Listen to David reading this piece here:

This story began as one of my longform essays, which I started on our southern hemisphere Spring Equinox in September 2024. Over a couple of months, it grew into a manuscript that charts how weather and climate have shaped my life and articulation of permaculture: a conceptual framework informed by deep time and ancestral wisdom towards resilient and regenerative futures for ourselves and nature. Now more of a book than an essay, here at Holmgren Design we have decided to publish it in 16 parts over as many fortnights as a snapshot of my thinking, without further reflection or updating. We are also exploring the possibility of it being printed as a book like my Future Scenarios work nearly two decades ago.

David Holmgren
Autumn Equinox 2025

Part One: The Climatic Genesis of Permaculture

On this 50th anniversary of my life-determining meeting with Bill Mollison in Spring 1974, I am drawn to reflect on my half century of weathering the conceptual wilds that have grown around the concept of climate change. Maybe it’s the early equinoxial gales roaring through the thirty-metre-tall blue gums we planted as a southwest shelter and sun trap to Melliodora over three decades ago that is inspiring me to start on this writing journey not knowing where it will lead. Maybe it’s the news that further afield ‘cyclone-like winds’ are wreaking havoc across Tasmania, Victoria and NSW.

The spring (southern hemisphere) equinox is a time of change, challenge, reflection, letting go and renewal for us each year just as it was, six months transposed, for our Celtic ancestors. The early Christians then used this time to ground the story of the resurrection of Christ. This making sense of our own indigenous and inherited foundational myths, in a new land never ceded by the original Australians, continues to be a fraught one. That Indigenous Australians collectively husbanded the continent to create ‘the biggest estate on earth’ over many thousands of years under the most unreliable climatic regimes on the planet is itself part of this story.

The Spring and Autumn equinoxes are also a time to remember the unity of the earth and its diverse places and peoples. They mark twelve hours of sun and twelve hours night everywhere on earth at the exact same time even if the time and date wanders back and forth somewhat each year. As such they should be a time to celebrate world unity, and the image from space of the fertile but fragile earth that was so iconic to the emergence of the modern environmental movement, of which permaculture is one thread.

All these things come together for me to launch my own personal story of climate change and a letting go of parts of that story that I no longer find useful. As such this is something of a death and resurrection story. But it is also a long and winding road over these decades of wholehearted engagement with the forces of nature, that despite the bubble of the technosphere, continue to command our lives and consequently, our attention.

Weather and climate shaping our world

I suppose I should first clarify something about the relationship between weather and climate.
Weather is what happens in the atmosphere of a place or region on a daily, monthly or yearly basis. It is inherently variable and ranges from benign to catastrophic. Climate refers to the larger patterns of weather that roughly repeat themselves over the years and, in most places on earth other than the equatorial tropics, show a distinct and repeating seasonal cycle over each year. The further from the equator, the stronger the influence of the sun position and duration in creating summer and winter and their intermediaries, spring and autumn. But a plethora of other bioregional forces are at work to create the distinct patterns of solar radiation, temperature, humidity, wind and precipitation that characterise different climates around the world and the degree to which climates, like weather, follow regular patterns or are more erratic.

Climate is perhaps the most powerful determinant in the evolution of ecosystems, especially in the terrestrial domain which life only managed to colonise 400 million years ago after thousands of millions in the oceanic domain where the water medium provides a buffer against the wild oscillations of the atmospheric weather.

As well as determining the fundamental structure of terrestrial ecosystems and the evolution of their member species, climate has been the most powerful force in the spread and evolution of our hominid ancestors and the progressive adaptation of homo sapiens’ lifeways to almost all of the earth’s diverse terrestrial climates. Archaeological evidence in Australia suggests the sandy deserts were the last biome to be occupied on a regular basis around 10,000 years ago as the climates of the continent and the world settled into their interglacial patterns, a subject to which I will return.

