Why Permaculture Principles in Your Life will Create a More Sustainable Future with David Holmgren

Permaculture has been around for a long time and it is an ancient technique that can be used to solve many of the world’s problems. The earth-friendly design promotes sustainable living by creating self-sufficient communities, where people work together with nature rather than against her…

You can listen to David’s interview with Regen Ray below:

Interview Transcript

intro voices: Welcome to Partisan Gardens. We can’t wait any longer for Tech Breakthrough Climate, apocalypse the Revolution, or a reform of the USDA loan system on Partisan Gardens. We know Climate Catastrophe

is here and it’s our food system’s dead end. Here we see sustainable, fine dining and ecological destruction, hunger and obesity, extreme wealth and immense poverty.

We must be frank about reality. To reckon with our options, we must choose sides and become partisans of a new way to live and grow food. This alternative path is already under construction. Through the experiments and struggles of food service and agricultural workers, we are figuring out how to create food systems that will nourish a livable world for us all.

Partisan Gardens will feature stories from kitchen staff, new small farmers, undocumented slaughterhouse organisers, agroecology researchers, black farming cooperatives, urban gardeners, indigenous land stewards, perma agriculturists, and countless others. Exploring this field of experimentation. Let those of us who refuse to wait proceed together.

The current food system has failed and we are on the side of nourishment and care.

(1m34s) Introducing David Holmgren and RetroSuburbia

This month we’re excited to share our conversation with David Holmgren, author of the recent RetroSuburbia and co-author of the Landmark 1978 book, Permaculture One with Bill Mollison, which launched the International Permaculture Movement, drawing on permaculture principles of recognising existing patterns and incorporating them into design.

Holmgren is calling for a bold and improvisational approach to the problem of the suburbs. Rather than start with a mythical blank slate for perfect ecological construction, he sees rich possibilities in retrofitting suburban space, opening it up to distributed small scale food production, and new forms of life.

In this episode, we discuss the crises we all face, what it means to write for a specific place, the power of speculative fiction for imagining alternative futures. And concrete visions for transforming suburbia. This is a deeply terrestrial proposal based on practical experiences in Australia and which will develop via widespread experimentation, playing with patterns and hacking suburban forms.

(2m39s) David Holmgren Introduction

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

(3m16s) Why Focus on Suburbia Now?

Partisan Gardens host: What brought you to focus on suburbia in this moment?

David Holmgren: Yeah, I suppose it’s a, a fairly long journey, but I’ve lived in rural Australia for over 35 years, but in moving from the city to the country, we chose to move into a small country town and live in what’s really a suburban street and have the intention of actually buying a house to retrofit, ’cause we saw the value was in the existing stock, but a combination of factors that the small town we were in and the way all the streets were oriented and we couldn’t get anything that met, it met all of our different criteria. We thought, oh, well I have the skills of the building and have built a passive solar house for my mother some years before that.

So in the, in the late eighties, we did design and build on this property, which has become a well-known permaculture demonstration site. But I suppose over those years, I was always seeing the looming crisis that most people would associate with the climate emergency now, but more correctly, it’s understood in terms of the limits to growth crisis that Permaculture was really framed around that crisis for civilisation and that we would be into that crisis. Having to retrofit and adapt housing, stock gardens, and productive environments, and in fact, our own behaviour. For a different environment without really very much time and certainly not the time to, oh, let’s build new ecological cities or knock down all our buildings and start from scratch.

So this process of working from what we’ve got was also informed by my work as a permaculture designer in rural Australia. And my discontent with the notions of blank slate design. You know, you have a field and we’re gonna put a house here and gardens and orchards. There isn’t such a thing as a blank slate every, everywhere comes with a history.

