Read Part One of this series here.

Listen to David reading Part Three here:

Ash Wednesday aftermath

My encounters with climatic extremes, fire and unwise interventions in nature were not confined to Venie’s property in southern NSW (see ‘Life in the weather’). Over those years in the late seventies and early eighties I was involved in actions to understand old growth forests, climate, and fire, past and present, in four states as well as New Zealand (See my essays ‘A table of many stories’ and ‘Saving Warners Track’ for some of this thinking). Living in a rented terrace house in North Carlton with Su Dennett and her two children Kimon and Jody, I remember regular visits by Jason Alexandra who was logging the fire-destroyed heritage gardens of Mt Macedon for their specialty timber after his permaculture nursery had been destroyed in those fires. He would come into our living room with its white carpet in his charcoal black work clothes and boots, but suggested we were the only townies he knew who lived like we were country folk, which of course we became (again) moving to Hepburn in 1985 to create Melliodora.

In those years I remember thinking how the great dust storm that preceded the Ash Wednesday bushfires covering Melbourne with the fertility from the bare Mallee wheatfields contributed significantly, if unsustainably, to the wealth Melbournians enjoyed. This disconnection of urban people from nature, and even climate, troubled me greatly because I thought when the realities of nature’s limits to growth really began to bite, urban people would not only be unprepared without the skills to survive and thrive in challenging and changing times, but would not have the psychological resources to weather storms that our forebears would have taken in their stride. It seemed to me that we were breeding a nation and world of middle class wimps with needs, wants, addictions and disabilities that were mounting with each generation. I remember articulating these ideas and being criticised for what in more recent years have been characterised as ‘ableist’ attitudes, lacking empathy for those without health and capacity. 

Two generations of ongoing debt supercharged wealth later, the idea(ology) of nature and climate awareness has created children’s environmental education, rewilding experiences, over-mediated ‘wellness’ and collective guilt about the past, amongst many other responses. However overall, the enclosure in the mediated virtual world has radically accelerated the separation from, and fear of, nature and especially the weather, including existential dread about future climate. 

After my work on bushfire that included the Flywire House design project, I regarded our move to Hepburn as being perhaps to the most bushfire vulnerable town in Victoria, in my by now somewhat expert opinion. This was later confirmed by David Packham, an actual bushfire expert in a talk at the Daylesford Town Hall earlier that year.

Wind is one of the strongest factors in bushfire because the intensity and rate of spread of fire is proportional to the cube of the wind speed, something we understand intuitively from blowing on a campfire to get it started. Slope is also a major factor with fire intensity and travel upslope doubling from flat to 10% slope and doubling again at 20%. So in selecting a house site I thought it prudent to avoid the most exposed, steep and windswept sites for lots of reasons including bushfire resilience. In consultancy I commonly advised clients to avoid ridgetop house sites due to fire risk, poor soil, and limited water supply options but in doing so I had to try to overcome the tyranny of the view. I suggested that the view would be for visitors because over time we tend to take for granted what we see every day. 

Buildings as refuges 

As well as my passion for passive solar, thermal mass design for climate responsive comfort, we designed the main Melliodora house to be as resistant to bushfire as feasible. From my research for Flywire House I understood how the presence of one able-bodied person was between two and four times more significant in determining whether a house burnt in a severe bushfire than any other site factor or design feature. Consequently, good design and construction is perhaps a self-confidence trick we play on ourselves to ‘stay and defend’ our home, but it works if what we are doing improves our chances of success without causing severe trauma in the process. 

Given that the most severe bushfires can generate their own wind gusts in excess of what is normally experienced, wind secure construction was one obvious issue to pay attention to despite our relatively sheltered site. Being owner builders with limited savings and no bank loan we were never going to over-engineer the building but tying the roof down securely, beyond what was required in the building code of the day, seemed as much a no brainer as putting in roof insulation (which at the time was only recommended not mandated). It had always amazed me to hear stories of roofs blowing off houses in Victoria with wind speeds sometimes less than 100 kph when standard design for cyclone regions could secure roofs in winds more than double that speed. Securing the roof to the walls is a little more complex in a mudbrick building, but not that difficult as documented in designs we published a few years later in Melliodora: ten years of sustainable living.

Back then, taking responsibility for the weather and climate welfare of our blended family with a newborn was high on my list of priorities, despite a modest and insecure income and no bank finance. While being outdoor people not afraid of the weather, it was still an incredible experience to move into our new home and to feel comfortable and secure in any and all weather. This sense of security at home in relation to heat, cold, hail, snow, wind, flood and fire is something we created and have maintained over the years out of a respectful understanding that nature is both our nurturing mother and potentially our destroyer.

