[Southern California Permaculture] Plant a Tree!/Bill Mollison/In Context Magazine Interview 1991

[Margie Bushman, Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

Hi everyone, as most of you know by now, 
Permaculture founder Bill Mollison died a few days ago...

This is one of my favorite article/interviews, 
written long time ago, but still relevant.    He 
was a rascally soul, but I loved him.  The two 
week design course he taught in Ojai at the Happy 
Valley School & Ojai Foundation in 1997 literally 
changed my life, shifted my brain, I will be 
forever grateful.  thought you might enjoy reading...

his family sent word that no tears, no flowers, 
just plant a tree!  that was his wish...wouldn't 
that be great if that happened with every 
person's passing?  we planted a tree in memory of 
our love ones instead of headstone?  we'd be a 
global forest in no time!  Margie




Permaculture: Design For Living
Permaculture is more than a new way of gardening -
it's a sustainable way to live on planet Earth
An Interview With Bill Mollison, by Alan AtKisson, Context Institute

One of the articles in Making It Happen (IC#28)
http://www.context.org/iclib/ic28/mollison/

Originally published in Spring 1991 on page 50
Copyright (c)1991, 1996 by Context Institute

Bill Mollison is a living legend. He’s known as 
the genius of permaculture, "the David Brower of 
Australia," or a crusty old curmudgeon, depending 
on the source. But whether it’s glowing 
admiration or sneering dismissal, reaction to 
Mollison is invariably strong. He is clearly one 
of the most interesting specimens of the human 
species – which he has spent years studying from 
a naturalist’s behavioral perspective.

He passed through Seattle recently with a film 
crew shooting a documentary about the far-flung 
successes of permaculture, a radically new (or, 
some have said, radically old) way of gardening, 
designing, and living sustainably by cooperating 
with nature. Ironically, we met in a downtown 
hotel room – filled with traffic noise – as we 
stalked a definition of permaculture and 
considered the eeriness of modern life. For a 
more detailed exploration, see Mollison’s book 
Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual.



Alan: Permaculture is a slippery idea to me. But 
from what I read, it seems that not even those 
who actually do permaculture really know what it is.

Bill: I’m certain I don't know what permaculture 
is. That’s what I like about it – it’s not 
dogmatic. But you've got to say it’s about the 
only organized system of design that ever was. 
And that makes it extremely eerie.

Alan: Why "eerie"?

Bill: There’s no other book about design for 
living. Don't you think that’s eerie? I mean, how 
can we possibly expect to survive if we don't 
design what we’re doing to be bearable?

Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when 
people build a house, they almost exactly get it 
wrong. They don't just get it partly wrong, they 
get it dead wrong. For example, if you let people 
loose in a landscape and tell them to choose a 
house site, half of them will go sit on the 
ridges where they'll die in the next fire, or 
where you can't get water to them. Or they'll sit 
in all the dam sites. Or they'll sit in all the 
places that will perish in the next big wind.

But then, at least half of every city is wrong. 
 From latitude 30 degrees to latitude 60, say, 
you've got to have the long axis of the house 
facing the sun. If the land is cut up into 
squares, that makes half of all houses wrong if 
they face the road. Even houses way in the 
country, and way off the road, face the bloody 
road. And from there, you just go wronger all the way.

One of the great rules of design is do something 
basic right. Then everything gets much more right 
of itself. But if you do something basic wrong – 
if you make what I call a Type 1 Error – you can get nothing else right.

Alan: When you say "we," do you mean humans in 
general, or Western humans especially?

Bill: Human beings in general. There are a few 
societies that show signs of having been very 
rational about the physics of construction and 
the physics of real life. Some of the old 
middle-Eastern societies had downdraft systems 
over whole cities, and passive, rapid-evaporation 
ice-making systems. They were rational people 
using good physical principles to make themselves 
comfortable without additional sources of energy.

But most modern homes are simply uninhabitable 
without electricity – you couldn't flush the 
toilet without it. It’s a huge dependency 
situation. A house should look after itself – as 
the weather heats up the house cools down, as the 
weather cools down the house heats up. It’s 
simple stuff, you know? We've known how to do it for a long time.

Alan: And it’s eerie that we don't do it.

