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Cycles of Renewal with David Holmgren
1.8k Plays11 months ago
David Holmgren is the co-originator of Permaculture, self-aware contrarian and contemplator of everything.
I’m lucky enough to be part of his extended household, so rather than shooting the breeze about the state of the world while sowing parsnips I figured I better bloody well get him on the podcast.
We dig into David’s own internal landscape as well as the contours of his life at Melliodora, and I was especially eager to quiz him about land sharing and housing alternatives; prime listening for those in the debt-avoidant club.
Listen out for our new Reskillience segment: Word Association – which sees me peppering David with all kinds of words and phrases to see what he’ll volley back. Such fun. And David said it’s unlike any interview he’s done before, which I’m taking as a good thing.
Permaculture principle #8 – Integrate rather than segregate
Edges talk given by David in Lisbon
Permaculture principle #11 – Use edges and value the marginal
David Holmgren’s collected essays
Essay ~ Pandemic brooding
Essay ~ Crash on Demand
Essay ~ The Apology
Book ~ The Golden Calm by M.M. Kaye
Call of the Reed Warbler ~ Charles Massey
RetroSuburbia Chapter #25: Changing Habits for Self-Reliance + Resilience
Book ~ RetroSuburbia: The Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future ~ David Holmgren
eBook ~ Trees on the Treeless Plains ~ David Holmgren
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Resilience & Natural Soundscapes
00:00:03
Speaker
Resilience! Hey there, this is Katie and you're listening to Resilience, a podcast about skills, the resilience they bring and living closer to the ground so we don't have quite so far to fall if our fragile modern systems fail us.
00:00:21
Speaker
I'm beaming to you from a little solar passive shack on unceded Jarrah Country with all the louvers flung open and the sounds of nature tumbling in. Our rooster Enzo saves up all his cockadoodle do's for the moment I hit the big red recording button which then sets off Richard
00:00:40
Speaker
the rival rooster at the top of the hill, which then triggers the goose, whose rusty honking can surely be heard from the moon. Then there are the wood ducks who crash land onto the dam outside my door, the chuff and magpie wars in the driveway, and, rudest of them all, the sulfur-crusted cockies who are louder than a herd of Harley Davidsons. You can probably hear them right now. All these creatures demand a place on the podcast. And who am I to deny them?
Embracing Nature in Storytelling
00:01:08
Speaker
I remember sitting with Maya Ward on the grass under the gum trees in a storytelling circle. She did something I've never seen before and I'll never forget. Rather than raising her voice to talk over the various and inevitable interruptions from nature, she would simply stop mid-sentence, close her eyes and tilt her head and listen. Letting the currawongs or the wind or the rustling leaves say their peace before continuing.
00:01:38
Speaker
She made room for more than human voices, integrating rather than exiling them. And when it comes to recording clean audio, I get it. I get why people do that. I know that it's distracting to have noises in the background and sounds that can shatter our concentration, jolt us out of our suspended states. Who wants a goose shrieking during a guided meditation?
00:02:03
Speaker
But I can't help but wonder why we're so obsessed with sterile audio. Going to such great lengths to scrub each sound file clean of its context, any last trace of the place it was captured, gone.
00:02:18
Speaker
If we really want to integrate rather than segregate, which is the eighth principle of permaculture, shouldn't we welcome back a bit of chaos, a bit of atmos, and make peace with natural soundscapes that acknowledge our entanglement with this living and cacophonous world?
00:02:35
Speaker
You might notice that reskillience features blips and chirps, buzzing flies and drooling roosters, the fridge switching on, a car hooning past. Because all these entities live here too. And who knows what riches they're adding to the conversation, if only we'd stop to listen.
Interview with David Holmgren: Exploring Permaculture
00:02:52
Speaker
When I apologized to David Holmgren, who is today's guest, for the lax soundproofing, he said it was a refreshing hybrid of his formal radio interview days and rugged phone recordings in the field. Because I have these really nice, shiny studio mics whose quality I totally undermine by throwing open the windows.
