In March 2022, David was interviewed for the Inhabit: Territories Substack.

You can read the full interview transcript on the Inhabit: Territories Substack, or listen to the recording of the interview on the Partisan Gardens website.

Interview Transcript

(3m1s) Introduction and Permaculture Origins

David Holmgren: Hello, I’m David Holmgren. I’m the co-originator of Permaculture, along with Bill Mollison in the seventies, and the author of Retro Suburbia, the Down Shifters Guide to a Resilient Future.

(3m16s) Focusing on Suburbia and Retrofitting

Podcast Host: What brought you to focus on suburbia in this moment?

David Holmgren: It’s a fairly long journey, but I’ve lived in rural Australia for over 35 years. In moving from the city to the country, we chose to move into a small country town and live in what’s really a suburban street and have the intention of actually buying a house to retrofit. We saw the value was in the existing stock, but a combination of factors—the small town we were in and the way all the streets were oriented—we couldn’t get anything that met all of our different criteria. We thought, well I have the skills of the building and have built a passive solar house for my mother some years before that. So in the late eighties, we did a design and build on this property, which has become a well-known permaculture demonstration site. But over those years, I was always seeing the looming crisis that most people would associate with the climate emergency Now, but more correctly, it’s understood in terms of the limits to growth crisis that Permaculture was really framed around. That crisis for civilization meant we would be into that crisis having to retrofit and adapt housing stock, gardens, and productive environments, and in fact, our own behavior for a different environment without very much time and certainly not the time to build new ecological cities or knock down all our buildings and start from scratch. So this process of working from what we’ve got was also informed by my work as a permaculture designer in rural Australia. And my discontent with the notions of blank slate design. You have a field and we’re gonna put a house here and gardens and orchards. There isn’t such a thing as a blank slate; everywhere comes with a history. So even in that context, that idea of starting from scratch is actually an illusion. I think it was also a long running debate with colleagues in the urban planning profession from really the days when I was in design school in the early seventies about whether our future human settlement patterns would be one of high density for urban efficiency or some lower density pattern where people had access to open space for growing some of their food and other functions. In that way, the potential to retrofit suburbia rather than infill development for greater density and supposed urban efficiency was, I was always a dissident on that urban planning orthodoxy, which the environment movement took on as virtually an article of religious faith. I think the other factor is that I observed the increasing regulatory stranglehold on doing anything new, innovative, small scale. My experience as a developer of an eco village here in Central Victoria and as owner builder on several occasions and as a consultant made me realize that a lot of the opportunities increasingly were to retrofit under the radar of regulatory control because that’s often possible, especially if people have the social license from those around them rather than the legal license. Whereas with new buildings starting from scratch, the requirements were becoming more and more onerous. At the same time, the corporate world seemed to be running amuck with more and more opportunities, but at the small scale, the individual and the small business were being tighter and tighter constrained. So there were a lot of strategic things coming together that led to the focus on suburbia and the focus on retrofitting, but then extending that paradigm of retrofitting from where it’s commonly understood is the built environment through to the biological and to the behavior.

(8m29s) Systemic Crises, Energy Descent, and Re-localization

Podcast Host: That’s extremely useful. I’ll mention the other thing that crossed into my mind, in addition to thinking about this critique of the Blank Slate Framework and escaping the kind of regulatory stranglehold, is just getting to grips with the increasing challenges and reduced resources that we’ll face as systemic crises escalate. The approach of retrofitting seems really important for rebuilding our relationship with the world. Being able to retrofit—we talk a lot about the hacker ethos, the commitment to open up and understand and repurpose technical systems that otherwise people don’t understand. We mean often computers or agricultural tools, but you’re talking about the entirety of suburbia. I was wondering if you could talk about the systemic crises that you think we’re facing and then what we can do in suburbia to address that.