Bill: And that we don't design the garden to 
assist the house is much more eerie. That we 
don’t design agriculture to be sustainable is 
totally eerie. We design it to be a disaster, and of course, we get a disaster.

Alan: There’s an old Chinese expression: "If we 
don't change our direction, we'll wind up where we are headed."

Bill: Exactly so. I think we probably have a 
racial death wish. We don't understand anything 
about where we live, and we don't want to. We’re 
happy to power on to the end – like Mr. Bush. He 
could have saved more oil than he needed from 
Iraq, but he preferred to go and "kick ass" – 
kill people – and use more oil in the process.

America is an eerie society. It seems to want to 
live on a dust bowl. But as one of your own 
Indians said, "If you shit in bed, you’ll surely smother in it."

Alan: Let’s get back to permaculture. What’s your 
current best definition of it?

Bill: You could say it’s a rational man’s approach to not shitting in his bed.

But if you’re an optimist, you could say it’s an 
attempt to actually create a Garden of Eden. Or, 
if you’re a scientist, you could liken it to a 
miraculous wardrobe in which you can hang 
garments of any science or any art and find 
they’re always harmonious with, and in relation 
to, that which is already hanging there. It’s a 
framework that never ceases to move, but that 
will accept information from anywhere.

It’s hard to get your mind around it – I can't. I 
guess I would know more about permaculture than 
most people, and I can’t define it. It’s 
multi-dimensional – chaos theory was inevitably 
involved in it from the beginning.

You see, if you’re dealing with an assembly of 
biological systems, you can bring the things 
together, but you can’t connect them. We don’t 
have any power of creation – we have only the 
power of assembly. So you just stand there and 
watch things connect to each other, in some 
amazement actually. You start by doing something 
right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.

Alan: This reminds me of John Todd and his work 
with artificial ecosystem assembly [IC #25].

Bill: There are lots of words for it these days. 
But the day I brought out my first book, 
Permaculture One, there was no word for it, 
though that’s what it means: artificial ecosystem 
assembly. I would agree with anyone who said that 
if Permaculture had to be written, I wasn't the 
person to write it. I'm sure the John Todds and 
Hunter Lovinses of this world would have done a 
far better job than I. But it had to be written 
by somebody sooner or later, and historically it 
was just bad luck that it was me.

Alan: How did you come up with the idea of permaculture? What led up to it?

Bill: I’d come into town from the bush – after 28 
years of field work in natural systems – and 
become an academic. So I turned my attention to 
humans, much as I had to possums in the forests. 
Humans were my study animal now – I set up night 
watches on them, and I made phonograms of the 
noises they make. I studied their cries, and 
their contact calls, and their alarm signals. I 
never listened to what they were saying – I 
watched what they were doing, which is really the 
exact opposite of the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers.

I soon got to know my animal fairly well – and I 
found out that it didn’t matter what they were 
saying. What they were doing was very 
interesting, but it had no relation whatsoever to 
either what they were saying, or what questions 
they could answer about what they were doing. No 
relationship. Anyone who ever studied mankind by 
listening to them was self-deluded. The first 
thing they should have done was to answer the 
question, "Can they report to you correctly on 
their behavior?" And the answer is, "No, the poor bastards cannot."

Then I sort of pulled out for a while in 1972 – I 
cut a hole in the bush, built a barn and a house 
and planted a garden – gave up on humanity. I was 
disgusted with the stupidity of the University, 
the research institutions, the whole thing.

When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was 
like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I 
couldn't write it down fast enough. Once you've 
said to yourself, "But I'm not using my physics 
in my house," or "I’m not using my ecology in my 
garden, I’ve never applied it to what I do," it’s 
like something physical moves inside your brain. 
Suddenly you say, "If I did apply what I know to 
how I live, that would be miraculous!" Then the 
whole thing unrolls like one great carpet. Undo 
one knot, and the whole thing just rolls downhill.

Alan: At this point, permaculture is not just a 
way of designing things – it’s a movement. What have you started?

Bill: Well, anything that’s any good is 
self-perpetuating. I’ve started something I can 
no longer understand – it’s out of control from 
the word go. People do things which I find quite 
amazing – things I would never have done and can’t understand very well.

