Reflections on Fifty years of Permaculture with David Holmgren

This is a transcription of our audio interview with David Holmgren, released July 9, 2023. As a transcription, the language can sometimes be a bit difficult to follow, but this fully captures the authentic voices of the speakers. A special thanks to Eddie for transcribing!

PPA: Thanks for tuning in to the Poor Proles Almanac. Once again, this is Andy, and today we have a very special episode, one that I wouldn't have ever imagined happening, to be honest. We're joined by one of the founders of permaculture, David Holmgren, to talk about the origins, evolution, and future of permaculture, and dive into some of the messier topics we've explored on this show, such as invasive species, poor PDC training, land back, and indigenous knowledge theft, among others. I'm pretty sure this is our longest episode to date and for good reason. We covered a lot of information here offering different perspectives and often many answers were multifaceted which ultimately meant we couldn't discuss each of these points separately.

I wanted to quickly address them or at least in some cases put them into context here. The first is regarding the concept of ecological fitting which was first proposed in 1985 by Daniel Janzen. And the second is the development of agriculture and high fertility soil. So first off, David brings up this concept of ecological fitting several times in the interview when discussing the utility of invasive species, which is a thorny issue within and around the permaculture community.

To describe what ecological fitting actually is, we can think of ecosystems as having these mosaics of species that interlock, where species are always evolving to fill every gap or niche with life. Ecological fitting explains that some novel species, meaning invasive species, can fit and connect into existing ecosystems by filling gaps that aren't currently occupied or replacing species already present. This often pushes the existing ecosystem members to begin exploiting new gaps through adaptation in order to escape the pressure of the novel species.

Researchers think these adaptations might be the re-expression  of older ancestral traits which resurface as conditions require. Insect studies have provided credence to the ecological fitting model. Insect-plant relationships exemplify tight ecological relationships, where a single insect species might only feed on a single plant species. When swapping the host plants of two closely related insect species, the insects are capable of feeding on the novel host plant despite never having encountered it before. In that sense, they potentially are able to fill each other's role in the ecosystem by quote-unquote fitting into that same slot.

Now, we've also seen that specialist parasites, for example, can persist for extended periods of time, utilizing suboptimal hosts, and may colonize distantly related hosts by what you might consider a stepping stone process. However, this novel idea of ecosystem fitting isn't a smooth and seamless process. Evidence has shown that non-native species can cause massive selection pressure on native species, altering their functions within their native ecosystem. This obviously has potentially cascading and negative effects.

That's not to say systems outside of invasive species pressure are static, but rather that when we talk about this idea of ecological fitting, it isn't biased towards or against invasive species, but rather helps us further understand the implications invasives have on ecosystems. While the ecological fitting model provides hope for a world in which invasives are unfortunately a permanent part of our world. Our research in the space is still pretty rudimentary and inconclusive regarding its impacts on diversity, and that's a best-case scenario.

Now, community ecology and phylogenetic biology may be the scientific domains where critiques of this fitting model may one day emerge. These fields focus their studies on the systems and relationships of distinct species and how they operate together. The researchers can provide a lens to examine how effective novel species can fit into these ecosystems, specifically how rapidly and how completely species adapt, and how the existing ecosystem members shift to accommodate them. Given infinite time, all species will co-evolve and, you know, learn to work together to create stable ecosystems.

The question in my mind is whether these systems will form in human timescales, and how destabilized our landscapes and foodways will be during this transition period of novel ecosystem formation. Life currently on Earth may suffer tremendously while we wait for these new landscapes to stabilize. For example, we can look at a species like Phragmites, which you may know as common reed, which despite being in the United States for 400 years, hasn't developed any new novel relationships with native insects, and has actually only been documented to support five native insects.

Further, for example, in 40 of the salt and brackish marshes of Connecticut's tidal wetlands, here in New England, for example, there were significantly fewer state-listed, endangered, threatened, or of special concern bird species in common reed rather than the native shortgrass vegetation, one that's dominated by bird species in common reed versus shortgrass vegetation, which is dominated by salt metal, rush, saltgrass, and cordgrass. The average number of bird species was also significantly lower in common reed than shortgrass marshes as well. Well, the takeaway is that simply fitting into the ecological system isn't inherently a good or alternatively bad thing.

Over millennia, these adaptations, like I said, will form, but that's not much comfort to the species like these birds or humans or any others who depend on pre-existing ecosystems for survival. That's not even to mention cultural and historical implications as species loss continues under the current pressures of climate change and ecosystem degradation? The short answer is that it's complicated, right?

Ecological fitting is simply a tool that helps us understand how ecosystems form and shift over time. It's not a defense of invasive species, but rather an explanation as to why certain species seem to play better with native plants or move into these spaces better than others, and offers some insight into how relationships in novel ecosystems might play out. Community ecology and phylogenetic biology comparatively offer a more careful approach to the long-term impacts of these relationships, including the direct human impacts that can result from these destabilized systems.

Now, moving on, the next point I want to cover is in regards to human agriculture, beginning in places with high fertility. David goes into this when talking about the idea that ecosystems want to become more fertile, and he makes this case using the maximum power principle. While a complex and nuanced concept, the basic idea of the maximum power principle in ecology is that successful species are those which are best at accumulating energy and can then, you know, meet their survival needs.

Now, in many permaculture circles, this translates into a mantra which argues that any photosynthesis is a power inflow, so Japanese knotweed here in the northeast or phragmites, this is good because it's creating photosynthesis. That means these invasives are a net positive because they produce massive amounts of biomass. Obviously, this can be a very troublesome argument, and not one I'm looking to dive into at this moment, but again, I just want to simply contextualize Holmgren's arguments for folks not familiar with these terms, because it's very easy to hear a bunch of new terms and assume that they know something you don't, when it's a concept you are probably familiar with or can understand fairly easily outside of this specific terminology.

And that brings me to the last point of this, why we were talking about the maximum power principle. He talks about this idea that soil fertility is based on the maximum power principle. While it's true that most agriculture did develop in high fertility soil, the story is often more complex, as we have explored in some of the Prol Model series, that indigenous people around the world have organized in alignment with their own native ecosystems.

For example, here in my own backyard, our low-nutrient ecosystem supports numerous endemic species found nowhere else in the world. Yet, these same low-nutrient ecosystems supported human population densities similar to most rural suburbs today. Further, many of these unique low-fertility ecosystems offer this genetic diversity adapted to thriving in these inhospitable places to most other species, and this creates these unique traits that we may need to rely on in the future. So the biggest contention in my mind is this, why didn't low nitrogen environments die out thousands and thousands of years ago?

These ecosystems have thrived for millennia, despite the fact nutrients can travel through species like nitrogen fixers, yet they didn't change. Additionally, both ethical and ecological questions about whether or not these landscapes, because of the soil type, hydrology, among a number of other factors, can actually support a healthy or stable novel ecosystem. The alternative might simply look no different than much of our disturbed woodlands that are filled with invasives and offering little diversity or resilience.

Lastly, I think it's important as you listen to this interview to pay attention to how the arguments he makes relate to one another, because I find these really insightful for understanding the fundamentals of how permaculture operates, in particular in how it advocates for human stewardship and really what that looks like. All of that said, I think having different perspectives on these complex and very subjective subjects is really important. It enables us to come to more complete and accurate understandings of the world and how we can best relate to it and fully understand other perspectives. That will only become more and more important as the ecosystem and climate shift further and further out of whack and we have to come up with new solutions.