David Holmgren: The term I used to describe that of course was energy descent 20 years ago in my book of Permaculture Theory, Permaculture Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. The idea that not just that energy will be expensive and not as available as it has been in the past, but that actually energy is a currency and a language to understand how nature works, how human systems and economies work generally. It’s not just fuel that we use for something; it’s embodied in everything we do. So it’s much more effective than money as a way to measure what is real wealth and what is possible. Without energy, nothing actually happens, and that doesn’t matter whether it’s at the cellular level in microbes or in our bodies or in our economies, at the micro macro. So that framework suggests that the energy available to future generations being less, that the patterns of societies with less energy all have more re-localized economies. In fact, the globalization of the economy is only a process that’s been possible with fossil fuel. So the re-localization is also the recognition that the energy sources of the future are distributed in their source nature. Whether it’s sunshine, wind, biomass, hydro, and other renewable energies are all little bits and pieces spread across landscape. They’re not concentrated out of giant holes in the ground, which have then supported these huge aggregations of human populations in mega cities at high density. So with energy distributed and of a lower density concentration and utility, even without the climate emergency of the need to radically reduce, if not eliminate, carbon dioxide emissions, society needs to restructure around those energy characteristics. Because right throughout human history, all societies end up being structured by their energy sources. What that suggests is the pattern of our relatively recent history, not too many generations ago, where perishable food was concentrated certainly in and around dense urban cities, very close to it. Those areas supplied the food. And also that there were other patterns of lower density residential development, which we could say like suburban areas where people actually were, it was really small scale farming, and people produced a lot of the perishable food in garden farming. That was of course also the non-monetary economy. Because one of the characteristics of the high energy Society is we’ve enabled continuous economic growth by sucking activity out of the household and community non-monetary economies that in all previous times were the base on which the monetary economy was built. Whether that’s people growing food or repairing their house or looking after their children or looking after their health and informal ways of social welfare, a huge diversity of things that didn’t register as the formal economy because they were non-monetary relationships. So inherently the household and above that informal community relationships are more energetically efficient and arguably much more humane and better ways to provide a lot of those things. That means that downsizing of the monetary economy and some of those things moving back into the non-monetary economy. And so that suggests the lower density residential structure is actually much more amenable to doing those things, doing things at home. We can think of it as simple as when people changed from taking their lunch to work—that lunch that they even just made at home from bought ingredients versus buying their lunch at work—there’s an increase in GDP as a result of that process, even though no more lunches were created. So when we move that back into the household economy, obviously the capacity of the household economy becomes a key issue. If we look at it in other ways in terms of the capacity of governments and corporations to deliver just in time reliable supply through globalized trade networks, all of these things, one can expect to be less reliable in an energy descent future. The proximate causes of that may be things like geopolitical instability and conflicts between nation states. It may be in many, many different ways, rather than, oh, there’s a shortage of fuel for the ship to come from one continent to another. A lot of the analysis around peak oil and the peaking of the largest energy source sustaining humanity misunderstood that you immediately get expensive energy and it not being available, and there’s a shortage of maybe food. Things are much more complex than that. We are actually experiencing that at the moment because we are past the peak of both conventional oil and now of what’s called total liquids, and that is really the king resource that despite the rapidity of the renewable energy rollout still is what is structuring our world to an enormous extent, but in ways that people can’t really see directly or understand.

(16m38s) The Importance of Local Context and Culture

Podcast Host: Just in terms of getting into the thicket of problems, there’s some global problems. There’s some that are more local and there’s complex interactions between. I guess I’ll mention that I really admired on a cultural level and in terms of publishing ethics, the decision to focus RetroSuburbia on the Australian situation and to put it into an Australian grammar. I was wondering if you could talk about that decision a little bit, what it means to start from your specific situation.

