Read part one of this series here.

Listen to David reading Part Two here:

Big-picture speculations about human futures in a world where ‘nature bats last’ were certainly part of my ongoing articulation of permaculture, but mostly that was in private with friends and colleagues more than writing and teaching. In the years between 1978 and ’88 my focus was mostly with the practical: building layers of skills through learning on the job, with the job being how to become more self-reliant and in the process be able to advise others pursuing their own pathway to less dependence on centralised systems. Inevitably, those activities (in the environment) exposed me to nature’s unmediated forces and risks familiar to our forebears but to fewer and fewer of my peers. With this came less concern for the norms, rules and rewards of the wider society as I charted my own course. 

While Bill Mollison was taking permaculture across Australia and around the world after the publication of Permaculture One to strong public and critical interest, I had been doing the opposite: consolidating my skills in building, ecological hunting and gardening in marginal climates and soils.

Jackeys Marsh thermal belt

Most significant in those experiences was my two years in Jackeys Marsh, caretaking and renovating a shack, restoring an abandoned garden, raising chooks, and hunting to eat, protecting the garden and tanning the hides of wallabies and possums (see my essay ‘Saving Warners Track’ for more on this time in my life). The regrowth and remnant forest giants of Jackeys Marsh, informed my own emerging theories about forest succession and tree age. For horticulture, the soil was so acidic (pH 4.5), as a result of the high rainfall and past land use history, that building soil against the leaching rain required mineral, more than compost amendments. While the winters at 600m above sea level were not harsh by northern hemisphere standards, the risk of frost and very mild average temperatures right through the summer made growing most warm season crops such as tomatoes and corn a gamble without polytunnels.

I remember the winter when my mother was visiting in her campervan and she returned to the shack at night to ask for assistance in opening her campervan sliding door which had frozen closed in a glazing storm.

Apart from being able to heat a small building with abundant wood, even a badly insulated and drafty one, and the value of multiple layers of clothing, I learnt that being active in the cold for the first half of the day allowed sedentary activity for the whole afternoon without being chilled, a habit I have continued through my winter writing sessions in the more secluded and less warm south office of our passive solar home, which we don’t actively heat at all.

I also experienced the intense difference in microclimates between the thermal belt where I lived and the valley floor where the closely grazed pastures were typically straw colour in winter as a result of hard frost on all clear sky nights without rain. My shack was set on a north slope with a clear view of Quamby Bluff which the low-angle winter solstice sun managed to clear, giving light, vitamin D and essential psychological warmth to balance the gloom of cloudy wet weather. A decade later, moving into our passive solar house in Hepburn with only slightly more sunny winters, I marvelled how so many we knew headed north to avoid the winter blues. Invariably it was the location, sun exposure and level of light in the dwelling that were important factors in people’s experience of the climate.

Age is also a powerful factor. As a fit 22-year-old, moving to the Marsh was more of an adventure than a hardship. Some of my fellow Marshian back-to-the-land settlers took the adventure a step further with winter bushwalking and camping trips on the alpine snow bound landscapes of the Central Plateau over 1000m above sea level. I remember Jim Deghand recounting how after setting up camp before dark, a boiling hot enamel mug of tea, without heating the liquid milk, would turn too cold to be comforting in minutes.

I also remember feeling my less-than-perfect blood circulation to fight the cold when doing fencing work with metal tools and wire in the snow, and it reminding me of working on the Gordon hydroelectric dam in the Tasmania wilderness in 1973. While the jibes of the redneck regulars about how us young hippies wouldn’t handle the hard yakka was bullshit, standing around doing nothing in the sleet in steel toe-capped gumboots was painful even with three pairs of socks. I remember attempting to meditate on the pain, being aware that while I had the pain signal my feet were fine, I just needed to tune it out. 

