Read part one of this series here.

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Permaculture: dancing with tech while getting rooted to Mother Earth

Taking advantage of currently available technology to establish systems that have the potential to persist into futures without those technologies being cheap, or even available, has been an important permaculture strategy from the beginning. In my own journey, as with many other permaculture designers, earthworks created with diesel-powered equipment is the most prominent example. But the use of computers and the internet to network and spread ideas follows the same logic, as does early adoption of modern renewables. 

So while it could make sense for us to take advantage of available and affordable renewable technology manufactured in China to cut down on carbon, the main reason we do this is the benefits such technology provide, hopefully in establishing systems that can outlive and partly replace that technology if and when it is no longer available. Just as with bulldozers and computers, we should remain aware that we are getting most of the benefits and not suffering many of the downsides. On the other hand, when we plant trees, build fertile water- and nutrient-holding soil or rehydrate eroded stream courses, these could benefit the local climate in ways that are not subject to the tragedy of the commons, at the same time as they extract carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and sequester it in landscape. As with bulldozers, computers and solar panels, the main reason we plant trees is for the direct benefits that we, our descendants and inheritors are likely to gain. Enlightened self-interest is a much more reliable and true focus for our energies than commitment to apparently noble, but remote and abstract, goals set by systems we have little influence over.

Being a contributor to Mother Nature’s 400-million-year-old strategies for making the land abundant and beautiful is a psychological and even spiritual benefit that for many people trumps the tumbling turbines or mirror reflection off solar farms that increasingly cover our rural landscapes. I understand that for some people the countryside is boring, and needs to be made more like the city for them to feel at home. Each to his own, but unfortunately the city now demands even more of the countryside to be remade to allow the city to claim it is sustainable. While rooftop solar is probably a good distributed use of existing surfaces to produce energy close to where it is used, the energy density of renewables is not high enough to support inner-urban cores and industrial centres. Thus each city requires a further transformation of the hinterland to harvest the sun and wind in the hope they can replace what currently comes from less pervasive, but very energy dense, ‘holes in the ground’ harvesting ancient (fossil) sunlight. 

Finally, fudging the frugality issue necessary for a just and enduring future was understandable, given that world elites are corrupt and cavalier in their own conspicuous consumption. Without the infrastructure of authoritarian control in place, it was necessary to sell the nonsense future of a clean green, cheap and reliable energy future delivering a safe and equitable climate. But like my suggestion that if you want to force mass change you need to hit the population when they’re vulnerable, I am having second thoughts about the frugality message that is now finally emerging, increasingly justified by the climate story especially in relation to personal movement and meat consumption. It is hard to assert that we all need to tighten our belts when the elites keep tightening the purse strings and the straightjackets for the majority. 

The disappearing wealth thesis and the Holmgren Human Wealth Indicator

One of the most influential articles I read over the years of reading resilence.org was a piece by Erik Lindberg from Transition Milwaukie suggesting the obscene accumulation of wealth by the power elites over recent decades may be a self-organisation characteristic of industrial modernity to avoid crashing the financial system. No matter how gross and obscene the consumption of the super-rich, it is not very significant except symbolically. The aggregate impact is limited as there are so few of them. Most of their wealth is virtual, in stocks and assets and financial instruments that could potentially be converted into demand for real resources but is currently parked. If this wealth were redistributed to either the global middle class or the global underclass, then the immediate result would be expenditure in the material economy, thus massively increasing the demand for energy and materials. If the world is close to limits of extraction rate for key resources, then prices would be driven to great heights, which would almost certainly result in the collapse of the debt-based financial system and a consequential seizure of the global economy. By having the money parked with the rich, the system is effectively avoiding collapse, at least temporarily. The more fundamental point is that the wealth of billionaires doesn’t really exist because it is impossible for it to be realised in actual consumption. 

This is not an argument against the Gandhian notion of leadership frugality, but the recognition that the rage that thrives on both the radical left and the right against the obscene wealth of power elites, may be counterproductive. If it drives mass mobilisation in the expectation of material wealth for all, then this is just a different pathway for collapse. Instead, I encourage everyone to recognise and grow one’s own wealth and reduce the power of the rich over us through the magic of recognising that the emperor has no clothes. All that is necessary is for us to see it, and then focus on recognising and husbanding our own non-financial forms of wealth such as measured by Chris Ennis’s Holmgren Human Wealth Indicator.

