The presumably most fundamental issue underlying the present converging financial, climate, food, energy, and environmental crises is that most of us only have a very dim perception of what it actually would mean to "live sustainably" if one were for once to take that notion seriously. Quite a number of people seem to have this vague idea that the destruction of our natural resources is kind of inevitable as the alternative would invariably involve "going back to the stone age".
Related to this problem is a very widespread misconception in our society concerning the notions of "ethics" and "ecology". Almost all people in our society perceive these as what one may call "must-not-do" disciplines: they are widely thought to exclusively deliver prohibitions. Many a book on ecology has been written whose introduction starts out mentioning "The Limits to Growth". Likewise (and somewhat bizarrely) there are ethical banks who seem to think they could make a point towards prospective customers concerning their ethical standards by measuring it in terms of the amount of profits missed due to adherence to ethical principles.
But is this all appropriate? Should there not be another side to both ethics and ecology, one that does not demand abstaining from certain behaviour, but mandates certain types of action? How does "the active side" of ecology look like? Simply stated, there only can be one answer: Stabilization and improvement of our natural resources, especially where they were degraded through previous human interference. In other words: Gardening. Is it possible to do this in such a way that at the same time, we can meet all the essential needs of the human population? While this question is most central to the very existence of mankind, and the need for an answer more urgent than ever, man has not yet managed to finally solve this puzzle. Nevertheless, as Nobel Laureate Dario Fo would say, "Great People are born out of necessity": the problems in particular of the last few decades are of a very special and rather novel kind. Therefore, one should not be overly surprised to see that some people took them as a strong incentive to investigate this question much deeper and find ways to do better than we did so far.
One should, however, be aware that here, we are not dealing with an issue of the "someone else will find some solution -- just leave that to the well-paid experts" type. Fundamentally, one idiot can create more devastation than all professors in the world can repair. That is the tragedy of human existence. So, getting out of the mess we got ourselves into will certainly need our combined effort. And quite heroic effort indeed. In the end, it will be up to you to get your garden going and up to me to get mine going.
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.
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, 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.
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 bit on 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. (Also, one thing that seems to be completely missing in the published permaculture literature is the issue of self-organizing criticality in structure formation and an appropriate discussion of natural hierarchies and the extra energy expenses required to impose artificial hierarchies. [Note to self: by now have written up something about that issue, but in German only, and it makes the point in a way presumably only accessible to theoretical physicists...])
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. For example, there is one report from an obstetrician who worked on the island of Jersey during the Nazi occupation which includes such bizarre situations as a hospital running out of soap, until he himself eventually started making some -- which actually would not at all have been that difficult straightaway!
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!
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...)