Reflection
Robert Newman’s History of Oil
Interview Transcript
(0m0s) Introduction and Personal Impact of Mandates
Artist as family host: Thanks David for having us here in your home at Medora. The last six months have been fairly intense for you, particularly, regarding vaccines, mandates and passports, and we’ve heard from a number of people, in these videos just how segregation and the discrimination has affected so many lives. And they’re often, things like, grandmothers not being able to attend a swimming pool to look after their granddaughters or people being refused, a rental property or economic, economic enclosure, and the difficulties of those things. But it’s been everyone has a different story. Yeah, so I thought it’d be really good to start with just hearing your personal story of, of this particularly over this last six months.
David Holmgren: Yeah, I suppose it’s very mixed for me because in part it’s been, this is part of what I not expected in exact form, but it’s part of my sense of, of course the world changing and all of that big picture view that I’m always trying to understand and always trying to predict what’s the next thing coming. So, what’s happened with the mandated vaccination and being outside of that and publicly stating that, the fact that there would be pushback effects, constriction, people not wanting to talk to you, those sorts of things. In some ways I expected, and most of my focus was on how are other people going to cope with this, because, of course, our own journey in resilience and living outside the system, not that we are totally, and certainly in a business sense, the constriction on what we’ve been able to do in terms of courses, tours, going to events, going to shops, going to cafes. Most of that for me has been my own internal ideological and self-discipline based band to the point that it’s, those things have become habitual. And that I don’t want to go to any of those places. I, in some ways, the impacts direct have been very little, but I have surprised myself in that sense of rise, of outrage, of exclusion, of the actual experience of it, as opposed to the empathetic connection to people who are suffering as a result of some sort of injustice. It is, to actually be part of the excluded, it goes a little bit beyond one’s intellectual and psychological preparation for that.
(3m36s) Economic Buffering, Smear Campaigns, and Childhood Echoes
Artist as family host: Now, I understand that you, the, what you and Sue have been doing for decades has buffered you from. particularly the economic constraints that have been put on to people who have chosen not to get covid injections. Mm-hmm. But as a, community friend and a family friend, I’ve, we’ve checked in over the last six months here and there and there have been some quite dark weeks. Your long professional life, and in service to ecological society and building ecological culture, was really smeared and there was a relationship made between you and neo nazism, which of course is absurd. And, you know, can be laughed off because it’s so absurd. I think the attack on yourselves. certainly the attack we felt on ourselves, was pretty heavy for a while there.
David Holmgren: I think for me, that weight, I was sort of in a sense wanting to bring that on. ’cause there’d been a whole lot of tension about when is this going to break? And there were elements of that going back when I wrote Principles and Pathways more than 20 years ago. Who’s the journalist who’s gonna go through this with a fine tooth comb and tear it to pieces to discredit me because there’s so many challenging and if you like, wild ideas in that book. And, when we did RetroSuburbia, I thought maybe it’ll really happen with that. And various of my essays, about the pandemic especially. The the last one, one before going to the marches where I sort of stated sort of publicly position and made it very, very clear. But it was actually the social media dynamic of us being in a march with our 20-year-old banner permaculture, local solutions to global problems, a positive message, and yes, being branded as marching with neo Nazis. So that social media dynamic of not being part of social media for me, although we project our work with social media. For me, I look up those things occasionally like a website, but they’re inactive. They’re sort of not dead, but passive things because I am not being fed this stuff. And I noticed the huge difference that, yeah, all these things that were being said about me and I saw some of them and whatever they, in a way, and I don’t think I’m just covering this and playing strong, it felt a bit like water off a duck’s bag. Oh, finally there’s the Flo of just crap in the psychosocial angst. I think also that reawakened the childhood experience of exclusion. Yeah.
Artist as family host: Not exclusion. Is that because your parents were in the Communist Party or,
David Holmgren: Well, my parents left the Communist party right before I was born. Right. Or my mother about right. Shortly after I was born in the fifties. Oh, so this is more childhood Yeah. Childhood e experience. Right. Uh, during the Vietnam War years. Yeah. Uh, when I was bashed up at school for being a comm traitor in 1964, because I refused to stand up for God Safe, the Queen at the Anzac Day, assembly, at a primary school of 600 people.
Artist as family host: How old were you then?
