permaculture

[Pacific Edge Permaculture + Media <pacedge@magna.com.au>]

Interesting interview with Bill Mollison. He's done great things, Bill. He
is an inspirational speaker, a motivator, and we're all better off for
having him come into our lives in some way, if I can make a sweeping
generalisation.

Bill also makes use of sweeping generalisations in his public speaking and
media interviews. He makes copious use of the term 'we'... as in 'we did
this'...  'we did that'.

I guess he's speaking in generic terms that imply permaculture people, but
the term has created the impression that Bill has had direct involvement in
these things... I have heard that from people who do not know him. Yet, in
some cases, permaculture people have had only peripheral or no involvement
in the things he mentions. What permaculture often has had is an
influence...  people have  read the permaculture books (not only Bill's) or
seen the Global Gardener video. This may have caused friction between them
and permaculture people in the past.

As I read the interview, I could see how Bill's statements alluded to events
in the social history of 20 years ago, events that may or may not have had
permaculture input... such as the mention of 'hippies' occupying Cape York.

It's this use of generic terms and the blending of permaculture with
contemporary events that I find a little troubling... I find myself asking
questions of Bill's statements... questions such as who? when? where? how?
where's the detail... the evidence?... maybe it's my background in
journalism that leads me to ask these questions... but I think that unless
information is accurate and adequate and can be backed up, then it can
amount to an accidental misleading of the public, not to mention a
misreading of recent social history.

Anyway, as I said, I liked reading the interview but I felt compelled to ask
the questions and make the comments below....


------- Forwarded message follows ------- From:               "Chris Trem"
<Chris.Trem@...> To:                 "Bdnow" <bdnow@envirolink.org> Subject:
Interview with Bill Mollison Part Two Date sent:          Wed, 10 Apr 2002
12:38:56 -0700

INTERVIEW WITH BILL MOLLISON - PART TWO

> The whole of the peninsula of northeast Australia runs right up into the
> tropics, it’s called Cape York. When we first got photographs of it, it was
> solid rain forest.
> 
Am I missing something? I'm not all that knowledgable on the ecology of
Northern Australia, but isn't the central core of Cape York, at least in
parts, savanna grassland or woodland or at least open forest? I am aware
that tropical rainforest exists along the coastal strip and river valleys.

I guess that somewhere in this ' solid rainforest'  were the cattle stations
and the aluminium mining industry occupying areas of the Cape.

> In Sydney, though, we're
> 
Who, precisely, is 'we're'? A group, an organisation? It certainly wasn't
the Permaculture Sydney Association. Is it a collective, generic, term for
some class of people or occupation?

> noticing little holes appearing in the rain forest all along the coast and, 
> in
> the end, they turned into quite large holes with buildings in them.
> 
This implies that the photo interpretation continued over two or more
generations of photographs... a really determined focus for whoever did it.

When did this observation, this interpretation of what are presumably aerial
or satellite photographs take place? Who had access to them?

As far as I am aware, there has been a cattle industry on Cape York for some
time and there are cattle stations there... so surely they must have
appeared in the photographs to be 'quite large holes with buildings in them'
as well as must the clearings of the 'hippies' Bill mentions below.

Granted, the 'hippy' land clearers might be easy to pinpoint in the
photographs as they are reported to occupy only the coastal strip (which is
a very long coastal strip - take a look at a map). And that's assuming that
there are no other settlements that could be mistaken for hippy clearings.

A lot of 'the little holes appearing in the forest' surely must be not so
much the 'hippies' Bill blames but the road built to Cape Tribulation in the
1970s and the rainforest lots sold soon after. The purchasers, for the most
part, were probably not hippies, but I'm only guessing.

> So, they went to have a look
> 
Who went to have a look? When? Where on the Cape did they look? What did
they find? Who paid for their expedition? Where is their report? How can I
get a copy?

> and the hippies were escaping the city by going to Cape York, finding a nice
> waterfall ten yards from a beach, cutting themselves a clearing, putting in 
> a
> garden and building a house and then getting a bigger house and asking their
> friends to come.
> 
And enjoying the plagues of mosquitos that also live in the rainforest?

Cape York is a big place. Is Bill alluding to the Cedar Bay settlement on
the Cape York east coast of the late 1960s/ early 1970s? Yes, that was the
era of the hippies and of what was known as the 'back to the land movement'.
If not, what is he referring to? On the scale of the Cape, Cedar Bay was
very tiny - only a small settlement on part of a bay.

Could Bill mean the Aboriginal settlements on the cape? - no, they probably
don't qualify as 'hippies' though they do occupy clearings with 'little
holes' containing buildings in them.

If it's not Cedar Bay that bill refers to, then where? who? when? are they
still there? do they still have clearings around their buildings?

