David Holmgren was recently a guest on the Healing with Confidence podcast with Natalie and Andrew.

You can listen to the podcast here or watch the conversation here:

Interview Transcript

(0m0s) Introduction to David Holmgren

Andrew: Today’s episode, Natalie and I interviewed David Holmgren, who’s the co-originator of the Permaculture concept. Following the publication of Permaculture One co-authored with Bill Mollison in 1978, David’s globally recognised as a leading ecological thinker, teacher, writer, and speaker, promoting permaculture as a realistic, attractive, and powerful alternative to dependent consumerism.

Andrew: David lives at Melliodora in central Victoria, Australia, on the unceded land of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. David’s work, the permaculture concept, has continually inspired Natalie and I to take small and slow steps towards ecological stewardship. And I think you’re going to get a lot out of this episode. But before we get to the interview, here’s a few words from our podcast sponsor, Nutrition with Confidence.

(0m56s) Podcast Sponsor: Nutrition with Confidence

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(3m8s) Defining Permaculture

Andrew: All right, David, thanks for being on the podcast today. I think a great place to start is just with a definition of permaculture. So in a nutshell, what is permaculture?

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, permaculture can be defined in lots of different ways, but I generally describe it as a design system for resilient living and land use, and at the same time, resilient and regenerative.

David Holmgren: So it’s concerned with both the production side of the equation, where we get our basic needs from a working relationship with nature and how we live and organise ourselves and make use of all those things through all our living arrangements, right through to institutions and structures in society.

David Holmgren: So it’s really covering a huge spectrum, but its origins can be said to be potentially historically a branch off the tree of organic agriculture. In its origins in the 1970s, both Bill Mollison and I were very embedded in one of the waves of emergence of organic farming, which of course had its origins much further back in the 1930s and forties.

(4m43s) Learning from Indigenous Cultures

Andrew: And in your book, we’ve read the, it’s a short, I think, 30-page book, Essence of Permaculture. I’m remembering the title right. You write this focus in permaculture on learning from indigenous cultures stems from these cultures having existed in relative balance with their environment and surviving for longer than any of our more recent experiments in civilisation.

Andrew: And I was wondering if you could share a bit more about how you began to learn about indigenous cultures learn from indigenous cultures.

David Holmgren: Well, I suppose when I met Bill Mollison, he just actually completed the family lineages of the Tasmanian Aborigines, which were thought to be extinct.

David Holmgren: And the descendants of those people he had academically traced all their lineages and met all those people scattered across Southern Australia, not just Tasmania. And so he had that connection, but we were also academically looking at what were the systems of management in so-called hunter-gatherer peoples, who apparently from a western point of view just wandered around the landscape and didn’t actually manage it or intervene.

David Holmgren: And we were discussing and interested in those ideas, especially that of Australian ecologist and anthropologist Rhys Jones, who in 1972, a couple of years before I met Bill Mollison, coined the term fire-stick farming to describe indigenous land use in Australia, which was sort of an early revival of observations that have been made by early explorers, that these people are just not randomly lighting fires.

David Holmgren: They’re actually engaged in a sophisticated land management system. And that observation had been lost for hundreds of years, effectively for quite political reasons why it had been expunged. So there were those aspects. And also looking at polycultures around the world of more, quite concretely, agricultural or horticultural garden agricultural systems, especially in the tropics that were still in existence in many places, especially not far to the north of Australia, in the Highlands of New Guinea. So some of that was coming from those sort of connections that Mollison had to some of those people who were very fragmented from their traditions, but still had elements of that.

David Holmgren: And also the crossover, I would say in the modern world between just traditional rural bush people, anywhere, including white settlers who’d only been in Tasmania and Australia for a few generations, that their culture was actually closer to indigenous culture than it was to a lot of urbanised modernity.

Andrew: Yeah.

David Holmgren: So rather than seeing just the invader culture as this foreign thing, which it very much was from the modern perspective, any rural people actually had a lot of elements still, that through our own lineages, we could discover a connection to land and nature. So this idea that permaculture explained to many traditional, older, rural, more self-sufficient people, at least in my experience in the 1980s, they would say, well, isn’t that just common sense?

Andrew: Yeah.

David Holmgren: And I’d say, well, a lot of permaculture, not all of it, but some of it is common sense, but it’s no longer common.

Natalie: Yeah.

David Holmgren: So in that sense, permaculture was not just learning from possible insights from long indigenous traditions, but also the rediscovery of our grandmother, grandfather, common sense.

Natalie: I love that. It’s like a remembering of that knowledge that’s been lost.

David Holmgren: Yeah. And an interesting anecdote in that regard. I suppose Australia as one of the most modern, early industrialised colonised by the first proto-industrial power in the beginning of the 18th century and by 1900 being the richest country in the world per head of population, in a sense we were a place even perhaps more than the United States or as much disconnected from a lot of those things by the effects of modernity.

David Holmgren: So that rediscovery here was often a multi-generational thing going back, but also learning from migrant peoples who were still closer, connected to land and in both our countries, that migrant culture, bringing some sort of connection to land has been important. And I remember many years ago, decades ago, having a young Japanese woman volunteer who’d been in Australia for a year and staying at various permaculture and related properties.

David Holmgren: And I said to her, what is the thing you’ve learned most importantly in your time in Australia? And she said to go home and talk to my grandmother.

David Holmgren: That’s amazing.