By comparison the hard work of a concrete pour that lasted a whole shift was fun that worked the leg muscles and kept the feet warm. A team of two would run up an inclined cone heap of 20 cubic metres of concrete with aggregate bigger than cricket balls holding a 2 meter tall 25kg vibrator with a 25mm high pressure hydraulic hose in tow and plunge it into the top of the heap while constantly lifting gumbooted feet to avoid sinking into the liquified concrete as the heap levelled itself out across the shuttered block about 20m by 20m. While the massive concrete buckets continued arriving right through the shift, each team on the vibrators only did a couple of heaps before swapping over and then watched the spectacle, a break that mostly avoided a sweat and thus a chill.

In the Marsh I also remember marvelling at the blood circulation of young children allowing them to enjoy the cold more than us young adults. A few of us single blokes comfortable in our respective huts were feeling sorry for a young family with two kids living in tents while trying to complete the timber frame of their modest abode. We decided to lend a hand and I arrived at sunrise with my carpenters’ nail belt and my much-loved leather handled Estwing hammer (gifted to me by my parents for my twelve birthday, and which I still have after building three passive solar houses with it). The frost on the valley floor site looked like snow and any bare ground had frost heave crystals. As I got to work swinging the Estwing at bright steel nails into the slippery green timber roofing frame with frost icicles 20mm long slowly melting in the rays of morning sun coming over the distant ridge, I had to keep working my hands to counter the numbness. To my amazement, the seven- and four-year-olds of the family were running around on the still frozen grass whooping with joy. They were both barefoot.

But I also knew how cold could kill and I remember a story by Janet Mollison (Bill’s oldest child; the same age as me) of her childhood winter experience in the southern part of the Central Plateau. Out with her local friends on horseback, the cold had got to her hands making them numb and ineffective. One of her mates shot a rabbit, opened the gut cavity and got Janet to put her hands inside the carcass. But on the ride back to the homestead she started to feel drowsy and wanted to lie down for a rest. Her mates hurried her back to the homestead but locked her outside, which enraged and energised her. After she had run around the house several times banging on doors and windows her hosts allowed her into the warmth, confident that her hyperthermia was no longer life threatening. 

Right across open grazing properties in Tasmania and southern Victoria, wind chill can be lethal for lambs, a major motivation for graziers to plant shelterbelts, and in some cases shear sheep around lambing to force ewes to seek shelter and so protect their lambs. Sheep weather alerts have long been part of rural weather forecasts by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, but it is only in recent times that the standard Canadian winter weather forecast including the windchill has been adopted in this country.

In northern hemisphere winters, hundreds of millions of people can be at risk of death from cold each winter if heating fails, while heat caused deaths are less common. In Australia the areas subject to cold are always combined with wind to be life-threatening

Another personal experience with cold emphasised how dangerous windchill can be. On a winter’s day, with the first heavy snowfall on Mt Wellington, I ventured up the road to the mount as far as where it was closed and hiked to the summit to enjoy the snow and the view. It was sunny and only a light breeze with temperatures not far below zero; very comfortable really. But an hour later, with winds which could have been 60km or more, I was rallying others in the modest shelters to make the trek down the road and out of the wind. I remember the windward side of my face, protected by my Japara hood and balaclava, starting to go numb while the leeward side was fine. 

Outback heat & dehydration

In large parts of the Australian outback, heat, sunstroke and dehydration can obviously be lethal if you are not prepared. As a child I remember news items about people broken down on the Birdsville Track and other iconic outback routes and in the days before satellite phones, either perishing or being lucky with rescue by other travellers. In fact, heatwaves have been the quiet killer of more people in Australia over the decades than any other natural disaster, although the very large numbers that are often quoted would mostly be the very young or very old. While these deaths are tragic, they don’t adversely impact society as much as when healthy active adults are lost in bushfires, floods and other more dramatic natural disasters. Consequently, I have always been a bit sceptical about the claimed catastrophic impact on society of extreme heat or extreme cold.

In 1973, standing on an outback creek crossing in the Hamersley Ranges with the severely broken down van of my hitchhiking host, those stories were very present as we assessed our meagre water supplies, the 40km ahead to Wittenoom Gorge and the possibility that one of the mineral exploration camps about 15km back might have help or at least water. That adventure turned out better than anyone could imagine (we got hosted in a permaculture-like paradise with a swimming pool in the middle of a mining camp, while we used their workshop to fix the casting of the carburettor).

