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.
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie@sbpermaculture.org
http://www.sbpermaculture.org
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