Also, as a human, coming to the table with people with dissimilar perspectives with genuine openness helps us better understand the foundations of our own perspectives and the emotional reasoning which may underlie them. Listening with respect and honest attention allows us to be more compassionate for folks who have different views than our own and build bigger, more healthy human ecosystems where we can thrive and build resilience. That's what I believe the core of this conversation is truly about. Understanding different perspectives in a very polarizing vacuum.

Hopefully you all will enjoy this conversation. A huge thank you to David for coming on. A massive thank you to the folks who have helped me put together the content for this. And a special shout out to Dangy, Richard, Thread, Tommy, Thrift, Baby, Science, Born, Tetral, and Frog for all your help organizing this content with the Proles team. Your work and your support cannot be understated. Thank you. Enjoy the episode.

Music.

PPA: David, thanks so much for coming on. I don't think you need an introduction. Most folks listening are going to be familiar with your work. How are you doing today? Good, good. And it's good to be speaking to you from summer here at Meliodora in the Southern Hemisphere to you in winter. Yeah, yeah. We're both enjoying mild climates at the moment, for better or worse. I think probably worse in my case. You know, it's nice during the day, but it's not nice, you know, what it means, right? So, I wanted to talk to you today a little bit about permaculture as a thing. And this is something you've probably thought about and probably answered at some point in the long time you've been doing this. Did you ever think it was going to be this globally recognized term?

D: Well, yes and no, I suppose. Certainly, for me, the movement that emerged out of the concept, because, of course, permaculture started as a concept hatched between myself and Bill Mollison when I was very young and he was a generation older than me. And that relationship was an informal, if you like, student mentor relationship, even though we were both in academia, we're in different institutions and had no formal relationship to each other through those institutions. And I suppose I was very focused and empowered on creating the world we do want by living it each day. And in some ways, that was a reaction against my upbringing in a radical political left family about fighting against all the injustices in the world.

I didn't have many things I could rebel against my parents, unlike most of my baby boomer peers. But that led me to that very strong focus on the self-empowerment by doing things and modeling this world we want. I suppose my co-originator, Mollison, was looking for a larger stage than the audience he had in the University of Tasmania. And the idea of taking permaculture to the world was really his. And the brilliance of the permaculture design course, intensive residential course initially, as it was set up in 1980, where he taught many people, including people who came to Tasmania from around the world. So there was this spread, which was very globalist, network spread across networks around the world, rather than a local growth of something.

I mean, it's also important to understand that Mollison was very embedded and a significant, if not leading figure in the organic gardening and farming movements and the early green environmental political movements in Tasmania, which only had a population of half a million people, but was an autonomous state within the Australian Federation. So it had all the benefits of democracy and affluent society, but a small population where people could make a difference. Those sort of networks of people knew each other and Tasmania was one of those places where that early activism of organics emerged. So understanding those contexts of where things came from and how that then spread, I was much more circumspect and really... Feeling not necessarily a fraud, but not having the depth of experience to maybe justify these ideas we had.

So, I was more focused on, can we test these things? Can we be the guinea pig? Yeah, that's always important. I think it was the review of Permaculture One, which was published in 1978, by Earl Beinhart at the New Alchemy Institute in your part of the world.

PPA: He's only about 30 miles from me.

D: Oh, right. That made me think, oh, what we've done is significant. Because there were some of the people that we respected who were sort of working in these sort of kindred networks saying, I know this is actually significant. So, right from the beginning, I suppose, I was a bit of a skeptic or a critic of almost what we had done. And that was in counterflow to the huge interest that there was in that time, which was, you know, it's hard to explain to young people how much was going on in the 70s as a result of the oil crises of 73 and 79. And Permaculture One was published between those two. So it caught that wave of huge interest in all the things we would call sustainability today.

If it had been published in the mid-'80s, I believe it would have sunk like a lead balloon. So it's important to understand how ideas can spread, not just because of the brilliance of the ideas and the energy of those pursuing them, I don't discount that, but that they're actually, the timing is right. And that they catch, you know, something that was happening. So that process of how permaculture spread was really interesting and complex. And there were other ways because that basically what I call the Thatcherite-Reaganite revolution. Starting with Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1981, sort of ended up sort of like disabling that first wave of this sustainability and alternative radical thinking and then it wasn't until the late 80s early 90s that there was a second wave which was much more modest much more constrained much more suit and tie but it also led to a huge surge in interest in permaculture.

Now, some of those, my documenting of these multiple waves has a bit of an Australian bias to it. But even generally in the English-speaking affluent world, I think those patterns actually show up. And we're probably now in fourth or, depending on how you look at it, fifth wave. So that sort of pulsing pattern where things don't just grow slowly or lead to some gradual rising and then maybe exponential growth, but this pulse and then a sort of a consolidation phase where people actually try out these ideas, do something with them quietly, slowly, and then there's another huge phase of interest or, you know, new people have practiced the two bones idea. So that's how I've seen it happen. Of course, that was in retrospect.

But I do need to acknowledge that back in the 70s, maybe with youthful sense about we're going to change the world and the ideas of the limits to growth, we thought, both Mollison and myself, so me and youth him in middle age thought that the 80s would bring on this radical stress to the global industrial system and that actually didn't happen yeah so we thought that in that crisis as the crisis worsened as the cost of food the cost of energy the supply lines became became more unreliable, ideas like permaculture would be thrust into the space and actually. Sort of grow and maybe influence the world. So in that sense... I wasn't surprised by the fact that it has grown, but it's been so in a completely different way to what maybe we imagined.

PPA: You know, you're talking and I'm just like, what year are you talking about again? Because that sounds awfully familiar. I feel like I can experience that supply chain issue, how to control food prices. Yeah, it sounds kind of familiar. And I think a lot of people in my generation and younger, I still think of myself as young, but I have to start accepting that. That I'm not anymore, that it feels like we're at that kind of a moment again, that something has to change, right? It feels that way.

D: Well, absolutely. The evidence is sort of more extreme. I mean, the thing that I would refer back to is, of course, the Club of Rome Limits to Growth Report of 1972. Which didn't actually suggest that there was these immediate limitations that were going to constrict global industrial society. They said it would actually, in the models, not using it as a prediction, but the models all suggested it happening in the 21st century. And in fact, the tipping point in industrial output per capita, and then very shortly after that, food per capita, was about now. No, that feels good.

But a lot of us thought that naively we had enough ridiculous faith in markets. We thought once the captains of industry and the people in the know understand these limits to growth, market intelligence will start pushing up the price of resources, whether it's oil, copper, food, timber. And that these forces will lead to this big change. But actually what happened, markets have no more intelligence than the end of their nose. So what happened was a huge amount of the wealth from the Middle East oil wealth was recycled through the World Bank and the IMF loaned to developing countries to develop their resources. At record speed to pay back the interest on those loans.

And so, the world was actually flooded with new resources, which crashed the prices and triggered the third world debt crisis. And all of the people doing rural self-reliance, trying to become self-reliant peasant farmers, while their peers had renovated a couple of terrace houses in the city and become millionaires, all of those ideas like what's the point of all this this doesn't work so it's a matter of sort of like understanding that complex geopolitical history the economics the energetics and that all of these things provide a context in which ideas like permaculture survive and thrive or or sort of fade away yeah so i you know a lot of people don't think of the world in those terms they think of them in terms of their own efforts or their own failings and success and and don't see that connection and that's always been a part of my work while focusing on the pragmatic to inform people and it's something I suppose I came back to in later years, starting to channel my father's brilliant understanding of geopolitics and history even though he left school at 14. So you could say that's a bit of a focus on the negative or what's wrong with the world, but it's that balance of trying to understand. You know, how things emerge and succeed and also what are those blocks and obstacles.