David Holmgren: Uh, I was nine. And my parents were at the forefront of the activism against the war. And that was the point at which Australia had just sent soldiers. And, the, and for me the difference in terms of exclusion back then is that it wasn’t like the, what happened to the discrimination against the WG kids, let alone the ABO kids, as was the language of the time they couldn’t do anything about their exclusion. Whereas I was sort of a white average, maybe lower middle class family. I mean, I was Jewish, but that wasn’t noticeable in any way. So there was nothing about my exclusion. That I couldn’t do anything about. I chose to be different. Yeah. I chose to stand out and to receive the punishment of that. So that sense of being the outsider and being prepared to do that. This recent experience sort of brought all that back, but it did sort of shatter that comfortable thing of being the pioneer of a positive in environmental solutions. You know, that permaculture is almost like a, to some extent a, a motherhood positive thing that, Australian society, there’s huge sense of goodwill about it, and that goodwill has come to me increasingly over the years because I was there at the beginning and because I have held to those values through all the dark decades, and there’s a certain status and credibility that the recent experience of being an anti-vaxxer, the unclean, the lost soul, the, all of those things is,
(10m37s) Shifting Perceptions and Solidarity with the Excluded
Artist as family host: I share, I think with you a similar, acceptance of being either fashionable, which we were, which we were, our household was before like weird, fashionable, marginal, fashionable, cool. Yeah. You know, and video. And then to be completely unfashionable and to actually go, oh, that’s actually, that brings certain gifts as well. So yeah, I think, I think that’s the thing that I share with you that there, there isn’t this need to be in, in the right camp. And in fact, being in the incorrect camp is actually, given some incredible revelations about the culture. Generally,
David Holmgren: yes. For me, it’s given a greater sense of solidarity with ordinary, maybe socially conservative people, people who trusted in the system, people who I might have in the past regarded as naive or not really aware of their own best interests or having really different values. But to see a proportion of those people, some minority who said for whatever reason, no, I can’t go there in terms of the vaccination and then the acts falling on their world, being, you know, losing their job, uh, losing their family, connections, all of those things. And being cast as the outsider, as the unclean that, what must it be like feeling that empathetic connection? That there needs to be solidarity with those people. And that’s what I was feeling intensely in the period when the illegal marches were happening in Melbourne and the police violence was at a level that definitely seemed to exceed what those of us on the radical left were sort of not shocked about. Generally, you know, we know. The past experience. You know, we know that anti-globalisation March, one of the few, anti things that I’ve been involved with over the decades, back in 2000, in Melbourne, what that banner was made for, how it was a party atmosphere one day, and then the day we weren’t there, the police came out and bashed people. I, in some ways I know and expect that, but to see that happening the way it was to people who weren’t out there sort of trying to, we want society to do something completely different. No, just we want to be left alone to be allowed to be who we are and have control over our own bodies. That, that was very strong for me emotionally.
(14m19s) Choice, Coercion, and the Crumbling Narrative
Artist as family host: choice is, as a big part of this, we are often told, well, you have a choice. So the discrimination you’re facing at the moment or the segregation you’re facing at the moment is justified because you, you have a choice. And to me, that isn’t a choice. That is actually coercion and manipulation.
David Holmgren: And so,
Artist as family host: yeah, I just, yeah,
David Holmgren: the notions of choice, I mean, it’s ridiculous in any sort of. Intellectual debate sense just does not stand up. It’s not, it is not worth even discussing. It’s like ridiculous propaganda and distortion of meanings of words to say people have a choice. But in that sense of the context, I feel I probably had more choice than just about anyone. Yeah. Because of the way we have organised and also the stage of life and also because of the number of those delicate personal relationships that would be shattered, especially family ones were actually fewer. Uh, for me. There was still some of those that were very tricky, but not like so many of the tragic rifts that are happened in so many families. So in that sense, in a relative sense, yeah, I had a lot more choice than most people. But of course the concept is is ridiculous.
Artist as family host: Yeah. Yeah. So we’re at this point now where to those of us who have been following science, rather than the science, lowercase s science, and seeing that the narrative is really crumbling, we’re working on a new film at the moment, showing statistics from the uk and we’re trying to compare those with the Australian statistics, particularly along covid deaths relating to vaccination status, which are not, is not looking good, for double and triple vaccinated people as what appears to be immune fatigue. Uh, and there was an article in The Guardian just recently, by Eric Topple arguing that natural immunity plus one dose is scientifically shown to be the strongest immunity there is. So, to all of those people who got one dose and then a really bad adverse reaction and just couldn’t go back then got covid, well, they’re actually the most protected. Um, but natural immunity, of course is really very superior. So for those of us who have trusted the microbiome, world and being very skeptical of corporations with a long track record of criminal behaviour such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca, it looks like we took the right path despite the pushback and the incredible amount of abuse, both your household and our household has received. But as the narrative crumbles, we now have a war. It seems to me, that there is this unfolding narrative that the vaccines have been a colossal failure. They’ve made a lot of money for people like Bill Gates and for Pfizer and certain individuals, but a lot of people are economically, not just people who didn’t get the vaccine and can’t work, but actually a lot of people are economically ruined, or are really struggling while a small bunch have made huge amounts of money. Yeah. So that shift from pandemic chaos to war chaos, I just wonder whether you could just, where your thinking is at the moment on that.