David Holmgren: Because in modern affluent Japan, there’s still this, not too far back, especially in rural areas, there’s this strong retention of traditional culture and knowledge about food and health and land that still exists.

(11m46s) The Importance of Remembering Ancestral Knowledge and Energy Descent

Natalie: Why, if someone were to tell you, oh, that’s not very important, how could you convince someone? Or what would you ask them to try to share? What’s the problem with not doing that? Or why is this so important to remember these kinds of things?

David Holmgren: Well, I think that gets to some of the assumptions that were built into permaculture from the beginning.

David Holmgren: Of course, I met Bill Mollison two years after the Limits to Growth Report was published, and one year after the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East triggered a rise in oil price from $5 a barrel to $40 a barrel, which triggered the first substantial recession in the Western economies after the post-war economic boom.

David Holmgren: And showed up this huge vulnerability of society to dependence on fossil fuels, which were obviously depleting in some way. And how that report was sort of thrust into the public consciousness and really influenced environmental thinking at the time, which was in a surging process of growth, both in an oppositional sense to bad things happening in the world, but also in the creative sense of ideas like organics and permaculture.

David Holmgren: So what came through that was a view of the future of one that I later defined or characterised as energy descent, that each generation into the future, instead of having more power over nature and more energy and material resources to continue creating more and more complexity and separation from nature, future generations would have less.

David Holmgren: And therefore the design rules, if not the exact patterns of societies that existed before the pulse of fossil fuel would be more of the pattern. So for example, relocalisation of economies and cultures rather than continuing globalisation and many, many other patterns. So that’s why it was essential from that perspective to say, well, we will need to develop some version of things that are attuned to actual physical and energetic realities.

David Holmgren: Which was a huge conflict with the idea of invincible human material progress, which is very strong, shows up in all civilisations that have this sort of pulse of resources. But in the modern world, it’s a very deep religion.

Natalie: Yeah, absolutely.

(14m58s) Overview of Permaculture Principles

Natalie: So I wonder if you could briefly name some of the principles of permaculture.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I suppose first it’s important to recognise that in Permaculture One that was published in 1978, there’s no clear list of permaculture principles there. They’re implicit in the text. And even when you get to Mollison’s encyclopedic Designers Manual a decade later, the Permaculture Designers Manual, there’s laws of necessities use and various principles. It’s only when you get to the Introduction to Permaculture, which Bill Mollison with Reny Slay. But actually Reny Slay was the main author, distilling 10 years of permaculture teaching through the eighties, and actually influenced by various American contributors is there in the Mollison lineage of permaculture teaching a sort of clear list of design principles.

David Holmgren: And then when I came back to Permaculture, in a sense, from being an observer of the emerging movement for 10 years and teaching principles in the nineties, I started to tweak and refine that framework, which then became published in 2002 in Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. And there’s many different iterations and explanations of permaculture principles.

David Holmgren: But over the last 25 years, that framework has become quite consolidated. And a lot of people have found, oh, this applies beyond gardening and farming. So starting with observe and interact is teaching us to unlearn some of the things that we’ve learned through modernity, especially of education ironically, that to learn something, we need to have our heads opened and the knowledge poured in, whereas in fact, reviving that childlike and that deep pattern in our cultural forebears of to learn by directly observing. And in fact, all animals that survive and thrive do so by observing and not just observing, but constantly interacting with their environment.

David Holmgren: So that is absolutely essential to rediscover those skills through skills like reading landscape and then recognising that all of these principles that are embedded in natural systems, we can see them operating in ecologies and then we can see them expressed through indigenous and traditional culture and we have to work out how to do those things appropriately in our own context, which is obviously different because the principles don’t give you any sort of answers. So catching and storing energy, and energy is of course, if you like, a currency for all resources that are necessary for an organism or for a system to survive, that those resources are not available in a steady flow.

David Holmgren: So you need to store them. Our bodies do that with fat over the winter. One of the highest dense energy density forms in nature, energy density equivalent to diesel, actually, body fat, love it. And that seasonal storage of traditional agricultures in temperate climates of the abundance of summer stored through preserves for the lean times.

David Holmgren: And we see it very basically in nature of the pulse of photosynthesis during the day in plants and then respiration at night, the storing energy, and then consumption of it. Whereas the modern world has made the supply of basic needs so reliable through regular wages going to the shop each week and getting half a dozen tomatoes right through the year that modern people start to think that that’s actually a normal thing.

David Holmgren: So this pulsing, adapting to this pulsing nature and thinking about that in, we could say in a financial sense of thinking about investment for the future rather than just now. But also the other principle that goes with that is to obtain a yield. So we need to eat today if we’re going to be able to plant the forest for the grandchildren.

David Holmgren: Which is sort of like capitalism distilled down to one principle amongst 12. And then that’s balanced by principles like diversity, where we don’t put all our eggs in one basket. The idea in agriculture of polyculture rather than monoculture was very foundational in permaculture. And the idea of integrated systems by default rather than segregation.

David Holmgren: In the modern world, we’ve tended to segregate functions. Firstly in the industrialised cities because the blacksmith shop in the village had turned into a giant satanic mill that was killing people with pollution. So let’s put the houses over there and they can commute each day on trains to the factory over here, segregating things that otherwise would be in conflict.

David Holmgren: And segregation is actually a part, a strategy in nature. It does exist, but by default things tend to be integrated. And a really interesting example of that is that for the average, modern person, the idea there’s farms for animals and there’s farms for growing crops, seems, yeah, that’s okay. You don’t have in nature animal ecosystems and plant ecosystems separate.