Nevertheless, I remain convinced that frugal futures are coming for most, if not all of us; our kin and communities here and around the world. That the renewable energy rollout might fail to maintain business-as-usual growth and instead contribute to diversifying our energy sources for a frugal future, at greater cost but without raping the planet and covering the land and sea, is my hope for a benign Energy Descent future. That this diversified energy base might support us in our real task of regenerating the Earth’s biological abundance for the wellbeing of future generations and nature is perhaps a naïve hope, but it is at least energetically plausible.

Climate change in retrospect

I no longer think the models of GHG driven climate change are necessarily giving us much of a heads up on the climate futures we face locally or globally. Potentially they could be completely wrongheaded and divert attention from a plethora of other threats. That the climate narrative is increasingly being used to enclose people in a techno-straightjacket separate from nature I think is obvious to more and more ordinary Australians.

So do I regret any of the practical actions and passions I have pursued over the decades of waxing and waning belief and scepticism about the anthropogenic emissions driven climate change narrative? 

Not at all! The climate story has always been just one thread in a fabric of evidence, stories, and rationales for why I have chosen to live differently from the forces enclosing us and taking us away from nature. Despite many of my projections about energy, society and climate having not come true, at least so far, the apparently ‘unnecessary’ investments and self-disciplines I have engaged in have still allowed me to live a fulfilling life with a sense of contributing to a better world.

In terms of existential issues that could affect my own and my family’s commitment to Djaara Mother Country I see climate as a continuing force to be reckoned with each season and never taken for granted. Of course before too many years or decades, Su and I will be buried in the same grave where my mother’s bodily remains have already gone back to the land. 

But for others in our communities, especially our youth, I encourage them to think and act positively in the face of many changes and challenges, most of which I believe will emerge from the psycho-social, financial and geopolitical realms over the coming decades. One of the greatest hopes is for the lessons we can learn from Nature herself as she eco-synthesises novel ecologies of ‘old timer’ and ‘new comer’ species in a multicultural profusion of abundance. 

Of equal importance offering so many creative challenges are the opportunities to parasitise, retrofit and remanufacture many of the wastes and discards of the old system. This obtainium engineering revolution will only be limited by our imaginations, in the way Mollison spoke optimistically about permaculture design being only limited by imagination.

I believe, at least in Australia, the combination of whatever surpluses Mother Country provides, along with the castoffs of the old system, there is a pathway to future sustenance, or even frugal hedonism.

Machiavellian regrets

Do I have some regrets about articulating the hard Machiavellian methods to nudge the public in directions necessary to serve an agenda no matter how noble in intent? I now see those same strategies weaponised by the media in service of the climate cause. Mass formation by well-intentioned do-gooders seems to be morphing into some woke version of Mao’s Red Guards to implement the plans of psychopathic powerbrokers, desperate from the unravelling of their empire of lies. 

It is clearly ridiculous for me to now feel guilty for articulating those strategies so many years ago, but the old adage ‘be careful what you wish for’, and the idea that was powerful for my Jewish ancestors as ‘people of the book’, that words spoken and written into this world do have the power to come to life, for better and worse. Maybe there is magic, for better and worse, in words and intention, in the sense that John Michael Greer defines magic as being the art and science of changing consciousness through an act of will. I find this idea more realistic and empowering than any hope for magic in the material world that overrides the laws of physics and biology.

That (magic) change of consciousness starts with the self, and thus our experience of the material world, and extends naturally to changing the hearts and minds of others without force in the bodily realm. 

For me, the climate story has become something akin to a fearful religious belief held close by a majority of so-called ‘well educated’ folk with a strong ethical sense of concern and care for the wider world. I continue to respect that belief as genuine, and apparently supported by a vast body of authoritative science, but I no longer share their faith.

Left and right world views

One of the ideas I have come across in my exposure to socially conservative people on the right is research in which Republican and Democrat voters were asked a series of questions about their values and political priorities in the world. The Republicans’ replies showed a clear pattern akin to a permaculture zoning model with priority to self and family, followed by geographic community with attenuating concern and interest out to the global, including issues such as climate change. The Democrat voters’ answers tended to start with global and abstract values and progress the other way to considering the self last – even if their behaviour actually included strong elements of ‘me first’ just like the Republicans.