However the adventure did highlight for me how much worse it could have been, especially in summer rather than spring, given that region of Australia holds the record for heat. All Western Australian primary school children of my generation knew about the locality called Marble Bar that had the Australian record for both the highest temperature as well as a 100-day run of temperatures above 100 degrees (in the old Fahrenheit measure). 

While some of these experiences might be considered those of irresponsible youth, I know I had a reputation amongst my peers as being relatively cautious and circumspect in my risk taking compared with the norm for the baby boom generation raised by the generation that went through the Great Depression and the Second World War.

In early childhood I was described as ‘a bull at a gate’ and had lots of scars as a result but by the time I arrived at Mollison’s place in 1974, I was already well on the journey to greater self-reliance that involved exposure to risks, including those generated by weather. I distinctly remember one occasion where Bill was teaching me to use a crosscut saw on a fallen log and with my knees folded under the log, the big ‘M tooth’ grazed my left knee. My decision at that point was that if I was going to live this exposure to risk without the state or an employer to take responsibility for ‘workplace’ injuries then I would have to get my act together around safety awareness (even if the standards I set in that regard might be regarded as irresponsible from my perspective half a century later and aged nearly 70). 

Permaculture in the Bush

My learnings about climatic extremes had mostly been through indirect or modest encounters, but in 1979 my mother, as a single woman approaching 60, purchased 180 acres of bush near Wyndham on the Far South Coast of NSW to do the ‘back-to-the-land thing’. In my absence she did hire early permaculture pioneer and landscape architect Phil Gall to check out the place before purchase. 

Decades later, in her 90s, Venie claimed she ‘allowed me to use her money to try out my crazy permaculture ideas’, while my memory is having a distinct sense of superior wisdom about my mother’s rash decision, and that I had a responsibility to build her a decent passive solar off-grid home and the water, fencing and soil improvement necessary for successful food gardening. Above all else, her place needed to be resilient in the face of bushfire threat. Memory is certainly a strange beast but our letters do support mine more than hers (Permaculture in the Bush, now out of print, was my write-up of the project as a case study). Venie spent the next 16 years there until she felt she couldn’t maintain the place the way she wanted and moved to a suburban house on the coast. During those years in the bush, she maintained a productive and beautiful garden, hosted WWOOFers and PDC student  visits, was active in campaigns to save local old growth forests and, most significantly, began her late career as a published performance poet. 

At the time we were considering joining forces on her land. I remember Venie saying the local farmers in the Towamba valley declared that the country was in drought, and that gave her confidence that the property was relatively benign with lots of options for water supply to sustain lush and abundant gardens and protect from bushfires. As the drought years dragged on and intensified, a soak near the house and a small dam in the fire sector provided a modest pumped supply for gardening and bushfire safety but the 20 megalitre dam I had designed (built by the NSW Soil Conservation Service) to provide abundant gravity fed water with 20m head pressure to the homestead and garden, sat empty with zero inflow over each winter. The drought culminated in the horror summer of 1982/83. On the day after the Bondi State Forest on the Victoria border 50 kilometres to the south west was incinerated during the night, charred leaves covered Venie’s property, but fortunately there were no local fires to test my modest efforts at bushfire resistant design. 

However the drought breaking rains that autumn filled the dam in less than a day and broke the bone dry 8 metre high wall of decomposed granitic material that never had a chance to moisten and settle. It left a tear in both our hearts for years before we managed the task of rebuilding and securing the reserve of water for future droughts. The rains also scoured the contour ploughed forest clearing around the homestead leaving rills of erosion. Although the damage and loss of precious topsoil was relatively minor, I can remember punishing myself emotionally for having to relearn the pain and loss that pioneer farmers suffered and inflicted on the country through their modest and not so modest efforts to create abundance and security.

