GroAction Interview with Luke Miller Callahan in 2011 discussing permaculture principles.

How do we move away from a fossil-fuel based society? In this interview, David Holmgren discusses the strategies for transition. For all you suburbia naysayers out there, this discussion will be especially interesting to you.

See also an excellent post by David MacLeod on Integral Permaculture.

Interview Transcript

(0m0s) Introduction and Advertisement

Luke Miller Callahan: Hi everyone. It’s Luke Miller Callahan. I’m the founder of grow action.com, and we are home of the Grow Action network of change agents of people making a positive impact in the world. If you’re making a positive impact in the world, feel free to apply right there. It’s free, and you can join others who are making a positive impact in the world and want to help you do the same, help you fill your needs and get your initiative thriving.

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Luke Miller Callahan: All right. Now today I’m here with David Holmgren, and we’re talking about permaculture and also the transition away from fossil based fuels. And we kind of get into suburbia a little bit in the role that suburbia plays. In the past, people have thought that suburbia is perhaps the worst thing that our consumer based society, our growth based society has come up with, but as we are seeing, it’s actually pretty instrumental in this move aways from fossil fuels because people can be more self-sufficient on the land instead of the dense urban cities that have come to be known as the poster child of urban planning. Enough on that, I mean, David Holmgren is just an incredible character. He’s an ecologist ecological design engineer. He co-originated the term permaculture with Bill Mollison, and he’s written a couple of excellent books. One of them that I’m sure so many of you have heard of is Permaculture Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, and he just came out with another one. It’s called Future Scenarios, how Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change. Let’s get into the interview. All right, well, David, really excited to be talking to you today about permaculture and the transition away from an oil-based society and all the repercussions. So, welcome to the program.

David Holmgren: Thank you.

(1m56s) David Holmgren’s Current Work and Focus

Luke Miller Callahan: So first of all, gimme a little background on what you’ve been up to lately and your role in permaculture.

David Holmgren: Well, I continue to spend about a third of my time on home-based self-reliance here at Melliodora, gardening and building and various volunteer things in the local community. And about a third is teaching and public speaking. And I suppose about a third of the time is one way or another research and especially sort of over the horizon views of the sort of world we’re moving into. And of course a lot of that is reflected in recent work on future scenarios and how we transition into this world of more expensive and less energy and more unstable climate, and really the unraveling of the current economic system with all the instabilities that come from that. So that’s a sort of a mixture from the big picture stuff down to the very practical and local.

(3m9s) The Balance Between Hands-On Work and Big Picture Thinking

Luke Miller Callahan: Yeah. What do you enjoy the most?

David Holmgren: Well, I really do enjoy the balance between… yeah. The balance, I suppose between working with the hands and doing the conveying the really the big picture of where we’re heading in the world to people to empower them to do things with their hands as well.

Luke Miller Callahan: Yeah. So yeah, it’s great how it always just comes back to empowering people to do the small actions, right?

(3m48s) Importance of Bottom-Up Change and Modelling Solutions

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I think while the big political movement stuff is always going to be in some ways more exciting and there’s certainly some exciting aspects of that emerging in the world now around the notion of demanding that someone do something. I don’t think those things really help change the structure much unless people are also making the changes themselves. Because the changes that people make themselves are both double insurance, their insurance against dysfunctional or anti-social behaviour by elites. And there’s certainly plenty of evidence for that. But they’re also the way we model the world that we’re actually wanting to be. Because in a lot of ways it’s a matter of being able to crawl before you walk the sort of world we’re trying to construct. I think it’s actually impossible to construct that top down. It has to actually be rebuilt bottom up in parallel with the crumbling system. And then as those models become more real, it’s possible to get some degree of top down reform support for those things. But if they don’t actually exist, if we don’t have the working, living solutions, then it’s very hard for policy makers to say, yes, we’ll have more of that. Less of that.

Luke Miller Callahan: Right, right, right.

David Holmgren: They can’t actually sort of create the things we need.

Luke Miller Callahan: Right.