For example, one of the people I had trained in 
1983, Janet McKinsey, disappeared with a friend 
into the bush – two women with children. They 
decided they could cut down their needs a lot, 
and they made a very scientific study of how to 
do that in their own houses. They’ve now started 
something called "Home Options for Preservation of the Environment" – HOPE.

They point out, for example, that there are only 
four things in all cleaners – whether it’s 
shampoo, laundry detergent, whatever.You buy them 
in bulk and you mix them up properly, and they 
all work. It doesn’t matter if they call the 
stuff ecologically friendly or have dolphins 
diving around on the label – it still has these 
damn four things in it. Anything else is just 
unnecessary additions to make it smell good or 
color it blue when it goes down the toilet.

Alan: So would you call what they’re doing permaculture as well?

Bill: Oh, I don’t know what you call it. But they 
got there after a permaculture course. When they 
first came to town – Benala, in Australia – and 
lectured, all the women of the town said, "Oh 
this is marvelous, we’ll all do it!" The women 
started to order these bulk canisters – so then 
the shops in the town had to change, because they 
couldn’t sell them that other crap anymore. Then 
the Council had to change, to institute recycling.

So the women – and women spend the money of 
society on its goods – examined every item they 
bought in relation to its energy use and its 
necessity, and just eliminated those that were 
energy expensive and unnecessary. Simply by women 
learning exactly what to buy and how to buy, the 
whole thing can be brought back to sanity. That’s 
spreading like mad – like every good idea does.

So my students are constantly amazing me. Here’s 
another story: I gave one permaculture course in 
Botswana, and now my students are out in the 
bloody desert in Namibia teaching Bushmen – whose 
language nobody can speak – to be very good permaculture people.

Alan: What can they teach the Bushmen that the Bushmen wouldn’t already know?

Bill: Gardening. Because the Bushmen can no 
longer go with the game, and the game have been 
killed by the fences put up by the European 
Commission to grow beef. Just like the Australian 
Aborigine, 63% of what they used to live off is 
extinct, and the rest is rare now. You can’t live 
like a Bushman or an Aborigine anymore, so 
they’ve got to rethink the whole basis of how 
they’re going to live. Permaculture helps you do that easily.

Alan: So permaculture seems to be as much a 
change in perception as anything else – a change 
in where one begins to look at things from.

Bill: I think that’s right. For me, having 
suffered through a Western education, it was a 
shift from passive learning – you know, "this is 
how books say things are" – to something active. 
It’s saying (and this is a horrifying thought for 
university people) that instead of physicists 
teaching physics, physicists should go home and 
see what physics applies to their home.

Now, they may teach sophisticated physics at the 
university. But they go home to a domestic 
environment which can only be described as 
demented in its use of energy. They can’t see 
that, and that blindness is appalling.

Why is it that we don’t build human settlements 
that will feed themselves, and fuel themselves, 
and catch their own water, when any human 
settlement could do that easily? When it’s a trivial thing to do?

Alan: Perhaps because we’re so wealthy that we believe we don’t have to.

Bill: Well, I don't call that wealth. You want a 
definition of wealth from Eskimos, the Inuit? 
Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural 
world. I think Americans are so poor it’s 
pitiful, because you don't understand the natural world at all.

Alan: If you want to do permaculture, and there 
isn't a teacher around, where do you start?

Bill: Just start right where you are.

Alan: I read somewhere that you've said, "You 
start with your nose, then your hands 
"

Bill: "
 your back door, your doorstep" – you get 
all that right, then everything is right. If all 
that’s wrong, nothing can ever be right. Say 
you’re working for a big overseas aid 
organization. You can't leave home in a Mercedes 
Benz, travel 80 kilometers to work in a great 
concrete structure where there are diesel engines 
thundering in the basement just to keep it cool 
enough for you to work in, and plan mud huts for 
Africa! You can't get the mud huts right if you 
haven't got things right where you are. You’ve 
got to get things right, working for you, and then go and say what that is.

Alan: Doing permaculture seems to be the opposite of abstraction.

Bill: Oh, I put it another way. I can easily 
teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once 
they know how to garden, you’ll get a 
philosopher. But I could never teach people to be 
philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

When you get deep ecologists who are 
philosophers, and they drive cars and take 
newspapers and don’t grow their own vegetables, 
in fact they’re not deep ecologists – they’re my enemies.

