David was recently interviewed by Nate Hagens for the The Great Simplification podcast.

In the episode, David discusses his experience within the permaculture movement and what it might look like for more systems to be designed using permaculture in the future. While often thought to be an agricultural tool, permaculture thinking is meant for designing human systems to be embedded in nature – an important principle for a future where societies will need to re-synchronise with natural flows. What does it mean for permaculture design to ‘scale up’, and how is it different from how we usually think about growing a system? How will permaculture design change as we move through different phases of resource availability? More importantly, how can the ‘small and slow’ foundation of permaculture help human societies adapt to a lower throughput future as we navigate The Great Simplification?

Interview Transcript

(0m0s) Introduction: The Need for Diverse Solutions

David Holmgren: We don’t face a future where one big solution trumps all. So when people say, oh, but not everyone could do that, that is a sign of the thinking that comes from the fossil fuel era where there’s been one big solution that actually works everywhere. That’s not the sort of future we’re facing. There’s lots of little different things of both energy sources and ways of doing things.

Nate Hagens: Joining me today is David Holmgren, who along with Bill Mollison around 50 years ago, designed the concept of permaculture, with their book Permaculture One back in 1978. Since then, David has developed three properties in Australia, consulted and supervised on urban and rural projects, and written many more books, of which I have several.

Nate Hagens: Within the Permaculture Movement, David is committed to showing by personal example that a sustainable lifestyle is realistic, attractive, and a powerful alternative to dependent consumerism. Please welcome David Holmgren.

Nate Hagens: Hello, David Holmgren. Great to meet you after all these years, and

David Holmgren: great to meet you too, to join you on this fantastic podcast of yours.

Nate Hagens: I’ve known of your work for 20 years, plus or minus. So, let’s get right into it. I’ve had several permaculture experts on the show, however, you’re actually one of the co-founders of Permaculture.

(1m52s) Defining Permaculture: Design for Resilient Living and Land Use

Nate Hagens: So in your words, could you briefly describe what is Permaculture and how you first became interested in it?

David Holmgren: I am one of the co originators of the concept, and was the co-author with Bill Mollison of the first book published in 1978, based on our work together in the early and mid seventies.

David Holmgren: And, but I of course acknowledge him as the father of the permaculture movement. As it grew beginning in the eighties. I was more of an observer of that process rather than a founder of the spread of permaculture as a movement, which has happened through a lot of mechanisms, but especially the permaculture design course, often in a residential form where people had a deep immersion experience in the ideas.

David Holmgren: But those ideas. Often people think of it as a cool form of organic gardening or something like that. And gardening is a very important application of permaculture. But permaculture at its essence is a design system and it’s a design system for resilient and regenerative land use in all its forms.

David Holmgren: Gardening, farming, forestry, aquaculture, but also resilient and regenerative living. So that’s that permanent agriculture and permanent culture and redeveloping or developing a permanent, a perennial. We use the word permanent before the sustainability discourse in the 1970s.

David Holmgren: So this resilient and regenerative culture expresses itself in a grassroots ground up build from the bottom through behaviour. So we can think of that as living and land use design system for resilient and regenerative living and land use.

(4m23s) Resilience vs. Regeneration Explained

Nate Hagens: So you, you said three times there, you distinguished resilient and regenerative. How could I think about the difference between something that’s resilient and something that’s regenerative?

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, firstly, the resilience concept of course is, has come into discourse sort of. Beyond the sustainability discourse of recognising the ability of systems to withstand shock and bounce back, not necessarily to exactly the same state, but to recover basic function.

David Holmgren: And that concept is in attention with the drive of our civilisation to, and often individuals towards efficiency. So that it’s like backup systems, it’s like insurance, it’s like having the flexibility, adaptability, which all comes at some sort of cost to a focused deficiency.

David Holmgren: That in practical terms means things like storages of water, storages of basic needs, multiple pathways to achieve things as we said in early permaculture. Teaching every important function is supported by many different elements and pathways.

Nate Hagens: If you have to support every function by multiple pathways, that makes it less efficient and perhaps less profitable and perhaps less chosen by our current system, but more resilient to unknown futures.

David Holmgren: Yes. Whereas the regenerative is going beyond environmental thinking about minimising adverse impact and actually how what human systems are doing are regenerating the resource base that supports those systems. And that can be from natural resources of soil forests, biodiversity, and all of the other important renewable resources and also the social or cultural resources. And of course, dealing with the issues of depletion of fixed stocks, which is always a sort of a problematic issue of how a system deals with fixed stocks that cannot be regenerated in any reasonable time, which is the fundamental problem for our civilisation, dealing with depletion of fossil energy.

(7m28s) Origins of Regenerative Thinking and Soil Building

David Holmgren: So that regenerative culture, the origins of it in the permaculture lineage come from the pioneering Australian farmer and land use visionary PA Yeomans who critiqued the whole soil conservation culture about, that’s not good enough. We’ve actually gotta be building soil rather than just saying, we are not losing what’s taken thousands of years to create.

David Holmgren: And in the 1950s and sixties he was saying, through broad acre management of land, we can actually not just recover the damage, but actually create soil. Now the limitations of that and whatever can all be debated, but that idea that what humans do can actually not improve on nature in some mental way, but can actually restore and extend natural systems and their functionality rather than just minimising impact is a very key distinction from most environmental thinking.

Nate Hagens: So if you had to guess, and I doubt anyone has the answer to this, but of all the soil in the world that humans are planting in in order to get crops or food, what percent of that is actually being done in a regenerative way, that it’s building the soil and adding something back, in the way that you just described?

David Holmgren: I would say a fairly small percentage. And ironically, some of that is actually happening through processes that are actually not intentional, perhaps even more than the designed regenerative agricultural activity. So, for example, many areas that became uneconomic in our centralising system went back from being crop land to pasture land.

David Holmgren: And in that process, even not necessarily the best grazing management of intensive rotation or whatever the soil is actually rebuilding under those pasture systems, a lot of people will be quite surprised to hear that, but that’s certainly possible in our own country and in places like the United States and Europe and Japan, other affluent places, a lot of land has actually become retired from intensive use.

David Holmgren: Often at the cost of land elsewhere. And then another big process, which is even more dramatic, is the regrowth of forests around these affluent communities. Everywhere I’ve been in the affluent world, there’s this regrowth of forests because people are living out of the oil well instead of out of those forests.

David Holmgren: So that regeneration that’s actually happening is one of the untold stories as just an ad hoc byproduct of urbanisation and increasing dependence on. Resources via those that are supported by fossil resources and the intensive degradation of large scale tracts of land, often in remote hinterlands and in other countries.

David Holmgren: So those processes are actually bigger than the very substantial and important efforts at organic and regenerative forms of agriculture, of which permaculture has only been one small influence in that world.

