In 2024, David Holmgren was a guest on Bhavani’s nurture5 Podcast.You can watch part 1 and 2 below.

Part 1 of nurture5 podcast with Bhavani

Part 2of nurture5 podcast with Bhavani

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Part 1 Interview Transcript

Click here to scroll down for Part 2 interview transcript

(0m0s) Bhavani’s Introduction and Vision

Bhavani: Namaste everyone. This is Bani from Nurture Five. And just a little bit about myself. I’ve been converting our ancestral property into a permaculture farm. I’ve worked with a lot of kids and farmers to bring awareness about sustainable living. Later on, now I’m focusing on the farm itself, implementing the zones. Later on, I want to use this space as an educational hub. That’s my vision. My background is IT, and I worked two decades in the US and came back to India. It was six years ago. And this is my journey.

(0m40s) Introducing David Holmgren

Bhavani: And today we have a special guest here with me on the podcast. And he is an international icon, and he’s the—guess who, you can see him on the screen. You can guess. He is the co-originator of the permaculture concept. And, Lord, thank you very much David Holmgren for joining our podcast. I’m really fortunate to have you here.

David Holmgren: It’s good to see you again after you being out on our Permaculture design course here in Central Victoria.

Bhavani: Yeah, same here. I’m really excited about this podcast. Thank you once again for accepting my request. We couldn’t do it live, but this is also as good as live. And for the audience’s sake, you might know he is the co-originator of the permaculture concept, but he is more than that. He is an author and has written several books. He’s an advisor to a lot of committees and government bodies and has done a lot of multiple huge, humongous projects. Melliodora itself is a living permaculture farm and space, I would say, and RetroSuburbia, which is empowering urban people. We’ll go into details. And another one is Fryers Forest Ecovillage Project. So these are the ones; the list goes on and on. So I will stop here and I will ask David a few questions about it, about the journey.

(2m24s) Defining Permaculture for Laypeople

Bhavani: And David, I wanted to start from a layman’s perspective. Let’s say people who don’t have a gardening background, permaculture background, or farming background, but they’ve heard this term called permaculture. So from their perspective, how would you explain permaculture?

David Holmgren: Well, that’s a very interesting question, which I think is different in different contexts. And this is saying this having never been to India, but in a limited number of travels overseas I’ve had, I’ve noticed that sometimes you would explain permaculture with some sort of concrete example that people are familiar with. And in Australia in the early days, it was very popularised through, say, instant creation of gardens through sheet mulching, using large quantities of free organic matter to turn maybe lawn or pasture into an instant garden without the hard work of taking all the weeds out and losing all the fertility. So much so that people popularly thought that’s what permaculture was. Whereas permaculture is, of course, a design system for both living and land use. So it’s concerned with both the production side of the equation, how we provide for our needs through gardening, agriculture, working relationship with nature—all of those important foundational aspects for not just our ancestors, but directly. We are still animals that need to eat, and agriculture and food systems are how we gain that. So that importance of food and how it’s produced, but also the living patterns and the organisational patterns—how we live in our households right through to our community governance structures—are all part of that design. But going back to those sort of concrete examples, for example, when I was in Southern Italy, to say something like, “Oh, permaculture is about growing trees and vegetables and chickens together, integrated together.”

David Holmgren: People would have said, “So what? All the old peasant people did that.” Yeah. But in Southern Italy, if you said, “Oh, permaculture is about collecting water off the roof into water tanks and using that,” people would say, “Oh, that’s a strange idea.” But in Australia, if you said permaculture is about collecting water in tanks from the roof, they would say, “So what? All rural people did that.” Yeah. So in different places in the world, permaculture has brought sometimes innovative technologies or methods or ways of doing things that have actually been normal and, in fact, indigenous in other places.

Bhavani: Yes. Yes.

David Holmgren: And yet those things are now needed or useful in other parts of the world. And so sometimes, especially, people have found in many development projects in poor communities, it’s those key technologies or techniques or methods that ordinary people can see, “Oh, that is really useful.” And so then they become interested. And so if they can see a method that works, whether it’s from water harvesting with swales or many other different things that, depending on the history of land use, may be something missing. And so that’s often, then that gives a validity to permaculture through something that works for people. But that, of course, is different in different places. In some places, it might be something like for urban dwellers connecting to farmers through community-supported agriculture, where they don’t have any opportunity to grow food themselves, but they can develop some direct connection to organic and regenerative farmers and even help on the farm in harvest season. And that creates a connection which doesn’t exist in the normal centralised food market system. So that can become a pathway. So yeah, it’s a difficult question to answer because of the context.

(7m40s) Indigenous Influences and Bill Mollison

Bhavani: Yeah, yeah. It actually clears my mind also. I always used to think that, yeah, what is permaculture? This is like indigenous people always lived this way. That was thousands of years back. A lot, around the globe. It’s not only India or any other country. So, did you guys, like you and Bill Mollison, really spend some time with them and come out with this concept? It’s my doubt I just want to clear.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, firstly, Bill Mollison was a generation older than me, and although I grew up in suburban Australia and, at least from my generation of the post-war baby boom, I was no more connected to nature or the land than most of the population. But Bill Mollison grew up as part of the pioneering culture that was still clearing the forest in northern Tasmania when he was young and worked in a lot of those activities—those hard activities and, of course, also very destructive activities. But he also then went to university as an adult after working with wildlife researchers in research on the rabbit plague problem in Australia, and they recognised his genius. And he studied ecology with some of the top wildlife research people in Australia. And so this combination of the pioneering knowledge of working in the environment through exploitative systems, the science of ecology, and then also connection back to indigenous culture that was still very fragmentary in Tasmania. So as an academic, Bill Mollison knew socially a lot of those people, but the knowledge base in that community was very, very low. And we were also reading a lot about the evidence for indigenous land management in Australia before white settlement. And then there were also academic studies of garden forest farming systems in Southeast Asia, in the highlands of New Guinea, and in Central America, amongst others that I remember. So there were direct and indirect influences, as well as, I mentioned, his pioneering world, because that was a hard understanding of what it’s like to extract a living from nature in the globalised world that Australia already was, of supplying commodities to markets. Yes. So whether that was him working in the forest felling trees to make barrel staves for the breweries in Melbourne, or on the shark boats catching fish for the centralised markets, or farming in Northern Tasmania. So I think although those things are sort of very diverse, there’s a lot of grounding in the practical understanding of the land, and then looking at indigenous and traditional systems.