David Holmgren: So things we need are all very small, localised, particular. Yeah. And large scale systems just can’t do that.

(5m53s) System Change: Collapse, Reform, or Parallel Development?

Luke Miller Callahan: Yeah. It’s almost like you need a framework for customisation if you want to go with a framework at all. Right. I mean, yeah. That’s it. Do you think that the systems in place now, looking at the political systems, money systems, do you think they have to come down in order for this movement to take form, or are we seeing it happening without a giant shift like that?

David Holmgren: Well, I think the evidence of what’s going on around us, as well as the past evidence of history suggests that things develop in parallel to a fair degree. And there’s an ambiguity between how much it’s actually rebuilding something from scratch. Yep. And how much it’s a matter of reform. So in a way it’s the old debate between reform or revolution. Right. But of course that word revolution has got all sorts of connotations associated with it. Oh, sure. But permaculture really comes from the premise of that you’ve gotta design from first principles. That a whole lot of the ground design principles built into our society which have been functional in the past, aren’t functional in the future, and you can’t necessarily just modify them beyond certain limits.

(7m22s) The Problem with Perpetual Growth and Climate Change Responses

David Holmgren: So, for example, the idea that of growth of sort of more or less continuous economic and material growth is very much built into the foundations of the system we’ve got and I think there’s some good systemic reasons why it’s difficult for that large scale reform at the top to contemplate that. And perhaps the biggest example of that is when faced with something as life-threatening to civilisation as climate change. There’s no public discussion or place for discussion in a serious public forum for the observation that the only proven way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is to actually contract the economy. And we know that works and it works really fast. But no one ever discusses it as a serious strategy, and that tells us how deeply committed our system is to perpetual growth.

Luke Miller Callahan: Yeah. The GDP, you know, we’re addicted to it. Right.

David Holmgren: Yeah. So, and we can as individuals sort of comment and even sort of laugh at that. But it’s hard to know at what point that can actually become part of a serious discussion at the highest levels of policy. And I suspect that’s not really possible. There’s always gotta be this fabrication. Oh yes. Well, we’re gonna reduce our impact on the environment by all sorts of means, but we’re not, but we’re still gonna grow. Don’t worry. You can still buy as much as you want. Yeah. Yeah. Even when the evidence is that we are not, that growth is not occurring, the belief, you know, project out over the point at which it’s not happening. So it doesn’t mean that that situation is hopeless for the possibility of positive things coming at a national level or an international level.

(9m43s) Faith in Human Adaptability Over Institutional Inertia

David Holmgren: But I think the assumption that because those are big and powerful systems and because we need change, positive change very fast, that that is the predominant place we have to have faith in. I think the reverse is true. The predominant place we have to have faith in is for the ability of people as like fast moving, intelligent new life forms, like the early mammals replacing the dinosaurs that humans, individually and collectively without rigid institutional structures can think on their feet. And can incorporate both the long-term vision stuff that we associate with big institutions and long-term planning that humans are actually capable of it.

Luke Miller Callahan: This is so weird. I’ve never had this happen before. Uh, well, okay. So nice. I don’t know what’s going on. Um, but in the the humans are are capable of leadership like that.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I think we’re capable of both responding to the immediate environment around us in ways that institutions can never be capable of. Yeah. But we’re also capable of some of those things that we associate with institutional capacity, this long term wisdom, ability to understand complexity. And maybe that’s part of the inheritance of the modern world because people in the past didn’t necessarily have that on an individual basis. But it is possible now if people want to look and learn for humans as individuals and communities and families to have virtually the intelligence that we previously associated with institutions and societies.

(11m52s) Crisis as a Catalyst for Change and Rethinking Consumerism

Luke Miller Callahan: Yeah. And to me, it seems like in order for that to come about humans, our race, I mean, our society needs to be kind of kicked in the butt and say, here’s this big disaster. I mean, financial crisis. Now it’s time to act. Now it’s time for everybody to come together and start thinking instead of just responding to the system constraints and start building new. And I really do see that happening with the end of consumerism. The increasing price and scarcity of oil and the transition, I think is is not going to be pretty, but it’s gonna be, I mean, it’s what we need, right? It’s what’s gonna spark this leadership of of the human race to evolve. Right.

