Read Part One of this series here.

Listen to David reading this piece here:

Articulating the strategy

Around the turn of the millennium, fresh from the experience of the design and development of the Fryers Forest ecovillage, I assumed all efforts to design and build new settlements (at all scales) adapted to climate and resource depletion energy descent would be too little, too late. Further, I reasoned most efforts would be misguided in pursuing strategies that might seem currently beneficial but would later prove counterproductive. An example of this is my bugbear, urban densification, including its supposed role in both mitigating and adapting to climate change. 

Instead, I thought a diverse suite of retrofits of the built, biological and behavioural fields of existing human habitation, led by residents of those same habitats, had the best chance of creatively surfing energy descent realities, including climate change, with the least adverse side effects. I believed this could also achieve massive one-off reductions in GHG emissions, at least in the rich countries with extensive suburban landscapes. The excess residential capacity and other examples of ‘fat in the system’ could be radically redeployed without new building or massive infrastructure upgrades. In the process, I figured health and wellbeing could improve, as it did with Victory Gardens during the Second World War. There would also be a reduced crime rate, due to the proven benefits of casual community surveillance from more home-based activity, along with gains in a suite of environmental indices beyond the reductionist GHG emissions metric.

In a landmark interview with Adam Fenderson (aka Adam Grubb) recorded in 2004 and published at Energy Bulletin (now Resilience) I explained my positive take on the potential and likelihood of a retrofit of suburbia as energy descent futures began to bite:

Fenderson: What do you imagine for the future of suburbia?

Holmgren: I think it’s a mixed message. There tends to be a view that suburban development—spread out cities—are a product of the motorcar and cheap energy. And although that’s true, the suburban landscapes are no denser in human settlement than some of the denser agricultural landscapes in the world. Now admittedly people living in those suburbs consume far more resources in total than people who lived in those densely settled agricultural landscapes. Somewhere like the Red River Delta in Vietnam has a higher density of people living more or less totally off that land than say, Australian suburbs. Of course they’re very special environments, they’re all fed by integrated water systems, it’s fertile, flat land, but similarly we can look at our suburbs and say they are an infrastructure. Our city’s water system has the biggest articulated agricultural landscapes in Australia. So the water is there. We have an infrastructure of hard surfaces that actually harvests stormwater, which is seen as a problem at the moment, but which allows augmentation of natural rainfall to direct that water into the remaining areas that are potentially productive. We’ve got mostly individual houses that can be retrofitted to have solar access because they’re generally set far enough back from neighbouring houses to get that. Now that might involve cutting down a lot of gum trees in those leafy suburbs, but there’s a lot of ways in which the suburbs can be incrementally retrofitted in an energy-descent world.

One of the things I think a lot of the urban planners miss is that they assume that any future framework will be driven by public policy and forward planning and design. Whereas, I think, given the speed with which we are approaching this energy-descent world, and the paucity of any serious consideration of planning or even awareness of it, we have to take as part of the equation that the adaptive strategies will not happen by some big, sensible, long range planning approach, but will happen just organically and incrementally by people just doing things in response to immediate conditions. So if you live in an apartment in a multistorey building, and you’ve got to work out how to try and retrofit that in an energy-descent context, there’s a lot of complex, technical infrastructure and organisation involved. In the suburbs, people can actually just start changing houses and doing things—give or take planning regulations—without the whole of society agreeing on some plan. The suburbs are amenable to this organic, incremental, adaptive strategy.

In practical terms, what that really means is that big suburban houses that have one to three people living in them, mostly not present, will actually re-adapt to have people work from home-based businesses and retrofitted garages with workshops and people making things, even with food production in them. The street, which is a dead place at the moment in suburbia, will again become an active space because people will be present rather than commuting away. Now that re-creation of active urban life will be not that much different to what existed prior to and even into my childhood in the 1950s. It’s not really a radical a thing to envisage suburban life where there are larger households—whether that’s a family or shared households where people are taking in borders to help pay the rent or mortgage or whatever, and help share the tasks that need to be done in larger, more self-reliant households. So I’m quite optimistic about how the suburbs can be retrofitted.

In a powerpoint presentation at the Aldinga Arts Ecovillage in South Australia in January 2005 I experimented with graphics showing a row of four houses in a typical Australian suburban street developed in the 1950s to explain the history and future potential for household-led retrofitting of suburbia to make it fit for new purposes in radically changed circumstances. 

