Transcript: DAVID HOLMGREN on a Quiet Boycott /221
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Ayana Young Hello, and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with David Holmgren.
David Holmgren So we need to have working models at the smallest scales that then inform and feed out into the redesign, reformation and when necessary, the radical turning over, destruction, and salvage of large scale entities.
Ayana Young David Holmgren is the co-originator of the permaculture concept following publication of 'Permaculture One', co-authored with Bill Mollison in 1978. His most recent book, 'RetroSuburbia: The Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future' shows how people can downshift and retrofit their homes, gardens, communities and above all, themselves to be more self-organised, sustainable and resilient into an uncertain future.
Well, welcome, David, thank you so much for joining us today. And I just want to let you know that my personal journey has been very impacted, inspired, and influenced by permaculture. So this is really an honor to be speaking with you.
David Holmgren Oh, it's great to be talking with you from the climate zone that has what some parallels to where you are in Northern California. But of course, we're entering the early stages of summer here.
Ayana Young Yes, and we are entering the early stages of winter, as the rain is pouring down on my little cabin right now. So you might hear some pitter patters, and wood stove crinkles from time to time. So yeah, well, wonderful.
I’m sure many of our listeners are familiar with permaculture, but as an entry point, I wonder if you can share how permaculture differentiates itself from organic gardening or agroforestry? How do practitioners of permaculture apply a holistic approach to living that honors time and leisure, and isn’t at the complete beck and call of the farm, but is still in relationship with the land?
David Holmgren Yeah, well, I suppose they’re in some ways, the simple questions, but they're also big questions. Permaculture certainly emerged out of a context in the 1970s of a resurgent interest in organics and organic living, organic farming that was happening in the Western world, building on roots that go back, of course, to the 1930s. And even earlier, so some of the reactions against the adverse effects of industrial modernity, and especially the industrialization of agriculture, which a lot of people don't realize was actually the last industry, if you like to be industrialized, the textile industry was the first where a single culture was very, very problematic for the industrial methodology.
So it really is a 20th century phenomenon, and in a lot of ways, a post Second World War phenomenon. So in that sense, permaculture really was a branch of the tree of organic agriculture. But it was picking up some of the themes that were in that movement, but also questioning some of the fundamental assumptions, including why is agriculture based primarily on annual plants, given how fragile and susceptible to erosion and land degradation, agricultural systems based on plants that have to be grown each year. Why doesn't our agriculture, like nature, end up being dominated by perennial plants and especially trees was obviously that huge focus and that was picking up on one of the threads that were in those earlier waves of environmental thinking from the 1930s, the ideas of especially the work of Russell Smith, looking at tree crops and the huge potential undeveloped potential in the world's tree crop.
So it was also looking at how the modern ideas of design thinking as a sort of new literacy really, that was not innate or obvious to sensibilities of farming, where there was a focus on husbandry, agronomy, but not so much spatial and temporal design. So those ideas coming out of the design professions, architecture, landscape architecture, planning, also was something that that permaculture was adding or infusing into that lineage. And then there was another related aspect, which was looking at the ideas of systems ecology, and especially the work of Howard Odom to try and understand the development of human systems in terms of energy transformation, and using energy as both a language to understand nature, and to understand human systems and a currency to really get a measure on it, that would free us from the measures that dominated industrial modernity, especially that of money. So there's a lot of threads to those distinctions, or additions, or evolutions that permaculture was making to that lineage of organic agriculture.
Ayana Young I really do love the design and systems thinking elements of permaculture and I'm looking at it,my food forest right now that I built upon a very degraded, logging landing from this land's history. And yeah, just I don't see one straight line in this place. And, yeah, I really appreciate the quality that permaculture brings to growing food. And I know that practitioners of permaculture have been critiqued for appropriating Indigenous knowledge under the name of permaculture, and I have also heard you credit Traditional Ecological Knowledge for heavily informing your co-conception of it. So, I’d like to ask you what the term permaculture really implies and which areas have largely come from Indigenous knowledge, and how that informs it’s ethics?
