Renowned
Australian biologist and founder of permaculture
talks with Scott London about his revolutionary
approach to food production and ecological design.
Permaculture:
A Quiet Revolution
The
ethics are simple: Care of the earth, care of people,
and reinvestment in those ends. Renowned Australian
biologist and founder of permaculture talks with
Scott London about his revolutionary approach to food
production and ecological design.
Bill Mollison calls himself a field biologist and
itinerant teacher. But it would be more accurate to
describe him as an instigator. When he published
Permaculture One in 1978, he launched an
international land-use movement many regard as
subversive, even revolutionary.
Permaculture- from permanent and agriculture- is an
integrated design philosophy that encompasses
gardening, architecture, horticulture, ecology, even
money management and community design. The basic
approach is to create sustainable systems that
provide for their own needs and recycle their waste.
Mollison developed permaculture after spending
decades in the rainforests and deserts of Australia
studying ecosystems. He observed that plants
naturally group themselves in mutually beneficial
communities. He used this idea to develop a different
approach to agriculture and community design, one
that seeks to place the right elements together so
they sustain and support each other.
Today his ideas have spread and taken root in almost
every country on the globe. Permaculture is now being
practiced in the rainforests of South America, in the
Kalahari desert, in the arctic north of Scandinavia,
and in communities all over North America. In New
Mexico, for example, farmers have used permaculture
to transform hard-packed dirt lots into lush gardens
and tree orchards without using any heavy machinery.
In Davis, California, one community uses bath and
laundry water to flush toilets and irrigate gardens.
In Toronto, a team of architects has created a design
for an urban infill house that doesn't tap into city
water or sewage infrastructure and that costs only a
few hundred dollars a year to operate.
While Mollison is still unknown to most Americans, he
is a national icon down under. He has been named
Australia's "Man of the Year" and
in 1981 he received the prestigious Right Livelihood
Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, for
his work developing and promoting permaculture.
I sat down with him to discuss his innovative design
philosophy. We met over the course of two afternoons
in Santa Barbara in conjunction with an intensive
two-week Permaculture Design course given in Ojai in
1997. A short, round man with a white goatee and a
big smile, he is one of the most affable and
good-natured people I've met. An inveterate
raconteur, he seems to have a story or a bad joke for
every occasion. Almost every remark he makes is
punctuated by a hearty and infectious laugh.
SCOTT LONDON: A reviewer once
described your teachings as "seditious."
BILL MOLLISON: Yes, it was very
perceptive. I teach self-reliance, the world's most
subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their
own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes,
it's seditious. But it's peaceful sedition.
LONDON: When did you begin teaching
permaculture?
MOLLISON: In the early 1970s, it
dawned on me that no one had ever applied design to
agriculture. When I realized it, the hairs went up on
the back of my neck. It was so strange. We'd had
agriculture for 7,000 years, and we'd been losing for
7,000 years everything was turning into desert. So I
wondered, can we build systems that obey ecological
principles? We know what they are, we just never
apply them. Ecologists never apply good ecology to
their gardens. Architects never understand the
transmission of heat in buildings. And physicists
live in houses with demented energy systems. It's
curious that we never apply what we know to how we
actually live.
LONDON: It tells us something about
our current environmental problems.
MOLLISON: It does. I remember the
Club of Rome report in 1967 which said that the
deterioration of the environment was inevitable due
to population growth and overconsumption of
resources. After reading that, I thought,
"People are so stupid and so destructive we can
do nothing for them." So I withdrew from
society. I thought I would leave and just sit on a
hill and watch it collapse.
It took me about three weeks before I realized that I
had to get back and fight. [Laughs] You know, you
have to get out in order to want to get back in.
LONDON: Is that when the idea of
permaculture was born?
MOLLISON: It actually goes back to
1959. I was in the Tasmanian rain forest studying the
interaction between browsing marsupials and forest
regeneration. We weren't having a lot of success
regenerating forests with a big marsupial population.
So I created a simple system with 23 woody plant
species, of which only four were dominant, and only
two real browsing marsupials. It was a very flexible
system based on the interactions of components, not
types of species. It occurred to me one evening that
we could build systems that worked better than that
one.