David Holmgren: They’re integrated. So all of those 12 design principles can be seen in natural ecosystems, in traditional and indigenous ways of organising things. And then they are sort of memory tools to check when we’re operating at the more specific level in design with strategies and techniques.

David Holmgren: How is what we are doing fitting into this larger framework. And I think it’s interesting that a lot of people in other fields, including the health field, have gone, oh yeah, well this applies in our field, or these are resonance there some of those things.

(22m48s) Permaculture, Nutrition, and Health: Healthy Soil, Healthy People

Natalie: Yeah. Especially with nutrition, it’s kind of part of my mission actually to, I can’t do my job well unless I get people reconnected with nature and the health of a person is directly correlated with the health of the food system that they’re connected to.

Natalie: So it’s just, that’s what nutrition is. And it’s funny that we separate agriculture and nutrition. They’re just so interconnected.

David Holmgren: Well, of course, in saying permaculture was a branch off the tree of organic agriculture, that lineage is really important. And I think the organic slogan that I remember that was so much part of those pioneers that I met in the seventies, but their forebears and writers in the 1930s and forties was healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy people. And that those ideas, organic farming, was not separate from the issues of integrated holistic approaches to health. And so although a lot of people might not necessarily make that obvious connection in permaculture, I think it’s very much there in the origins and it’s also there in the modern scientific battle that’s gone back and forth without people necessarily being aware of it between germ and terrain theory of disease.

David Holmgren: So what my observation has been is that in soil science, right through to gut microbiology, there’s been this gradually the scientific view that health is actually composed of a full balanced ecosystem, not a sterile one. And starting with things like in horticulture, the extremes of industrial horticulture are to grow healthy plants first sterilise the soil mix with carbon tetrachloride, and then your plants can just freely get all the nutrients without any of those nasty pathogenic organisms, which of course creates an open field for the invasion of pathogenic organisms.

David Holmgren: Whereas healthy soil is actually composed of all these beneficial organisms, a full ecosystem and the science behind that has become very well established. So I think there’s a parallel across all of these areas. I wasn’t until relatively recent decades aware of, I can’t even remember the name of the French, whether he was a microbiologist at the same time as Pasteur who developed the terrain theory that health is a result of the environmental balance. Béchamp.

Natalie: Is it Béchamp? Béchamp.

David Holmgren: Yeah, I think so. And obviously there’s validity and usefulness in understanding agents of disease, whether it’s in human health or in forest. Yes. Those trees are dying directly of Armillaria, a root fungus, which is killing those trees, but why is it killing those trees and not these others or whatever, because the Armillaria is everywhere in the forest. So those ideas I think are very relevant to assert today because we’ve had a massive pushback in my observation, in the field of health as a result of COVID and its discontent that’s sort of suddenly let’s sterilise everything, and the germ agent.

David Holmgren: This is the cause of everything. And so that’s a huge backward step, which you can say it’s just part of the way these things flux and flow. But I think permaculture has definitely been in that sense of health in natural ecosystems, in gardens, and right through logically into ourselves aligning with those ideas of full and balanced ecologies rather than sterile ones.

David Holmgren: And for me, that’s also personal because my partner in life, Sue Dennett, when she had her first son born in hospital in Sydney in 1972, he got golden staph in the hospital and then was given antibiotics. And when I met Sue, he was nine years old and was just at a point where he could start to eat relatively normal things and go to the odd party and eat junk food and not destroy his gut after Sue using Macrobiotics and other approaches to recover his gut flora being destroyed at birth through the antibiotics which were there to deal with an organism which had been created by the sterile environment of hospitals.

David Holmgren: That overuse of antiseptic had created golden staph even back then. So that lived experience of the downsides of being too successful at what is a natural and sensible objective of all people to make an environment clean. And what it illustrates is a design problem is when we get too powerful and successful at doing something which is sensible, but then we do it to such extremes where it starts to create worse problems.

David Holmgren: So I think that is a deep structural problem with having a lot of power. And this, I think applies with modern interventionist health in the same way that it applies in the landscape that, yeah. Like we can make all these synthetic fertilisers and we can use huge tractors and plow the soil to a deeper level.

David Holmgren: All of those things weren’t necessarily bad in some sort of limited way, but so I think that I would say that as a design problem, not just for humanity, but even in nature, when there’s too much power, things get done too big and they start to create different problems.

Natalie: Yeah. Wow.

(30m48s) The Problem of Separation in Agriculture and the Role of Animals

Andrew: And I wanted to track back to that concept of separation. When you were talking about we’ve got the livestock over here, right? In the feed lot, and then we’re going to do the vegetables over here. To me, I see obvious problems with that. But for someone who’s not as familiar with agriculture, what are the problems of that separation?

Andrew: And then I also am curious if you could share about what is the role of animals and animal input in a permaculture system?

David Holmgren: Yeah. I think the first thing to recognise is that in any agricultural system, like in any landscape, there’s a limited amount of concentrated plant material with small enough amounts of fibre and toxic or undesirable materials for animals like humans that live on the sort of more concentrated good parts of biomass to eat.