By the mid-2000s my Aussie St presentations had a wide audience, especially through the ‘2006 H2’ (Heinberg and Holmgren) national speaking tour of Australia. At the Brisbane event, organiser Dick Copeman described Aussie St as a permaculture soap opera. Part of my aim with Aussie St was to prod academics and planners to question the urban density meme and see the opportunities to make better use of existing building stock.

As a consequence of publishing my Future Scenarios work, the more practical-focused RetroSuburbia part of my larger manuscript sat languishing, although I did write more limited articles and continued to update and elaborate my Aussie St story. On a second round-Australia speaking tour in 2014, this time with Nicole Foss presenting her insightful analysis of the financial system hazards and their connection to peak oil and climate change, large audiences were inspired by Aussie St as a positive hedge against looming systemic threats. 

As a stepping stone to having the RetroSuburbia strategy taken seriously in sustainability circles, I distilled a short article ‘Retrofitting the suburbs for the energy descent future’ from my dormant manuscript, which was published by Samuel Alexander at his Simplicity Institute website in 2012. In that article I critiqued the assumptions that underpinned the urban density debate:

Firstly, the strongest driver for growth is not population, but the desperate need to keep the bubble economy of building and development from deflating. Despite the endless propaganda to the contrary, the latest evidence suggests Australia (like the US, Ireland and Spain) has an oversupply of housing driven by credit expansion and collective belief in never ending asset price growth.

The idea that we had enough buildings and would be better off socially, environmentally and economically with larger households sharing the existing building stock seemed outrageous or just plain silly from the perspective of the public discourse on urban development. I included a meta-analysis of Aussie St emphasising how critical parameters of urban land use such as hours of occupancy across our residential landscapes had not been studied, despite the term ‘dormitory suburbs’ being in vogue since the 1960s to describe the degree to which zoning laws and commuting had killed our communities.

Secondly the ideology, policies and development over more than three decades to increase population density have totally failed to stop the expansion at the suburban fringes. More strident calls for increased building density hide the reality that our cities are crowded with more and more buildings, housing fewer people who spend most of their time in other new buildings or going between them on crowded streets and public transport. Urban densification has become a cargo cult that has degraded our urban and suburban landscapes without achieving its stated objective of stopping the urban sprawl. 

I thought there was strong circumstantial and anecdotal evidence that my RetroSuburbia strategy, if widely adopted, could substantially increase resource efficiency and thus reduce GHG emissions, but I knew it would also reduce GDP because of the expanded home economic activity, outside of the monetary economy, enabled by the efficiencies of larger households. This household non-monetary activity would, in turn, naturally spill out into the community non-monetary economy of gift, reciprocity and barter, providing fresh food, child and health care, education, maintenance, security and other services that had all been outsourced to the monetary economy over preceding generations. I reasoned that since all low energy frugal societies did most of these functions in the gift economy of reciprocity, primarily at the family and household level, and we only outsourced this activity with the advent of cheap energy, then it was reasonable to assume that it would be more resource efficient and reduce GHG emissions. Making a shift in that direction would also reduce the sense of crowding in cities, address the loneliness epidemic, and have other benefits. 

But anything that reduces GDP, and thus cuts governments and corporations out of their slice of the pie, amounts to ‘economic treason’. After a presentation at the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne, I was told by someone who worked in the Victorian State Planning Department that my ‘take in a boarder’ strategy came up in a brainstorming session about how to facilitate greater population density in the existing metropolitan area. Everyone in the room laughed in acknowledgement and apparently went straight back to discussing tactics to get Melbournians to accept more medium and high-density development in their suburbs. I remember thinking that some sort of instinct must exist for sniffing out (and cancelling) any sensible policy ideas that might slow the growth, let alone lead to contraction, of GDP. 

Global context

For decades I had been scathing about the myopia behind the Gross Domestic Product metric and the god-like status it held in the eyes of economists, politicians and pundits. However as oil prices went off the boil following GFC-driven demand destruction, I became more focused on how financial systems would both respond to the more fundamental drivers of energy and climate, as well as their own dynamics of boom and bust. After being obsessed with the energetic and ecological basis of life for more than three decades, I had now become obsessed with how the virtual nature of money could flip systems much faster than the slower-moving drivers of energy and climate. My major influences in that investigation were the systems researcher Nicole Foss and her colleague Raul Ilargi Meijer writing at The Oil Drum and later The Automatic Earth.

