David Holmgren was recently interviewed on Podsongs.

Podsongs is a podcast where Jack Stafford (and other musicians) interview inspirational people, in service to others, as inspiration for a brand new song.

You can listen to Jack and David’s conversation below:

And here is the original song Jack wrote, based on their conversation:

If you’d like to sing along, these are the lyrics for the song, titled:

RETROSUBURBIA

You say this way of living is way too hard
Start a revolution in your backyard
Be the change in the world that you wanna see

What if you could stay right where you are
No more wasting hours every day in a car
What if you could make a living doing what you really love

Retrofit suburbia
Downshift through the gears

Before the crash, be earlier
Thriving there for years

Are you Ready?
Are you Ready?
Are you Ready?
Ready for resilience

What if you could suddenly be free of debt
Leave behind your worries and your woes forget
What if you were poor but the richest man you know

Yes imagine being rich beyond your wildest dreams
Cos you lived entirely within your means
Saying you were happy already right where you are

Retrofit suburbia
Downshift through the gears

Before the crash, be earlier
Thriving there for years

Are you Ready?
Are you Ready?
Are you Ready?
Ready for resilience

You don’t like the way we’re living
Build it for yourself

Surrounded by abundance
In happiness and health

What if the world around you collapsed
But you felt so relaxed

Cos you’d reduced yourself years ago
Now help all the rest

Are you Ready?
Are you Ready?
Are you Ready?
Ready for resilience

Ready
Are you Ready?
Are you Ready?
Ready for resilience

Interview Transcript

(0m0s) Introduction to David Holmgren

Jack Staford: Hello, welcome to pod songs. I’m Jack Stafford, and I interview inspiring people in service to others as inspiration for a new song. Today’s guest is an Australian environmental designer, ecological educator and writer. He’s best known as one of the co-originators of the permaculture concept. Legend is a big word, but in terms of gardening and sustainability, he is a giant.

Jack Staford: Please welcome David Holmgren.

(0m41s) Seeking the Essence and Early Influences

Jack Staford: So I wanted to speak to you, I wanted to write a song. I want to get to the essence of your work, the Red Line through it, because I want to know those kind of the compass that guides you, because I feel that if I do kind of a summary on you, then I won’t need to ask you about my clay soil or what I should be planting. Now, if I could see through your eyes, if I can think like you, then I might not need the big books. Or even if I read the books, it’ll make a lot more sense. So if I could just get that. Because you wrote permaculture one when you were just 23.

David Holmgren: While I was writing it, I mean, that’s when I was 20 actually. It was polished when I was 23. I suppose there’s a do-it-yourself legacy. That goes back to just being a super active kid, pulling clocks apart to see what made them tick and physically doing things, learning by doing, and in a way, having parents who were very free and open, but weren’t super practically skilled themselves. So my father, for his generation wasn’t really a practical sort of person. He was a big thinker and a lot of my ideas world, partly stimulated by being in a household where politics and philosophy was discussed all the time. And my parents were radical political activists, so there was always the flow of ideas.

(2m53s) Meeting Bill Mollison and Grounding Permaculture in Practice

David Holmgren: But I was the kid in the workshop sort of making things, come from the beginning. And that do-it-yourself streak. I suppose when I met Bill Mollison, one of the exciting things, apart from his thinking that I saw, I judged to be ecological thinking. Whereas a lot of the academically trained ecologists I met, they still seem to be the same reductionist scientists that I saw everywhere. So, that was particularly important at a conceptual level. But when I moved into Bill Mollison’s house at the age of 19 and got to know the neighbours living across the way who were mates of his and all the people in his circle. That was incredibly exciting for me because here was a circle of people who, if they didn’t do everything themselves, they knew someone who could do that. And it was this whole world that in a sense, connected to what my childhood doing was. So I was very much in that sort of do-it-yourself realm. And after the publication of Permaculture One, I was, while Bill was taking permaculture to the world, I was much more interested in grounding the ideas in practice.

(4m25s) Practical Application, Ecological Building, and the Centrality of Food

David Holmgren: Partly that was a difference of age between us. He was in his late forties looking for a larger stage than the Tasmanian University. And I was, after three years in academia, I wanted to get my hands back doing stuff. So I went off to work with a friend who was the same age as me, who ran his own building business. And we were doing ecological building. And in a lot of ways I consider myself a better ecological builder than I am ecological farmer. But I know what the world needs more of. We’ve probably got enough buildings in a lot of places in the world. We just need to retrofit them. Ala my RetroSuburbia work, but we need food every year. We’ve gotta produce it every year. And so that idea that food is sort of central to permaculture has always been a passion. And some of that comes from being just seriously interested in food and different foods and, and again, being raised in a family where unusual and different cuisines were part of the upbringing, so that experimenting with food, because a lot of food gardeners have had the experience that they grow the food, but getting the family to eat out of the garden rather than out of the supermarket is actually the sort of harder thing. So it’s the people’s food habits are very close to the core of their being, and a lot of those things are embedded when people are young. And so that experimental openness to different things and different ways of what we might eat, how we might eat it.