So even in that context, that idea of starting from scratch is actually an illusion. I think it was also a long running debate with colleagues. In the urban planning profession from really the days when I was in design school in the, in the early seventies about would our future human settlement patterns be one of high density for urban efficiency or some lower density pattern where people had access to

open space for growing some of their food and other functions. And in that way, the potential to retrofit suburbia rather than infill development for greater density and supposed urban efficiency was, I was always a dissident on that urban planning orthodoxy, which the environment movement took on as a virtually an article of religious

faith. I think the other factor is that I observed the increasing regulatory stranglehold on doing anything new, innovative, small scale. My experience as a developer of an eco village here in Central Victoria and as owner builder on several occasions and as a consultant made me realise that a lot of the opportunities

increasingly were to retrofit under the radar of regulatory control because that’s often possible, especially people, if people have the social license from those around them rather than the legal license. Whereas with new buildings starting from scratch, the requirements were becoming more and more onerous at the same time.

The corporate world seemed to be running amuck with more and more airy opportunities, but at the small scale, the individual and the small business were being tighter and tighter constrained. So there was a lot of sort of strategic things coming together that led to the focus. On suburbia and the focus on retrofitting, but then extending that paradigm of retrofitting from where it’s commonly understood is the built environment through to the biological and to the behaviour.

(8m29s) Retrofitting and Systemic Crises

Partisan Gardens host: That’s extremely useful and I’ll mention the other thing that crossed into my mind, in addition to thinking about this critique of the Plant Blank Slate Framework and sort of escaping the kind of regulatory stranglehold is just getting to grips with. The increasing challenges and reduced resources that we’ll face as systemic crises escalate.

And so the sort of approach of retrofitting seems really important for rebuilding our relationship with the world. Being able to retrofit, you know, we talk a lot about the hacker ethos, the commitment to open up and understand and repurpose, you know, technical systems that otherwise people don’t understand. We mean often computers or agricultural tools, but you’re talking about sort of the entirety of suburbia and so I was just wondering if you could sort out, you know, the systemic crises that you think we’re facing and then, you know, what we can do in suburbia to address that.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, the term I used to describe that of course was energy descent 20 years ago in

in my book of Permaculture Theory, permaculture principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability and the idea that not just that energy will be expensive and not as available as it has been in the past, but that actually energy is a currency and a language to understand how nature works, how human systems and economies

work generally, it’s not just fuel that we use for something. It’s embodied in everything we do. So it’s much more effective than money as a way to measure what is real wealth and what is possible. So without energy, nothing actually happens, and that doesn’t matter whether it’s at the cellular level in microbes or in our bodies or in our economies, you know, at the micro macro.

So that framework. Suggests that the energy available to future generations being less, that the patterns of societies with less energy all have more re localiseed economies. In fact, the globalisation of the economy is only a process that’s been possible with fossil fuel. So the re localisation is also the recognition that the energy sources of the future are distributed.

In their source nature. So whether it’s sunshine, wind, biomass, hydro, and other renewable energies are all little bits and pieces spread across landscape. They’re not concentrated out of giant holes in the ground, which have then supported these huge aggregations of human populations in mega cities at high density.

So with energy distributed. And of a lower density concentration and utility, even without the climate emergency of the need to radically reduce, if not eliminate, carbon dioxide emissions. Society needs to restructure around that, those energy characteristics because. Right. Throughout human history, all societies end up being structured by their energy sources, and what that suggests is the pattern of our relatively recent history, not too many generations ago, where perishable food was concentrated, certainly in around dense urban cities.

Very close to it. Those areas supplied the food. And also that there were other patterns of lower density residential development, which we could say like suburban areas where people actually were, it was really small scale farming, and people produced a lot of the perishable food in garden farming. So that was of course also the non-monetary economy.

Because one of the characteristics of the high energy Society is we’ve enabled continuous economic growth by sucking activity out of the household and community non-monetary economies that in all previous times were the base on which the monetary economy was built. And whether that’s people growing food or whether it’s repairing their house or looking after their children or looking after their health and informal ways of social welfare, a huge diversity of things that didn’t register as the formal economy ’cause they were non-monetary relationships.