I found this so useful. Firstly, I prefer the honesty about self-interest rather than hypocritical articulation of high ideals and virtue signalling. Secondly, I like the idea that we can know most and judge best about what is closest to us, while considering things of great abstraction or geographic distance, we are forced to rely almost completely on secondary sources of information and so are vulnerable to being misinformed and gamed by actors beyond our feedback or even understanding. Lastly I see the tendency of activists on the left to self-sacrifice for the cause as one of the evolutionary conundrums of modern society where the apparently enlightened folk thinking about future generations have no children and fail to pass on their genes, epigenetic changes and memes. 

I still am shocked by how many capable, well-educated and younger people have been seriously injured or died as a result of the Covid vaxes and still they and/or their families believe it would have been worse without the vax. This reminds me of the mentality that led to the Jonestown cult mass death where well-meaning and educated folk came to actions against all human instinct.

The evidence that great ideals can turn into horrors worse than the simple but sometimes brutal instinctive actions of self-preservation, is a recurring theme in art and literature. But rather than dwell too much on those dark potentials, most dramatically associated with the charismatic demagogues of the 20th century, I prefer to recognise the strengths and weaknesses in both the perspectives unearthed by interviewing Republicans and Democrats. My regular use of the phrase ‘enlightened self-interest’ to describe how I characterise permaculture activism is my own attempt to encapsulate the strengths of both the me-first and the world-first perspectives and how this view can reframe the environmental slogan ‘think globally and act locally’. 

Solidarity with the deplorables

After a life of being critical of people mindlessly following the ‘more materialism is good for me and my family’ meme, I now feel solidarity with the battlers and disbelievers who see more of the fenced enclosure and less of the benefits of the shiny new green future being sold to escape the climate trap. For decades I have witnessed how those in even the moderately high ranks of society simply walk away from their failures, while those at the bottom on the job, still in the dirt and the weather, continue to face the consequences of their stuff-ups whether in the market, social standing or from what Nature serves up in return. Whether it is farmers in hock to the banks producing the cheapest staple food in history, truckers working to keep the goods flowing or miners providing a last human link in the machine extraction of everything middle class urban dwellers need to exist, my solidarity has been with these folk. This has not just been since the massive anti-mandate marches, but extending back to French farmers spraying government buildings with shit, and Hillary Clinton’s disorganised ‘deplorables’ who brought Trump to the presidency against all expectations of the cosy elite and intelligentsia and, just like Marie Antoinette, thought they should all eat their iPhones. 

My whole life has been an effort to reduce dependence on so-called ‘essential workers’ but because I have done so, I understand better than most just how dependent I remain, at least indirectly, on those who keep the wheels of the society machine turning. While those who actually do the essential work received unavoidable but temporary recognition in the Covid era as ‘essential workers’, this too could have been just another nudge unit meme to enforce compliance in those same battlers. 

There is an overlap between this valid sense of solidarity with the ‘essential workers’ and some empathy, if not agreement, with ordinary conservative and comfortable middle class folk who see no good reason why the world at large, or their lives in particular, need to change. These people remind me of all those citizens of the Soviet Union who turned up to work each day, and received their pay plus the other benefits of the socialist economy until that system imploded, shattering expectations. Many older Russian men just drank themselves to death. For the comfortable middle class of western societies, I believe the future could be even more of a shock.

Currently it looks like AI might wipe away most of the jobs of the professional class including all those who fought their way through the education system at great cost to become doctors and lawyers, only to find their work is done cheaper by machine learning. After decades of trying to encourage young people to walk away from the education system, I find myself caught between a sense of empathy for those who followed the signals from society and a feeling of schadenfreude about people who don’t have the willpower to follow their own paths of enlightened self-interest.

The collapse of the comfortable middle class could make the tilt towards far-right politics in the working class appear mild in comparison to the rise of the angry left mobilising the failed intelligentsia. 

The edge principle

During Covid some commentators asked whether my dissident stance was just an automatic rejection of whatever the majority thought was good. I freely admitted that my instinctive reaction to a mob running one way is to quietly walk off in the opposite direction, but that is balanced by wanting to avoid pain and suffering as well as be acknowledged and accepted by others. So I do consider my reactions were reasonable, and well justified by evidence coming to light since, and certainly not able to be dismissed simply because of a history and ongoing tendency to be a dissident. 

The edge principle in permaculture can be interpreted as avoiding the majority or dominant view by default. I believe that through periods of cultural stability, the conservative instinct, built into all traditional societies from the indigenous to the industrial, is generally functional for society as a whole, if not the free spirits constrained by it. In such times, social norms and institutions carry culture for the long haul.