PPA: Yeah. And I think that's really important because, you know, people, you know, here in the US at least, you know, people be like, corn's in everything. Why is corn in everything? And it's like, well, if you understand the history of corn and like understand the history of agriculture, you can start to understand why, you know, high fructose corn syrup is in everything. It wasn't like an insidious plot. It was like you had said with the market, there were these rational, short decisions that were made. And the consequences of multiple rational, disparate decisions can have negative effects. Sometimes it can have positive effects. It usually has negative effects.

But if you don't understand that context it it can just very easily go down like some really dangerous rabbit holes of understanding how the world works and that there's a new world order and you know some of these more extreme understandings when it's like no there's there's rich people that are taking advantage of you they don't have to be secret they're just doing it and you can look them up they exist you know what i mean?

D: Well I suppose the two sorts of theories of history at the extreme, the cock-up theory of history that everything is just an accident, and the conspiracy at the extreme end of a mechanical control of the world by an all-powerful elite that can control everything. I suppose most people would accept that those are two extremes, but there's an element of truth in both. And the thing about the cock-up theory of history is that it comes out of reductionism, that nothing is connected to anything else. Everything is an accident and it can't be understood. Whereas the conspiracy theory is actually a primitive attempt at systemic thinking. And the demonization of it actually came out of psychological operations by the CIA to try and actually deal with the problem of the Kennedy assassination.

So there wasn't actually this term conspiracy theory in the mainstream media until 1964. So it is important to understand that and that's what I do in Principles and Pathways. Understand try and show how this systems thinking which permaculture is actually a part of is actually one of the most powerful contributions that have actually emerged out of modern scientific literate society and yet it's not the way normal discourses is discussed everything is in silos everything is separate and it's become more and more extreme in that way and that is actually to the advantage of powerful elites who can think systemically who can see okay the system is sort of working like this how can i use the power i have whether that power is small or large to work with what seems to be the zeitgeist of the system yeah.

And there is definite interest in the most powerful in that not being common skill and experience so in a sense it doesn't matter whether our university education and the education of generally well-educated people actually makes them blind to these things by some sort of conspiracy or by some sort of accident the systemic understanding that shows that shows that the generalist holistic thinking, which is constantly underplayed and under-rewarded in our system, is actually the pathway to independent thinking. And, you know, so for me, that is very important to bridge across these polarized worlds of notions of that we actually understand what's going on in the world.

The complexity of what's happening is immense, but I see great value in trying to see the patterns in that. And certainly in the food area, the other thing we can acknowledge is that conspiracy is actually straightforward. These people get together and informally talk and they know each other personally at the highest levels and a lot of stuff, you know, happens. And I suppose one of the things that also degrades any respect for conspiracy theory apart from, you know, the propaganda origins that I mentioned is that often people with limited power actually do attempt to conspire and it mostly doesn't work for them.

So that it can conclude that conspiracies can't work because it's not possible you know they're just impractical like you know it just doesn't add up but that sort of also does depend on how well informed you are how well connected you are and i suppose it's also natural that people who are the most disempowered see the whole system as not working for them whereas those that it's working for, to some degree, are quite happy and comfortable with the idea that they're comfortable because it's just an accident of history. And they're not, as you and I are, the benefits of a global empire, both in the United States and Australia, also as part of that. We are the beneficial recipients of that extractive system, even if we sort of partially resist it. And that's the sort of, That's more comfortable to deal with, that we are part of a crime against future generations and a crime against the planet, if it's just like some, as a result of the accident of history. So that's a bit of my sort of, I suppose, balancing those perspectives.

PPA: Yeah, and I think it translates really well into permaculture in a lot of ways. And it also speaks to, I think, some of the things that are really, I would say, difficult for a lot of people when it comes to permaculture, right? That it's framed in a very specific language. In the case of permaculture, it's mostly positive language about abundance and what we can contribute to the world around us. The ideas of supporting ethical food systems. Now, you've brought up Mollison and organic gardening, which at the time in the 60s, 70s, and even going into the 80s, was a very specific brand of, at least, I can't speak to Australia, but here in the US, you had Rodale and all these other actors that were very explicit from the trash farming model to 60s, 70s, and 80s, pushing a very specific idea of what organic is, and that existed separately from permaculture.

But, you know, as permaculture is this very fluid thing, it kind of absorbs a lot of stuff that kind of, it's like, well, this counts too. This is good. This meets all of the things that are defined by us to be permaculture. And I'm interested in your thoughts about how permaculture has evolved to kind of absorb a lot of these different things. If maybe it's become a bit of a blanket term that doesn't fit what you had initially envisioned.

D: Yeah, well, any sort of self-organizing emergent living movement as permaculture is without any sort of central control or articulation is going to evolve and be influenced by things that were different from what the co-originators imagined. But also our own ideas emerged and evolved. And Mollison said, I mean, Permaculture 2 published only one year after Permaculture it inherently implicitly meant permanent culture. And so that all of the underlying, underpinning things, or looking at it another way, the things built on top of agriculture as our prime way of providing our sources of sustenance, all of the elaborations of society and civilization that sit on that also need redesigning from first ecological principles in the same way that agriculture does.

So that extending out of permaculture to a much sort of broader concept, which I suppose for a lot of people, they saw that broader flowering in my depiction of permaculture with the seven petals of the permaculture flower, all of these different domains, not just land and nature stewardship, building tools and technology, education and culture, health. And spiritual well-being, economics and finance, and land tenure and governance. That permaculture thinking could be applied to all of these. So I articulated that in Principles and Pathways in 2002. But if you look at what Mollison said in Permaculture 2, it had that sort of more overarching view. But you can see that actually back in the early pioneers of organics. While in the savagely, you know, hostile cultural framework, the likes of Rodale and others might have defined organics in a limited way. I mean, the whole notion of healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals, and healthy humans was connected to all of the ideas of holistic health.

And it's no accident that many of the people who are actually involved in organics were also involved in complementary and alternative fields of health. So just as sort of one example of that sort of more larger picture of what organics was. So I saw organics, in a sense, moving down a reductionist pathway, especially as it became certified agriculture and how does it find its place in the current world economy as in the end providing some sort of commodity to the extent that when I was a keynote speaker at the iPhone conference held here in Australia in the early 2000s, it was interesting that there were some synergies between some of the things I was saying as to some extent a radical outsider and some of the people who were the founders of iPhone were saying about sticking to values and those who were sort of saying organics is an industry and some you know serious advisors to organic certification organizations that stated quite clearly that there was no connection between organics and this idea of local food.

You know, so I suppose there's all of these crossovers and evolutions, but I think sometimes these things come in waves too. There's a huge interest currently in what is the connection between permaculture and indigenous ways of land management and knowledge. And also going beyond that to the idea of decolonizing permaculture, that permaculture is part of a sort of a Western white sort of imposition which is ignoring those roots and origins. Well, some of those things are sort of like reinventing the wheel or restating or rediscovering, What was there in an earlier form? Okay, in the 1970s, the language and context was very different to the awareness now.

But a lot of people don't realize that some of the things that Mollison was involved in as an academic, apart from the work we did that led to permaculture, he actually was the academic who documented the lineages of the Cape Barren Islanders and led to their recognition that they were indigenous descendants of Tasmanians, whereas the story was that all the Tasmanians died out, became extinct. And he knew them all personally. So that connection was there actually at the beginning.

