David was interviewed on the Next Economy Now podcast, which you can listen to below.

Interview Highlights:

• From the co-originator of the permaculture concept, David shares his definition of what permaculture is and what it is not

• Discussion of David’s book, RetroSuburbia: The Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future

• An unpacking of many economic ideas based around what David  argues is the basic economic unit of society: the household.

Interview Transcript

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(02m51s) Introduction to David Holmgren

Podcast Host: Welcome to Next Economy Now. The goal of this podcast series is to highlight the leaders who are taking a regenerative, bioregional, equitable, democratic, racially just, and whole systems approach to creating the new economy. It is, I am honored, really a distinct privilege to introduce and to have a conversation with somebody that I classify as, maybe a little vulnerable or embarrassing, but as a hero, somebody I’ve learned a tremendous amount from, both in the written word. And then I had the enormous privilege to learn in person early in this century. And somebody who I believe has truly impacted the world, which I can say about very few people. So without any further ado, I’d like to introduce David Holmgren.

David Holmgren: Pleased to be on the Next Economy. Thanks.

Podcast Host: David, I think when people typically introduce you, they probably introduce you as the co-originator of the permaculture concept. And when I think about the Next Economy Now audience, it’s maybe there’s some of us who are not yet aware of what permaculture is. And though I’m sure you’ve addressed this a thousand times, I’m wondering if you would do us a favor of introducing permaculture in your own words.

(04m08s) What is Permaculture?

David Holmgren: Permaculture is in essence a design system for both sustainable living and land use. So it’s concerned with both the consumption side of the equation: how we behave, how we organize ourselves in our living arrangements, our economic arrangements, and also the production side of where humanity gets its basic material and energetic needs, which is from essentially a working relationship with nature, whether that’s a dysfunctional relationship or not. That’s where wealth, that’s where what we need, comes from. And in a lot of ways, it’s about bringing those two sides of that separate realities back together again. When we grow food for ourselves in our gardens rather than going to the supermarket, we are pulling back together that consumption-production system into one looped, cyclical system. And that requires, or has at least the opportunity to apply, design thinking, which we can think of as a sort of a new emergent literacy of humanity. Now clearly, traditional systems before the modern era did involve design when we look back, we can see the evolutionary design, but that’s a very slow process. And in the 20th century, design as a sort of a new literacy started to show some of its potential. And so I see permaculture emerging in the 1970s as part of that design revolution of consciously, how do we put these things together? So the starting point for that for Bill Mollison and myself was around the questions of agriculture because agriculture is the primary human activity on the planet. It’s the most environmentally and resource-problematic one. Relatively recent recognition of that in the greenhouse metrics of carbon emissions is that agriculture is still this big thing, especially when you look at it as the whole food supply chain. So a lot of people would associate permaculture, of course, as some sort of cool form of organic gardening because permaculture has brought together a lot of techniques from a spectrum of sources, from traditional and indigenous ways of doing things to innovative ideas in the 20th century that we do associate with organic agriculture and gardening. But also then spreading out in related areas of intentional communities, designed communities. So it really means different things to different people. But stepping back even a bit further, you could put it in a sort of a spectrum, one part of the spectrum of positive environmentalism, trying to create the world we want rather than negative environmentalism, not in the sense that that’s bad, but trying to push back or stop bad things happening in the world. But its focus, instead of being at how do we change government policies or make the latest green corporation, its focus has been at, if you like, at the grassroots, in a communitarian sense, but also right down to household and individual level: how do we live the change we want to see in the world? And sort of use the freedom and opportunity that the modern world provides to create a parallel world that has a chance of providing some learnings for society, maybe right back to the idea of being lifeboats in the case of that main society pushing itself further over the cliff as it seems to be doing. So that, rather than trying to reform the large-scale settings, start again at the bottom. And in that sense of childhood development, learning to crawl before we walk before we run. So what does this new world look like that later became called sustainability more than a decade after permaculture? I suppose the other way to think about permaculture, of course, is that it’s now a worldwide movement and network of people and organizations and not just confined to the affluent countries of the world. In many poorer countries, there’s quite strong permaculture networks, and mostly we’d associate those with organic agriculture, intentional communities, ecological buildings, those sorts of networks. But also spreading out into the peer-to-peer new economy sort of areas. And I mean just for as an example of a connection in that particular area, back in the 1980s, when permaculture activists first started becoming involved in ethical investment in Australia, ethical investment was about not investing in tobacco companies and arms trading. With the influence of permaculture activists, that became about investing in positive environmental solutions, which started with an organization called August Investments, which became Australian Ethical Investment, which is the largest ethical investment fund in the country. So permaculture has had a connection to, I suppose, the economic side from early days as well as, you know, more recently.

