First Introduction
(Thomas Fischbacher)
t.fischbacher@soton.ac.uk
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Coming up with an appropriate assessment of some situation, especially one we are deeply involved in, always is an extremely difficult task, mostly due to our inherent (mostly subconscious and involuntary) talespinning predisposition. Actually, we all know from everyday experience that, whenever we are on a wrong track, the earlier we correct that mistake the easier the (ultimately inevitable) correction will be. Given these circumstances, the most obvious question hence is: what can we do to learn when we have gone wrong -- and how can we find out as early as possible? This actually might even be the most central question of all religion. It is, for example, interesting to note that Jesus considered the capacity to see through the delusions produced by one's ego (by which it tries to make itself appear in the best possible light) as the essential pre-requisite for spiritual salvation.
So, if we for the moment accept that the self-image of ourselves and our activities that we hold on to may actually be seriously distorted by our egos trying to present us to ourselves in the best possible light, what would a peek in a hypothetical `magic mirror' show that is able to portray us as we really are? That is an extremely difficult problem, as we seem to be wired against learning the true answer.
But even if this may be the defining question behind what commonly is called `the human condition', and might be unsolvable to us, we may be able to approach it with a certain sense of pragmatism and make some important progress in doing so.
One interesting observation concerning the "big picture" effects of our presently dominant collective behaviour is that there is a quite visible pattern in our interactions with the living world around us: Once we learn to make use of something we find in the world we inhabit, we deal with it in such a way that we totally use it up, while at the same time making us so dependent on it that no longer having access to it causes serious stress to us. Then, as "need is the mother of all invention", our "cleverness" ultimately helps us to find some other resource which can functionally substitute the one just despoiled. In this way, we are - at times, slowly, at times, rather fast - climbing down a winding staircase, a vicious cycle of resource development, despoilment, crisis, innovation, and substitution, over to the then-next-best-available resource. This interpretation may or may not be correct, but if we take a close look at our history, the evidence that it by and large manages quite well to explain a large number of observations (such as the collapse of many past civilizations) should give us more than enough reason to stop for a moment and give it some thought. If this is what we really do - wouldn't that mean that, if we continue like this, then in all likelihood we would ultimately end up being driven to eat the grass and the earthworms from the soil for there is nothing else left which we have not destroyed before? Art has raised this question many times. This is, for example, the topic of the science fiction movie "Soylent Green".
When we get confronted with such an idea, how do we deal with it? In our western society, there seem to be two widespread reactions to it: The maybe less common one is "the environmentalist's" of considering this as our inevitable fate, with the only relevant question being whether we can slow down the inevitable degradation enough to retain a reasonable quality of living for the next few generations by curtailing our own exploitation in order to leave something for them to exploit. (Is it inappropriate to associate this thinking to "environmentalists" as strongly as this use of that term in the previous sentence seems to indicate? Most likely so. Still, quite a number of people have views which at least broadly match this concept.) The presently dominant reaction is "the economist's" of coming up with rational-sounding excuses based on the idea that "our cleverness always found a solution, and always will" - a comforting idea which we all perhaps would like to believe, but which undeniably quite strongly smells of human-ego-off-its-rocker-again, and doesn't actually fare well when confronted with the evidence. Essentially, this is little more but a thinly disguised head-in-the-sand attitude. (Comments on the appropriateness of ascribing this view to "economists" similar to those above also hold here.)
But how inevitable is this process of gradual destruction of everything we ever touch? The legendary ancient king Midas was cursed with his touch turning everything to gold. Is it an accurate description of our species that our touch ultimately turns everything to waste? Somehow, such an idea seems quite wrong, for if it were true, wouldn't that mean that we, as human beings, perform much worse in that respect than pretty much all the other species around us? Given our unparalleled abilities to act in a constructive way, shouldn't we instead be able to repair damage to our own habitat and that of others inhabiting this world like no other species on the planet?
This is a bold idea. A daring idea. Man as the ultimate repair species, our ultimate purpose being to speed up the restoration of damaged biological productivity wherever it occurs and with deliberation create stress-minimizing habitat for ourselves and other species around us. Gardening man turning deserts into forests.
Permaculture is not about philosophical investigations into the validity of this picture. Permaculture is all about making it happen.
