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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Interview with Bill Mollison
  • Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:06:24 -0600


Interview with Bill Mollison
By Scott London
http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/mollison.html

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 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 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.





  • [Livingontheland] Interview with Bill Mollison, Tradingpost, 04/25/2008

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