The power of climate in shaping the modern world is so clearly emphasised by ecological historian Alfred Crosby through his concept of ‘New Europes’. In Ecological Imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (1986) he explains why Europeans displaced indigenous peoples to create new European societies in North America, parts of southern South America and Australia and New Zealand. While being successful at colonising and subjugating indigenous peoples in other places, Europeans never managed to displace those majorities. Climate rather than culture or technology was the determinant. In the successful New Europes, the crops and livestock the colonists brought with them thrived and the diseases that came along for the ride were much more devastating to the indigenous populations than what the locals passed on to the invaders.

For example, with most of Africa and India, the crown jewel of the British empire, being in the tropics, they never sustained large white settler populations.

Mexico and South Africa are climatic grey zones that support Crosby’s thesis. While Mexico is in the tropics, the main plateau that sustained the Aztec civilisation with agriculture based on corn, beans and squash is over 2000 m above sea level with a mild climate year-round. Even so, with this weird climate (for Europeans), it took until the 1930s for natural increase of the mixed indigenous and settler populations, along with later migration from Europe, for the population to recover the estimated 30 million of Mexico prior to the arrival of Cortez and his band of desperados. Ecological historians estimate up to 90% loss of population largely from introduced diseases across the Americas.

In South Africa, the Mediterranean climate allowed the Dutch (Boer) settlers to survive if not thrive, but not displace the indigenous Bantu to any degree and even the technologically powerful British at their peak of empire were always ruling over a majority black population.

In China, Europeans never really managed to colonise let alone populate the country even though the north has a more or less ‘temperate’ climate with a distinct summer and winter. However it is extremely harsh, more like Russia in its continental nature, another place that western Europeans have repeatedly invaded but never succeeded in colonising. Perhaps China and Russia are examples where cultural strength of the natives combined with less-than-ideal climate determined the outcome.

Since reading Lewis Mumford’s The City in History (1961) in my youth, I have always found ecological history a great antidote to both the ‘great man’ ideology and ‘cultural determinants’ theories of history that still prevail in academia and the general public’s understanding of human history and future prospects.

Drought-proofing the home patch

I remember childhood summers at Bicton on the Swan River in Western Australia avoiding the heat and squinting my blue eyes in the harsh light, as well as holiday escapes to the cool forests and south coast of the state. Maybe it was being born in an unairconditioned hospital during a WA heat wave, or my Scandinavian heritage, but I never felt at home in the dry heat of WA.

I think I was 10 when I came to the shocking understanding that far more people around the world lived where it rained in the summer rather than the winter, an early realisation of how climate must shape who we are. I was yet to grapple with the concept that for people in the equatorial tropics, the concept of summer and winter or even seasons at all has no meaning.

I spent 1973 hitchhiking around Australia and fell in love with Tasmania. In 1974 I moved to Hobart to join the Environmental Design school under the inspired leadership of architect Barry McNeil. So it was the climate, both intellectual and meteorological, that consolidated the love affair.

After moving into Mollison’s home and articulating the path ahead in my freewheeling studies in Environmental Design that led to permaculture, I returned to visit family in suburban Bicton and made a strategic intervention in the garden. The sandy soils of the Perth coastal plain are notoriously hard to keep moist in the long hot dry summers. I thought I would try to counter that with some macro mulching, an early permaculture technique Mollison and I were already using to smother perennial weeds on the sticky boulder clay at his place on the foot slopes of Mt Wellington (Kunanyi) in Hobart. At home I ordered a truckload of Jarrah sawdust and a smaller truckload of pure chook manure, which I encased in the sawdust to capture the off-gassing ammonia (and avoid complaints from the neighbours). Before returning to Tasmania I spread a layer of the manure covered by a thick layer of sawdust on all the perennial beds of the garden. In addition to the mulching effect, I hoped the sawdust might turn into long lasting soil humus that would better store water and nutrients.