00:03:13
Speaker
Like me, David is a contrarium happy to live on the professional fringe and he speaks on these topics today in what turned out to be quite a personal and inquisitive and context-laden convo that digs into David's own internal landscape as well as the contours of his life here at Meliodora. I was especially eager to ask him about sharing land and the work and the patience and the joy that that entails.
00:03:39
Speaker
And I also trial a new resculiant segment at the end called Word Association, which sees me peppering David with all kinds of words and phrases to see what he'll volley back. Dave said it's unlike any interview he's done before, which I took as a good thing.
Living on the Edge: Embracing Fringe Lifestyles
00:03:54
Speaker
And I really hope that you find lots to love in this integrated sit down with the co-originator of permaculture combo. What's that tea? The tea is sage, rosemary and thyme.
00:04:07
Speaker
and honey I'm hoping that it is a cough suppressant for me and an anti-viral microbial for you. Do you like being interviewed Dave? I've got used to it and yeah to some extent yeah but it
00:04:26
Speaker
It feels a funny hybrid between that sort of experience and being with you in the tea. Well, I just realised all the windows are open. Normally I close the louvers because they provide a pretty good level of soundproofing. But as we were sitting here just now, I realised they were open and I thought, well, to hell with it, because I actually like
00:04:46
Speaker
the emanations of the roosters and the birds and the leaves and firing the kind of hoons that go up and down the street. I think it's quite nice to have that atmosphere. Yeah. Well, a lot of people don't realise when they come to Meliodora that we are in a suburb. Yeah. Yeah. To explain that sort of edge. I mean, in that article I talk about
00:05:10
Speaker
growing up in suburbia at the edge where the bush then just started and the wild reaches of the Swan River along Blackwall Reach and that hinterland and then being at Mollison's Place on two and a quarter acres actually on the edge of Hobart with the wilderness of Mount Wellington behind
00:05:35
Speaker
and then being here on this edge to the wild of the Gully and Spring Creek and elevated plain and that those sort of edge places have been part of the synergy where the crafting of how you could
00:05:56
Speaker
retrofit the suburbs, influenced by this interface with the wild and interface with the rural land. I'm trying to think, there's an essay about permaculture originating in Tasmania at these edges.
00:06:18
Speaker
these interfaces and how that sort of reflected, you know, that principle. And that, uh, Mollison's Place, you know, was only three kilometres from the University and the GPO and all of the institutions of modern democratic affluent society. And then you could walk across the road, up on overgrown walking tracks from the great 67 fires, up over
00:06:47
Speaker
shoulder of the road to the the summer and cross one fire trail and then there was nothing between you and the southwest wilderness you know which is like where is that possible that that edge between civilization and wilderness is is so so close
00:07:07
Speaker
I miss that about living in Hobart, that access to the wild. What are some other examples of edges that may not be so dependent on someone having bushland on their doorstep? Yeah, well of course there's the conceptual edges of being at the social and cultural fringes where from the sort of historical perspective
00:07:33
Speaker
Those things are peripheral to society, physically and conceptually and in power sense, the marginal people, the marginal places. And that's true through the long runs of history where institutions carry culture through periods of stability. But in periods of eruptive change, all of the action is at the edge.
00:08:02
Speaker
So they are those edges between civilisation and nature. They are in the rural hinterlands. They are at the conceptual fringes and in some ways I see why.
00:08:15
Speaker
why would permaculture come out of this funny little place, this island in the Antipodes, with this population which in Australian context was the most ruralised population in Australia, with this strong connection between all those benefits of civilisation and all of the frontier destruction from the
00:08:41
Speaker
the genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines to the Australian equivalent of Minamata Bay chemical pollution in the Derwent estuary and hydro industrialisation and the fights over wilderness. And yeah, that small distance between the people who were
00:09:08
Speaker
the intellectuals and the politicians and the power people and the battlers on the fringe who were the firewood cutters and the rabbit trappers and the miners and the battlers in the working class suburbs that when I met Mollison, you could touch both of those inns literally through personal connections.