(10m49s) Permaculture and the Formal Economy

Podcast Host: Right. And I think in that case, that’s one of permaculture’s connections to the formal economy. And I think highlighting that, at this personal and household scale of action, there’s whole realms that we could still associate with the word economy in terms of this producer-consumer, bringing that closer together where we are locally self-reliant, meeting our own needs. How do you connect your insights and observations about the economy at large, the formal economy, in terms of how it motivates some of your thinking around maybe even why suburbia and why retrofit and some of the things that have come up recently? And I guess for those who are listening, I should mention, and I’ll put it in the resources, very recently, within the last year, David has published a book, *RetroSuburbia: The Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future*. It’s a tremendous work. I’ll let you kind of describe a little bit about that connection, maybe.

(11m28s) RetroSuburbia and Energy Descent

David Holmgren: Well, I suppose *RetroSuburbia* is really coming out of a lineage of nearly 20 years work. That in the late ’90s, teaching on permaculture design courses and thinking about the framing of the future that permaculture was based on in the ’70s, the evidence of the *Limits to Growth*, the idea that complex industrial civilization was not going to keep growing at 2% per annum just didn’t comply with the laws of physics or the possibilities of mathematical exponential growth. And understanding what are the different ways in which that could come to an end. And so that led to, as we approached the millennium, and there was evidence that we’re approaching both the climate crisis and the resources crisis through the agency of peak oil primarily, limits to the energies that sustain society, and the adverse consequences of those energies primarily in the form of climate change, but species extinction and a myriad of other consequences, a lot of them relating to agriculture, of course. That those limits meant it was really important to think about what sort of economic systems could actually make that transition and whether that transition would be in an ordered, planned way or more chaotic ways. And of course, because we’ve moved on so much from the 1970s, 1972 when the *Limits to Growth* report came out, we’ve mostly gone radically in the wrong direction. And so all of those problems that were very clear back then, that we’re going to emerge very strongly according to the modeling in the mid-21st century, are already here. So that meant that humanity, one way or another, is going to adapt to what I called an energy descent future, if not an energy collapse future. And using energy as a sort of a marker of the underlying real source of wealth that sustains humanity, not just in the sense of fuel that you put in your car or electricity that you run your computer with, but energy in the larger ecological sense, that in various forms all systems that grow depend on a growing supply of energy. There isn’t one that doesn’t. So with those understandings, it became clear that the vast residential landscapes of suburbia in affluent countries like the United States and Australia that had been, I suppose, regarded by planners and environmentalists for decades as the lost landscapes, the dysfunctional landscapes, the ones dependent on commuting, and that were dormitory suburbs and all of these negative things, they’re all true, that these landscapes actually had huge potential for incremental retrofit and re-ruralization for energy descent futures where we would have to be more locally self-reliant. So that was sort of that larger framing that was always there at the beginnings of permaculture that became a stronger part of my work, but it got sidelined a little as I focused on the future scenarios side of that equation. So in 2007, we put out a website, Future Scenarios, which became a book in 2009, where I suggested that peak oil and climate change were the big drivers of multiple potential energy descent scenarios that would in some way involve a world of less rather than a world of more. And so using that future scenarios framework of scenario planning, how do you adapt and flexibly respond to how those might emerge? And I suppose it was after that work that I came back to the suburban context. But there was a lot of work that was continuing in that, including my *Aussie Street* story, which is sort of a permaculture soap opera of people adapting in situ in suburbia and surviving and thriving through what’s a near-future scenario of the second Great Depression of the 2020s. So that, and then that’s of course a story in a chapter in the *RetroSuburbia* book, but it’s a storytelling that I’ve been doing for more than a decade which has been, I found, a more creative and engaging way to talk about a lot of those issues. So I think that uncertainty about the future and what are the aspects of the future that we can’t negotiate away, or are unlikely to be negotiated away, and then how do we respond creatively to those? What are the limits of human agency, individually and right through to globally? There’s still that debate hugely raging, and it illustrates the commitment to growth in materials and energy and economic expression is very strongly a religious faith. It keeps re-emerging in different forms. And of course, permaculture from the beginning, and certainly with *RetroSuburbia*, it’s more a creative, positive response to that possibility of, and likelihood of, energy descent in some form. And I use the term descent rather than collapse because I think, in spite of the incredibly good work by economic and ecological historians on collapse of previous civilizations and the implications for our own, the word collapse does imply the complete ending of something. And I think that’s not exactly the most likely path. And I think it’s very interesting that the one that we understand the most of historically, Rome, was described as a decline, a sort of gradual unraveling of empire and gradual replacement with other structures, of course with crises along the way. So in that sense, I am, I suppose, one of those thinkers who’s spent a lifetime thinking about how do we work in that environment of less and recognize that there’s then an alignment, once you do that, from an ecological, energetic, economic point of view with a lot of the spiritual traditions of our own culture and traditional peoples, who always recognized the limits of the material world and said the place where growth can continue is in the internal, the spiritual, the awareness domain. That’s where growth is always good. But growth always ends in the material world. The growth of anything comes to an end. So in some ways that awareness of limits is also a redirecting towards a pathway of internal growth. And that’s not necessarily in a completely sort of private, internalized, personal thing, it’s in a societal sense too, a shift from materialism really to being in other ways, if that’s not too esoteric.