(11m38s) The Pre-Industrial World and Design Patterns

David Holmgren: And also from a theoretical point of view, we were very interested in how the world worked before

Bhavani: industrialisation

David Holmgren: humans tapped the hundreds of millions of years of stored sunlight in fossil fuel. And that, if not the direct practices of the past, but the design patterns,

Bhavani: Mm-hmm.

David Holmgren: the principles behind the way steady-state, sustainable ecologies and human economies worked. And so those things involve references to peasant knowledge from the Mediterranean also was a very big influence, especially in relation to the use of trees as food sources for humans and also fodder for animals. The pre-agriculture systems of the Mediterranean were a great influence on permaculture. And they still existed in fragmentary ways in the 1970s, but mostly managed by old people, with industrialised agriculture doing most of what was in the world by that stage.

(12m59s) David and Bill Mollison’s Working Relationship and Permaculture One

Bhavani: So you have done… yeah. Those of you who don’t know who Bill Mollison is, he’s the father of the permaculture movement itself. And you both worked together. I read an article saying that you both implemented the permaculture principles in Bill Mollison’s backyard. Yeah. So how did the daily schedule look? I’m just curious about your working relationship and

David Holmgren: Well, he was, at the time I met him, a lecturer at the other tertiary institution in Hobart. I was at one studying environmental design. And he was actually a senior tutor in the psychology faculty, even though I said he was primarily an ecologist. I was attracted to him through his ecological knowledge and nothing to do with his work lecturing at the university. I never actually went to one of his lectures there. But, by some story, ended up moving to his property, about one hectare on the fringes, a semi-rural property. And as we developed the ideas of permaculture, it was both a conceptual development and redevelopment of retrofitting, getting the property developed as a permaculture garden, and collecting plants from many different sources. And I was in a course, environmental design, that allowed me great freedom. And I actually did the development of that garden as one of my practical projects, and I was working on writing the manuscript that became Permaculture One. Yeah. And Bill and I were developing all the ideas, and we were working together developing the garden at the same time. So it was both conceptual and practical. Practical. And there was a lot of, I suppose, what you would call economic botany. “Oh, what are these unusual plants that people don’t usually grow, that we could grow?” Many different fruits and other species, and herbs and other things. So we were doing that work both practically and the theory at the same time,

(15m49s) Observing Nature and Wild Ecosystems

Bhavani: observing nature too and treating the volunteers. How did this happen?

David Holmgren: Yeah, so there was also that understanding of the wild ecosystems and what they could produce, and that built a lot on Bill Mollison’s earlier work in wildlife ecology. And we were talking about quite complex things that later became more developed in permaculture that we didn’t know much about, like the role of wild mushrooms in the forest. Bill Mollison had already seen how Australian wallabies actually ate a lot of these beneficial fungi and spread them around the forest. And we were speculating about, “Hmm, how could these eucalypt forests that we have, that yes, have very great timber, but not much in the way of food?” And in an Australian culture, very much building from the English culture, very suspicious of anything other than field mushrooms being edible. We were speculating about all the diversity of fungi that already existed in these forests or could be encouraged to grow, even if most of our food plants that we want to grow don’t grow very well with big eucalyptus trees. Yeah. So all of those ideas were there as part of, yeah, how do we create cultivating ecologies suitable for providing people’s needs, but how do we also use the wild things around us and better understand them?

(17m36s) The Fate of Mollison’s Original Property and Permaculture’s Spread

Bhavani: Who is maintaining that after Bill passed away? Any idea? Does it still exist?

David Holmgren: Ah, well, there was a tragic lineage there. He sold the property when we were still living there, and I stayed and continued to manage it for a period. But then the new owner… oh, tragically, it’s interesting that it became a sort of junkyard of cars as that owner had difficulties psychologically. Okay. And so I think sometimes it’s important not to be attached to small concrete outcomes and accept that ideas can spread and have influences elsewhere. And it’s, yeah, it’s also interesting that in a lot of ways, the development of the permaculture movement, even before or concurrent with it starting to spread overseas, really germinated and took strong root in Victoria and parts of places in New South Wales and Queensland,

Bhavani: Yes.

David Holmgren: more than it actually did in Tasmania, yes, where it initially came from.

Bhavani: Yes. Yes.

David Holmgren: So this region here where I am in Central Victoria, a decade before I was living here, was already one of those centres that permaculture as a movement was starting to flourish.

Bhavani: Yeah, I wanted to visit Bill Mollison’s place actually. When I visited Krishna Eco Village, then a lot of floods happened, that’s why I couldn’t. But you raised a very good point actually. We see a small impact attached to that space itself rather than how much is the bigger impact in the world and in yourself also, rather than just a piece of land. I think it really opened up. But certainly there

David Holmgren: were other places in Tasmania and in Northern New South Wales where Bill Mollison worked, and they all had their own complex stories. He was a man with a very tumultuous life and complex personal relationships and grand schemes. And not all of them worked out on the ground, but he had that huge influence.

(20m11s) Inspiration from Masanobu Fukuoka

Bhavani: Yeah. So do you have any inspiration from, say, Fukuoka?