David Holmgren: Yeah, well, I think that works at a number of levels. That any system that has a lot of rigidity in that structure around past proven ways of doing things, is obviously reluctant to change out of those patterns. And it takes big shock to sort of break that apart. And we know that occurs in nature. We know that occurs in our own lives with the way health crises trigger a sort of a reorganisation of our lives. And we can see that happening in society around us. And that can be for both better and worse. That the crisis becomes an opportunity for various players to leverage the system in certain ways. And certainly for those of us who have been on this path for a long time, we know that the interest in things like permaculture is countercyclical to the economy. You know, that when the economy’s down, interest in permaculture increases. Uh, and it’s not like everyone sort of rushes from one side of the boat to the other, but it’s like when the economy’s booming, people are focused on the next job advancement, the pay increase, focus towards the city, towards status and when things are shaky people are focused on family connections to place connections to nature, basic needs. And it’s like, not that they run and change, but they turn their heads in a different direction. So, that experience of, yeah, crisis being an advantage or an opportunity, is pretty clear.

(14m35s) Peak Oil’s Impact: Economic Contraction vs. High Prices

David Holmgren: You know, of course those crises can unfold in different ways. You mentioned peak oil. A lot of peak oil researchers tended to think that that would come through astronomical prices for oil. But a lot of the more recent evidence suggests that maybe our current economy actually can’t cope with oil prices above about what they are now. Because it produces recession, if not depression. Yeah. So that, rather than seeing astronomical oil prices, which is imaginable in a world that was structured very differently from ours, we could afford to think of energy as costing huge amount more. But our current economy actually depends on it being very cheap.

Luke Miller Callahan: On cheap, yeah, exactly. It means it’s the infrastructure

David Holmgren: and people understand that. But it’s quite surprising the ways that comes about because people think, oh yes, well energy and maybe food will get more expensive, and therefore those things won’t be available. And I mean, some positive things have come outta that. People say, oh, well I’ll start gardening and growing food. But what’s often missed is that no long before there’s no food in the supermarkets, all the hairdressers have closed down. All of the discretionary, luxury, service parts of the economy have contracted back. And energy and food is still sort of available because you’ve got rid of all the other stuff.

Luke Miller Callahan: Right, right, right.

David Holmgren: Uh, you know, because when things contract, you dispense with the luxuries, the extras, and of course, most of our economy, that’s what it is. So if we look at the sort of contractory economics that are happening, not so much in our country here in Australia, because we’re one of the new energy superpowers of the world, but certainly in Europe and the United States and many other places, it’s that general contraction in those luxury aspects of the economy. And that means that although the strategies of people growing their own food are important, they’re not perhaps quite important in the way some simple survivalist motivation might drive some people to do that. They’re really around a reconnection with a more frugal, simple way of living where you can provide for some of your own needs and reserve the money you have for the things that you can’t produce yourself. And historically, people growing their own veggies has been one of the things that people can do for themselves.

(17m45s) Shift Towards Essential Skills and Localised Economies

Luke Miller Callahan: Well, exactly. I mean, if you look at what, if you look at the western world and it it’s shocking how low the percentage of the population are farmers, right? I mean, it’s less than 2%. And in agrarian based societies, it’s 80, 90, 95, sometimes even a hundred percent in small communities. And I don’t think we’ll ever progress up to that higher at 80, 90% because we have some efficiency. I mean, there’s a lot of efficiencies within perennial based diets. But I think, I mean, just that the nature of that is saying these hairdressers, these people in the service based economy that are kind of superfluous to what we actually need in a daily life are gonna move towards the food industry, which is essentially the energy industry.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Yeah. And beyond food, the, one of the simple ways looking at is about having some skill that you can trade with some other person. Whereas a lot of people have skills that can only be bought by a large institution like a bank or a corporation or a government department. And that means you actually don’t have anything to offer into this new, slash old economy that’s emerging. Whereas if you know how to fix cars Yeah. You know, again, that might be counterintuitive. You say, oh, well there’s gonna be less cars, less people driving around. That might be true, but there’ll probably be more old cars that need to be repaired.