(11m31s) Intellectual Influences: Howard Odum and Energy Systems

Nate Hagens: So I read on your Wikipedia page that you were, I didn’t know this until this weekend, that you were studied and were influenced by Howard Odom, HT Odom, who also influenced a lot of my thinking. I didn’t know that.

David Holmgren: Yes. Well, power Environment in Society, 1971 is the first reference in Permaculture one, and I read that in 1973. Very difficult text. And at the same time I was reading. Of course influenced by the Club of Rome Limits to Growth Report. And many of the ideas, EF Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, and also ecological interpretation, ecological history, ecological interpretations of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Goldsmith.

David Holmgren: Teddy Goldsmith in the E magazine was an amazing influence on looking at this ecological interpretation of past human systems, but Odom’s framework of using energy as both a language to understand natural ecosystems, human modified ecosystems, and in fact human societies. And a currency to actually evaluate very different types of inputs and outputs was, for me, really transformative and was a strong influence right through my articulation of permaculture.

David Holmgren: Whereas I think Bill Mollison, who was, although he referenced such work, he was more strongly focused on how the creative design can overcome limits. Whereas I was a bit more doer about there’s no free lunch. And so Odom’s messages about understanding what is the physical and energetic basis of our existence was a stronger part of that work.

Nate Hagens: As far as currencies go, though we didn’t use energy as a currency because according to Autumn’s own maximum power principle, it’s much easier to print money and print debt, and new credit, then we can spend on energy. So energy is the ultimate currency, but we can create markers to get it faster.

Nate Hagens: I wonder what he would say about that, where he’s still alive.

David Holmgren: Yes. Well, of course my book, Permaculture Principles and Pathways was dedicated to his memory and in my sort of second phase of focused on, focused on his work in the early eighties, I was. Very hopeful that his advanced form of embodied energy accounting that became called energy accounting, would give us a way of actually trying to understand the complexity of human systems, and lead to some sort of possibility of holistic thinking around those, even if it wasn’t actually a replacement for money in practical sort of everyday business.

(15m31s) The Dissident Nature and Permaculture

Nate Hagens: So I also read on your Wikipedia page that you had the highest grades in your high school class, but it went unrecorded because of your dissident nature. And I’m just wondering, given our industrialised world and the narratives, does it take something of a dissident nature to dedicate one’s life and one’s efforts to permaculture or what you’ve done? Does it take that sort of a rebel spirit when the rest of the world is going a different way?

David Holmgren: Well, I think that there was an element of that, even though we’re a generation different in different ways, in both my own lineage and background and Bill Mollison’s. In my own case, my parents were radical leftist, political active activists.

David Holmgren: I grew up with the campaign against the war in Vietnam. And before that, the Ban the Bomb marches and grew up with parents who were atheists and into whole foods that made my peers at school look at strange things we ate and all of those things of being used to being an outsider.

David Holmgren: And so that is a sort of, if you like, a psychological comfortable space for me. And I suppose there’s a tendency to fall into that by default of being the devil’s advocate, especially when a consensus forms even around some of my own ideas of have a record of being the kicker of permaculture sacred cows or the potential emergence of of those within permaculture thinking over the decades.

David Holmgren: And I can see a lot of people who’ve been pioneers in permaculture have that fringe dissident thinker activist approach in all sorts of different ways, and that can be a limitation too. But there’s also always that process when ideas become mainstream or adopted in society. There’s a compromise with some of that radicalism and some of that is just the natural process of things being absorbed and adopted.

(18m18s) The Lost Potential of the Last 50 Years

Nate Hagens: So I’m gonna, I have lots of questions on permaculture and your work and your books, but let me just ask you, there was so much, and you mentioned EF Schumacher and HT Odom and Limits to Growth and we were close to an awareness and even a practice on some of these things 50 years ago.

Nate Hagens: And then we went to debt and we went to globalisation and we were kind of off to the races and it was kind of swept under the carpet. These limits and these other concerns, do you ever feel like the last 50 years were wasted by what was possible for humanity to do?

David Holmgren: Yes. And as sort of my own version of being an educated historian in the lineage of my father who left school at 14 and was probably the most influential on me, historian in his own way of the world he lived through, I have particular view of of that lifetime. And I suppose I try and explain that to younger people through saying in 1977, 15 publishers approached a cantankerous unknown academic and a completely unknown graduate student wanting to publish the manuscript of Permaculture One. What the hell was going on in 1977? For that to happen. And I’ve also predicted that if that had moved forward to say 1984, 85, that permaculture is an idea, if it had been published, probably would’ve sunk like a lead balloon because we were already into what I used to call the Thatcherite Reaganite revolution. The neoliberal revolution.

David Holmgren: And of course there was a second great wave in the late eighties. Early nineties, which again, permaculture grew on that wave. Mollison’s great Encyclopedic designers manual was published in 1988 and that caught exactly that second wave that was involved sustainable development and. A shift in a way of what we could call sustainability Thinking away from a lot of the biological and cultural and behavioural change elements that were strong in the 1970s wave and became more narrowly focused around tech and the metric of greenhouse gas emissions and a whole generation of environmental activists and entrepreneurs and politicians, threw away all of the failed alternative ideas, hippie ideas, got on the suit and tie, became evidence-based and focused around, okay, the limits of resources, which was the big issue out of.

David Holmgren: That drove the first wave because it coincided with the Yom Kippur war and the first and second oil crises, maybe the limits of of sinks using the limits to growth metric language in climate change was the thing that was gonna bring about the great change. So, I have this sort of sort of wave theory that I’ve never sort of written out at a great length or research that as these pulsing waves that then where these new ideas come and change things.

David Holmgren: But then there’s a reversal. But to some extent, there’s a consolidation also that happens at the fringes in those periods. And then there’s another wave and those waves are intensifying and getting. Shorter and shorter. It’s harder now for me to see and document those recent waves, but I did see the 1970s one through to maybe 1981, 82, and then 88 to 92, and then 99 I saw a third wave, but it was sort of stillborn by the events of September the 11th and the war on terror and regime change.

David Holmgren: But in since the 2000s, there’s been these increasing frequency and intensity of waves where these ideas come back and obviously change and adapt to the context of the times.

(23m27s) Relocalisation and Scaling Permaculture

Nate Hagens: So is permaculture inherently a practice of relocalisation? As some people talk about scaling up permaculture practices, would that be a paradoxical idea then? I mean, can it be scaled to some extent?

David Holmgren: Adoption into the existing systems always involve scaling up because things become energy dense. Basically fossil fueled or indirectly powered and fossil fuels natural scale is not human scale. So all of the discussion endlessly, for example, in the urban planning debate about how do we get human scale cities, well, sorry, our cities are designed around fossil fuel scale, which is inevitably inhuman.

David Holmgren: When the energy density goes down, you get human scale systems. Designed or undesigned again. So understanding that driver that these things are not just primarily choice. A lot of permaculture thinking, being adopted into, for example, mainstream agriculture inevitably involves larger scale, and those inevitably involve contradictions of the direction we’ll need to go with lower energy density in an energy descent future.