David Holmgren: Yes. Well, I suppose we first heard about Fukuoka’s work in ’79, the year after Permaculture One was published. Okay. And Bill Mollison included a lot of reference to his work in Permaculture Two, which was published. Because, of course, it was the translation of his into English, of his book, The One Straw Revolution, that we became aware of his work. But it wasn’t until I went to Japan in 2004 that I gained that greater understanding. And rereading Fukuoka, the lineage of natural farming in Japan, of which he is perhaps the most famous exponent, actually has a long lineage going back to a pioneer originator, whose name I can’t actually remember now, in the 1930s. So that makes natural farming in Japan concurrent with the emergence of organic farming in Britain and the United States, and biodynamics in Germany. And of course, the influence on Albert Howard, who worked in India, of traditional composting systems from India. All of these ideas were sort of emerging in response to the first adverse impacts of industrial agriculture. And Fukuoka was really one of the more modern exponents of that lineage, and in some ways, taking it deeper, more radical. In his sort of no cultivation, no fertilising, the sort of wild approach. Yeah. But certainly when I went to Japan, there were also elements of natural farming which appeared more, a bit more conventional. And I think in different places those methods can be adapted and applied. One thing I would say about Fukuoka’s direct seeding systems of grains in succession, which is almost like an ideal for how we should do grain agriculture, they depend on very reliable seasons. The patterns of “this is sown this time and that”… Yes. Yes. And I saw that culturally the Japanese had this very strong expectation about “the seasons are like this.” And from an Australian perspective, the country with the most unreliable climate, yes,

Bhavani: yes.

David Holmgren: in the world, it seemed silly. How can you expect? And yet, it seems like a lot of Fukuoka’s rotations were based on that. But also in the current world, even in places like Japan, whether that’s the elements of climate change, the more chaotic and unreliable seasons mean that those patterns do have to be very flexible. Sometimes that will work well and plants will grow and get the jump on weeds and other competition. And at other times it doesn’t work so well. And I think that’s true of a lot of aspects of both annual cultivation that, I suppose from the permaculture point of view, we saw that tree crops had that greater resilience and ability to cope with variation. And we can see also how in many parts of the world, animal husbandry is, if not super productive as plants in terms of production of food per hectare, is very flexible and adaptable to changing seasons. So different types of land uses are more resilient than others, whereas mostly in agriculture there’s been a focus on what is the most productive, yes, and hoping that the seasons will always comply.

(25m10s) Dealing with Climate Change and the Resilience of Tree Crops

Bhavani: Yeah, not anymore. So that golden period is gone around the globe. So I do face a lot of challenges because of climate change. Last time it didn’t rain at all. This time, kind of heavy rain. So how do you deal with it with annual crops? Definitely, planning according to the seasons doesn’t work that great. But still, you’ve got to be resilient for climate change for sure. So there is no like A plus B or one plus two equals three anymore. So you just have to go with the flow. And I think tree crops are very good for resilience and climate change, and if you plant windbreaks. I think that is the way to go With my experience, I’m also facing that. Mm-hmm. Same way. Yeah. It’s a very good explanation, David, that way of farming and now with climate change, how that’s different, how the combination… you explained it really well for the audience.

(26m20s) Permaculture Principles for Sustainable Living and Behaviour Change

Bhavani: So the principles, I think you have covered the way of doing sustainable living basically, right? In the permaculture principles. It’s not just focused only on farming and growing food and eating.

David Holmgren: Mm-hmm.

Bhavani: How do you live with nature? Yeah.

David Holmgren: And I think that one aspect, of course, that is strong for me because most of my work has been in the, amongst the billion or so privileged middle-class people of the planet—maybe it’s now two billion, actually, partly because of India and China. I used to say one billion middle-class people on the planet. But I saw, although permaculture work with the majority of people who weren’t consuming much was important, the overall global impact of, firstly, the very rich is limited because they’re so few in number, and the global middle class, yes, you could say we are the cause of the problem. And also, how can we become part of the solution? And a lot of that is around behaviour change. Some of it is about becoming responsible producers again, rather than just consumers. So learning how to be gardeners, farmers, workers with nature to sustainably produce. But a lot of it is transforming how we consume. And so our ways of living are as big a part of the equation. And change is quite difficult because, as Sue would say, it’s easy to change behaviour when you have young children. Children are very malleable and flexible. Yes. But adults… yes. And sometimes even more university-educated adults, they have all sorts of rationalisations for why they need to keep doing. And then, of course, there are all the structures of society: of debt and social expectation and advertising that are channelling people into particular patterns that are very, not just destructive of the planet, but increasingly dysfunctional for the people who are doing them. They’re not even beneficial. So there are the problems of health, mental health, and then the actual, when facing more difficult economic and even political futures, people’s increasing faith in the authorities will look after us, or “they just need to do what I am told” type of attitude, too. No, one needs to be more self-reliant and more collectively reliant in our households, in our communities, because we can’t necessarily expect the government or the corporate employer or whatever those larger structures are to look after us. We can expect it, but it might not be the case.

Bhavani: Yeah, anymore.

David Holmgren: Maybe we think we have a right to it, but it might not happen. So that enlightened self-interest in changing behaviour, not just as an atonement for damage to the planet, but “No, this is actually a better way to live.” And that has been quite a difficult message because, throughout history, there haven’t been many grand movements or revolutions shouting for “less.”

Bhavani: Yes.

David Holmgren: And in a way, permaculture is saying to people of middle-class circumstances and privilege, whether that’s here in Australia or in India, “No, living this more simple way is actually better. It’s better for us.” So to some extent, that is a message, a selling point, dare I say, when certain aspects of affluence have become so adverse in their consequences. And things as simple as a connection to nature, that people are now having that Nature Deficit Disorder. Well, this isn’t really very hard to solve. Just half a day a week in a garden, sometimes.