(6m31s) Rationalism, Problem-Solving, and Rebelling Against “Saving the World”

Jack Staford: That coming out. But do you think perhaps you, because you’re, you describe yourself as a rationalist and I think that, do you think you were formed by the problem that you saw if you were born into a perfect world where we all have, we’re all in touch with nature and growing our own food, you wouldn’t need to have gone, you could have done something else with your life. No.

David Holmgren: Well, I suppose so. I didn’t have a sort of view that I’m set out to save the world because my parents did that and I saw the failings. Oh, right, okay. Not that they ever sort of provided a bad model, but the degree to which as part of the baby boom generation, the sex, drugs and rock and roll revolution, if you like. There was a huge sort of gulf between my parents’ generation and my own, which I didn’t sort of really experience. I saw it in all my peers who hated their parents or at least hated their parents’ values. Whereas when I started smoking dope and even taking LSD I talked to my parents about it, at the age of 17. So that different sort of relationship. So that was very difficult for me to rebel, because what did I have to rebel?

(8m1s) Second Generation Alienation and Creating the Desired World

Jack Staford: You could have been a banker. You could have been an accountant or something like really rebel.

David Holmgren: Well, that’s a pattern that sometimes occurs in radical parents who stimulate an opposite reaction in their children. And it can sometimes oscillate down the generations. But in other family lineages, there can be the radicals who make the break from the past and then successive generations that build on that until that again goes through a decay process, which is all affected by not just family dynamics, but geopolitical cycles. I have a whole theory sort of about this, about myself being second generation alienated, whereas my parents were first generation alienated and I discovered this when I saw all the people rushing to permaculture. Of my generation, like that this was going to save the world. And I thought, oh, this is like my parents thinking utopian socialism. The communist revolution was going to save the world. So I was sort of cautious about that and more even prone to kicking the sacred cows that might develop out of my ideas of permaculture, of pulling the rug out from under those things. But the degree to which I really rebelled was that I saw my parents’ activism as about trying to stop the bad things in the world, the injustices. And when I met Bill Mollison, he’d gone through a fairly intensive five years at the pioneering frontline of the emerging environmental movement in Tasmania. And it sort of come to the same conclusion as me. Me reflecting on my parents’ sort of heritage that no, we’re just going to go out and create the world we do want. We’re not going to be ignorant of all of those forces, but just we’re going to create the world we do want. And that fitted in with my childhood. Do it yourself, tinkerer, self-starter sort of approach, combined with the big thinking. So, I’ve always been self-employed. I’ve been an owner builder. I’ve built several houses. I’ve been a self-publisher. It’s just natural for me to, that we publish our own books. And, sort of in more recent decades, a futurist and a public intellectual, but without the support of an institution, a university, any of those organisational structures. So that being on the fringe, being on the outside is a sort of a natural place for me to be. And the transition into recognising my role as co-originator of permaculture and therefore exercising some sort of, dare I say, leadership role in what’s now this global movement when I don’t feel like I sort of created that movement. Yes. And that’s why I say, I’m the co-originator with Bill Mollison of the Permaculture concept, but he was the father of the Permaculture movement. But it took me 10 years of sort of looking at that movement from the outside to go, oh yeah, this is actually. This is in spite of its limitations and the downsides and the problems with movements, this is actually a really good thing. And it’s still, that transition from being an outsider, the individualist, do yourself to recognising you have a sort of role in leading or inspiring other people in their journey.

(12m14s) Being Your Own Guinea Pig and Balancing Practicality with Conceptual Thinking

David Holmgren: So there, there’s some of the things that have motivated me, but I suppose that getting your hands dirty, being your own Guinea pig, if you’ve got these new ideas about how society should be, then from an ethical point of view, the thing is to see if you can. See if your ideas work out for yourself. Be your own Guinea pig rather than telling the world what it should be. And I think that led a lot of people aware of the origins of permaculture, to see me as the quiet practitioner, practically grounded person and Bill Mollison as the big thinker. And then when in 2002 I published my book, Permaculture Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, which has now been translated into nine languages, some people got a shock that I was actually sort of a conceptual thinker myself. And that in some ways, I suppose the doing the practical stuff is a way of anchoring oneself to the ground so that the head doesn’t drift away into the sky. So that balance between the constant conceptual thinking, constant theorising, constantly trying to understand the big picture and the patterns behind things.

