David was recently interviewed by Chris Jeffries on the Homeless Romantic podcast.

Chris writes:

My friend David Holmgren stops by to discuss his work in Permaculture and creating more sustainable ways of life. We also touch on some of the reasons why the message of Permaculture has been hindered or ignored. He gives a few examples of other cultures from the past who have done a better job in living WITH nature rather than attempting to dominate it. This is an important conversation with an inspirational and brilliant human being.

You can watch/listen to Chris and David’s conversation here:

Interview Transcript

(0m30s) Introduction and Current Conditions

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: Ladies and gentlemen, we’re back again. We got a very special guest this time. We got one of the godfathers of permaculture. Somebody who is a design master, somebody who is living the way we all should probably consider living. Mr. David Holmgren. How are you?

David Holmgren: Good and good to speak to you from hearing very wet Southeastern Australia.

David Holmgren: At Melliodora, it’s incredibly wet, which we mostly celebrate. Yeah. In this part of the world,

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: Is there any threats of flooding in that area or do you take all the rain you can get?

David Holmgren: There is threats of flooding downstream, of where we are.

David Holmgren: It has been mostly sort of just benign, persistent, incredible wet winter spring, which is our normal wet season. But in a progressively drying climate, these very wet winter springs are getting rarer and rarer. So the big public reservoirs, some of them in our region don’t from. Another. This year there’ll be spillway parties where people are celebrating the overflow of the reservoirs.

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: Good. Well, always on the lookout for things go how things are going. I am in Germany right now and it’s. Was a dry summer, but now it’s beginning to be wet. But we, of course, we have this threat of being cold all winter and other, other things.

(2m3s) Defining Permaculture

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: So in a nutshell, can you tell everybody who might not know what Permaculture is?

David Holmgren: Yeah, well, permaculture means different things to different people, and a lot of people would understand it probably as a cool form of organic gardening, but it’s really a design system for how we do land use from the back doorstep, right to, as we’d say in Australia, the back paddock. So all scales of land use and with a strong focus on food production, but.

David Holmgren: Also with forestry, animal husbandry, all of the ways in which we provide for human needs from a working relationship with nature. But similarly, it’s a design system for how we live and organise our lives. So concerned with both the production side of the equation and the consumption side, and those.

David Holmgren: Separate for so many people in the modern world, bringing those back together. So when you produce food in your home garden for yourself and your family outside the monetary economy, that’s sort of. Collapsing what the economists call disintermediation. All of this incredibly long supply chains of complexity that we have built in the modern world.

David Holmgren: Now, not every aspect of permaculture is doing that, but it’s redesigning fit systems to be more localised, to be more. In the hands of the people who benefit and contribute to those systems rather than those being scaled up to industrial economies of scale, which were all our current systems are.

David Holmgren: So it might start for a lot of people with gardening, but it’s equally concerned with how we adapt and retrofit buildings to make them fit for purpose in new and challenging times. Right through to all the way we organise in our households, right through to communities. So in that sense, it addresses a lot of things.

David Holmgren: But it started with, back in the mid seventies, Bill Mollison and I were looking at the problem of agriculture because this is a big problem. It’s the activity that humans do on more of the planet than any other activity, and it’s how we provide our most fundamental needs. And it’s basically been completely unsustainable, both in the damage it was causing to nature, but also in its dependence on depleting resources, especially oil and all.

David Holmgren: Its byproducts that of course, like fertiliser. Yeah.

David Holmgren: Nearly 50 years on, well, 50 years on from the Club of Rome Limits to Growth Report, which focus a lot on a lot of these issues. And Permaculture emerged, not long. After that report.

(5m36s) Industrial Agriculture Inefficiencies & Corporate Control

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: And so these, not only is it bad with the fertiliser and stuff, but there’s just some parts of industrialised agriculture that are just highly inefficient. What are some of the ways that the whole supply chain is inefficient and the system itself is inefficient and it swayed towards giving money to the top?

David Holmgren: Yes, the scale of systems and the complexity of industrial systems allows the mediators in the middle, the intermediators, the corporations who both supply farmers with the products they need

David Holmgren: fertilisers, chemicals, fuel, and finance because of the scale on which farmers are operating and controlling what consumers have access to.

David Holmgren: So that controlling the producer and consumer has benefited. Those corporations and entities in the middle, but is incredibly inefficient in terms of energy and resources that supplying things. Especially when it comes to perishable food, fresh fruit and veggies, small livestock products. ’cause those are the things that historically were always grown as close to where people live as possible.