This relationship to weather and climate is fundamental to this story, but I noticed it was missing from most people’s regular complaints about weather, along with their casual disregard of what nature could serve up. In dealing with the immediate need for comfort, most seemed happy to rely on just-in-time, switch-on technology and energy. In planning for the worst, most put their faith in the experts and authorities to warn and protect with insurance and charity providing the compensation in the case of misadventure or disaster. 

Learning from passive solar living 

My engagement with the idea that buildings could be heated and cooled simply by orientation, window placement, design of eaves and other standard building elements without the need for furnaces, power, pumps, pipes and other components of active climate control has been a long one. The Environmental Design School (ED) where I was a student in the mid-1970s, hatching the permaculture idea, was a gathering place for all the radical ideas in the design professions including owner building, natural materials and passive solar design. 

I didn’t spend much time in the angle iron and chipboard rabbit warren that the staff and students created within that bland building of the Mt Nelson campus of the then-new College of Advanced Education. The glass front of ED faced into an internal hallway and stairwell while beyond the blank double brick wall to the north was a magnificent view of Mt Wellington and on every sunny day horizon-to-horizon sun exposure could have provided the majority of winter heating needs. Apart from the lack of site awareness in the off-the-shelf design from North America, the air conditioning was so dry that flowers in a vase would run out of water overnight. Of course the chipboard student cubby holes gassing off formaldehyde didn’t help. When asked why I spent so little time at school, preferring to work from home or out in the prototype permaculture system Mollison and I were creating at Strickland Ave on the footslopes of Mt Wellington, I asserted the ED building was uninhabitable (suffering from sick building syndrome) and that the college library was so stuffy it just put you to sleep.

In Jackeys Marsh a few years later I did what I could as caretaker tweaking the shack facing north to Quamby Bluff but the veranda on the north side was typical of the errors people still make in passive solar design and the attached greenhouse on the east side of the building was not particularly efficient in adding heat to the hut. At least in the mild Marsh summers, the excess heat gain typical from east and west facing greenhouses was not a problem.

Everywhere I lived and travelled I made sketches for passive solar buildings with attached north facing greenhouses, some of the designs inspired by Ken Kern’s experimental constructions documented in his classics Owner-Built Home and Owner-Built Homestead, referenced in Permaculture One. But it was the opportunity to join Venie where I got to turn my designs into reality later documented in Permaculture in the Bush. In my enthusiasm I already had concept plans before getting to the land, on which I got some advice from Bob Dunkle, a retired CSIRO solar engineer. I well remember sitting in his owner built semi-active solar house in the Dandenongs and him saying the design looked good to him but noted that (back then) there were still not enough solar houses to create computer models that could attempt to predict performance.

Venie and I moved into the house in May 1980 as the frosts grew progressively harder in the lengthening drought. After living in a bush camp built around Venie’s campervan, it felt like luxury. The woodstove wetback close coupled to the hot water cylinder in the drying cupboard directly overhead regularly boiled, requiring scalding hot water to be run into the bath set into a deck in the greenhouse and encouraging bathing with a view of the moon, stars and greenhouse plants.

On one frosty evening in June when Venie was still getting the hang of driving the woodstove, she filled the house with smoke. I immediately went upstairs to the loft and opened most of the south clerestory windows, came down and opened the east facing kitchen door while Venie did the same to the west facing double doors. From nowhere a breeze came in both doors, clearing the smoke through the high vent windows and dropping the air temperature about 15 degrees. We closed the doors and windows and within 15 minutes the stored heat in the internal mudbrick wall and mud floor made the place cosy again. That rewarming we experienced was not just a rise in air temperature from contact with relatively warm thermal mass walls and floor, but also due to the direct radiate warmth our bodies collected from those surfaces. It is this diffuse radiant energy that makes passive solar comfortable and healthy with lower air temperature than those generated by convection air heating. The contrast with the experience in uninsulated buildings with convection air heating alternately feeling stuffy and overheated or chilly could not have been greater. That was the point I can identify with becoming a passive solar evangelist. I went on to build several more passive solar buildings, all with north facing greenhouse, including ‘the studio’ at Melliodora for my mother in her final years. 

From her connections to the architecture scene in Sydney back in the 1960s, Su had been vaguely familiar with the concept but her commitment to our own house being passive solar was from visiting Venie’s in the years we lived in a rented terrace house in North Carlton, where of course we dreamed how we might retrofit it with our wonderful landlord’s help had we chosen to stay in Melbourne. I don’t know from whom Su got the phrase, but ‘passive solar, active humans’ came to encapsulate the issue of resident behaviour and even more the issue of whether passive solar was compatible with the double income commute lifestyle households that were already becoming the norm.