(31m36s) David Holmgren’s Projects: Introducing Melliodora

Bhavani: I wanted to cover more projects because people mostly know you as the co-originator of the permaculture concept. But I wanted to introduce people around the world who don’t know about your multiple talents and multiple projects and huge projects you have taken up. And they are in working condition. I have seen it. It’s in an implementation stage. They’re successful and showing great impact in the world. So first, my favourite and most loved project, which I have seen: Melliodora project. And I’ve visited. You’re a good host too. Love the food. And to introduce Sue, your partner. She is a great personality, great inspiration to me, great cook and fermenter, and a most knowledgeable animal lover, whatnot. Her great contribution to the permaculture movement itself. So in Melliodora, when you started, did you both start, or did you happen to have volunteers along with you? I wanted to focus more on my favourite subject: solar passive house and zoning implementation, successfully implemented so people can see. And the overall project itself, the community living in the space?

(33m9s) Melliodora’s Origins, Family, and Sue’s Role

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I think we started here as a family project: Sue and myself and her two pre-teen children from a previous marriage, and she was also pregnant with our son Oliver at the time when we bought this piece of land and moved from where we had been living in Melbourne. And I had already had sort of ten years of both a self-run apprenticeship in permaculture design and consultancy and worked on many different projects. And so it was pouring all of my energy and knowledge into this small, one-hectare piece of land, but also in the urgency to create a home and become established because Sue was leaving behind her job as an Italian interpreter in the city. And so we were effectively dependent on my then micro business as a permaculture consultant in the early eighties. And yeah, all of those things were very much focused on, okay, how to use the experience I have to create this for our own needs, but also with the idea that it would be an example of permaculture design at a modest scale. And I suppose in the peak of my energy in my thirties was the sense of leaving energy and space for other projects rather than having a very large personal project that was then all-consuming. But I suppose Sue was very much led by me having greater expertise. But it was interesting early on how, her having the empathetic connection with animals, she naturally fell into that space of being the animal person and was much better at that than I would be. So I was the plant and the technical person. And so that sort of balance of roles was something that we didn’t have sorted out, but that emerged over time. And before I met Sue, I used to cook quite a lot and baked bread and different things, and I continued to do that. But very clearly, when we moved into this house, it became her kitchen, and she was the mistress of that space. And I did what I was told or worked within that system, in the same way that she accepted my role in placing the larger design of the property. But very much the place has always been a joint effort between us and a joint passion. And I suppose mine has been a little bit more focused on permaculture productivity, how we make new things and as a project, and hers on the cyclical patterns of daily and seasonal living, and how we minimise our impact and our needs. So she has a very strong focus on that. How do we live very lightly on the planet? Very frugally. So she has been the leader of the two of us in that respect of that radical simplicity, and especially in the context of affluent, multi-generational, middle-class Australian society. It’s very easy to sort of fall back into the norms of the society around and be influenced by that. And Sue’s radical resistance to that has been part of the leadership.

(37m43s) RetroSuburbia and the Importance of Behavioural Change

David Holmgren: And I think in looking at the book RetroSuburbia, which is in the three fields—the built, the biological, and the behavioural—Sue says I start at the back of the book in Behaviour; that’s the most important chapters. And in many ways, a lot of the ideas in that are actually channelling her ideas. I’m the writer, but whether it’s about approaches to raising children or health and wellbeing that are all part of that sort of holistic approach that permaculture represents.

(38m25s) The Melliodora House: Passive Solar Design and Sustainable Building

David Holmgren: But yeah, what you were saying about the house, in a lot of ways, I regard myself as a better ecological builder than ecological farmer. This house is one of three passive solar houses I have designed and built, and I have a great passion for, especially as a woodworker, the sustainable use of timber, and taking it from ideally forest form and processing it and building using the best of wood and earth together as natural materials. And also the idea, especially in our climate, of passive solar design: the idea that in a relatively cold winter climate in Southern Australia, it’s possible to get most of the heating needs by the arrangement of the building to capture the sun in the winter, and especially with our low-angle sun in the winter, and then exclude the sun in the summer. And thermal mass and venting allow the house to be comfortable in a hot summer without the need for air conditioning. And that is still an amazing thing after all these decades of living in a house like that where, while it requires you to be conscious of how to manage the house, the house doesn’t really need so much in the way of active heating and nothing in the way of cooling in summer. And so that makes that sort of refuge when the outside environment is harsh and difficult. And often you are working outside in less than ideal weather conditions, and then to be able to come back into a house which is comfortable is a very, very special, and of course very significant, in terms of dependencies on depleting and polluting fossil fuels and other normal ways of providing that comfort.

Bhavani: It’s not like a tiny house, or it’s not like really layman kind of work, but it’s quite a modest house.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I think it’s modest in the sense, in an Australian context, of how much we use it. Yes. So it is a functional house that’s also an office for our business, and then volunteers who are here and people sharing the property, having shared lunches.

Part 2 Interview Transcript

(0m0s) Permaculture Zoning and Melliodora

Bhavani: Podcast with David Holmgren. He’s the co-ordinator of Permaculture Zoning. I can see it, the good demonstration of zoning in permaculture in Melliodora.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, the idea that the intensive food gardens should be close to the, the kitchen door, so to speak, so you can quickly get things and bring them inside.

And also. The awareness, especially for modern people even who are quite outdoors. If something is further away from the house, we don’t pay as much attention. Yes. And I know that common sense,

Bhavani: I think Logical. Yeah.

David Holmgren: Now it’s interesting, I suppose when, or. Our forebears in the past, living in very, very tiny houses, maybe with no light and no running water, and people might go and work in their fields.

(1m4s) Efficiency of House-Centred Design

David Holmgren: That might be some distance. Yeah. That, that was a very different work pattern. But the efficiency of having food gardens close around a house is, is very, very, special. And especially for modern people who are more sort of house centred. And so it’s also the sense that we can create a more benign, cultivated, living ecology, which is like outdoor rooms of the house. That that’s what a garden, the inner zones of a garden should be an extension of the living zone. And so all of that management and manipulation where things and trainings in particular ways to modify the microclimate. All of that attention to detail works so much best when we’re there with it, whereas the things that are.