00:09:37
Speaker
you know, so that those interfaces and edges are not just a geographic one. Well, a lot of us use that term edge to describe a place where we're just comfortable enough to keep going, but one more step would result us being in a place of extreme discomfort. Are you someone who actually thrives in edge zones? Oh, absolutely.
00:10:05
Speaker
You know, I suppose the sense of being the dissident or the sceptic, I have to admit it's default habitual behaviour for me. Whatever is the consensus, is the norms, is the mainstream. My instinct is to do the opposite. Now, I say that
00:10:34
Speaker
as a sort of an acknowledgement, as a weakness or bias. And I think I said that in relation to COVID in my essays about that. But I've done that with permaculture throughout my life.
00:10:52
Speaker
the skeptic about permaculture, the questioner, the devil's advocate. So when I saw new orthodoxy develop around how bad pasture and lawns are, well, I wrote an essay in 1997 about the benefits of lawns and pastures in permaculture. And it's not like in that that I'm
00:11:22
Speaker
completely going against any particular orthodoxy, but it's a sort of a rebalancing. What's the other perspective? So that being at the edge is something, yeah, I grew up with that totally. You know, that was my childhood. Well, how do you explain that? Where did that come from? Well, growing up in a family that was different, but not different in the way
00:11:51
Speaker
maybe the kids from wag immigrant families were, or let alone Aboriginal kids. It was a difference that was sort of basically chosen, at least chosen by my parents, and I enrolled enthusiastically in that, of thinking differently. So, you know, taking a lunch to school that involved a whole meal, bread and dried fruit, things that
00:12:20
Speaker
kids hadn't seen, or if you did, maybe you saw dried fruit at Christmas or something, and this alternate curiosity and, ooh, what is that interesting, through to the revulsion and naming and blaming, but more fundamentally in the emergence of Vietnam as a political issue.
00:12:46
Speaker
I can remember in 1964, at the age of nine, refusing to stand up for the national anthem at the Anzac Day parade in the Bicton Primary School quadrangle, 600 kids, and I sat there with my arms folded. Bugger that. I'm not standing up for this. You know, Australia's just sent troops to Vietnam to oppress
00:13:15
Speaker
the people of Vietnam, and my parents were right at the forefront of that campaign, right at the beginning in 1964, against Australia's involvement in Vietnam. You know, and that led to me being branded by kids as a commie traitor and beaten up for it. You know, so that preparedness to do that, I mean, there was a certain amount of arrogance in it too, you know, that, no, I don't need to
00:13:45
Speaker
obey that or go with that. Whereas I saw most people just looked around and saw whatever the crowd is doing, whatever.
00:13:56
Speaker
things are you know how things are working and you follow that. You know maybe there was also an element like by the time I was 12 and had the feedback that I was smart intellectually and you know articulate and whatever. I was also curious that all of the social rules the
00:14:20
Speaker
hidden language, the social body language, that all the ordinary kids, including all the dumbest ones, seemed to understand completely, and I didn't get it. And I came to this analysis that I might be intellectually really smart, but I was a social dummy. You know, that I didn't understand the rules of the game. I thought
00:14:46
Speaker
You know, it was what we talk about or articulate, but no, there were all these hidden rules. And so that ignorance was partly a refusal to participate in it, but some of it was just dumb, you know, that I didn't get it.
00:15:05
Speaker
And I didn't get the consequences of what would happen to you if you broke some of those rules. So there weren't so much the rules from school. They were the rules that the kids used to break each other into the social norm of the group or the tribe. I love hearing from
00:15:29
Speaker
your past. And I also am inherently fascinated by what it's like to be other people, what goes on inside the minds and in the emotional patterns and experiences of another human who I think we're pretty good at disguising a lot of those feelings and experiences that we're having internally. Knowing that you felt like a big dummy as a kid, at least in terms of social cues,
00:15:57
Speaker
What would you say your experience is now? Are there things you're still learning? Are there things you're still struggling with? Or do you feel quite contented most of the time? Well, I suppose like...