Bill Mollison, who received the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize") for his "Permaculture" concept in 1981, managed to demonstrate quite dramatically what can be achieved by working with nature rather than trying to impose our will on it by force and gave many courses in which he taught his integrated framework. In these days, there are Permaculture associations in many countries that offer standardized "Permaculture Design Courses" based on Bill's lectures, and, in particular, the material in the Permaculture Designer's Manual. This set of lectures is a typographically more friendly re-edited variant (extended with many additional comments) of a freely available (in PDF form, at http://www.bettertimesinfo.org/pdc_all.pdf) transcript of one of the original Permaculture Design Courses given by Bill Mollison back in 1981. (With some advertisement material from the 80's removed, as it reasonably can be expected that this by now would at best be of historical value, e.g. to compare prices then and now.)
This material is interesting for many different reasons. For one, it is a free resource which gives quite a detailed idea what Permaculture is about. Likewise, it should serve to give a good idea of what Permaculture actually is not about! While Permaculture to a large extent is a clever amalgamation of rather sound simple physical, engineering, and ecological principles, it certainly is not some mystic esoteric occult Hippie New-Age woo woo hanky panky. True, Permaculture is attractive to many different groups of people, which may in particular include Hippies, Pagans and Druids, but just as well Biologists, Physicists, Hackers, and ordinary people. Furthermore, the main reference text on Permaculture, Bill Mollison's "Permaculture -- A Designer's Manual" unfortunately is a bit cryptic in some places, and these lecture notes frequently provide a different and much more colloquial re-phrasing of some important concepts, which can help a lot to comprehend what some technique is supposed to do and how it works. Still, for a more detailed and more well-structured discussion, one is very strongly advised to consult the "Permaculture Designer's Manual". Quite a fair bit of the content we find in this course transcript, and to much lesser degree in the Designer's Manual, is easily misinterpreted. For example, Bill occasionally says "10" when a physicist would rather say "about an order of magnitude". (Actually, this holds true for quite many works on resource management, including as well the Bible's use of the number "fourty", for instance.)
As with every involved subject, it usually pays to read through the introductory texts multiple times, as one inevitably will extract more information from it already having a rough map of the subject in mind. Dr. Thomas Fischbacher, who decided to embark on this transcription project, turning the old PDF lecture notes into more useful HTML form, learned a lot over time by linking different texts and sources. As all this background information is not available to the newcomer, he added a number of footnotes and comments to most of these chapters (more to follow) with the intention to build bridges into this subject in order to (hopefully) make it more accessible to people who so far never gave issues such as food production much thought. Unfortunately, there are a number of points where Bill can be rather misleading, especially if taken literally and unquestioned. While there is a lot of sense in much what Bill Mollison has to say, should you find that he just cannot be right in some issue, this presumably is a matter of missing context. In many situations, it should be pretty evident, however, when he is joking, for example. While most footnotes (hopefully) provide more context that might be helpful, it is quite well possible that some of them are not yet as helpful as they could be. With a subject as all-encompassing as Permaculture, as one's own understanding grows, the view on what is most important and helpful and what is not keeps on changing.
The first version of these pamphlets was numbered 1.0-1; later modifications which will add further footnotes and explanations will have version numbers 1.0-2, -3, etc. The major version number will only change should Bill Mollison himself start to make changes to the content. Later versions with additional information will (might) follow. Thomas Fischbacher would like to personally add that from his perspective the most important bit that is explained in a far better way in the Permaculture Designer's Manual than in these pamphlets is the discussion of the energy flows in natural systems and how to creatively put a large number of productive uses between source and sink. In his eyes, that issue alone definitely is reason enough to get the Designer's Manual.
Even if only a small part of what Bill Mollison has to teach us were right (T.F. is personally convinced he presumably is more right on a lot more things than pretty much anyone else) -- these texts at the very least should be highly useful to overcome many of the mental blockades our culture is facing at present. Studying historic reports of resource scarceness, these blockades often have been among the most important impediments.
However, as important as it is to make these approaches widely known which presumably are far closer to the right way to do things than anything we developed over the last two centuries, two things should be remembered: the first is that this is not a dogmatic approach. It certainly would be wrong trying to cast the underlying principles in stone, just as much as it would contradict Gandhi's principles to turn them into a formal catechism-type belief system. In particular, it is well possible that there is a number of things in here that will not work as expected, and it may often be trickier than first suspected to get things right (even though it is possible and should be done). Secondly, as the saying goes, "fair words plant no cabbages". If we want to go down that route (and it both seems to look rather promising and there by now is considerable experience with systems that have been set up according to these principles some decades ago), there is a lot of work that lies ahead of us which will require action where we have to involve ourselves personally, for example, getting urban garden-scale mini-farming going. After all, problems will not go away by just talking about possible solutions, rather than really tackling the big challenge!