(18m43s) Geopolitical Context: Limits to Growth, Crises, and Power
David Holmgren: I mean, I shouldn’t do the, I told you so thing. And as a futurist, that’s part of my role in the last decade or more since the publication of future scenarios. Uh, this, can I use my big picture holistic systems, thinking through permaculture and combine it with my heritage of geopolitical real understanding of how real power lies. ’cause this power in the human world and power in the natural world are not just metaphors. These are actually all the same story. The human story is nested within the ecological story. So. In recent years and virtually the last two decades I’ve seen, part of my role is to help the people committed to the positive solutions of permaculture and kindred movements, to give them, help them a little bit with a bit of the over her, the horizon radar, thinking about what’s coming next in the unfolding chaos that we call the limits to growth crisis that we’ve known about now for 50 years, that eventually industrial civilisation, quite quickly reaches the limits of resources to sustain it and where it can send all the pollution and that those distill into two emblematic actual, macro crises, the depletion of the greatest resource, which is sustained humanity, the king one, which is oil, and then the king pollution story, which is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and resulting climate change. Of course, there are a myriad others from pandemics and resource, other resource depletion and species extinction. And also just the multi-generational downsides of affluence. When you run mass society affluence for generations, all sorts of debts build up. And of course the financial system, the magic of money, which is coming to its final limit so many ways in which all of these stories are combining. So. When Covid came around, it just felt like part of that whole process and that I, once I saw the way that was being used to restructure society, the way elites have always used crises to try and shift systems that are resistant to shifting when they’re not in crisis. I thought that, well, at some point this story relating to this virus is going to fail as a driver of big structural change from the top and an explanation for why the world has fallen apart and there will need to be some other story. And the two I most likely saw was, um. war with Russia, and collapse of the global financial system, that they would be the next crisis. Mm-hmm. But of course, if we step back a little bit, before Covid in 2016, I wrote a short story called History from the Future about our region here in Central Victoria over the next, 60 years. A story told from 2086, and it included in 2022, a short war between the US and China. Well, you know, the, in a way when I was thinking back, back then, a lot of my actual practical thinking was much more worried about what was happening, between the Western powers and Russia. So that meant that really from about 2010, I had been following the situation in Eastern Europe very, very closely. And it was actually one of the reasons that I said quite provocatively to people when the, in 2016 when, Trump ended up as the stunningly, as the Republican candidate facing off Hillary Clinton. And I said to friends, oh, well I hope Donald Trump gets elected because I thought that under a Clinton administration, the risks of nuclear war with Russia would be far greater than with a Trump administration.
(24m12s) Neocons, Deep State Strategy, and the Ukraine Context
Artist as family host: Do you wanna give a little context for that?
David Holmgren: Yeah. So it’s important to understand that. What are called the neocons, this sort of very big picture. Hard you could say, hard right, of the Republican party, but really a more broad, deep state view about how for the United States to continue to be the dominant power in the world for another a hundred years. The plan for the new American century written in, I think 98, published on the web, was the precursor to a lot of the strategies that unfolded in Afghanistan. Um,
Artist as family host: so this is Cheney and Bush? Yeah.
David Holmgren: Yeah. So they were the implementers, you know, under the Bush administration, but there were people, who were involved and sort of. Behind that. And then they became discredited through the bush years because of the disasters of weapons of mass destruction and the chaos of what happened in Iraq, which people see as largely as incompetence. Whereas I saw it as actually a deliberate destruction of a country. Uh, and there’s good reasons why they were wanting to destroy that country. Um, so the thing is, I don’t have a sort of view about that the system being completely incompetent, but an empire at its end stage is very, very dangerous as it tries to maintain power against both other rising empires. And also the fact that maybe empires overall, their days are actually numbered because of this. The resources to support that huge projection of power in the world is actually going to be and is already declining. Mm. And so therefore, it doesn’t matter whose empire it is, maybe the days of empires at that global scale or actually numbered. So that’s my sort of, you know, big picture context. And the Anglo-American Western Empire as the first really global empire was seeing its greatest threat as China. Mm-hmm. But that in the shorter term, it had to complete the process that wasn’t completed in the nineties, the crushing of Russia. Mm-hmm. And so the strategic objective to crush Russia and then deal with China was part of the NeoCon strategy and the Trump administration. Effectively put a spanner in the works of what was already unfolding in Ukraine with the coup that was initiated under the Obama administration in 2014.