David Holmgren: There’s this huge amount of biomass, firstly, which is wood. And secondly, there’s all this other biomass that can only be eaten by animals with more adapted design, digestive systems such as four stomachs. And there’s this small amount of stuff that is actually good for us to eat. And that also has concentrated levels of mineral nutrition enough to support our huge demands, especially our large brain, like all animals high up on the food chain. We have that need for mineral nutritional density, which occurs in seeds and fruits and growing tips of special parts of relatively special plants. So that means just as a byproduct of attempting to grow those things, there’s a whole lot of other biomass just comes out of our gardens, in weeding.

David Holmgren: What can usefully use that? Well, animals. And whether it’s peasant peoples with fat rabbits in cages being fed the weeds out of their garden or whether it’s sheep grazing the grass. There’s that ability of animals to process and use things that we can’t use. So that complementarity and that then carries over into how do we manage landscape biomass in landscape without relying on fossil fuel, fire herbicide.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, there’s our own labour, cutting plants back and doing things. But animals are one of those big tools that our ancestors used. Big munchers, managing the landscape to make it open, fire, safe, all of the different things. And then the other side, of course, is that animals are contributing manure to the landscape as fertilising, stimulating that growth.

David Holmgren: And it’s a feedback loop. And of course it needs to be in the right balance. Otherwise it actually degrades the land. So that cycle, if you look at it from the other point of view of saying, oh well we can get that incredible mineral nutrition and everything more easily actually eating animals that have been eating plants because they’ve done a lot of the concentration.

David Holmgren: And that gathering together of that sometimes is easier. Say for example, eating a pig that’s been eating the acorns rather than us gathering the acorns and leaching the tannin out of it and eating the acorns and that we get all this fat and other beneficial nutritional things. So obviously our ancestors in most places have done both of those things in extreme environments.

David Holmgren: People have lived on largely just animals like Inuit peoples and whatever. And then the other extreme when we have, especially in the tropics, but in very minerally rich fertile valley systems where civilisations over long periods of time have built up very dense populations. People have tended to have more plant-based diets and less animal food, especially in India and China and Asia.

David Holmgren: That pattern became quite strongly established. And because it’s ecologically works better, and also plant foods tend to be more minerally balanced in those geologically young, naturally fertile areas where the mineral base in the soil is still strong, unlike places like Australia and parts of Africa and other parts, even parts of the United States where the infertility of soils, the loss of those minerals mean that it’s a bit harder to get that balanced nutrition from plants.

David Holmgren: So those things have affected how our ancestors have done stuff in different places. But if we look at it from the modern point of view and the overeating of meat and the using fossil fuels directly and indirectly to creating animal feed lots, you end up with this huge byproduct of animal manure, which is stinking and gassing off greenhouse gas emissions and whatever, which is needed back over where the plants are grown.

David Holmgren: So you need to sort of move that across, or you don’t bother because you are using artificial fertilisers. And then that just becomes a form of pollution. Obviously you need to get the animals and the plant systems back integrated and at smaller scales. And of course that actually addresses the horrendous animal welfare things of large centralised systems that from our personal point of view, we’ve refused to participate in any of that world for for our whole adult lives.

David Holmgren: We never have bought meat that has gone through the central abattoir system. And I think that debate about animals, it is possible to have vegan permaculture systems. I was quite personally challenged on a tour we did in 94, a teaching and study tour in Europe. And the last place we stayed was a small farm in Sweden where they grew all of their own food and they were using Fukuoka type methods of direct sowing without plowing. And they did have animals, horses and pigs, but they were just pets. And for me that was actually quite a challenge. Oh, this is very difficult to do, not have animals as part of the diet and part of the essential part of the system. They were still there as part of the system for their services, if you like, the ecological services including being friendly animals. So it is possible to arrange things in all sorts of ways, but I’ve also said that there’s a complementarity between different cultural diets and personal dispositions, that it’s not necessarily best for everyone to do exactly the same thing.

David Holmgren: And that there can be complementarities between those differences in the way land is managed. And obviously that issue of the role of animals. But it is one that a lot of people who are interested in permaculture find very contentious. Bill Mollison used to be a bit scathing in his critique of vegetarians, let alone vegans. I’m more modest in that and yeah, just recognising that some way or another animals are part of the system and that includes actually all the wild animals, right? You can’t think about an ecosystem as just plants.

(40m24s) Vegetarianism, Veganism, and the “Problem is the Solution” Principle

Natalie: I used to be vegetarian and actually vegan for a long time. And then I was doing it mostly for the environment and then the more I learned that you can’t grow really good, healthy soil or plants from healthy soil without animal input, then I realised, okay, there needs to be a better way.

Natalie: And it makes me think of the permaculture principle of the problem can be the solution and using that. It just makes sense of, okay. The reactionary of, oh, I don’t want to eat animals because they’re not treated well in our society and we don’t have the right system set up.

Natalie: Well, that’s reactionary and what are the impacts of that to my health? And also, it’s not like I can change that, but one way I could change it is actually putting effort into gathering or supporting local farmers who are doing it the way that I want it to be done. Yep. And if we can keep working towards connecting those two parts of our system of, there’s the problem of the manure building up, how can we connect that to soils that need fertiliser?

Natalie: How can we do that? Maybe we can, or maybe it needs to be rethought altogether. I don’t know.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well that’s an interesting dilemma that I addressed in Principles and Pathways and used an example of an innovative intensive piggery that was using the energy from the manure to run the intensive system and then also making composts, which were sold.

David Holmgren: And, but when I, sometimes if you look at a system like that, you can say that is making that intensive system more sustainable. But when we step back say, does it actually make sense to have pigs in buildings and be growing grain somewhere else that’s brought to them when pigs by their nature are foraging animals.