Passive solar, active humans

In exploring the first issue of behaviour to optimise building climate, we realised that passive solar buildings were simply more powerful heat engines than the average house, so if you didn’t manage them properly, then they could run off the rails more seriously than the average house left to its own devices. The required ‘management’ is not difficult or time consuming but it requires a familiarity with the pattern and timing in opening and closing blinds, windows and other ventilation, management of plants and even placement of rugs and furnishings. Being tuned to the daily weather and the seasonal cycles is essential, especially in spring and autumn when the arc of the sun shifts most rapidly and the management can range from benign neglect to timely intervention as the weather flip-flops.

I realised that growing up in an uninsulated double brick and tile roofed house in WA, I had absorbed from my parents a pattern of seasonal, especially summer, management that I later understood was true for any house in southern Australia as far north as maybe Sydney. 

That summer pattern was to close all doors, windows and curtains and shades as soon as it was warmer outside than in, and then open everything as soon as it was cooler in the evening. Even though my childhood family home was poorly designed to dump heat during the night, we were close enough to the coast to receive the cooling onshore breeze, known as the ‘Fremantle Doctor’, most afternoons so opening the house on its arrival did wonders for getting a good night’s sleep. 

In the passive solar houses I built (in the Towamba Valley on the Far South Coast of NSW, and Melliodora and Fryers Forest in central Victoria) the same management is optimal. As I became more confident in understanding these patterns, I noticed how many people did not understand them at all and relied on, or whinged about, the absence of insulation and air conditioning. In poorly designed buildings I would often see people attempting to use the pattern universal in the humid subtropics and tropics by letting breezes pass through the house during the day. While this gives some relief from stuffy heat and provides some evaporative cooling for the occupants it just heats up the house more, and then depending on the thermal mass and degree of night cooling, it makes it harder to sleep at night. 

On tours, explaining ‘passive solar and active humans’, I would point out the behavioural strategy for dealing with excessively hot houses is to follow the pattern of closure described above, but move oneself outside to under a shady tree preferably with a water feature or sprinkler to provide bodily evaporative cooling.

Similarly we see so many houses in winter with their curtains drawn on north facing windows. Like our aesthetic revulsion at seeing mixing plastic, cans and kitchen scraps all together in a bin for me and Su, a house turning its back on available winter sun gives us projected shivers from the damp gloom or alternatively flushed cheeks from the stuffy heat of closed houses burning gas or electricity while the residents are elsewhere.

Orientation

Just as the average house will not stay as cool as ours without air con, the average house cannot get most of its winter heat from the sun, even in sunny southern Australian climes. However a typical Australian three bedroom brick veneer house on a concrete slab facing north can get about 30% of winter heating needs from passive gain if substantial north-facing windows are neither shaded by evergreen vegetation nor have drawn blinds during the day. This 30% passive solar gain is about the theoretical maximum possible from good passive solar design in cloudy cold western Europe, or so I was told by ecological architects we connected with on our 1994 teaching and study tour. I showed slides of our house getting about 70-80% of winter heating needs and suggested that with better wall and ceiling insulation and double glazing our house could approach the 100% mark, but added that the vast majority of Australian houses are heated and cooled with brown coal fired grid electricity, a fact that shocked my green colleagues. While the dash to depleting Bass Strait gas and the more recent massive rollout of renewable energy infrastructure has reduced the role of coal somewhat, the total heat demand per household has gone up over decades.

Jevons Paradox and five-star fuck ups

After building three passive solar houses with natural (low embodied energy and emissions) materials, I was also scathing about the unbalanced focus of the 5-star ratings system on well-insulated boxes with switch on and off heating and cooling. On tours of Melliodora I would point out how over the previous decades most of the housing stock in Australia’s colder cities of Melbourne, Canberra and Hobart had been insulated, but energy use (and GHG emissions) had gone up. Didn’t insulation work or was it just an expression of the Jevons paradox or other rebound effects that most of the newly minted sustainability professionals still seemed to be clueless about? 

My introduction to the Jevons Paradox, without knowing the term or its origins, was a friend who spent a lot of time fixing up cars for single mothers and other battlers in the early 80s only to notice that the savings they made on fuel was offset by their tendency to drive more. More significantly my friend had built a passive solar house for his sister, greatly reducing her energy bills, the savings from which she immediately spent on a holiday to Bali. Without the systemic redesign, it seems that the pursuit of environmental efficiency in itself tends to lead to the same or increased consumption. 