Artist as family host: So that, move from a NeoCon agenda into a Democrat agenda through the likes of Hillary Clinton. Can you just describe that?
David Holmgren: Yeah. So under Obama, it appeared the neocons had been pushed back. Mm-hmm. But actually Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and she was responsible for the destruction of Libya for a lot of parts of the continuation of what was the NeoCon agenda. But perhaps history will show that Obama and some other. People in the, in that administration were restraining in some ways part of that agenda. Mm-hmm. And maybe still on the path of the, war on terror agenda, which in the scheme of things was a distraction, but partly an enabler to destroy those various countries like Libya, Syria, Iraq, aiming for Iran, of course, Afghanistan, all of those. So it’s important to understand that Hillary’s, uh, one of her closest aides, Victoria Newland, was managing things in Ukraine and she was also very involved in the destruction of Libya and that Hillary and Victoria were very, very close. And that under Hillary Clinton. Victor Newland was going to become Secretary of State. Now the weird thing is that Victorian Newland is a lifelong Democrat, was married to this guy Robert Kagan, who is a hard right hawkish Republican who wrote the plan for the New American century. And when I realized that these two were husband and wife, the thought of, oh, and she’s going to be Secretary of State, and the setup that had already unfolded in Ukraine with this very bloody coup that we called a Democratic revolution, the Euro maiden square revolution where the democratically elected Russia aligned, Ukrainian government was replaced with a Western. Aligned.
(29m57s) Political Cynicism, Trump, and Elite Manipulation
Artist as family host: You can see why people wanted Bernie Sanders or Trump because both of those are disabling the NeoCon democrat relationship and in, in what you are describing as actually marriage in, in a very strategic relationship. And so the cynicism that has for, for people that politically astute Americans, that could see this, the war machine, under those, that NeoCon democratic policy, which was only on the surface, characteristically different, but actually underneath was very structurally the same thing. And we see that with the liberal labor. Liberal and labor in Australia. A similar, very similar thing. Yeah. And in, in the UK and many of the, this sort of, these duopolies has people being so cynical about them that you’re getting a lot of independence and fringe parties, popping up. But yeah, just to go back to, where you left off, I think to be mindful of just why someone like Trump got in as problematic as he is politically, socially, ecologically. Um, there is, there is a reason for that. And, and I think that the Trump Russia story is quite interesting.
David Holmgren: Yes. Well, in that context, it was very important. Once this bull in the China shop, this spanner in the works, Trump had got in the, the ability of. The empire, the deep state, the people who think strategically in the long term, the stuff that rides out the ups and downs of elections and everything to, towards looking to that really long-term picture. And I have some respect, at least for people who at least think long term because most of our society is just this fluff of the next few minutes or the next election cycle, the next meme. Yeah. And so as an ecological thinker, as a deep thinker about those things, I think at least there’s some people thinking about these things. But of course the way in which they’re thinking and what they’re choosing to do and manipulate populations and be prepared to not just break eggs, but smash nations, and. Dump populations in how you deal with these really big challenges, the people who think at that stratospheric level, and of course, you know, some of those big thinkers that have influenced that world, all through my life, like Henry Kissinger, are still alive and are still whispering in the ears of their, their understudies. Uh, like Henry Kissinger was the mentor to, Klaus Schwab who created the World Economic Forum, him when he was only 32 years of age and ran the First World Economic Forum in 1971. So this lineage of these elite people without resorting to it being this simple cabal of evil grand minds that are running the world, I think that story is. It is a simplistic, but at least more valid interpretation of what’s going on in the world than the fantasy we get out of our media, you know, which are really just Fanta
Artist as family host: fairy stories. Would you, would you say that that, those global elites that, the, the billionaire philanthropist class, philanthropist class, uh, could be considered in this post democratic world? We’ve stepped into, um, a kind of neo feudalism.
David Holmgren: Yes, to an extent, but they’re also all fighting each other. Like one of the characteristics, one of the theories of the failures of civilisations.
Artist as family host: But that’s the fetal system. Was that too, like small principalities?
David Holmgren: Yeah. Though they ended up with this sort of like, to some extent their own territories in a geographic sense. Yeah. Whereas, there’s this fights going on at a larger scale and I’m still very agnostic about how much that’s happening at the global scale between empires, how much there is synergy between China and the United States. I mean, we use these nation states sort of labels, but you know how much that is meaningful in this fluid flow of power, which will by the evidence of history all be reorganised, very radically, in this decade that we’re in.