(14m7s) The Art and Importance of Reading Landscape

David Holmgren: And the practical, I think is sort of drawn together in one of my passions, which is around reading landscape, of how we can learn and understand things by direct observation. Not in the sense of, oh yeah, I was here last year, so I know that about this site, what it’s like in winter. But going there in summer and being able to see from the signs in summer what it’s like in winter, that direct observational interpretation. That doesn’t come from book learning and to some extent doesn’t come from apprenticeship learning either. It’s a different sort of learning and it’s deeper in our cultural ancestry and even in our mammalian animal nature that an animal that doesn’t observe and interact with its environment is very quickly dead. And yet formal education has sort of taught us that to know anything, either someone’s got to tell us it, or we’ve got to actually experience it, from the hard knocks of known experience, or we get it through indirect sources, media, books, everything. So that building that skill of reading landscape was an early passion of mine that brings together the conceptual and the practical.

(15m47s) Deepening Landscape Observation Skills

David Holmgren: Because obviously if you are not grounded in any sort of practical connection to landscape nature, then it’s hard for you to know what’s happening around you. But also if you can’t go past what is in front of your eyes and see what are the underlying processes, the abstraction of patterns of energy, of the echoes of the past, of what’s in a place, then you are sort of locked into the concrete of just what’s right in front of your nose. So that means there’s an abstraction which we associate with sort of conceptual theory and theories of the world, but it can be an abstraction the way indigenous people saw things of understanding energy flows and seeing the formative processes of what’s around them rather than just the surface thing. So trying to understand that and build it as a skillset is really being a passion for me and trying to inspire other people through permaculture teaching to actually for them to start doing that so they’re not just learning from hard-won practical experience or secondary sources of information, that there’s this direct sort of observation and not just with eyes, obviously our ears.

(17m36s) Multi-sensory Learning and Understanding Place

David Holmgren: As a, I’m very much an auditory damage when it comes to music or sound. Whereas some people, of course as musicians amongst them, the world is full of sound and everything comes through the auditory field, but then there’s taste and smell and touch. So all of this experiential knowledge is part of that reading landscape. And it’s been sort of like a really a bit of a mystery because I didn’t start off with all of the right learnings as a kid. I just grew up in the suburbs and as I said, my parents were freethinking, intellectuals and not particularly practical. And yes, I did some practical things as a kid, but it wasn’t like I grew up in the forest with all of this amazing knowledge and I had to learn those things as a modern, very intellectual, rational person. And I had to learn them because to be able to be a permaculture designer and advise people coming onto a piece of land, if I wasn’t just going to give them some templates, some precooked design ideas or some imposition, then you’ve got to understand the place.

(19m12s) Reading Landscape and People; The Intensity of Observation

David Holmgren: Now equally, you’ve got to understand the people. It’s more difficult. And that reading landscape is a bit like reading people, there’s all sorts of levels of understanding that can come through direct contact with people. The body language, the implications and so many different things and we all have some ability to read people, but we can all get better at it. And it’s the same with reading landscape. So that’s been a big part of passion for me. And it means that travelling is a very dense experience and I liken it a bit to a story of aboriginal elders in central Australia taken out onto country where they hadn’t been for a long time. And they’re travelling in the back of a utility vehicle at 60 kilometres an hour over the dirt. And they’re telling the stories of the place at speed.

(20m36s) The Exhaustion of Rapid Observation

David Holmgren: It’s exhausting, when those stories are supposed to be told walking through the landscape. And it’s the same for me, when I go travelling in a car, let alone a plane, which I don’t fly anymore, travelling over Brazil for hours on end, reading the landscape out the window, there’s so much to learn, so much to absorb. So it’s a full-on thing travelling, whereas most people, it’s just sort of goes past.

(21m14s) Rationalism, Intuition, and Experiencing Landscape Energy

Jack Staford: But have you, because I’ve got into metaphysics and yoga and learning about the divas and nature spirits, and. You did LSD a bit when you were young, but do you, have you, are you developed, is it, are you talking psychic senses as well?