So inherently. The household and above that informal community relationships are more energetically efficient and arguably much more humane and better ways to provide a lot of those things. So that means that downsizing of the monetary economy and those things move some of those things moving back into the non-monetary economy.

And so that suggests. The lower density residential structure is actually much more amenable to doing those things, doing things at home. We can think of it as simple as when people changed from taking their lunch to work, that lunch that they even just made at home from bought ingredients versus buying their lunch at work, that there’s an increase in GDP as a result of that process, even though no more lunches were created.

So when we move that back into the household economy, obviously the capacity of the household economy becomes a key issue. If we look at it in an other ways in terms of the capacity of governments and corporations to deliver just in time reliable supply through globalised trade networks, that all of these things, one can expect to be less reliable.

In an energy descent future, and that the proximate causes of that may be things like geopolitical instability and conflicts between nation states. It may be in many, many different ways. Rather than, oh, there’s a shortage of fuel for the ship, you know, to come from one continent to another. A lot of the analysis around peak oil and the peaking of the largest energy source sustaining humanity sort of misunderstood.

You know, that you immediately get expensive energy and it not being available, and there’s a shortage of maybe food. Things are much more complex than that. So we are actually experiencing that at the moment because we are past the peak. Of both conventional oil and now of, uh, what’s called total liquids, and that is really the king resource that despite the rapidity of the renewable energy rollout still is what is structuring our world to an enormous extent, but in ways that people can’t really see directly or understand.

(16m38s) The Role of Local Context and Ossie Street

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

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well I think this idea of re localisaion as the sort of necessary state is also the redevelopment of local culture and local context, which of course, people have been angsting about all over the world. This sort of dissolution of their own local culture and the predominance of. What is modernity, industrial culture that people often label as American culture, but I say it’s either the shared global culture or it’s no one’s culture. It comes from Mars or something, but it’s very, very different from all cultures of place that existed before.

So that redevelopment of local culture is more likely to be some sort of. Hybrid of things from the past and new things, but it, it reflects the local context. And I think this is one of the difficulties that people coming from our shared modernity assume because this, this is what would’ve been our lived experience for a few generations, is there’s one big solution that trumps everything else and spreads everywhere.

You know, and whether it’s the lingua franca of English or whether it’s computer software that works the same everywhere in the world, once you’re working with nature, once you’re working with living systems, everywhere is different and the particular nature of solutions. Is different and people get very frustrated that they can’t just take an example from one place and rubber a stamp it across landscape.

So that also applies in the publishing world, that publishers of course, want generic books that will apply to the widest product audience and actually manipulate the authors. To rewrite text away from their lived experience as an author in whatever the field is to generalise. And that’s understandable enough.

But as an author and as a publisher, and from this deep culture of permaculture, I know we have to articulate the local and the specific context because then you can get down to relevant. And it’s always been that difficulty with permaculture because while it’s ethics and design principles are universal, they’re very abstract.

And the concrete strategies and techniques unfortunately, are not universal. You know, they, um, they don’t apply everywhere. And then I. There’s been a bit of that story back and forth, especially between, uh, this country, Australia and the United States in relation to permaculture, because Australia was where Permaculture came from.

And even when Mollison, you know, uh. Travelled in the US and people having to, um, interpret his language. What is a ch and, uh, in a way it’s playing with that cultural colonialism also of turning that around. But it’s also a commitment to one’s own territory of providing the most valuable, immediate, applicable information to one’s constituent immediate geographic community.

And then if that information is useful in a wider field, that is good, but it actually biases quite deliberately to the local. And we have done that over the decades with our permaculture design courses. We say in here in Central Victoria, while we design methods and. Design principles and processes are universal.

All of our example material comes from the SPI region, and that means the course is most useful to those in this SPI region. And if people wanna come from further afield, well they can still do that. but we are not restructuring that course to make it global. So it’s, it’s very deliberate in a sort of a.