Luke Miller Callahan: Exactly.

David Holmgren: Um, rather than new cars that don’t need repair. So, you know, skills as a mechanic for example is, you know, a tradable self-reliance. Yeah, yeah. You know, maybe almost as much as being able to grow food and have some surplus to provide to others.

(19m42s) Questioning the Commuting Culture and the Value of Office Work

Luke Miller Callahan: Well, I know, and you know, it’s so interesting, right? If you look at a city on the on a grand scale, and you see all of these buildings, and you see all of these people come in every day and go into these buildings and leave at the end of the day and then go home. What work was accomplished in those buildings? What was accomplished by all of these people going into one place and typing some stuff on a computer? I mean, at the end of the day, was there any any tangible things produced? And the answer is no, for the most part.

David Holmgren: Yeah. That also relates to this issue of the assumption that modern life is about movement from one place to another each day. And that it’s a completely natural experience that you get up each day, get dressed, get in the car, or in some other form of transport and go somewhere else. And that actually to be a member of society, that that’s what you have to do. Whereas, a normal society operating with limited energy will have most things done where people live. Some people will move each day, but a much, much smaller proportion. And what that really means is the places where people are living, and especially in our car based societies with their extensive suburbs. That is these spread out areas of suburban development and small towns. That’s where we have to recreate the economic activity, so that we don’t need to move, rather than the notion, oh, we need efficient forms of transport. That would be lovely to have efficient forms of public transport. But we are moving into the crisis so fast.

(21m34s) The Surprising Adaptability Potential of Suburbia

David Holmgren: That a lot of what we’ll have to do is adapt in place of where we are. And I’ve been, for many years, an advocate of the idea that the suburbs, rather than coming to an end as suggested perhaps in the pioneering peak oil movie, end of suburbia, are actually a place that is adaptable in a counterintuitive way to this low energy future. And I think that’s partly because of accidents of history. It’s certainly not to do with sensible planning and forethought, but I don’t think the prognosis for suburbia is as bad as people suggest. And on the contrary, the idea that dense urban cities are more efficient, is, I think, questionable. If not dangerous in a world of serious energy descent.

Luke Miller Callahan: Yeah. That’s interesting. I mean, so many urbanists, like you’re saying, constantly say suburbia is, I mean, they’re gonna be vacated, suburban homes will be vacated suburban neighborhoods because they aren’t efficient enough in transport. But if you think about it, like what you’re saying. Why do we need to move around day to day?

(23m0s) How Self-Sufficient Suburbs Might Function

Luke Miller Callahan: So what do you think the transition to self-sufficient suburbs will look like?

David Holmgren: Well, I think it’s the, it’s at a number of levels. Firstly, because it can be started incrementally. You can start in one house and garden within the limits or under the radar of regulations and social censure from neighbors, without having to get the whole of society to agree. When you’re in a multi-story apartment, there’s very limited things you can do until everyone in that apartment or whoever owns it agrees. Uh huh. So that piecemeal nature of suburbia allows piecemeal models to develop ahead of when society actually understands that it needs to do this. Secondly, the level of space that exists both in the built part of suburbia in the houses themselves and the double and triple garages and in the open space give a lot of opportunity to start productive activities. So the fact that these houses are so large relative to the numbers of people who have lived in them. We can create new households, whether that’s extended families or shared households, or people taking in boarders to get larger economies of scale in the household economy. And so if you’re cooking for six people rather than two, it’s actually, there’s a huge economies of scale that happen. The double and triple garage. Get the cars outta the garage, sell, you know, maybe leave one on the street and that becomes a workshop space where someone might be manufacturing something at home. And of course the garden space with access to sunlight, the ability to collect water, the ability to have some autonomy, energy, with things like photovoltaic power, a lot more of the needs with a combination of old fashioned ways of doing things and new technology can be provided right where people live. So that means a greater proportion of people’s needs are being met. And the need then to commute both economically to commute, to earn money, but also socially to commute, starts to decline because you’ve got more happening in the street.