(2m6s) Origins of Permaculture Zoning from German Villages

David Holmgren: Further afield, large crops, grazing areas for animals and especially forest and resources that work more by themselves need to be further, afield. And that idea in permaculture design for, a particular farm or a small rural property originally came from study by geographers in Germany on the plains of Germany where they noticed this pattern around the dense pattern of, small village. Okay. Quite compact urban settlement. There would be the initial gardens, okay, and horticultural crops, and then there would be the field crops and then the pasture, and then there was forest and that this pattern existed around each village. And we took that and said, oh. Maybe that applies to, a greenfield’s site design for an individual property in the Australian rural context. And so, something that, was part of a village design pattern in a particular part of the world. We, we took up and recognising that in different places, those ideas need to be adapted and, and changed to suit. Circumstances, but a lot of it is around how to optimise one’s own human energy, which is its greatest power close to where you are most of the time.

(3m43s) Conserving Human Energy and Starting Small

Bhavani: I think now it’s very much needed indeed, the need of the heart conserving the human energy because you don’t have that much energy to do that big, much of a big effort because of health conditions also. I think, it’s, more logical. It’s, it’s, very interesting that how you took it when you read the village landscape and then remarkably added into permaculture so that modern people can, makes a lot of sense to, focus on the things, more efficiently. Rather than overwhelming, oh, I need to manage the forest. I need to manage the animals. I need to manage this, this, this. But based on the priority where it needs care.

David Holmgren: Mm-hmm.

Bhavani: Put intervals, I think could,

David Holmgren: It was also part of what. Mollison said when people said, where do I start? What do I do? And he would say, start at the back doorstep of your house, where it goes out into the garden. Start there. Where, where you have the, the most control, the most familiarity, rather than sort of trying to think of maybe things that are overwhelming for, for people especially, that’s a big.

(5m0s) RetroSuburbia: Adapting Urban Living

Bhavani: Blunder I have made, I should, admit or accept in front of the media. I did a huge plantation, seven acres at once, so now I’m really overwhelming. Oh, how do you manage? Start small permaculture principle. That’s my best buddy right now. So you can mimic that once you are comfortably. With your mistakes and that is much, much easier. And I wanted to, go with the details about RetroSuburbia. It, impacted a lot of urban people and there is a great movement going on in India too that is a roof garden right now.

Bhavani: So I think it is similar, the suburbia you

David Holmgren: recognising. The world is changing very fast and things are opportunities to, have grand schemes to create eco cities and all sorts of ideas on a, a large scale. That in a way, those are sort of like a hundred year projects. Yes. And so that in many ways, humans everywhere are facing. Environmental crisis and very rapidly changed world with whatever is around them. And certainly building stock, even in the modern world with rapidly growing economies, it takes, sort of decades, to change and build new building stock. So the sense of. Retrofitting what already exists as a strategic opportunity, especially I saw that from the perspective of Australia and other long affluent countries where that, most people were living and have lived in urban areas. In spite of the reputation of Australia as being a rural place in 1900, Australia was the most urbanised. Country in the world. Actually, we had the highest, highest proportion of urban residents. But the special, I suppose, role of, the suburb of detached houses on small parcels of land was originally seen as a. A sweet point, having the benefits of the city and the benefits of the country. And of course in modern Australia and the United States, there’s been a whole lineage of urban planning, which has seen it’s ended up with the worst of both, the worst of the countryside and the worst of the city. But. From a permaculture retrofitting point of view, we saw huge opportunities for incremental small scale adaption and change, which where people have some of the freedom and autonomy that we associate with rural properties, and yet there is some critical mass of community and possible connection, for sort of informal. Community organisation for childhood networks to develop without dependence on parents with many opportunities because there is a reasonable density of people together, and that without the more complex technical and regulatory and cultural.

(8m51s) Advantages of Suburban Scale Retrofitting

David Holmgren: Difficulties if we say we want to change high density cities. ’cause there’s so many more stakeholders when we’re talking about yes, high density buildings, they’re more technically complex. The retrofitting for different futures is, is actually not impossible, but more complex and difficult. And it’s, it needs a greater proportion of society. Seeing the necessity for that change before you can make much start. Whereas in the suburban scale, people can make a start on their own place and connect with other like-minded people in the street or the neighbourhood. So I, we did write RetroSuburbia, unashamedly for, Australian context and even. The southeast of the continent in a sort of cool temperate and Mediterranean climate. Instead of doing the book publishing thing where you’ve gotta make it, this is a general book for the whole world type of thing. But we felt that people, certainly in other. Long affluent countries with the suburban patent most powerfully the United States and Canada and New Zealand, and to an extent, Britain, that people would make the adaptions and interpretations. But we’re even finding in places like Latin America and India, people are saying, oh, we can interpret. Some of these, these ideas to apply to what might be quite different contexts,

Bhavani: especially weather. I think that is the one which is different. But the patterns might be saying, plans you choose and the seasons are little bit different. So that’s where, yeah.

(10m47s) Passive Solar Design and Natural Building Materials at Melliodora

David Holmgren: Yeah. And, and obviously things like, the passive solar design that’s so important in our climate, in the. In the tropics where the sun is mostly overhead, there is different building patterns and we, we sort of intimated some of those things, but recognising that at the suburban scale, when people develop really good solutions, often, ah, there’s another house that those. Same design solutions can apply. What was passion about was passive solar design. The idea that houses can largely heat and cool themselves in southern Australian climates without the use of of much in the way of augmented heating and no mechanical cooling. Building with natural materials was also for me a given. So mud brick has a material very little in the way of embodied energy, great thermal mass. Not such good insulation, but a great structure to hold up the roof. And the other was of course, timber And my passion for trees, sustainable forestry. So designing the house around those materials with passive solar design and to minimise the use of electricity. Certainly no use in heating or water heating, and also to build in wood as the secondary form of energy for cooking for hot water and backup space heating.