I was perplexed how black-roofed houses with no eaves and large west facing windows managed to pass the test and get built while our own house, built before any of the regulations but retrospectively evaluated using an early version of the First Rate software, got a miserly 1.5 Stars and the recommendation that the building needed a very large air conditioner to prevent overheating in summer. While our house does need some supplementary heat (from wood) in winter it has never been uncomfortable in summer without air con or even fans. Our place along with three other ecological houses were evaluated using a range of ecological indices at a local event we held in the mid-1990s called The Great Sustainable Building Debate.

The First Rate assessment of our place was an embarrassment, given the expert who helped design the software freely asserted that our building would perform the best of the four, but that the software could not evaluate a building with so much north-facing glass and it took points off for the perimeter mudbrick walls and the high ceilings. Some years later another evaluation using a then-current version of First Rate gave it a 4.5 star rating by a creative interpretation of the greenhouse. We believe it should be rated about 7. So much for the software developed and used to build hundreds of thousands of houses since Bob Dunkle eyeballed my designs.

I became increasingly dismissive of the so-called sustainable solutions being rolled out in the 90s and saw them as just novel ways to keep GDP growing, but all the while claiming to reduce GHG emissions. But rather than getting further into the weeds of technical flaws in 5-star rating software, developer resistance to house orientation standards, embodied energy in building materials, corruption in the building industry, or the corrosive effects of the long running bubble in real estate values, I began to focus more on human behaviour and our relationship to comfort and climate. This was a fundamental but largely ignored aspect of the climate change agenda. In this I was following Su’s lead as I increasingly saw greater possible leverage in what, years later in RetroSuburbia, we came to call the ‘Behavioural Field’.

Home-based lifestyles

The earlier question about whether passive solar works for those with double income commute lifestyles was a serious one. Without the presence of someone to open and close blinds and windows at appropriate times of the day and evening, the passive house doesn’t work anywhere near as well and, in some situations, may actually be worse than a more conventional house. Of course these days it would be possible to have the whole house automated and controlled by software informed by a weather station although I think such complexity to replace the aware householder is just another financial and environmental cost, all prone to breakdown. It also cuts out the personal weather awareness that is one of my themes in this biographical engagement with climate. 

I came to similar conclusions about the enormous functionality we gain from our wood cooking stove, realising that for those away most of the day it could be more of a luxury. From a permaculture perspective, designing from first principles, my conclusion was that this is just more evidence that double income commute households are unsustainable, rather than the conventional response that passive solar and woodstoves are impractical.

Changing Gears to home-based lifestyle

After decades of living a home-based lifestyle without commuting to work, we had a visit from journalist Greg Foyster and his partner Sophie as part of their ‘pedal powered detour from the rat race’ that became the book Changing Gears (2013). In writing about their time with us, it wasn’t the diet of homegrown food or the outside compost toilet that was the greatest mental challenge in our way of life. Greg chose to write about the absence of the ritual commute each day to a different space to be part of society as the great challenge to his identity as an urban dweller.

Greg’s insights highlighted what I had been convinced of for decades; that commuting was not just a necessary evil for many people but a habit, in fact an addiction, that people inherit when they get carted off to child care at an early age. This deeply embedded pattern is more central to the environmental crisis than the need to switch energy sources. In fact in 1994 in a keynote address to the European Permaculture Convergence, I addressed the issue of permaculture as aid for the developed (rich) world to help overcome addictive and dysfunctional behaviours.

The body thermostat

The drift toward comfort or any other convenience of modernity can catch even permaculture puritans by surprise. After sleeping in an open shed on a residential PDC in Kangaroo Valley over winter in 1995, Su felt we were becoming comfort wimps sleeping in a passive solar house, and began fully opening the almost floor to ceiling louvres in our bedroom right through Hepburn winters. We stayed warm together under the doona and had the benefit of fresh night air. The bedroom door stayed closed to avoid all the passive heated air in the rest of the house from being lost each night. 

We noticed how extreme most people thought our behaviour was, but reflecting on our own respective childhoods in the 1950s and 60s sleeping in unheated bedrooms in uninsulated houses with only two blankets on the bed, we wondered what had changed over the decades. While I lived in mild coastal WA, Su’s early childhood was in Albury NSW with frosty winter conditions. Our families, like almost all Australians, weren’t so poor that we couldn’t afford more blankets; we just didn’t need them! In contrast we noted that by the 1990s it seemed most people lived in insulated houses with some bedroom heating and/or electric blankets plus doonas, and heating demand overall had gone up. 