David Holmgren: And so for their wellbeing, they need to be able to do what pigs do. And they’re great at gathering, I mentioned the acorns, but waste food and whatever, where it occurs. And so in a lower energy society, those systems will redevelop pigs in that more integrated role. And the intensive system, even in its refined, more sustainable way, will be done out of business because the waste streams that it’s commandeering or depends on won’t actually be available.

David Holmgren: And in some ways that starts with, oh, the low grade grain on the farm is actually supporting some pigs on a smaller scale, rather than being shipped to those centralised systems so that that issue of how these principles can be applied at different levels. And, but sometimes it’s inevitable that as greater pressures of ultimately energy cost and resources that simpler, more holistic integrated ways will displace those systems.

David Holmgren: And we can think of it in terms of waste collection systems that in our country have been accelerated since China hasn’t been accepting our waste. And now there’s green bins of people putting their waste. But if people are home composting and trying to maximise food growing at home, sorry that green waste supply and the compost they’re making from it, it’s got greater risks of contamination and there’s a great truck coming round picking it up. It just actually makes more sense for the householder to do it on site. Right. So in that sense, that small flexible system actually takes the resources away from those big centralised systems, in the same way that those small systems in permaculture parasitise off the wastes that that larger system generates.

David Holmgren: So, for example, one of the classic techniques associated with permaculture in early days so much that people thought permaculture was mulching when permaculture was first popularised in Australia. So deep sheet mulching to establish a garden from scratch over grass and weeds is a great way to use accumulated biomass.

David Holmgren: But that biomass is a byproduct of a wasteful society that has all this stuff to throw away. So it’s not necessarily sustainable in some perpetual sense, but it’s a great opportunity to make use of what those systems are wasting. And it’s the same when people go to the rubbish tip and get some discarded steel or materials to make something rather than going to the hardware or people getting their clothes from the op shop.

David Holmgren: It is a form of parasitism off the consumer society, but it’s actually an appropriate adaptive strategy, and clearly it’s not sustainable. If everyone got their clothes from the op shop and there was no textile industry, well, we’d probably have enough clothes for another two decades anyway.

David Holmgren: Whereas food, we need to grow it every year.

Natalie: Yeah. It’s amazing how much is in every box store. And it’s like, so many clothes. And they’re all plastic too. They’re mostly, yeah.

David Holmgren: Well, plastic. So we can be more selective and only at the op shop, only get the natural fibre things.

David Holmgren: Yes. So I think there’s so many ways in which as we learn to reconnect to those sources that are reflecting our values and rebuilding those local connections between consumer and producer. The ultimate radical reconnection is the consumer and the producer, or the one person.

David Holmgren: And that idea of self-sufficiency, as it was called in the 1970s, was there in permaculture that people would often associate with terms like off-grid living these days. But one of the important aspects of that, that I emphasise in my RetroSuburbia work is the idea of the household economy as the key foundation for any larger economy in society.

David Holmgren: And doing things at the household level works best when there’s more than one or two people. Because there’s more jobs and things to do and there’s greater efficiencies of cooking for five people rather than one person is so much more energetically efficient. And so right through to nutrition and many other aspects of health, those things, health is not something which is maintained out in some professionalised centralised system.

David Holmgren: It’s primarily maintained at the household level.

David Holmgren: Created at the household level. So this idea of rebuilding household economies, which have been largely withered away or lost in the modern world is a core idea in permaculture that, as I said, relates to those two ideas, the old one from the seventies of self-sufficiency and the more current off-grid living of how do we do more things at that most localised scale.

David Holmgren: And I think health is incredibly related to that, and of course, right through to psychological and emotional health that a whole lot of the loneliness epidemic. And yes, it’s important to have connections in our community and don’t want to underplay those larger things.

David Holmgren: But sometimes I find environmental and social activists coming to permaculture thinking in terms of the individual and the community, and forget that we all live in some sort of household and that often miss that. How do we strengthen that foundation? And ironically, that idea seems to have been challenging for people on the environmental and social justice left of the political spectrum, I might say.

David Holmgren: And I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s associated with right, socially conservative people valuing family values or something. But people on that spectrum, more on that view get that idea usually very clearly. But it has been part of my RetroSuburbia work based on permaculture principles of how do you rebuild this household economy.

David Holmgren: And I deliberately call it a household rather than family to say that households can form in all sorts of different ways, but history suggests that the extended multi-generational family that most of our ancestors lived in was a pretty natural and obvious sort of form. And it probably will be the dominant form for our descendants as well in some form or another.

David Holmgren: Even though the process of getting there will involve many blended families and households in all different forms, as there were, we don’t need to go back very far in Australia, even that in the 1920s many households had boarders, single people that were living in a larger household. So I think that very much connects to health in lots of practical ways, of maintenance of health, right through to emergencies, minor medical emergencies that are all dealt with at that level rather than rushing off to centralised systems.

(52m39s) RetroSuburbia and Adapting Existing Structures

Natalie: I think of the state of emergency of our health systems. Especially during 2020 COVID times, we had to see that we needed to maybe think more preventatively household.

Natalie: How can I triage things at home first before I go in and go to an overwhelmed hospital? That really created a big awareness, I think for a lot of people. Unfortunately it took that kind of situation because, being in thinking about nutrition with health in the household, I think most people don’t end up pursuing nutrition unfortunately until they’re at an emergency state.