The next years were tumultuous ones for me and my family. After selling the family bookshop business in 1975, my father died from cancer in ’76 (aged 58). In ’77 my mother Venie was off travelling through the central deserts to the eastern states in her campervan, my brother Gerard was the sole resident at Wrexham St during the intensifying drought that led to Perth’s first water restriction in ’78. I was in Hobart co-creating permaculture, which set the course of my life.

One neighbour reprimanded my brother for letting the dead lawn go through a natural succession to a tall winter field of wild oats that attracted many pigeons. The neighbour further suggested the garden was a disgrace to the memory of our dead father; a very bizarre accusation, given Jack Holmgren’s leisure habits: he read the New Statesman and other newspapers he subscribed to, listened to the cricket or played his saxophone (to practise for Saturday night dance band gigs).

My father’s gardening mostly consisted of a seasonal prune of the grapevines. As far as the suburban weekend ritual of mowing the lawn was concerned, that had been outsourced to professionals in our early childhood by my mother, instead of asking her husband to exercise with the push-mower around the extensive lawns on the full ‘quarter acre’ block. Given he had no mechanical skills at all, getting a petrol mower, like most people in the street, seemed like a bad idea.

When I returned in 1979 with my mother to renovate and sell the family home, the garden was a wilderness but almost all of the garden shrubs and trees that I mulched had survived, despite the lack of water, while the neighbouring gardens hadn’t faired so well through the ‘cold turkey’ cut off of reticulated water supply. I also remember returning to visit a friend’s now-abandoned backyard vegie garden where, in 1974, he had created black moisture holding soil using lawn clippings from his gardening business. Heat, and the relentless UV radiation of several drought years after he had moved on, had turned that moisture- and nutrient-holding organic soil back into the same grey sand as everywhere else. It was a revelation that the effort to build soil humus, the primary strategy for any organic gardener, can just as easily be reversed by the climate cards that nature deals us. The hardwood sawdust at Wrexham St had created much more long-lasting humus than my friend’s lawn clippings but on the other hand, the soils had developed an extreme hydrophobia, a problem I came to understand more deeply over later years.

I see those observations and interactions as providing early lessons about planning for harsh climates and the potential of soil as our best hedge against climate change and variability. In the later language of the climate story, organic and permaculture soil building strategies had the potential to simultaneously sequester carbon where we needed it most, reduce our use of fossil fuels and their derivatives (including fertilisers and machinery) and adapt to emerging shifts and extreme events. However the processes for success are subtle and divergent without fixed and simple recipes that could be rolled out by governments and corporations irrespective of country and context.

Current reflections

Maybe the climate change story was doomed from the start by not focusing on facilitating these no regrets, bottom-up responses and accepting a graceful shift to what is currently called a ‘degrowth economy’. Instead, there were massive efforts to nail down the global climate system in reductionist scientific models of enormous complexity and the endless talk and platitudes about recycling, greener consumption and the weightless economy. When the scientific community was finally convinced and/or corralled into alignment, the fight for the future direction of civilisation began in earnest, between two versions of endless growth on a finite planet, one powered by fossil fuels with nuclear the solution after eventual depletion, the other by a vast battery of distributed new and emerging renewable sources covering the land and sea. To the extent that the biological land and seascape solutions to absorb carbon are part of the picture, they too are being bastardised such that the solutions are turned into new larger problems.

With the battle for control of policy more or less over, the apparent need for urgent and powerful action from national and global governance to address the ‘climate emergency’ is now bypassing the incremental, diverse and even muddling-along processes of free markets and democratic decision-making based on values shared with past and future generations. Instead, what I see unfolding reflects command economies of war, and existential drives to power, typically associated with communism and fascism. My story weaves these threads of personal observation and action on the ground, revelling in and weathering the seasonal cycle, with my own evolving big picture interpretation of the science, geopolitics and environmentalism of climate change.