David Holmgren: Look, I’ve always, I come from a background both in upbringing, but also my personal habits as being a super rationalist. I can remember as a kid not remembering my dreams because, how do you make sense of dreams? The complexities of the mind, which the experiences of LSD proved to me, absolutely. There was more complexity in the human mind that could ever be understood at that rational level. And that’s made me open to things. But it’s been a very slow journey in terms of even accepting that I had any intuitive connection in what I did. And I wouldn’t say I’ve had those transformative experiences of what people would call connection to spirit beings or any of those sort of things. But I do experience the landscape and places in terms of their energy and their past patterns, often at a bodily level, which I can sort of partly explain in terms of some of the things I know through rational science, and sometimes not. So, I am sort of open to, philosophically those different ways of seeing things. But I also, I have retained my sort of radical rationalist scepticism. When so many clients said to me, oh, we just came and knew this was exactly the right property for us. I thought, oh yeah, it was a sunny spring day.

(23m51s) Balancing Intuition and Rationalisation

David Holmgren: So of trying to sort of weed between what is sort of rationalisations that humans constantly are doing to sort of justify or interpret their own behaviour to see the patterns of meaning in things. And what I think is there of that real deep intuitive connection to something that cannot be understood at the surface level. And that’s, I suppose, where the rationalists throw up their hands of saying, how do you tell? Because there are so many layers. It’s a balance of emotional stories we tell ourselves or explanations or rationalisations for things. But I think those don’t deny that there are deeper connections that are very, very potent and meaningful.

(24m52s) Attunement, Embodied Knowledge, and Serendipity

Jack Staford: I guess someone who spent as much time with the hands in the soil as you have, you get tuned in though, just by the presence.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well there’s, see, there’s processes by which you become attuned to things where a lot of stuff, which is of course conscious when you’re in a learning stage becomes fully integrated. It’s a bit like riding a bicycle. You don’t need to know what that self-steering connection, correction, process is because it’s automatic, it’s in your body. And so I think there are things like that, but there’s also serendipitous processes where you sort of just accidentally do things or find yourself in a space where you are in the flow, and you make right decisions in the same way that you can get paralysed, as I’ve done many times with huge amounts of knowledge and information, and then paralysed to make a decision.

(26m0s) Learning from Mentors and Moving Beyond Pure Rationality (The Coin Toss Story)

David Holmgren: And one of the strongest learnings in that process for me was my second mentor, who I regard as my second mentor in permaculture. Haka. He is certainly older than me, but Bill Mollison’s age and we were setting up a workshop site in uplands of New Zealand for the first of these workshops that would begin the organisation that became Permaculture New Zealand. And we’re designing the site and, oh yeah, we’ll have the camp kitchen over here and vehicles will park over there and people will put up their tents here and, and the sauna next to the stream will go there and whatever. And we came against some block in, should the pattern be this way or that way. And just two very experienced designers suddenly not sure what to do. And he says, oh, this is a case for the coin. And he pulls out a coin. Flips it. And I as a rationalist, I thought, this is ridiculous. What a way to make a decision. And he gave me a long lecture about the I Ching and the meaning of the Yarrow sticks, which he said, aren’t Yarrow sticks there? Fleabane sticks actually. And the divination through processes that are partly about seeing what one’s own reaction is to the chance, and also ways in which there’s learning through that. So that was one of the openings to saying yeah, how to get beyond those sort of like just purely rational decision making.

(27m52s) Introducing RetroSuburbia: Adapting Existing Suburbs

Jack Staford: That right brain, left brain. Yeah. Because it is a, there’s this creative, I guess, that’s the hardest thing when you have a blank site. I mean, it’s easier to react against things. You’re moving on now to RetroSuburbia, because permaculture stood the test of time. That’s an established thing. So what are you trying to do with RetroSuburbia?

David Holmgren: Well, RetroSuburbia is an application of permaculture. It’s powered by, and guided by permaculture ethics and design principles. But I suppose it doesn’t necessarily even need the demeanour of Permaculture, and you don’t even need to believe in climate change or whatever to see some of the value in just how to live a more resilient, self-reliant life where people already are. For a huge number of people, especially in countries like Australia, it’s in residential landscapes of separate houses, on blocks. Whether we call that suburbia or whether it’s part of small towns and villages like where we live here in Hepburn, that pattern is in spite of the negative things said about it. I think it’s one of the, it’s a sweet point for adaption to the world that’s coming so that it has that critical mass of people and interaction in terms of density and economic possibilities that we associate with cities. But it has the access to space, sunlight, water, resources that we associate with the rural environment. That it’s really amenable to incremental adaption and change. Whereas our big city higher density areas are a bit locked in. They can be retrofitted, but it’s much more technically complex. There’s many more stakeholders who’ve got to be consulted, and there’s many more hazards in a low energy future, which I believe most of the signs are pointing towards, rather than we’re all going to be living in super complex cities of the future.