Uh, you know, a cultural, um, sense and, and reflecting the sort of permaculture localism without sort of wanting to get into some sort of parochial, you know, the olive oil from my village is the best in the world. It’s actually was quite functional for people, peasant peoples to have that view of their, their place and their love of their home place, even if it wasn’t true.

But it also has a dark side, of course, of a parochialism. We want to maintain the international thinking, the global thinking, but acting

(22m16s) What Ossie Street Represents

Partisan Gardens host: like what, in terms of trying to. Bridge that same gap that you’re talking about and to think from a territory, but you know, have something to say to people elsewhere. And so I just wanted to ask you to sort of talk in specific about the role of Ossie Street. You know, maybe, maybe you could explain a little bit about what Ossie Street is, but the role of it in the book and in your writing process. What does it mean to kind of use speculative fiction in this way? To think about transformations that we’ll need to undertake?

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, Ossie Street emerged as a presentation initially, and it, it wasn’t even really a story, it was just a map of four suburban streets showing the history of how that street had evolved over my lived experience of starting in the, in the 1950s, and then how it might evolve in the future and gradually.

That storytelling emerged with people’s names and became sort of like a, a sort of a permaculture soap opera. Uh, so that, that sort of predated the RetroSuburbia book, and we knew that it had to be in some form, you know, part of the. The book. And it was very interesting in writing it down. It’s sort of like the story almost ran away. Like it was a whole, for me, reality at that point that it was that amazing experience of, yeah, oral communication that wasn’t written down to it. Having that form, and I suppose part of it for me was educating younger people about the recent Australian history.

About the places where most Australians grew up because we’d had this absence of academic interests and disdain for suburbia for so many decades. There was almost no sort of serious work on even studying what Australians did in their suburban backyards. There were no books from, or significant academic research from 1975 to 2005, there’s this great gap. So Ossie Street was a bit my sort of poking fun at academics of, Hey, you know, what is the real history of of, of this?

Also introducing it to people who were migrants to Australia who had landed here and found, you know, the modern affluent Australian culture. So weird and so different from their own experience. And then being able to show them that there are actually elements in. The not so distant past that actually connected with some of their own experience from other countries. And then I suppose the third level is this. Oh, this is actually, this suburban pattern is one that is of course, common.

(25m45s) Challenges Specific to the Suburban Pattern

To the affluent and especially extensive new Europe’s, especially of North America, and of course our sister country, across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand, much more than perhaps some of the denser urban patterns of European and Asian cities. But that essentially that suburban pattern has been exported all over the world. Uh, you know, sort of. You like coming out of America. And so there’s very many similarities in that. But other variations that might lead to other stories that people can tell about their own shared history. And then of course, the really important thing of imagining and creating a positive future,

You know, some of the similarities that come through that, you know, almost became spooky for me. Like in our town, in the Midwestern United States, we have had to figure out, you know, negotiating difference with grumpy bike punks who are impatient with our pace of transition and our approach. So just reading that just really kind of touched me and I totally both empathise with, you know, the grumpy bike punks on Ossie Street and the ones in our town.

But, you know, these are real dynamics that, you know, kind of stretch themselves across the globe.

David Holmgren: You know, I suppose one of the things when I first travelled outside of Australia and New Zealand, which was not until 1994, and while the extraordinary difference of of landscape and language and culture that people sort of mostly comment on in overseas travel.

The thing that struck me is how the same much, the same, the story of modernity was, uh, everywhere. And whether it was the, you know, the Arab Israeli kids on their, on their BMX bikes, with their walkmans on riding down the street in front of the house where there’s a new. Third story being put on the house and next to the tractor and the farve bean crop in the front was the new BMW and the roses and the other signs of sort of affluent edition, to many, many other examples.

So many things struck me that, that so much of the modern world is actually, of course, a, a shared, global experience.