(35m16s) Complexity of Power: Competition and Cooperation
Artist as family host: But I take your point about the infighting and that one of the things that I always put back to highly conspiratorial folk that I’m having a conversation with is that I just don’t believe in some sort of, like, the 1% are all organised and on par, and they sit in circle and they express themselves, and they, they’re actually some of the most competitive and ruthless people in the world. So the backstabbing nature can’t create a one simple one story, even though the World Economic Forum and places like this do actually, you know, find places of accord to work for each other’s wealth, ac recruitment, and of course there’s that going on. But there is, as you say, there is also a lot of backstabbing and a lot of struggling for power.
David Holmgren: But of course a lot of these things can be seen from an ecological perspective that there is both competition and cooperation. In all levels of nature, in all human systems, and that a lot of what people see as conspiratorial is just recognising that cooperative common interests emerge naturally in the same way that they emerge between cops and robbers. There’s been this that actually both, increase in number and depend on each other. Uh, that during the Cold War, the KGB and the CIA, actually their validity in their constituent populations was enhanced by the behaviour of the other, so they’re actually in an ecosystem. Together, these things develop naturally and people’s blindness to not see those things is because of ideology around good and bad. So these people are good actors, so they could never naturally start doing things, you know, with mutual benefit with bad people because they wouldn’t, would they? So once we step back from that and see that, no, there’s a, it’s actually natural for entities to find coalition. And actually that’s important because that’s how
Artist as family host: nature works. But in an eco system or within a biome, if one species or one, one entity. Over competes or is is where competition is dominating and cooperative. Uh, mutualism isn’t, and that recedes, which it seems to be, and that’s the global culture at the moment. There seems to be, I mean I don’t like thinking of about ecology in terms of balance, but there’s always sort of growth and decline of certain species. Um, but we know, we know that if there are too many herbivores, and not enough apex predators, there is a problem. And if there’s too many apex predators, and it seems like we’re, we’re in a culture of too many apex predators, which is toxic patriarchy.
(38m29s) Elite Corruption and the Ecological Basis of Power
David Holmgren: It’s like when elites start to believe that they are the purpose of the system. Hmm. Rather than they’re there to serve the system and as Howard OEM said, maximise power of all levels in the system. Mm-hmm. And when they start to believe that the purpose of the system is them, then that is the corruption, which of course has been deep and longstanding. And some people would say, oh, it’s always been like that. But I think human societies go in these pulses where there is huge destructive cycles as a result of that corruption at the top and the limits of not respecting the things at the bottom, the people at the bottom, nature at the bottom, which is actually sustaining and providing the wealth and starting to believe that those at the top actually create the wealth. So this sort of deep civilisational level corruption, of course, is not to do with the likes of. Trump, Biden, Putin. I mean, this is way, way bigger than that. So that’s part of, for me, leads me away from the evil person view of history and what’s unfolding and the good person, the hero, and the villain, and also away from the ideological view. So for example, why was the Soviet Union a superpower? Well, you know, my, in my parents’ youth, they, and many of their ilk thought it was because of the brilliance of Marxism that had, and to some extent it had captured the imagination and the energy of people’s in. Not just the Russia, but the wider Soviet Union and that enormous energy, human capacity. Mm. But look, it was mostly because Russia alone is the equal with the United States and Saudi Arabia, the biggest oil provinces in the world. So rather than the brilliance of Marxism, it was the brilliance of nature’s, stored wealth in millions, hundreds of millions of years have stored sunlight. Why was the United States this great superpower? Most people would say, oh, the brilliance of capitalism and free markets and democracy. No, it’s actually because of its oil wealth. So that sort of ecological, energetic view sort of moves beyond this thing of ideology. Um, and I think it’s also important to recognise that that. Um, uh, dictatorial and then beyond that to, um, totalitarian forms of power. Really just use ideology. And so, you know, there’s certainly no ideology behind, um, the conflict in Europe. It’s,
(41m59s) Ukraine War: Security, History, and Energy Geopolitics
Artist as family host: really the use of ideology, it’s security, isn’t it? It’s a security issue, that this war, that Ukrainians are suffering because of a sec, a perceived security threat, that Putin is.
David Holmgren: Well, we need to step back a few things. Firstly, Russia’s had this deep history of being invaded from the west repeatedly. The last time 20 million citizens died. Mm-hmm. A and pushed back the,
Artist as family host: when was that?
David Holmgren: The second World War? Yeah. Yeah. Um, the greatest loss of any country by far, the US Didn’t u lose one civilian in the second World War?
Artist as family host: I think what did, they can’t remember whether they lost 4,000 or 40,000 soldiers or something. Do you mean at Oh, and not one civilian? Yeah. Yeah. Not, not even in Pearl Harbor. That was all, uh, no, it was all, all sailors. Yeah. Wow.