(30m29s) Adapting Existing Infrastructure for a Changing Future

David Holmgren: So whatever that future is, it’s coming towards us at such a fast rate that we are not going to radically change other than by accidental destruction. The deliberate destruction through conflict or natural disasters, the existing settlement patterns. We’re going to take those patterns made for this world and we’re going to adapt them into the future world because even with a rapidly growing economy, it takes more than a hundred years for a city’s building stock infrastructure to sort of even half turnover. So we’re going to be in the climate emergency and all the other aspects of the future, the good and the bad with what we’ve got. So that process of, rather than the blank slate of building a new intentional community or building a new eco city or whatever, we’re going to adapt with what we’ve got. And I think that’s a very creative and empowering process.

(31m41s) The Power of Incremental Change and Working with Existing “Templates”

David Holmgren: Because it can start small, making small changes. And whether that’s in the built environment to buildings, water systems, energy, whether it’s in the biological, gardening, animal husbandry, or most powerfully in the behavioural, the retrofitting paradigm applies that we can take what we’ve got and say, okay, how do we tweak this? How do we change it? How do we add something, take something away?

Jack Staford: So you have the, you have this landscape. So you’ve, you have the, you’ve already got the template and you want, you’ve seen how you can change it.

David Holmgren: Yeah. And so that actually fits into this deeper permaculture wisdom that there isn’t anything such as a blank slate Anyway, everywhere has a history. Everywhere comes with something. And we come with our own history, our both the benefits and skills and knowledge we have and all the baggage of dysfunction and that we inherit from the past that may be inappropriate for the future. So I think that paradigm is also significant for people who are making a change ahead of society as a whole, getting the message that these changes are needed because it’s possible to make those small changes without getting the whole of society to agree.

(33m11s) Social Licence vs. Legal Licence in Making Changes

David Holmgren: And a lot of those changes can happen that don’t need the legal regulatory approval and others can actually happen that are illegal, but happen under the radar of legal oversight with, especially if people have the social licence from neighbours. So in my presentations funded by local government councils around Australia. I tell people, don’t worry about the legal licence. Make sure you’ve got the social licence. And that’s very interesting to see the reactions of mayors and heads of planning departments and whatever to that. It’s one of those sort of critical issues that people are interested in.

(34m2s) Retrofitting as a Way to Bypass Regulatory Gridlock

David Holmgren: What am I allowed to do? And so that retrofitting, if we think of it in building, it’s very different, making some modifications to a building, to building a new building. So all of those obstacles of regulatory gridlock that are getting worse and worse in the affluent countries, especially as we have more and more regulation, even though at the top the corporations are still running free with what they want, but people in their ordinary lives are more and more constrained. So breaking out of that mould, where people already live in the way they live, in the way they garden, the way they modify houses and then spilling out into the community is really drawing on all the learnings of permaculture and transition towns and the intentional communities movement.

(35m7s) The Importance of the Household Unit and the Non-Monetary Economy

David Holmgren: So one of the big themes in that is that I’ve noticed that in environmental and social activists often talk about the individual and the community, and then there’s all the big structures in society and whether they need to change. But for people who are focused at the sort of the idea of bottom-up change, they often speak of the individual and the community and they forget often to mention that we all live in a household, even if it’s just a household of one person. It’s not much of a household then, but households are the critical unit of society. And although we can’t do everything at the household scale, a lot of things need to be done at the community and larger scales. If we don’t have our households strong, resilient, dynamic, we can’t build this new self-reliant community economy, which is founded in the non-monetary economy, so that ironically in the modern world, our household are too small, even though our houses are so big. They’re bigger than they’ve ever been in human history, but there’s fewer people living together and they spend very little time at home because of this sort of commute to work to everything, which thank goodness that was one of the things that the pandemic has. Finally, I’ve been waiting for it for 20 years to shatter this spell that to be a part of society.

(36m57s) Rebuilding Home-Based, Non-Monetary Economies

David Holmgren: We’ve got to get in a car or get in public transport and go somewhere else each day, otherwise we’re not really alive or we don’t have a job. Or, rather than the idea of our ancestors, mostly were home-based. Sure they went out and whatever, but a huge amount of activity happened at home. So that’s a huge part of that idea behind RetroSuburbia that this home-based, place-based, household scale is a foundation for rebuilding the non-monetary economies that have been such dry in affluent countries in most of it over my lifetime. Obviously extending back to the beginnings of industrialisation, but a lot of it has happened within my lifetime since the 1950s.

(38m0s) The Illusion of Economic Growth via Monetising Household Activities

Jack Staford: And I heard you say that a lot of the growth we’ve had has been illusory because it’s just transfer of activity outside the household.