(20m00s) Human Agency and the Household Economy

Podcast Host: To be… yeah, I’m struck by the agency of humans in the context, isn’t potentially another motivator for personal voluntary behavior change where we have agency? And I found in my work using permaculture design, that work on a personal and household scale as the distinct accent and emphasis doesn’t necessarily preclude at all advocating for or acting for transformation of larger systems, the government or community scale. That these two things can be potentially both. And you mentioned permaculture’s connection to the world of formal economy, ethical investing. It’s just an example, maybe not transformative but certainly from a harm reduction perspective, of the enormity of the power of the economy to shape the harms in this world.

David Holmgren: Well, the important thing of modeling, if we are talking about radical structural change rather than just reform of the slight collateral damage created by industrial civilization and its main mechanism of organization through capitalism, then to do that in saying we’re going to restructure this from the top is a recipe for disaster because we’re talking about how something organically grows. And it’s got to grow from simple examples because in nature and human systems, any complex system that works evolved from simple systems that worked. No complex system that was created from scratch ever worked. And I think this is true right through to a lot of discussions about even physical systems. The electricity grid and the internet are the two most complex physical systems that humans have ever created, and they weren’t designed from scratch, they evolved. So this thing of how do we model? What does some sort of deeper form of sustainability or adaptability to ecological and energetic realities look like? Well, you start at the base. And for me, the basic economic unit of society, which is self-evident and is often not even bothered to be mentioned, is a household. Now, whether that’s a family of related people in some sort of traditional sense or not, that is the basic unit of where things are provided. Now it’s difficult in the modern world to even recognize that because we’ve shunted most activity out of the household up into higher levels of economic organization and complexity and mostly monetarized those. But even in affluent societies, the work of feminist economist Marilyn Waring showed in countries like New Zealand and Australia, the unpaid work of women way back in the ’80s was so much that, if it was paid, it would send those countries bankrupt. So even in modern societies, that household activity is where a lot of basic things get done: looking after children, preparing food, fixing a leaking tap, a myriad of things, even when we’re not considering what we would say self-reliant households, who grow their own food, bake their own bread, milk goats, remanufacture bicycle parts, or do a myriad of things for themselves. So I’ve been suggesting in my presentation of the *RetroSuburbia* ideas, and it’s a sort of a challenge out to economic researchers, the idea that my guess is that 50% of the growth in GDP in my lifetime, over 60 years or so, has been completely fake. So not in the sense that legal litigation or car accidents contribute to GDP, bads and disservices, but in the sense that those activities were already happening, they just weren’t monetarized. So for example, when someone stopped making their lunch at home and bought it at work, no more lunches were created. It’s just that the activity became monetarized. It moved out of the household economy and into the monetary economy. Okay, we can look at the lunch that was being made in the household economy, and in most places in the modern world it was made from bought ingredients, but at least the service component of making the lunch was not part of the monetary economy, but it was still there as a value to those individual people and to society. So if we can, if we have done that move, and a lot of what we call economic growth is all it is, then if it’s more environmentally efficient, socially beneficial, and creates greater economic autonomy for people to move some of that activity back into the household and community non-monetary economies, certainly more resilient…