But in times of turmoil and change, I reason the norms become counterproductive, the experts and the majority are wrong more often than not, and creative responses emerge from the margins. In fossil fuelled affluent globalised post modernity, the amount and diversity of creativity at the fringes is staggering. Just as in comparable periods of history, much of this activity is froth and flotsam that is likely to disappear after a great culling of activity, if not individuals, and a new ecological and societal stability emerges. I believe this new steady state likely emerges from the creative fusion of effective novel designs, with foreign imports as well as a rekindling of the truths and practices that once underpinned institutions and social norms. These hybrid cultures will be different everywhere in response to the local history and context.

Environmental crusades

I remain committed to encouraging radicals and visionaries everywhere to be the guinea pigs of their own experiments, to live different and better lives, not to get too caught up in complaining about the structural obstacles stopping us doing so, and never to succumb to the lure of power to force others to follow the vision, which inevitably leads to totalitarianism.

In the early days of evangelical interest in permaculture with Mollison as its guru, I had fears about the potential for some form of eco-fascist movement spreading in the wake of the system collapse that I thought was approaching. Over the decades, I have become more sanguine about the larger benefits from permaculture as a movement, despite its downsides, but my visions of eco-fascism that I see modelled on that of Covid and its discontents is stronger than ever. 

In the 80s, I occasionally had nightmares about some local right wing fascist mob dragging me off, and some of my redneck close associates standing at the back of the crowd saying nothing. As a result of Covid and the hardening of the Climate Crusade, those scenarios are replaced by images of being dragged away by the authorities, and my Green friends and colleagues watching silently. I don’t mean to suggest I live in fear of such events, but we all have dark stories we tell ourselves. That inversion of the story is, I think, emblematic of how things have changed. Some would jump on this admission as evidence that I have turned into some right wing, climate denying baby boomer exhibiting ‘white fragility’. Rather than strongly reject such accusations, I am more inclined to just sit with them, or maybe respond like I have to the accusation that I have become an anti-vaxer. Yes, I was just against the Covid experimental jabs but now I have decided to throw the baby of establishment medicine out with the bathwater of corporate contamination. 

For a more nuanced analysis of how the Green Left have turned, or alternatively shown their true colours, Paul Kingsnorth, a writer whose trajectory has some parallels to my own, recently quoted the Canadian ‘red Tory’ philosopher George Grant who suggested that: ‘the directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.’ Kingsnorth added, ‘These days, they have abandoned their separate vessels and are sailing downstream in a superyacht together, while the rest of us gawp or throw rocks from the banks’. 

I would love discussion and debate, public or private, with any of my Green colleagues on some key issues such as Trump, Covid, Censorship, Ukraine, or Equity, Inclusion and Disadvantage, but especially the Climate Crusade to explore the various shifts in values and positions. Perhaps we might still find some old Green Left common cause in relation to Israel and Gaza to remind us that the shifting values and alliances are complex and multilayered. And if the Deep State succeeds in starting a new hot war with Iran, and Trump takes the bait, then I will be with them in whatever sort of resistance is possible. 

Maybe all crusades, environmental and otherwise, reach limits and encourage some form of blowback. I suspect we have probably reached peak climate change belief globally. What many mistake for a rising tide of belief, may be just a hardening of belief by most, if not all, of those already committed, along with an increasing chorus of media, NGOs, corporations and government institutions that are proclaiming the overwhelming consensus of all authorities. At the same time they deplatform, censor and punish the dissenting voices following the shameful and authoritarian model rolled out globally for Covid, for which there has been nothing approaching a truth and reconciliation process. 

The idea that Truth is a fragile maiden needing protection from the stones and arrows of lies and corruption is countered by the idea that Truth is a lion. Set it free and it will defend itself. Historically, censorship has always been used to hide truths that are inconvenient, embarrassing or even an existential threat to existing power elites. The rapidly unfolding deplatforming, censorship and punishment of dissident thinkers and actors, combined with the trail of officially acknowledged lies and corruption over the last two decades, is indicative of the fragility of the order we live under. 

I understand and empathise with friends, colleagues and associates who find my analysis bleak because it suggests that the breaking of trust in our institutions of science, media, commerce and governance is so great that we are moving to a primitive state where the trust horizon shrinks to what we can see with our own senses, and to whom we would entrust our lives and our children’s. In the virtual world of finance, trust can vanish in a flash faster than climate can change or oil deplete. While trust in institutions may last a little longer after their degeneration and dysfunction, when that trust is gone it can leave us naked and exposed.