David Holmgren: And of course, it’s only cheap. Fuel and energy for refrigeration and complex packaging and everything that’s been possible to develop these incredibly long supply chains from huge monocultures remote, from where the consumers are. And that’s given sort of some claimed deficiencies. Like, you can grow things in a climate.

David Holmgren: Which can provide early produce like in the United States, in California that can then ship that to other places. So these sort of so-called benefits by having everything very large scale and very globalised, all depend on cheap, reliably available. Fossil energy.

(8m8s) Dangers of Pesticides/Herbicides & Permaculture Alternatives

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: Okay. You heard it from him First. Fossil fuels and the agriculture industry. This is unsustainable. We need to rethink the way we get our food and the way we live. So pesticides and herbicides are also, like you mentioned, dumped in large amounts in industrial agriculture. What are some of the dangers of these kind of chemicals and how can permaculture get us to use less?

David Holmgren: Well, I suppose the dirty secret of horticulture, the most intensive part of plant agriculture is that there’s a shift in cultivation where people, around large cities that used to be. Clustered market gardens and then progressively the soil got trashed and poisoned and people would sell that up for housing and move further out.

David Holmgren: Because the more intensive the agriculture and the greater the use of chemicals, both in the form of fertilisers and pesticides. There’s all these residual effects and distortions that even if they’re not illegal, in the sense of toxic levels that are banned, they’re at levels that are certainly unacceptable in.

David Holmgren: So for example, organic standards.

David Holmgren: Minimise those problems by developing new pesticides which are less toxic. So there’s been this sort of development of the efficiency and lower toxicity, but overall the problem keeps getting worse. Or the problem becomes more subtle. So you get, for example, insecticides that is systemic insecticides in plants that.

David Holmgren: Subtle effects on bees, whereas previously they were just using things like arsenate of lead, which accumulate in soil. And of course the famous DDT, are no longer used or or used in various third world countries, but a lot of the replacements end up having these more subtle problems such as contributing to a collapse of bees, which is of course worldwide problem.

David Holmgren: A single reason for those things. And sometimes people can get sort of over hysterical about the, I need all of my food to be completely pure. I mean, we live in a world of where the natural environment has. Contaminants, too, but the cumulative effect of those things is very serious.

David Holmgren: But the other thing that people don’t realise is that these pesticides and and other chemicals are very energy intensive to manufacturer. And so as energy costs rise, just like the effect on fertilisers. All of these things become more expensive. So if we look at something like one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, Roundup produced of course, by Monsanto.

David Holmgren: Well, the alternative to that from a permaculture point of view, for a lot of the uses that that gets used for just general vegetation management, a

David Holmgren: turns that excess vegetation that people are trying to kill and make a dead zone out of. Turns that into animal products and provides ecological services in the process. So, and the goat reproduces on the farm and benefits the farm economy, whereas the herbicide is just something that has to be bought and then achieve some.

David Holmgren: Value on the farm or in landscape management that justifies itself, and not, and trying not to worry too much about the adverse toxic effects and and those herbicides are a great example that.

David Holmgren: Glyphosate, the chemical in Roundup was toxic. The evidence was sort of pretty fragmentary, but we now know its effects on gut flora in animals is absolutely immense. And just the same as it said, adverse effects on the soil. Microflora,

(13m27s) Skepticism towards Technological “Progress” & Civilisational Complexity

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: Yeah. And I like throughout history too, we’ve had this mistake where we welcome technology with an open arm. We say, oh, it’s a new product. And we find ourselves 30, 40, 50 years later backpedaling and saying, well, we shouldn’t be spraying DDT anymore as an insecticide maybe, or we should not be putting lead. In our paint and in our, so, and now when I hear about new technology, I’m very weary and I just think, I don’t need all this progress. I need to digress back into old, older times.

David Holmgren: So yeah, a lot of the time that is seen as a sort of a romantic response of harking back to the past, but the analysis that is almost. Not there on so-called progress is that it’s actually a greater level of complexity to deal with the problems created by the previous cycle of expanded complexity.

David Holmgren: And of course there’s analysis of civilisations showing that they fail when they can no longer sustain the complexity.

David Holmgren: All the complexity overwhelm them and you have to rebuild simple systems. Yeah. So that example that I started with of home food production being an alternative to all of this enormous complexity, it doesn’t mean that everyone has to be like an absolute professional competent.