That was a remarkable revelation. Ever so often in
your life perhaps once a decade you have a
revelation. If you are an aborigine, that defines
your age. You only have a revelation once every age,
no matter what your chronological age. If you're
lucky, you have three good revelations in a lifetime.
Because I was an educator, I realized that if I
didn't teach it, it wouldn't go anywhere. So I
started to develop design instructions based on
passive knowledge and I wrote a book about it called
Permaculture One [co-authored by David Holmgren]. To
my horror, everybody was interested in it. [Laughs] I
got thousands of letters saying, "You've
articulated something that I've had in my mind for
years," and "You've put something into my
hands which I can use."
LONDON: Permaculture is based on
scientific principles and research. But it seems to
me that it also draws on traditional and indigenous
folk wisdom.
MOLLISON: Well, if I go to an old
Greek lady sitting in a vineyard and ask, "Why
have you planted roses among your grapes?" she
will say to me, "Because the rose is the doctor
of the grape. If you don't plant roses, the grapes
get ill." That doesn't do me a lot of good. But
if I can find out that the rose exudes a certain root
chemical that is taken up by the grape root which in
turn repels the white fly (which is the scientific
way of saying the same thing), then I have something
very useful.
Traditional knowledge is always of that nature. I
know a Filipino man who always plants a chili and
four beans in the same hole as the banana root. I
asked him, "Why do you plant a chili with the
banana?" And he said, "Don't you know that
you must always plant these things together."
Well, I worked out that the beans fix the nitrogen
and the chili prevents beetles from attacking the
banana root. And that works very well.
LONDON: You have introduced
permaculture in places that still rely on traditional
farming practices. Have they been receptive to your
ideas?
MOLLISON: I have a terribly tricky
way of approaching indigenous tribal people. For
example, I'll go to the Central Desert, where
everyone is half-starved, and say, "I wonder if
I can help you." And I'll lie and say, "I
don't know how to do this" And they say,
"Oh, come on, we'll make it work." By the
time it's done, they have done it themselves.
I remember going back to a school we started in
Zimbabwe. It's green and surrounded by food. The
temperature in the classroom is controlled. I asked
them, "Who did this?" They said, "We
did!" When people do it for themselves, they are
proud of it.
LONDON: For some people particularly
indigenous tribes the notion that you can grow your
own food is revolutionary.
MOLLISON: When you grow up in a
world where you have a very minor effect on the land,
you don't think of creating resources for yourself.
What falls on the ground you eat. And your numbers
are governed by what falls on the ground.
Permaculture allows you to think differently because
you can grow everything that you need very easily.
For example, the bushmen of the Kalahari have a
native bean called the morama bean. It is a perennial
that grows underground and spreads out when it rains.
They used to go out and collect it. But after they
were pushed off their lands to make room for game and
natural parks the morama bean was hard to find. I
asked them, "Why don't you plant them
here?" They said, "Do you think we
could?" So we planted the bean in their gardens.
Up to that point, they never actually thought of
planting something. It stunned them that they could
actually do that.
The same thing happened with the mongongo tree which
grows on the top of sand dunes. They had never
actually moved the tree from one dune to another. But
I went and cut a branch off the mother tree and stuck
it in the sand. The thing started to sprout leaves
and produce mongongo nuts. Now they grow the trees
wherever they want.
LONDON: You once described modern
technological agriculture as a form of
"witchcraft."
MOLLISON: Well, it is a sort of
witchcraft. Today we have more soil scientists than
at any other time in history. If you plot the rise of
soil scientists against the loss of soil, you see
that the more of them you have, the more soil you
lose.
I remember seeing soldiers returning from the War in
1947. They had these little steel canisters with a
snap-off top. When they snapped the tops off, they
sprayed DDT all over the room so you never saw any
more flies or mosquitoes or cats. [Laughs] After the
war, they started to use those chemicals in
agriculture. The gases used by the Nazis were now
developed for agriculture. Tanks were made into
plows. Part of the reason for the huge surge in
artificial fertilizer was that the industry was
geared up to produce nitrates for explosives. Then
they suddenly discovered you could put it on your
crops and get great results.