(28m4s) Social and Economic Dynamics in Suburbia

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

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well I suppose those things are, a lot of the issues are to do with the socioeconomic cycle of, is this suburbia of new tightly held? Aspirational owners, but dependent on mortgages and almost never there, and very little community connection. Is it places where, you know, people dying off or moving to nursing homes and there’s a new generations of people coming in and development pressures? To infill develop and sort of being resisted by, you know, new families that are moving in.

There’s so many different sort of dynamics in suburbia right through to the, the battle of places that are sort of, if you like, the abandoned landscapes where workers. You know, the industries that supported those people have gone and, and maybe communities of, of great disadvantage. So we can see all of those things, different types of suburban landscapes that all have this.

Separate house on, on a block of land, of whatever particular configuration that, that basic template with very, very different communities. And I suppose a lot of the opportunities are in the places. Where there is, has been some breakdown, loss of value transition in owners and land use, whereas in the places newly established and with higher affluence and a sense of tight regulatory control, and then reinforced by.

Some social norms of maintaining property values and security and all of those things that are often associated with suburbia, those patterns can be more difficult. But I think one of the things that happens in looking at this is that there’s, I’ve suggested the lens of looking at it through as a community as a whole has sometimes.

(31m17s) Starting with the Household Unit

Uh, run up against some limits and my RetroSuburbia work in some ways inverts that and takes what might be seen as a more, socially conservative view and starts with the household and that as the autonomous unit from which then builds community relationships and connections. So this is sort of part of a, I see an evolution, a learning evolution in Permaculture activism over the decades that I would characterise.

The first generation of Permaculture activism was mostly rugged individualists, often in a rural context, sometimes with a family in tow, with a vision of what they were going to do. And then there was a second iteration, which was much more. Community focused. And you can see this in the emergence of the transition towns movement in in Britain and then spreading to other places around the world. How do we look at, whole community approach and often in a sort of more urban context, and then between those two, people often miss that all communities are based on a.

The functional unit of society, economically and socially is a household. Now, whether that’s a, a family, let alone a nuclear family, it’s people living together that share food in some way and do things. They are some sort of economic unit and that we’ve tended between to go between the individual and community, individual and community. And sometimes that missing building block is, if we look at it in terms of social change. That’s the one that’s missing. And especially from a politically left progressive perspective, it’s sort of been seen as, oh, well that’s the territory of the social conservatives or something on the right, and maybe that’s something that then, that’s a sort of a learning and getting past some of those barriers to recognise the household as a starting point.

So my RetroSuburbia work is primarily focusing on that and that does bypass some of those issues of, gee, how do we get all these people to cooperate or start doing things together? ’cause obviously there’s enormous potentials that can be developed at the community neighbourhood level, which can’t sort of really be achieved easily just at the household level.

(34m11s) Shared Households and Using Large Houses

Partisan Gardens host: I think there’s been a serious resurgence of communal forms in the US, but it’s interesting because many of those are not swinging as far nearly as the kind of classic cases of the sixties and seventies, and I think are based on a pattern of just how people really of all ages, I was gonna say young people, people of all ages are able to afford life in cities and suburbs. And so, you know, you have more or less communes, but they really look like the households you’re talking about. They’re not 20 people, you know, and they’re not necessarily even, you know, making the kinds of intentional, lifelong commitments that one associates with these kind of big C communes. But it’s people getting together to survive and I think then be able to undertake some interesting experiments.

So I just mentioned that because I think it’s an interesting point to think about that swing. Between them and between that. A lot of people, I mean just on a really large scale, I think are finding somewhere in between here that’s a little bit different than has ever been found before. I think.

David Holmgren: Yeah, I think that’s very much reflects the strategic focus that I took with RetroSuburbia and if we think about the life expectancy of.

Traditional family households, especially when you look at relationship breakups and movement of people from one place to another. And then you look at these amalgamated households, micro communities, that. Not necessarily having any long life expectation. These things are not actually so different, you know, so the casual shared household of students and other young people and people setting out as a family.