David Holmgren: Food producer for it to be valuable enough for people to grow some of their own food, and that’s the difference in the sort of household economy. Simple ways. You don’t have to be the absolute professional, whether it’s. Bottling your own fruit or even fixing the car for it to be actually economically and socially, environmentally beneficial to do.

(15m51s) Rebuilding Household & Community Economies

David Holmgren: So there’s huge advantages in rebuilding what we call the household and community non-monetary economies, which a lot of my. Permaculture in recent times has actually focused on that. So how we can do more things for ourselves. But of course that does tend to lead to a decline in GDP, which economists and politicians and bankers see as disastrous.

(16m31s) Decline of Local Economies & Rise of Corporatisation

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: Yeah, this is the classic shortsighted nature of it. And I’ve seen it firsthand, hitchhiking across America and seeing what happened to Main Street USA, which basically they take away their people’s ability to be the town shoemaker or the town bread baker and stuff like this, and everything becomes corporatised.

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: And so you have. These were replaced with Walmarts, which basically just take all the everything a person could need, subsidise it to kill all the rest of the competition, and then drown out small communities like that. So now we’re all on this global kind of network and it’s, it’s a bit bizarre.

(17m13s) Permaculture’s Answer: The Grey Zone Economy

David Holmgren: So I.

David Holmgren: Permaculture answer to that is rather than the failed efforts to try and downscale the corporations back to the small, local businesses and.

David Holmgren: The policies of the corporations and the policies of governments have made it increasingly difficult for small business, but there’s still a huge amount of freedom in the non-monetary economy of the household of people doing things for themselves outside of the regulatory framework. And as I said, you don’t have a professional.

David Holmgren: To actually get net benefits from those things, and especially when people own or occupy houses that actually have often surplus space and capacity. To actually kickstart that household economy, doing things for themselves against, getting the junk out of the garage and and setting up a small workshop, making things.

David Holmgren: And that’s how we actually regrow a monetary economy from the things that just people do for themselves. And then some people find they’re actually really good at it and that they can actually do it and other people will pay them for it. In the gray economy outside of all of that controlled center. So that is a sort of a positive pathway by which both we can be more self-reliant, but over the longer term we can rebuild a localised economy from the bottom up.

David Holmgren: How do we reform, get together at a big political level and reform this larger scale system and. The sort of human scale economy that we want, because efforts in that direction, and people articulating that for the LA of most of my life have sort of mostly gone backwards. Yeah. So, let’s try a different strategy

(19m21s) Soil Health & Depletion in Industrial Ag

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: and, David said it great. It’s the gray zone. It’s the, you’re with your friends, neighbours, colleagues, people around you, you’re rebuilding community and trying to keep your your own economy and separate yourself from the system as is. So, so you deal with soil health sometimes, and a lot of the stuff that happens with industrial agriculture, the soil gets depleted really easily and I’ve had to work with some pretty bad soil over the years. What are some of the things that you can recommend for help in depleted soil?

(19m57s) Permaculture Techniques for Soil Improvement

David Holmgren: Yeah, well, I suppose there’s a number of sort of different situations. A lot of our agriculture these days is on our best soils, but have been enormously damaged, and there’s a lot of work in the organic and regenerative agricultural fields that have.

David Holmgren: Worked on that with beneficial microbes, with remineralisation, with cover crops, and of course shifting from just dependence on annual crops to perennial tree crops, which was one of the the great focus of of the early working in permaculture to reduce our dependence on crops that involved.

David Holmgren: Cultivation of the soil each year, and also the shift to greater use of rotations, especially legumes to provide nitrogen fixation. So there are many different. Techniques there that are both being developed in alternative, organic regenerative agriculture fields that we would see as part of the suite of permaculture solutions.

David Holmgren: But there’s also the ways of growing food on marginal soils. That agriculture has long abandoned or doesn’t think it’s possible to grow food, and one of the great examples of this was in the crisis in Cuba in the nineties with food shortages where people. Who had knowledge of agriculture just started growing vegetables on the rocky outcrops in the vacant land around Havana and Cuba actually does have a lot of really good agricultural soil.

David Holmgren: And of course the scientist said, oh no, you can’t grow food there. But there were permaculture activists from Australia who said, oh yeah, we just grow gardens wherever. You just get lots of organic matter and even if it’s on ground, that’s just solid clay even. And. People were just sort of doing without sort of knowing whether this would work, became the basis of the sort raised intensive vegetable growing system, which is actually still today part of.