00:16:14
Speaker
Most people, as they go through life, they learn to adjust and operate and develop greater sensitivities to what else is going on rather than being so caught up in their own world. And I think
00:16:37
Speaker
often about how much of that comfort and sense of being a gradually more evolved person as you get older, how much of that is dependent on a very comfortable social and physical environment that
00:17:02
Speaker
I've managed to create around me a very supportive one and how much
00:17:10
Speaker
I might still be a complete fish out of water in maybe different circumstances. And so that's a constant question.
Creating Supportive Environments
00:17:22
Speaker
And returning to that reading people and understanding what's going on, that says a very strong analogy to my passion about reading landscape. And I see the two as very similar. And I'd say, yes, I'm actually very skilled in reading landscape.
00:17:39
Speaker
I'd still say I'm not very skilled at reading people. You know, that it takes me longer to, you know, get the cues. And there's a disability that is reinforced by being a constant teacher, public communicator, because you are so often in that role of putting out and
00:18:08
Speaker
So I also remember maybe about ways in which I might have gone backwards over the years, because I can remember many people, especially women friends, saying that I was a really good listener, you know, really good at listening to other people and where they're at. And I suppose over the years,
00:18:33
Speaker
I've felt perhaps lost a bit of that because you're always being asked to articulate and being rewarded for that. And so that listening skill I think is an important aim for me. Well, maybe you're listening to the more than human world very intently in a way that some of us aren't. So it might just be the distribution of listening.
00:19:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's an aspect of that. But yeah, there's also that aspect of not needing to communicate what I know or what I'm passionate about. I'm just sitting with situations more. Well, I'm pleased to hear that you've also wondered if
00:19:34
Speaker
You personally have made grand alterations or if it's been this elegant kind of unconscious process of finding the right context for yourself because I wonder that a lot. And living here at Meliodora feels like I've actually spent my whole life trying to wiggle my way into a situation like this that is now providing me with such
00:19:59
Speaker
a degree of support, you know, psychologically and spiritually and physically that all those times in the past where I felt unhinged and unhealthy, I was actually driven to be in more of an environment like this and working for myself and having flexible hours and being in touch with the land. And I think it's very affirming to hear that you've also had similar wanderings. Yeah, well, maybe it was
00:20:29
Speaker
around when I was your age, I started to look back and see the experience of my life, which I'd mostly experienced as sort of life just happened to me. I didn't feel particular powerful agency about I'm going to do this or that.
00:20:51
Speaker
And that may seem a contradiction to what I said about, you know, going my own way or rather than whatever the herd was. But I just had the sense that things happened or opportunities emerged and then
00:21:09
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose by the time of my 30s, I started to say, oh, there's a pattern how these things, one thing built towards another. And so that there was a surprising amount of, I must have had some agency in that rather than it just happening to me. So that greater acceptance that you were doing things
00:21:35
Speaker
not necessarily in a planned way and not necessarily understanding what the next stage is, but that each stage was some sort of stepping stone or revolution. So what does that mean for people who do day-long workshops around their purpose and their intentions and actions and goals versus people who
00:21:57
Speaker
as you may be insinuating most of us are unconsciously navigating and doing the things we want to do anyway without that overlay of determination and strategising. Yeah, I've always been personally sceptical about those sort of processes, but not in a judgemental sense because I think different people need different processes in the same way that I...
00:22:23
Speaker
that different people need different messages and at different stages of their life because I thought about that issue so much when I was reacting to the first super publicity about permaculture and Mollison as the charismatic figure projecting that out into the world and what my reactions to that were and over time I came to see that
00:22:52
Speaker
Yeah, different messages and different pathways suit different people. But that's that clear goals and making something happen.
00:23:10
Speaker
hasn't seemed to me to be a strong part, though what has been is once I make a decision around a particular commitment, I don't usually bail out. And I suppose most
00:23:27
Speaker
significantly with the, you know, decades long partnership with Sue Dennett, which, you know, obviously you go through difficulties in relationships and that persistence, that commitment. And yeah, maybe coming slowly to commitments, but once committed, yeah, I mean. So how do you know when to quit?