Limits To Growth and the Whitlam government

At that pivotal time of my coming of age, the western world was reeling under the impact of the first major recession since the Second World War, triggered by the oil crisis of 1973 when the price rose from $5 to $40 a barrel. With its own ‘giant’ oil field of Bass Strait providing much of the country’s then more modest needs, Australia was not so affected. But it was also a time of political and economic turmoil following the election of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972 after 23 years of conservative rule. The constitutional crisis that developed from that turmoil led to the Governor General dismissing the government in November 1975.

The majority of Australians saw the inflation and other problems of those years as the fault of the Labor government rather than global factors, so they elected the Liberals, under the leadership of Fraser, in the election of ’76. Many on the political left later came to understand the ‘Dismissal’ as partly connected to Whitlam playing hardball in the negotiations for the renewal of the lease on Pine Gap, the most important communications spying base for the CIA outside the USA. Whitlam was angling to get a better share of the intelligence through the Five Eyes spying alliance and threatened to tell the Australian public the function of the base. The records certainly show the CIA was freaking out that Whitlam was ‘out of control’. The trigger for the crisis was the blocking of ‘supply’ preventing the functions of government by the Fraser opposition who controlled the Senate. That control was only achieved after the untimely death of a Labor senator from Queensland and breaking of all conventions by the Bjelke-Petersen state government in appointing a non-Labor replacement senator who promptly voted with the opposition thus precipitating the crisis. Again, some of the left, at least in retrospect, point to the suspicious set of circumstances by which the most radical reformist government in Australia’s history was deposed.

To Mollison and I, along with many environmentalists, scientists, geopolitical strategists and even ordinary folk, the oil crisis was a foretaste of what the Limits to Growth Report to the Club of Rome the previous year had modelled as the most likely constriction of the global human project by about 2020. Those limits were many, but they were modelled in two broad ways: the limits of resources and the limits of what the systems modellers called ‘sinks’. Certainly the 1973 and 1979 oil crises dramatically underlined for everyone just how dependent all of the affluent world was on cheap and reliable supplies of liquid fuel and myriad other essentials of modern life and manufacture made from oil, including electricity supply in many countries.

Like many other creative outcomes of that first great wave of environmental solutions in the 1970s, permaculture was predicated on a ‘world of less’ being the most likely human future. We saw that reduction in material wealth would be primarily driven by depletion of all non-renewable resources, but especially the king resource of oil. Despite the rapid shifts during the 1970s crises and the more recent and much trumpeted renewable energy transition, oil is only down from 44% of global energy supply in 1971 to 31% in 2024. In absolute terms, oil extraction and consumption has increased from 230 exajoules to 606 exajoules over those years. However that massive extraction is supporting a population that has more than doubled, giving about a 20% increase per person when averaged for the whole world.

Decades later my research about the oil crises and why they didn’t lead to a massive structural shift to a ‘Conserver Society’ (see the work of Ted Trainer), highlighted many factors that we didn’t understand at the time. Among them was the ‘loans affair scandal’ in Australia that led to the political opposition blocking money supply bills in the Senate and so triggering the constitutional crisis of 1975. The so-called scandal was an outcome of the oil crisis, the billions of petro-dollars floating around global money markets and the rise of ‘resource nationalism’ by which countries with the resources that the world needed were trying to use the rise in oil and other commodity prices to leverage a better deal from the rich, consuming countries. Australia, like Canada and New Zealand was, and remains, in the unusual situation of being up there with the rich, but, like most poor countries, its economy depends on the export of non-renewable resources such as coal, gas, iron ore and other metals as well as unsustainably managed (if theoretically renewable) resources such as food, fibre and timber.

Rex Connor, the then federal minister for Minerals and Energy, was seeking to borrow 4 billion of these petro-dollars through unorthodox channels to develop the vast NW shelf offshore gas reserves, and build pipelines across the continent to further develop the manufacturing economy, value-adding to the natural resources, rather than Australia continuing to be subject to the ups and mostly downs of commodity markets through which the rich countries exploited the poor.