Anarchist perspectives on the neoliberal revolutions

My multifaceted immersion in skill development outside the formal education or institutional workplaces, involving exposure to the elements and nature, continued to inform and evolve my personal critique of mainstream responses to environmental, geopolitical and cultural issues. One of the strong connections between personally responsible self-reliance and my philosophy was a rejection of both the increasing structural, regulatory and social constrictions on ordinary folk’s agency to respond to changing circumstances. Of particular concern was of the increasingly risk-averse culture of fear that spread through all aspects of society. I saw my own baby boom generation coddling their children after their own wild expressions of risk taking had succumbed to fears and cautions of middle class, middle aged, debt-burdened parenthood in the 1980s. A new generation of punks was still out there rejecting social norms but I saw less of the rural and nature focused self-reliance to go with the outrage and more of the demand for change from above. 

For me, an early disenchantment with the leftist outrage demanding rights from the system was my big picture energetic and ecological perspective on both ancient and more recent human history. The great struggles for social justice and a fairer share of the abundances of industrial modernity were, for my parents’ generation of radical leftists, primarily an outcome of worker organisation and solidarity to demand their rights. I increasingly saw this redistribution of wealth to create a larger middle class was tolerated and even facilitated by business and governance elites to increase consumption of all of the surpluses fossil fuelled capitalism was creating, especially after World War Two. This allowed these power elites to preside over an ever-growing system. 

As the Neoliberal economic ideology started to retract those middle class and comfortable working-class benefits, I interpreted this as systemic recognition of the Limits to Growth, which I assumed power elites would naturally interpret as a need to push more people off the ‘gravy train’ of affluence and back to become a disenfranchised underclass for a future of energy descent. In 1983, the Hawke/Keating labour government coming to power was seen by many of my peers as the dawning of a new era of social justice (with The Accord agreement between the unions and the government) and environmental priorities (with the freeing of the Franklin River in the Tasmanian wilderness from being dammed for hydropower). I saw it as the Thatcherite/Reaganite revolution with a human face and a green tinge that would begin the process of dismantling the ‘gravy train’ of benefits. I figured that in all probability, the dole (that sustained some radical activists and self-reliance experimenters), and even the old age pension and superannuation would have evaporated before I was eligible for that second sacred privilege of industrial modernity.

To any who would listen. I preached the radical self- and collective-reliance that was the philosophical and political foundation of permaculture. I rarely used the term ‘anarchism’ to describe that pathway because of the lingering effects of the late 19th century version of the ‘war on terror’ propaganda image of the bomb throwing anarchist, with the general perception of it being, or leading to, social chaos. It was also because of those amongst my peers who were self-declared anarchists; most demonstrated a parasitic resistance to ‘the system’ but not much in the way of creative regeneration in partnership with nature. Perhaps I was simply projecting the widespread impression of the typical anarchist being a depressed poet getting up late before drinking and chain smoking in dark inner urban dives with collaborators, articulating what was wrong with the system and how best to put a spanner in the works. 

Popping the First Wave biofuel bubble

The experiences at Wyndham set me up for starting Holmgren Design Services (HDS) in 1983. My new electric typewriter was soon replaced by the first word processor, while the business logo I designed back then survives to this day. Apart from typing my consultancy reports to go with hand-drafted plans for clients, looking through the archives some years ago, I found a letter from 1985 using the printed HDS letterhead giving feedback on a report by the then Solar Energy Council of Victoria (SECV; later rebranded Sustainability Victoria). 

This was on biomass fuel potential in Victoria and included a draft proposal to get 20% of Victoria’s liquid fuel needs from ethanol by the year 2000. The proposal involved growing Jerusalem artichoke on the northern Victorian irrigation districts to be processed in ethanol plants at 100 km intervals down the Murray valley. In my response I commended the choice of crop but raised some important sustainability issues.