David Holmgren: But I think when people talk about scaling, they often miss that there’s two different ways you can scale by growth of systems and you can scale by replication and viral replication. Is actually a faster in some cases, but also a less risky and higher learning pathway by lots and lots of copying and morphing and modification of small scale systems.

David Holmgren: So that basic debate about scaling often is confusing and I see no contradiction with the viral replication other than the problem of very rapid viral replication can lead to just fashion templating copying without adaption. But you can get. Scale effects by that. So we can think of the viral replication in the suburbs of garden farming to support household and community.

David Holmgren: Non-monetary economy has the potential in long affluent countries to take a significant chunk of the whole food supply pathway. And that that could happen relatively rapidly. And that’s a scaling.

(26m38s) Permaculture First and Beat the Rush

Nate Hagens: John Michael Greer often says, collapse first and beat the rush. And sometimes I say simplify first and beat the rush. If you think that we will have to have relocalised, smaller scale futures that will be designed or undesigned, would you advocate for permaculture first and beat the rush so that we have a little bit of design on how it looks ahead of the time when it would be forced upon us?

David Holmgren: Well, that’s exactly from my perspective what permaculture was designed for. How do you model these things ahead of urgent necessity? So you have the freedom of time and the resources of affluence to experiment and make lots of small mistakes, lots of small trials, and what better way. To do that where people who have the enlightened self-interest to say, this is a better way to live for me, and I will take my idealism or my crazy ideas and be the Guinea pig of my own ideas and see if one person households, communities making that intentional change can do this stuff.

David Holmgren: Now, you can say that that is against the tide of the larger structural systems in society, which makes it very, very difficult to do. But it’s also you get, if you’re on the right path, you get the early adopter advantages. So, for example, one of the strongest elements of permaculture projects around the world, more than forms of ecological, agricultural, ecological building, is creative reuse.

David Holmgren: If you like, scavenging from what the system is discarding and the huge opportunities there are to redesign and adapt and retrofit things because the system is just so wasteful. So for people who have just get all of their clothes from the opportunity shops, it’s easy to say, oh, but not everyone can do that because it depends on the endless, unnecessary, affluent consumers who are doing the purchasing.

David Holmgren: Well, that’s one of the sort of advantages you have as an early adopter, collapse or simplify First, is that it’s very appropriate and that, but that’s part of a learning process that also I. We don’t face a future where one big solution trumps all. So when people say, oh, but not everyone could do that, that is a sign of the thinking that comes from the fossil fuel era where there’s been one big solution that actually works everywhere.

David Holmgren: That’s not the sort of future we’re facing. There’s lots of little different things of both energy sources and ways of doing things.

(29m55s) Decentralisation, Complementarity, and Parallel Systems

Nate Hagens: So permaculture is inherently decentralised. Is it possible for us to have both where we have a global civilisation right now is currently all in on large scale efficiency systems?

Nate Hagens: Should we swing the pendulum the other way or are there limits to that? Like the same thing with renewable energy. 20% solar in an area is really good, but 80% then we have problems with affording the backup plants and the transmission and everything. Is there a middle ground while everything is still holding together for decentralised pockets of permaculture and similar things to combine and be at the same time as the large scale fossil system? What are your thoughts on that?

David Holmgren: Yes, I think they are directly complimentary, but I don’t see that happening through sensible, logical, top-down policy change. I think that happens in a way that is partly parasitic, where those new systems develop in the shadow of large scale centralised systems and there’s actually complementarities because they’re actually modelling pathways that might be necessary for change.

David Holmgren: So for example, in the food supply system, my feeding retro suburbia from the backyard to the bio region is postulating. What a localised food system around a city like Melbourne of several million people might look like feeding not a hundred percent of the population, but 20% of the population.

David Holmgren: Assuming that the centralised system will be one of the last things that central government actually maintain and support, if it’s the last thing they do. So those systems are not gonna just like, go away or be changed. They’ll become armoured and more centralised. But building a parallel food system is both something that. Can engage those who see it as a positive action for themselves. So there’s enlightened self-interest. It can be then a model for if society got to energetically realistic, common goal policies, then actually, okay, how do we design this sensibly over multiple generations? And it can be a lifeboat in the sense of actual failures and large scale collapses of those more centralised systems.

(32m54s) Networking, Knowledge Sharing, and RetroSuburbia

Nate Hagens: So this gets back to your replicating comment. You are in Victoria, which is in the south of Australia. And I’m sure there are permaculture projects around the world, but let’s just say within 200 kilometres of you, there might be. 30 permaculture efforts or something. If there were 300 or 3000, then we have a proving ground and a crucible where people can compare and share and learn from the best practices. Or is it inherently an individual thing without such networked information? I mean, you mentioned your book, I have it here, RetroSuburbia. I mean, this is like an amazing bible. So this is a great way to get started, but is there knowledge that’s being shared in a global network somehow on best practices?

David Holmgren: Hmm. Well, I would say that at a couple of different levels. Firstly, permaculture is a very loose, globally networked affiliates. And there’s people who are very familiar with my work and lots of other people who are sort of actually working on the other side of the world who may be actually individuals more familiar than. The people down the street or in the next city. So we live in that networked world rather than geographic world. And that’s part of those realities. But we also see places where there’s a cluster of geographic concentration, where people can share a lot more of the patterns because those patterns that are more unique to landscape, climate, culture are actually more immediately relevant rather than just relevant at the sort of more inspirational scale or need to be more widely adapted.

David Holmgren: But the other thing I would say, Nate, is that. That permaculture has also been part of a positive agent of influence through a lot of things that are not branded permaculture. So in Central Victoria in the region where we are, we see a lot of the collaborations and a lot of what’s happening, doesn’t necessarily have a permaculture label on it.

David Holmgren: And that is both a weakness that there’s sometimes not the acknowledgement of the power of its. Influence through a lot of more mainstream movements. But it’s also where things don’t carry the baggage that it comes with a label and a classification, and the bad stories or the skeletons in the cupboard or the project that someone saw that didn’t work or that nasty person.

David Holmgren: All of those dynamics that work against something which is branded or classified in a certain way, let alone all the cultural and culture wars or, oh, those are those sort of people or these sort of people. So I think that’s part of the complex dynamics of how. Those cells of replication and experimentation work.

David Holmgren: And I wouldn’t say in this region we’re a long way down that track, but I think there are a lot, and certainly in terms of my book, there’s a limited number of case studies in the book, but there’s a whole lot more case studies on the retro suburbia website. And some of those have also that research element of people measuring their produce, so you’re getting data back of, okay, how productive are some of these garden systems or other elements?

(37m27s) Applicability of RetroSuburbia Globally

Nate Hagens: So I was very impressed by that book and I never read the whole thing ’cause it’s just really a compendium. But my take was, one of the core messages in that book is given we have this existing infrastructure, how might it be repurposed to deal with limits and radically localised, and there was kind of menus of how to do this. Would something like this be applicable pretty much anywhere in the world where people are watching this podcast? Or are there some cities or regions that are too big with poor climate or soils that would simply need to be abandoned? Or is this kind of can be applied everywhere?