What was happening? Doesn’t insulation work? Is it an aging and more sedentary population? Or the Jevons Paradox striking out efforts at environmental efficiency? Most of all, where was the discussion and debate, let alone research, about these issues in the mainstream sustainability discourse? 

One factor that we thought might be generating a generational difference was baby rearing habits. Su noticed how over the decades babies were typically placed in overheated rooms with inadequate fresh air, and we speculated that such exposure might be pre-setting the metabolic thermostat for a lifelong inability to self-regulate. It was as if the whole population was perpetually suffering from the flu and losing their temperature self-regulation. A crazy idea? Maybe, but where is the interest and research to find out why decades of focus on building climate control is not stopping the escalating use of heating and cooling?

For a lot of children of my generation, especially those in the fibro-sided and uninsulated tin roofed houses of the working-class suburbs, the veranda ‘sleep out’ with louvers and sometimes flyscreens against mosquitos was a way to escape most of the radiate heat of an inside bedroom. As in Aussie Street, for the oldest boy of the family the ‘sleep out’ might be the bedroom summer and winter. At least it gave some freedom in arriving home late without disturbing the siblings. When we moved to Hepburn we got to know a family where the watching of television was regulated by it being on the veranda without flyscreens to protect from mozzies in the summer or heating in winter. Sometimes discomfort is what we need to stay active, healthy and on the ball.

In current times, the absence of real science and any reference points from the past, the ideology of progress and loss of collective memory leads to the assumption that, before the present moment of technological wonder, everyone lived miserable lives. Our commitment to deeper enclosure in the bubble of technospheric comfort grows stronger with each generation. 

In the process, we are conditioned to treat nature as uninhabitable and even normal weather as intolerable for all but those rare folk who increasingly seem like Olympic athletes in their superhuman powers to tolerate what the majority find unbearable. The rise and rise of air conditioning from rarity to ubiquity in mild southern Australian climates is of course the big change and one that now threatens the grid with overload more than winter heating. Again the general conclusion seems to be that it must be a sign of global warming without considering more proximate factors, especially those closest in our own bodies and minds.

Water Security

While there were many factors in our moving to Daylesford and Hepburn, future climate was a major factor in selecting a place to settle. I already knew that the Murray Darling Basin water resources were over allocated for the current climate, let alone the warming and drying climate that seemed to be the growing consensus of climate scientists. Daylesford and Hepburn seem on a climate sweet point between my familiarity and love of the cool, wet, tall forest country to the south and the hotter warmer Mediterranean fruit ripening country to the north, and my youth in Fremantle WA, albeit with the addition of frosts not known in coastal WA.

Since that visit to Maryborough (see Part One: The climatic basis of permaculture), I had gradually come to terms with the realities of regional Australia, so the prospects of the Hepburn climate turning into Maryborough’s with climate change over decades seemed both technically manageable and psychologically tolerable, if and only if, we had a secure water supply. While the town water systems were a bit flaky in terms of drought resilience and catchment management, we knew town water at 20 cents a tonne delivered at pressure to your property was too good an offer to refuse. But finding a property that was on the receiving end of urban stormwater runoff (complete with various pollutants) was the key reason for buying the block that became Melliodora. Urban stormwater and sewerage water from the regional centres and small towns were the only two relatively unused and increasing new sources of water in the Murray-Darling system; small in the larger scheme, and still regarded as problems to be disposed of, rather than assets.

Within the 40 hectare catchment that was upstream of Melliodora, one third was bush, one third was golf course and one third was low density residential development. With urban infill development in our catchment, I knew flows from hard surfaces into our modest dams would increase even in a radically drying climate. That is what gave me the security to vigorously develop Melliodora as a tree crop farm with 150 fruit and nut trees, confident in the ability not only to produce food but create a relatively fire safe and fully defendable home base in one of the most bushfire vulnerable towns in the most fire vulnerable region in the world. Perhaps this might have been the over confidence of a 30-year-old compared with my now more circumspect 70-year-old self, but it is a vision that I have remained committed to despite the swings of policy and collective psychology, along with the creeping changes in the climate, over the decades since.

Salinity and the origins of Landcare

Concurrent with settling in Hepburn, my consultancy work focused on helping ‘back-to-the-land’ settlers establish the infrastructure for sustainable settlement on marginal land including navigating the hazards of waterlogging and salinity along with drought and fire. I was also working more with farmers in whole farm planning and revegetation, which led to Trees on the Treeless Plains in 1987, a report to Project Branchout that had already been responsible for hundreds of trial tree plantings up and down the Campaspe, Loddon and Avoca river catchments of the Murray Darling Basin. That organisation was partly the brainchild of the same Terry White who was at the time trying to pass the baton of the International Permaculture Journal to others in the NSW Northern Rivers region, as the bioregional work that led to Saltwatch and Landcare took over his and his family’s life. 