The study’s findings that Jerusalem Artichokes have more potential than sugar beet agrees with my own impressions. However, I am sceptical that large scale cropping of any root crop could be carried out on land at present under pasture in the northern irrigation areas without acceleration of soil degradation processes including erosion, compaction and structure loss. New methods of cropping and return of some organic matter may help but in my opinion any change of use must not only maintain the present status of our soils but reverse present decline if such systems are to be sustainable. As with agroforestry for fuel crops, sugar tuber cropping will reduce available pasture for animals. The study does not consider how mash from alcohol fermentation could be used as animal feed. Could it offset the loss of pasture in terms of total feed value? Would it require animals concentrated in feedlots around ethanol plants? If so, what are the implications in terms of nutrient recycling/effluent disposal? How would the energy budgets of such systems affect the overall calculations of energy efficiency?

Finally I questioned their net energy analysis thus:

Calculations by Odum (in fossil fuel equivalent units) for a conversion project in NZ using sugar beet show a yield ratio of 1.6 but when lost farm production is considered the yield becomes negative at 0.9. Even assuming Jerusalem Artichoke is considerably more efficient, the net yield of 5.6 quoted in the report (table 6) is vastly different to Odum’s. Without knowing the details of the methods and assumptions used, I suspect that not all the indirect inputs have been considered and that conversion ratios to equate energy inputs of differing ‘qualities’ have not been used.

I was not meaning to be harsh, and commended the SECV for the investigation. I received no reply to my feedback but I suspected, in any case, that the report was shelved as one of the last hurrahs of responses to the 1970s energy crisis. My larger learning was that Odum’s 0.9 net energy return (a marginal loss) was more useful in predicting whether the proposal was going to get legs by the turn of the millennium than the claimed 5.6 net energy return in the study.

I also reasoned that if the 5.6 net return figure was real, then many of the sustainability problems I mentioned could be compensated for (with expenditure of at least some of that surplus energy). Conversely, I believed Odum’s methodology and result was a macrosystemic warning of a raft of adverse consequences that might flow from any energetically marginal proposal. 

This early example of challenging renewable energy proposals was part of my efforts to get Odum’s methods recognised as ‘mission critical’ to any consideration of policy and practise toward sustainable post-fossil fuel systems. It predates the focus on renewable electricity that took off in the 1990s on the back of GHG emissions becoming the big metric driving Second Wave environmentalism. My response was a strong historic marker of my recognition of the importance of renewable sources of energy, but a deep scepticism about them ever being some cheap and easy replacement for precious fossil fuels. It took another decade and the rise of oil prices to drive the big wave of biofuel proposals and larger-scale production, especially in corn ethanol in the Midwest of the USA, before energetic and practical realities burst the dreams of the investors and silicon valley entrepreneurs who thought they were going to transform the energy section as they had done in IT. Fortunately, the lack of agricultural subsidies, our chronically poor cropping soils and unreliable climates saw little in this regard across Australia’s cropping country although canola for biodiesel and sugar cane ethanol in Queensland did get a bit of a flurry. 

My efforts to get Odum’s work acknowledged for its centrality to better science were not much more than a drop in the ocean. Perhaps not surprising for a popular writer and consultant with an arts degree and a bush lifestyle removed from academia, but even within permaculture networks, Odum’s work seemed a bit abstract to those who bothered to follow up on my appreciation of its import for permaculture. 

Life on the land vs life in the lab

The influence of Odum on my thinking reflected a larger critique about how I thought science was stuck in a reductionist rut of more and more complex specialisation studying less and less. Characteristic of my generation of environmentalists, in the 1970s I saw the great hope for science in breaking the limitations of reductionism was from the then-fashionable science of ecology, and especially the branch of the subject called Systems Ecology. Meeting Mollison in Spring ’74, I appreciated his thinking as holistic and ecological. This stood out in contrast to most of the academically trained ecologists I met who struck me as ‘bit’ people fascinated with the parts (species, populations, individuals) rather than the systems they were part of.