LONDON: So the green revolution was
a kind of war against the land, in a manner of
speaking.
MOLLISON: That's right. Governments
still support this kind of agriculture to the tune of
about $40 billion each year. None of that goes to
supporting alternative systems like organic or
soil-creating agriculture. Even China is adopting
modern chemical agriculture now. LONDON: I remember
the late economist Robert Theobald saying to me that
if China decides to go the way of the West, the
environmental ballgame is over.
MOLLISON: I overheard two
"Eurocrats" in Vienna talking about the
environment. One said, "How long do you think
we've got?" The other said, "Ten
years." And the first one said, "You're an
optimist." So I said to them, "If China
begins to develop motor vehicles, we've got two
years."
LONDON: What kind of overconsumption
bothers you the most?
MOLLISON: I hate lawns.
Subconsciously I think we all hate them because we're
their slaves. Imagine the millions of people who get
on their lawn-mowers and ride around in circles every
Saturday and Sunday.
They have all these new subdivisions in Australia
which are between one and five acres. You see people
coming home from work on Friday, getting on their
little ride-on mowers, and mowing all weekend. On
Monday morning you can drive through these areas and
see all these mowers halfway across the five acres,
waiting for the next Friday. Like idiots, we spend
all our spare time driving these crazy machines,
cutting grass which is only going to grow back again
next week.
LONDON: Permaculture teaches us how
to use the minimum amount of energy needed to get a
job done.
MOLLISON: That's right. Every house
should be over-producing its energy and selling to
the grid. We have built entire villages that do that
where one or two buildings hold the solar panels for
all sixty homes and sell the surplus to the grid. In
seven years, you can pay off all your expenses and
run free. They use this same idea in Denmark. Every
village there has a windmill that can fuel up to 800
homes.
LONDON: The same principle probably
applies to human energy as well. I noticed that you
discourage digging in gardens because it requires
energy that can be better used for other things.
MOLLISON: Well, some people like
digging. It's a bit like having an exercise bike in
your bedroom. But I prefer to leave it to the worms.
They do a great job. I've created fantastic soil just
from mulching.
LONDON: Does permaculture apply to
those of us who live in cities?
MOLLISON: Yes, there is a whole
section in the manual about urban permaculture. When
I first went to New York, I helped start a little
herb-farm in the South Bronx. The land was very cheap
there because there was no power, no water, no
police, and there were tons of drugs. This little
farm grew to supply eight percent of New York's
herbs. There are now 1,100 city farms in New York.
LONDON: Short of starting a farm,
what can we do to make our cities more sustainable?
MOLLISON: Catch the water off your
roof. Grow your own food. Make your own energy. It's
insanely easy to do all that. It takes you less time
to grow your food than to walk down to the
supermarket to buy it. Ask any good organic gardener
who mulches how much time he spends on his garden and
he'll say, "Oh, a few minutes every week."
By the time you have taken your car and driven to the
supermarket, taken your foraging-trolley and
collected your wild greens, and driven back home
again, you've spent a good hour or two plus you've
spent a lot of money.
LONDON: Even though permaculture is
based on scientific principles, it seems to have a
very strong philosophical or ethical dimension.
MOLLISON: There is an ethical
dimension because I think science without ethics is
sociopathology. To say, "I'll apply what I know
regardless of the outcome" is to take absolutely
no responsibility for your actions. I don't want to
be associated with that sort of science.
LONDON: What do you think you've
started?
MOLLISON: Well, it's a revolution.
But it's the sort of revolution that no one will
notice. It might get a little shadier. Buildings
might function better. You might have less money to
earn because your food is all around you and you
don't have any energy costs. Giant amounts of money
might be freed up in society so that we can provide
for ourselves better.
So it's a revolution. But permaculture is
anti-political. There is no room for politicians or
administrators or priests. And there are no laws
either. The only ethics we obey are: care of the
earth, care of people, and reinvestment in those
ends.
Scott London
is a writer and radio producer based in Santa
Barbara. This interview was adapted from his radio
series "Insight & Outlook." For more
information, visit his web site at: www.scottlondon.com.