David Holmgren: Well, firstly, being our own publisher, the book breaks the rules of making it as widely applicable as possible by being unashamedly local. Its examples. But in saying that we see that firstly that suburban template of separate houses on separate lots is a hugely common pattern, especially in the Anglo-American world, but more widely in the affluent world and increasingly exported to all sorts of places around the world.

David Holmgren: So that basic pattern of suburbia and the potential for retro suburbia of organic small scale adaption of that is I think a very important pattern. And it’s also a pattern in countries like the United States and Australia where most children are raised. And that’s really important because that’s actually creating the next generation who will osmotically learn potentially from their living environment, adapting to the having more adaptive skills to the world. We’re facing. So in that sense, retro suburbia is very widely applicable, even if some of the details need to be adapted to obviously different climates. And I think the issue of higher density cities and cities in extremely difficult environments, that are, for example, extreme deserts being fed by fossil or unsustainable water use from elsewhere.

David Holmgren: Clearly there’s this problem of we’ve created cities in places that never supported many people in the past. I mean, as a nation you would say Saudi Arabia is at the maybe the extremity of that, where there were just wandering Bedouin peoples and small settlements on. On the fringes have now a hugely powerful and populous country.

David Holmgren: And you say, well, are those places in the long term that you can support a city. And the other one is the super high density. And although there’s a lot of permaculture and kindred ideas for adaption of high density cities, they involve a lot more stakeholders, much more technical complexity and a lot more difficult issues than lower density cities.

David Holmgren: And they also may not be over the long term really workable at the population densities that are currently there. And the extremity of that would be somewhere like Hong Kong obviously.

(41m26s) Future Cities: Salvage Economy and Novel Ecosystems

Nate Hagens: Well, like you said before, you were explaining resilience and cities like Hong Kong and other big cities are very efficient at providing human needs and preventing the takeover of natural systems. But they’re also an incredible drain on resources from the surrounding areas and really disconnected from nature. So it’s this, again, this trade off between efficiency and resiliency. So instead of debating what’s gonna happen in the next five or 10 years because we don’t know what is the answer or what can you speculate on 50 to a hundred years from now when we’re clearly past peak fossil fuels, peak growth, what sort of future city habitation structure might be? Fitable for those humans?

David Holmgren: Well, I think firstly, the possibilities of a hugely productive salvage economy where we take the infrastructure, the tools, the buildings of the huge discretionary economy that’s being created, which will actually have no real function. There won’t be a way to drive that.

David Holmgren: So what are all those buildings gonna be used for? What are all those pumps and spa baths? That could be wicking beds, something retrofitted to aquaponic systems rather than saying, oh, we’re going to build all these sort of high tech systems to. Provide perishable food where people live using new manufactured materials, which I’m very skeptical about the embodied energy and complexity issues in that.

David Holmgren: But if we’re salvaging what already exists, there’s enormous opportunities that our ancestors never had. And then if we project that deep time forward into deep energy descent, something like stainless steel, our descendants will always have stainless steel to make high quality knives just because of the stainless steel that we’ve created, which is, doesn’t go away, is lying around.

Nate Hagens: So this, and it could be reformatted, reformed with an anvil and heat or something.

David Holmgren: Uh, yes. But that. We shouldn’t sort of see, okay, what is the final technology that might be perpetually sustainable? We need to see how there’s this reuse, opportunistic, reuse, and accept that maybe that will be workable, but maybe people will just simplify again into the future and progressively cast off things of the saying, no, let’s do it a simpler way, or let’s not do that function.

David Holmgren: It’s actually not worth doing. So the discretionary economy itself is a whole lot of things that are actually really not even beneficial to people in any sort of. Deep inner sense in the same way that a huge amount of work is what’s technically called bullshit jobs, where even the people doing them regard them as useless to society.

David Holmgren: So I think that’s one of the most creative positive aspects of this reconfiguration that people often don’t see. Now, I know there’s a huge number of really serious problems, but the other one I would see is the. Positive opportunities that come from novel ecosystems, this hybridisation of biology that’s happened from mixing species from all around the world and high fertility along with polluted environments.

David Holmgren: ’cause sometimes those are almost the same thing. That’s creating these powerful novel ecosystems that most people call weeds or that are actually creating new resources and rehabilitating land. So that’s been part in my work, part of the very positive thing of looking at those things that other environmentalists have seen as just signs of dysfunction in nature.

David Holmgren: We are now getting support from strong ecological research in that area to says. Well, these are really important to study because there’s gonna be a lot of these ecosystems and that ecosystem evolution, unlike perhaps species evolution is remarkably fast. So a lot of ecological functionality is coming out of these new hybrids that actually offer possibilities that are potentially more productive than what existed in the past, rather than just going back to what existed in the past.

David Holmgren: But most people call them weeds. For example, the issue of exotic vigour where something has taken from one environment and actually grows better in a new environment was one of the things that came out of European colonisation and happened at the same time as fossil fuels. And if it hadn’t been for fossil fuels, this novel productivity would’ve been the biggest single thing to increase human carrying capacity on the planet.

David Holmgren: Now we can see the arrival of things like corn and potatoes into Europe, let alone Africa from the Americas, but also species of trees like the Australian Eucalypt, which is the basis of all the energy supply in places like Ethiopia. The shift of northern hemisphere conifers to Southern Australia, and then, okay, what industrial agriculture and forestry have done, have taken those and through the monoculture of mind, focused on just one species and created monocultures with have, which have had all their apparent disasters.

David Holmgren: But those downsides don’t take away from this fundamental jump in biological productivity, and that when nature actually then hybridises that into new ecosystems with remarkable speed, even when we don’t even help or we’re hindering. We see all of this. Increasing in biological productivity and function.

David Holmgren: So for example, in Southern Australia we have low fertility oligotrophic systems adapted to infertility. But now with phosphorous in the environment from phosphate fertiliser, the whole continent is cranking up to a higher level of fertility that shows up in our stream courses. Those have been cleared of native vegetation and now being colonised by many trees from the northern hemisphere, the dominant one being willows.

David Holmgren: Well, we now have the science on how much systemic productivity stabilisation that’s actually happening from that. And gearing up the environment to actually work as a high fertility environment. And nature doesn’t let fertility easily go away once she’s grabbed it. So we’re dealing with these changes in environment that we’ve been documenting and also managing in our own backyard.

David Holmgren: And so there’s these great opportunities there that we see in that regard.