Natalie: But you wish that we’d all be doing this just because. But that leads me to asking if you could share more about the impetus of your book, RetroSuburbia, to get more into that.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of permaculture initially was on what architects and planners called greenfield sites.

David Holmgren: Someone starting on a so-called blank site and building a house and gardens and developing something. And then you can look at examples like eco villages of intentional communities and the crossover of those ideas through into more mainstream sustainability ideas of eco cities. And this process of turnover of firstly, building stock is something that takes decades if not centuries.

David Holmgren: So yet we’re running into the multiple environmental crises, what some people are calling the polycrisis. What I’ve called energy descent, that we’re actually going to be stuck with a lot of stuff that already exists that we’re going to be adapting and retrofitting a whole lot of existing buildings.

David Holmgren: And in fact, when we think outside of the built environment and all the infrastructure, and we think about the biological environment, gardens, farms, landscapes already exist. They already have trees in them and different things. So we are not dealing with blank slates. We’re going to adapt something that already exists and then we can cross that over into the big domain of our behaviour, human behaviour, which ultimately is the most flexible adaptable of those three.

David Holmgren: The built, the biological, and the behavioural that we’re going to have to adapt, but live with the inherited stuff, the behaviours that we’ve inherited, both functional and dysfunctional from the past. And how do we adapt and move from those to something more appropriate. And so that’s an incremental process where we do different things.

David Holmgren: There’s little compromises, there’s steps, there’s a whole lot of learning cycles that develop through this retrofitting paradigm rather than grand plans that we’re going to create, dare I say this, a hundred percent renewable energy grid, that’s all going to magically provide everything society has now, and it’s going to be environmentally beneficial and have no problems.

David Holmgren: No, we’re not. It’s going to be a disaster because doing things bigger and faster when you’re actually reaching the limits actually makes things worse. So smaller adaptive movements also work very well where society is not ready for some large scheme that people don’t trust for, in some ways very good reasons.

David Holmgren: Big schemes driven from above. And so working with what you’ve got, and of course the suburban landscape or the pattern of separate houses on little blocks of land, not just in the suburbs surrounding our mega cities, but also in all the small country towns and villages of countries like the United States and Australia is where vast numbers of people live and where they’ll have to adapt in situ to changes that are coming.

David Holmgren: And so that makes more sense than either we’re going to build these gleaming new eco cities, or we’re all going to leave and move to some remote rural location. And so that focus on the retrofitting paradigm and on suburbia as actually an opportunity rather than a problem has been a big part of my work for at least the last 25 years.

David Holmgren: But it proceeds that. When we moved to a small country town in 1985, our intention was actually to buy a house and renovate it and have a modest flock. But in the town we’d selected, it was fairly small. And when we ran through all of our criteria, we actually couldn’t find a house that suited. So I said to Sue, well, got the skills of building, got the tools, maybe we’ll buy a vacant block and ended up building a passive solar mud brick house.

David Holmgren: But that idea of retrofitting has sort of been with me as a strategic aspect to permaculture from a long time back.

(59m6s) Small and Slow Change: Integrating Lived Experience

Andrew: And I’m so drawn to your thinking there of working with what already exists. We’ll have to adapt as time goes on and we enter into this energy descent and that principle of small and slow change.

Andrew: I know in internal family systems, I have training and we have this concept of protective parts, parts of us that go to extremes, and I’ve thought of those concepts a lot as you’ve been talking with these parts of us that want to control. And these parts come out of experiences of trauma. I’m kind of getting on a side tangent here, but going back to that small and slow change, I think it integrates so well with the lived experience Natalie and I have from responding to the symptoms we’ve had that have been largely related to, I think stress, modern toxin exposure and our food system, right?

Andrew: The highly processed sugary foods. And I just love that concept of small and slow changes because it’s overwhelming to, as you said, think of these grand ideas for how to address these huge ecological problems we’re facing, these huge health issues we’re facing. But really it’s those small slow changes that we make for our health and for the health of the community.

Andrew: I think that really propel us as a community towards better health and better connection. And so what you’re saying really resonates with me.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well that of course is that principle in permaculture. Like all of the other principles that overturning an embedded mindset in the modern mind of big is better and fast is better than slow.

David Holmgren: And now the idea that big is better has had a bit of knock back over the decades. But the romance of Fast has been certainly accelerated by the information technology revolution. And that slowing down, I think is obviously through many issues of health, mental health, but in so many ways of not trying to do a million different things all at once. And the very basic idea in plant, animal health and human health, that super accelerated growth from overstimulated food growth, actually we know from intensive feedlot animals, leads to an incredibly short life expectancy. And that fast growth is not actually necessarily healthy in children.

David Holmgren: So that a lot of those things of reducing things to smaller scale and the learning cycle that comes from that, because that means that there’s still the capability of what people call scale. How does this solution actually scale? Well. Gardens don’t keep growing. A successful garden doesn’t grow from a quarter acre to an acre to 10 acres to a hundred acres and take over the landscape.

David Holmgren: What happens is a successful garden spins off plants and seeds that create another garden.

David Holmgren: So replication is a way that scale can be achieved. But yeah, how does this small solution actually do anything to these larger problems? So those small examples and I think this applies in health also, that people see a model of someone doing something overcoming deeper problems they have, especially when there’s that intimacy with relatives, friends, family, they see something and sometimes it’s that, ah, I can maybe do something influenced by that. And often I think people are influenced when they see something from above that they consider some sort of authority or expert, but they see it sideways or from below, from someone who is just ordinary to them, but in their field.