Often, you know how long those households last might not be so different, and we can see how. In both cases, a longer life expectancy of a shared household or a traditional family will create greater capacities and greater possibilities that are not so achievable in a rapidly changing or turning over household or community context.

But at the same time, those short-lived ones are learning opportunities. Constantly. But I, I think there’s also a point to understand that when we look at economic periods of economic hardship or contraction in recent history over the last a hundred years or so across countries, the primary way that people cope with that is by aggregating together in larger shared households.

And it was actually some of my observations and looking at the data from the United States in relation to the global financial crisis when I was working on all of this RetroSuburbia research more than in Australia, where the impacts were not as severe, that we saw starting to see the data on larger household size.

I’m saying larger house size there. Sharing together. And while those new forms of sharing are part of that process, we know that the bulk of it, for better or for worse, is actually extended family re amalgamation children, adult children moving back in with their parents because of hard times or moving in as carers, multi-generations together.

And that if we had better patterns of. How to do this well, then this process would be more positive, but it, it does happen. We know historically that that’s how people cope because it’s just, it’s more economically efficient. It’s more secure in uncertain times and conditions, and it just is a product response of people losing housing or whether through mortgage failure or whatever.

(38m35s) Using Underused Space

But it’s also a unique possibility. In the modern world where we now have these very large houses, which are historically speaking large houses with a huge amount of floor space per person that are incredibly underused and they’re underused for multiple reasons. The prime one is that people’s lives have been increasingly outside of the home.

Sucked into the monetary economy. So at work, at school, at the childcare center, at the gymnasium, at the cafe, all of these things that we associate with urban life, but actually that means houses are empty under lock and key. So we have this sense of our cities being crowded, but they’re actually not crowded with people.

They’re just crowded with people rushing between all these underused buildings. So the opportunities to re-inhabit suburbia, occupy more people in a household, but spending more time there is much greater. And I suppose the Australian context is one that is a little bit different to most of the United States in that the climates mostly very benign In Southern Australia, our.

You know, for fit and healthy people, you can live outdoors in an Australian winter. So it’s, you know, more like California in that sense. And so the whole other problem of, oh, when you get too many people together, they’re all crowded together, there’s crowding. Well, the old Australian pattern was to send the kids outside, you know, to play, play on the street.

occupy the outside. Space and of course that’s would re-inhabit the street as well. I saw that there were huge opportunities, especially in the Australian context, that we could actually support many more people in these suburban landscapes without getting to the point of actually what we would call overcrowding.

(41m4s) Getting Started with Retrofitting: The Assessment Tool

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

David Holmgren: Well, we’ve developed a retro. Suburban, real estate, assessment tool, which is, both in the book, but it’s also downloadable as a spreadsheet from the RetroSuburbia website.

And that is obviously framed within Australia and actually Southern Australian climates and, and patterns. But I think it’s a very. Generally useful tool for people to use both in evaluating their own place where they’re, or thinking about where they might choose to live or purchase. In making those sorts of decisions and looking at both the build can the biological and the regulatory patterns that are in that place, because people often tend to fall.

Between two extremes, that in looking at their own place, they’ll often say, well, this has been a good place to live. it’s always gonna be reasonable in the future. Why not? And have a sort of a sunny ignorance about. You know, threats and challenges that are coming down the line or at the other extreme, oh, there’s no point doing anything here. This is just doesn’t work. Nothing’s right. it’s all wrong until I can go somewhere better. There’s no point doing anything. And in fact, often, you know, a, a sort of proper analysis will really show strength and weaknesses in all different places. And we do that with our case studies of actually showing, what those, scores of those places are and what they were before they were retrofitted, and then how they scored afterwards.

So I think that is a tool, even if the particular scores and some of the. Points of evaluation might not translate to different climates and contexts. And we know even that retro template needs to be modified in the subtropical areas of Queensland, for example, where, you know, some of the patterns, don’t so much apply.