David Holmgren: Well I think this idea of re-localization as the necessary state is also the redevelopment of local culture and local context, which of course, people have been angsting about all over the world. This dissolution of their own local culture and the predominance of modernity, industrial culture that people often label as American culture, but I say it’s either the shared global culture or it’s no one’s culture. It comes from Mars or something, but it’s very, very different from all cultures of place that existed before. So that redevelopment of local culture is more likely to be some sort of hybrid of things from the past and new things, but it reflects the local context. I think this is one of the difficulties that people coming from our shared modernity assume—because this is what would’ve been our lived experience for a few generations—is there’s one big solution that trumps everything else and spreads everywhere. Whether it’s the lingua franca of English or whether it’s computer software that works the same everywhere in the world. Once you’re working with nature, once you’re working with living systems, everywhere is different and the particular nature of solutions is different. People get very frustrated that they can’t just take an example from one place and rubber stamp it across landscape. So that also applies in the publishing world. Publishers of course, want generic books that will apply to the widest product audience and actually manipulate the authors to rewrite text away from their lived experience as an author in whatever the field is to generalize. That’s understandable enough. But as an author and as a publisher, and from this deep culture of permaculture, I know we have to articulate the local and the specific context because then you can get down to relevant detail. It’s always been that difficulty with permaculture because while its ethics and design principles are universal, they’re very abstract. The concrete strategies and techniques unfortunately, are not universal. They don’t apply everywhere. There’s been a bit of that story back and forth, especially between this country, Australia and the United States in relation to permaculture, because Australia was where Permaculture came from. Even when Mollison traveled in the US and people having to interpret his language. What is a chook? In a way it’s playing with that cultural colonialism also of turning that around. But it’s also a commitment to one’s own territory of providing the most valuable, immediate, applicable information to one’s constituent immediate geographic community. Then if that information is useful in a wider field, that is good, but it actually biases quite deliberately to the local. We have done that over the decades with our permaculture design courses. We say in here in Central Victoria, while we design methods and design principles and processes are universal, all of our example material comes from this specific region, and that means the course is most useful to those in this specific region. If people wanna come from further afield, well they can still do that. But we are not restructuring that course to make it global. It’s very deliberate in a cultural sense and reflecting the sort of permaculture localism without wanting to get into some sort of parochial, “the olive oil from my village is the best in the world.” It was actually quite functional for people, peasant peoples to have that view of their place and their love of their home place, even if it wasn’t true. But it also has a dark side, of course, of parochialism. We want to maintain the international thinking, the global thinking, but acting locally.

(22m16s) Aussie Street: Speculative Fiction for Transformation

Podcast Host: In terms of trying to bridge that same gap that you’re talking about and to think from a territory, but have something to say to people elsewhere. I just wanted to ask you to talk in specific about the role of Ossie Street. Maybe you could explain a little bit about what Ossie Street is, but the role of it in the book and in your writing process. What does it mean to use speculative fiction in this way? To think about transformations that we’ll need to undertake?

David Holmgren: Aussie Street emerged as a presentation initially, and it wasn’t even really a story, it was just a map of four suburban streets showing the history of how that street had evolved over my lived experience starting in the 1950s, and then how it might evolve in the future. Gradually that storytelling emerged with people’s names and became like a permaculture soap opera. That predated the RetroSuburbia book, and we knew that it had to be in some form, part of the book. It was very interesting in writing it down. The story almost ran away. Like it was a whole reality for me at that point. It was that amazing experience of oral communication that wasn’t written down to it having that form. Part of it for me was educating younger people about the recent Australian history, about the places where most Australians grew up because we’d had this absence of academic interests and disdain for suburbia for so many decades. There was almost no serious work on even studying what Australians did in their suburban backyards. There were no books from or significant academic research from 1975 to 2005, there’s this great gap. So Aussie Street was a bit my poking fun at academics of, hey, what is the real history of this? Also introducing it to people who were migrants to Australia who had landed here and found the modern affluent Australian culture so weird and so different from their own experience. Then being able to show them that there are actually elements in the not so distant past that actually connected with some of their own experience from other countries. Then I suppose the third level is this. This suburban pattern is one that is of course, common to the affluent and especially extensive new Europes, especially of North America, and of course our sister country across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand, much more than perhaps some of the denser urban patterns of European and Asian cities. But essentially that suburban pattern has been exported all over the world. Coming out of America. So there’s very many similarities in that. But other variations that might lead to other stories that people can tell about their own shared history. And then of course, the really important thing of imagining and creating a positive future.