Sue: It was, was really good in terms of having a wood stove that gave me the possibility of learning how to use the wood that we had locally and that we could gather ourselves. And we’ve, I found that a very lovely family process to go out and collect wood a couple of times a year.

Another feature of the kitchen was the cool cupboard instead of a big refrigerator,

David Holmgren: the cool cupboard draws air from underneath the house in contact with the ground, which then rises by convection. Up the column of the cupboard. And so it’s a very simple technology. It’s not a fridge, but it means it’s much more suitable for a storage of, of many things. And so we just have a, a small under bench fridge, and that’s been adequate for us all these years. So that possibility of replication and extension by just simply copying something. Whereas sometimes when you copy something. From a completely different environment and it almost never works. But, so that suburban pattern of similar houses, of similar era on, in the same landscapes creates whole templates where it’s possible to copy what neighbours, or others, did. And, and it works, you know, can work

to.

(14m5s) Community and Economic Opportunities in Suburbia

Bhavani: Thinking pattern also changes when you look at other people and about good ideas, obviously.

David Holmgren: Yeah.

Bhavani: So how you can think differently and adapt to your environment, how we can take that good to change, then it’ll be easier for you to find out with your climate. Other situ,

David Holmgren: We also saw a lot of opportunities for. Complimentary development at the suburban scale along the street, and ideas like all the conflict with children needing to play. Ball games and rough games in, in limited space gardens and that being incompatible with delicate vegetable and food gardens. Yeah. And, and that where one person has got the, the big shady trees and the, the, the trampoline and the play space, and the. Other house next door has the extensive vegetable garden with a, the very keen gardener. And they’re swapping Yeah. Something that, the children are playing here, but then the food is growing here. So those different complimentary Yeah. Skill sets or priorities or different sites suiting different things. Can develop a, if you’d like, a, a complimentary, informal. Gift economy between those places. Yeah.

Bhavani: Yeah. That’s a good way to put in actually. Yeah. That’s a good, complimentary economy.

David Holmgren: We saw that in terms of ideas like if not taking the fences down between properties, gateways, path, ways between, so people start making use of, of space in a more efficient. Designed, way, and I suppose, the aspects of really rebuilding the, the household and community, non-monetary economy at the same time as providing a lot of opportunities for children to experiment with different. Things that might start off as a passion or a hobby and become a small business. Yeah. Things that they can try that there needs to be a lot of

Bhavani: diversity

David Holmgren: in, in the household, and the, community environment so children can learn by that immersion and see different things that they might take up. So in that way, it’s sort of like. The, the suburban scale is often a, a nursery for new actual livelihoods and businesses that might and actually become part of the monetary economy in, in time. So I think that environment for raising children with the diverse opportunities,

(17m19s) Reclaiming Children’s Play Space

Bhavani: it’s very important. Changing the environment for the kids to have that freedom of thinking and exposure to diversity rather than just one idea. I just go to school and get a degree, is a very best environment.

David Holmgren: Yeah, I don’t know how much it’s, a, a problem in different places in India, but in Australia and other long affluent countries, there’s been this retreat of ranging territory over which children used to travel. And when I was a child, being able to travel many kilometres free with other children and just needing to come back. Home at night. Whereas progressively each generation, it’s been analysed how the ranging territories become more and more constricted. Mm. And not just with higher density urban development, but even in these lower density environments and how to. Enable a reclaiming of territory for children to sort of occupy their neighbourhood. And we see that perhaps in some other countries, that process hasn’t, degenerated so far and children are still, a bit more free. But we think that that important to, to reconstruct that belief that. That’s possible. Even if there are all sorts of fears and risks.

Bhavani: Yeah. In India, I think cities still it’s, restricted. But villages to some extent, villages are also transforming. But, it is rare. Okay. In villages still little bit. Mm-hmm. But in cities, yeah. It’s the same story like any other city in the world. Yeah. But now they’re, going into the retreats and weekend, weekend vacations so that we can get good exposure to nature and have a fresh breeze. And that is the culture, coming up. And it’ll be changing slowly. Like me, a lot of people, transformed from corporate job to just completely doing permaculture or just farming or different lifestyle with the nature. So it is changes inevitable and it’s coming it’s minor.

(19m55s) The Friars Forest Eco-Community

Bhavani: I wanted to, know about the Friars Forest eco community that you, built.

David Holmgren: Yeah, just briefly.

Bhavani: Well, I, in,

David Holmgren: In the mid nineties, I was approached, as a consultancy job about assessing this piece of land for, a potential eco village. And, I had a, an assessment of the land and then made a very rash response at the end of the day’s consultancy by saying, don’t worry about the consultancy fee. I am interested. And that was the beginning of a process by which we became partners with another couple in developing the 120 hectares. That led to, a hamlet of, 11 residential lots clustered in one part of what’s a very rugged and diverse, mostly forested, landscape, in Central Victoria. And it was, Our partners intention that they would be the first people living there that didn’t actually sort of work out. Sue and I were very much committed here in and our wider. Community. So we never committed to that. We would, live there, own there, but we, that we would live there. But we owned one of the residential lots and we developed that, with, other people. So we are very much involved in the community, but from a distance and, I suppose it reflects a lot of the. Situations of, people living in rural Australia with incomes from other sources and some of them commuting and that sort of thing. But there is an element of husbandry and management of the forest. Oh. Which is quite unusual in our, sort of. Cultural and economic context Yes. That most people don’t bother to manage forest. Yes. Or ideologically think the forest should not be touched because it, because of past damage and Yes. And the idea of forest husbandry is, is still a relatively foreign idea in Australia. So I’m very proud that the community there. All sort of see that in a positive way. So we often call ourselves greenies with chainsaws, so we are environmentalists, but we are also thinning and managing, the forest for better health in the longer term. And there is. Quite strong elements of keyline water design in the, the development of, of that property, of using the larger patterns of the landscape to, harvest water using contour roadways, feeding around to, large earth dams, which should, beautify the environment and make it more fire safe in the fire prone landscapes that we have in this part of the world. Yeah, and there’s many different, ecological houses of all different natural building materials have been built there, over the years. Wow.