Podcast Host: We can do that and call it economic growth, which makes pro-growth…

David Holmgren: That’s a spin I haven’t heard yet. I haven’t heard that turn on it.

Podcast Host: Yeah. Yeah. So I think so many of the economic arguments really need to be broken down and seen through a completely different lens. And that, this is, I suppose, the core idea that should be really simple but I think is often ignored: that the household is an economic system. But our households are weaker, more fragile, and ironically, too small to be very self-reliant. On average, too few people living together.

(26:41) The Household as an Economic Incubator

David Holmgren: And that then leads to, I think, two responses, without even being aware of that sort of, you know, having been sucked dry and everything shunted into the monetary economy who benefited from that. And of course there’s huge challenges in this because one of the biggest ways in which that happened was women moving from the household economy into the workforce. And so that process that most of us understand as part of gender equality and all of these positive aspects of that, maybe that actually happened, the biggest forces behind that were really that this is a way to keep growing GDP, and not necessarily in some conspiratorial sense, but that it’s the mandate of capitalism that everyone must be in this system because that’s how the system can grow. So as well as the expansion of fringes in terms of economic colonization and new forms of colonial economy, and of course the colonization of the future in terms of over-extraction of resources and all those sorts of things, you’ve got this internal colonization of the territory that was not controlled by governments and corporations and banks, and it’s just what people did for themselves. And so that didn’t require a monetary measure. So in most societies before very recently, a vast amount of what we would call economic activity was at the household level, and for very good reasons because it’s actually just more efficient to grow vegetables, for example, right where people live and that not be part of a monetary system. It doesn’t mean to say that everyone doing that is the most efficient, expert person, but people did that because they kept money for the things that they couldn’t do for themselves, whether that was going to the doctor or some higher, more complex functions. And what we know through economic history in the modern world is whenever there’s a downturn in the monetary economy, we get a resurgence in these household and community non-monetary economies. And we get it whether people like it or not. It happens.

Podcast Host: Yeah.

David Holmgren: And so a lot of what *RetroSuburbia*, or even larger permaculture is about, is about doing that well. How can we do that well? Because it’s going to be done anyway, and it gives this enormous capacity for both resilience to uncertain shocks in systems, but it also gives a degree of political autonomy that is incredibly lacking today. And a lot of people advocating for radical political change don’t seem to understand that most people in the modern world are virtually dependent, almost on the air they breathe, on a system that has power over them. So some degree of household and community autonomy, self-organizing autonomy, is also one of the foundations of any sort of political equity. And so those connect over into these very large issues, but of course, *RetroSuburbia* as a book is not about that. It’s about the patterns of that actually work for people doing these things because my intention with the book was to help enable people doing these things rather than write the book about the theory and the framework and those sorts of things. And it’s very comprehensive.