It became clear to me why GHG emission driven climate change and peak oil had been such challenging obstacles for the system to address: because most of the sensible direct and indirect responses would reduce GDP. Beyond the greed of established industries and interests, any substantial reversal of GDP growth would inevitably lead to a financial collapse of unprecedented proportions for a number of structural reasons.

Since the bump up in energy costs created by the 1970s energy crises, an increasing amount of the continuing growth in GDP had been enabled by unleashing access to easy money, especially for corporations, but also citizens. It was the rise in private and corporate debt that was driving the need to extract resources faster and faster to continue to service those debts, more than that bogeyman of Neoliberal policies, government debt. Any contraction of growth in economic transactions (GDP) could lead to a cascade of unpayable debts that in turn could lead to an economic seizure worse than the Great Depression. Nicole Foss likened the financial system to the virtual ‘operating system’ of the global economy. If it crashes then the economy grinds to a halt, even if there are crops to harvest, supplies of energy and inputs for manufacturing and all the other resources still theoretically available. 

The failure to service debt, and consequently the failure to deliver goods and services, can then lead to a collapse of trust, especially in far-flung global supply chains. Once trust is lost it is very hard to rebuild. Foss spoke of how the trust horizon can shrink to a small local circle, but if those local economies have been completely hollowed out, then very little economic activity can continue without some reboot of the operating system. However there are no procedures on how to do this that will be trusted by all major stakeholders, let alone the population of workers and consumers at the base of the economic food chain. 

Much of the growth during the decades of Neoliberalism had been in the FIRE sectors (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate), giving the illusion that energy and materials from the Earth through agriculture, forestry, mining, fishing and on into manufacturing were less and less important to sustain growth in GDP.

A more alarming aspect of the recent evolution within financial systems has been the development of massive ‘casino’ economies far larger than the ones which most people at least partly recognise in the stock market, real estate and other so-called markets where speculation on prospective asset price rises have long trumped any return from the production or use value of those assets. For me, discovering the existence of the unregulated market in derivatives, where parties bet on whether some external asset, private or sovereign, that they don’t own, will go up or down was a shock. The very idea that the supposed collective value of these bets was larger than global GDP is itself mindboggling.

Through Foss, I became aware of evidence that structural changes in the global financial systems following the GFC provided the largest financial players with guarantees that if the system collapses, then they could use their successful bets in the overarching derivatives market to reach down into the real economy and take those assets that were still of any value, leaving the public and ordinary businesses with the proverbial ‘empty bag’. 

It seemed to me increasingly likely that the virtual world of money was the much faster morphing force that would likely save the world from the worst effects of intense resource depletion and harsh climate change, but at great cost in pain and suffering without any recognition of the underlying energetic and ecological causes.

Oil vs money: battle for control of the world

Meanwhile the climate data and the machinations of the IPCC reports and COP conferences had been grinding forward at the pace of Ice Age continental glaciers but with a determined trajectory. At Copenhagen in 2009, environmental and social justice advocates proposed a ‘cap and share’ system for global carbon emission rights, but had to accept the ‘cap and trade’ preferences of the global bankers. Goldman Sachs had already positioned itself to be the largest carbon trader in the world, but the apparently immovable mountain of the fossil fuel exporting countries and corporations managed to stymie the plans of the bankers and the progressive, mostly European, countries. 

As one of those exporting nations, but with the predictions of being hit by climate change worse than any other OECD (rich) nation, Australia was caught in the middle. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, consummate diplomat and passionate leader in the climate crusade, came back devastated by the failure of the COP and immediately slapped an excess profits tax on the mining industry. Over the next few years, the political turmoil in both the Labor government and the succeeding Liberal government reflected the struggle between the pro and anti fossil fuel forces. 

Following Copenhagen, I wrote ‘Money vs fossil energy: battle for control of the world’ in which I counselled environmental and social justice activists not to side with the bankers just because they accepted climate change, and had apparently potent top-down plans to address it. I still regard that essay as one of my most significant and one that prefigured the significant but short-lived Occupy Movement against the injustices and dysfunction perpetrated by the masters of money. It marked a turning point to more overtly political analysis in my writing and was dedicated to the memory of my younger brother Gerard Holmgren who died of cancer in 2010. 