And of course, Mollison and I were discussing things like George Augustus Robinson's journals documenting the examples of what were really proto-agriculture by Indigenous people and that, of course, the inspirations for permaculture were sort of really out of what are the design rules in nature from ecological science and what are the design rules we can learn from the cultures of place and especially Indigenous ones that existed before the industrialized world. Because if not in the particular details, then the patterns and principles behind those systems, that's where we need the models.

And, of course, the early ideas for food forests came out of ethnobotanical documentation of those forms of agriculture that just existed all through the tropics and subtropics, if not so many examples in the temperate zone. So, some of these things are sort of reframing something or rediscovering it or doing it in what is culturally, you know, today's accepted language. And we see this in lots of the, when we go back and look at pioneers of organics or the early ecological thinkers of the late 19th century, one of the failings I see today that I think has adversely affected permaculture, but it's just part of the society, is the tendency to judge things in the past by the exact demeanor and standards of today.

And so, look at people in the past and say, oh, you know, they used the bad language or they didn't, you know, respect this or, you know, just ridiculous notions that we, I mean, in a larger sense, historically, people have been doing that a lot, you know, going back and trying to interpret the ancient Greeks in terms of today's thinking. For example, the ancient Greeks thought the world was created perfect originally, and it degrades over time. We find that incredibly depressing, but it's actually more in keeping with the laws of thermodynamics, you know, and the good life is lead by passing it on in as best condition as possible, but basically everything is downhill.

So, you know, it's very hard for modern people to sort of try and get out of their box of their own thinking and see how people think in different cultures and at different times, including our own ancestors. And so that's one of the things that bothers me a bit about some of the way people interpret permaculture, how it should be interpreted now, and even its own history over the very short number of decades. But maybe that's the inevitable becoming a cranky old co-originator.

PPA: Yeah, that happens. So, you've brought up a lot of really interesting points that I want to ask about. I definitely, I'm going to try to table this and I'm going to say it out loud so I don't forget, but I do want to talk about land back and this idea of indigenous practices. But I'm really interested, I think, you know, you've brought up this idea of permaculture being relearning how to ride the bicycle or, you know, where it's trying to relearn all of these things and it's just this this very broad set of rules how we think about our relationship with nature.

So this idea of like the PDC model, right? That is very important in understanding how it has evolved into something very different. You know, you've made this point that the whole idea was that you didn't have control over what it would look like. And I think that can be really great. But I also think it can be sometimes a little bit dangerous, because it's really hard to hold people accountable. When I've taken PDCs, I've taken good PDCs, I've taken bad PDCs. And, you know, some of them are very good and some of them are very bad.

And that's, it is what it is, right? That's the model. And I think it's great because it does allow for some liberation for people to evolve their teaching to new knowledge, new science, and specifically their regions. But also, I see people recommending things locally that don't make any sense, that make plenty of sense where you live, not where I live. And I'm interested about your thoughts of if you could go back in time, if you would change things, if you would maybe reinforce the need for how local conditions should drive things maybe a little bit more authoritatively or any particular thoughts.

D: Well, yeah, I think right from the beginning, I was always picking any of the sacred cows that started to develop around our ideas, around there being any universal strategies and techniques in permaculture, that the only thing that was universal is the ethics and design principles. And even the design principles was an emerging, evolving articulation that was not clear, actually, from the beginning. The design principles are implicit in the early texts and even in Mollison's great work, The Designer's Manual, published in 1988, 10 years after Permaculture 1.

There's not actually a sort of a clear list of design principles that sort of emerges out of the experience of decades of teaching. And then, of course, there's all different articulations of that, but at least the concept of ethics and design principles being universal. The downside of that is they're incredibly general and therefore don't tell you exactly what to do. And the problem of wanting to know a recipe actually comes out of one of the deep blind spots of our civilization because we've come from 250 years where one big solution tends to trump all others in every field and this is a result of fossil fuel. There's one way to do things and agriculture was the last thing to be industrialized while textile manufacture was the first thing to to be industrialized.

The reason agriculture was the last thing to be industrialized is that it's so fiddly, that land is different everywhere, that farmers are different within a farm. Everything is different. And it was very difficult for that industrial system to come up with templates, recipes that just work. Now, eventually, they sort of constructed things that sort of, in terms of the system, sort of halfway work. But ordinary people still expect that. And so they go to, they receive something and it's the expertise from somewhere else often that that must be the answer. So, for example, you know, I've been a great critic of one of those universal permaculture solutions, swales. Well, they don't actually apply where I live at all.

Even though in the 90s I was teaching in local design courses that with climate change they could actually start to become relevant and we're actually seeing that here in our region now and even so on certain sites with certain soil types and land uses in this region I have actually used swales on rare occasions so that's very frustrating for people the idea that even people accepting that oh that garden up the street they've got that successful thing growing there and not realizing actually the frost level there is different to where you are or the soil actually changes over two meters into a completely different geology or something people find it incredible that nature can be that variable. So they're always looking for a recipe. And, of course, pictures are prone to that of just dishing out something and especially something that I actually haven't done.

Because permaculture design courses involve such a wide range of fields and knowledge, I have never taught more than 50% of the content of a permaculture design course. I thought it was outrageous that people attempted to copy Mollison and expound for two weeks on all of these different subjects. I mean, apart from the pedological flaw of having one style of teaching one person just in an intensive course.

Now, the reality is that actually what happened is that most people attempting to teach permaculture actually self-regulated themselves. They just go, oh, like people did with permaculture design consultancy. Oh, I actually don't know enough. And they went away and went through a whole self-training process, or they combined with colleagues who had complementary skills. So I've been, I suppose, while incredibly frustrated and even cringing at some of the things that get taught as permaculture, that's been my life experience all the time. And I've just sort of come to accept it, whereas Mollison did sort of go out and say, go out and conquer the world.

But he then, he got discontented with what people did and tried to sort of rein it in and then took the opposite approach that said, you know, that his designer's manual was the curriculum for people. Permaculture design courses. And people would ask me, oh, what do you think is appropriate in the curriculum? And I'd say, well, do you realize that permaculture came out of the most radical experiment in tertiary education in Australia's history, the Environmental Design School, where I was as a student. There was no curriculum. McNeill, who set up that school, said there's no point teaching architects, landscape architects and urban planners a specific set of skills because by the time they come to practice, the world will have changed. You need to teach them how to problem solve and how to think.

So I said, I don't accept the concept of a curriculum. So this was sort of like just really confusing for people because they are so embedded in, oh, yes, what is the right content that you should teach? So I have sort of like, you know, very radical views of this And it was very amusing when I went to the European Permaculture Convergence back in 94 and at an intentional community that had started with radical pedagogy ideas and then discovered permaculture. And naturally, they fused their ideas about radical education with permaculture. And I watched all these English, earnest English permaculture teachers be shocked at how this is probably a book about permaculture.

So in some senses, I have, you know, reveled in that discovery and fusion of ideas and people gathering things from other spaces. But inevitably, I also have frustrations with some of the things that people have adopted. And, you know, I reference one of those in relation to Indigenous culture and the need to decolonize permaculture. And I can see that, yes, the way some people have presented permaculture as this sort of imposed thing, this received wisdom. And so everywhere I've gone, I have always encouraged people to use their permaculture thinking to be able to look at what exists in their own region, in their own cultural context, context and be able to say that's relevant to permaculture, not by the demeanor, not by the label that it has on it, but that the underlying patterns are in accord with deep permaculture thinking.