(30m45s) RetroSuburbia: Design for Resilience

Podcast Host: Pause for a moment on *RetroSuburbia* because it’s not… I mean, there’s a preamble that does give the general framing, and you admittedly don’t go to the layer of detail that some permaculture literature goes to, specifying certain vegetation selection, even though there’s great recommendations for the climate zones identified. But it’s really the pattern level. It’s this design level for this intentional retrofit, making it possible to be less haphazard as we voluntarily develop these resilient households and connected resilient households into resilient neighborhoods. So as much as I’d love to query you about Babakos and some of our favorite fruits and vegetables and so forth, it’s not necessarily that layer of detail, though if there’s a reader out there that wanted that layer of detail, there is enough there to satisfy. Especially, I found the soil and soil toxicity stuff very additive to my existing understanding and experience, as an example.

David Holmgren: Yeah. We certainly went into, within the three fields that the book covers, in some ways it’s… several commentators have said it’s really three books: the built environment, the biological, and the behavioral. And the behavioral is the biggest section, but the one that people would most strongly associate with permaculture is the biological: food production systems. And we see food production as certainly the core of what is possible in the suburban-scale household economies. In higher-density cities, city environments, then yes, there’s still a role for the household economy. It’s smaller than at the suburban level, which you could say is smaller than at the rural level. But there’s a different proportionate focus in those three fields of action, and growing food is certainly one of the powerful ways in which households can become more self-reliant, provide for more of their own needs. And it’s also the place where the household becomes an incubator for potential future generation monetary economic activity. So the child who starts with a passion for raising seedlings, or whatever, and gets into producing something and then is developing a small backyard enterprise, that the way in which the household economy is literally this nursery for future monetary activity rather than the idea that monetary activity starts from some sort of rational search just by investors and entrepreneurs as to what market needs more. The idea of economy coming from a passion, a thing of people who do something really well and discovering they can and want to do that for other people. So the diversity of resilient household economies for children, especially seeing lots of different models and lots of different niches in which they can experiment.

Podcast Host: Yeah. Yeah. And some of that is not copying the adults. It’s finding the vacant niche, in the same way that our son in the workshop didn’t copy me as a woodcraft person. By the time he was 15, he became a much better welder than me. He became the metal worker. So finding that vacant niche. And the trouble is, in most modern households, it’s a very simple, crude, fragile ecosystem, and there aren’t many niches to occupy.

(34m47s) The Sweet Spot of Suburbia

David Holmgren: And the potential we see in suburbia is there’s a sweet point between the space and resources for autonomy and self-provision that we associate with rural areas, combined with the critical mass of population and connectedness for interaction and exchange that we associate with cities. And so that potential, despite the dysfunction of the way it’s been designed and lived in, is still there in suburbia to be exploited and developed in ways that don’t require the whole of society to come to some agreement that this is necessary. Whereas in urban areas, especially in higher-density apartment buildings, there are so many stakeholders that have all got to get on board before something can shift that it’s very hard for the household and individual level to get action, which is why most of that creative action then goes out into network systems in the community. And there’s been more action at that level, whether that’s through community gardens or different forms of co-ops and different types of creative new economic activity, because where people live and often in the physical systems is sort of locked down. And of course it’s more technically complicated. How do we retrofit a 10-story apartment building with incredibly complex electrical and plumbing and communication systems for an energy descent future? It can be done, but it’s much more technically complicated than how do we retrofit a single-story building and grow food in a backyard. So that’s why we see that sweet point in suburbia.

Podcast Host: Right. It’s something about the settlement pattern with… if there’s enough density. So I thought it was provocative. You mentioned it earlier, just having enough people in the household is something, as part of the retrofit, is actually in many cases maybe increasing density, or at least increasing household activity and presence.