David Holmgren: Ah, yeah. That idea. So these things do come a bit from that combination of top down and bottom up together. But the idea of all of those things being possible to have more modest changes and doing things in moderation. I think sometimes in the health area there tends to be this swing of whether it’s a swing from a vegan diet to a pure paleo diet that well wait a minute, yes, that might work for some people in some context, but so that balance is part of what comes, I think, with the small and slow solutions.

David Holmgren: And that doesn’t preclude those changes being quite radical and fundamental, because they often start with a small seed of something like people going, how do I just simplify my life and get rid of some things that I apparently need or are addicted to and just start with something that’s really bugging me.

David Holmgren: And then that process can often build incrementally and people shedding away things that are unnecessary in their lives or are actually in some ways damaging or toxic to them. Yeah.

(1h5m55s) Personal Health Journey, Aging, and Shifting Perspectives

Natalie: I’m curious if you saw a difference in your health as you started to live this way.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, for me, I don’t think there’s been any sort of exact point in that because I grew up in a family where my mother bought whole meal bread from this particular baker, and we had dried fruit and fresh vegetables in my lunch at school that kids thought was very weird in the mid sixties in Australia. So, and I can remember discussions in the eighties about school junk, providing junk food. And my mother saying, I thought we won that battle in the 1960s. So these things go in cycles.

David Holmgren: And although her understanding of health and everything was just within the context of those times, I felt I already was raised with a healthy diet and the ideas of permaculture. I was 19 when I met Bill Mollison when he was 43, I think. And I was already an organic gardener and into ecological hunting and on this path that became permaculture.

David Holmgren: And so, yeah, but I think with aging, there’s things that have shed or changed. And one was the growing intolerance to modern processed wheats and things like that. Almost becoming what we call a gluard, which is of course an epidemic.

Andrew: Join the club there, David. Yeah.

David Holmgren: All in that together. Yeah. We found that in fact, eating spelt sourdough bread at home wasn’t actually a problem. It was actually when I went out and was presenting somewhere, even in permaculture places and consuming industrial refined flours that were the problem.

David Holmgren: And so some of the things, also problems that show up progressively with aging that you don’t have tolerance to, so adjusting and sort of changing diet a bit. And I suppose also learning through very limited health crises that I’ve had, including a bad back in my nineties that I discovered was actually about carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders and having poor posture that was mostly in my head.

David Holmgren: And working through those processes, including as someone with a sort of super rationalist lineage being helped by kinesiologist who we used to call the local witch, helped through those problems. There’s been, yeah, various things along the way that have reinforced the commitment to alternative and complimentary ways of health. But in that, I’vebeen led more strongly by my partner, Sue Dennett, who had, as I mentioned, had been through various things and was much more radical in her skepticism. So for example, our son who was born in 86, like his older half brother and sister weren’t vaccinated.

David Holmgren: And in that I was following, she was the leader in that area, even though I had perhaps more faith in conventional medical systems than she did. And I think actually over recent years, I’ve become more radicalised in that pathway. That and my evidence about great trust in Science has sort of actually been challenged a bit.

David Holmgren: But yeah, those so different approaches with approaches that come from the gut and emotion versus from the head, those balances of learning from those things and learning to slowly get in touch with your own intuitive capabilities, which I didn’t think I had any ability in that, as I said, coming from that sort of super rationalist, overthinking things.

David Holmgren: So yeah, different journeys and ways along, but at 69 I feel the great privilege of both good genetics and being healthy and fit and who knows, maybe I’ll drop dead with cancer or whatever, but I’m largely outside the medical system. And you could say that, well, that’s just fortuitous and luck, but it’s also a result of a deliberate strategy.

David Holmgren: And Sue’s eight years older than me and sometimes people say, oh, you are young and fit and healthy. I said, yeah, it’s keeping up with her.

David Holmgren: Wow.

Andrew: Yeah.

David Holmgren: So she still goes down the gully, taking the goats down with the slash hook to cut the blackberries and do what she says is her green gym work each day.

Natalie: I love it. That’s

David Holmgren: definitely, yeah. Part of the way we live.

Natalie: Yeah. I would say it’s more than your genetics. It has to be just the principles you were raised with and then holding onto them. It must have been, your mom really passed down a lot more health principles that have served you.

Natalie: And that’s, I think I see a lot of that missing. Especially the, there was something you had said earlier about that made me think of the generational issues of how people are dealing with more and more health issues at younger and younger ages. Oh, it was when you were speaking to the aging process.

Natalie: Right. And now you also have some reactions to the gluten containing grains that are specifically from this centralised system. And so, yeah, it makes me think of though a lot of younger individuals who have been in this from the get go, indoctrinated into the centralised systems, we can’t get away with as much as, say my grandmother who’s 90, who was introduced to more of these centralised systems later in her life.

Natalie: So she’s, especially with food, she can still have a lot more than I can get away with before I really feel it and notice.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Yeah. We’re discovering all these accumulation of disadvantages of modernity continue. Whereas initially, they seem to provide really good things, which, and I don’t disparage those things.

David Holmgren: I don’t have a naive view of primitive romantic sort of view of what the world was like magically in the past. But I think the accumulation of problems that is also the mechanism that is in more recent years smashed that separation between nature and nurture, the environment, or genetics with epigenetics that, yeah, the diet of your grandparents actually had some influence on your current health and their trauma or whatever.