(49m36s) Food Production Potential Without Fossil Fuels (Phosphorus Pulse)

Nate Hagens: Let me ask a tangential question to that. Tomorrow morning I have a round table discussion with Andrew Millison, Vandana Shiva, and a few others, talking about how much food could we grow with modern technology and more human labour. Without fossil fuel inputs, without pesticides, without fertilisers, without herbicides or with de minimis, like much, much less. And you talk about biological productivity, and fertility. So we can indicate roughly that there’s 700% of the mammalian biomass on the planet than there was 10,000 years ago.

Nate Hagens: We have seven times more humans, livestock, and wild animals, and that is a product of the carbon pulse. But we also have a lot more human ingenuity and technology and able to change our environment. So what is your answer to how much food could we grow with permaculture, with the skills that you know, and others in the Permaculture Network are learning without much or any fossil inputs.

David Holmgren: Yeah, this is a very difficult question and I think there’s the timescale of the depletion of that salvage economy, the reuse. Or embedding of what’s already happened. So for example, the phosphate rock that’s been mined, which is now in the biological system, originally from phosphate fertiliser, but also in sewage effluent and whatever is like powering up the earth’s terrestrial systems to degrees in the same way that depletion of nutrients in other places is actually degrading them.

David Holmgren: So that heritage, because of the nature of phosphate and the soil chemistry and the biological relations to it, isn’t easily going to go away over fairly substantial timescales. So that is a heritage. Of the fossil fuel era, and it’s sort of a once off because those concentrated sources of phosphate are limited.

David Holmgren: And the nitrogen pulse from the Haber Bosch process that’s created almost half the protein in the human biomass. That’s living today is a more fickle thing that can come and go. And that’s why in permaculture there’s a lot of focus on nitrogen fixing fixation via natural forms.

David Holmgren: And that aspect of novel ecosystems, exotic species powered by the phosphate to increase natural nitrogen fixation over pre-industrial levels are real possibilities, but how they work in the complex. Cultural knowledge base, those other factors are much more potent and how we solve the conflict between the tribes, how much resources is going into military destruction and waste.

David Holmgren: Those issues, I think are the more potent ones. And even if we look at the issue of more people involved in agriculture, we only have a history of taking people out of self-learned peasant farming and bringing them into urbanisation and modern education. We don’t have a recipe for, as Sharon Astyk said in her book, in a nation of farmers, the United States needs 50 million new farmers, most of them garden farmers.

David Holmgren: But the process of how we get those people, how they learn. That’s a societal project that has never been done before. And can we do it in ways that are different from Pol Pot trying to send the urban middle class back to the farms? To take the extreme.

Nate Hagens: This is the question, because most of those people have jobs right now, that are paying quite a bit on the backs of the carbon pulse and the complexity. And they’re not gonna voluntarily do very hard work, except a few people that want to permaculture first and beat the rush. Maybe those people act as pilots, and people like, I wanna live like them, but I don’t think, nor do I expect you do that. We’re gonna create 50 million farmers before we have to.

David Holmgren: No, this is, yeah. The realities we have to deal with.

(54m44s) Understanding the Phosphorus Bank Account

Nate Hagens: So let me understand what you were saying before. I didn’t understand what you were implying about the phosphate or phosphorus pulse. Mm-hmm. So I understand the carbon pulse and the nitrogen pulse, and you said that there’s an abundance now of phosphate, which we have brought up from rocks and the ground, and ground it up and put it in our NPK supplements for conventional agriculture.

Nate Hagens: And it goes into the soil and then into the rivers and it’s everywhere. But it’s no longer concentrated, it’s diffused. So what do you mean by that? It can continually be used by humans.

David Holmgren: Because the phosphorus tends to be bound in soil very quickly on iron and aluminum phosphate, which is virtually unavailable to plants, but microbes can use their biological jackhammers to get it back and make it available.

David Holmgren: So there’s many soils, ironically, in the affluent world that have been over fertilised with phosphate that is locked up, but it’s in the soil. So that makes it very different from nitrogen in that sense. There’s this huge amount.

Nate Hagens: So we’ve, we’ve built a phosphorus bank account in the soil, which is a good thing, but we have lots of bad things that are combined with it. Is that a way to say it?

David Holmgren: Yeah. And then the leaching, well, firstly, some of that then expresses itself in gigantic blooms of grass and plant pollen. And that is supporting insect life and other structures. But we’ve also got the very obvious one of blue-green algal blooms in rivers based on phosphorus into those rivers coming directly from fertiliser, coming directly from some of those biological products.

David Holmgren: And of course from human effluent and livestock effluence and urban dogs and cat manure. All of those things going into waterways, which are. Over fertilising, destabilising those systems. So we do have a lot of rapid movement of phosphate into the oceanic systems and some of that damaging those and also going into deep geological recycling down to the ocean floor and waiting for the tectonic cycle to recycle all of that.

David Holmgren: So all of those processes are happening. But it’s also important to understand that phosphate is the driver of nitrogen fixation. That without phosphate, the microbes, whether they’re on legumes or other things, generally can’t do much in the way of nitrogen fixation. So that is sort of part of that powering up what’s happening.

(57m55s) Soil Phosphorus and Future Opportunities

Nate Hagens: So we have like, so the soils around the world are much depleted relative to 200 years ago the top soil where I used to be where I live used to be seven feet deep and now it’s 18 inches or something like that. But what you’re saying is that the soil has an abundance of phosphorus relative to a couple hundred years ago, and that gives us opportunities in the future for things like permaculture and legumes and things that might be grown without fossil fuels. They have that built in helper in the soil. Is that what you’re saying?

David Holmgren: Yes. And some of these things don’t necessarily translate and show unlimited magic, for example, a new film planet Soil, which is a fantastic education on the biology and life of soil. One of the examples in that they’re all in examples in the Netherlands of organic and regenerative farming.

David Holmgren: And one of them is actually a place which is a food forest. And they’re saying this doesn’t actually receive any fertiliser at all, but it’s actually surrounded by a landscape which is intensively farmed landscape. And of course, all the birds that are feeding off that are coming into that food forest system and transferring nutrients into it.

David Holmgren: So that’s an example also of more direct scavenging or para. Off what’s actually happening in the environment and helping to stabilise that and gain productivity from it. But you can say, oh, well if it was all the food forest, that doesn’t happen. Similarly, you can see systems of swill systems in deserts that have been promoted as great examples of permaculture, which are actually harvesting all the water off barren desert into a swale.

David Holmgren: But if you put those swales all across that landscape, you can’t support quite the productivity you can. So I don’t want portray that position that, yeah, these things are some sort of magic, but understanding there are opportunities and results from, if you like, the disasters of what we’ve done to the environment that are actually part of the way of regeneration.

(1h0m21s) Wood Gasification Research and Local Context

Nate Hagens: While you’re speaking, I’m hearing some birds in the background. Were any of those kookaburras? I didn’t hear any kookaburras,

David Holmgren: but they are around here. There’s a huge bird life at the moment in this box iron bark ecosystem that’s around this property where I am in this passive solar greenhouse that our son has built on his property where he’s involved in the beginnings of biomass research, wood gasification from sustainable management of the forest, actually focusing on the transport end of things of hybrid wood, gas, electric trucks.