Second Introduction
(David Hemenway)
Permaculture started in 1975 or 1976 as a public interest when Bill was talking about it to a friend who had a friend who was a radio interviewer on the national, government run, radio station in Melbourne. Bill was asked whether he wanted to do a talk-back program at this radio station. So he did. It turned out to be the most interesting talk-back program they had ever had. The board was just lit up for the rest of the day. People were asking what it was about and where could they get more information.
Bill, at that time, had a manuscript that he had been working on, just ideas. He thought now was the time to publish something because there was so much information needed. He had at least three thousand letters coming to him saying, "Where can I get more about this?"
At that time, David Holmgren was writing a thesis at the University about permaculture, working together with Bill who was directing his research. So they got the thesis together, Bill added some more, and they rushed together a book which turned into Permaculture One. Twenty-five thousand copies were printed. Within three years they were out of print.
Out of that came a group of people wanting to get together to talk about permaculture. They decided to set up an association. The Quarterly now has about three thousand direct subscribers. [Now known as The International Permaculture Journal, it has ceased publication, at least temporarily. However, there are quite a few active permaculture publications around the world. -D.H.]
Regional permaculture groups started. People get together once a month or every two weeks to talk about permaculture. Maybe they get something going politically or set up a bioregional association to let each other know what is going on regionally. They are swapping plants, and mapping species of trees in the bush which are good bearers of nuts, and operating a seed exchange, that sort of thing. Thirty-six of those groups in Australia arose in the first four years. Everywhere we hold a workshop, a group usually forms and starts doing something. Every one of those groups seems to be performing a different function.
About two years ago, Bill decided that Permaculture Two needed to come out because there was more information. There was also a need to update a lot of the material in Permaculture One and change the emphasis from theory to something more practical. We got the manuscript together that Bill had written. It was pretty haphazard. I went to stay with the editor of the Quarterly and we put it together and edited it some more. Then we had thirty thousand of those printed. This book is now reprinted.
Bill came over here to America last year, just lecturing and going from place to place with a few books and selling them, and scraping the money together so he could get to the next place, not really having much money, buying a van in California for $700 to get across here. It was during that really hot summer and the van died. Bill was stuck out in the middle of nowhere, dead van, and wondering whether this was all worth it?
Then he went to the Futures Conference in Toronto. There were probably 1500 people there. They gave him a little spot, and he gave a talk about permaculture. Someone asked him whether he would like to talk again. He said, "Yeah, ok." There were 700 people at the next meeting. And he was asked to talk again, and there was a bigger crowd. Bill was one of the main finishing lecturers. When things seem to fall down a bit, and no one knew where to go on from there, Bill got up and started talking, and everyone was going, "Wow! Listen to this guy!"
After Bill's trip across the USA, a few groups of people decided that they wanted to hold some more workshops. One of these was The Rural Education Center. And here we are. It probably depends on you as much as it does on us, now.
(T.F.: ...Removed some old advertisement material here...)
[A note on these lessons: In addition to the original parts of this document, a few extra lessons written by T.F. which are clearly marked as such have been added. The underlying reason for this is that deeper investigations showed that a number of additional explanations on subjects that seem to play a key role should be helpful to many readers. While Bill primarily deals with issues related to the soil, forests, water, climate, these additional chapters focus on more abstract issues related to the role of religion to resource management, reasons how we got into this highly dangerous situations and strategies to get out again, etc.]
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Transcript of full Permaculture Design Course given by Bill Mollison in 1981:
1. Preface
2. Introduction to Permaculture
3. Permaculture in Humid Landscapes
4. Permaculture in Arid Landscapes
5. Permaculture on Low Islands
6. Permaculture on High Islands
7. Permaculture on Granitic Landscapes
8. Permaculture for Fire Control
9. Designing for Permaculture
10. Permaculture Techniques
11. Forests in Permaculture
12. Water in Permaculture
13. Permaculture for Urban Areas & Urban-Rural Linkages
14. The Permaculture Community
15. The Permaculture Alternative
16. Permaculture for Millionaires
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