(23m41s) Advice for Youth Entering Permaculture

Bhavani: It’s a lot of things, combining to one huge area. So that’s a good, framework, for that community. And, I just wanted, I got a few questions from the audience, from the subscribers, so I wanted to read from their perspective. The first one, youth wants to like graduate, wants to start, they’re inspired by permaculture, but, social responsibility or social pressure they might have. So they wanted to start. So what do you advise for the youth? Just a student, let’s say for example. That’s one of the questions.

David Holmgren: Ah, yes. Well, it’s always very difficult to know. Yes. Context is everything. Yeah. As we say, the, the answer to every question in, in permaculture is, it does. It depends.

Bhavani: Yes. But yes, I think

David Holmgren: as a young person, it is always good to, I. Be able to, allocate time to travel and learn through immersion in all sorts different, opportunities where one can work as a volunteer, even if it’s in quite simple apparent, meaning menial tasks like weeding or, feeding animals or all of the different practical activities. And through that process. See what you can learn, what you like, what you decide is, oh no, that’s not what I’m attracted to. And that opportunity to become a useful person, useful to yourself, useful to other people is, is a huge opportunity and a low cost. Opportunity and even when some of the learnings are negative, that those are temporary things that yes, you immerse yourself in the context, in the experience and then go, oh, well, we’ve learned something not to do here or, or something to avoid or yes. Or find where our passion is. And I, I think that’s been a very strong way in which Permaculture has. Spread. I would say it’s almost as important as the Permaculture Design course has been. People just going to, different permaculture inspired properties or, or related, places. And they might not be all rural. They might be in urban areas too, because it’s looking at how people and experiencing living in a particular. Why rather than it just being an idea, in the head. Um, so that,

Bhavani: ’cause the knowledge is very, very important in this field, especially because you’ll have one idea and, it’s a fascinating, but practically are you fit for it mentally, physically, is it? Mm-hmm. Really a good idea. It sticks with you for a long time or just a fascination, so Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I did really learn, when I did a PDC course with you and really fortunate, to come to Australia and do a PDC with you. There’s a little story to it also how I ended up in Australia, because there is a, alternative, I think, in India. They’re, permaculture pioneers, work with Bill Mollison. And they rejected me for their course. I signed up for a course, not PDC, but other course they rejected because I don’t have a PDC certificate. So I thought, ah, by the time I have already implemented some of the permaculture principles and worked with the schools and sustainability living, I sent a profile. They rejected. Oh, you know what? Okay, why not? This is a good opportunity for me to learn anyway. I wanna visit Australia and work with the co-ordinator himself, learn from him. So that’s, thankful to.

So that is a very good, intake for the youngsters. Especially good advice too. With the idea and get the knowledge and then think about, you are really serious about that, part of it.

(28m22s) David Holmgren’s Focus on Bioregional Engagement

Bhavani: Any plans to visit India? We would love to host you for sure.

David Holmgren: No, I, my traveling, is much more modest these days. And I am trying to actually focus. More to see a lot of things locally in our region. It’s ironic that. When we are, often so focused here at Melliodora and at Friars Forest and in the projects that we’re very directly involved in, and then the outreach to the world, whether it’s things like, this podcast with you or writings that sometimes the ordinary things within our bio region, of which there are. So many interesting ones. And I feel also a responsibility to acknowledge and see what people are doing and both to continue to learn from that, but also to use my status as the co-originator to say, say to people, good on what you are doing. This is, this is significant. Keep going with that. That is. I don’t know anyone else who’s doing that. So that sense of giving back into my Bioregional community has been, a stronger sense of, responsibility that, makes me.

Bhavani: Yeah, yeah.

David Holmgren: Unable to, consider, travel, but, yeah, who knows?

(30m8s) Guidance for Large-Scale Permaculture Projects

Bhavani: Yeah. And the subscriber we’re asking, he has around, a hundred acres of land and he has done PVC and he is, overwhelmed with idea of converting the entire land into. From a culture design, so how much is worried about little bit, how much money I need, how much manual level, and this looks like overwhelming. So that’s his state of mind.