I later came to surmise that when ecology first became popular in the late 1960s, there were very few ecologists to teach the subject and many botanists and zoologists started teaching ecology but with a reductionist bent. The influences on my understanding of ecology weren’t just from Howard Odum and his older brother Eugene who wrote the widely used academic text The Fundamentals of Ecology. It included Peter Kropotkin, the Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher, and Baron von Mueller, both of whom I regarded as proto-ecologists, and Edward Goldsmith foundation editor of the influential Ecologist magazine, the title of which scandalised the discipline because it was more of an activist outreach than a scientific journal. I still regard Goldsmith’s The Way: an ecological world-view as a classic in undermining unquestioned assumptions of reductionist science. 

While the great hope and promise that ecology could become a predictive science was probably hubris of the post-war period, I certainly subscribed to the idea that holism didn’t automatically imply spiritual understandings. I saw common sense in Odum’s view that organisation and complexity in nature is as much a product of top-down constraints on the constituent parts, as it is an outcome of the parts coming together to form some larger whole. Our bodies, ecosystems and, in fact, the whole Earth, using Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, work to maintain order down the hierarchy of organisation to the smallest most fundamental parts. After centuries of reductionism leading to the billions spent on the search for fundamental particles of the universe, I thought it was a no-brainer that humanity’s understanding of, and finding our place in, the larger order would be advanced by greater investigation of how self-organisation in nature follows patterns that replicate themselves through space and time at different scales. If we better understood those patterns and principles, we would have a better chance of co-evolving a brighter future for humanity and our fellow species, or, in Odum’s terminology, for maximum power at all hierarchically nested systems from microbes to the whole Earth. Odum speculated that the drive of self-organisation was so widespread, and not confined to living things, that Maximum Power could be considered as a Fourth Law of the Universe. 

I remember discussions with academically trained ecologists about the directionality in nature through both succession and evolution towards greater fertility. I was genuinely shocked to get pushback not just on high level organisation for ‘maximum power’ beyond living things as exemplified by the Gaia hypothesis, but that my interlocutors didn’t recognise any directionality in terrestrial ecology towards fertility. They said there are just species and ecosystems adapted to fertile environments and ones adapted to infertile environments, which is true; but they further asserted that fertility itself was just a human value construct. I was confident that any indigenous person or peasant farmer connected to land from the equatorial tropics to the tundra would regard such a view as an absurd denial of the observable world and their conception of teleology (purpose) in the universe. 

While I was slow to accept, let alone adopt, any spiritual explanations for the world, on the issue of directionality towards fertility I was definitely with some of the ancient philosophers including Aristotle who, acknowledging directionality, said the purpose of acorns is to make oak trees. I think those discussions may have been turning points in my growing view that civilisation and science may have been making people more stupid, or, at the very least, the gains in insight and understanding on one level were balanced out by losses of understanding and blinding arrogance on other levels. 

In Odum’s words, 

Because the real world operates simultaneously on many scales, models should include all scales pertinent to the phenomena of interest. There is a tendency, through long habit and the desire to simplify, to concentrate on models of one scale. No scale is more basic than another, but people concentrating their work think of their scale as special. However, limiting the scale of view limits understanding, because every scale is part of the scale above and composed of the smaller scaled items below. We cannot understand one scale without studying its relation to that above and below. Control on the longer time scale comes from the larger scale to the right [in Odum’s system diagrams], but understanding of the parts comes from the organization of their relationships… When emphasis on looking smaller is carried to the extreme, people on one scale deny there is any science at the next largest scale. Many people are taught that looking for purpose is not scientific, that teleology is bad. However, what is viewed as purpose of a unit at one scale is its part in mechanisms of the next larger scale. Avoiding purpose is really hiding from the larger scale, which controls the longer scale of events.
(Modeling for All Scales: An Introduction to System Simulation, p.14 )

What I was reacting to was a result of what I came to see as a bastardisation of the promise of systems ecology and its replacement with reductionism during the neoliberal revolution, which, amongst other things, has eliminated the funding for energy accounting research.