David Holmgren: The mainstream food supply system in Cuba, because they didn’t go back to, oh, we’ll get all the cabbages from one farm at the other end of Cuba and bring them all to Havana. So they kept that, that and the part that permaculture played in that was quite a small, but it it was this inspiration that, well, sort of at the garden scale, you can grow food on on the most.

David Holmgren: Crummy land if you like. And I suppose sheep mulch gardening was the technique that in the in Australia in the late seventies, early eighties, people thought that’s what permaculture was, of getting large amounts of organic matter, putting down newspaper, over compacted grass and areas and garden.

David Holmgren: It’s not a technique for perpetually producing food on a sustainable cycle, but it’s a way of quickly establishing garden systems on very difficult soils using abundant organic matter, which is often available as a. As waste streams, lawn clippings, leaves, raked up from deciduous trees, animal manure, food waste, all of these things.

David Holmgren: And it’s sort of an in situ composting. So that is a, it’s just one technique, but it’s it’s something that empowered a lot of people to start food gardens.

(24m1s) Compost and Nutrient Cycling

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: Yeah. And, and especially tree leaves, people, this has got a great nitrogen, potassium, NPK. It’s just really, really great and full of nutrients, so it’s good, good compost.

(24m13s) Greenwashing & Rethinking Consumption

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: So, so right now it’s a really tough time because. Permaculture has been on the fringes for so long, and corporations are now offering us stuff in green packages to address our concerns about climate change, and they’re trying to kind of greenwash this stuff. Do you think it’s kind of disingenuous to do this and or do you think we need to rethink our consumption habits?

(24m41s) The Delusion of Green Tech & Need for Downscaling

David Holmgren: Well there’s, there’s a couple of different levels. The issue. Firstly, yes. The perception that new green technology, carbon neutral technology will allow us to consume energy and resources in the same way we’ve been doing. But it won’t be damaging to the planet. I think that is a delusion.

David Holmgren: And it’s a delusion that’s not just cynically. In the corporations, it also occurs across the tech. Sector and especially in the renewable energy sector, the electricity sector where there’s been great strides in in beginning to replace fossil fuels in the electricity sector, which is 18% of total global energy.

David Holmgren: The rest is transport and industrial use and whatever, which is all. Fossil fuels pretty much is. So there’s been some sort of progress in in that. But unless you are honest and and say we actually need a massive downscaling of the human project and that most of that has to happen for the one or 2 billion middle class people.

David Holmgren: Sure. The rich stop flying in their private jets and eating so much caviar and and champagne. But there’s so few in number that actually their consumption, their power and control of the system is really important, but their actual consumption is not so important. It’s the. One to 2 billion middle class people on the planet. That is the vast majority of the consumption, and that has to massively downscale. So that is disingenuous, including right down to our mainstream green political parties who don’t want, sell that message. Yeah.

(26m48s) Elite Agendas & Controlled Demolition vs. Grassroots Pushback

David Holmgren: But on the other hand, there’s also the ways in which that happens increasingly actually through catastrophe because I believe the elite elites are now working in ways that instead of just promoting the Smooth Green Tech transition, they’re actually looking at a sort of.

David Holmgren: A control demolition of what already exists because they know it’s too late to sort of. Constantly sell the. So, I think what is being experienced in Europe, and the need to sort of de-industrialise and and everyone shrink their their consumption, that that is.

David Holmgren: Actually a perception from the top that that’s actually what’s needed. So rather than denying climate change or denying resource depletion, they’re actually a bit desperate about it, but they’re doing it of course, in a way that tries to preserve power at the top.

David Holmgren: And of course that means everyone else and nature ends up paying one way.

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: Yeah. Another,

David Holmgren: you know, so it’s a tricky situation because there’s also the pushback that the lack of trust at the top means there’s the increasing number. Of people who resent and reject that and see that as a mad green agenda to like in Germany, that the push to try and go really fast into renewable energy was actually a really crazy mistake. And.

David Holmgren: Actually, all of these are sort of green ideology that’s actually causing all these problems, and there wouldn’t really be any problems if we’d just stuck with the old ways. So that’s also, I think misguided, but understandable that people think that way. So we’re now in a situation where there is no trust and there’s a.