Luke Miller Callahan: Right, right.

(25m47s) Barriers to Retrofitting Suburbs: Social, Regulatory, and Financial

Luke Miller Callahan: What do you think the biggest barrier about retrofitting the suburbs is?

David Holmgren: Oh, I think the barriers are at two levels. One is the, at the community level and the regulatory level. About the degree of disconnection between neighbors that leads to people, when there’s some conflict or some uncertainty, ringing up the police or ringing up the council, the local government to say they’re doing something they shouldn’t be doing. Right. Whereas if there’s actually a good relationship between neighbors, those problems that emerge can be just solved informally in place. Right. Therefore, the regulatory structure doesn’t actually come into it. So I think that’s, that’s one of the big issues. The second one, which is also a really a psychosocial one is the sense about people’s privacy and sharing their own houses, because a lot of the best strategies both for people’s own economic and social wellbeing and for society overall would be to, for people to take in a boarder, share their house. Right. And I think that issue of privacy is partly connected with the difficulty we have. Not so much in the sharing, but the difficulty as owners. The pride. Well also of exercising power because that bad feeling about, well, what if there’s conflict? What if, you know, I don’t get on with the person who’s my tenant and I have to ask them to leave. And that terrible feeling is so severe because we come from egalitarian societies where we believe everyone is equal, and we’re uncomfortable about exercising power. But in fact, in our society, power is not equally distributed. No. And some places people think it’s normal, the difference between tenants and landlords, and they feel quite comfortable about exercising that power that actually exists. Well, it’s also, so those are, those are interesting obstacles that are not what the usual ones that people think of.

Luke Miller Callahan: I know. I mean, and that’s kind of the premise of suburbia is that, I mean, a lot of people buy into the whole, I’m gonna ha my, I’m gonna get a bigger car than my neighbor. I’m gonna get a bigger tv and I’ve got this, I’ve gotta go out and earn more. And this whole notion, and I mean, that I think is a fundamental, I mean, I need my own space. I have to have a fence in my backyard. I keep a lawn in the front yard. And that’s the way I do it, right? I mean. This competition based?

David Holmgren: Well, I think there’s quite a lot of people who’ve moved beyond that sort of view now, but there’s still, as they start to contemplate the logic of these other strategies, there’s still these very substantial obstacles around that privacy or autonomy. The other issues, of course, are indebtedness. Is a huge issue that people can learn to live frugally, but if they’re, the mortgage is driving that need to commute and earn money, that indebtedness is obviously one of the really severe obstacles in a counterintuitive way. The loss of asset values that’s happening in the United States and in Europe and and has been happening for a long time, somewhere like Japan, is actually what’s needed to bring those supposed values of real estate down to a level that it’s possible for people to live in those places without that enormous debt. And of course, some of that is like tragedy for current owners. That might actually become opportunities for others, young people who currently don’t own. But in a world where houses might end up at 20% of their past values, then people might be able to contemplate. Yes. Very frugal, living. Simple lifestyle, minimal income to support being an owner. So, you know, there’s, these changes might come about in ways that are not to the advantage of current occupiers, but we’ve gotta remember that the, this enormous infrastructure that has been built in suburbia that Kunstler called the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world, which in a lot of ways I agree with, is not gonna just disappear overnight, short of very, very catastrophic scenarios. It’s gonna be sitting there and so something’s gonna be done with it. You know, people are gonna be living there some way or other, ’cause we are not going to transform our cities overnight. We’re gonna transform our behaviour overnight, essentially.