My understanding is that the leaders of other commodity exporting countries were waiting with baited breath to see how this bold move of Australia would play out after the coup against the socialist government in similarly resource-rich Chile two years before. Historians might argue whether the dismissal of the Whitlam government was one of the 50 odd soft power coups by the USA around the world since the end of World War II, but when the corporates did develop the vast resources of the NW shelf, it included building the new expensive gas liquefaction plants and transport ships to sell the gas at substantially higher prices to boost the Japanese, South Korean and later Chinese industrialisation rather than Australian industry as envisaged by Rex Connor. It was not until the rise in oil prices post-2000 that resource nationalism was again an element in geopolitics. This was led by the rise of Chávez in Venezuela and, most importantly, Putin in Russia, which is by far the greatest energy and natural resource superpower of the world.

Back in 1974, ‘the limits of sinks’ was a harder factor to fully grasp, but essentially it was the ability of the global environment to absorb all the wastes from the human project that would limit and ultimately lead to a reduction in human population. In other words, it was all about pollution, that at the time included traditional industrial pollutants such as sulphur dioxide, more generalised acid rain from coal fired power stations, amongst other sources, a broad spectrum of heavy metals and other elemental toxins, chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT and Dieldrin and other persistent chemicals, and of course nuclear contamination from nuclear weapons testing, growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons and expanding numbers of nuclear power stations around the world. All of this was overshadowed by the Cold War, driven by deep ideological division between America and the Soviet Union, threatening nuclear war and nuclear winter.

Climatic stability of the interglacial epoch: prospects for humanity

At this time, greenhouse gas induced climate change was just one theory discussed in esoteric circles of climate scientists, but the potential for rapid climate change was all part of the big picture thinking that informed permaculture. The paleoclimatic evidence was quite clear that over the last several million years in which hominids had evolved, the earth had gone through 10 cycles from ice age to interglacial. Homo sapiens had developed complex cultures through the turbulent climatic millennia of the last ice age of around 100,000 years but had room to move as needed in response to change. It was not until the more benign and remarkably stable climates of the current interglacial epoch beginning around 12,000 years ago did agriculture, and what is called civilisation, develop. Most startling was that strong evidence that the ice ages lasted about 100,000 while interglacials lasted 10,000 years plus or minus 2000 years. Our current interglacial was coming up to 12,000 years of age already.

One of the most extraordinary influences on my thinking at the time was an interview by Robyn Williams on the ABC Science Show with Rhys Jones (c. 1975), the archaeologist and ecologist who coined the term ‘firestick farming’ (in 1972) to describe Indigenous land use in Australia. I remember that interview for an extraordinary assertion beyond Jones’ idea of firestick farming, which was already a part of the discussions between Mollison and myself. He suggested that a relatively simple and generalist technology (akin to indigenous ways) would be better adapted to the irregularities of the coming ice age, than the very complex and specialised technology of modern civilisation and that a forward-looking mature society would start the process of developing a simplified, robust generalist technology interface with nature to provide for human needs through the tens of thousands of years of unreliable ice age climates facing humanity. For me, that interview remains one of the most influential ideas in crafting permaculture for humanity to surf the uncertainties of long-term futures.

Creatively responding to future climate change

As the work in creating the first permaculture garden and articulating the concept progressed through 1975, Mollison and I had a strong focus on microclimatic (site) modifications to allow a greater diversity of climatically marginal species to be grown in the cool damp Tasmanian climate. But the permaculture focus on diversity was also a hedge against future climate change.

In the manuscript published in 1978 as Permaculture One we wrote:

In the event of a definite climatic trend, permacultural species both buffer the change, as moderators of local climate, and provide species for extension of a more suitable assembly for increased cold, dry, or steamy conditions. At present, many of the species that would be needed to replace others in any such change are not commonly under cultivation or established in temperate areas. As in other factors, the principles of permaculture permit some plants at low yield to occupy space, trading-off yield now for stability in a changeable future. [p. 16, bold added]

Thus design for resilience in the face of climate change was built into permaculture from the beginning without any certainty of what direction the climate might take.