David Holmgren: Perceptions of what the problem is as we move deeper and deeper into the crisis, and how much of that is just humans shooting themselves in the foot creating crisis versus no nature is actually setting limits to the human project after. Yeah. Humans have long denied that there are limits.

(29m43s) Navigating Uncertainty & Finding Common Ground

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: And, and to be absolutely fair, the some of the voices in the crowd that are contributing to this madness happen to be paid for by people like Chevron and Exxon, they, they’re constantly creating fake presence on the internet, trying to manufacture consensus by having these fake people on the internet commenting, saying, yeah. The green energy is dumb and and the climate change is a hoax and it’s just,

David Holmgren: yeah. So the thing is that what we have to accept is there’s enormous uncertainty and that that people in our communities and people directly believing different things, we need to have humility about saying, okay, what.

David Holmgren: What do we need to get on with? So for example, if we are talking to someone who doesn’t believe in climate change, and various other things that that’s actually not necessary to see that we have common purpose in becoming more self-reliant and more community interdependent. And that.

David Holmgren: That, that might involve a combination of making use of existing technologies that are created by corporations, such as solar panels on our roof, but it also might. Make use of a very efficient wood heater manufactured by a small engineering business. Or it might, might even be a little rocket stove that we build in the backyard out of rubbish that can use stick fuel with very little pollution and cook some food.

David Holmgren: That it might involve all of those things. And that we don’t need to sit down and come to an agreement about, what is the state of the, what is whose fault, the state of the world is to do things. And might I think that’s really important.

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: Yeah, it might be just more exhilarating and more fun for everybody to play the blame game. It certainly seems to. Be fun.

David Holmgren: Yeah, I think that’s sort of playing out, on multiple parties and and sides. But it, it also, we can see that. Sometimes people’s anger is is sort of manufactured through the internet and and other things. But in other ways it’s also people’s circumstances.

David Holmgren: People understanding their circumstances and the circumstances for their children are actually. And of course that is the fuel for sort of fascist politics in in all sorts of different forms. Yeah. And.

David Holmgren: Those expressions are coming in in different ways. So I think it is important to sort of look outside the window, see what one can see oneself, and yes, understanding what’s happening in the world at a larger scale.

David Holmgren: But remember, we’re all being gamed all the time in this sort of crisis.

(33m25s) Learning from Indigenous & Traditional Cultures

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: And you know, I’m so glad you say that ’cause that makes me feel a lot better. Because we’re in it together, because I have to look out. I also do the same thing. You look around, you look at the resources you have and realise as long as your neighbourhood is on fire, you have a chance to make the world you wanna see.

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: But we’re being gamed at all times, that’s for sure. But, and we’ve been gamed for a long time.

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: Our Western values have been focused around the idea of technological progress and capitalism being good, and now it’s pretty clear that it’s harmful to the environment. Do you know of actually examples in indigenous societies where they were doing a better job living with the environment rather than dominating it?

David Holmgren: Well, both what we call indigenous cultures original. People cultures, even though that’s a sort of a difficult term, and also all traditional cultures of place, had a huge influence in the original conception of permaculture. And it’s on going evolution. And I’d sort of give two examples. Firstly, in Australia, the most infertile continent with the most unstable climate.

David Holmgren: And I don’t mean that just in today’s terms, but over the last 50,000 years, people, indigenous people here developed a a culture of land management, created a cultivated landscape, which was optimal for the support of people, but also the maintenance of biodiversity and without any institutionalised.

David Holmgren: On the scale of warfare where, whole tribe swept across the continent, that in as we can tell. And so. Codes of reciprocity that extended across the continent, which dealt with the issues and contained the issues of conflict between groups. And that may have come about partly ’cause there wasn’t enough resources in in Australia that it was worth rushing over the hill to conquer and take over those people’s territory.

David Holmgren: You likely would’ve yourself down through.

David Holmgren: Strategy of warfare actually sort of worked. So for the last 6,000 years, it’s been a big problem on the planet. So I think that’s one example of sustainable societies that have maintained a balance with the environment and from all the evidence that people were living. A level where they were below the carrying capacity of their local environment and resources, mostly living in incredible abundance.

David Holmgren: Now there’s debates amongst archeologists and anthropologists about whether that was just ’cause there were particularly good times when. Europeans arrived or whatever. And also the the diseases of crowding had already arrived and the populations had been impacted and there was this just limitless food and landscape.