David Holmgren: Actually, that these things carry over. So there’s these accumulations and that is both a benefit in terms of survival, of how people survived is actually in some ways passed on. But also the traumas and consequences of the past are there in us. So I think we are dealing with all of those things.

David Holmgren: And I think one of the big things with the limits of interventionist medicine is that it’s been historically blind to ecological wisdom in saying, okay, what happens if you are successful in running full interventionist medicine and save everyone at birth who would otherwise die for 10 generations?

David Holmgren: What would the human genome look like after that? Well, we know from animal husbandry, you destroy the health through that process,

David Holmgren: and

David Holmgren: that raises this very difficult dark area because. Oh, does that mean we should be engaged in something that would ultimately be called eugenics? That we actually intervene to select, well, actually for our ancestors, they had limited ability to influence things.

David Holmgren: And that was in the hands of nature, the gods or whatever. And that dilemma didn’t come up well, I think in the future we’re more likely to again, be subject to nature, the gods, whatever the consequences of our past behaviour. It doesn’t matter what you call it. And that realigning with accepting, moving beyond a death phobic culture, and not just in relation to aging.

David Holmgren: But also in relation to birth, the idea that every birth must be perfect and live well. Nature doesn’t actually work that way. And so how do we, the proverb, let nature take its course is a pretty harsh one in a way. And we associate that with the principle, very interestingly of use and value renewable resources and services that when we work in this way with more natural things, we actually are not so much in control.

David Holmgren: And that can be sort of quite harsh. I mean, at a more humorous level. I talk about the classic permaculture idea of using chickens in the garden to scratch and eat pests and fertilise the soil, which is great. But when they get into the garden when you don’t want, it’s really annoying.

David Holmgren: Whereas the rotary hoe sits in the shed and stays there. When you put it, it doesn’t come out when you are not looking and start rotary hoeing the garden. So we shifted to these more technological and interventionist ways of doing things because it gave us more control. And in the process of moving back, because we have to, and because we recognise it’s appropriate and better overall, it means we actually have to work with natural processes and there’s a degree of loss of control.

David Holmgren: And that I think is very, very challenging for the modern mindset, and I think a lot of health professionals are sort of unwilling to acknowledge those processes and maybe just it reflects the population generally, but having that, putting that expectation on health professionals and health systems, that somehow everything can be fixed and saved.

(1h20m5s) Relinquishing Control and Learning from Experience

Andrew: Yeah. David, will you, on that topic of relinquishing control and letting go, would you share a bit about that process for you in your life or some examples of relinquishing control and letting go in moments?

David Holmgren: Well, I think that has mostly happened for me. As I said, I’ve had a very fortunate life in terms of health and wellbeing.

David Holmgren: Even though in my family there’s been other things, I had a brother who died of cancer at 51, and seeing his life pathway, but more at the practical level as a permaculture designer and project developer. That whole thing of having all the facts, having all the information and effectively being a control freak to know that sometimes doesn’t work anyway, even when you think you have all the understanding and then to sort of see things that the consequences of your own actions in our own place. Melliodora, my own overuse of dolomite lime at a critical period in the development of the property. There’s still the echoes of that in distortion of trees and things that didn’t work so well because I’d actually had a narrowed view of what I thought needed to be done and over intervening in a system and intervening in the wrong way in the early nineties.

David Holmgren: And so for me that was a pretty painful lesson, when I was sort of gung-ho this is going to be this great example of all the things in permaculture and living with those consequences when you live with that and oh, that’s the food you are eating. And that some of those things that also reflected in being our own guinea pigs and in our son’s life, his teeth were a reflection of some of the mineral imbalances that I’d actually created and then fed to him.

David Holmgren: Oh, so that sort of thing, even though it’s sort of minor in the scheme of things, amazing for me, they’re those sort of, yeah. An example of lessons of over control or thinking you know what you’re doing and actually having to let go and and also live with the consequences of what you’ve done.

Andrew: Awesome.

(1h23m27s) Conclusion and Further Resources

Andrew: Well, David. Thank you so much for your time. This has been such an engaging interview. I’ve taken so much away from what you’ve shared and getting about to the end of the interview here. If people are interested in learning more about your work, where’s a good place to direct them?

David Holmgren: Yeah, well, the website, holmgren.com.au has a lot of my writings and what we are doing, including teach online permaculture design courses with colleagues and other things. And through that there’s access to the books and other material, including the RetroSuburbia and of course, Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, which is actually being translated into, I think nine languages now.

David Holmgren: And and through their access to our online store where we largely stay outside of the centralised corporate marketing systems and have networks in the US too small scale to support what we do.

Andrew: Well, thanks again, David, for your time and generosity and yeah, really, really appreciate your time.

Natalie: Yeah, I could ask you more questions for hours. I’ll need to attend more of your class or lectures or something so I can do that.

David Holmgren: Yeah, well it’s interesting in the RetroSuburbia book. My partner says, I’ll go to the last section, the section on behavioural stuff.

David Holmgren: Because that’s all the difficult and the big questions. And in a lot of that, the distillation of that work sort of very much influenced by her, even though I’m the one that’s sort of doing those things. But she’s been persuaded to, she’s doing an online thing that’s called Do with Sue, which is mostly things in the kitchen and whatever.

David Holmgren: That’s great. Her wisdom and practicality that is, yeah. Critical in that health field that we’re all concerned with. And yeah. Good luck with the with the podcast. And hope that all goes well.