(37m09s) Rethinking Density

David Holmgren: This plays into one of the big beliefs in the planning profession and the environment movement generally, that for cities to be sustainable, we need more density and the suburban density is too low. And that’s been a sort of orthodoxy ever since I was at design school where we came up with the permaculture idea in the ’70s. But it’s based on a fallacy that, effectively a cargo cult, that to get that density, if we assume more density is needed, we put up more buildings. And we’ve done that, and what has actually happened is density of number of people per square kilometer has actually not changed.

Podcast Host: Right, right. That’s the sprawl phenomenon.

David Holmgren: What’s happened is that the number of people living in those houses…

Podcast Host: Yeah, yeah. So we’ve done infill. Yes, of course suburbs have continued to sprawl at the fringe, we’ve infilled the existing suburbs, and we’ve put up towers at the center. So we’ve done all of that, but the number of people per square kilometer, short of real high-rise development, has, in a lot of places, not actually increased. We know that from data in the city where we’re closest to, in Melbourne. So 30 years of infill development hasn’t increased the average population density. So you would think there would be a questioning of, maybe this infill development doesn’t work. So what has actually gone on? Well, families are smaller, households are now smaller. And all of that means there’s fewer people with more floor area per person, full of stuff. But that’s only a little bit of the equation because the hours of occupancy is something that we can’t really get any data on. But what we know anecdotally and from experience is that people are spending less and less time at home, until fairly recently at least. And that activity has all moved off into the public space, into the commercial world. So whether it’s at the restaurant or the dog shampoo service or the gymnasium or at work or school, everything is out there which makes us experience cities as being crowded. So there’s this existential angst about cities being packed with people, but they’re actually not. Most of the buildings are empty at any one time. And of course this is how pro-growth has been constantly expanded. So as well as building the houses, extra floor area per person, we’ve also built all of this other stuff. As well as the toilet you use at home, there’s the toilet in the gymnasium and the restaurant and all of these other things in the commercial economy, so far greater growth. So what that really means is that the effective density, in terms of hours of occupation, is a tiny fraction. So I did a little bit of an experiment on this, modeling our own occupation of our self-reliant, almost suburban-scale homestead here at Melliodora over the last 30 years and doing it with a spreadsheet and looking at hours of occupancy and the people who work in the office and the volunteers who come here and all the different bits and pieces. And then comparing it to a typical suburban household with a couple, both working full-time, and three kids going to school and the different holidays and activities. And I was a bit surprised that we’re only at about double the household occupancy. So that meant that our house, 30 years old, was actually 60 years old in terms of its use, which is interesting in itself, this use of buildings, how much buildings are being actively used, or whether they’re just sitting there as an asset, which in theory is just rising in value. Because, of course, without that rise in value, that imaginary rise in value, it’s the use value of something which is important economically. But it was interesting when I modeled the kitchen where we make all our own bread and bake cakes for people who come on tours and provide food for people who work and do all our own bottling and processing. I worked out that the kitchen was 300 years old in terms of a typical suburban kitchen. So there’s a whole lot of ways of looking at the whole urban planning, urban development, economic development matrix that are not really being considered in conventional discussions. So our strategies, encouraging people to take in a border, taking someone into your house to share the house, as the thing you can do that’s good for the community, good for the environment, good for your own household resilience and financial circumstances, how come that isn’t a strategy of a political party or a government, or a community advocacy?

