Wow Larry, what a great document! Thank you for posting it! It is an
inspiration to read, and came at the perfect time, at least for me..If every
home had a kitchen garden, even if only a few containers on the porch, we'd
all be so much better off..
Namaste,
Linda :-)
From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2016 10:50 AM
Subject: [permaculture] Fwd: (no subject)
[this was sent to me though probably intended for the list so am
forwarding it]
Bill's acceptance speech of the Right Livlihood Award was given 35 years
ago and is more relevant today than back then.
His work is still timely as ever and it is within the realm of permaculture
to heal our planet and ourselves but it requires a willingness on our part
to acknowledge that we have the knowledge and power to accomplish what Bill
spent his latter life advocating.
Thanks for posting this Mike...
Scott Pittman
RIP Bill Mollison……
by mikestasse
You won't see mention of Bill Mollison's passing away in the media today -
just the usual boring stuff about a couple of good looking Hollywood actors
getting divorced or TV programs about baking cakes or who will make the
next footy grand final..... In case you are wondering who he was, Bill was
a one time Tasmanian shark fisherman and hunter who co-founded the
permaculture movement which can be neatly encapsulated as the notion of
people living in abundance within nature's systems.
mollison
Here is his acceptance speech when he won the 1981 "Right Livelihood Award"
also known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize".............:
"I grew up in a small village in Tasmania. I was born in 1928, but my
village might have existed in the 11th century. We didn't have any cars;
everything that we needed we made. We made our own boots, our own metal
works, we caught fish, grew food, made bread. I didn't know anybody who
lived there who had one job, or anything that you could define as a job.
Everybody had several jobs.
As a child I lived in a sort of a dream and I didn't really awake until
I was about 28. I spent most of my working life in the bush or on the sea.
I fished, I hunted for my living. It wasn't until the 1950s that large
parts of the system in which I lived were disappearing. First, fish stocks
became extinct. Then I noticed the seaweed around the shorelines had gone.
Large patches of forest began to die. I hadn't realised until those things
were gone that I'd become very fond of them, that I was in love with my
country. This is about the last place I want to be; I would like to be
sitting in the bush watching wallabies. However, if I don't stand here
there will be no bush and no wallabies to watch. The Japanese have come to
take away most of our forest. They are using it for newsprint. I notice
that you are putting it in your waste‑paper basket. That's what has
happened to the life systems I grew up in.
It's always a mark of danger to me when large biological systems start
to collapse, when we lose whole stocks of fish, as we've lost whole stocks
of herring, and many stocks of sardines, when we lose huge areas of the sea
bottom which were productive in scallops and oysters. When we enquire why
this happens, it comes back to one thing: the use of energy sources not
derived from the biological system.
Dr. Sternglass, who was a pupil of Einstein's, has followed the drift
of radioactive dust from Three Mile Island. The newspapers say: 'Nobody
died at Three Mile Island'. Dr. Sternglass says that 30,000 children are
now dead, died under the cloud drifts of hypothyroidosis, and many
thousands are yet to die. Across this country, Russia, Germany, Japan,
Canada and the United States, drifts an air system, carrying not only
radioactives, but highly corrosive acids: sulphuric acids from the burning
of coal, and nitric acids from motor vehicle exhausts.
The snow which we measured in Vermont a few months back had pH values
of 1.9 to 2.5, which is much more acid than vinegar, more acid than any
biological system can stand. We cannot find in the northern part of the
United States or in Germany waters of pH higher than 4. Fish can't breed in
those waters, frogs can't live there, and salamanders are extinct. Forests
started to die in 1920, soon after the coal era started. Chestnuts have
disappeared on the American continent by 80%, the Beech trees have
disappeared. The Oaks are beginning to die throughout America, the pines
are dying in Germany (they're losing 80,000 hectares this year) and many of
them are now dying in Japan. The Eucalyptus are dying in Australia at 14%
per annum. It won't be very long before you won't have any forests to throw
away in your garbage cans. It's obvious to simple people like myself who go
out on foot to find out what's happening that the Northern hemisphere will
not be occupied by man for very many more years while he uses coal, petrol
and radioactives. I wonder what happened to make us abandon the sort of
life that I grew up in, in which we could sustain our lives indefinitely
and in which no great systems died. I don't believe that we lead a better
life, that we are any happier than I was and the children in that town
still are.
I withdrew from society about 1970 because I had been long in
opposition to the systems that I saw were killing us. I decided it was no
good persisting with opposition that got you nowhere. I thought for two
years. I wanted to return to society but I wanted to come back only with
something very positive. I did not want to oppose anything again and waste
my time. Somewhere someone had given me Mao‑Tse‑Tung's little red book. I
didn't understand it very well, in fact it was very difficult for me to
read. But, at one point when he was talking about an attack on the city of
Tai Ching, his advice to his army was 'Don't attack Tai Ching: it's too
heavily defended. Go around it and Tai Ching will fall.' So I've been going
around the things that I think are killing us.
When I came back into our society I came back with a system I call
Permaculture, a way in which man can live on the earth. To me we're not any
more important a form of life than any other life form. Those of you, very
few, who have been alone in forests for a long time, more than five weeks,
know that you totally lose identity as a human being. You can't distinguish
yourself from the trees, you can't distinguish yourself from any other
living thing there. All aboriginal people, all tribal people, have to
undergo such a period on their own in the environment. Afterwards, they
never again can see themselves as separate: man here and tree there. You
become as though you are simply a part of life.
The only safe energy systems are those derived from biological systems.
A New Guinea gardener can walk through the gates of his garden taking one
unit of energy and hand out seventy. A modern farmer who drives a tractor
through the gate of his farm takes a thousand units of energy in and gives
one back. Who is the most sophisticated agriculturist? We are getting rid
of our soil even faster than we are destroying our atmosphere. For every
one of us there is a loss of ten tons of soil a year. Nature can only
replace one or two tons. We will leave our children an earth in which there
is no soil or drinkable water.
We ourselves have always been left out of the energy equations. I'm the
only machine I know which can fuel itself: I can make the food upon which I
run. Give me a few friends and I can look after myself and many others.
This will do me for an alternative energy source. We've never been taught
to have confidence in ourselves as our own salvation. All the books you can
buy on gardening are books on technique. All the books on strategy are
wrong because they are one-dimensional. Multi‑dimensional systems will
out‑yield one‑dimensional systems hundreds of times. Polycultures will
always out‑yield monocultures. The Permaculture system is a safe way of a
sustained ecology; it is in itself a safe and sustainable energy system.
In the days of Carl Linnaeus we were still naming things. For a century
or so after Linnaeus we were finding out how they functioned. Today we know
some of the principles that make them work but just as we've reached this
stage, they have commenced to fall apart. We estimate that of the species
that we can see and count, we will lose some 35,000 in the next one and a
half decades. All my life we've been at war against nature. I just pray
that we lose that war. There are no winners in that war.
A couple of years ago I resigned from a job at the university and threw
myself at an advanced age into an uncertain future. I decided to do nothing
else but to try to persuade people to build good biological systems. I
existed for quite a while by catching fish and pulling potatoes. Then I
started to make some money by designing sustainable systems for people, for
their own houses and for their villages. Since then I've been able to train
20 people at a time. I have trained 400 young people who are now designing
systems throughout the U.S. and Australia. In the coming year I will be
training people in Germany and Brazil. We've set up a sort of brotherhood ‑
and sisterhood, because half of us are women. I don't believe women are any
better designers than men but I think they know more about living systems.
We must make a very large movement towards a very quiet sort of
revolution. We will go on training people until we have saturated all
countries. What we try to do is to integrate all things that plants and
animals will do with our own lives and our structures. It's possible to
design entirely biological systems in which you could live, but we have to
start with a place like Stockholm, which is about as abiological as you can
get. There are simple things that anybody can do to look after themselves.
Every city, for example, can produce its own food.
We are faced with an absolute choice: We can build the sort of cities
we are building, continue to accumulate resources and power to run around
like blowflies in cars, and be killed before long. Or we can live easily on
the earth. It's possible for us to construct biological systems that work,
it's well within our capacity. For a fraction of the cost of Swedish
armaments Sweden could become an entire system like this. It's up to you,
it's entirely up to you. I hope you all go back to work tomorrow and take
your wages. Good luck to you."
mikestasse | 26/09/2016 at 3:35 pm | Tags: bill mollison, passing,
permaculture | Categories: permaculture | URL: http://wp.me/pbVMJ-2kW
Comment See all comments
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You won’t see mention of Bill Mollison’s passing away in the media today –
just the usual boring stuff about a couple of good looking Hollywood actors
getting divorced or TV programs about baking cakes or who will make the
next footy grand final….. In case you are wondering who he was, Bill was a
one time Tasmanian shark fisherman and hunter who co-founded the
permaculture movement which can be neatly encapsulated as the notion of
people living in abundance within nature’s systems.
[see image below]
Autobiography:
“I grew up in a small village in Tasmania. I was born in 1928, but my
village might have existed in the 11th century. We
didn’t have any cars; everything that we needed we made. We made our own
boots, our own metal works, we caught fish, grew
food, made bread. I didn’t know anybody who lived there who had one job, or
anything that you could define as a job. Everybody had several jobs.
As a child I lived in a sort of a dream and I didn’t really awake until I
was about 28. I spent most of my working life in
the bush or on the sea. I fished, I hunted for my living. It wasn’t until
the 1950s that large parts of the system in
which I lived were disappearing. First, fish stocks became extinct. Then I
noticed the seaweed around the shorelines had
gone. Large patches of forest began to die. I hadn’t realised until those
things were gone that I’d become very fond of
them, that I was in love with my country. This is about the last place I
want to be; I would like to be sitting in the
bush watching wallabies. However, if I don’t stand here there will be no
bush and no wallabies to watch. The Japanese have
come to take away most of our forest. They are using it for newsprint. I
notice that you are putting it in your
waste‑paper basket. That’s what has happened to the life systems I grew up
in.
It’s always a mark of danger to me when large biological systems start to
collapse, when we lose whole stocks of fish, as
we’ve lost whole stocks of herring, and many stocks of sardines, when we
lose huge areas of the sea bottom which were
productive in scallops and oysters. When we enquire why this happens, it
comes back to one thing: the use of energy
sources not derived from the biological system.
Dr. Sternglass, who was a pupil of Einstein’s, has followed the drift of
radioactive dust from Three Mile Island. The
newspapers say: ‘Nobody died at Three Mile Island’. Dr. Sternglass says
that 30,000 children are now dead, died under the
cloud drifts of hypothyroidosis, and many thousands are yet to die. Across
this country, Russia, Germany, Japan, Canada
and the United States, drifts an air system, carrying not only
radioactives, but highly corrosive acids: sulphuric acids
from the burning of coal, and nitric acids from motor vehicle exhausts.
The snow which we measured in Vermont a few months back had pH values of
1.9 to 2.5, which is much more acid than vinegar,
more acid than any biological system can stand. We cannot find in the
northern part of the United States or in Germany
waters of pH higher than 4. Fish can’t breed in those waters, frogs can’t
live there, and salamanders are extinct. Forests
started to die in 1920, soon after the coal era started. Chestnuts have
disappeared on the American continent by 80%, the
Beech trees have disappeared. The Oaks are beginning to die throughout
America, the pines are dying in Germany (they’re
losing 80,000 hectares this year) and many of them are now dying in Japan.
The Eucalyptus are dying in Australia at 14%
per annum. It won’t be very long before you won’t have any forests to throw
away in your garbage cans. It’s obvious to
simple people like myself who go out on foot to find out what’s happening
that the Northern hemisphere will not be
occupied by man for very many more years while he uses coal, petrol and
radioactives. I wonder what happened to make us
abandon the sort of life that I grew up in, in which we could sustain our
lives indefinitely and in which no great systems
died. I don’t believe that we lead a better life, that we are any happier
than I was and the children in that town still are.
I withdrew from society about 1970 because I had been long in opposition to
the systems that I saw were killing us. I
decided it was no good persisting with opposition that got you nowhere. I
thought for two years. I wanted to returnto
society but I wanted to come back only with something very positive. I did
not want to oppose anything again and waste my
time. Somewhere someone had given me Mao‑Tse‑Tung’s little red book. I
didn’t understand it very well, in fact it was very
difficult for me to read. But, at one point when he was talking about an
attack on the city of Tai Ching, his advice to
his army was ‘Don’t attack Tai Ching: it’s too heavily defended. Go around
it and Tai Ching will fall.’ So I’ve been going
around the things that I think are killing us.
When I came back into our society I came back with a system I call
Permaculture, a way in which man can live on the earth.
To me we’re not any more important a form of life than any other life form.
Those of you, very few, who have been alone in
forests for a long time, more than five weeks, know that you totally lose
identity as a human being. You can’t distinguish
yourself from the trees, you can’t distinguish yourself from any other
living thing there. All aboriginal people, all
tribal people, have to undergo such a period on their own in the
environment. Afterwards, they never again can see
themselves as separate: man here and tree there. You become as though you
are simply a part of life.
The only safe energy systems are those derived from biological systems. A
New Guinea gardener can walk through the gates
of his garden taking one unit of energy and hand out seventy. A modern
farmer who drives a tractor through the gate of his
farm takes a thousand units of energy in and gives one back. Who is the
most sophisticated agriculturist? We are getting
rid of our soil even faster than we are destroying our atmosphere. For
every one of us there is a loss of ten tons of soil
a year. Nature can only replace one or two tons. We will leave our children
an earth in which there is no soil or drinkable water.
We ourselves have always been left out of the energy equations. I’m the
only machine I know which can fuel itself: I can
make the food upon which I run. Give me a few friends and I can look after
myself and many others. This will do me for an
alternative energy source. We’ve never been taught to have confidence in
ourselves as our own salvation. All the books you
can buy on gardening are books on technique. All the books on strategy are
wrong because they are one-dimensional.
Multi‑dimensional systems will out‑yield one‑dimensional systems hundreds
of times. Polycultures will always out‑yield
monocultures. The Permaculture system is a safe way of a sustained ecology;
it is in itself a safe and sustainable energy system.
In the days of Carl Linnaeus we were still naming things. For a century or
so after Linnaeus we were finding out how they
functioned. Today we know some of the principles that make them work but
just as we’ve reached this stage, they have
commenced to fall apart. We estimate that of the species that we can see
and count, we will lose some 35,000 in the next
one and a half decades. All my life we’ve been at war against nature. I
just pray that we lose that war. There are no
winners in that war.
A couple of years ago I resigned from a job at the university and threw
myself at an advanced age into an uncertain
future. I decided to do nothing else but to try to persuade people to build
good biological systems. I existed for quite a
while by catching fish and pulling potatoes. Then I started to make some
money by designing sustainable systems for
people, for their own houses and for their villages. Since then I’ve been
able to train 20 people at a time. I have
trained 400 young people who are now designing systems throughout the U.S.
and Australia. In the coming year I will be
training people in Germany and Brazil. We’ve set up a sort of brotherhood ‑
and sisterhood, because half of us are women.
I don’t believe women are any better designers than men but I think they
know more about living systems.
We must make a very large movement towards a very quiet sort of revolution.
We will go on training people until we have
saturated all countries. What we try to do is to integrate all things that
plants and animals will do with our own lives
and our structures. It’s possible to design entirely biological systems in
which you could live, but we have to start with
a place like Stockholm, which is about as abiological as you can get. There
are simple things that anybody can do to look
after themselves. Every city, for example, can produce its own food.
We are faced with an absolute choice: We can build the sort of cities we
are building, continue to accumulate resources
and power to run around like blowflies in cars, and be killed before long.
Or we can live easily on the earth. It’s
possible for us to construct biological systems that work, it’s well within
our capacity. For a fraction of the cost of
Swedish armaments Sweden could become an entire system like this. It’s up
to you, it’s entirely up to you. I hope you all
go back to work tomorrow and take your wages. Good luck to you.”
-
“If and when the whole world is secure, we have won a right to explore
space, and the oceans. Until we have demonstrated that we can establish a
productive and secure earth society, we do not belong anywhere else, nor (I
suspect) would we be welcome elsewhere.” – Bill Mollison
Tributes are flowing from around the world for the Tasmanian man who
co-founded the global permaculture movement.
Bruce Charles "Bill" Mollison — known as the "father of permaculture" —
died on Saturday in Hobart, aged 88.
His system advocated agricultural ecosystems that were sustainable and
self-sufficient.
Mr Mollison rose to prominence after publishing Permaculture One with David
Holmgren in 1974.
The book advocated a system "working with, rather than against nature" when
producing food, and favoured cultivating species suited for local
conditions.
He founded the Permaculture Institute in 1978, his ideas influencing
hundreds of thousands students worldwide.
Well-known horticulturalist and former ABC Gardening Australia host Peter
Cundall described permaculture as "an all-encompassing method of actually
living without in anyway disrupting the environment".
"It was the way of the future, and this is why it became so exciting," he
said.
"The greatest contribution Bill made was as an outstanding marketer and a
brilliant public speaker.
"So he not only toured different parts of Australia, but then went overseas
and went to Africa, India and other places."
Mr Cundall said the biologist helped grow Tasmania's reputation as the
birthplace of the environmental movement.
"Tasmania is in many ways unique because it started this whole business of
trying to live within our environment without destroying it," he said.
Mollison unlike any other academic: co-author
Mr Holmgren lived and worked with Mr Mollison as they were writing
Permaculture One.
He told 936 ABC Hobart Mr Mollison was unlike any other academic at the
University of Tasmania, and it was his "ecological thinking" that struck
the young student.
Mr Holmgren said there was a lot of interest in what the pair were doing in
the late 1970s.
"It was also a time with a huge interest in what we would call
sustainability today," he said.
"There were six mainstream publishers who approached a rambunctious
Tasmanian academic and a completely unknown graduate student wanting to
publish Permaculture One in 1977.
"Bill was actually really the father of the permaculture movement because
of his genius in setting up the teaching system that he described and it
all being outside academia."
Mr Holmgren said he would be remembering Mollison at the Australasian
Permaculture Convergence in Perth in next week.
"It will be a huge point of reflection and a celebration of his
contribution," he said.
'You started a quiet revolution'
Social media has been flooded with tributes, and a page "In Memory of Bill
Mollison" has been created on Facebook.
"May his words and teachings of permaculture continue to spread like
chickweed in our gardens," read a post on the Facebook page Women Who Farm.
"Thank you Bill for providing humanity with an education that no other
leader has been able to achieve. RIP," Glenn Shannon Kett wrote.
"You started a quiet revolution. You have sown the seeds of change, and you
will live in the bounties of nature, in every flower, in every tree, in the
soil and the water, and in every hand that nurtures nature," wrote Vani
Bahl, a Facebook user from California.
The author won numerous awards for his work and was also the first
foreigner invited and admitted to the Russian Academy of Agricultural
Sciences.
Mr Mollison was born in Stanley in 1928 in Tasmania's north-west, and left
school aged 15 to work in a number of jobs, including as a shark fisherman,
seaman, forester and mill worker.
He spent his final years at Sisters Beach on the state's north-west coast.
>From other news sites:
EDUCATOR, author and co-founder of the global permaculture movement Bill
Mollison has died in Hobart at the age of 88.
Mr Mollison’s passing on Saturday was announced on the website of the
Permaculture Research Institute, which he founded.
“A massive tree in the forest of humanity has fallen,” the Institute said
in a statement.
“With deep sorrow, we wish to inform family and friends that Bruce Charles
‘Bill’ Mollison, the ‘Father of Permaculture’, has passed away.
“He gifted so much to the world: a vision and framework for a positive
future, a special concern for developing countries, and above all, hope.”
Mr Mollison and David Holmgren developed the system of permaculture as an
integrated and sustainable form of agriculture — designed to create a
symbiotic relationship between man and the world — which they spelled out
in their 1977 book Permaculture One.
The system adopts environmentally friendly techniques including forgoing
the use of chemicals, thoughtful garden design, mimicking natural
ecosystems and incorporates recycling and the use of waste.
Mr Holmgren said Mr Mollison was one of Australia’s ecological pioneers.
“Bill’s brilliance was in gathering together the ecological insights,
principles, strategies and techniques that could be applied to create the
world we do want rather than fighting against the world we reject,” he
wrote.
“His legacy lives on in all those who were transformed by his teaching.”
In a tribute posted on the website of Permaculture Magazine, author Graham
Bell said Mr Mollison was a visionary in his field.
“A few people are born who are world-class heroes to those who know them
and unknown to the great majority, until one day their inescapable
influence floats to the surface and is generally recognised for the cream
it is. In hindsight such leaders go on to become household names.”
Born at Stanley, Mr Mollison was a former University of Tasmania lecturer
who spent decades travelling the world spreading the word about
permaculture.
His work was recognised with numerous awards and international recognition
including the Right Livelihood Award and the USSR Academy of Sciences’s
Vavilov Medal
Photo: Bill Mollison has been applauded for his dedication to sustainable
food production. (Supplied: Facebook) (image below)
Perma-Australia
@PermacultureAu <https://ello.co/PermacultureAu>
Permaculture International Ltd. trading as Permaculture Australia, is a
Not-for-profit Australian Charity and registered environmental organisation. https://twitter.com/PermacultureAu
Permaculture Australia http://permacultureaustralia.org.au/2016/09/25/farewell-bill-mollison/
Australia and the world have lost one of its most influential thinkers on
community-led approaches to sustainable development. Author, educator,
academic, researcher and innovative thinker, Bill Mollison, died peacefully
in Hobart, Tasmania, on 24 September.
Mollison has been described as one of Tasmania's leading intellectual
exports. Born in 1928 in the Bass Strait fishing village of Stanley, he
leaves behind a worldwide movement of remarkable resilience. From its
humble beginnings in Hobart, Tasmania, the permaculture design system,
which Bill co-created with David Holmgren, spread world-wide, inspiring
individuals and communities to take initiatives in fields as diverse and
food production, building design, community economics and community
development.
A diverse background
Bill Mollison left school at fifteen to help run the family bakery. In the
years following he worked as shark fisherman and seaman, forester,
mill-worker, trapper, tractor-driver and naturalist. His lack of formal
education gave him many learning opportunities in how the world works.
Bill joined the CSIRO Wildlife Survey Section in 1954 and gained extensive
research knowledge. His time in Tasmania's rainforests and natural systems
gave him the founding structure for what became his life’s major innovation
— the Permaculture Design System: the idea that we can design sustainable
systems that enable us to live within our economic and ecological means and
enjoy a modest prosperity. Later, he taught at the University of Tasmania.
In 1974, in Hobart, he and David Holmgren began to develop the permaculture
concept, leading to the publication of Permaculture One in 1978. He
traveled the world in the 1980s and 1990’s, teaching thousands of students.
Bill contributed articles, curricula, reports, and recommendations for farm
projects, urban clusters and influenced local governments. In 1981 he
received the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the 'Alternative
Nobel Prize'.
Bill later featured in the documentary series, 'In Grave Danger of Falling
Food', which was broadcast nationally and, following repeated requests,
rebroadcast twice. He authored a number of books on the permaculture design
system, the best known being The Permaculture Designers’ Manual, published
in 1988.
After establishing the Permaculture Institute in the Tweed valley of
northern NSW, Bill returned to his Tasmanian homeland to spend his final
years at Sisters Beach on the Bass Strait coast.
The final words represent Bill in his true classical way: “If you hear that
I am dead tell them they lie.”
Next week, Bill Mollison will be honoured at the Australasian Permaculture
Convergence in Perth, WA. This afternoon an old friend of Bill’s imagined
him saying: “In view of the Australasian Convergence coming up, I thought
I’d go a bit early - just to keep you on your toes”.