[GJM] An Interview with Permaculture Founder and Self-entitled Subversive Revolutionary: Bill Mollison

[ecotort at gn.apc.org]

An Interview with Bill Mollison  


By Scott London

 

 

	

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 practised 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 course he teaches each year in Ojai. A short, 
round man with a white beard 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. His comments 
are often rounded out 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. 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 ploughs. 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.


 

This interview was adapted from the radio series Insight & Outlook 
<http://www.scottlondon.com/insight/index.html>, hosted by Scott London 
<http://www.scottlondon.com/>. It appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of 
/Green Living/ magazine.

 

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