Podcast Host: Some of the similarities that come through almost became spooky for me. Like in our town, in the Midwestern United States, we have had to figure out negotiating difference with grumpy bike punks who are impatient with our pace of transition and our approach. Reading that just really touched me and I totally both empathize with the grumpy bike punks on Aussie Street and the ones in our town. These are real dynamics that stretch themselves across the globe.

David Holmgren: I suppose one of the things when I first traveled outside of Australia and New Zealand, which was not until 1994, and while the extraordinary difference of landscape and language and culture that people mostly comment on in overseas travel, the thing that struck me is how much the same the story of modernity was everywhere. Whether it was the Arab Israeli kids on their BMX bikes with their walkmans on riding down the street in front of the house where there’s a new third story being put on the house and next to the tractor and the fava bean crop in the front was the new BMW and the roses and the other signs of affluent addition, to many, many other examples. So many things struck me that so much of the modern world is actually, of course, a shared global experience.

(28m4s) Addressing Suburban Challenges and Household Dynamics

Podcast Host: I’ll say that I appreciated that in Aussie Street there was a real effort to wrangle with transformations and relations between genders and racial dynamics and migration patterns. That evokes some of the things that are most difficult in this puzzle of this pattern as it especially as it originated in the US and suburbia here at least, is tied so tightly the questions of racial exclusion and also the home, not as a kind of, I forget exactly how you put it, but the home economic unit or not just the useful home, but the exclusive home that doesn’t do a very good job of caring for itself even. I was wondering if you could just talk about, given that you’re focusing on suburbia and the potential retrofit, what are some of the challenges that are specific to the suburban pattern and how can we address them?

David Holmgren: Well I suppose those things are, a lot of the issues are to do with the socioeconomic cycle of, is this suburbia of new tightly held aspirational owners, but dependent on mortgages and almost never there, and very little community connection? Is it places where people dying off or moving to nursing homes and there’s a new generations of people coming in and development pressures to infill develop and being resisted by new families that are moving in? There’s so many different dynamics in suburbia right through to the battle of places that are, if you like, the abandoned landscapes where workers, the industries that supported those people have gone and maybe communities of great disadvantage. So we can see all of those things, different types of suburban landscapes that all have this separate house on a block of land, of whatever particular configuration that basic template with very, very different communities. I suppose a lot of the opportunities are in the places where there is, has been some breakdown, loss of value transition in owners and land use, whereas in the places newly established and with higher affluence and a sense of tight regulatory control, and then reinforced by some social norms of maintaining property values and security and all of those things that are often associated with suburbia, those patterns can be more difficult. But I think one of the things that happens in looking at this is that I’ve suggested the lens of looking at it through as a community as a whole has sometimes run up against some limits and my retro suburbia work in some ways inverts that and takes what might be seen as a more socially conservative view and starts with the household. As the autonomous unit from which then builds community relationships and connections. So this is part of, I see an evolution, a learning evolution in permaculture activism over the decades that I would characterize the first generation of permaculture activism was mostly rugged individualists, often in a rural context, sometimes with a family in tow, with a vision of what they were going to do. Then there was a second iteration, which was much more community focused. You can see this in the emergence of the transition towns movement in Britain and then spreading to other places around the world. How do we look at whole community approach and often in a more urban context. Then between those two, people often miss that all communities are based on the functional unit of society, economically and socially is a household. Now, whether that’s a family, let alone a nuclear family, it’s people living together that share food in some way and do things. They are some sort of economic unit and that we’ve tended between to go between the individual and community, individual and community. Sometimes that missing building block is, if we look at it in terms of social change, that’s the one that’s missing. Especially from a politically left progressive perspective, it’s been seen as, oh, well that’s the territory of the social conservatives or something on the right, and maybe that’s something that then, that’s a learning and getting past some of those barriers to recognize the household as a starting point. So my RetroSuburbia work is primarily focusing on that and that does bypass some of those issues of, gee, how do we get all these people to cooperate or start doing things together? Because obviously there’s enormous potentials that can be developed at the community neighborhood level, which can’t really be achieved easily just at the household level.