David Holmgren Hmm, yeah, well, I suppose as a really a design system for sustainable living and land use, so being concerned with both the production side of the equation in land use in all its diverse forms, from horticulture through to forestry, agriculture, and for that matter, the harvesting of the marine environment, as well. Also similarly concerned with how we make use of all of those things that we gain from nature. So the living side, the consumption side, it's looking at design principles that we can see, embedded in nature, and then expressed in more concrete meaningful form in sustainable cultures that have persisted through time in connection to a localized resource base, rather than flushes of human empire, expansion, and urban systems that have come from those.
So that inevitably takes you back to both what we would call Indigenous peoples, and also more broadly, traditional cultures of place, connected to land. Because those limits of nature, the sort of the hard, ecological and energetic limits are built in to those cultures because the feedback loop, the negative feedback loop of you know, if you take too much too many fish out of the river, or all of those things, those are built into some of the cultural learnings. And although we claimed the emerging design principles of permaculture, were perhaps a unique permaculture conception, the ethics of permaculture of care of nature, care of the Earth, care of people and fair share, we could see was really a distillation of what was common to old traditional cultures in the past. So we weren't claiming those things to be new but that ethical framework, or reference point, really meant that permaculture was not just some set of techniques or even strategies that could be used without reference to ethical relationships. And so that is probably the most single important aspect that drew from Indigenous knowledge.
But then there was a plethora of examples, of course, that mostly were in a context of people providing their needs directly, not through a monetary economy, but through self provision at the household and community level. And, of course, that's been a major theme of permaculture, as a push back to the monetization, the commercialization, the shoving of all of human economic activity into the monetary economy, which is really a very, very recent aberration only made possible by fossil fuel. So in that sense, we're also harking back to a world where a lot of human needs both material and non material are provided at the household and community scale. Yeah, what people would call self sufficiency or those sorts of ideas, because they have just, like, normalized in, in those traditional knowledge areas. And of course, there's the more obvious ones that people associate with permaculture, which would fall into the category of what is the field of economic botany of all, look, there's this really interesting plant that these people grow in this place, you know, that could be useful to incorporate. It's not part of our cultural lineage. And it's certainly not part of, you know, commercialized agriculture, but that looks like a useful species. And there's some knowledge about it with these people who, you know, have been using that for centuries or, or longer, you know, so that, I suppose, is some of the areas where people might speak of cultural appropriation, my attitude to that has always been that it's really important to acknowledge where things come from, but that in a world of global diffusion of not just people's biology, that inevitably, the world is in new fusion, out of which may emerge over long time, new, enduring cultures of place, which themselves will inevitably be some sort of hybrid fusion of different cultural influences that are relevant to that place, in the same way that the biology of those places is changed forever by the infusion of biology from other places. And both those issues have been, I suppose, somewhat contentious in permaculture, the valuing of naturalized species, and this valuing of different sources of knowledge and, and making use of those.
Perhaps one of the distinctions I'd make in the area of appropriation is that when the use is at the non-monetary level of self provision, I see that as quite different from when that transfers into commercial activity. And then I see another transition that people often don't make a distinction between people who are making a living livelihood in the monetary economy from some sort of knowledge or, or biology that may have come from other people, and then when a corporation is doing that, when a non natural person is self organizing cost minimizing profit maximizing devices that we created, that now have human personhood, doing that. So I say there's three levels. And the concerns about appropriation need to relate to those levels of use.
Ayana Young There has been a recent wave of skepticism when it comes to “radical self-reliance” and a very fervent discourse that looks to hold industry, government, and corporations accountable in its place. But you’ve long been vocal that individual acts, in the form of self-reliance, might be more successful at generating structural change than mass movements or policy ever could. How does disavowal at the community level, or what you call “voting with your feet”, create the kind of change that meaningfully thwarts the State, or at minimum is a necessary precursor to mass mobilization?