So, for example, in that we can see in Southern Australia that. Big evergreen trees that might provide lovely shade, really inhibit the growing of food and sometimes involve fire hazards. Whereas in the Queensland sub tropical context with the greater heat and greater rainfall, sometimes those overshadowing, you know, large trees are not such a.

A disadvantage, you know, so there’s all sorts of ways in which those, those patterns can be either new patterns added or the scores that you would give, a benefit or a disadvantage can be re evaluated. And similarly with the sort of building framework we looked at, you know, a lot of Australian.

Building methods and um, you know, the sort different types of construction of houses and their ability to be retrofitted and identified, for example, that. houses that were more of the 1950s era up on stumps, with timber floors rather than slab on the ground, offered a lot more retrofits in relation to cool cupboards, compost toilets, and various options for plumbing retrofits than places that were slab on the ground.

So a lot of those things were, you know, will apply in some. Patterns but not on side. I’d really recommend that that tool, which people can also see in the online version of the book, which is available everywhere, of course on a, on a pay, what you feel basis, which we is something we did during the pandemic to make the work more widely accessible.

(45m40s) Risk Exposure in Suburbia

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

David Holmgren: Yeah. Bushfire is a major theme in my work over many, many decades and has been an element because the southeast of Australia is the most severely impacted by wildfire in the world. Though in recent decades, perhaps being rivalled by, parts of North America, that issue has always been central to permaculture design in, in.

In rural areas, but it’s been in more recent decades that the impact has happened more into suburban areas. And that’s partly because those suburbs have colonised the sort of leafy, forest, environments and people’s desire to have. Forest trees around them, and in both the west coast of the United States and in Australia, a lot of those predominant trees are actually fire enhancing trees like and, and conifers.

But I think it’s also very predominantly the steep sloping land, which is. You know, that is a very powerful dynamic in, in bushfire. And so that analyzing the landscape and its risks and hazards are part of what we have in the book of looking at those templates, including, the other threats like flooding and the modified landscape.

Ones like, storm water flooding, the way people can have this shocked experience of. You know, a wall of water coming through their back door, being completely unaware that their property was actually in a gully, in an urbanised drained landscape. And when the storm water systems don’t cope with the peak runoff, suddenly, oh, it’s, look at the position we are in. The landscape of people not being aware of where they. In, in the land. So those, those sorts of things certainly apply with the bushfire. But we also have building patterns and building materials which are inherently more fire resistant right through to ones that are, um, very hazardous and.

Of course for an Australian with, a focus on bushfire, some of the west Coast and more widespread building methods with, tar roofs, pitchmen roof systems, you know, they’re sort of like a bit frightening that. You would have that in a, a sort of a fire point area. And then also a lot of the lightweight softwood, shingles and, and shakes these materials that are very easy to ignite. But I think there’s also understanding the dynamics of fire and how.

The presence of able-bodied people is more important than any other factor or design feature in whether a house burns down. So the whole modern strategy of every resident is a dependent, vulnerable person that the authorities need to remove, and then somehow the authorities will run around with competent professionals to every house and look after it. When actually self-reliant communities mostly in place are able to defend and survive in situ is a real possibility and very much supported by the evidence of science.

(50m9s) Self-Reliance in Disasters

And of course that was really policy in Australia though we have now drifted back towards the American command and control. The authorities will do all the things and you all flee type of approach, and it is more or less inevitable when you get major fires and there’s no one present. Then embers just gradually get into buildings and the buildings progress burn down often after the fire front has passed.

So there’s a strong correlation. Where fire actually deals with all of these things, the fundamental landscape position, the nature of the building, fabrics and systems, the infrastructure of town, water supply and other services, the nature of gardens, and whether they are fire retardant or fire enhancing, and the behaviour of the residents, most, most importantly.

So it’s one of those issues that pulls. together, and, and so I think it’s, it’s, it’s very emblematic of the nature of permaculture design solutions that we. Sort of, inform and empower, RetroSuburbia and also, a key expression of, of what the climate emergency looks like in, a lot of landscapes, even though of course in other parts of our country’s its expressions through other forms of intense weather and natural disasters.