David Holmgren: I think, I think it might’ve, yeah, there was a whole lot of sailors died in that. But yeah, there was, my understanding is there’s no civilians lost in the World War. So there’s all that sort of history and the fact that, uh, Ukraine, of course, was part of the Soviet Union and the agreement for the reification of Germany and the disillusion of the Soviet Union was based on the fact that NATO would not move one inch further east. And through the nineties, they in fact, broke that agreement. Uh, with Russia and protect, uh, progressively adopted, all of the countries of Eastern Europe into, into nato. And the last big one, which was of course not just moving right up to Russia’s border, was Ukraine. So the us manipulation of the politics there. Uh, and then actually two regime change the colour revolution of the orange revolution of 2004, and then the much more bloody one of 2014 to keep tipping the politics of Ukraine back towards being,
Artist as family host: uh, part of the west. Now the interesting thing about the 2014, um, unrest in, in Ukraine is that that was. Largely led by neo-Nazis. Hmm. And yet what’s so interesting is the, yeah, the labeling of neo-Nazis onto any, any bad, perceived bad guy like Putin is Hitler. And, and it’s not to say that I think that any of these people are good or bad guys. And I think that’s what I’m hearing from your nuance perspective, that this is actually very much, comes from an ecological or energetic place. The, so the geopolitics is formed by how much available energy, which is, you’ve been consistently talking about this for decades, but Yeah. But to go back into the micro of this unhappy situation for Ukrainian people right now, firstly, what do you think would end this quickly? And secondly, just to talk a little bit about the n the neo-Nazi politics in Ukrainian government, that’s actually happening right now. I’ve heard of Russian Ukrainians being killed by neo-Nazis. There’s been reports,
(45m37s) The Crucial Role of Natural Gas Pipelines
David Holmgren: look before that Patrick do need to mention that the gas, which is the only fossil fuel that has the net energy that can to some extent substitute for oil and that we’ve been in a process of the last 50 or more years of progressively becoming more and more dependent on gas is critically different in the way it can move around the world. Yeah. It wasn’t until the 1970s here in Australia that all the infrastructure was built to actually ship gas. Still very expensive. So basically pipelines are the way gases distributed and Russia and Central Asia. Uh, the great reserves of gas, but the gas industry in the old Soviet Union started in Ukraine. All of those fields have been long depleted, but all the pipeline networks that were built over the decades came out from the hub in Ukraine, and then after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That pipeline hub became incredibly important in supplying Europe, especially when the North Sea, with its great resources, that supplied made Britain and Norway exporters of gas, that that rapidly depleted. And Europe has become incredibly dependent on Russian gas, but through the Ukrainian pipelines. Mm. And Ukraine is a very poor country, and they had the privileges of old Soviet era mates rates on their gas, and they got a fee for managing the pipelines for it going through. And eventually Russia said, can’t remember what year it was. Uh, as the gas prices went up, they said, look, you’re gonna have to pay world gas prices. And the Ukrainians said, we can’t afford it. And so the Russians turned off some of the gas coming through, and then the Ukrainians just stole the gas that was coming through their pipelines going to Italy, Germany, and all of these other pipelines started to be built like the Nord Stream one. And then the Americans were building pipelines to bypass Russia completely coming from Azerbaijan through Georgia, which they just incorporated into nato, and down through Turkey. And then during the short war in 2008. With Russia, the Russians bombed either side of that brand new pipeline just to remind them that they actually could turn it off. So this, most people are completely clueless about all of this stuff. Yeah. And you know, I joked after nine 11, and the stories about Afghanistan and NATO going to Afghanistan, what NATO is the organisation for control of Stan, this huge sort of strategic battle going on. So without that understanding of history, all of this other stuff is just ridiculous fairy stories.
(48m50s) Understanding History Through Energy, Not Just Human Stories
David Holmgren: Mm. And it’s the same as that. We don’t have a shared history of the real history of the 20th century. So through energy, yes.
Artist as family host: Yeah, through energy. Um, it’s always the human story, isn’t it? It’s like we are storytellers, we do. I get it. Yeah. I get that the media and books are written on this prince and that president and, you know,
David Holmgren: well, Archduke Nan got shot.
Artist as family host: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And
David Holmgren: then Europe collapsed into mayhem and warfare. And as British comedian, Robert Newman said, no one is that popular.
Artist as family host: Yeah, exactly. And the, whereas the Berlin to Baghdad railway for getting oil,
David Holmgren: so the, the German Navy would have secure supplies of oil. For their Navy. ’cause they’d changed from coal to oil following the British change. And that gave, I’d know something like a 30% speed increase in navies by being powered
Artist as family host: by
David Holmgren: oil rather
Artist as family host: than coal. And Churchill feeling very threatened about that. And so that, that story, which again is an, and that’s over a hundred years ago. Yeah. Which is an energy story. Yes. Is just constantly disappeared for the human complexes and the, you know, like we’ve got Biden and Putin at the moment.