David Holmgren Hmm, yeah, I think it operates at several different levels. Firstly, there's the issue of all of us being complicit by being embedded, dependent on it, and benefiting from the structural systems of global exploitation. So there is a sort of, to some degree, an ethical imperative that if we are talking about a different world where the systems need to be dismantled, that there's a sort of an ethical pressure or imperative to see if we can do that ourselves and although strong arguments can be made that the degree to which we can do that is very limited because of the structural embedded nature of those systems, nevertheless, there is that imperative to try out our own radical ideas ourselves.
And I think that gives enormous credibility and gravitas to those ideas compared with sort of demanding that we sort of somehow restructure society in these radical ways. But to attempt to do that, at large scale from the top down, is almost certainly either going to fail or have adverse consequences. Because any system that works, that is successful, from a systems thinking point of view, has evolved from a simple system that works. So the simple system that works is at the smallest scale, that of the individual, the household, the local community. So we need to have working models at the smallest scales that then inform and feed up into the redesign, reformation. And when necessary, the radical turning over destruction and salvage of larger scale entities.
There's also a really important argument about scale, and human ability to understand or comprehend the current scale of industrial systems. But there's also another important aspect in terms of political autonomy, that when we have some degree of self reliance, and I'm generally not thinking of that, at the individual level, I think it's very difficult to think of that at the individual level, but at least at the household level. And by household, I tend to mean more robust, often multi-generational households of several people, there is an enormous strength and partial political autonomy that comes with that self reliance. And then when speaking to power from that position, there is not necessarily leverage over those systems. But at least we're in a position where we can't just be turned off, whereas the modern person is embedded in the industrial system, is almost dependent on that system for the air they breath. So it's very difficult to have a mass movement, shouting for change, when there is actually very little power over the day to day most basic needs. When we regain that, as all of our peasant ancestors actually had, then we can combine that with global understandings and information systems to be in a much better position to change those larger scale systems. And I think finally, the recognition that we are in such an extreme level of crisis, that we do have to come to terms with the fact that our agency to bring about transformative large scale change without collapse, and some degree of chaos, means that it is incredibly circumspect, to have that self reliance has some degree of function in the sense of lifeboats, not that, you know, the some sort of isolationist view of that at the extreme of perhaps the survivalist attitudes is of course, In any way viable, but it does make sense to be doing those things for all of those nested purposes.
And that ability to have some degree of autonomy, by people who are part of the global middle class, I've articulated is a potential huge strike against the system. It's not just a strike of labor, it's also a strike of consumption. And for most middle class people, it's potentially a strike of capital, in terms of investment. And that is a very powerful withdrawal of contribution that is possible. And that signal into the system, I've suggested that it would only take relatively small proportions of population to do that, to have an enormous effect on the system. Whereas if you look at the democratic politics, the whole attempt to get majority ideas over the line, that's a huge task, especially when the mass movement we're talking about is in some ways, a dematerialization, a reduction in material consumption, a mass movement shouting for less, you know, we don't have many, if any presidents in history, for such ideas being successful. And we also have recent history that shows us when the system is committed to a particular direction, even a majority of the population wanting to go in a different direction doesn't necessarily produce the result, maybe you need sort of 80% or 90% of the population to overturn some deep drive in the system in a certain direction. In Australia, I use the example of Australia's decision to join the United States in the invasion of Iraq. The vast majority of the Australian population were completely against that. But it still happened because the system at a deeper level was so deeply committed to the American alliance and geopolitical machinations driving systems in the Middle East, that we still, you know, went to Iraq. So I see the possibilities are relatively small proportions of empowered people voting with their feet, can have an enormous influence on the system. But even if it doesn't, it serves all of those other functions.
Ayana Young I really appreciate your analysis, and the clarity and the empowerment that it makes me feel when I'm listening to what you just described. In The Class Divide in a Time of Pandemic: a Permaculture Perspective, you write “I have articulated this life as a quiet boycott of an unsustainable system that beguiles the population with its seductions and addictions while increasingly exploiting those at the bottom as it trashes our precious earth and hands a cargo of adverse consequences to future generations.” And I’d like to discuss class and privilege in terms of permaculture because it is something that is often shied away from, but you are open about the “barely recognized privileged elite.” So, with this in mind, can you speak to the importance of the quiet boycott in terms of class and privilege and reducing degrees of dependency on the wealth of globalized capitalism? How does the middle class have an important role to play here?
