Transcription
[Music] [Applause] I'm David Holmgren, and I'm best known as the co-originator of the permaculture concept in the 1970s with Bill Mollison. [Music]
Sometimes there's two stories that are told about how the idea of permaculture really came about. One story is that Mollison was my supervising academic, and I was just some technical assistant who worked with him. And then there's the opposite of that, which is I was the brilliant student, and he was the academic who stole my work. Which neither of those are true. I mean, for a start, he was my mentor while I was working on that permaculture manuscript. But if it had been left to me, the permaculture manuscript would have just molded away in a drawer. It was Bill who was like, "No, we're going to take this to the world." [Music]
The core of the idea of permaculture really came about when I was coming towards the end of my first year in environmental design. My interests were gravitating around ecology, agriculture, and landscape design. And I could see how two of these connected, but I couldn't see anywhere where the three crossed over and intersected. So I wanted to look at that. At a seminar about how land is owned and controlled, there was a bloke there who said some really interesting things. He pointed out that the rabbit problem in Australia could have been solved by rabbit trappers, but they had no incentive to do so because they didn't benefit from the land being in better condition, from there being less rabbits. So what did they do? They farmed the rabbits on the farmers' land. So he was pointing out that the ownership of the land had this really adverse effect on the sustainability of the land. I thought, "God, this guy thinks just completely different to the academic ecologists I've met," and that was Bill Mollison. I got chatting with him afterwards, and I said, "Well, I'm interested in this intersection between ecology, agriculture, and landscape design, and how natural systems could influence that." And he said, "Oh, how about this for an idea then: if most places on the planet nature creates a forest, why doesn't our agriculture, if not look like a forest, function something like a forest? Why is our agriculture all composed of only annual plants that grow and die in one year, whereas in nature there's a diversity?" [Music]
And that's exactly in that intersection. By understanding how nature designs things, we can create permanent agriculture and permanent culture in everything we do. [Music] And that became permaculture. It comes from two Latin roots: permanent—to persist through time—and culture—connectivity that supports human existence. So put those together: it's a persistent system that supports human existence. [Music]
So Bill was my mentor. We were developing the first permaculture garden on the fringes of Hobart and persuaded me that we should publish it. But I didn't have a lot of the experience in all the different fields that underpin permaculture. And so my passion was about doing those things and building Meliodora here, whereas Bill was ready for a larger stage, and taking permaculture to the world was his next agenda. And developed the beginning of the permaculture design course, and that mechanism was really how permaculture spread, not just in Australia but around the world. So although I was the co-originator of the permaculture concept, Bill was the father of the permaculture movement.