Parochial scientific specialisation

But beyond the conceptual battles between holism and reductionism in science, I was also identifying what I thought was the intellectual inbreeding through specialisation well before the internet allowed scientists to only interact with those who could and did peer review their own work. By international travel to the conferences central to one’s career, I saw how scientists could socialise with others who understood their arcane language and concepts. I remember describing scientists coming together at the same conferences as being like a bunch of old men and women in a remote mountain village dealing with some challenge, with the power of parochialism and groupthink, despite coming from the four corners of the world and being from different cultures. They would all be highly sensitive to the collective in considering a new idea which would be resisted until they all jumped together (once the evidence was overwhelming). I remember describing this process on one occasion and someone said, ‘Oh, you mean Thomas Kuhn’s Scientific paradigm thesis,’ about which I had never heard but clearly I was thinking along the same lines. What I found interesting was given the status of Kuhn’s idea, it seemed to me that in the over two decades since its publication it had not made much of a dent on the problem. Since then, I have seen the problem accelerate with the internet as every discipline turned into a self-referencing echo chamber despite all the talk about interdisciplinary studies. 

Limitations of being a plant nerd

While I recall strongly articulating my critiques of the perils of specialisation to any who would listen in the 1980s, writing up those memories now brings up an earlier story from not long before I met Bill, and like that meeting with him, the humble rabbit features in this one. 

A bunch of Environmental Design students were out and about on the newly set up campus of the College of Advanced Education, Mt Nelson to see what we could learn about recolonisation of the site by bushland plants that had formed a relatively intact flora before the college construction. Our leader in this task was Phil Simmons, a petite woman of strong character, landscape architect and Environmental Design staffer who in the late 1950s had been a pioneer in the use of local indigenous species in her designs. We were a bunch of unashamed plant nerds trying to understand why some species were returning but others not. I include myself in that group as I was at the time going through the arcane details of plant taxonomy to learn all the native plants along with commonly planted exotic species. 

But the suggestions by the senior landscape architecture students and Phil herself that complex microclimate and moisture regimes were responsible for determining which species had returned and which had not, seemed absurd to me. The active rabbit breeding mounds with fresh droppings suggested to me that palatability of regenerating species to rabbits was a better explanation. I pointed this out and was probably none too subtle. Maybe it led to me being marked down as a smartarse. 

I recall this as an early lesson in how we all tend to explain the world in terms of the subjects we understand and that specialisation in knowledge and work leaves us vulnerable to missing what those with more general knowledge and experience of the world would spot first up. For that group of plant nerds, ecology was all about the plants and their relationship to soil and climate, missing the fact that animals are powerful in determining what gets to grow and what doesn’t. As Mollison came to say in the Designers’ Manual more than a decade later, ‘everything gardens’; not least the humble rabbit maintaining its lawns against invading bush but in the process eliminating the sweetest and most nutritious plants from those same lawns. 

Famous to 15 other people

By the late 1980s, with the second wave of environmentalism boosting interest in permaculture, I would occasionally have people say to me, ‘Oh, you are David Holmgren, you’re famous,’ to which I would reply ‘Well sort of. You know how Andy Warhol (in the 1960s) said “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”; well my version of that is that in the future, everyone will be famous to 15 other people, and yes I am famous to more than 15 people but you get the idea.’ More than a decade before the rise of social media, I was recognising the trends driving us towards networked communities distributed across space and perhaps time (with better video and other records), at the same time that geographic communities were withering in the face of globalisation. The connection between this story about minor celebrity and the intellectual inbreeding of science should be clear: each scientist is famous to 15 others in their self-reinforcing circle. The social and cultural echo-chambers that are such hot topics for ordinary folk have not left science unscathed. 

Reflection

And so I look back with hindsight and find myself surprised that over time I more and more accepted climate science models that were both reductionist in their construction and developed by communities of scientists working in increasingly hyper-networked worlds, especially after the formation of the IPCC to advise the world’s governments about climate change. In retrospect, I now see this intellectual inbreeding within scientific disciplines as equally pernicious in the collapse of scientific culture as the corruption due to dependence on money and power to practise science in the current context.