David Holmgren Yeah. I mean, it's, for me, these things sort of have quite a deep history because I was brought up in a family of radical socialist activists who inherited all of the issues of working class struggle for rights at the same time, then my parents becoming small business proprietor, owning a bookshop, a technical bookshop, and, you know, those sort of different worlds of allegiance to class in different ways and being recognized growing up, “Oh, no, actually, we are middle class”, in spite of a whole lot of things about political allegiance, and the superficial reality, or the surface aspects of the way I grew up. And a lot of that is to do with privilege, and being able to recognize that privilege, and take it as a responsibility to be able to think forward and take longer term actions rather than be driven just by immediate needs.
So I think there's a long lineage in affluent societies where in spite of the toxin of affluence there are aspects where people with privilege, work out how to use that privilege, for some larger, deeper purpose of social transformation. And evolution. I think that is important. Of course, we're now in a situation where the global middle class might be still expanding at the fringes in India, and China. But in its places of origins in the Western world, the middle class has been in a process, of I would suggest of contraction, since the, what I call the Reaganite-Thatcherite Revolution of the late 1970s, and early 80s, of gradual squeezing down of that, and of course, that's part of what has generated the toxic politics in so many countries.
But that privilege that still exists there, for those who can step outside the propaganda of the system, which is telling people to basically do things which are actually against their own economic and political interest. And that gets down off into telling people that they need a big house and a high debt and two full time incomes on a treadmill. When if people stepped back from their own situation and looked at it objectively, would say “No, we should actually get out of debt, move to a simpler place, drop back to two part time livelihoods or one livelihood and the other, get the household economy cranking again, because actually, we'll be better off”.
So that ability to step back from the propaganda, and be able to actually look at one's own self interest firstly, and then extend that in some sort of enlightened self interest and think about the larger social and ecological systems were embedded in is to some extent, privilege, but it's also an incredible opportunity. And those opportunities are, in some ways, historically unprecedented. So for example, there are so many middle class people in our countries who actually do own their own homes. And those homes are the largest homes that are, you know, mass populations have ever owned in history. So actually, as owners of those homes, people are in an amazing position to take in borders, create extended household economies, while still having some degree of control/privilege over that process, and yet, empower these, you know, other people and provide conditions for other people to participate in that.
Now, the fact that most people don't choose to do that have some large house sitting there largely unused and going out and working in jobs, they don't like to support all that is, to me, people being really stupid, you know, they're not actually looking after their self interest, they're not actually making use of their privilege, they're wasting it, both for themselves, and obviously for the, for the planet for their wider community. The other aspect that I think of privilege is when we, if you like, dabbling with growing our own food, rather than doing that with the need for certain success each year, like a lot of our peasant ancestors couldn't fiddle with the recipe too much, because their food supply in the coming year really depended on what they did. Whereas we have the privilege to experiment, to do things and “Well that didn't work. What's the learning from that?” Now, some people disparage that as saying that it's just recreation or hobbies, or, you know, it's not real. And it's just, of course, propped up by the larger system. But if we take that opportunity as a learning opportunity, where we can take risks, when we can bring that spirit of the entrepreneur, the scientific experimenter, back down to that domestic scale, and say, “Yeah, this is our privilege, and our obligation to do this, so that the next generation has got more robust systems, in case they don't have the privilege and the opportunity to do the experimentations that we can do.”
Ayana Young Yeah, You wrote Retrosuburbia, which highlights the importance of strengthening the home-economy, which I think many are beginning to experiment with informally right now. At the same time, I also feel that the cultural conditioning of consumerism has been so omnipresent over the past few decades. This pandemic temporarily showed us just how unnecessary so much of our economy is, but the halt of consumerism was short-lived, it was simply rechannelled to different venues. So, how can we replace mindless consumption with mindful productivity in the home economy?