David Holmgren: That is part of our small contribution using permaculture thinking to some of the things. Not so much in the food sector, but relates to what this landscape actually generates spontaneously, which is wood.

(1h1m26s) Applying Permaculture Principles at Larger Scales

Nate Hagens: So here’s a naive and difficult question. I imagine, so permaculture, as you’ve said, is a system of design. And it’s for designing a system, a permanent culture, food, regenerative resilient system on your land. Could the designing of the system, could the principles that are in permaculture be applied to design a future system for Australia or the United States? Or is it, is it only on the local small level?

David Holmgren: In principle, yes, the Permaculture Principles definitely are useful for trying to understand and inform the possibility of policies. But I also give the balance to that. In a recent essay I wrote, dictated Dave’s national water policy where back of the envelope calculations I did, saving 40% of Australia’s impounded water with the water crisis that we face in this continent from some basic land use changes.

David Holmgren: But I acknowledge in that if that was to actually be put into practice rapidly, the known and the unknown economic psychosocial and including ecological. Disruptions that would come from that rapid top-down implementation would in themselves make it not simple. So I think that’s just really important to understand that even the best thinking when we sort of push it into nudging or pushing a complex system into a different state that’s evolved in a particular way, the inevitable chaos that results is not what you intended and.

David Holmgren: So if I’m acknowledging that with what I think is some of the best ecological, holistic thinking, I think that’s what we’re getting from the various power agencies and power structures. Trying to do things, even to nudge our energy system into running on renewables, as I’m sure you would agree, the two most complex things that humans have created are the internet and the power grid.

David Holmgren: And neither of them was designed from scratch. They evolved. And so you have to start with simple systems, and build the complexity. From those, but the usefulness of permaculture design principles and ethics of, are these useful for people working at all scales? I think they definitely are to inform in some way whatever is being done on.

(1h4m55s) Time in Permaculture: Small and Slow Solutions

Nate Hagens: So, I have lots more questions and it looks like we’re gonna run out of time for me to ask all of them, but let me keep going here. Time is money is a popular phrase in our modern, technologically heavy, fast-paced, modern and industrial society. How does time work differently in permaculture systems?

David Holmgren: Well, we have the principle of small and slow solutions, which is a direct counter to the big and fast as the prevailing way of the fossil fuel world. And Although that’s not an absolute, it’s a mental counterbalance to that. And we have many examples where we can see taking the time for something is actually a better pathway in practical terms.

David Holmgren: Many people have had the experience of putting seedlings from the supermart in the garden and them collapsing because they haven’t been hardened off. Their growth hasn’t been slowed down that most woodworkers know that good quality timber comes from slower grown trees rather than very rapidly grown trees.

David Holmgren: We know that the rapid force feeding of livestock leads to diseases and short life expectancy compared with. The more slower development. And we know in human design processes, especially the late Dan Palmer’s living design process, that when we do things in small incremental ways, the creative adaptive process rather than very fast processes.

David Holmgren: Now some of that can be seen as extreme, but we can apply that at more modest scales too. Right? On this property here, there’s just been some earthworks done for the infrastructure for this biomass research, and it’s been done with an old five ton excavator. Now, it was actually a job for a 20 ton excavator, which would’ve done it very fast, but the smaller machine operated by the person who is actually creatively designing all that is making adjustments, dealing with hard rock that can’t be broken. Where do we put those materials that are coming out? Actually improving the design by working more slowly and in a process that is more like the way nature actually designs things. So that taking that time is actually really important in many ways.

(1h7m45s) Mindset Benefits of Slower, Smaller Systems

Nate Hagens: So taking the time, doing things slower and smaller benefits, the emergence and the creativity of the land and the permaculture. But it also, well, I’ll ask you. Does it also help the mindset of the human, instead of the constant dopamine ratchet effect growing higher to do things slower on your land also improves your mental health and resilience and fortitude.

David Holmgren: Yes, exactly. And this is this very important aspect of these ideas that we’ve talked about in rational energetics. These are actually returning to what it means to be human, what it means to be connected to nature, connected to people connected to. Community at human scale where human agency means something rather than just being a processor for massive resource inputs driven by imaginary indicators.

David Holmgren: Like money and the drivers of debt. So it’s the same with this issue of is it more efficient to pack people into a higher efficiency city and they become embedded deeper and deeper into the machine, or is our inherent nature as being part of nature? So obviously we have a very strong, if you like, philosophical but also psychological view and supported by so much science that that is what our true nature is.

David Holmgren: And this is also the rediscovery of the ancestral wisdom of our forebears, which is also part of permaculture of saying, okay, people have had this wisdom before. What can we learn from that? So we are not just trying to. Create something absolutely anew, at least being informed by our ancestors. And the reconnection, which is a lot of people have observed that permaculture owes a lot to indigenous and traditional cultures of place.

David Holmgren: Rather than it just being a construction out of ecological and system science, some of the great achievements of the modern world. So I think those reasons, those psychological and wellbeing reasons are actually often the primary drivers and sometimes the first most important benefits that come from this process.

(1h10m40s) Balancing Global Influence with Hands-On Practice

Nate Hagens: Except when you write a 500 page book on permaculture, that keeps you from probably doing the permaculture yourself. I say that as someone that’s podcasting about living differently, but I’m so busy that I’m not really living differently.

David Holmgren: Yes. Well, in my life, what I’ve done is always a balance between that external work in the world, and having my hands in the soil, so to speak, or being the greenie with the chainsaw or all of those things.

David Holmgren: And that’s has been a benefit from me. For me at two levels, at the expense of maximising power of apparent global influence is that I’ve chosen. To do that, to the standard. I turned down an invitation to come to, I think it was one of the early Pioneers Conference in the United States. ’cause I couldn’t see that I could be there for three or four months and that was my minimum to justify going that far. So, but it’s also been by living that, I think the quality of what you then present in what you do is has that. That, as the Maori would say, that mana, that potency, this is actually real stuff.

David Holmgren: Rather than just, okay, how do we imagine what needs to happen? And of course the system is always dangling the incentives. To you can be more influential and powerful if you maximise that. And I saw that with David Suzuki when he was at his peak of going from one hotel to another and being from the airport in helicopter to the event that we organised in Central Victoria.

David Holmgren: And I really respect all of that work that people have done. But maybe I’m a wimp. I know that I couldn’t live in that way with that, that I’ve gotta have hands on and the connection into ordinary things and also just be an ordinary person. Not, that amongst when you’re doing things now, you’re just the person from down the street rather than always at that level.