David Holmgren: Yeah. So that, when people, I suppose in my childhood, a lot of blokes would go after work and their wives would give them their lunch. Right, because the wife was at home, working in the household on non-monetary economy. And then when people started buying their lunch, as a very small example, that increased GDP, but no more lunches were created. It’s just that the process has become monetised. And then of course, when women moved into the workforce, that was this huge shift because then childcare became part of the monetary economy. And all sorts of things happened. And we can see back, my mother’s generation of feminists saw that as part of the great achievements of that thinking that women should have equal access to the workforce. And yeah, that it was a great achievement, but it was also something that was allowed to happen because it accelerated economic growth and there certainly wasn’t the encouragement or reward for men to go part-time and pick up if not exactly the same tasks that women were doing in the household doing stuff, being productive in the non-monetary household economy. No, everything has this one-way direction. So we see this ideology everywhere.

(39m49s) Redefining Poverty and Wellbeing Beyond Monetary Measures

David Holmgren: You even see it in the UN sustainable development goals where the end of poverty is defined in terms of how many people live on less than a few dollars a day, which is merely measuring their monetary transaction. So that person who’s living on a couple of dollars a day could be in a village somewhere where they get clean water out of a stream where they produce the vast majority of their food outside the monetary economy, and they need that couple of dollars for going to the doctor for something or getting some tool, or that person earning $2 a day could be in a slum settlement on the edge of a city where they can’t grow any food, they don’t have any fresh water, and everything they need comes from either scavenging the wastes out of that city or what they can buy with that few dollars. So that’s a completely different view of the world because money is not necessarily the measure of wellbeing and non-monetary economies are actually a lot more efficient at providing a lot of needs. And until recent history, the monetary economy was just the icing on the cake of the non-monetary economy.

(41m20s) True “Pro-Growth” by Revitalising the Non-Monetary Economy

David Holmgren: So. If it’s better for the planet, more efficient, economically efficient and better for people, for at least some of that activity to move back into the non-monetary economy at the household and community level, then we can do that and we can call it economic growth. So I am actually pro-growth. I’m laughing at the absurdity of so much economics that could actually go through this fast of saying you’ve created growth by just stealing it from the non-monetary economy. It just merely gives corporations and governments a slice of the cake.

(42m6s) Challenging Societal Norms like Commuting Addiction

David Holmgren: Now clearly there are some things that are not efficient to do at the household level. The Chinese in the Great Leap forward in 1958 tried sort of backyard steel furnaces, didn’t work very well, but there’s an awful lot of things that it’s, whether it’s sort of cleaning out the gutters or looking after kids or maintaining health, growing fresh fruit and veggies. So many things are actually, they’re just more efficient to do at home.

Jack Staford: Yeah. It just depends on your values.

David Holmgren: Well it also depends on stepping outside the propaganda illusions of the society that take certain ways of doing things as not just normal, but as though they’re governed by like laws of nature, like the law of gravity, like the law of commuting. To be a part of society you’ve got to get in a and teleport to some other location each day. And I believe actually to a significant extent, people have become addicted to commuting, not just because of their adult experience of economic necessity, but as children they were put in the car and taken off to the childcare centre at a very, very young age. Now that didn’t much to people of my generation, but to people a bit younger, a lot of people as babies, they were taken somewhere each day. And so that sort of gets built in to one’s way of being that yes, it’s nice to be at home on a holiday or the weekend, but gee, it feels a bit weird to stay in one place.

(43m55s) The Challenge of a Home-Based Lifestyle in Modern Society

David Holmgren: And it was, it came to me when I was interviewed by someone who was actually studying people who are living these different ways of downshifting. And he was a very urban person, journalist on his bike, travelling around the country, meeting all these people. And the most challenging thing about our place was not our outside compost toilet or strange foods or anything else. It was the fact home-based lifestyle, that of actually being in one place all the time. And it was great ’cause he wrote about that in the book, that that was this idea that in the future most people would more or less spend their days in one place. So, very limited numbers of people would travel each day.

(44m50s) The “Needing to Move” Fallacy vs. Adapting Where You Are

Jack Staford: Do you think people applied that teleportation idea to permaculture? They say, well if I’m going to get into this, I need to buy a big ranch or lots of acres in the countryside so I can really get into permaculture.