By 2013 I was increasingly aware of the burn out from, and desperation of activists about, the climate emergency and began suggesting that we in the permaculture and kindred networks were enjoying life much more. However I also suggested that we might represent a model for how to tip the world off the course to climate catastrophe. My essay ‘Crash on demand: welcome to the Brown Tech future’ (2013) suggested that Australia, if not the whole world, was on course for my Brown Tech scenario (of a fast and severe onset of climate change and relatively late peak and slow decline in global conventional oil production). I thought the controversial point of the essay was that only five years after writing the scenarios, I was calling it for Brown Tech rather than the inherently less severe scenario of Green Tech. 

However it was my casual, almost tongue in cheek, suggestion to all those burnt out and desperate activists that, if they had not completely given up on the idea of human agency in our fate, then permaculture strategies might be a path forward. I suggested they could switch their efforts from getting the renewable energy machine to roll out faster, to modelling and advocating a systemic strike of consumption in an effort to trigger a collapse in the global finance system. This might in turn lead to a seizure in the global economic engine, which combined with peak oil and other structural factors might save the world from climate catastrophe. 

As previously indicated, I had no personal motivation to ‘smash the system’ but I reasoned that if 20% of the global middle class seriously worried about the climate emergency reduced their own total consumption by 50% then that would result in almost 10% drop in global consumption and that might be enough to stall the financial engine of the global economy. And of course most of these climate activists already believed it was the global economy, at least as currently structured, that was on track to kill most of nature and humanity. 

My speculations lead to a flurry of responses. Most focused on the moral hazard of suggesting a strategy that would cause pain and suffering for millions. My question in return was to ask if the climate emergency was just a story to scare the punters, or was pain and suffering for millions already in the pipeline anyway? Rob Hopkins of the Transition movement saw it as undermining the case for benign transition and Nicole Foss suggested that the crash would happen of its own dynamics but it was dangerous to suggest any agency in it, as in the horrible aftermath, one could be blamed. Few could get the nuance that I was not recommending any action beyond people doing what was enlightened self-interest. I have always felt that grand strategies to save the world turn out to be philosophically and practically problematic. As with my suggestion about trying to influence victims of natural disasters, I was simply pointing out logical consequences of visionary activism to save the world from existential crisis. 

Reflection

I can look back to those years and see my progressive adoption of the climate story as an equally important or potentially more powerful driver of the future as possibly reflecting a cluster of influences on my outlook. Firstly, there was the gathering body of science reporting accelerating global climate indicators of higher temperature and a diverse spectrum of others that variously suggested the evidence about extreme events was consolidating. 

Secondly, there was the gathering head of steam in the media, policy and political circles that made it the mandatory context for any discussions on the environment and land management. 

Thirdly, the progressive withering of the prospect of near-term peak of oil production (total liquids) due to the shale oil boom in the US, and reduced consumption by the battlers of the western world balancing rising consumption in the growing economies of the east led to moderated oil prices. Fourthly, the extraordinary supercharging of debt creating a sense of wealth out of rising stock, property and other asset prices was deferring, if not ending, the threat of financial system collapse. 

These last two factors suggested economic growth would continue to rise rather than collapse and therefore GHG emissions would continue to rise driving climate change. Even in the case of a rapid and massive roll out of renewable energy technology, I reasoned that GHG emissions could rise even faster due to the front-loaded costs in the mining, manufacturing and transport industries, which would be fossil fuel powered (and largely remain that way to this day). 

The massively greater upfront investment required for renewable energy sources, storage and distribution compared to fossil fuels leads to some counterintuitive outcomes, even if the longer-term costs of operation are substantially lower. A rapid scaling up of the renewable rollout could cause much greater net emissions over the next few decades, causing GHG emissions to rise faster than a more gradual transition. In the worst case scenario, this rapid uptick could increase the likelihood of tipping points in the global climate system leading to runaway climate heating.

RetroSuburbia vision

While all these big-picture interpretations of the context continually informed my much more grounded and practical focus on RetroSuburbia, the real work was building on the positive aspects of the suburban past, the efforts at permaculture-inspired substantial self- and collective-reliance outside the monetary economy over several decades, and the unique opportunities I saw from the inevitable bursting of the residential property bubble. 

In ‘A short personal and global history of retrofitting the suburbs’ I wrote: 

In 2014 I teamed up with Nicole Foss on a national speaking tour in which I presented the updated ‘Aussie Street’ as the positive response to the challenging evidence about the emerging deflationary collapse of debt-fuelled growth. In workshops for community activists I used the Future Scenarios work to focus on a range of “Brown Tech” mini scenarios: geopolitical oil shock, climate change natural disaster and property bubble collapse. These workshops generated some empowering insights: the same household and community level strategies that reflected permaculture ethics and design principles, were likely to be beneficial in all three mini-scenarios.