(31m28s) Future Food Systems: Industrial, Backyard, Urban, and Perennial

Luke Miller Callahan: Mm-hmm. So do you, what do you think of the the food system looking like once people optimise the use of their suburban land to grow their own food, do you see industrial agriculture as a big presence or see it evolving into perennial based and moving away from grains?

David Holmgren: Well, I see an a number of things happening simultaneously. I don’t think the current industrial food system will be abandoned lightly. And governments in my brown tech scenario, governments subsidise the current food supply system to keep cheap food in the supermarkets, right. But um, in terms of the positive ways we can change or build the parallel system. I see that the backyard agriculture, the garden agriculture that can provide a part of people’s food needs is the breeding ground for a new generation of farmers. That’s one of its prime functions. Where people learn to become actually a very small proportion of people who do do that become so good at it that they start doing it commercially. And then the open space we have in our cities that’s essentially public open space, most of it, some of it private open space. Starts to become converted into urban agriculture and some of those things are gonna be things like providing dairy products. Again, perishable foods produced close to where people live. Some of that will be The reason dairy is important is that it comes from animals that you use as your primary tool for managing the landscape to replace fossil fuel and herbicides. So managed animals, sheep, goats, especially goats. Yeah. Um, you know, herbivores that can turn excess biomass that just grows as we know in, especially in high rainfall areas. Like where you are in Portland? Yeah, that’s right. Uh, you are constantly cutting back this biomass. A lot of that biomass essentially can be food for dairy animals. So we get a lot of our landscape management in a low energy way, employment, and some of the other needs. So a lot of these things actually start to rebuild stuff that was self-evident in a traditional system. The big one that is really the opportunity is of course, is in the tree crop realm of how much more of our diet can become based on tree crops rather than field crops. And I think that’s gonna be, uh, not perhaps as big as it might have been because it’s it’s a long lead time thing.

Luke Miller Callahan: Right.

David Holmgren: Um, you know, it’s an investment in the future.

Luke Miller Callahan: Can we just get some factories to make those? I mean, what are we with?

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, this is one of the problems that sometimes people think if something’s important, you can just throw more money at it. I tell ’em, you can’t fast track the seasons, you know, growing seasons just go at a set rate that that’s what global warming was all about.

Luke Miller Callahan: No, they just become more intense rather than uh, just turning up the volume instead of fast forward. That’s what it is.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Um. You know, so I think there’s a lot of possibilities that come with what we would call the, you know, the perennial of agriculture. But some of that’s gonna be long, slow, incremental things. One of the things that I thought was very sobering from the Cuban experience of that a lot of people have referred to as a sort of like a simulated peak oil Yeah. experience with the crisis in the nineties is that although people changed their food habits there, uh, around what meat they ate, like they ate all the pigeons out of Havana, I was sobered by how strong the traditional culture of what is appropriate vegetables to eat in Cuba didn’t change so much under pressure that there’s still this European Spanish inheritance around what we’d say are temperate climate vegetables, which grow in the dry season in Cuba, but are very difficult to grow in the wet season. And that there’s a whole lot of Asian vegetables that people are not familiar with that do grow. Yeah. And and how slow it was under that desperate need for people’s diets to change. Hmm. So I think similarly with the perennial of agriculture, there’s not just the technical issues about what is the appropriate varieties and systems to grow, but it’s also how do you eat this stuff, you know? Well, does it feel good to eat it? And and how? That’s a multi-generation project.

Luke Miller Callahan: Oh, definitely.

(37m11s) Preparing Communities: Need for Examples, Transition Movement, and Flexible Planning

Luke Miller Callahan: And so you’ve kind of touched on this a second ago in saying that, you know, this crisis is coming up fast. I mean, the end of consumerism is coming next couple years. I mean, and hard and and I’m really interested what you think, because it’s different everywhere, is what’s needed to prepare societies, these local communities for as this crisis does come and say, this is the shift, this is the framework, this is the direction we should go, and here’s some good resources on it so that you don’t get a repeat of the Cuban crisis where people say, oh, well, let’s just do what we’ve been doing, but better, you know? Instead of saying, well, let’s look at what’s the right steps here.