David Holmgren Yes, well, you're certainly right that how quickly the forces redirected that consumption system in otherways, and I think the hope or the pause of the pandemic, has provided a trigger for so many people who are already questioning the way they live, thinking about other possibilities. And like, a lot of analysis about the pandemic, just accelerating processes that are already underway, for example, digitalization of the economy, and all of those sorts of things, we can see the emergent interest in self reliance and the household economy, which has been growing in pulses for the last 30 years against a background of decline. Little pulses at different times when faith in the mainstream economy and society declines, there's a rise in interest in these things. And I can correlate the interest in permaculture with those pulses, you know, typically associated with economic recessions. And we can see how the pandemic is another strong, one of those.
So I think that also can bring back learnings in young people or younger people that they inherited from their parents going through similar ideas in the past, but then were swept aside by the onrush of the economy. So we've always taken the view that's often said in the Catholic Church about, you know, give me a child until seven and I have them for live, it's a little bit more problematic in the, in a postmodern world, but the idea is that children raised in a family where there is a robust household economy when the conditions are arrived as adults, they will immediately pick up that, that experience rather than having to start from scratch.
So I think we are already seeing the consequences of this multi generational, if you like, countercultural aspect of the revival of household economic values, and that, that it's a sort of a building at the same time. And of course, there's these larger forces that are, keep funneling everything towards the centers of power and wealth, and control. But of course, there's huge challenges in that, because that brings us face to face with the people we share a household with, we are in intimate relationships with, and so many intimate relationships in our society are actually successful, and to some extent enduring, because people spend very little time with each other. And that is a very sobering realization about the fragility of relationships, that when people are embedded in outside work, and even entertainment and different networks, they can avoid the difficulties that come with being in close proximity.
So I think the challenges of how to work together, certainly ones that a lot of people are finding difficult in, in a pandemic, and it naturally leads people to say, “Oh, let us pray to get out and get back to what we're doing”. And some of that is positive engagement with many more people, and a lot of our courses back into the patterns of the past. So I think where people have a history of working from home; partnerships, where people, certainly my own experience of a partnership in life and livelihood that's been going on for 35 years, you know, people often marvel at how do you actually put up with each other, and the mechanisms by which we develop autonomy, or authority in certain areas, and whether those are ones that might be traditional, if that suits our disposition, or quite different ones. But, you know, certainly in our own household, the notion of his and her department creates a situation where there is autonomy of action where you don't need to consult with others, you may get help, and you put the conditions for that help, but you have your territory of influence or authority, and working out how that household economy has those complementary relationships, rather than the idea that we are all equal, have all equal skills, and we all do the same things. Because in an ecological sense, we see in nature, that it is actually a setup for competition between species or competition between individuals. What we see in nature and in human society is people with different capabilities, different dispositions actually have a natural tendency to cooperative relationships because there's this mutual interdependence.
And of course, it's that dance between having the interdependence that is for the benefit, mutual benefit, but enough autonomy, that we are not totally dependent on each other in ways that are not so healthy. And you know, it's always a balance and it's like the balance between, are we jacks and jills of all trades in permaculture, or a master of one? And I think really, we have to be jacks and jills of all trades, but also a master of one. So there is a connection there between how that household economy works, and how the wider society works in our roles in it.
Ayana Young Yeah, human relationships and the dynamics that follow are so complicated and challenging. So, I feel that and yeah, I have found that many permaculture communities tend to be dominated by a very similar grouping of people, but you write that these adaptive strategies are accessible and intended to be adapted by the majority, which I think for many begs the question of who is permaculture for? Is it accessible to everyone in terms of resources and tools? And if not, how do we work to make it more so, because I have found the practice to be so incredibly pleasing to the soul, the way in which natural growth is allowed and common sense is welcomed...
David Holmgren I think where we see permaculture as a specific set of practices, inevitably, the limitation of those practices, when we shift from one environment to another shows up quite obviously. And I've been a great critic of people proposing permaculture, you know, in that sense of a specific set of practices, you know because of that, everything is context dependent. And similarly, when we look at people's social or economic situation, and a definitely cultural context, some things will translate from others, but not always.