And so when I was in Japan in 2004, this debate in permaculture networks there, is permaculture part of the innovative ecological ideas coming from the West that we need to adopt? Or is it the rediscovery of traditional Japanese sustainable integrated land use and cultural systems? And of course, it's actually elements of both, but I very strongly supported those people focusing on it, how we rediscover those roots in our own culture.

PPA: That brings, I guess, to me, I think kind of the biggest crossroads in permaculture today is this idea of decolonizing and figuring out how to pair this very ubiquitous word with local historical context, you know, thinking about. You know, if I'm in New England— how is this land stewarded pre-colonization? And how does that relate to the terms of permaculture, the term of permaculture? And what takes priority is the traditional stewardship methods of the land stewardship practices, or some guy who teaches a PDC and is talking about a food forest with Eurasian fruit trees and things like that. You know what I mean? It becomes very complicated. And I can see how, for a lot of people, one can quickly get kicked out in favor of the other one. So, I'm curious about your thoughts on that.

D: Yeah. Okay. Well, the way I would see that is the way I have dealt with some of those issues in Australia and as one of the, we are both in places that are the new Europes, which are very important to understand that these are not places where Europeans colonized and dominated as a minority the local people and environment, like in most of Africa, large parts of Latin America, and parts of Asia. Some places were just too big for Western civilization to digest, like China. But, you know, even in India, we go to South Africa, there's one that's halfway between. Europeans almost turned it into a new Europe, but not like North America, Australia, and New Zealand, and parts of Southern South America.

Obviously, it was climate that actually determined that. So understanding that powerful, you know, the physical environment actually sort of shaping this process of what we call colonization. That in the new Europe, you know, we, our European ancestors. Almost completely displaced indigenous cultures. And the current ecological evidence for the Americas, I understand, is that the estimates are really 90% of the population died at contact and left two continents of free resources for European culture to reboot its own ecological failing base in Europe.

So that's important to sort of understand and acknowledge that, but in that, those worlds have also changed in the same way that European peoples were able to adapt to those environments without succumbing to the diseases of tropical places and whatever. Whatever, a whole lot of their crops, all their plants, all their medicines worked. And in fact, in the Northern Hemisphere, a lot of them were actually closely botanically related and not too dissimilar to local indigenous species anyway, because they weren't separated by... Tens of millions of years or hundreds of millions of years, as they, to some degree, in southern Australia.

So it's very important to see that sort of context. And then when we sort of come to the present, we need to acknowledge all of those different cultural lineages of settler peoples. But those settler peoples, while they might have been part of the wave front of a global colonizing industrial process, they were also people, we were also people who were dispossessed from our connection to land. By the enclosures in England, by the effects of the Roman Empire, by all of those processes. And that those processes have been going on until very, very recently and are in a sense still in operation.

There's separation from our own Indigenous cultural roots. And this is a thing that Robin Francis, one of the first students of Bill Mollison, one of the leading permaculture educators around the world in northern New South Wales, her long connection with the local Indigenous people there, the Bundjalung, One of her relationships with them there led to them saying to her, what's your dreaming? Where do you come from? What's your roots? And her journey back into rediscovering Celtic herbal medicine and traditional sources of that, even though she's in a climate in the subtropics where those things less naturally root into the ground than, say, where we live. In southern Australia or where you live.

So that's one of the important learnings that comes from connecting to Indigenous people is actually, oh, what is your mob? Where are you from? And of course, so many of us don't even know what that is. We are so disconnected. So the other aspect of that is when we look at the situation now and we say on the ground okay what is the sources for permaculture and we can say well there's a whole lineage of modern ecological thinking in the world maybe starting i see it in the 1880s 1890s and then a big wave in the 1930s and then since the 1970s we need to see that as part of ideas that have come out of modernity out of effectively the effects of of modernity, that that's actually part of our linear gen sources.

And then we need to look around us and look at people who are third, fourth, fifth, sixth generation people connected to the land. Often local rural battlers, small farmers, timber workers, people with unacceptable attitudes and views of the world who are, in spite of this affluent society, still at the connected-to-nature end of business. The rednecks, because they actually have another part of the picture. And then that third one is, what are the roots of the surviving Indigenous cultural knowledge and systems that are relevant, that were here before the colonization process. And of course, in your part of the world, compared with my part of the world, that's, you know, you're reaching further back.

But the amazing thing about Indigenous cultural revival is that some of these roots that we thought were completely exterminated have actually survived. Now ironically the places they've survived is a cross-cultural fusion with those other subcultural group i just mentioned the rednecks because that's where those worlds actually blended that people who were part of that lineage were in the battler working rural if you like backwoods people that's how they survived the dominant culture so i just completely completely reject this idea of there's this permaculture sort of intellectual idea out of academic privilege. And then it's trying to sort of grapple with. It's inherited guilt around, oh, how do we rediscover what is actually relevant from deep Indigenous knowledge?

Recognising that there are multiple subcultures and fringes, and of course I don't mean to call local Indigenous culture here in Australia a subculture, but in the context of how we exist, that's what it is. And what I find is that people from the second, third generation ecological thinking through lineages like permaculture that we can say is actually being part of the counterculture, part of the hippie revolution. Those people feel incredibly alienated from the way almost everything is done. Just the same as the rednecks feel. and just to say as the indigenous people trying to find the words to say we just think differently to any of this system that's in the consensus tent whereas what actually the system is doing is using the term of inclusivity to bring us all into the tent. But the tent and its contents are hard to find, and I completely reject that idea of this concept of inclusivity because it is really a corruption of the idea of diversity because with diversity, you actually are contemplating and dealing with things that you don't understand, you don't fully appreciate, and maybe even you don't like. And that's what the diversity principle is about.

It's not about celebrating all the things you love. It's about dealing with the, as Ivan Illich said in his book, Vernacular Gender, the relationship between male and female gender in traditional societies was an ambiguous complementarity where one never fully understood the other. They were different universes, but they clearly had this complementary relationship. And that can't be found in the inclusivity world, which is all within the dominant paradigm. And so that is, for me, a fairly recent articulation and sort of pushback about some of these ways in which these subjects are being discussed.

It clarified for me at an event in northern New South Wales following the catastrophic bushfires there, bringing together people in the community there to look at emergency response. Response people across all different groups of the communities but many of those people had badges the volunteer firefighters the police council workers and whatever but there were also all sorts of community groups and there were people from the local indigenous mob and what i noticed is there were actually three subcultures not represented at that other than the indigenous mob. Indigenous mob were one. And then there was, as I said, the rural rednecks. And then there were the second and third generation hippie back to the landers.

And what I heard from all three was this, alienation, disconnection, attempting to say, no, we need to operate differently. And so what I was suggesting was that those three groups should walk away from the tent in relation to fire. How would you just go and manage some bit of bush or something? Let's go and sit on the ground and see what we can come to an agreement about doing. Totally outside the regulated system, totally outside the authorities. So the idea that these three groups, that ordinary society would see, well, they're really got very radically different ideas. I could see where there was a lot of commonality between those three and that some people had a foot in two of those camps, the rare person had a foot in all three.