Podcast Host: I think there’s been a serious resurgence of communal forms in the US but it’s interesting because many of those are not swinging as far nearly as the kind of classic cases of the sixties and seventies, and I think are based on a pattern of just how people really of all ages, I was gonna say young people, people of all ages are able to afford life in cities and suburbs. So you have more or less communes, but they really look like the households you’re talking about. They’re not 20 people, and they’re not necessarily even making the kinds of intentional, lifelong commitments that one associates with these kind of big C communes. But it’s people getting together to survive and I think then be able to undertake some interesting experiments. So I just mentioned that because I think it’s an interesting point to think about that swing. Between them and between that. A lot of people, just on a really large scale, I think are finding somewhere in between here that’s a little bit different than has ever been found before. I think.

David Holmgren: I think that very much reflects the strategic focus that I took with RetroSuburbia and if we think about the life expectancy of traditional family households, especially when you look at relationship breakups and movement of people from one place to another. Then you look at these amalgamated households, micro communities, that not necessarily having any long life expectation. These things are not actually so different. So the casual shared household of students and other young people and people setting out as a family. Often, how long those households last might not be so different, and we can see how in both cases, a longer life expectancy of a shared household or a traditional family will create greater capacities and greater possibilities that are not so achievable in a rapidly changing or turning over household or community context. But at the same time, those short-lived ones are learning opportunities constantly. But I think there’s also a point to understand that when we look at economic periods of economic hardship or contraction in recent history over the last hundred years or so across countries, the primary way that people cope with that is by aggregating together in larger shared households. It was actually some of my observations and looking at the data from the United States in relation to the global financial crisis when I was working on all of this RetroSuburbia research more than in Australia, where the impacts were not as severe, that we saw starting to see the data on larger household size. I’m saying larger house size there. Sharing together. While those new forms of sharing are part of that process, we know that the bulk of it, for better or for worse, is actually extended family re-amalgamation children, adult children moving back in with their parents because of hard times or moving in as carers, multi-generations together. If we had better patterns of how to do this well, then this process would be more positive, but it does happen. We know historically that that’s how people cope because it’s just, it’s more economically efficient. It’s more secure in uncertain times and conditions, and it just is a product response of people losing housing or whether through mortgage failure or whatever. But it’s also a unique possibility in the modern world where we now have these very large houses, which are historically speaking large houses with a huge amount of floor space per person that are incredibly underused. They’re underused for multiple reasons. The prime one is that people’s lives have been increasingly outside of the home, sucked into the monetary economy. So at work, at school, at the childcare center, at the gymnasium, at the cafe, all of these things that we associate with urban life, but actually that means houses are empty under lock and key. We have this sense of our cities being crowded, but they’re actually not crowded with people. They’re just crowded with people rushing between all these underused buildings. So the opportunities to re-inhabit suburbia, occupy more people in a household, but spending more time there is much greater. I suppose the Australian context is one that is a little bit different to most of the United States in that the climates mostly very benign In Southern Australia. For fit and healthy people, you can live outdoors in an Australian winter. So it’s more like California in that sense. The whole other problem of, oh, when you get too many people together, they’re all crowded together, there’s crowding. Well, the old Australian pattern was to send the kids outside to play, play on the street. Occupy the outside space and of course that’s would re-inhabit the street as well. I saw that there were huge opportunities, especially in the Australian context, that we could actually support many more people in these suburban landscapes without getting to the point of actually what we would call overcrowding.

(41m4s) Getting Started: Retrofitting Tools and Assessment

Podcast Host: If I could just ask, if you have tips for people who want to get going and what are the first steps in looking for potential homes to retrofit or just getting started?