Microclimate: ameliorating what nature serves up

The focus on microclimate was informed by the classic German text, The Climate Near the Ground by Geiger. Based on the literature, our observations and initial experiments at Mollison’s place on the footslopes of Mt Wellington, we saw that it was possible, by careful design, to modify the microclimate of a site to increase the diversity of useful species that could grow and thrive. The 28 pages of ‘6.0 Site Planning’ in Permaculture One include 16 pages devoted to microclimate and how to modify to advantage in cool maritime climates like Tasmania. It is slightly embarrassing how many of the charts, graphs and diagrams in that section were (acknowledged) reproductions from Geiger but the alternate designs I did to show bad and good microclimate modifications through farm tree shelterbelts were fundamental in influencing the designs I crafted for the Central Victorian landscapes a decade later in Trees on the Treeless Plains.

While shelter against wind is the most obvious way in which microclimate is changed for the better, irrigation in Mediterranean climates is perhaps the greatest transformation of growing potential, even if efforts to do this beyond the garden scale can often create more problems and not be sustainable through drought periods and change in the wider bioregional or global climate.

Design against disaster

Closely related to the focus on microclimate modifications was the idea of design to mitigate the effects of weather-generated natural disasters. The south east of Tasmania is a microcosm of the south east of the continent, the most fire vulnerable region in the whole world. Living in the house on the footslope of Mt Wellington, Hobart, that Bill Mollison saved from the catastrophic bushfires of 1967 was seminal to the larger strategy that permaculture design should include consideration of natural disasters that are relevant in different climates and landscapes. From those beginnings, design against bushfire became central to my life’s work with permaculture including the connection between climate change and bushfire risk in Australia and around the world. Whatever the climate, extreme weather events of many kinds set limits to the resilience of nature, agriculture and engineered infrastructures including housing. This theme of weather and climate extremes, more than averages, as determinants in all efforts at resilient and regenerative design has been a recurring one for me over the decades.

While I was back in the West, mulching the garden at Wrexham St, Cyclone Tracy devastated Darwin on Christmas Day. I had spent some time camped on Lameroo Beach in Darwin the year before, so the pictures in the newspapers of the destructive power of the wind stuck in my mind but the stories about shortages of infant formula in the aftermath also caught my attention. Because mothers had increasingly been discouraged from breastfeeding, what should have been the most self-sufficient of functions post-disaster, became one of the most urgent needs. This highlighted to me that it wasn’t just poverty, war and other causes of disadvantage that could amplify any human vulnerability to natural disasters and more general energy descent stresses. Affluence itself was creating multigenerational dependencies and vulnerabilities unknown to our ancestors. Fifty years on, another two generations of novel dependencies, vulnerabilities and disabilities plague the population.

The next time I was in Darwin was 1999 and I noticed how very few of the houses had been rebuilt following the traditional open airy tropical model because the new improved cyclone standards made it cheaper to build a concrete block house on a slab. Without constant air conditioning these houses are uninhabitable, creating further unnecessary vulnerabilities to climatic extremes or, alternatively, may lead to the Indigenous habit of living outside under a shady tree.

This tired brown land

The next milestone in my reaction to thinking about possible climate futures was during a visit to Maryborough Central Victoria in the summer of 1978 for a permaculture workshop. This was organised by Terry White, who in the same year had created the desktop published Permaculture Journal (before computers). After years of becoming enamoured of, and acclimatised to, the lush green Tasmania landscapes, I remember being horrified by the desiccated volcanic plains north of Melbourne, then appreciating the touch of green around Trentham and mostly appreciating the avenue of spreading chestnuts on the Midland Highway outside Daylesford. Weather records suggest it was more or less an average summer, but travelling with my mother in her campervan home of those years, I remember saying that the Daylesford chestnuts suggested a place of refuge and secure food. However the goldfields country that unfolded as we headed north and west left me questioning whether permaculture ‘gardens of Eden’ could ever be created in these landscapes.