David Holmgren: Yeah, that’s certainly an element of that thinking that if I’m going to radically change the way I live or what I do, then it can’t be where I’ve been. But somehow, and that can become an excuse for not doing things now, it’s valid. I think sometimes people need that change of space, change of place to actually go through the psychology of making a change in their life. So it is valid, that idea of, I need to go somewhere else and I am shedding something. It’s a bit like growing up and leaving home, even in a more traditional society, people come back to where they grew up or back to even the family house. That idea of needing to go out and find something different. Understandable and valid, but I think it often becomes also an excuse for not doing things where one is, or falling into, I suppose there’s two things where people go, either this is true in what we’ve talked about in RetroSuburbia, where people either say, my current place is useless, I can’t do anything here. It’s completely flawed, so I have to go somewhere else. Or, oh yeah, this place will be perfect. It’s been good in the past. It’ll be fine for whatever happens in the future. And people tend to fall into one of those two attitudes to where they live. And our RetroSuburbia real estate checklist that attempts to help people do an evaluation of where they are and see its strengths and its weaknesses and whether the decision is to work with that or no, we need to move somewhere else for whatever reason. Including the need to get out of debt and downsize to somewhere cheaper.

(47m39s) Predictions: Accelerating Change, Crises as Triggers, and System Fragility

David Holmgren: But, yes, the, I think the commuting and the romance of the international commuting that’s been characteristic of recent decades is unravelling. I expected it to unravel primarily because of the cost of aviation fuel before it has now. It’s happening because of pandemics, but I don’t think we’ll see it coming back for most people.

Jack Staford: What’s next then? What’s your next prediction?

David Holmgren: Well, I think it’s always surprising how things do evolve. But I think we’re moving into a period of accelerating change where people to some extent will be shocked by things that appear to come out of left field. Like the pandemic, which of course we’ve known new pandemics were sort of on the horizon and due, but also the responses to those events. Because we now have, I believe, the situation where the response to the pandemic is a bigger world changing event than the pandemic as a virus itself. And I think those things are inevitable because all structures, organisations, people with any sort of intelligence understand that the current ways of doing things are in a process of unravelling and change. And the triggers for being able to make change are crises. And whether those crises are geopolitical crises or viral crises or cyber warfare, hit crises. All of course the, just the accelerating natural disasters driven by climate change. That that process of those crises and big impacts produce the more permanent changes. So without necessarily seeing that in a conspiratorial sense, it’s more the way the world self-organises into and attempts to muddle through the chaos of change rather than it being in any way sort of controlled. But I think for ordinary people, it’s important to expect that a lot of the things they take for granted, like their savings in the bank or their superannuation or many things about the way government works, their food supply works. None of those things are guaranteed uncertain.

(50m35s) Navigating Unsustainability: Reduced Expectations and Local Resilience

Jack Staford: Because it’s not sustainable. The system is too long.

David Holmgren: Yeah. They’re not sustainable and they will break down in all sorts of really complex and surprising ways. So having reduced expectations, and more finding non-material ways to find satisfaction in life and providing for more of the basic material needs through one’s own efforts and efforts at the community and household levels, is a big project. Very exciting and lots of stuff to do. So I think being able to sort of focus on those things is very grounding and acts as an antidote to the angst about how the tragedies of what we might be losing. That it’s a shame to lose. And that could be things, some of the gifts of civilisation, right through to, of course, the extinction of species that’s happening. We, there is a big, I think part of the whole grieving process that people need to go through at all sorts of different levels, especially in the affluent world, about that.

(51m46s) Pandemic Lockdowns and the Shift Towards Localism

David Holmgren: But, permaculture and RetroSuburbia, we see so many opportunities in those. And, I suppose when the pandemic hit and the incredible surprise that governments took the, followed the Chinese model of, oh, let’s use lockdowns since none of those things were actually in their pandemic plans. And then they decided to, I was joking with friends saying, oh, which permaculturist released this virus? Because it not to sort of ignore the massive adverse impact on people, but breaking that spell that we have to go somewhere all the time seemed to me bizarre because it seemed to me information technology offered a way off the drug of fossil fuel driven transport. Not that it is the same thing communicating in these ways, but that it’s a very easy stepping stone for us to learn to gradually become more connected to being people of place as all of our ancestors were. And even if we don’t have that technology into the future, we have it now as that transition to learning how to stay put a bit more.

(53m38s) The Unsustainability of Constant Movement and the Need to Do More with Less

David Holmgren: Then of course it’s all of the movement of goods. But with that movement of people that again, produce what is needed, where people are, because this is the biggest single unsustainability in the world, is this constant movement of people and things because it’s transport energy and 90% of that transport energy is fossil fuel. And it’s not easily changed into renewable electricity. And even if it is, of course, we’re seeing the rollout of regime change for lithium resources just as we saw it for oil, all of, and lithium, copper, all of these resources that are necessary for the renewable energy revolution. If we follow the same path as the past, which we can see happening around us, then it’s not a pathway for movement into an environmentally sustainable or just world. We have to be effective doing what we do with less of everything. And that’s a shift that is very, very hard for generations of people raised in fossil fuel affluence to accept. And it’s, but, we can model as we’ve attempted to do and many other people are doing that pathway of choice, follows that, I suppose that.