David Holmgren: Well, we’ve developed a RetroSuburbia real estate assessment tool, which is both in the book, but it’s also downloadable as a spreadsheet from the RetroSuburbia website. That is obviously framed within Australia and actually Southern Australian climates and patterns. But I think it’s a very generally useful tool for people to use both in evaluating their own place where they’re, or thinking about where they might choose to live or purchase. In making those sorts of decisions and looking at both the built, the biological and the regulatory patterns that are in that place, because people often tend to fall between two extremes. That in looking at their own place, they’ll often say, well, this has been a good place to live. It’s always gonna be reasonable in the future. Why not? And have a sunny ignorance about threats and challenges that are coming down the line or at the other extreme, oh, there’s no point doing anything here. This is just doesn’t work. Nothing’s right. It’s all wrong until I can go somewhere better. There’s no point doing anything. In fact, often, a proper analysis will really show strength and weaknesses in all different places. We do that with our case studies of actually showing what those scores of those places are and what they were before they were retrofitted, and then how they scored afterwards. So I think that is a tool, even if the particular scores and some of the points of evaluation might not translate to different climates and contexts. We know even that retro template needs to be modified in the subtropical areas of Queensland, for example, where some of the patterns don’t so much apply. For example, in that we can see in Southern Australia that big evergreen trees that might provide lovely shade, really inhibit the growing of food and sometimes involve fire hazards. Whereas in the Queensland subtropical context with the greater heat and greater rainfall, sometimes those overshadowing, large trees are not such a disadvantage. There’s all sorts of ways in which those patterns can be either new patterns added or the scores that you would give a benefit or a disadvantage can be reevaluated. Similarly with the sort of building framework we looked at, a lot of Australian building methods and the sort different types of construction of houses and their ability to be retrofitted and identified, for example, that houses that were more of the 1950s era up on stumps with timber floors rather than slab on the ground, offered a lot more retrofits in relation to cool cupboards, compost toilets, and various options for plumbing retrofits than places that were slab on the ground. A lot of those things will apply in some patterns but not others. I’d really recommend that tool, which people can also see in the online version of the book, which is available everywhere, of course on a pay what you feel basis, which is something we did during the pandemic to make the work more widely accessible.

(45m40s) Suburban Risks: Fire, Flooding, and Resilience

Podcast Host: One of the contradictions of suburbia is that it’s been seen by many people as a place of refuge and safety and retreat, but actually has turned out in a number of contexts to be an edge along which you’re exposed to lots of different dangers. I was wondering if you could just give us snapshot of some of the ways to think about suburban retrofit and exposure to risk, especially fire, because that’s been a huge issue in Colorado.

David Holmgren: Bushfire is a major theme in my work over many, many decades and has been an element because the southeast of Australia is the most severely impacted by wildfire in the world. Though in recent decades, perhaps being rivaled by parts of North America, that issue has always been central to permaculture design in rural areas, but it’s been in more recent decades that the impact has happened more into suburban areas. That’s partly because those suburbs have colonized the leafy, forest environments and people’s desire to have forest trees around them. In both the west coast of the United States and in Australia, a lot of those predominant trees are actually fire enhancing trees like eucalypts and conifers. But I think it’s also very predominantly the steep sloping land, which is a very powerful dynamic in bushfire. Analyzing the landscape and its risks and hazards are part of what we have in the book of looking at those templates, including the other threats like flooding and the modified landscape ones like storm water flooding. The way people can have this shocked experience of a wall of water coming through their back door, being completely unaware that their property was actually in a gully, in an urbanized drained landscape. When the storm water systems don’t cope with the peak runoff, suddenly, oh, look at the position we are in the landscape of people not being aware of where they are in the land. Those sorts of things certainly apply with the bushfire. But we also have building patterns and building materials which are inherently more fire resistant right through to ones that are very hazardous. Of course for an Australian with a focus on bushfire, some of the west Coast and more widespread building methods with tar roofs, pitchmen roof systems, they’re sort of like a bit frightening that you would have that in a fire prone area. Then also a lot of the lightweight soft wood shingles and shakes these materials that are very easy to ignite. But I think there’s also understanding the dynamics of fire and how the presence of able-bodied people is more important than any other factor or design feature in whether a house burns down. So the whole modern strategy of every resident is a dependent, vulnerable person that the authorities need to remove, and then somehow the authorities will run around with competent professionals to every house and look after it. When actually self-reliant communities mostly in place are able to defend and survive in situ is a real possibility and very much supported by the evidence of science. That was really policy in Australia though we have now drifted back towards the American command and control, the authorities will do all the things and you all flee type of approach. It is more or less inevitable when you get major fires and there’s no one present. Then embers just gradually get into buildings and the buildings progress burn down often after the fire front has passed. So there’s a strong correlation. Where fire actually deals with all of these things, the fundamental landscape position, the nature of the building, fabrics and systems, the infrastructure of town, water supply and other services, the nature of gardens, and whether they are fire retardant or fire enhancing, and the behavior of the residents, most importantly. So it’s one of those issues that pulls together, and I think it’s very emblematic of the nature of permaculture design solutions that we inform and empower retro suburbia and also a key expression of what the climate emergency looks like in a lot of landscapes, even though of course in other parts of our country’s, its expressions through other forms of intense weather and natural disasters.