David Holmgren: Yes. So the same year that the coup was happening in Ukraine 2014 that we sponsored using the Nazis to overthrow, we, we, you know, our empire that we are a part of, we here in this household, I had my usual listening to radio national. Every day hearing endless different stories about the First World War, every imaginable take on the First World War. Not one of those stories, those erudite academics was about the energetic resource, competition reasons and or even what was the strategic win that Anzac represented rather than this story about it being a great failure of British imperial hubris? No, it was actually incredibly successful and that’s why Churchill who managed that rose in status because he managed that. Now, I won’t go into what the details of that were, but even a hundred years later, we could not be told the truth. We are still the children who must be fed these fairy stories that are accepted as part of serious discourse and. So that’s why conventional politics, you know, there’s no point in actually engaging a lot of these things because I don’t accept any of the version of reality that,
(51m50s) The Ecological Lens and the Need for Generalists
Artist as family host: well, it, and that reminds me, of a, an attack that, artist as family often has got over the last six months, stick to farming. And you know, that, that you can only be one thing and your lane is defined. You, you can define it if you’re privileged enough, but then you should stick in your lane. Whereas actually without being a farmer in an ecological sense, you have to understand energy. And if you understand energy, then you actually have to, then it leads to politics. So, so what you’re essentially saying is that, the absence of generalists being able to. Particularly from an ecological lens, which is what we need right now, you know, more than ever is in, is that ecological, energetic, uh, understanding. And I’m just trying to think of the author. No, not,
David Holmgren: not, uh, Lewis Mumford.
Artist as family host: Yeah. Lewis Mumford, yes.
David Holmgren: Yeah. So he was,
Artist as family host: he was important for you.
David Holmgren: He was a very influential thinker on my parents and I read the city in history, which was really, he’s regarded as the father of ecological history actually. Um, and, uh, yeah, the, there are these understandings in our academic lineage, and there are always these voices, but they are sort of like, ignored or suppressed. I suppose that the thing that even though I get sort of agitated about these things, I think the. Energetic geopolitical story does at least tone down the sense of outrage about good and evil. Mm-hmm. Because although I think it’s important to be motivated around justice and and notions of the search for truth, I think it’s also important to sort of see those larger pictures and have some sort of, not acquiescence, but sort of comprehension of those complexities and what drives people as individuals and nation states to do things. And just returning to that energy lens, every energy transition, like the transition from coal to oil. That involved the First World War. These big energy transitions have always involved geopolitical realignment. So the idea that even driven by climate change, we’re gonna have this a hundred percent renewable energy rollout and let’s say that’s all possible. And industrial civilisation continue. It has such completely different dynamics of where those resources are, what is their forms that they will restructure, the whole existence of nations and the disillusion of nations and the formation of new ones. And of course, in my big picture view, renewable resources are more distributed than fossil resources, which are concentrated in particular points, holes in the ground. Whereas sunlight and wind is across the landscape. So it’s like forestry and agriculture as a source of energetic wealth. Mm-hmm. It suggests actually a redistribution of power. And so how could that happen without there being current systems being overturned? So what’s happening in Europe when we stand back in that large sense is part of that, larger story. It would be ridiculous to think that there wouldn’t be, this reorganisation. And of course, what’s happening currently in the Ukraine and Russia is actually just a minor stage tweaking of that. But of course, there’s always that risk that it actually unravels into nuclear annihilation. In the meantime, it’s incredibly tragic for the people of Ukraine. And the main cause of that tragedy has been the actions of the West over the last 20 years. Mm-hmm. That, that’s very, very clear in terms of the Nazi, neo-Nazi label that’s been thrown around. Unfortunately, Ukraine is the place in the world where those labels actually do apply to significant proportion of the politics. And that over the last 20 years that has been cultivated by the West. But it turns out that the recent readings I’ve been doing on this, going back to the beginnings of the Cold War, when, the NATO and the CIA were using cells of, hard right extremists, and actually in a lot of cases, ex Nazis in their own countries as little sleeper cells, that if there was a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Those sleeper cells would come to life. They were maintained right through, and they ended up doing some other nasty things like false flag operations, in the 1970s and eighties, killing people in Western European countries. But that’s small compared with what the CIA maintained inside the Soviet Union itself, inside Ukraine of the old Nazis as something to sort of try and eat away and potentially attack the Soviet Union from within.
(58m3s) Information Sources and Navigating Ideological Divides
Artist as family host: Who are some of your main sources in this?
