permaculture

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe@silcom.com>]

Death is the father of duty
The progenitor of permaculture, Bill Mollison, who died on September 24 at 
the age of 88, avoided the spiritual arena with a healthy passion. 
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/life/home/death-is-the-father-of-duty/article_24638814-826d-5e01-9aa9-bdd2967bd2ea.html
 
<http://www.santafenewmexican.com/life/home/death-is-the-father-of-duty/article_24638814-826d-5e01-9aa9-bdd2967bd2ea.html>

Without mercy, he would brashly challenge any and all claims as to the 
existence of the paranormal. “Aye, fairy worship!” he’d protest with a snort 
and a hyperbolic roll of his wide eyes.

Ironically, it may be time to put Mollison in prophetic terms. Okay, I know. 
Some of you may not be ready. He hasn’t been gone long, but please make your 
sobbing snappy. Time is short. Resource depletion, species extinction, 
climate change. Pick your pollution. Like it or not. We must quickly 
cultivate Mollison’s legacy. What the Hell? Why not aim high?
Like any paradigm-shifting bloke, Mollison was a profound thinker and a 
charismatic communicator. I’ve been blessed to see him in action several 
times, and in 1992 I was fortunate to have him as lead teacher of a 
permaculture design course at Santa Fe’s Apache Creek Ranch. I’ve had many 
effective teachers in my life — professionals, who blew minds on regular 
bases. He tops them all.

Mollison was to teaching as Jerry Garcia was to playing guitar — talented, 
original, exceedingly interesting and often amusing, poignant and profound. 
Both would go noodling off on saucy, seemingly irrelevant and half-brewed 
tangents. But if a patient listener gave the chow fun time enough to boil, a 
slippery new world would spiral into a dreamy bite of rhizomatous wisdom. 
Delivered with a plucky faith in life’s mercurial tempo and a preternatural 
ability to slow down and soften up, each master regularly provided his 
sagacious goods with an intense and enduring shock.

But Mollison was more than an entertaining teacher who made you giggle and 
grow, greater than a soulful sage who made you weep and love.
His prophetic side becomes apparent when one considers the content of his 
message. Like all prophesy, it’s morally significant, directly connected to 
the workings of the universe, and able to predict the future. Some call it 
mystical, religious, or transcendent. In permaculture, we use a set of 
self-evident ethics founded on the concept of moral responsibility, and we 
study predictable patterns in nature as we apply universal, science-based 
principles to our work.

Permaculture’s moral significance is best understood in comparison to the 
term “sustainability.” Both words were coined in 1972, but as synonyms go 
it’s critical to note that they differ almost as much as they resemble each 
other. Sustainability describes a condition, real or imagined, but it’s an 
end unto itself with no known means to attain its goal. Conversely, 
permaculture provides a detailed and comprehensive road map toward the 
sustainable Promised Land. The word itself comes complete with a built-in 
plan for real-world success, which is essentially this: Mimic the patterns 
and principles of nature whenever you affect your environment, and 
efficiencies will occur, yields will increase, local biodiversity levels will 
begin to rebound, and you will be on the road to a sustainable future.

Like sustainability, permaculture can refer to a goal, but the latter is also 
a moral plea, a cultural movement, a motivational philosophy, a system of 
design, a set of practical techniques, a wide-spectrum of authentic examples 
based on the same biologically based creed, and much, much more. I tend to 
think of permaculture as a school of thought and action — in sharp contrast 
to the vague and easy to co-opt term sustainability. This linguistic 
distinction is helpful to understand when you are trying to comprehend the 
internal power and universal life-forces embedded in the more-complex term.

To confirm the oracular nature of permaculture qua prophesy, let’s work our 
way back from 1972. In cooperation with Mollison’s student at the University 
of Tasmania, David Holmgren, the two ecologists developed a practical 
philosophy that provided the keys to human survival. As a portmanteau of 
permanent, agriculture, and culture, permaculture unveiled the importance of 
creating locally based food and energy systems in order to maintain some 
semblance of human civilization given our planet’s limited resources. In 
sharp contrast to the post-World War II soil-depleting systems of 
industrialized food production, permaculture was a sibylline call to action 
to which our culture has responded but has not yet fully embraced.

In 1978, Mollison and Holmgren published Permaculture One. After that, 
Holmgren mostly stayed home to create an Australian oasis. As living proof 
that permaculture works, he’s the movement’s well-grounded and much-loved 
mother figure. Tune in next time for my sainthood argument. (Well, no. 
Don’t—I’m in deep enough, I’d assume.)

Meanwhile Mollison spent many decades exhorting the ways, means, and benefits 
of permaculture. By the beginning of the 1980s, he’d taught in five 
continents. By the end of the decade, Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual was 
published, and permaculture designers, permaculture teachers, and even 
teachers of permaculture teachers suddenly had a formidable textbook, a 
580-page eco-bible to which they could refer and through which they could 
sound reasonably intelligent and mostly believable.

Conceived in one of the most remote corners of western civilization, the idea 
first swept swiftly into the fringes of alternative society. Decades later, 
even the New York Times, Le Monde and Aljazeera America are reporting about 
it. In the Guardian’s obituary on Mollison, which has close to 10,000 shares 
and God knows how many views, the 195-year-old international news outlet 
claimed that permaculture has three million practitioners and that the 
movement has spread to more than 140 countries.

One apostle, Robyn Francis of Djanbung Gardens, has taught 143 permaculture 
design courses since 1985. Last month she graduated over 40 more permaculture 
designers in China. The movement is growing. But what’s next?

In macabre situations like the death of a beloved guru, permies might look to 
the second of Mollison’s five design principles, “The problem is the 
solution.” Of course, the “problem” of Mollison’s mortality is a “solution” 
to the problem of looming cultural demise. Fortunately, given his current 
physical state, we don’t have a rotting-body problem. With Mollison’s death, 
we have a duty to disseminate a growing body of knowledge across the globe 
and down the street. It’s an opportunity to spread the word, so please do.

In the great tradition of ecology-based morality, which includes the work of 
Aldo Leopold, Masanobu Fukuoka, and Rachel Carson, Mollison recognized the 
dilemmas that human beings would be facing today. He found the solution and 
spent the rest of his life sharing it with others. May we continue his work 
and move it into contemporary mainstream society. And may he decay into glory 
and rise up through the trunks of the trees planted by those who’ve learned 
that we are all creators now.

Nate Downey is the author of Harvest the Rain (Sunstone Press, 2010) and the 
president of Santa Fe Permaculture, Inc. You can contact him through his new 
company website, www.permadesign.com <http://www.permadesign.com/>.
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