(51m52s) The Human Element: Behavior, Conflict, and Community

Podcast Host: And yeah, just going exactly there, but in a more general way, I wanted to close by going to the last third of your book, but where you provide a whole bunch of tools for thinking about behavioral design or thinking about the human element of or the social element of retrofitting. So I just wanted to ask for you to unpack some of the things that you offer for people facing climate chaos for people who are facing intensifying crises. Because you sort of address conflict resolution and group formation, I think offers some powerful tools. So I just wanted to ask for you to touch on those things for our listeners.

David Holmgren: My partner would say, start at the back of the book. The behavioral field is the really important stuff. Of course, it deals with everything from ownership and living arrangements, new forms of livelihood, raising, self-reliant and resilient children, financial planning and security, sustainable diet and sustaining and sustainable diet. Really all the big difficult issues for which there’s no real exact answers. I think the last chapter in that section that I wrote was on health, disability, and aging. Because in some ways it’s perhaps the most challenging, but arguably the issue is around conflict resolution and intentional communities and group process work. How much that, if you like, practice and science can combine with some of the best of traditional relationship understandings and patterns to how do we deal with conflict? How do we deal with emergence and generational change and those sorts of issues. I think within the field that might be called social permaculture and related networks, especially intentional communities movement, there has been a lot of work done on those processes that are absolutely essential when we’re dealing with larger groups and communities. But they do have some application down at the household scale. I think the issues of working through some problems sometimes with an outside elder or facilitator. Sometimes that historically happened in extended families, but people finding ways to provide alternatives to those if those don’t exist. One of the greatest ones we are dealing with and we illustrate both in the Aussie Street story and talk about in the book is this interaction between older homeowners who often own their places outright without debt, but really need younger people to help them achieve the potential of the place and younger people who are not in a position to own their own properties. How do these two groups get together? Because they both need each other and both groups need to learn to give up some of the things they’re holding onto. For older people, it’s sometimes their privacy or their sense of control of their territory, but also come face to face with the ambiguity of their power difference. As an owner with others in their house, how are they comfortable with those intimate relationships where they actually have more power than the other person? And how do those others, who often younger people come to grips with getting beyond that situation of, oh, I don’t have the power. This is not my place. I can’t really do anything that I need to do until I have my own autonomy. Both those groups really need to learn to give up something. From that huge synergies and potentials are possible. We can see how that can exist between generations of what I said of re-amalgamating extended family households. But we also know that there’s a lot of old stuff and triggers for going back to old patterns. Whereas sometimes when that connection between older people and younger adults, those people are not related, at least you don’t have those old patterns that have to be overcome. So we have some not answers on those questions, but at least guidance of some of the issues. We’re hoping to continue, like with all of the sections of the book, add more resources to the retro suburbia website in the same way that we’re adding more inspirational case studies so people can have a flavor of, oh, how did those people deal with that?