Dryland salinity was the greatest land degradation threat driving landholder action in several regions across southern Australia, independent of each other and of government, in the early to mid-1980s (See my essay from 1995 ‘The Landcare movement – community based design and action on a scale to match the continent’). While salinity is inherent to an ancient continent loaded with sequestered salt, the genie had been released by land degradation processes since white settlement and farming. Over those years, research by hydrologists, settled on the theory that salinity in lower-lying deeper soils with higher pastoral and cropping potential was primarily caused by groundwater recharge coming from fractured rock and skeletal soils higher in those same landscapes where trees and perennial native pasture had been replaced by sheep-grazed shallow-rooted annual pastures. This vegetation’s failure to make full use of the winter/spring rainfall led to excess recharge of the rock aquifers which, by hydrologic pressure, pushed sequestered salt below the lower lying and deep soils to the surface. 

‘Revegetating the hills’ became the mantra for pioneering farm tree planters, and later government policy, but after the wetter-than-average years of the 1980s, the progressively drying climate pattern led to falling water tables, thus reducing the efflorescence of salt that was leading to barren ground. Thus the much-trumpeted salinity disaster that was predicted to massively degrade central Victoria and other regions was avoided. The substantial efforts at tree planting and perennial pasture sowing that were done by farmers, and supported by government, combined with increased natural revegetation as the collapse in the price of wool reduced the incentive to graze marginal land were also factors. 

The heritage of small titles from the gold rush and proximity to regional towns and Melbourne also led to a rush of back-to-the-land and hobby farm rural resettlement. Most of the new owners appreciated the bush and let the wattles and gum trees colonise substantial areas, which had been kept clear by previous generations of graziers and small landholders since the almost-total clearing of the indigenous husbanded mature forests during the gold rush.

This is not the place for a review of that whole salinity driven process, but two factors stand out for me, the first is the obvious one that I have mentioned, that a drying climate (whether driven by GHG emissions or other forces) may have allowed us to dodge the salinity bullet. The second is more challenging: the very theory of dryland salinity being caused by catchment recharge may have been wrong. 

There were other ideas about salinity along valley bottom lands. For example, Wilf Crane from CSIRO suggested that taprooted trees (and ants) maintained drainage pathways through heavy clay subsoils of the extensive bottom lands of the indigenous landscape and that one hundred years after the clearing of the tree root systems, those drainage pathways had progressively sealed over causing water to waterlog the topsoil, evaporate and draw sequestered salinity to the surface.

Another idea based on William Albrecht’s soil mineral balance theories suggested the loss of calcium from the land in livestock products, erosion and leaching was leading to progressively lower ratios of Calcium to Magnesium and consequently more sticky, poorly drained and hard setting soils that increase plant vulnerability to high sodium levels from rising salt.

Perhaps best known is Natural Sequence Farming articulated by maverick practitioner Peter Andrews and evaluated for his bankers by my New Zealand mentor Haikai Tane, suggesting salinity resulted from the failure of freshwater flooding to get out of the incised stream and gully channels and onto the floodplains to flush down salt. Those incised channels were, in most regions, a direct result of accelerated catchment runoff. Runoff increased dramatically as squatters allowed sheep numbers to breed up in the good seasons and then devastate the native pastures in droughts, as well as the well-known hoof compaction of soil compared with the soft-footed native marsupials. As noted by our great botanist and pro-ecologist Barron von Mueller, everywhere he travelled as he collected, identified and described fully half the native flora of Victoria, he saw knifed out gullies that destroyed the chain of ponds pattern in the indigenous landscape. His constant appeals to the government to halt the further spread of sheep fell on deaf ears. So those initial erosion events in the very earliest stages of settlement were not due to the tree clearing that came later with the selectors.

While the myriad impacts of the gold rush in central Victoria worsened the gully erosion creating what the indigenous came to call ‘upside down country’, it was sheep rather than gold that primarily separated freshwater runoff events from their adjacent floodplains in all but the most extreme events. In wet years this was not seen by graziers as a bad outcome because it allowed those floodplains to be better drained and the sheep suffer less from liver fluke. However Andrews’ success in using leaky weirs to block, slow and spread fresh floodwater to flush out salted floodplain topsoils suggests the indigenous chain of ponds pattern created by some combination of nature’s processes and human husbandry appears to have kept the salinity sequestered at depth with the fresh waters above. 