David Holmgren: Uh, sources that were collated together through energy bulletin, which became resilience. Mm-hmm. Energy bulletin was course started by colleagues who were around the issue of peak oil and trying to understand that. Um, and so through the. The years, that was a major source. And then in the debates around peak oil and the economic sort of unraveling that would happen, a debate emerged around whether we would face a deflationary economic collapse or a hyperinflationary. And some of the thinkers who were debating that, that I saw through all of those researchers on energy bulletin was Nicole Foss and her writing partner, um, Raul, his pen name, largi. And then, you know, I think about 2010, they formed the Automatic Earth, which had a much stronger focus on finance, and the relationship between finance and energy and geopolitics. And so my thinking started to move. From the ecological, energetic basis of things to trying to better understand the complexities of money. Because even though those things are derivative, they, they’re obviously incredibly complex and, you know, incredibly powerful. And then over the more recent years that blog, the Automatic Earth has been a clearinghouse for things. But interestingly, in the Trump era, um, the Automatic Earth became associated with this sort of right wing Trumpian sort of view of the world, mostly by people labeling it as such. And, resilience.org, managed, uh, and curated by colleagues from a left progressive, point of view sort of was sort of moved. In the other direction. Mm. So you get all of the things around skepticism about renewable energy, you would see much more,
Artist as family host: um, in the automatic earth. Well, that’s, that’s actually a really good point because one of the guardian’s main benefactors is Bill Gates.
(1h0m38s) Critique of “Green” Narratives and Elite Agendas
Artist as family host: Mm. When they refer to him, I think Gates gave the guardian something like $10 million in 2021. And you can see the pandemic narrative, being quite influenced there. I believe, I mean, that’s a complex story. I’m not saying it’s just a simple story, but, you know, they refer to him and he’s often referred to now as a green activist. So, this is someone who’s buying up land throughout the world, particularly in America for gm, GMO. Farming, which is, you know, in our language, yours and mine and many others is brown technology. It’s industrial brown technology. So it’s this very interesting, like the Republican and Democrat or the NeoCon and Democrat sort of relationship. This, you know, Klaus Schwab’s fourth industrial revolution agenda being this green tech. And you know, when I think of the green activist, I think of yourself and I think of Vandana, Shiva, an ecological and also ecological thinkers as you both are. Um, so, you know, this sort of, I guess, I guess this fits into the meaning crisis, that anything can just be labeled a neo-Nazi or a great, you know, labels and titles and words are losing their meaning or being, And maybe it’s part of Newspeak or double speak, that this kind of confusion around what things are. Because when I think of Gates, I think of GMO farming and his sort of, almost as Van Shiba says, a kind of Christopher Columbus about Al V Age in terms of just colonising land for GMO farming. She’s deeply concerned as many of us are. Um, but but Gates likes to present himself as the hero, the hero of the pandemic, the hero of new, new vaccines, the hero of new food. And with that, with people like Klaus Schwab, um, where he presents this Green Tech future as the fourth industrial revolution, whereas I think thinkers like yourself and Van Shiva are much more have been working towards. A microbiome and microbiome approach to life where technology and energy are important, but in terms of sharing world’s resources and producing equality, that we actually re regionalise and sovereignty, political sovereignty, um, is is it goes back to local places, bio regionalism in a way. Now you can see how that is also related to some aspects of the right. Um, and that’s been discussed before. But yeah, just to get back to this sort of slide from who are the greenies, um, and it, because it’s hard to tell these days what’s really going on.
David Holmgren: Well, I think when I was inducted into the, uh, green Hall of Fame, I can’t remember exactly where it was. I wrote an essay. Uh, about this and being alongside Bob Brown and Olivia Newton John, I think, in the Green Hall of Fame. Um, and this essay about this concept which was not mine of uh, light green, bright green, dark green and deep green and these different sort of elements and potentially complementarities between different shades of green ideology and strategy and politics. And, yeah, I thought it was a sort of a useful framework and the recognition that there’s useful complementarities, you know, that is not one right way. You know, the light green was the changing the light bulbs and green consumers and the bright green was, we’re gonna have the great renewable energy technology that’s gonna do all. These things and the deep green, the ecological deep ecological transition and the dark green that this civilisation is sort of actually coming to an end. And we must rebuild from the bottom, from the ruins. Uh, you know, and that, you know, I could sort of place myself in this spectrum and, you know, thought it was sort of quite useful and could see how, you know, one can acknowledge different parts of this. But I suppose over time, what’s happened is some of those different perspectives have been colonised by the worst aspects of the machine, of this dying civilisation.
Artist as family host: And you could call that brown green.
David Holmgren: Well, this. You know, in a sense it’s an extension of what corporations have long done, where they buy up a small company that has a good, brand or quality or reputation and then just consume it, you know, trash it. Um, you know that you buy an asset, you buy good will.
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