(1h13m14s) Simplifying Supply Chains and Future Scenarios (Brown Tech)

Nate Hagens: I love that answer. And I hope I’m never in a position where I have to take helicopters between meetings, but I’m doing one or two trips a year and that’s it. And I’m trying to influence things from this small vantage point. So, so let me ask you this. One of the popular or common themes on this podcast is, someone just logged me out of this, hold on just a second. I will have to edit this. I wonder what happened there. Um, so one of the common themes on this. Podcast is that we have six continent supply chains. They’re fragile. We’ve got geopolitics and complexity and financial overshoot and energy depletion. And that one of the obvious implications of this in the coming decade is we’re gonna have to shorten and simplify and strengthen our six continent supply chain.

Nate Hagens: In your opinion, doing the work that you have for such a long time, what might this actually look like and if helpful, using your nation of Australia as example, w what would simplifying and shortening our supply chains and having a larger percentage of our population do some sort of permaculture, both for their own mental resilience and to be more resilient and regenerative with the land.

David Holmgren: Well, I think now to some extent I make a distinction between what I’m sort of committed to and what permaculture generally is involved with. And my future scenarios work of looking at what is realistically the context in which we’ll find ourselves working. Because I think there’s that distinction between the, what we might like or want or try and manifest in the world, but also being realistic about what’s coming over the horizon.

David Holmgren: And I see the relocalisation is happening through things like the reestablishment of national critical materials. Resources where globalisation is actually starting to go into reverse, and nation states are going, oh, we need to secure these basic things. So in my future scenarios work, I suggested that all of the scenarios involved a relocalisation, but.

David Holmgren: Ironically, in the Brown Tech scenario, which I’ve said we are well and truly into, largely in a world context. Now it’s relocalisation from global decision making to the reemergence of strong nation states, taking control of their own resources. And so that’s actually for ordinary people, that’s an increase in power from above, it’s just actually a bit more localised.

David Holmgren: So we get, we shift into a command economy where the government says, this is what we’re gonna do with these resources, where we’ve been in a world where whoever holds up the most US dollars gets the resources. So we saw the beginnings of that with the rise of Putin and Chavez. In Russia and Venezuela at the turn of the millennium and this. Resource nationalism Australia is a huge natural resource producer, very rich relative to our populations. Perhaps the richest in the world in Odom’s energy analysis. We’re twice as rich as the United States per head of population, and so more value added processing of those resources like lithium and all of those things.

David Holmgren: I expect more of that to happen here that are not really to do with permaculture so much, but recognising that that is the context. In which we are likely to be working in the same way that we see all of the modelling on climate change suggests of the OECD countries. Australia is the most vulnerable to extreme climate change.

David Holmgren: So that was the essence of my Brown tech scenario that especially for Australia, is emerging. And so that is a very different form of relocalisation. And what I’ve suggested in that process is you get a hardening and armouring of the system where there’s two different incentives. One is to bring people into the system and protect them, and they remain consumers and producers within it.

David Holmgren: And the other is to push people out and go and look after yourself. Forget social welfare, go and look after yourself, go and be self-reliant in the country, whatever. But this is a tension in the system. So people doing things at the fringe will find they’ve actually have this, these choices where you’re either in the system or you’re out of it, instead of a sensible ability to take the best of both.

David Holmgren: So for example, a classic one in self-reliance is greater home birth and people taking responsibility for birth at home, but having access to the centralised system as a backup increasingly in the world we’re facing, unfortunately. You end up with a choice. You’re either on your own at the fringes with the informal, unsupported or even illegal midwife, or you are in the centralised system and totally have to accept what it gives.

David Holmgren: And as it’s armoured and becomes more armoured, the choice is actually narrow. So there’s a security, but a straight jacket. And that sort of pattern is actually a dynamic which is relating to a form. Of relocalisation where different things start to happen in different parts of the world. And it also reflects the geopolitical shift from the rules based international order, which our nations are trying to maintain, and the multi-polar world that China, India, Russia are articulating, which actually means the sovereignty of nations to do actually different things.

David Holmgren: Now, whether that morphs into another form of a globalised empire, my energy analysis suggests it’s unlikely to actually get to that and this thing where different things happen in different places and they’re both good and bad. So that, so that’s trying to show people this dynamic of these, how those things might work.

David Holmgren: And I think. The covid and its discontents can be understood as both perhaps a last effort of this global coordinated response. And it can also be understood in terms of, oh, this is what a command economy looks like. Where the government goes, oh shit, we’re the government. We’ve gotta decide what happens.

David Holmgren: And so we can see that the climate emergency may actually involve those sorts of strategies where the government just says, this is gonna happen. You are gonna get fuel here. You can’t, it’s gonna be conserved for this. And. That adaption to that it’s not around what’s right or what’s wrong of understanding those dynamics of how different forces start to come.

David Holmgren: Now, the sort of things we’re suggesting obviously have, even retro suburbia actually involves a rapid growth in the household and community non-monetary economies. And that is actually subversive to GDP. So what we have to accept that some of the strategies we’re pursuing while they’re cool and friendly to people, they’re actually very, very subversive to established interests.

David Holmgren: And how we make that dance of this is actually a good thing. It’s small scale. But understanding that it’s actually a threat to all sorts of established interests. And people have sometimes said that permaculture is revolution disguised as gardening. So I just exist with that ambiguity of those things while a lot of permaculture people actually are strongly committed to the continuing common sense of we can have things from the bottom up and things from the top down and they can work together.

David Holmgren: And a lot of people involved in permaculture are working at both those levels, but I say we need to keep those communications going, but understanding this rift, this structural separation, which is, it doesn’t matter whether you attribute it to sort of evil people at the top or just the self-organising. Nature of systems, it’s the world I think we have to deal with.

(1h23m36s) Advice for Listeners: Connecting Locally and Building Skills

Nate Hagens: So for people that are starting to get their arms around this, which is many people watching this program, two part question. What advice do you have at this time of global upheaval, anxiety limits, climate, energy geopolitics, just general advice to listeners.

Nate Hagens: And the second part would be if they want to take some steps towards starting or advancing permaculture where they live. Um, would it be the same advice you would give or two part question?

David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I think that one of the first things is if permaculture seems to make sense for people to become more. Deeply embedded in the lens of thinking about it in terms of ethics and principles and look around and see things that you can see, oh, those things are reflecting that whether or not they have any label or even if they actually look, the social demeanour of those things seems wrong. So for example, I’ve said, you don’t need to even believe in climate change to see a lot of the common sense of retro suburbia.

David Holmgren: So to see those things around, especially in your own geographic community, to step outside of one’s network, and increasingly network online community. Not to remove oneself from that, but to look at what exists down the street in the neighborhood and make those connections to people. Ar around common understandings, and that may be exchanging of things, working, extending that trust in the community, non-monetary economies.

David Holmgren: So building all of those possibilities, I think especially across the cultural and value divides that appear to be really dividing people is is perhaps the most important thing within families, within households. That’s really, really important. So also using permaculture as, and some of the tools that were provided with retro suburbia of. The more household order, what’s our strengths, weaknesses, and threats, looking at that in a holistic, not fear-driven version of what people might see as prepping. And look at, okay, what are our opportunities to structurally change that, to create new households? And a lot of that we see as the reemergence of extended family households, but also the strength in the household economy.