At the workshop we were taken to a 5-acre bush property in the Paddy Ranges outside Maryborough and I was asked to suggest permaculture solutions. I looked at the concrete like barren soil between the stunted coppice regrowth of box and ironbark eucalypts and wondered if a dam built on the property could collect enough water to create and maintain a garden and refuge against the ever-present threat of bushfire through an average, let alone an extreme drought, summer.

Over those next few years, my deeper engagement with ancient Australian landscapes and soils and the dramatic contrasts in geologically youthful New Zealand reminded me of the limits to our capacity to transcend landscape and climate limits. In particular I came to appreciate how the unreliability, more than aridity, of Australian climates, beyond small pockets in the south west and south east of the continent, was critical in limiting the capacity of the continent to support agriculture, perhaps even permaculture versions with greater use of perennial and tree crops beyond the household-scale.

Remineralising the Earth

Terry White’s insightful work in the Permaculture Journal mostly focused on solutions and one of the big ideas around in those years was the work of Hamaker suggesting soil remineralisation as a hedge against the coming ice age. His theory was that the mineral fertility created by the rock grinding continental glaciers of the northern hemisphere create the abundant water and nutrient holding soils that supported agriculture and growth in human numbers. My time in NZ certainly primed me for this picture of world carrying capacity. But Hamaker suggested this fertility pulse depletes after around 10,000 years and disease and decay in forests leads to massive fires that rage around the earth emitting carbon dioxide and other gases that scientists understood could create a greenhouse effect warming the planet. Counterintuitively, Hamaker suggested this surge in temperature drives the global climate system with more evaporation at low latitudes leading to larger winter snowfalls at previously semi-arid high latitudes. Once large enough winter snow accumulation fails to melt in the following summer, the beginning of an ice age is triggered with high reflectivity keeping soils cold and the icepack slowly building from year to year.

The discovery of woolly mammoths frozen in the tundra with grass in their mouths showed they had been caught in blizzards and snowdrifts beyond their capacity to clear with their massive bodies and snow sweeping tusks. That there was no melting leading to decay for tens of thousands of years suggests climate change can be rapid and sustained rather than gradual and back and forth.

The idea that global-scale soil remineralisation could counter the enhanced greenhouse effect from burning fossil fuels, avoid global forest conflagrations and maintain soil, plant, animal and human health while avoiding an otherwise inevitable ice age, was an attractive one from a permaculture perspective. While Hamaker’s fringe science ideas got a lot of attention at the time including support from the early guru of eco-design, Buckminster Fuller, interest faded in the 1980s as the science of climate change shifted towards warming rather than cooling. Nevertheless interest in soil remineralisation as part of organic and regenerative agricultures predates Hamaker and has persisted over the decades.

Current Reflections

From a permaculture perspective, the use of fossil fuel powered rock crushing and transportation to rebalance and build soil fertility is, like earthmoving to create dams and other water-harvesting structures, an example of optimal use of fossil fuels. The role of natural rock minerals in supporting agricultural productivity is now better appreciated but its potential role in stabilising wild ecosystems against emergent threats is still little explored. In the language of the ‘climate emergency’, remineralisation is a benign ‘no regrets’ form of geoengineering to increase the capacity of soils to sequester more carbon.

It is easy to dismiss ideas from the fringes and the past that appear to have been discredited by later science, but this story shows how there might be elements of truth, or simply stimuli to think laterally, in many different explanations of the past and future prospects.

In Part Two: ‘Life In the Weather’ I will be recalling how my life exposed to the weather and creating permaculture cross-fertilised with my early critiques of renewable energy and reductionist science, all informed by Howard Odum’s holistic articulation of systems ecology.