But if you get someone who looks after himself 
and those around him – like Scott Nearing, or 
Masanobu Fukuoka – that’s a deep ecologist. He 
can talk philosophy that I understand. People 
like that don't poison things, they don't ruin 
things, they don't lose soils, they don't build things they can't sustain.

Alan: Everything you've done suggests that 
turning around and going another direction is really not that hard.

Bill: I think mine is a very rich life. I 
probably lead a very spoiled life, because I 
travel from people interested in permaculture to 
people interested in permaculture. Some of them 
are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so 
on. I believe humanity is a pretty interesting 
lot, and they’re all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.

Alan: Permaculture involves tampering with 
nature, but how far do you think we should go? 
Should we be doing genetic engineering, creating hybrids, etc.?

Bill: The important thing is not to do any 
agriculture whatsoever, and particularly to make 
the modern agricultural sciences a forbidden area 
– they’re worse than witchcraft, really. The 
agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 
1980 has caused more damage on the face of the 
Earth than any other factor. "Should we tamper 
with nature?" is no longer a question – we've 
tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.

If you let the world roll on the way it’s 
rolling, you’re voting for death. I’m not voting 
for death. The extinction rate is so huge now, 
we’re to the stage where we’ve got to set up 
recombinant ecologies. There are no longer enough 
species left, anywhere, to hold the system 
together. We have to let nature put what’s left 
together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.

At the same time, anything that’s left that’s 
remotely like wilderness should be left strictly 
alone. We have no business there any more. It’s 
not going to save you to go in and cut the last 
old-stand forests. You should never have gotten 
to the stage where you could see the last ancient 
forests! Just get out of there right now, because 
the lessons you need to learn are there. That’s 
the last place you’ll find those lessons readable.

Alan: How has permaculture been received? What do 
reviewers say about your books, for example?

Bill: The first time I saw a review of one of my 
permaculture books was three years after I first 
started writing on it. The review started with, 
"Permaculture Two is a seditious book." And I 
said, "At last someone understands what 
permaculture’s about." We have to rethink how 
we’re going to live on this earth – stop talking 
about the fact that we’ve got to have 
agriculture, we’ve got to have exports, because 
all that is the death of us. Permaculture 
challenges what we’re doing and thinking – and to that extent it’s sedition.

People question me coming through the American 
frontier these days. They ask, "What’s your 
occupation?" I say, "I’m just a simple gardener." 
And that is deeply seditious. If you’re a simple 
person today, and want to live simply, that is 
awfully seditious. And to advise people to live simply is more seditious still.

You see, the worst thing about permaculture is 
that it’s extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.

Alan: So that’s worst from whose perspective?

Bill: Anybody that wants to extinguish it. It’s 
something with a million heads. It’s a way of 
thinking which is already loose, and you can’t 
put a way of thinking back in the box.

Alan: Is it an anarchist movement?

Bill: No, anarchy would suggest you’re not 
cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete 
cooperation between each other and every other 
thing, animate and inanimate. You can’t cooperate 
by knocking something about or bossing it or 
forcing it to do things. You won’t get 
cooperation out of a hierarchical system. You get 
enforced directions from the top, and nothing I 
know of can run like that. I think the world 
would function extremely well with millions of 
little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.

Alan: Given all the study you’ve done of our 
behavior and your work in spreading permaculture, 
do you have reason to hope we’ll make it as a species?

Bill: I think it’s pointless asking questions 
like "Will humanity survive?" It’s purely up to 
people – if they want to, they can, if they don’t want to, they won’t.

I would say, use all the skills you have in 
relation to others – and that way we can do 
anything. But if you lend your skills to other 
systems that you don’t really believe in, then 
you might as well never have lived. You haven’t expressed yourself.

If people want some guidance, I say, just look at 
what people really do. Don’t listen to them that 
much. And choose your friends from people who you 
like what they do – even though you mightn’t like what they say.

It’s us chickens that are doing it. There’s no 
need for anyone else – we are sufficient to do 
everything possible to heal this Earth. We don’t 
have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything. We can do it.



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margie at sbpermaculture.org
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