Without being able to necessarily trust anything else, we find ourselves disconnected and lacking in skills, common sense, gut instincts and other capacities that our ancestors took for granted. Thus we are truly primitives. Alternatively, we can trust our lives to the Machine as our parent and protector from all the fearful and uncertain emergent realities of the unravelling of industrial civilisation, a theme the insightful film The Matrix explores (even if its energetical implausible and action storyline initially turned me away from giving credence to its deeper message). 

Conclusion: at peace with the process

We can discard ideas, behaviours and even addictions like worn out shoes that are no longer fit for purpose, and if necessary, or if it takes our fancy, become free of shoes altogether. Just like the Romans of the late stage of Empire who freed themselves of the burdens of citizenship and faced the challenges of living as barbarians closer to Mother Earth, those people are adapting to emerging realities and creating new ways to live outside of a failing system to forge a new culture. In the much-denigrated medieval period of European history, for nearly 1000 years, our peasant ancestors shared use of the commons, and maintained a degree of autonomy from both state and church power. Many indentured serfs worked as little as one day a week for their masters and were free to arrange the rest of their time and energy as they saw fit, foraging from the commons, socialising or just drinking homebrew. Hopefully our descendants will be able to forge a culture with even better results for both nature and humanity through the centuries of Energy Descent that are likely to follow the exhaustion of fossil fuels and overly complex technologies and institutions built on that foundation. In this way, humanity may progressively discard the worn out but still constricting shoes of industrial modernity and again walk free on Mother Earth. 

Permaculture, both in conception, articulation and a life well lived, is my attempt to contribute to that process. I feel fortunate that so many others have also found permaculture empowering, even if many don’t follow some of my lines of thought and action. I feel comfortable with a diversity of understandings about the reality, or otherwise, of climate change within permaculture and kindred networks. 

We need a flowering of diverse, small and slow responses without power concentrated to the point that any ideological framework can be forced on people and nature. What I do assert, with whatever natural authority I have in those networks, is that in a time of radical uncertainty and change, divergent responses are the way nature and society evolve. With Covid, some colleagues pointed to the damage, real or imagined, that the behaviour of some would or could cause for others and the collective welfare of society. That these memes were crafted to appeal most strongly to those with the deepest ethical concerns for the disadvantaged and the collective, on the political left is now, I think, self-evident. 

My request in relation to the ‘Climate Emergency’ is for family, friends and dear colleagues to resist any idea of demonising, let alone punishing the apparent bad behaviour of individuals, households and small business folk pursuing their own notions of self-interest. Instead, I would ask them to do something far less challenging than Jesus did to his followers in asking them to turn the other cheek. No one needs to submit to real cases of direct harm from others. However, to support the use of state and social power to condemn and criminalise the behaviour of others based on abstractions and the theory of collective responsibility is never acceptable, no matter how much ‘The Science’ appears to support it. 

Using the lens of political philosophy to label permaculture, I think my 50 years with Climate Change could be quite accurately depicted as a meandering journey, informed by a fusion of Anarchist and Libertarian thinking, recognising the importance of both collective and individualist impulses that drive both nature and humanity. Just as the radical thinker Ivan Illich said of the ambiguous complementarity between the (two) genders, the individualist and collective impulses are both part of deep human cultural heritage, apparently opposite in nature but complementary and balancing each other. 

Most of recorded history shows that in periods of stability, institutions carry proven cultural patterns for the long haul. However, in times of change, individuals and small self-organised groups salvage the truths from the breakdown of the old culture and project forward new conceptions of living within limits into a future which is yet to be more widely understood, let alone crafted. The great irony that spiritual historian William Irwin Thompson refers to is how previous examples of successful cultural transition, notably Pythagoras’s role in the origins of western civilization and the monks of Lindisfarne in peacefully converting Britain to Christianity, include tragic stories of destruction of the visionary’s places or projects, and yet their visions prevailed anyway. In putting my hands, heart and soul into Melliodora and other physical expressions of permaculture, I have always been aware of the potential for nature and human affairs to extinguish those examples. Consequently, it is the inspiration and learning by others that is the seed to carry what is of value into the future. 

Similarly I accept that permaculture itself may be just a temporary flowering followed by a hardening, ossification and death. But I am confident that its diverse expressions will themselves produce abundant seeds that blow in the winds to the future. Many will fall on barren ground, others will sprout and later wither in the seasonal wilds, while a few will find the niche and microclimate to flourish and grow a new culture no matter how harsh a field this culture leaves in its wake. 

