from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, ecologist David Holmgren traces the path of permaculture from its roots in the 1970s to its potential, in the future, to reshape how humans interact with the planet. He explains how its premise—working with nature rather than against it—will help us adapt to and survive in a resource-scarce world.

Interview Transcript

(0m4s) Introduction: What is Permaculture?

David Holmgren: Of course, I should explain permaculture as a grassroots movement for designing how we live better from working with nature rather than working against it and using the design principles in nature, ecological principles to design our agriculture, our housing, our community organization.

(0m30s) Origins and Spread

David Holmgren: Now has a lineage stretching back from to the 1970s and has spread around the world both in rich and poor countries. And I suppose people have been attracted to it because it’s about a positive approach to how we create the world we do want, rather than fighting against the world we don’t want. And in some ways, if you think of that politically, it emerged out of some earlier analysis by myself and Bill Mollison that maybe a lot of social democratic and environmental activism even by the 1970s was starting to show the effects that there were going to be more and more problems to fight against, and maybe we should sort of head off, well, what are the solutions rather end of things.

(1m21s) Context: Limits to Growth and Energy Crisis

David Holmgren: And so at that time in the 1970s with the energy crisis, there was a huge interest in this sort of thing that we today would call sustainability. And the big focus was around resource depletion, including oil. But most importantly, the limits to growth report of the Club of Rome of 1972 had created an enormous amount of controversy because the energy crisis actually highlighted what they were saying. Of course, they were saying that eventually, continuous growth in industrial civilization runs up against limits. And those are both limits of the resources and limits of the sinks where you can put all the stuff you don’t want.

(2m12s) Peak Oil & Climate Change as Symptoms

David Holmgren: And so peak oil and climate change, although they didn’t talk about that, are symbols of that basic systemic problem.

(2m21s) Core Premise: Energy Descent and Relocalization

David Holmgren: So permaculture was took for granted that humanity was heading into a future of lower resources. And that that meant that agriculture especially, but everything we do needs to be designed differently. Designed like it is in nature. Now, of course, there’s other concepts that have come along that have worked on that basic insight in the sort of industrial field, biomimicry, the idea of how do we do things that work like nature does. But I suppose permaculture started from that premise that a future society will be one of low movement of people and goods. Because the thing we’ve done with surplus energy more than anything else is move everything around at high speed, both people and goods and created a globalized system. And so the most certain thing we can say about the future of less energy is that globalization by some process goes into reverse, or alternatively, we can say there is a relocalization of economies, of politics and eventually of culture. Now that could take hundreds of years for that process to reach some new plateau of stability.

(3m53s) Designing for the Future: Beyond Business-as-Usual and Collapse

David Holmgren: So permaculture was predicated on we were moving into a world that I’ve coined the energy descent future. And it’s a one of continuous less and less energy and resources each generation. Now, what that means for particular places and particular scenarios in the future is of course incredibly varied. But I suppose what we’re saying is that it’s possible to actually design for that, but it is neither a modified form of business as usual, which is what a lot of mainstream environmentalism has really proposed that we sort of make industrial systems more efficient and less damaging to the environment and that we eventually develop an economy that can work without needing to grow all the time. So we reform the money system and and do various things that can move us on to some sort of steady state. Permaculture principles have really assumed we are going into some sort of a decline, but not necessarily the precipitous collapse where we see the end of civilization. And in that space, it’s possible, both looking at historical models like what happened to the Roman Empire, and looking at a lot of practical solutions, we can see there’s ways for people to adapt over time that is not some sort of gigantic human die-off scenario.