After the tour, my need to refocus on the book became stronger and early in 2015 I committed to making it happen. We discussed three potential books.

The existing manuscript written for academics and activists that would aim to break open the urban sustainability debate was the first and most obvious book. The second was a handbook that would be directly useful to those already or seriously considering a DIY downsizing and retrofitting pathway. The third would be inspirational case studies of people and places that showed some of these solutions in action. Somehow the inspirational power of Aussie St had to be part of it.

The handbook won out as the most important, followed by the case studies, while the arguments might be a follow up if and when the others generated enough controversy to require a more extensive justification for seeing so many benefits from household led bottom up change. My enthusiasm for arguing the case needed to be set aside to concentrate on helping those who are already convinced to change their lives, homes and community through ‘direct action’.

Over the following years, my writing turned the book into a life manual of benign, practical and no-regrets strategies by which ordinary folk, at least in the long-affluent countries, could improve their lives while radically reducing their ecological footprint and increasing their resilience to shocks from whatever quarter. It felt like my whole life’s learnings had been a preparation to pass on as best I could the positive, practical and empowering action householders could take for a better life now, and in the future, independently of any specific belief in the likelihood of a financial collapse, peak oil generated crises or even belief in GHG emission generated climate change.

The household level

Over the decades I had noticed how most change activists tended to focus on the tension between the individual on the one hand and the community on the other, forgetting that the household remains the fundamental unit of social organisation responsible for raising children, and feeding and looking after ourselves more generally. From past periods of crisis we knew having larger, stronger households is how ordinary folks survive and even thrive in hard times. The trouble was household size in long-affluent countries had shrunk so much and lost most of their capacities for self-provision outside the monetary economy. 

I chose to use the term ‘household’ rather than ‘family’ deliberately because I recognised the strong perception on the cultural left that focus on family was identified with the socially conservative cultural right. I didn’t want to alienate my left green heritage and constituency but was also consciously courting those on the right, especially the battlers who once supported the left but for decades had been drifting to the right. Just as I attempted to open up the left-right philosophic myopia about the ‘wealth of nations’ in my ‘Money vs fossil energy’ essay, RetroSuburbia was not predicated on the need to believe in peak oil or even climate change to see the benefits of a better way to live. 

That appeal to the punters to adopt strategies that from the ruling elite perspective could be classified as economic treason, fitted the prior description of permaculture as ‘revolution disguised as gardening’. In writing the book I deliberately drew back from the revolutionary or evangelical aspect, let alone the idea of policies to force any change on others. Instead I focused on the more libertarian right to ‘do our own thing’, and being the guinea pigs of our own ideas (but with a full awareness that when our ideas become ideology and we demand others do the same, the pushback gets stronger).

Urban density meme as cargo cult

Nevertheless, in presentations, talking to journalists and writing, I continued to challenge planners and policy makers about the urban density meme being a cargo cult and ridiculed economists who count the transfer of activity from household and community non-monetary unmeasured economies to monetary ones as economic growth. I used the example of how people starting to buy rather than take lunch from home, hadn’t created any extra lunches. 

Beyond the better understood idea that GDP growth was increasingly the result of more ‘bads and disservices’ rather than ‘goods and services’, I provocatively claimed that half the growth in GDP in my lifetime was fake because it was the result of accounting fraud. To further emphasise the absurdity of the GDP growth god I argued that if it was better for us, society and the environment (including climate) to return at least some of that activity to the non-monetary sector, then I was logically at liberty to call it ‘Growth’ and so I am ‘Pro Growth’. Even a modicum of holistic thinking can reveal that so many ideas in society taken seriously by the intelligentsia are flawed and reminds us how often the emperors have no clothes. 

Once RetroSuburbia was out, we launched into the biggest promo campaign we have ever attempted, concentrated in Melbourne and Victoria, partly for logistical reasons but also because that was the geographic focus of the book, and I hoped we might generate a critical mass of retrosuburban action. Beyond a critical mass and viral replication of proven bioregional patterns, I hoped to trigger some public pushback that would allow me to publicly debate the sustainability mainstream obsession with urban densification. 

Despite RetroSuburbia being a publishing sensation, outside the mainstream publishing and promotion industries, very few journalists took any notice. There were almost no reviews in mainstream media for a 2kg, 600-page book, which was crowdfunded to print in Australia (rather than China) and broke almost every rule in the business as well as being a financial success with several print runs. The RetroSuburbia Community Facebook group grew to over 25,000 participants with a broad range of practical solutions and actions.