And so, people walking away from the restrictive dominant paradigm, taking off their badge or whatever. And this is what happened directly from the young leader of the Fire Stick Alliance, a young Aboriginal guy. And he said, look, I've sat down with ministers talking about cultural burning and how we re-establish these things. And he said, but I can't say to any of my people they should go and join the local RFS brigade, the local government-sponsored volunteer firefighting service. Because, oh, can we go and do a cultural burn? Oh, well, there's all this paperwork. There's all this stuff.

There's all this. It's completely alienating for them. He says, I can't encourage any more people to join that system. So he was incredibly articulate in the system. But no, we need to walk away from that? So that might be a lot of challenging ideas and it's stuff that I am beginning to write about more. But I think there's also enormous positive cross-fertilization comes between those three subcultures, certainly in our own context in Australia, that we're sort of hoping to sort of try and bridge some of those things.

And for myself, I self-identify in that back-to-the-land hippie culture, you know, the long hair. I have never, you know, went through the 80s distancing myself from that lineage, all those stupid ideas that, you know, were not evidence-based or crap. That was part of the propaganda of the neoliberal factor Reaganite revolution to demonize all of those ideas. And of course, there were stupid things and eco-fashion and all sorts of silly things that didn't work. But I see that as part of a cultural lineage. And one of the things people mistakenly do when they're young and have got new ideas, they say, we've got this new idea. It's never been done before. And we're going to create the world like this. Whereas what the conservatives with power do say, they wear the cloak of their ancestors and they claim some great lineage from the past, even if it's fake.

And so back in the 80s, I was saying this to people, permaculture builds on the organic pioneers of the 1930s, the ecological ideas that emerged in the 1890s. This is part of a great lineage. now that might have been me partly gilding the lily you know how great that lineage is but it's really important and that most people actually respect things that have some lineage some connection obviously we all like and young people really like novelty something new something that hasn't been tried but if you really want to bring about deep cultural change you've got to connect to your sources, your forebears, acknowledge your ancestors.

PPA: It's interesting to listen to you talk about these things because one of the things early on i think when this episode comes out it'll be like 170 or something just like wild but when like one of our first 30 episodes we started looking at traditional land stewardship practices in Europe because to me, my parents are from Italy. I'm American but my ancestry is not from here and I can very easily tie myself to my ancestral history because my grandfather was a farmer in southern Italy and I've been to that farm. And I have a very close connection to that. And that is not normal in the United States.

And, you know, just as you were speaking about, we have to deconstruct, you know, break down this idea of whiteness, and Europeanness into something as meaningful and tangible and something to be proud of. Which is like a dangerous thing to say, but also really important because otherwise you fall into this milquetoast nothingness that is the vapid consumerist white identity of Europeans, which is meaningless. And people get really frustrated when that's all they have. And like, why is, you know, pasta important as an Italian person? Like, let's talk about where our food comes from and why it's important, right?

And while it's incredibly important for us just as we try to wrestle with this really difficult conversation of indigenous sovereignty, indigenous land back, we also have to do that internally, too. So we have to address the same exact issues internally. And it's a two way street; doesn't mean our way is as hard or harder. It just means it's also something we need to be doing outside of, you know, addressing these very wrong things that our ancestors have collectively done. So when I think about like, how do we integrate ideas of land stewardship, you know, and how do I integrate the landscape or the ancestral knowledge and histories and experiences that my ancestors have, trying to find a way to pair that with the land stewardship practices of the people that have lived here.

And I guess that's really, I guess, what I'm trying to figure out from your perspective of how do we bring these things together? And obviously, there's a whole ecological component that comes with it as well. You know, you'd mentioned burns, because burns are very important for land stewardship. Many species even here have co-evolved with burnings that don't happen anymore. I live near the Pine Barrens, which is a very rare ecosystem here, and it's getting taken over by black locust and autumn olive, which, you know, a lot of permaculturists advocate for, but they don't see the damages that it's causing to these very rare and endangered ecosystems.

D: Yeah, I suppose, again, that's one of the sort of evolving ideas that back in the 70s, the use of indigenous species, the valuing of biodiversity, of local indigenous biodiversity, was actually there in permaculture from the beginning. But the context in the society was very limited, like the best reference we had for useful Australian native plants, Maiden, published in 1872. No accident that a facsimile new edition, facsimile edition, was published in 1972, two years before I met Bill Mollison. That was our best reference on the subject.

And it's from that period in the nineteenth century when there was all this interest, so understanding that re-evaluating the common, the things that are everywhere, the things that grow by themselves, the indigenous things that the pioneers were cutting down, oh no, these things have value. That was actually central to permaculture. But what happened around the same time is a more extreme view that started to identify permaculture even at that time as a huge threat to nature because it was promoting species that might be weeds.

So that idea I watched with somewhat amusement because it reminded me of the Trotskyists and the Maoists and the various branches of radical leftist thinking all fighting amongst themselves in my parents' youth. And, you know, how could ideas of valuing Indigenous biodiversity be contradictory to permaculture? And yet what happened in the 80s is that it started to actually become government policy. And then in the 90s, I started to push back on this nativist orthodoxy. And that actually shocked quite a lot of people within permaculture. Also who were adopting this as part of, oh, well, these are these deeper understandings that we need now.

And it's interesting that, In that particular issue, Mollison and I were actually of the same view and the same as my second mentor in permaculture, who I consider a mentor, Hakao Tane, who said that nature is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of species, race, and ethnicity. So the ideas behind intact ecosystems and the whole scientific idea that ecosystems like species are very slow co-evolving structures, we actually criticized as being wrong. That ecosystem evolution, not necessarily like species evolution, can happen quite rapidly.

Now it wasn't until the internet and that we actually started to see any of serious science actually agreeing with us so the work of Janzen working in the most complex diverse tropical lowland rainforests of costa rica developed in the 80s the concept of ecological fitting that species with different lock and key structures that did not co-evolve come together and form relationships so there's a whole different view of ecosystem evolution which is pulling the rug out from underneath a lot of what actually are now established developing in orthodoxies around these things so that's a sort of great debate that i've been involved in from the beginning, but we can clearly see some of the ways that might lead people doing things might be sort of cavalier in that regard.

So, for example, I've dealt with ecologists who've criticized permaculture for exactly the thing you described, people going out and planting different species and then they naturalize. And I was told that I need to take, by a very prominent ecologist, that I need to take responsibility for this. And I said, ah, so I need to take responsibility for that. Do I, Tim? Will you take responsibility for the VicRoads Authority when they direct seeded the Hume Highway Corridor, the main highway between Melbourne and Sydney, with local Indigenous species? But of course, they got the seed from whoever the contractors could supply the seed. So they genetically contaminated all of the local provenances with seed from everywhere.

Maybe I can take responsibility for the permie who planted some exotic species and it got away in the bush. If you take responsibility for that, because there's one person doing something, if you like, inspired by permaculture ideas of valuing and using the gamut of biodiversity. And then there's other ideas that say we should maintain and conserve systems. And then when anyone attempts to do that, especially at large scale, they actually do something which is, by objective means, actually creating more ecological contamination than planting a few things which are actually clearly exotic.

If you understand this, you know, when you're dealing with very plastic species like eucalypts in Australia that cover the whole continent and many of our species that cover huge territories, there's very different provenances, very different local subspecies. And so when you gather seed from anywhere and you spread them they of course immediately hybridize and whatever was there you've actually lost that. So I think it's very important to sort of put these things in perspective and it's obviously a big issue, I can't sort of talk about it at length, but recognising and studying new ecosystem evolution as it changes is very, very important.