I now think all of these theories could have played a part in the salinity conundrum in our region, but my main point is that an army of landholders and volunteers beavered away, supported by taxpayers’ money, informed by the best consensus of science, which may in hindsight have been either completely wrong or at least only part of the picture. Not that any great harm was done, but I learnt two lessons: first, that society does things that don’t work, moves on without recognition or acknowledgement; and second, that ideas of substance on the fringes are derided before being quietly adopted:, all part of Thomas Kuhn’s scientific paradigm shift process.

Revegetation Strategies

In my own work in Trees on the Treeless Plains, consultancy and on the commons downstream of Melliodora, which we later came to call Spring Creek Community Forest, I continued to apply my own fringe permaculture perspectives that included use of exotic species, valuing naturalising species demonised by most as weeds, and the holistic integration of production and conservation that was central to permaculture but was lost from Landcare as it became more Nativist, and Segregationist between what was ‘nature conservation’ and what was ‘agricultural production’. 

Nevertheless, my early naïve hopes of food forests across pastoral country had been replaced by a more modest focus on establishing a framework of robust and functional revegetation across our better agricultural landscapes. Inevitably, hardy species proven in the environment by long co-evolution or at least planting, surviving and thriving from previous generations of farm tree planters were more the focus, and accepting that the ‘tired brown land’ and its unreliable climates set limits to what humans could achieve to change that into a garden of Eden. 

When dealing with the more marginal country occupied by rural resettlers and hobby farmers, I always emphasised transforming small Zone I and II garden farm human habitats supported by farm dams and surrounding multipurpose shelter and woodlots. On the rest of the land I often suggested a ‘managed wild’, of self-established native trees, shrubs and naturalised pastures managed by domestic animals and kangaroos as the best accommodation to climate and soil realities with a good hedge against a drying climate and greater bushfire threat. On the toughest bush blocks, beyond suburban-scale irrigated garden farming protected from wildlife by good fencing, if not enclosed gardens, I almost always suggested thinning dense regrowth bush to bring on the best trees and hedge against bushfires and a drying climate. 

In both consultancy and permaculture teaching I pushed back on the idea that swales were of much use on clay soils in winter rainfall cool inland climates, even though they were one of the favourite earthwork technologies of some very prominent permaculture consultants and teachers. Looking back over my teaching notes from the 1990s, I see my caveat about how climate change models strengthened the case for swales in our bioregion in the future. Predicted reductions in winter and spring rains would reduce the risk of waterlogging on clay soils in spring, while catching runoff from dry hard-setting soils after thunderstorms is obviously desirable and these storms were predicted to increase somewhat. 

But in general, I favoured farm dams storing surplus winter rainfall as the most useful strategy for securing garden farming. On larger farms and across catchment landscapes I advocated and did some modest design projects applying keyline land management strategies as the most sustainable pattern. I saw the government funding of large public dams on our rivers over the previous 30 years, instead of applying Yeoman’s vision across our catchment landscapes, as a tragic lost opportunity. However in a drying climate, it seemed inevitable that tighter regulation of farm dams in the catchments would come into force in an effort to maximise inflows to the government dams and allocations onto irrigation farming the semi-arid plains of the Murray Darling Basin. At the same time, I imagined the wasteful flood and sprinkler irrigation of pastures for dairy and beef cattle would be replaced by more efficient drip and microspray irrigation of high value horticultural crops, especially tree crops. Looking back from the present, both those processes have happened through a complex series of regulations and incentives including water rights trading, and so in the process have been a progressive response to both drying climates and resulting river, wetland and farm degradation.

Second wave environmentalism

The processes that led to the establishment of Landcare were part of a much larger second wave of environmentalism that took off in the late 1980s after the neoliberal revolution of the early 80s had swept away most of the ideas of the 1970s first wave. Among other policies, the Hawke-Keating Labour government floated the dollar and deregulated the banks, increasing the benefits from, and exposure to, globalised markets and beginning the endless expansion of household debt, which in turn elevated asset prices to create our current crisis in land and housing access and a looming Second Great Depression. 

That neoliberal revolution pushed permaculture to the fringes and convinced most environmentalists, rising politicians and policy wonks of my generation that the limits of resources were not going to bring about a fundamental change in the economy and society towards what visionary of that first wave, Ted Trainer, called a Conserver Society. Everyone cut their hair, put on their suit and became evidenced-based in making any case for change. 