David Holmgren: Iwhere and people’s management of the land had already reduced. Or also that Australia’s climate is so unstable that people have actually maintained their populations in a very conservative way to allow for that huge fluctuation. But whatever it is, there’s an enormous amount to learn from that.

David Holmgren: And of course, it was just. A couple of years before I met Bill Morrison that the anthropologist and ecologist Reese Jones coined the term fire stick farming to describe how aboriginal people managed the the land. So that’s one example. The other example I choose at the moment is.

David Holmgren: Edo Japan before the Meiji Restoration in 1860 at the point of a gun, American guns, Japan had 60 million people on those limited islands. 70% of the country was forested, 78% I. It was up to. So they weren’t, they had the the landscape in a stable, balanced structure. And there was.

David Holmgren: A conservative society that was not based on growth, but poured human creativity into things like tea ceremony or things that didn’t actually use a lot of resources that could occupy human creativity without. Constantly what humans do when they’re sort of well off, oh, let’s have this big project and let’s build all these things.

David Holmgren: No, 60 million people without fossil fuels, without an outside empire, without outside subsidy. Were in a sustainable, balanced pattern on those islands, which is pretty amazing because that’s. Half, the current population, a little bit less than half the current population, but of course today, Japan depends on, fossil fuels and imported resources, and even saying that it’s way more efficient in all of the way it does things than most.

David Holmgren: Other affluent countries. So, a book, written by an American author who’s lived in Japan, just enough, I’m trying to think of his name. We had a discussion online about, the connections between permaculture and Japanese traditional. Systems. So, that they, that’s just two examples, but, everywhere, a lot of permaculture has been inspired and directly makes use of those indigenous and what I call traditional cultures of place embedded in their their landscape and with a reverence.

(40m7s) Feeling Pressure or Silencing from Establishment?

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: Yeah, there were times in history where we actually had it right, and we decided to divert from that in the name of progress and so on. So, you’ve been doing this for a long time. And I know that when you start talking about sustainable living, you are at odds with some of the hierarchical forces in the world, like corporations and, billionaires and stuff. And, have you ever felt the pressure or personally hindered or professionally hindered or silence from spreading, kind of the gospel of permaculture?

David Holmgren: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I suppose not particularly, but that’s partly I think because I followed the strategy of personal autonomy and maybe not putting as a priority, gonna go out and change the world, the more change oneself.

David Holmgren: Focus on small things that you can do and, as a public intellectual outside of academia, never depending on on funding or all of those. Structures and working in a small business model of teaching, book authoring, publishing, and what used to be my original work mostly, permaculture design consultancy for people rather than corporations. But I have noticed that as.

David Holmgren: My major theory text on Permaculture, Permaculture Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability published in 2002, that it was very hard to get any mainstream media coverage of that. And you say, well, oh, it’s a really complex book of ideas. And, but they weren’t even interested in the fact that as a publishing phenomena that this book was actually sort of.

David Holmgren: Sold all these copies and then was published in seven languages. And is actually after we. Boycotted Amazon and the big distribution things and did our own distribution. That it’s still been relatively successful trying to get mainstream media even interested in that as a publishing story.

David Holmgren: And the same thing happened with. My big book, RetroSuburbia, the Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future, which came out in 2018. It’s had no mainstream reviews in Australia. It’s a, it’s a full colour, 600 page book. It’s like really three books in one, $85 printed in Australia when all books are printed in China, has sold 15,000 copies.

David Holmgren: The mainstream media are not interested. So, that sort of story though, sort of do indicate. Not being silenced, but sort of, I suppose, being ignored when Yeah. You could say, well this is the sort of, even if you’re not interested in the ideas, you say, gee, that’s pretty curious how to, right, right.

(43m50s) Example: The “Taking in a Boarder” Strategy (Economic Terrorism?)

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: This starts your, your conspiracy kind of paranoid train of thought. You go, what is happening here? I’m doing fine by it, but nobody there. ’cause there is obviously something at the heart of that, but. Makes sense. I can’t say I’m not, I’m not surprised.

David Holmgren: Yeah. I mean, example would be in my.

David Holmgren: Strategy that local government could do of encouraging people to take in a border, a renter to sort of solve, help solve the housing crisis, and obviate the need to knocking down suburban houses and building apartments and whatever. We’ve got this huge underused. Housing stock and it would be better for the environment, better for society, and better for the individuals involved to have more people sharing in some way.