What Bill is doing, I think, is using his example as a generalisation of the
movement of people into select rural areas in Australia 20 or so years ago.

As a generalisation it typifies but does not regard the exceptions to the
generalisation. It certainly does not apply to the many who resettled
clapped-out old dairy farms and grazing land and proceeded to build on it
and vegetate it. Yes, housing sometimes did follow the evolution Bill
describes of 'building a house and then getting a bigger house', an
evolution that might take ten or more years of occupation as skills were
developed and capital accumulated.

> So the hippies were actually eating the rain forest. And they’re the very
> people who turn up in thousands to stop all forests being cut anywhere.
> 
They sure turned up in thousands to try to stop the Cape tribulation road
and the associated destruction of the rainforest.

What I see here is Bill's long-held antipathy to anti-logging protestors. At
times, he has taken a devil's advocate stance of proclaiming himself a
one-time logger (which he was in younger years). While advocating the
cessation of land clearing, Bill has for some years been critical of
anti-logging forces...  and, sometimes, I think, with good reason.

> But they themselves, at home, were the main cause of the disappearance of a
> very uncommon tropical rain forest because they like to live in a beautiful
> place. What they don’t like to do is build a beautiful place to go and live
> in. They like to go to a place that is already very beautiful. That’s very
> typical of rich people and hippies.
> 
No argument with this. 'Hippies' - or 'new settlers'  as they sometimes
called themselves when they left the cities for rural land - might have
liked living near waterfalls despite the mosquitoes and leaches and
certainly did move into bushland. But, to the credit of the more foresighted
among them, they have been responsible for a reasonable amount of
reforestation, even if that was little more at times than allowing the bush
to reoccupy abandoned dairy land.

And the rich people? Yes, they followed.

> You’ll hear hundreds of hippies say, “Oh, I’ve found this marvelous place.
> It’s got a waterfall; it’s got beautiful trees. It’s got thousands of birds,
> you know. I’m gonna build there.” It’s right in a national park! You’ll hear
> that a million times, right?
 
Wrong Bill. In Australia, you cannot build residential houses in national
parks.

> And I think, “You stupid bastard. You’re a type- one error 
> yourself!”(laughs)
> The hippy should go somewhere where there’s no forest, like I did, where
> there’s just cattle-trodden grasslands and build that beautiful place, 
> which I
> did.
 
Credit, Bill! 'I' and the rest of the people who developed the ex-grazing
land that the Permaculture Institute occupied in Northern NSW.

Yes, Bill did develop about 2.5 hectares that was the original settlement at
Tyalgum, and, yes, today it is a great testament to his foresight and effort
with its understorey of coffee bushes and canopy of leguminous South
American trees.

> put lots of lakes in it with 50 good dams, so everywhere there’s water, and 
> I
> created paradise.  It created itself even more than I did; I gave it a
> three-year start. It built itself amazingly fast.

This describes the Tyalgum property of the Permaculture Institute - they
moved out this year and put it on the market. Yes, dams were put in (50
though?) and it was developed as an interesting property and home to
experiments, some ill-fated, such as Commonworks.

> BM: In little towns up in Queensland, that’s where our cooperatives got up 
> and
> got going. We put the credit union there too and the credit union is for
> everyone in the town. It started with an average investment of $15 each and 
> it
> now stands at about $18,000 each and it grew so fast.
 
This must be the Maleny Cooperative Credit Union... but, once again... who
is the 'we' Bill refers to?  Permaculture people were involved, but does
Bill's statement include people like Jill Jordan (I think) who were
instrumental in starting it?

> Everybody bought their own houses, bought their own cars, bought their own
> farms, set up their own businesses, and they had a huge surplus:
 
'Everyone'?

> I think it’s about 15-20 million bucks. It’s only a little town. And nobody
> wants any capital anymore. They’re all fully capitalized. And they did it 
> with
> their own money! It’s amazing what your little town could be like if you put
> your credit union with your coop.
> 
> When I wrote Permaculture, I didn’t think I was the first person to write it
> or teach it. I thought, there must be a lot of people much better than me to
> do it. Nobody ever did.

Well, there was David Holmgren who co-authored, with Bill, the first book on
permaculture, Permaculture One, in 1978, and who contributed his own ideas.

I don't write this to denigrate the good work and wonderful inspiration that
Bill is. I write to express the observation that people have been
mislead by the way Bill  phrases what are the achievements of other
permaculturists and other people working for sustainable systems.

I know that people have been mislead because they have told me so over the
years - people at addresses given by Bill, at permaculture courses I have
been involved with in teaching, people who have read Bill's statements or
heard them on television or video.

What we must do, in light of the interview with Bill the above quotations
are part of, is to regard his statements as alluding to the permaculture
and sustainability movements as a whole.

... Russ Graayson