(42:48) Equity, Power, and Retrofitting

David Holmgren: Now, of course if our houses were all full of people, that might be more difficult. So if we tell people, the 15 people in the Soweto taxi, that they should put 30 people in the Soweto taxi, it’s a little bit difficult. Whereas when we look at cars in countries like Australia and the United States, we can quadruple the energy efficiency of the engine with four people in the car. So that process of how we get to use what we’ve already got, and obviously there’s a lot of innovation in the sharing economies that’s being talked about, but we forget often that the model for how we do this, and how children learn how to do all this stuff, is actually in a household. And so when we just try and create all these things in a monetary, planned way, they might be good, they might be a bit of the icing on the cake, but we need to put a lot more energy into rebuilding our household as foundational economic systems. And in doing that, that also reaches across that widening economic and ideological gulf in societies like the United States and Australia, between those of progressive thinking on the left and people on the other side of that divide who don’t perhaps think in the same way. But actually, on a lot of these issues, there could be a lot of common ground, a lot of understanding. And we’re getting a tendency for these things to not see some of these solutions because they might involve an acknowledgment of some truth or value in people who see things on the other side of that world, which is perhaps a stronger divide tearing at countries like the United States, even Australia. So *RetroSuburbia* is really challenging a lot of orthodox thinking, not just in the conventional top systems, but looking at our own values and how we do things, and also recreating a lot of what some people have called “nanotechnology,” “grandmother technology”: simple ways of doing things. And again, the theme, some of these themes here are patterns. This capitalism, with its mandates for increasing monetization and monetary transactions as its measure of success, or even sustenance, seeps in and erodes the diversity of expressions and even vocational calling for people to explore what they’re most interested in. And we find some of these themes as… the behavior field, you mentioned, is the largest part of the book, which can apply at… that’s almost independent a bit of the… I mean, there’s pieces of it that are in the sweet spot in the suburban context, but the behavioral field I’ve always seen it as something that’s applicable whether it’s in an urban density or even in a rural setting.

David Holmgren: Exactly. Yeah. It’s a lot of that is sort of, you could say, what characterizes it, it relates to modern and long affluent contexts rather than people who are at the other end of the scale in world economy, who are still living in traditional villages and still connected into a lot of things that, ironically, we need to re-learn. Some of the things about raising self-reliant, resilient children, those sorts of issues that there are still places in the world. And in fact, many of those things that we’ve said in the book that are controversial, in many places in the world that would be just self-evident common sense and not need to be talked about at all.

(46m53s) Permaculture, Indigenous Knowledge, and Cultural Appropriation

Podcast Host: Actually, I was going to ask about that, just the… when you think about the third ethic, this, of permaculture… for those who are listening, permaculture is an explicit set of ethics, which is one of the, I think, the distinctions as a design system from some of the other design systems with their own rhetoric. Permaculture has a very explicit set of ethics, and the third ethic is typically described as placing voluntary limits to consumption and reproduction. This idea of voluntary limits, voluntary, I think, is key. But what I was going to ask about that is, it’s common for me to hear, when thinking about the ethics and thinking about permanent or permanent settlement or permaculture, or a long-standing continuous human community or settlement, is this idea of, is permaculture itself a form of cultural appropriation from indigenous peoples who, with their lifeways that have developed from their lived experience over time and place? And I’m curious if you could respond to what sometimes comes as a critique, or at least a question about permaculture, in that regard.

David Holmgren: Well, I think to some extent permaculture is, if we just use the words in a neutral sense, cultural appropriation. The thing about it is, is whether that is transparent and acknowledged or not. And I think certainly from the beginnings working with Mollison, one of the things he had done by the time I met him was actually did the work on the lineage of the Tasmanian Aborigines, presumed to be extinct, which actually led to people of that descent being recognized by the Australian government as being Aboriginal. Whereas before that work, they didn’t exist officially. And at that time, I mean he knew most of those people in the Tasmanian community personally. But we were also discussing the ways in which indigenous systems were actually a model for permaculture, because there’s two primary models for permaculture. One was nature itself: what are the rules, design rules and patterns, of natural systems and how do we use those as templates? And the second was those of long, sustainable, traditional and indigenous land-use systems and patterns. And in Permaculture One, those things are completely referenced. And so the degree to which permaculture is also common sense… often, people from a rural, more self-reliant background, when permaculture is explained to them they would sometimes say to me, “Isn’t a lot of that just common sense?” And I would say, “Yes, quite a lot of it, not all of it, but it’s no longer common.” And so it needs to be re-learned, rediscovered. So to some extent, there is a sort of… permaculture could be thought of, through one lens,as remedial holistics