David Holmgren: Mm. Well, I think the first thing is to look at what is the current. Management of the land or what is, what is the past management and what are the opportunities to have some sort of caretaker management that keeps options open, and yet is not particularly degrading the land or, or creating. Very strong, problems that might involve lack of social licence or, or legal licence. All of those factors that I, who knows what those things are, especially for me thinking about those things from. Because yeah, it’s very important not to look at land as a blank slate and to. Also, I suppose what I said in the reading landscape film about, understanding the land as deeply as possible of what’s there and what the history is being and what are the processes at work and trying to understand those things. Not in a judgmental sense of initially of what’s good and bad, but just try to understand processes at work. And they’re both the wild. Processes, the natural processes and the, the human, activity that there’s been, and that may be quite hidden or, in the background in land that might have been relatively unused or abandoned. It might right through to there’s actually already someone with some licence or lease to use the land that’s about to come to an end and. So all of those, possibilities, I think the understanding as much as possible and being able to be on the land in some small way that, again, that depends whether there is some sort of residence or, or, or whether there’s some sort of opportunity to reside or, or be somewhere where. Basic domestic needs can be more or less met rather than just visiting a place. And so you can experience the land through, different, possibilities. But I mean, I used to say when I was doing consultancy that when people. By a piece of land beyond, say the size of Melliodora. Yes. Then one’s own physical labour is a small Yes. Part of what is needed once you get to some like a hundred acres of land or, or so. It’s the, the. Other processes, which are primarily animals and machines and, money or resources in some way that must be mustered together to be able to make substantial changes from what the land has been because there’s a good reason that farmers often use the land as it was. There wasn’t necessarily a big pool of capital to do something radically different. Mm-hmm. Yes. They might have just done things ’cause that’s what they’ve always done with the land. So, often people are looking and that is, pa being passed, field, crop land or pasture your land, or in some cases. Wild forest land and wanting to create some sort of horticultural food system, and that’s a step up in intensity. So especially if that is considered on the larger scale, there’s a huge step change. And no matter whether it’s done with permaculture methods or conventional methods, it involves a lot. A lot more resources and infrastructure and plant stock and all sorts of things. Management also. But there’s also the possibility of saying, can there be some sort of caretaker, land use, like, sensible grazing of animals that might just require some fencing or some water sources, to. Maintain the land and hopefully be worked in a way that improves soil, but basically works with the natural seasons and the rainfall. And then maybe there’s a small place, which is a residence, which is some sort of gut small garden farm that is a starting point. So between those start at the back door step often, if there is no back door step. You have to have that sense of where should the back door step be? Where should a person be on this land? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it can be taken from many different perspectives. And I don’t think in a permaculture design process there, there can ever be, a single recipe for that. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Process. But, yeah, hopefully some of those things. I said, connect with the possible, situation.

(36m45s) The “Reading the Landscape” Film

Bhavani: No, reading the landscape is a very good, thing. David, so what is the film you are mentioning that,

David Holmgren: Uh, so this is, called Reading the Landscape with David Holmgren and it’s, it was a, a film that can be accessed, through the. Uh, reading landscape.org, website. Okay. It’s, will be freely available initially. It’s, through a sort of subscription there of putting in your email address because it’s still going out to film festivals. It’s just been in the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival and it’s me at all different sites, places around, central Victoria in Dja Dja Wurrung. Country, reading the landscape from rural properties to suburban scale and other people, including who we were talking about earlier, and, other colleagues including, local, indigenous, woman. So it’s more inspirational than didactic or instructive as it’s inevitable, with reading landscape. But,

Bhavani: I add that link, in the description about, your website and all the other details, and we might subscribe and they get the newsletters and they could get to experience, your work even more and get inspiration of course, and, to do more for the Earth.

(38m21s) Message for Future Generations: Nature’s Resilience

Bhavani: I wanted to ask you reading the landscape about it, but I think, they can take a look at that movie and, going through your website and that will be. More insightful rather.

David Holmgren: Yeah. And yeah, it’ll give, gives quite a, a strong sense of Melliodora and its evolution to, yeah.

Bhavani: So what is the, my last, important thing, message for the future generations from you wanted to conclude, with this,

David Holmgren: Uh, what I was saying before about, immersing oneself in. Doing things and contributing, for young people, is an opportunity to, become a, a useful person to oneself and to others. And through that, what you take away is. Is more valuable what you have within them than whatever you contribute in a volunteer way. But I think also another message that’s important in all the messages about the collapse of nature and that everything that humans touch being destroyed, I think there is the. The counter message that partly comes through the reading landscape film, that nature of nature’s resilience and her ability to reconstruct fertility and abundance, given half a chance, and sometimes even when humans aren’t just not. Constantly damaging it. So we see that a lot with the work we have done around what’s called novel ecosystems and understanding our nature is constantly constructing new forms of life. And so the, rather than the chaos of, nature falling apart, which is the prevailing message we hear all the time, and I’m. I know those messages are important and there is a lot of truth, in them, but I think, to be able to see whether it’s the small plant growing in the cracks in the pavement or, animals, readapting to changed environments and. New environments, how quickly nature learns through changing animal behaviour. Sometimes to our annoyance, sometimes in ways that, put us back in a fighting nature position. But to have that sense of nature as strong, I think is. Is, really important.

(41m17s) Reconnecting Production and Consumption

Bhavani: Yeah, I think you made it a simple way that when I asked you about the. Producing and consuming. These two are very important, I think, in everyone’s life. If we can fix those, what, what are we producing either through our actions or through our emotions? What are we emitting with our actions at the same time? What are we consuming? So what kind of things we are entertaining, in the name of a consumer. So these two things are very much important. So these are,

David Holmgren: And bringing those things back together Yes. Whereas the economy has pulled those things apart and taken them away from one another so they don’t speak to one another. Yes, yes. In consumption. Whereas, in the extreme, when we garden and eat food from the garden, we’re. In the economic, jargon sense, we are disintermediating this huge chain of separation and bringing that back together and in many different ways, we need to bring those two processes together so they talk to one another.

Bhavani: Yeah. Yeah. We see the relationship with one another rather than disintegrating. And, I don’t waste food anymore because I have realised after, doing the farming of growing patty how difficult it is. So wasted one grain of rice is also, how much I can see this work. So that’s how you realise also that’s, like self transformation happens when you really at. Plant a tree or plant something and do something with one single part, I think that will change for people’s perspective, for themselves and for the earth and for the planet. So this is the way I wanted to conclude and, I really, really appreciate David and it’s a good. In depth knowledge of, about the permaculture concept, itself and other things and what, how one person can, give a live in impact in the world. You are the true testimony, for that. And of course, joining in our podcast is a really big blessing for me. Thank you very much.

David Holmgren: Say hi to Best of luck your projects. And I think what sustains me is all of the people around the world in their own ways, small and large, doing, doing things with permaculture of something we started that has, spread and, and is. Alive and transforming in its own way with all of the different creativity and thinking and fusion with other kindred ideas, around the world.

Bhavani: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good, start. You guys have started and really I appreciate Bill Mollison’s, work also in this, podcast since he has done a major work.