David Holmgren: Mm. Well, don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a lot of positive things about the way uh, oh, Cuba handled this happened in Cuba. And certainly the community collective response was was definitely, yeah. Um, yeah. Part of that I think, what we need most is examples of people surviving and thriving. Yeah. Doing these things so other people can see, oh, well they’re doing well. And those people being well enough organised to be able to pass something on that’s of direct value. Here’s, here’s some seeds, here’s some, here’s here’s a garden fork. You know? Yeah. That that possibility of being able to offer people a help into the replication that we need. But you can’t get replication unless you have lots of local working examples. Yeah. ’cause they need to be very local. A lot of people get surprised to discover that, you know, the soil in your street in suburbia, it’s actually different to the next one. In some places it’s not. It’s all the same. And you can go and look around the city and see what they’re growing and what trees they’ve got in other places. It just, nature changes from one place to another very, very fast. And what is suitable in one spot. It’s not just like, download all the standardised information off the internet as a global set of information. Um, you know, and and I think that is a real surprise to people how specific really working refined solutions need to be. Um, so, and of course, you know, we don’t have that in large measure, but we have some of those examples. And I suppose, if we continue to have functioning global communications for some reasonable time into the future. Clearly that is one of the wild cards and one of the positives in being able to see a lot of examples from maybe distant places, but places that are similar to where we are, um, in some way, you know, because that is a huge stimulation for experimentation. The belief that well, they’re trying that there and look, you know, they’re similar sort of people to us in a similar sort of society. Yeah. And they’ve got a similar climate, so why don’t we give it a try?

Luke Miller Callahan: Yeah. So it almost seems like, um, you know, a good, like, good journaling method or good way of people tracking the evolution of how they’ve come together as a community would be helpful because I know, I just know that a lot of comm, or it seems like a lot of communities are gonna be blindsided and it would be great if there were some infrastructure, some tools, a framework for them to say, listen, we’re all of a sudden have to live in tents or, you know, we need to come together as a community and and do this right. And we need, like, let’s take this step, this framework, not this set plan, not this blueprint, but really of uh, you know, how to come together and organise this and evolve.

David Holmgren: Well, I think the transition movement that started in Britain with Rob Hopkins, which is very much founded and based in permaculture design principles, um, is an attempt uh, to do that in a more sort of, um, uh, active and organised way. And of course there’s been lots of criticisms about uh, the weakness of those efforts compared with the scale of the problem. Sure. But, um, it also has been, uh, more than an attempt to actually bring these issues beyond just, um, armchair discussion to uh, active engagement in the community. Um, we’re found locally with the, uh, PermaBlitz concept that started in Melbourne with permaculture colleagues that’s now both spread around the world in its informal mode. And it’s also getting uh, formalisation locally here where there’s actually funding uh, for it and people helping setting up gardens and doing things and exchanging information. So it seems that that positive get in do stuff, um, is one of the strongest motivators for a lot of people, um, rather than the grand plan. Yeah. But I think there’s also been efforts and being involved in those myself locally with the idea that’s come through transition of what’s called an energy descent action plan or energy descent action planning, where we could do this in a slightly less chaotic and more planned way. But my comment on that is that what that requires is very, very different sort of thinking to what’s characterised local government or community planning in the past, not just because the things we need to do are different. But because we have to give up that idea that we will, we can lay it all out as a plan, and we have the resources and the budgeting right, and then we’ll just implement it. It’s much more chaotic than that. So, you know, we’ve suggested there’s, you know, three broad levels in that process. The first is what we call the, um, the no regrets actions. You know, like, why don’t we plant a garden? Um, you know, good idea. Anyway. Not a big investment or cost or difficulty.

Luke Miller Callahan: Yeah.

David Holmgren: And maybe like really useful. And then we’ve got the long term investment thing that it might be, um, you know, putting photovoltaics on our roof for. Or planting, um, uh, food trees in the in the public streets. You know, it’s something that really does involve some more substantial investment and a deferred benefit, you know, in in the future mostly. Um, and then you’ve got the actions where you need to respond to crisis.