And the conservation biology field has been caught in a time warp of what it was when Europeans arrived. Whereas the paleoecologists actually just think all of that is laughable because they go back to the last ice age, not very long ago in Australia, it's all within the cultural memory of the indigenous people and everything was completely different everywhere and things changed in a very rapid time. The other thing that in relation to what you were saying about the rare low fertility environments that support, as you mentioned, they often support very unique biodiversity that's characteristic of those areas. And then we've operated an agriculture where we want it to be the highest fertility. And sometimes we are doing that in close proximity to ecosystems that we're saying we want to preserve which oligotrophic using the technical term rather than eutrophic and we're saying we want nature to be there and we want our agriculture to be here but even when it's not right next to each other the cycling of nutrients in the big nutrient pumps spread by birds and other things means that you can't make fertility go away.

And what nature does, by its deep wisdom of the last 400 million years of life on earth, is to capture fertility and build fertility. And so that actually means that when that fertility is there, it will, in its own terms, invade those spaces of low fertility and displace those species. So we can choose to garden those areas and preserve them, but it's not necessarily that we're maintaining a sustainable ecosystem. If the fertility is rising, we may find that even if we reintroduce fire. A new set of species will actually occupy those areas. And this is the limitation of conservation biology that is using reductionist thinking and is one of my great frustrations that a lot of the misunderstandings have come that the science of ecology got taken back over by the reductionists. And that happened primarily in the 1980s.

It's never been sort of really documented or explained as to how that happened, but the faith in ecology as a holistic science, that the reason it was, there was so much hope in that, that that actually broke as ecology actually became remarkably reductionist in most of its thinking. So, of course, my book Principles and Pathways is dedicated to the memory of Howard Odum, father of systems ecology, ecology really in the United States and is quite a different lineage to understanding ecology than the way it's taught mostly in the universities.

So, of course, that's my role is always to be, you know, challenge whatever the orthodoxies are. And I suppose sometimes that happens and it can be, people have pointed out, that might be habitual that, you know, if the mob is thinking that, then I think the opposite. I recognize that this can be a pattern, but it has stood me in good stead to always be questioning the orthodoxies, especially the orthodoxies that are part of our comfortable world. And that's my continuing role to some extent in the permaculture movement, but it is an ambiguous one because I also recognize the need as the surviving co-originator to be positive about all of the good things that have happened through permaculture and to support the people who have put so much into creating those positive solutions. So in that sense, I need to respect, if not represent, that broad vision, diversity that was in the permaculture movement but my inclination is always to be the question of the challenger.

PPA: Yeah I think your work has kind of made that pretty clear the way you just explained I just want to wrap my own head around it so it's the way you described it; you made it sound like you mourned for the individual plants or the species but saw it as on a larger arc or a larger curve of this is the way the ecology would be trending inevitably anyway and you know those species that may be accelerating it are just small pieces that would have regardless of their existence would eventually happen is that because you were talking about this idea of like fertility eventually moving in?

D: Yes, I suppose this is some of the differences between the way I would see things and a lot of reductionist ecologists that I've discussed it with. They say, oh, there's no preference in nature for fertility. That's just a human utilitarian construct. So you don't recognize that nature is actually attempting to catch and store nutrients, energy as best it can. No, there's ecosystems adapted to fertile environments and ones adapted to infertile. And I said, run that past any peasant farmer in the world that's been 10 generations on the same land.

Run it past any indigenous person connected to the land and ask them whether they think nature has a bias towards fertility. It's the maximum power principle. Where nature can it catches and builds itself to greater and greater construct but the reality is that nature is limited by geology and climate so it also has to adapt to what is. And so nature is constantly doing both these strategies maximum power which is the power principles in permaculture to catch and store energy and it's also not putting all its eggs in one basket. It's adapting it's using small and slow solutions diversity working at the edge so there's a role for all the the marginal all the diverse that can fit in that can do the job where those conditions are so one of the blind sides of modern ecological thinking is to say nature is actually sort of of driven by some, the diversity principle.

But it's actually a tension between power and productivity in its own terms, not in human terms, and the diversity of insurance has lots of different possibilities. And the human tension between power and productivity and diversity is a subset offset of that tension that nature has, if we can anthropomorphize in that way. Whereas this is one of the blind spots where it says the modern ecological ideology says nature is constantly changing. You know, directed towards directing itself towards diversity and productivity and power is just a human construct. But that's not true. If there's not the power and productivity there, nothing works. And that is the maximum power principle that is really a universal law of nature, which Odom and others identified very clearly.

And so, once we see that our own conflicts over these issues are actually a subset of nature's conflicts, then we realize we are a part of nature and we can never be anything else other than that. Whereas the ideology that we're bad is part of this, we are separate from nature and that we have never managed to become separate from nature. Nothing we do ever escapes the grand design rules that help the life of the earth into existence. And I think that deeper understanding is something that aligns with Indigenous people. It aligns with people connected to land.

And it's actually incredibly reassuring that okay this is a structural design problem yes should we focus on that variety of crop or that species because it's more productive it made us more money or should we have like our like the mexican farmers of ancestry keeping their family lineages of corn all growing even though they knew they weren't as productive as some other one because they have a moral responsibility to just do it. It's built into their culture. Oh yeah, it turns out that every catastrophic drought or bad, really bad fungal season, that old variety actually works better than this other productive one. And there's a built-in cultural limitation on becoming too obsessed with obtaining a yield.

And so that's this constant balance, thinking about the future but if you say we just focus on diversity where's the tucker for the family's meal today tomorrow how do we build capacity to do things to have the resources to plant the forest for the grandchildren you know power and productivity is not a sort of an evil concept it's actually just about bringing it back down in balance with the other and that's of course what our society running on fossil fuel capitalism has you know become so problematic so the permaculture principle obtaining yield a lot of people look at it and go oh that's problematic that's exactly what our society has been doing too much of and that's what i say that all Well, permaculture principles are like spokes of a wheel in tension with one another. Collectively, they keep the wheel true. But if you just go down focusing on one, then, to use the analogy, the wheel becomes buckled. You know?

PPA: Yeah, you brought up a lot of interesting points. I did have something else I wanted to ask you. You brought up this idea of scale, and I guess that's where I'll end things. Anyone that's been around permaculture, myself, and obviously you, you know, one of the things I think that when we think about permaculture is like, if this is something that we're trying to envision as a greater food system, an alternative, a more sustainable future, there's two things that I think are really important.

The first is that a lot of permaculture, farms, sites, whatever you want, projects, whatever you want to call them, they rely largely on volunteer or unpaid labor, which I think can be really beautiful. But also, you know, given that we do live under capitalism, there's some issues with that. And I'm also interested about your thoughts about scalability and if the idea of permaculture is predicated on this idea of homestead culture, because that's where the greater overlap exists. Not to say that people like Mark Shepard don't exist who are doing some really interesting things about scaling up, but from your own perspective, I'm really interested about where you think, where does this fit?

D: Well, the first thing with scale is that people often assume economies of scale are the only way things work. And we've got some, the most extreme examples of that, of course, are chip manufacturing now that's virtually in one factory, 92% of production in Taiwan. That's an example of scale. The sort of world that's come out of fossil fuel keeps getting bigger and bigger scales of economy. The idea that vegetable production, for example, if that's going to be part of the diet of future generations, will be like the factory in Taiwan, one place, would seem absurd to people.

In fact, when we look at our current scales of operation of growing cabbages in a 100-acre paddock and then that going into a centralized food supply chain compared with garden farming. Garden farming is the most efficient way to provide fresh fruit and vegetables for people right close to where people live. That's how all our ancestors did it. Yes, very quickly, things like grains and livestock products and that might scale up to larger scales.