So, for example, if you look at the idea of the most classic, iconic permaculture idea of a food forest, we're talking about systems that are dominated by long lived, often slower growing fruit in unnatural ways, and especially the natural is often quite long term before they even produce, so that obviously that investment of energy, to do that, you can see how that has been a major limitation for people in poverty stricken parts of the world with limited resources, where they're growing their food from annual crops each year. We can also see in the history of suburban food production, as documented in Australia, in the early 20th century, that middle class people grew gardens, whereas working class people mostly restricted themselves to backyard livestock, because they had poor security of tenure, they didn't necessarily, couldn't invest the time and the forethought in planning a seasonal garden, but they could feed some rabbits or, or backyard chickens, and take them with them, if need need be.
So you can see how in different contexts both historically and in terms of permaculture design, different strategies and techniques are going to be relevant to people both in their, you know, their cultural interest, their food preferences, all sorts of things. And we can see that with appropriate technologies, as well, of how we build on what already exists. And the retrosuburbia paradigm is really obviously focused on the western world where the large numbers of people, in many countries, the majority of people live in some sort of low density, residential living arrangement. And that template of living has this sort of huge potential for transformation by creative adaptation building on what already exists.
So that retrofitting paradigm is really a little bit moving away from what a lot of people would see the linear of permaculture, of clean slate design, whether that's a bold new plan to develop an eco village, or whether it's simply starting with a patch of grass and building a garden from scratch, to the idea that everything has a history. Everything has an existing state. Everything already has some value and some constraints, whether those are physical, or psychosocial and so that retrofitting from what we already have is both an honoring and an acceptance of what already exists. Without saying this is fixed, that we can change it to make it fit for new purpose. And that's where the retrofitting paradigms are really came out of the 70s energy crisis, especially in the United States, the idea of retrofitting buildings to make them fit for an era of expensive energy, but similarly we can apply that to the biological domain of changing existing gardens or, or farms, and of course, most dramatically, we can apply it to our own behavior, to retrofit our own behavior to make it fit for new context. And so that we can shed behaviors like an old worn out pair of shoes, or a pair of shoes that's inappropriate, that are too tight for our feet or high heels that don't work on natural ground, or a million other things that we can be open in that way to adapt and retrofit our own behavior. Without saying we need to throw everything out and start from scratch.
Ayana Young Here in the States, there has been a significant exodus of city dwellers to the countryside, and this jarring shift from one locale to another is not always done with care or consideration... So, when I think about building community resilience, this is something that also comes to mind; the dynamics and tensions between community and change. I wonder if you could just speak personally to what you are seeing in your community in terms of pandemic inspired relocations, and how we can weather the growing pains of gentrification?
David Holmgren Yes, that's certainly something we're seeing here, and of course, being 130 kilometers from Australia's second largest city and the one that went into a long extended lockdown has resulted in us seeing this exodus process you speaking of, and I think, again, it's accelerating, something that was there, there's been a sort of waves of move to move to the country. And in some ways, my retrosuburbia paradigm is, sort of saying to people, look, there are other opportunities, including adaption in situ, but we're also seeing a shift from higher density, urban core living to suburban living. But more commonly, this jump from the city, if not to rural properties, then to small towns like where we live, and also our larger regional towns. And that is mostly happening through people with the choice and the ability to do that, of course, and it doesn't take many people in a city of many millions to choose to move to the country to towns with only a few 1000 people being overwhelmed by both buyers of existing housing stock and people buying land and building.
So I find that certainly a bit depressing that we are going to get these. It appears we are getting at right now this rapid infill development and urbanization and gentrification, but I also sort of see how that's partly a consequence of the social evolution that happens. And I wrote about this in Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability where people who moved to the country in the 1970s and started many places that then became attractive to others of their own ilk that it stayed in the city. Then we're attracted to the resources, the economic resources, the health food shops, the alternative schools, the art galleries, all sorts of resources that then attracted urban people. And meanwhile, those pioneers who had begun that process had themselves become more influenced in ruralalized. To some extent, there had been this fusion, and I think this has occurred in the United States, like it has here, where people moved with environmental values that have come out of urban, middle class ideals, and found themselves in connection and community with people who were rural working class people, and that both groups actually started to see some of the senses or values in the other.