(45m0s) Embracing Chaos and Leveraging Crises for Opportunity

David Holmgren: The opportunities that come from chaotic and unpredictable change, and whether that’s natural disasters, um, you know, financial, um, uh, disruptions, um, or uh, shortage of uh, oil, whatever it is that those things break the system.

Luke Miller Callahan: But just talking about the kind of the the need to embrace the chaos that the communities. That there is not gonna be a set plan, more like an overarching goal that we’ll strive towards, and the meandering path we take to get there is perfect.

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well I think those, that last category of responding to chaotic change is, involves big risk stuff. It actually, uh, it sometimes involves personal risk, but it’s around uh, taking that opportunity. And sometimes it’s like the power vacuum that exists. I mean, the stories that have come out of Detroit and Chicago about, um, you know, decaying residential areas due to economic contraction and people just buying up whole blocks and with derelict houses knocking down most of them and and starting an urban farm. Because of a collapse in asset values providing some new opportunity for those who are ready to act at a larger scale. We could see how environmental activists have been very polite about and not uh, pointing out when natural disasters are immediately happening. Like in Australia, after the bush fires and the floods, uh, we didn’t get the, well, this is what climate change looks like. So in a way. Big disasters are also an opportunity to leverage change in the way people see things.

Luke Miller Callahan: do. Um, yeah.

David Holmgren: You know, so that’s when people do change. It’s not, most people don’t change when things are just trickling along, getting slowly a bit more difficult,

Luke Miller Callahan: like the frog boiling and water, you, you know, raise the temperature slowly. Yeah.

(47m0s) Attribution of Disasters and the Core Need for Behavioural Change

Luke Miller Callahan: Do you think people are afraid of, um. Identifying these larger and larger storms and natural disasters as, uh, climate change?

David Holmgren: Uh, well, I think there’s a, uh, on the one hand there’s a, um, a politeness that it’s bad form to, um, take political, uh, mileage when, uh, people are suffering. type of idea. Um, and then the other one is the sort of nerdish scientific precision that says, well, no particular weather event can actually be attributed to climate change in the same way that no particular cancer can necessarily be attributed to smoking. Uh, but, you know, which is a sort of a pointless Yeah. thing if you’re actually trying to leverage political change. Uh, and yet, you know, uh, environmental activists have sometimes wield out scientists to, you know, say, well, you know this, we we’ll see more of this. We have, yes. Yeah. Um, uh, you know, and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s caused by climate change or not, it’s about society reading signs all around it that it needs to change, right? Um, and that that change is is coming. And so we, um, you know, have all sorts of interpretations of of why that might be. I don’t think it’s necessary for everyone to believe in climate change or peak oil to start to behave sensibly to, uh, look after their own interests and their interests to their children and grandchildren. I think an understanding of peak oil and climate change certainly helps understand the complexities that are unraveling in the world. But I’ve argued quite strongly that it doesn’t really matter whether these crises are caused by geological and climatic realities, or whether they’re caused by evil actors or whether they’re caused by a God who’s punishing us for our sins. You know, they all, it all means we’ve actually gotta change what we are doing.

Luke Miller Callahan: Yeah, exactly.

David Holmgren: Anyways. So I, you know, I’m sort of ambivalent about that issue of the first thing is to hammer into people. They’ve gotta accept a particular explanation of what’s going on in the world and more just need to, I don’t, I don’t think that’s necessary.

Luke Miller Callahan: Yeah. I mean more we just need to change and it’s small steps and come together, build community, act locally, and start growing your own food. I mean, I mean, yep. Well, David, hey. I mean, thank you so much for taking the time. I really enjoyed every minute of it. Um. E even when the Skype, uh, fails us. And uh, and I’d love to do it again sometime in the future.

David Holmgren: Okay. Good to talk to you.

Luke Miller Callahan: Yeah. Hey, take care.