David Holmgren: So I see lots of opportunities for that. And I think those things can open up a lot of possibilities that are obviously very different and diverse in. In different places. So it’s hard to be specific, obviously, about those and people becoming connected to their sources of sustenance, the farmers that supply their food or if that’s not possible because of that centralised system.

David Holmgren: Well, what are the people you need to be connected to? And not everyone needs to be a farmer, but also saying, do you have a skill which is directly useful to other people rather than putting your card in the slot in some corporate or government system and producing some income, which then allows that, and it may be being a bicycle or a car mechanic.

David Holmgren: It may be sort of complimentary health related things, but things that are directly useful to another person. So I see that as really important opportunities to become a more useful, helpful person. And that is the how we rebuild support bases, and deal with difficult and uncertain times.

(1h28m39s) Advice for Young People: Flexibility, Skills, and Intergenerational Synergy

Nate Hagens: We don’t have a lot of young people watching this show, but there are some. How would you change your advice to young humans who become aware of the human predicament, who are in their late teens or early twenties? What advice do you give to those people?

David Holmgren: Although retro suburbia was very much focused on people who are sort of concentrating on permanent households, often raising children, one of the templates in is what we call mobile minimalism.

David Holmgren: And for a lot of young people, trying to avoid debt or minimise further debt, maintaining flexibility and building one skill base through voluntary action. People used to say to me when I was young, how did you learn all this stuff? I said, I used other people’s land, other people’s resources.

David Holmgren: Obviously I had to have something to offer to be able to do that, but I didn’t have, oh, I’ve gotta own it. Because what I used to say is what I take away in my head, what is inside me, no one can take that from me, and that’s actually more valuable than whatever asset or improvement. I leave behind. So this synergy that we need between older people who’ve been on this pathway to some degree and own property, own assets and are aging and young people who have energy want to do things, want to learn.

David Holmgren: There’s this huge complementarity between those. But both groups have huge psychosocial impediments to giving up some of the things they’re holding onto. And it applies on both sides, the people of my generation and young people. But we see some of those things are also learning places for a lot of people, especially at teenage, to go out and have that experience in the real world.

David Holmgren: And sometimes that leads to, oh, the old folks aren’t so bad, I can actually navigate with them this new path, which is even sometimes the better learning that comes from those sort of relationships. But sometimes it’s finding other mentors and people that you can work with, whereas the baggage of family and upbringing can often be too difficult to expect to navigate, at least in the current context and trying to do that in ways that remain geographically connected to the people you might be one day supporting.

David Holmgren: So trying to ease back from this globalised relationships across the world, which is a lot of pain and suffering of people who will be disconnected from each other, which is. Really, one of those tragedies.

(1h31m51s) What David Holmgren Cares About Most

Nate Hagens: It’s not something we often think about. We take it for granted. I mean, look at this. I’m talking to someone in Australia and recording it and hearing the sounds from your son’s farm, et cetera. It’s something we take for granted. So, David, what, um, what do you care most about in the world? A question I ask all my guests.

David Holmgren: Yeah. I suppose the,

David Holmgren: the potential for people to see and experience the abundance of nature, that’s nature still works and it is not a sort of a nothing thing. And it can be something that sustains us and fulfills us, even if it’s hard work and challenging. And we have to accept that we are not as in control as we expected to be.

David Holmgren: So I think that that energised acceptance of reality and how we keep that balance between doing things and yet being realistic about what we can do and what we can’t do, what can be controlled and what what can’t be. And from whatever sources, those things come from and what we attribute them to the weather.

David Holmgren: Natural energetic resource limits or evil cabals in the world, or God punishing us for our past sins, that there are things we just need to accept and work with. And of course, people aging. For all of us aging. That is a process that all of our ancestors have had had to deal with anyway, because that’s part of what happens of that letting go process as well.

(1h34m6s) The Magic Wand Question and Humility

Nate Hagens: If you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your dissident personality, what is one thing you would do to improve the future for humanity and the biosphere hypothetical.

David Holmgren: I find that Christian really difficult and I suppose my essay about dictator Dan’s dictator Dave’s national Water Plan is indicates that, but I suppose I used to think that sustained high energy costs would actually be the most useful, benign way. To stimulate positive change and adaption. But as we get to late stage thinking and late stage of response, I am more and more humble about any magic wands and the collateral damage that comes from all of them anyway. So I have a sort of a big psychological resistance to that because every possible thing I would put forward, I can just, the other part of me can ruthlessly show why that won’t work.

Nate Hagens: Yeah. Well, you, I mean, you’re not a fanatic. You’re humble. And I think, unfortunately, I think hubris of people knowing exactly what to do is one of the real risks and frailties of our species and our culture. So I appreciate your humility and uncertainty on that.

(1h36m0s) Closing Thoughts: Living in Extraordinary Times

Nate Hagens: So David, as a co-founder of the concept of permaculture, do you have any closing words for our viewers?

David Holmgren: Well, I think it is extraordinary to live in these times. And I think the stories that people will tell their grandchildren or other young people about this time is extraordinary.

David Holmgren: And of course there is that the saying about the curse of living in interesting times. I think it, it’s also how to feel special and not making judgements so much about the good and the bad. And for me, that’s been a lifetime thing of living on this pulse of fossil fuel, of the experiencing that and then being able to sort of. Move forward. Beyond that is is those huge opportunities and the huge privileges we have of living at this time where each one of us actually has the potential to influence the future. Like we are standing on a mountaintop and we go round that rock heading down for a pathway to safety and we go round that rock and we end up in a completely different valley to if we’d gone round the rock the other way.

David Holmgren: And so that pivotal time in history where remarkably small changes, even though we feel powerless in the scale of things, can result in enormous consequences. And that that is. A creative opportunity, and as my partner Sue says about raising children and the whole crisis joy of being parents, remember, whatever you do, it’ll probably be wrong.

David Holmgren: So just do the best you can, which may seem a very negative thing, but it’s again, part of this acceptance of where we live and that extraordinary time. And to not treat it as mundane, and as without possibilities.

Nate Hagens: Thank you for your time today, and thank you for your seminal work over the last 50 years. You’ve changed how many people around the world view their land and permaculture and to be continued. Sir, if I get to Australia someday for a couple months, I will look you up.

David Holmgren: It’d be very good to connect in in that way. Thank you. And thank you for your podcast. I was telling. My son’s partner who’s a small scale organic dairy farmer. I was gonna be doing this and she said, oh, that’s one of two podcasts that I listened to and we swapped between all those old males on there talking about really interesting things. And this other one that we do about farming, which is mostly girls and mostly local and very grounded in the practical and they’re both complimentary.

David Holmgren: So that was her comments on that.

Nate Hagens: That’s a great comment. Give her my regards. And we need both. I think we need both. Yes. Thank you so much, David.