And I think that's been one of the processes that then leads to people looking at the next wave of arrivals from the city with disdain, because they recognize or maybe they don't recognize, but they have changed, as well. As you know, people bring in another phase of hyper consumerism. The other aspect that I'd say that is some positive aspect is that those people coming who have more financial resources are often in a position to employ local people, and take direct responsibility for the paradise they want to create for themselves. And that's actually in a social evolution since a better step than that disconnected consumption in the centralized system, where I don't really have any direct relationship with the things they're consuming, and often don't have any direct relationship with the people they might be employing. So, you know, these things are always, I think, a mix that you know, that perspective in permaculture, that the problem is the solution.
Ayana Young I'm going to have to remember that and tell myself that when I'm feeling the anxiety, of the gentrification, of the countryside, because it's definitely something that makes my heart beat faster.
In the article previously mentioned, “The Class Divide in a Time of Pandemic: a Permaculture Perspective” you also write “The greatest blessing of the ancient Mediterranean world was to be a free citizen of Rome, but over time the tax burden of sustaining the bloated empire made citizenry more of a curse. When the empire did fall, life for many ex-Roman citizens actually improved, even if many of the great cultural projects and achievements of the civilisation were progressively abandoned. Maybe humanity can make a better job of it this time round with the progressive failure of global industrial civilisation. It is a great irony that the fate of our cultural legacy will lie more in the hands of households and communities than with grand institutions and nation states.” And I’ve also read about how you see great limitations when it comes to how we imagine dystopias. This question is open-ended, but I’d love to learn about how you are thinking about the potential of salvage economies or your work with Future Scenarios and how you are guiding people to think about extreme crisis as a temporary portal?
David Holmgren Hmm. Well, I suppose just starting at a very simple level with adding my observations of permaculture projects around the world, in the sort of few extended teaching and study tours that I've done overseas, I've found that more than ecological agriculture and gardening, more than ecological building, perhaps the most universal claims of those of creative salvage and reuse, they just seem to stay everywhere. And I think that's partly a sort of a symptom of the huge opportunities that come as very large, powerful industrial civilization complexes go into decline and dysfunction, that what that means is the world is littered with a whole lot of nasty things that we don't want to inherit, whether that's heavy metal pollution, or you know, some of the worst things of nuclear waste deposits, and many nuclear power stations and other horrendous disasters that have been focused on. But it also means that our descendants will have this huge opportunity for creative reuse of things at a lower scale. I remember a permaculture colleague who did a lot of work in Vietnam, talking about the incredible creative reuse of the industrial hardware layer that were left behind by the Americans after the defeat in Vietnam, and, you know, engines out of tanks, you know, driving water pump systems, and all sorts of amazing creative reuse and high levels of skill, engineering skill in fixing and, you know, using things in in that sort of way.
So, I think that applies to so many aspects of our society that give options when the drive of that system towards constant growth has failed. And they certainly, you know, if you look at the United States, the proportion of its wealth, which is going into the military budget to project and maintain the power is actually a perfect parallel to the Roman Empire, where that's actually depriving the citizenry of basic resources. And, you know, for the sake of maintaining the Empire, which is exactly why, you know, Roman citizens bailed out of being Romans.
So there's many ways in which that salvage economy can express itself and in the more extremes of my energy descent scenarios of the future, have pointed out that these scenarios are not like some return to the Stone Age. And just the example of stainless steel, that the quantities stainless steel, that there are in the world that is not going to rust, and go away. And with some fairly basic tools, it's possible to fabricate all sorts of things at the most basic level, a stainless steel knife, you know, for 1000s and 1000s of years into the future, even if none of that industrial capacity is ever maintained or rebuilt. So some degree of endurance of not just things, but also of knowledge, of capacities to do things. And all these things, of course, have depreciation rates. You know, there's loss of knowledge, there's all sorts of things which are lost. But there's the possibilities of creative energy descent pathways, that more than the extremes that are associated with, you know, the term collapse.