David Holmgren: And, but the reality is that strategy would result in a reduction in GDP. And after I’d done one of these presentations at a big event called the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne, I had a planner come up to me who was a planner in the State Department of Planning and he said, you know, you are sort of taking a border strategy.

David Holmgren: Came up in a brainstorming session at the department about how do we get more urban density in Melbourne, a city of 4 million plus. People and and at this mention that, you could encourage people to take in a border. Everyone in the room apparently laughed in acknowledgement and then went back to discussing how do we persuade Melburnians to accept more apartment blocks, filling in their suburbs with high rise.

David Holmgren: Because I think people involved in that. I actually recognise that that is actually subversive. Yes, it would address the issue and it would have all of these other benefits. But it’s actually economic terrorism, right? So, the work I’m proposing is actually economic terrorism. And so it’s not surprising that, well,

(46m2s) Hopeful Actions for Young People

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: you guys could, you guys could stop shooting yourselves in the foot. Yeah, no, we, we have to keep shooting ourselves in the foot, but we just wanna figure out a way to. Bandage it after the fact. It’s like, okay, so, well we got a few minutes left here. So as this situation, the climate change continues and it’s becoming more obvious and more intense. What is some.

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: What is something hopeful? What is something that the young people with limited resources might be able to do to help? Like we just explained, it’s things we can do on a small scale. Like I grow mushrooms in my, in my back room, and I, they’re delicious oyster mushrooms, they’re nutritious, stuff like that.

David Holmgren: Fantastic. There’s a huge interest in, that’s a huge interest in. Weeds and learning all the culinary aspects of edible weeds and foraging. Of course there’s a huge culture developing of repair cafes and people upskilling in repairing devices through to bicycles. So all of these things that actually.

David Holmgren: Have that are enlightened self-interest rather than just, this is what I’m doing for the good of the world. Because when those things come together, when you are doing something that where you get an immediate benefit, there’s a benefit for society and there’s a benefit for the environment and you’re increasing your own resilience to.

David Holmgren: Shocks and and challenges that are coming then that those things are are really empowering. And I think a lot of those things are are drawing people to permaculture. And we, our contribution to that has been to support, in the last. Few years apart from my own big work in in RetroSuburbia and all the resources we have online for that, which is a little bit more focused on people who are getting grounded, committed to place maybe in a family home with with children.

David Holmgren: You might even say more socially conservative. Whereas Rosemary’s Morrow’s new book, Earth Restorers Guide to Permaculture is in a sense, a lighthouse beaming out for for young people, looking at how they can contribute and how they can. Do things for themselves and in ways that are beneficial for communities and beneficial for the planet, and a very sort of global view in that book.

David Holmgren: And she’s worked across the world in refugee camps and some of the most sort of disabled places with permaculture teaching and has distilled all this life’s work. This new book. Permaculture with sort of different lens and and focus of, because everyone’s in different situation and different stage of life and and different context.

David Holmgren: And we’ve tried to do that too within our RetroSuburbia book of seeing this decision making matrix of should we consolidate somewhere we know or should we. Migrate to somewhere that has better prospects or move bad happening and crossing. Do we power up and try and control our domestic environment for greater resilience Or do we downsize and disown and simplify and to be flexible?

David Holmgren: And that ends up creating force solution spaces, which actually suit people at different stages of life and in different circumstances. So we’re trying to sort of give a lot of those. Thinking tools for people to, do what they can. And your example of people living in apartments, growing mushrooms, incredible, nutritious food.

David Holmgren: Spectacularly beautiful things and the technology of doing that has become domesticated, simplified, including our colleagues, um, at Milkwood Permaculture who’ve done an enormous amount in teaching people these basic. Lab techniques, these very simple techniques for growing cultivated mushrooms in in a basement or a back.

(51m15s) Closing Remarks & Power of the Grey Zone

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: Yeah. That’s incredible. And yeah, and I slowly learned that. There are, there is some hope and there is some things you can do and especially every act that you can do where you take money out of the fiat economic system and, and in these gray zones, like David said.

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: We’re making a stand and, and doing what David does is the ultimate, most punk rock activist kind of thing that you can do right now, is to figure out how to, how to get these systems in your own hands again.

Homeless Romantic Podcast Host: So we’re running outta time on the meeting. I wanna thank David for coming on. We’re gonna check back with him in the next month, few months and hopefully have him back because why not?