(00:49:59) Permaculture as Remedial Holistics

David Holmgren: Permaculture can be viewed as remedial holistics for those raised in the dysfunctional affluent world. As the world changes, the advantages of affluence disappear. People previously seen as disadvantaged, with practical skills and a connection to the environment, may be better equipped. Some in the modern world look to indigenous peoples, recognizing their deep knowledge of sustenance from the land. While protecting indigenous cultures is vital, we also have a connection to our own recent past. Our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ views might align more with ancient indigenous cultures than with our own. The modern world has fractured these connections. Some criticize permaculture as cultural appropriation of ancient knowledge. However, it often involves relearning what our own ancestors knew. Early American colonization was pre-industrial, but Australian colonization involved people disconnected from the land, unable to understand Aboriginal practices. They were a prototype of modern humans. Industrialization created advantages for the affluent world, but problems were outsourced. Permaculture uses plants and ideas from diverse sources, acknowledging their lineages. Industrialization’s impacts have mixed cultures and biology. This relocalization will inevitably create new cultures of place.

(00:57:01) The Monetization of Permaculture

Next Economy Now: The critique of permaculture as cultural appropriation may be linked to the monetization of permaculture design certificate courses, which can be seen as elitist or expensive.

David Holmgren: The monetized economy’s dominance has led to reactions like recreating the commons, where knowledge is free. However, experience shows that people value things with a price. Society is deeply embedded in using money as a measure. Rebuilding starts at the household. Children can learn about money by creating surplus and selling it, learning how it works in a safe environment. The challenge lies in recognizing and addressing power imbalances, such as those arising when an owner asks a housemate to leave. Acknowledging power imbalances, like acknowledging our dependence on fossil fuels, is a critical step in moving forward.

(01:03:59) Technology in Permaculture

Next Economy Now: Silicon Valley has a fetish for technology. You’ve mentioned appropriate technology in contexts many people don’t think about. What technologies are worth considering? What can we scavenge from energy ascent?

David Holmgren: Many things needn’t be perpetually sustainable. We can scavenge from past systems. Sheet mulch gardening, for example, relies on readily available waste organic material, a byproduct of unsustainable industrial systems. Creative reuse is perhaps the most universal theme in permaculture projects. This is an immense opportunity. Beyond the domestic, an enormous amount of technology is wasted. In Australia, we are seeing solar photovoltaics being discarded. There isn’t a creative, skilled reuse industry because the focus remains on new products. Creative reuse is more about skill and creativity than complex technologies, but often involves tools like diagnostic equipment. Information economies and sharing economies have potential, but we don’t understand the fragility of the infrastructure supporting them. In times of contraction, newer evolved systems may be the first to fail. Electric fencing is a simple technology that can be transformative in land management. Digital shepherds use it with electronic tags and electric fences for vegetation management, combining old and new practices. Permaculture makes use of technology while recognizing the inherent risks of dependence on complex globalized manufacturing.

(01:17:02) Final Thoughts and Call to Action

David Holmgren: The world is changing rapidly. People who want a better world need to think about both big-picture change and small-scale action. There’s a need to recognize financial vulnerability in a potentially unraveling system. It’s important to model and enact large changes while also defensively looking after our own interests, especially given the uncertainty of existing systems lasting. The current moment offers a rare freedom to act boldly and increase our independence and interdependence.

Next Economy Now: You’ve held that torch for so long and consistently, and permaculture has created an amazing through-line of thinking. Future scenarios point to local self-reliance, and to interdependence. I want to thank you for framing permaculture in a way that acknowledges its sources. And also for this reminder about the importance of small and slow solutions if we wish to transform society and the economy. Turning to where we have agency is something you often talk about. I remember asking you once for the most pithy way to describe permaculture, and I believe you said “remembering ourselves as nature.” That has resonated with me for years, and it feels like some of the great work of our time.

Podcast Outro