(55m30s) “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush”: Deliberate Downshifting

David Holmgren: Joke in the field of futures that says, collapse now and avoid the rush. And of course, by collapse we don’t mean literally collapse, we mean deliberately, downshift, deliberately give up doing things that are just unsustainable in the future and find other ways to meet those needs that might have been associated with those things.

(56m0s) About the RetroSuburbia Book and Its Availability

Jack Staford: Well, you’re a great example. I mean, the house you’ve built Melliodora, how have been there now? 35 years. Yeah. It’s great. You’re a great inspiration and I’m definitely going to get the book and study it. Can you buy it on the website?

David Holmgren: Yeah. The RetroSuburbia book is now available through distribution in Britain. It’s still not available in bookshops outside of Australia, but it is distributed by our distributors in the United States and in Britain. And outside of Europe and North America, it still can be bought through our online site. But there’s also the online flip book version of the book, which we made available on a pay what you feel basis as a response to the pandemic. So people can at least have access to it in that way. But so many people have said, no, I want the physical book. Yeah, it’s nicer in my head. But it is really three books in one, the built the Biological and the Behavioural. And so it’s 1.8 kilos. It’s quite a book. It’s a manual for our times.

(57m32s) RetroSuburbia Online Version and Further Resources

Jack Staford: And then the online version is, is the more digestible, liked version.

David Holmgren: It’s the same, it’s the same book. It’s the full thing. The full, it’s everything there, but it’s a flip book format so you register for it and you decide how much you think you should or can pay. And that’s been a risk we took in publishing. And it’s worked well. So there is interest in translating the book. Of course language translation is one thing, but all of the examples are sort of being written in the Southern Australian context, but of course people are inspired and see how that can be adapted to where they are as well. And there’s a website with many case studies. There’s three case study, main case studies in the book. But there’s a whole lot more on the retro website.

(58m35s) Melliodora Publishing and Storytelling

Jack Staford: Wow. And you have a team, that real team there as well, and you have an illustrator living on the property and

David Holmgren: Yeah. So, it’s been quite a growth. The book has pushed Melliodora publishing into being an actual real small publisher rather than just publishing my books. So we do other books. And there’s also the Our Street, which is the kids version of Yes, I was going to mention that story. Fantastic.

Jack Staford: Probably that’s more my level, as well.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, storytelling is of course a big part of it and recognising that, that my Aussie Street presentation, by which I’ve introduced a lot of these things right. Is a great way to communicate those ideas. And that’s been for me, a late development. But of course, Bill Mollison was always a great storyteller.

(59m39s) Closing Remarks and Musical Connections

Jack Staford: Yeah. You’ve to evolve to take his place, grow into the light.

David Holmgren: Okay.

Jack Staford: Oh, well, wonderful. It’s been really great chatting to you, David. Thanks so much.

David Holmgren: Good. And I’ll look forward to hear the what?

Jack Staford: I wish me luck, I mean, to condense all that. Jesus, I mean, that’s

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I’m sure you can take some threads that make sense to you and

Jack Staford: It might, my song might end up wailing a kilo and a half if I

David Holmgren: And of course I’ve been very supportive of another musical venture, the work of Charlie McGee of Formidable Vegetables.

Jack Staford: Yes. Yeah. I saw them on your site.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Great. Ambassador in music or permaculture.

Jack Staford: I want to get him on the show. I want to get him on to come and,

David Holmgren: Yeah, that would be fantastic.

Jack Staford: I had Sandor Katz on the other day as well. He said he’d visited you a few times and

David Holmgren: Yeah, yeah. He’s been. Great inspiration for my partner, Sue, and lots of people in our community in the fermenting fury that’s taking over the world.

Jack Staford: Did it take over your house for a while? Did she go crazy away?

David Holmgren: Oh well, not quite the preventing evangelists that they’ve been around, but we’ve always done a degree of anything. And that freedom to make sense of something through your nose and taste and that confidence rather than that paranoia or about always something going to poison me. Oh, I going to poison the family. But that’s, that’s a great empowering message.

Jack Staford: Well, wonderful. Thanks David. Thanks again.

David Holmgren: Okay, thank you.

(1h1m43s) Outro and Advertisement

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