Whether my own ambiguous appreciative dance with the wider permaculture movement, which has continued to acknowledge me and my ongoing influence, despite the very different path I followed from my elder co-originator and mentor Bill Mollison, survives this writing might be a test of whether the movement is already hardening around a series of dogmas that the majority of followers all assert and believe. 

Usually challenges to dogmas come from outside institutions or movements. But in some cases, the very leaders of movements can seek to overturn those same dogmas. Krishnamurti is perhaps the most famous example from the 20th century. In my own case, right from the early days of the movement, I found my role was to challenge ideas, even when they were ones that I proposed, and so this questioning of the dogma of GHG driven climate change perfectly reflects this half century long story. 

Acknowledgements and Afterword

It is now a year since I began writing this Climate Series starting on the Spring Equinox and finishing around the Summer Solstice. Editing for clarity, finding images, mostly from my various archives, finding links to the modest number of references, and some basic fact checking have continued as the essays have been published progressively over the last 8 months. However, like the editing we did for the second edition of Permaculture: Principles and pathways beyond sustainability in 2017 (originally published in 2002), I resisted the temptation to modify, moderate or further explain at length any of the thoughts, feelings or records of action contained in this work. 

That process has been a dance between myself, Beck Lowe, as editor and factchecker, and Meg Ulman as ‘publisher’ who adds and oversees content on the Holmgren Design website. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the support of the rest of the Holmgren Design team including Ostii, Kathryn, Sun, Catie and of course Su Dennett who was the first to hear and give feedback on my reading of the first drafts, day after day, last year. In particular, I want to mention the encouragement of Meg Ulman and long-time colleague Richard Telford in recording readings of the essays, providing a stepping stone to doing an audio book of Permaculture: Principles and pathways beyond sustainability.

These essays provide a snapshot of my thinking in late 2024 before many of the tumultuous changes that have unfolded since, most notably for many people in the Anglo-American world, the second Trump administration. While many might attribute much of the chaos and confusion in the world to this one man, I think more fundamental forces are reshaping the world almost on a daily basis and I note two processes in response. One is the exponential proliferation of voices, a Biblical Tower of Babel, with endless variants of hotly exclaimed certainties as old certainties unravel before us. AI is supercharging this process, just as the signs of AI following the boom-and-bust pattern of the Dot-com bubble a quarter of a century ago begin to unfold. 

The other process is a retreat to close-at-hand familiar certainties and immediate concerns in the face of an ongoing loss of faith in trying to understand the wider world. This second trend seems to be both psychological self-defence against the algorithmic flip flop of attention and outrage, as well as a retreat to trusted sources both close and distant.

One change that I see unfolding since I wrote in the essay series is about the historic reversal of attitudes to censorship and freedom of speech on the political Right and Left. Especially in the USA, the dramatic political change, and ongoing conflict, has led to the Trump administration now applying some forms of censorship while the Left, in radical retreat, is again beginning to express support for freedom of speech. I see this flip flop as confirming my thesis that those in power tend toward censorship, while those out of power articulate the importance of free speech. As an author and public intellectual, with some limited influence, but always out of power (by choice), I follow the pattern in always supporting freedom of expression. 

And the way the world is going, maybe my common cause with Green Left colleagues that I alluded to in relation to Israel and Gaza could grow over time. In relation to climate change, I suspect that the peak and decline of the narrative, which I suggested was underway, could see my support for trying to save the baby of environmental awareness and regenerative living when the now putrid bathwater of carbon fundamentalism and the globalist responses get the toss. And I expect some in permaculture and kindred networks will blame me, at least in part, for the fragmentation of the permaculture movement. Just as I fretted about my mere suggestion of the logic of the Machiavellian highlighting of climate change as a cause of natural disasters when people are in the middle of trauma, I’m fine with the judgement of others, and what historians (if they still exist) will make of it all. Already some of the later essays in the series have brought out some savage comments and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s fine and I encourage anyone to give feedback rather than quietly self-censoring their concerns that the co-originator of permaculture could hold the views expressed in these essays. 

But if and when the feedback does intensify, my perhaps vain hope is that both critics and supporters of the climate change narrative will read the whole story to better understand some of the global and personal elements that have shaped the half century long journey of one actor in that grand narrative. 

David Holmgren
Permaculture Co-originator
Melliodora on Dja Dja Wurrung Country
Spring Equinox 2025