(51m52s) Behavioural Design and Social Aspects

Partisan Gardens host: And yeah, just going exactly there, but in a sort of more general way, I wanted to close by going to the last third of your book, but where you provide a whole bunch of tools for thinking about, you know, behavioural design or thinking about the human element of, or the social element of retrofitting. And so I just wanted to, you know, sort out.

You to unpack some of the things that you offer for people facing climate chaos for people who are facing intensifying crises. And, because you sort of address conflict resolution and group formation, I think offers some powerful tools. So I just wanted to ask for you to touch on those things for our listeners.

David Holmgren: Yeah, well, my partner would say, start at the back of the book. The behavioural field is the, the really important, stuff. And of course, it deals with everything from ownership and, living arrangements, you know, new forms of livelihood, raising, self-reliant and resilient children, you know, financial planning and security, sustainable, diet and sustaining and sustainable diet.

You know, really all the big difficult issues for which there’s no real exact answers. And I think the last chapter in that section that I wrote was on health, disability, and aging. Because in some ways it’s sort of like, perhaps the most challenging, but arguably the issue is around conflict resolution and.

Intentional communities and group process work, how much that, if you like, practice and science can combine with some of the best of traditional, relationship understandings and patterns to how do we. Deal with conflict. How do we, how do we deal with emergence and generational change and, those sorts of issues.

So I think within the field that might be called social permaculture and related networks, especially, intentional communities movement, there has been a lot of work done on that. Those processes that are absolutely essential when we’re dealing with larger groups and communities. But they do have some application down at the household scale.

And I think the issues of working through some, some problems sometimes with an outside elder or facilitator. And sometimes that historically happened in extended families, but people finding ways to provide alternatives to those. I, if those, don’t exist. One of the greatest ones we are dealing with and we illustrate both in the Ossie Street story, and talk about in the book is this interaction between older homeowners who.

(55m21s) Intergenerational Collaboration

Often own their places outright without debt, but really need younger people to help them achieve the potential of the place and younger people who are not in a position to own their own properties. how do these two groups get together? Because they both need each other and both groups need to.

Learn to give up some of the things they’re holding onto. For older people, it’s sometimes their privacy or their sense of control of their territory, but also come face to face with the ambiguity of their power difference. As a, as an owner with orders in their house, how are they comfortable with those?

Intimate relationships where they actually have more power than the other person. And how do those borders, who often younger people come to grips with getting beyond that situation of, oh, I don’t have the power. This is not my place. I can’t really do anything that I need to do. You know, until I have my own autonomy.

And that both those groups really need to learn to give up something. And from that huge synergies and potentials, are possible. And we can see how that can exist between. Generations of what I said of re amalgamating extended family households. But we also know that there’s a lot of, old stuff and triggers for going back to old patterns.

Whereas sometimes when that connection between older people and younger adults, those people are not related, you know, at least you don’t have those old patterns that have to be, over. Overcome. So we have some not answers on those questions, but at least guidance of some of the issues. And we’re hoping to continue, like with all of the sections of the book, add more resources to the RetroSuburbia website in the same way that we’re adding more inspirational case studies so people can have a flavour of, oh, how did those people deal with that?

intro voices: Thanks to everyone who helped with the show. They’re offering a pay what you like model for the book RetroSuburbia, the Down Shifters Guide to a Resilient Future. You can find it@retrosuburbia.com. And as always, our theme music is by Lynn Ry.

This has been partisan gardens. On this program, we are going to look at the world through the lens of food. We’ll speak directly to those with their hands in the dirt, but also to those in all sectors of the food world to the servers and those being served to the history of food in this country and beyond.

We will focus on understanding the systemic problems in our food industry, including food scarcity and racism. We want to talk to you too. Please write us at Partisan [email protected] and we will be in touch.