The ozone hole limit of sinks

After the discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica in 1982, and especially the formation of the IPCC in 1985, environmentalists seized on the idea that pollution (the limits of ‘sinks’ in the language of Limits to Growth) might be the mechanism to force more radical change, even if no one dared mentioning Limits to Growth anymore. The belated recognition of the breakdown of the ozone layer, which provides protection from excessive UV solar radiation, became a novel form of atmospheric pollution. The cause of the problem in this case was not from processes and substances central to industrial civilisation, but more ones of convenience in refrigeration and air conditioning and even frivolous consumption in spray can chemicals. The Montreal Protocol gave hope for a global governance and technical fix to collapse of the ozone layer, protecting us and the rest of life from excess UV radiation. That hope has apparently materialised, with the depletion of stratosphere ozone projected to be fully reversed by 2045. However the idea that apparently benign chemicals created by humans in modest quantities could damage the global atmosphere laid the conceptual foundations for many scientists and environmentalists understanding how relatively tiny changes in one of the minor atmospheric gases (carbon dioxide) due to the burning of fossil fuels could change the global climate for the worse.

The Rio Earth Summit

The first report of the IPCC in 1988 suggested anthropogenic driven climate change was an existential threat and this set the focus of the second wave environmentalism, culminating in the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. At the Summit, climate change was further characterised as a ‘wicked’ problem not so easily fixed with substitutes for fossil fuels and that a whole-of-society bottom-up movement needed to be mobilised to address the problem. It was in this context that Agenda 21 was adopted, and rolled out to varying degrees in different countries. One example presented at Rio was the Australian Landcare Movement based on local initiatives and actions that the government then came along to support. Despite my doubt about what Landcare has become since, my frustrations in the early 1990s were more modest and I saw this as positive, in principle at least.

The 1988 publication of Mollison’s encyclopaedic Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual and two ABC TV programmes In Grave Danger of Falling Food and the follow up Global Gardener series also gave permaculture a renewed surge in the Second Wave. However the focus on food and agriculture from the First Wave had been largely pushed aside for a zooming in on tech solutions, all driven by the metric of greenhouse gas emissions, in particular carbon. I thought this reductionist focus on carbon as the problem, more than the depletion of precious fossil carbon, was wrongheaded, but the evidence-driven rationalists of my and the upcoming generations were convinced that carbon emissions were the rational numbers that could push money off its sacred pedestal as the measure of everything. 

Part of my frustration was that carbon measuring ‘bads or disservices’ up against money as a measure of ‘goods and services’ was going to have problems getting traction. My own crusade to garner recognition of Odum’s embodied energy accounting as a measure of real wealth and value in nature and society got nowhere. Most academics and researchers in Australia had never heard of Odum. 

Even with my expanding role in permaculture writing and teaching, my efforts to introduce Odum’s more holistic methods of environmental accounting mostly went over people’s heads. For the more academically inclined, most tended to ignore names, concepts and theories for which they found no corroborating information, evidence or discussion by their teachers, influencers and peers. 

On reflection, after another three decades, measures of ‘bad stuff’ seem to have finally taken over every aspect of society, but we are more confused than ever about what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘service’ for ourselves and humanity at large, let alone nature. 

CERES Ten Year Strategy Plan 

Even though I never put on the suit and tie or cut my hair, in 1989 I was persuaded to return to CERES, one of the ‘First Wave’ hubs of thinking and action in Melbourne, to prepare a 10-year strategy plan. Through the plan, CERES hoped to convince the then Brunswick Council that the ‘peppercorn’ rent for what had been one of the worst bits of industrial wasteland in the city, to a bunch of influential gGreenies, was a good deal for the ratepayers going forward. My report focused on how environmental education, supported by at least partially self-funded community businesses using the 10 acres of land as well as the Merri Creek corridor, could create new models for community-level creative responses to the climate challenge (and resource depletion). 

In the process, I was appealing to the neoliberal ideology of the times by emphasising the importance of green businesses, but it offended the ‘green left’ establishment within CERES. Consequently, my report was seen by some as ‘Thatcherite privatisation’ and was buried, even if many of its proposals have come to fruition through other means over the decades. In my own small way, I had been trying to capture the market forces logic of those times to empower small business and community initiatives rather than see corporates move in to take over the climate agenda. This perspective was informed by my collaborations with Ian Lillington, then fresh from working closely in ‘community businesses’ and ‘social enterprises’ that were allowing city farms in Thatcher’s Britain to survive if not thrive through hard times. 

My report was prescient in that three years later the Kennett Liberal Victorian government was the first state government in Australia to force through much harsher versions of neoliberal policies. From day one the 50% of CERES funding that came from the state government disappeared, and over the following years CERES survived by its great capacity to capture Federal (Labour) government funding flowing from Second Wave Environmentalism, before the Howard Liberal government wound back those sources of funds, and private philanthropy, along with making money from community business and social enterprises, became a bigger part of CERES’s survival.