Some of that success was due to the next generation of sustainability facilitators employed by local government to get the public on board with reducing their GHG emissions. Many were looking for the next thing that might attract disengaged residents to the cause (and get the ticks from the climate, community development and other agendas local governments were following).

Quite a few of those facilitators, and even those high up in local government, had a positive take on, and personal influence from, permaculture and many over the decades had heard me speak and figured sponsoring events was worthwhile or at least worth the risk.

The Melbourne Model

As our team got into form working the media system much more than we had ever done before, our Events Co-ordinator and local poet Pete O’Mara suggested I write an opinion piece for The Age newspaper in response to two major reports, one by Infrastructure Australia, the other by the Grattan Institute, both promoting urban densification. The Infrastructure Australia report looked at three models for Melbourne in 2046: Los Angeles, New York and London with the third being the not-so-subtle push for infill development. The Grattan report talked about the middle ring of suburbs in Melbourne and Sydney where population had not increased in thirty years as the missing middle that needed infill development. 

Despite the timely nature of my response to their article, The Age declined to publish my carefully crafted 900 words. An extended version was published on the Holmgren website but I also took every opportunity to deride the substance behind these reports from the urban planning intelligentsia. We used our own drone photo (taken over one of the book case study sites in Coburg looking toward the Melbourne CBC) as evidence of the urban density meme being a cargo cult. This was classic “missing middle” territory where the number of residents has not increased at all in three decades. 

I would point out the case study rental where five people lived more home-based lives and grew food while next door was one old lady with the big backyard that her dead husband once managed for food. On the other side was the 1970s backyard infill houses and concreted driveways. Further south a compact row of 1990s terraces supposed to house more than the handful of suburban lots they replaced is clear in the picture. Closer to the city, an 8-story apartment block built in the 2000s on one of the main roads suggests many more residents. To the left on the commercial strip, a proliferation of small businesses in the nonessential economy now have paved car parking areas where once food producing gardens fed local families. So lots of development, less green space, less hours of occupancy but still no more even notional residents per square kilometre. And this landscape is typical of the missing middle suburbs. Thus the urban density agenda to put up more buildings and so accommodate more people is a cargo cult that has failed more spectacularly than the New Guinea highlanders who built runways in the 1930s in the hope of attracting ‘cargo’. 

While this story might not be central to the larger story about GHG emissions driven climate change, it does illustrate how averse the intelligentsia have become to the challenge of ideas through debate. Where debate is tolerated, it is within narrow guidelines where not just the protagonists, but the commentariat and the media more generally already know the substance of the various positions. Just as I had observed with the ACF Consumption Atlas producing data that did not compute with the orthodox assumptions, the positive solutions of RetroSuburbia did not compute as being related or connected to the urban density debate which was little changed in its tension between high rise, sprawl and infill over the previous half century.

This degeneration of intellectual challenge and discourse provides a context for how the GHG emissions climate orthodoxy slowly gelled into a new secular religion where those disputing the case were gradually sidelined or outright cancelled based on an old authoritarian ideology that, as the threat of the environment becomes more existential, ideas that disturb the emergent orthodoxy are dangerous and must be cancelled rather than debated.

Degrowth in the Suburbs

My efforts to influence the urban sustainability debate did attract interest from some academics, especially Brendan Gleeson, then head of Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, part of The University of Melbourne and an author of several books about urban issues. He partnered with Sam Alexander to write Degrowth in the Suburbs, and they invited me to write the foreword. Given that I had left the intellectual text arguing the case for RetroSuburbia to one side, I appreciated this book as at least providing some credibility and context for my fringe ideas. However, typical of most academic books, the print run was small, the cost was prohibitive and I am sure its impact was tiny compared with what we achieved in shifting the mental landscapes with RetroSuburbia. 

Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI) was later defunded by Melbourne University, thus ending one of my few short-lived peripheral associations with academia. At the time I figured it was seen by the establishment as primarily a nest of green Marxists, which was reason enough to give it the chop. However, I did wonder if the director consorting with voluntary simplicity philosopher Samuel Alexander and anarchist co-originator of permaculture David Holmgren might just have been the straw that broke the camel’s back of MSSI. Most likely this last thought was just the inflated sense of self-importance of a flea on the arse of a corporate education elephant (ie The University of Melbourne), but it was just one more signal that the action is at the edge not the centre.