And another aspect of that, that I think is very important, is similar to the way we look at industrial wastes as both toxin and opportunity. If we look at biological systems, that people would see as running out of control with so called invasive species, that so many of these biological systems are actually more capable at rebuilding soil, water, and biodiversity resources in the longer term, than a lot of the species that were originally in those landscapes, partly because they have that exotic vigor, that weedy nature. And that even if those things are both inconvenient for us, currently, or we can see the downsides of the impacts are having in a larger sense, they may be part of nature's sort of emergent strength out of the, you know, the chaos we've created. And it's very good, you know, evolutionary evidence to suggest that that that is the case. And of course, one of my lifelong sort of subjects of study has been these advanced novel ecosystems where you see where nature has taken over After humans have trashed a place, and we live in an area, which was all gold mining sluice down to the bedrock, in a enormous frenzy, that was part of the richest gold region of the world. And we now have these extraordinary recombinant novel ecosystems that are building new soil and, and biodiversity. So I see that is not so much a salvage economy, but nature actually sort of building new biological wealth for its own purposes. But that's also wealth, which will provide modest resources to sustain people in the future.
Ayana Young Wow, David this has been such an incredible conversation so far. And as we come to a close, I’m thinking about how permaculture works with nature instead of against it, which is a call so many of us are drawn to, but that requires familiarity and relationship and I think about how narratives of climate change and climate chaos emphasis that things are rapidly changing, and the Earth will become volatile and unpredictable in nature. How do you make sense of these somewhat conflicting realities? What can permaculture offer to those who are concerned about making it through challenging times?
David Holmgren Yes, I mean, I think these things are sort of enormous difficulties. And clearly, we do have the possibility of runaway changes that can make the Earth at least uninhabitable for a species like homosapiens, if not many other species of, of life. But at the same time, I think the disempowering nature of that information is more extreme when people don't have experience of the abundance and renewal of nature. And whether it's the birth of kid goats, or merely just saying, seeds emerge and grow into food plants, so many simple things, inevitably they seem ordinary, but I constantly am surprised how much that connection to growing your own food to connection to working relationship with nature, actually enlivens, and helps people deal with those larger scale questions of the severity and uncertainty about the future of, of nature.
And it doesn't mean that is a naivety about those things. But it just actually provides a more nurturing environment and a closer connection to the lived realities. So it's both bringing us to those realities and the difficulties of that, at the same time, that dealing with this abundance and renewal of life and the way nature keeps finding new ways to work. And I think that really is, at so many levels, contributes to being able to work productively, and contributes to that process, rather than succumb into a spiral of depression and dysfunction. And so really, in that sense, you know, we say in terms of permaculture activism, this is just, maybe this is just a more fun way to live. You know, we're having more fun, do this, and it appears relatively harmless. And that alternative when I see so many people going through the process of extreme burnout in activist actions to try and stop the bad things happening in the world, and so many people end up coming to permaculture from that state, as just well, this is actually just necessary for their psychological survival.
And, of course, it can be said and critiqued that, that's, that's not going to change the world. But neither is if we collapse in dysfunction or we resort to the extremities of the the extreme eco-terrorism, sort of like we must stop the system by destruction, which, in the end can only be symbolic and only brings the discrediting of the the changes that are needed. So in that sense, you know, permaculture has actually acted to find a space for people to survive with the burdens, the psychological burdens that the current world provides.
Ayana Young I feel that, David, the burnout is real. And it's healing. So healing to be with the Earth and with our hands in the soil and watching plants grow and nourish the land and ourselves and our communities. So this has been such a beautiful conversation. I personally appreciate your work, as well as on a collective level. And, yeah, I'm just excited to continue following your work and learning together as we move through this strange unraveling, this great unraveling of our time.
David Holmgren Well, thank you. It's been great to talk and appreciate your work in this regard.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Roma Ransom and Jody Segar. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger.