An excerpt from an interview with Bill Mollison, the co-"originator" of Permaculture:
Alan Atkisson: Let’s get back to permaculture. What’s your current best definition of it?
Bill Mollison: You could say it’s a rational man’s approach to not shitting in his bed.
But if you’re an optimist, you could say it’s an attempt to actually create a Garden of Eden. Or, if you’re a scientist, you could liken it to a miraculous wardrobe in which you can hang garments of any science or any art and find they’re always harmonious with, and in relation to, that which is already hanging there. It’s a framework that never ceases to move, but that will accept information from anywhere.
It’s hard to get your mind around it – I can’t. I guess I would know more about permaculture than most people, and I can’t define it. It’s multi-dimensional – chaos theory was inevitably involved in it from the beginning.
You see, if you’re dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can’t connect them. We don’t have any power of creation – we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible...
Alan: How did you come up with the idea of permaculture? What led up to it?
Bill: I’d come into town from the bush – after 28 years of field work in natural systems – and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests. Humans were my study animal now – I set up night watches on them, and I made phonograms of the noises they make. I studied their cries, and their contact calls, and their alarm signals. I never listened to what they were saying – I watched what they were doing, which is really the exact opposite of the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers.
I soon got to know my animal fairly well – and I found out that it didn’t matter what they were saying. What they were doing was very interesting, but it had no relation whatsoever to either what they were saying, or what questions they could answer about what they were doing. No relationship. Anyone who ever studied mankind by listeningto them was self-deluded. The first thing they should have done was to answer the question, "Can they report to you correctly on their behavior?" And the answer is, "No, the poor bastards cannot."
Then I sort of pulled out for a while in 1972 – I cut a hole in the bush, built a barn and a house and planted a garden – gave up on humanity. I was disgusted with the stupidity of the University, the research institutions, the whole thing.
When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn’t write it down fast enough. Once you’ve said to yourself, "But I’m not using my physics in my house," or "I’m not using my ecology in my garden, I’ve never applied it to what I do," it’s like something physical moves inside your brain. Suddenly you say, "If I did apply what I know to how I live, that would be miraculous!" Then the whole thing unrolls like one great carpet. Undo one knot, and the whole thing just rolls downhill...
Why is it that we don’t build human settlements that will feed themselves, and fuel themselves, and catch their own water, when any human settlement could do that easily? When it’s a trivial thing to do?
Alan: Perhaps because we’re so wealthy that we believe we don’t have to.
Bill: Well, I don’t call that wealth. You want a definition of wealth from Eskimos, the Inuit? Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world. I think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.
Alan: If you want to do permaculture, and there isn’t a teacher around, where do you start?
Bill: Just start right where you are.
Alan: I read somewhere that you’ve said, "You start with your nose, then your hands …"
Bill: "… your back door, your doorstep" – you get all that right, then everything is right. If all that’s wrong, nothing can ever be right. Say you’re working for a big overseas aid organization. You can’t leave home in a Mercedes Benz, travel 80 kilometers to work in a great concrete structure where there are diesel engines thundering in the basement just to keep it cool enough for you to work in, and plan mud huts for Africa! You can’t get the mud huts right if you haven’t got things right where you are. You’ve got to get things right, working for you, and then go and say what that is.
Read entire interview here
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