So understanding what is the optimal scale and how that changes when cheap fossil fuels are or are not part of that picture and whether that globalization trend actually is already failing. And so you've got the supply chain sort of issues but more fundamentally the issue of scale is part of the blind spot that things can scale by replication so one garden that works can be the model for another garden that works and literally provide the seed and knowledge and whatever.

So things can grow in their significance from small, limited numbers to many. They don't have to scale up. So that's like, it's really interesting the way people just assume to become significant, something must scale up. And that's part of the blind spot of the last 250 years. So that's the first thing there. And that's like a very deep issue in itself. Yeah.

What does replication look like? What people now call viral replication. That’s why a lot of my work has been focused on the suburb where replication is possible of patterns where people can overcome that problem I said about just copying the recipe. Oh, that person next door did that. Maybe that'll work for me. If you've got a whole lot of templates, a whole lot of situations that are actually very similar, then replication can actually produce significant impacts when the conditions are right. A lot of those conditions are social and economic and whatever.

So the other issue you mentioned of labor, volunteer labor, learning is expensive. Research and development is expensive. It doesn't matter whether it's formal by governments and corporations or whether it's completely informal. So we need to recognise that anything that's experimenting, that's experimenting, that's doing something that's not a proven recipe. Just follow how the grandfather did it. It works. Just stick to the recipe. There's a reason traditional societies were conservative. This works, don't mess with the recipe. When you've got rapidly changing conditions, totally novel conditions, people completely de-skilled, they're in a process of rediscovery and constant experimental innovation. And we know that's incredibly expensive.

So to look at systems where that is happening in experimental permaculture farms, a whole lot of people are learning through those processes. Now, it's all sort of inefficient and people come along and they didn't know what someone did a year before and they go and bloody do it again. And it's incredibly inefficient. But that is actually the nature of this sort of thing. The second thing is, of course, that when people are doing this as just some hobby or ideology, and it's not their primary source of sustenance, then they often end up just faffing around and don't make a very good job of something. And it doesn't matter because they just actually go off to the supermarket and get what they don't have.

So part of the art of working in this way is to experiment, to use the privilege of being part of the fossil-fueled affluent world, the privilege of having the internet and having people who can travel and bring new ideas or learn things, the privilege of doing all of that and saying, yeah, we're doing that. But we're also starting to go through a discipline where we suffer the consequences of our mistakes. Well, shit, the tomatoes, you know, we really stuffed that up. Sorry, we haven't got any tomato sauce in the cupboard this year. That's it. Well, deal with it, you know, rather than, oh, well, we just get it from somewhere else.

You know, so that feedback loop is really important. And certainly a lot of people doing these things, you know, don't build in those feedback loops. So those criticisms can be very valid that, oh, look, there's a whole lot of people just faffing around playing, basically. But, you know, how do we learn when we're really learning, when we're young? We play. You know, so play and work are sort of like really important parts of the puzzle. And just finding the sweet point in any particular situation between those. And, of course, that should change over time in the same way we play a lot when we're kids and we grow up and we become responsible adults and we work. You know, progressively through projects and whatever, we should see that process, even if a whole lot of other people are starting to play again.

PPA: You know, that's a really interesting way to think about it. That there's not many negatives in permaculture if you're the free laborer and you goof off too much. So I could see how maybe having a better system of accountability would really, I think, be a benefit for that. But there's a lot of value in just doing things for the sake of doing them and not because you're afraid of the outcome.

D: Yeah, and making those mistakes small in the household and community non-monetary economy, economy where the feedback is direct. And that's one of the issues. We don't want to make mistakes the way the system does at the moment. It cannot afford to make mistakes. And whether it's with novel vaccines or any of the large-scale systems, the sort of GMO technology in agriculture, culture, all of these things, the consequences of experimentation at those very, very large scales are huge. So there's all this lock-in around trying to ensure. And belief and then that what is being done will work and the adverse consequences at least will be manageable.

And, of course, as industrial civilization reaches its use by date, unfortunately, the benefits of those large-scale experimentations start to decline and the adverse impacts just get bigger and bigger. So make the stuff-ups at a small scale and there's also an ethical responsibility there. Be your own guinea pig. And we've done that with being more self-reliant in food than most people and probably ourselves and our son raised on that diet. Some of the mineral balance issues actually showed up in our health. So these are some of the lessons that I've sort of built into the retro-suburbia work and others, if you're going to be more self-sufficient from a particular patch of soil in a particular local ecosystem, you need to be more concerned, especially in ancient Australian soils, about the mineral balance of that soil. Because when you go to the supermarket, you get a diversity of deficiencies.

PPA: For sure. There's nothing that'll make you start researching deeply, like eating food from where you live, right? You start thinking about what year was my house built? Did they use lead paint? You know, those types of questions. Those things. Yeah. I'll ask you a kind of a fluff question to wrap this up. You are, I think, inherently an optimistic person, just from our discussion and things I've read. I think you are. Do you still have hope for humanity, given everything that we've been living through, especially the last decade?

D: Well, I suppose permaculture has always been informed by a pretty dark view of the state of the world. But I suppose the deepest faith is in the power of nature and the power of the living earth that doesn't necessarily order well for this little species of Homo sapiens, let alone this particular flourish of a fossil-fueled civilization that we're a part of. But I do see enormous resilience and rejuvenation that's possible through human society as it goes through crises.

But I do tend to be of the view that maybe the biblical reference of needing to walk through the valley of death to some sort of enlightenment, not necessarily Armageddon. We might be there right now. But yeah, in the same way that personal growth through crises, you know, is an established pattern of breaking out of old patterns as a result of some non-negotiable crisis, I think in a larger cultural sense. So, yeah, there's pain and suffering and tragic things happening, but I think in the larger scheme of things, I think that's part of reaping the consequences of what's been done, but that will bring its own deep transformation. Not necessarily in some completely utopian, you know, sort of perfect world, but I am positive about those things when I work with people who are doing that, when I work with nature and that is a balance to the big picture view that I still maintain attempting to look at the over-horizon picture and the issues of threats and obstacles that are in our eye.

PPA: David, do you have any books or anything interesting that's coming up that you want to plug before we wrap up?

D: Well, a lot of my writings are on the Holmgren website, very accessible. A lot of my essays of recent times that will be part of a new series of collected writings which is there's debate amongst the team here whether it will be called the third edition of David Holmgren's collected writings or whether it'll be called raves of dave but in terms of the the the retro suburbia work it is the really very substantial work that I'm passionate about that is relevant to so many people in your country and our country and that they're really positive about how many people have found that incredibly useful work and the networks that are building up around that, including a huge online community at the Retro Suburbia Facebook community. I think it's now over 20,000 people and the resources we're developing with that.

And of course, we work outside of the frameworks of the big publishing and distribution conglomerates like Amazon. So that work has been slow to spread into North America. But I think there's a huge amount of these learnings from permaculture over those decades and all the kindred networks that's built into that book, which is really a life manual for a lot of people in both the biological, the built and the behavioral transformations that we need to make.

PPA: Awesome. David, this has been a really fun and interesting conversation. I'm glad to have been fortunate enough to have some of these. You know, the questions that I've wondered a decade ago, 15 years ago, I'm now asking the guy who wrote the book. So it's really interesting and it's been really fun. And thank you so much for coming on.

D: You're welcome. Great to talk to you.