00:23:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's difficult. And I think there's been elements of where I've become very strongly reinforced, especially with intellectual frameworks of why I am doing something and why that's a good thing.
Nature's Lessons: Competition & Cooperation
00:24:17
Speaker
And occasionally I've had things of how I've been so stupid that I didn't see there was a flaw
00:24:26
Speaker
We work in the garden together a lot of the time, and I see you work extremely hard and feel a lot of very finicky, tedious, brain-numbing and physically demanding tasks. And I think, how? How? What drives you? What gets you out of bed and into the garden or into the workshop or up onto the roof fixing something?
00:24:49
Speaker
why do you do what you do and you have spoken to me about enlightened self-interest and so if you could weave that word association in there if relevant I would love that as well. A really simple example of enlightened self-interest is doing something that's good for your health and then that being
00:25:12
Speaker
enjoyable rather than being satiated by, say, junk food in the short term but it's actually accumulating. So it's taking that longer term view and
00:25:28
Speaker
There's an element of that that certainly motivates me and whether that's, you know, looking after those trees planted that winter that need water if they're going to get through the first summer that you've already made that commitment.
00:25:47
Speaker
you know so yes go and do that you know and sometimes that can be a sense of burden of all these different things and can you hold them all together or do you need to let go of some things that that that don't work. As I look outside the window with the self-accrested cockatoos taking the nuts off our walnut trees that I lovingly
00:26:15
Speaker
planted and I thought we would have this massive surplus of walnuts. So there's things that motivate me like that, that are gritted teeth and
00:26:27
Speaker
and frustration that sometimes turn into resignation or gracefully letting go of something or that what is the deeper lesson in something. What is the lesson with cockatoos decimating our hazelnuts and walnuts that I should get my gun license?
00:26:50
Speaker
I think it's a combination of understanding what all gardeners and farmers understand about competition is actually a real part of nature, not just a part of capitalist economies. And it's real and you need to be faster and smarter and
00:27:20
Speaker
to succeed or obtain a yield in some situations and to recognise that also all abundances in nature turn into other abundances. And if that is a surplus of cockatoos, how do we creatively accept but use those abundances? You know, I think it's also just the
00:27:50
Speaker
the way nature constantly pulls the rug out from under our sense of control because coming from the modern world there's this huge illusion of control that we have and the phobia of
00:28:06
Speaker
death and all of those things that the technological world has given this illusion of control. And nature and the weather, just when you're exposed to those realities, it immediately returns you to, you're not in control. There's a lot of other forces out there.
00:28:26
Speaker
But a lot of people have pushed back against that idea of competition and reframed it as, or posited that it's actually, there's a cooperative current running through the natural world. Do you subscribe to that?
00:28:40
Speaker
Oh yes, well the principle of integrate rather than segregate and diversity are enormous examples of that cooperative, synergistic, integrated pattern we see repeated in nature and that the obsession with
00:29:06
Speaker
Competition and segregation of conflicting things in the industrial world is an anomaly. But that's sort of like a pendulum, you know, and in crafting obtain a yield as a necessary principle. Initially, I thought it's self-evident that you need to obtain a yield, otherwise you're dead.
00:29:35
Speaker
You know, but modern people are so disconnected with fundamentals that they can become deluded because the sources of their sustenance are so indirect, like money going into a bank account, maybe say even because of investments, not anything you're literally doing at the extreme.
00:30:00
Speaker
you know, or there's no actual connection between the work you did and its productivity and your financial reward that there's, whereas people who are farmers,
00:30:17
Speaker
or for that matter most people who are in small business they understand there's this direct connection and feedback between what you did and did it work that reward cycle and understanding that when you thin out the carrots or thin out the dents
00:30:37
Speaker
trees in the forest that a whole lot of like things with similar needs are naturally in competition with one another, but they develop naturally synergistic complementary relationships with things that are different.
00:30:55
Speaker
So that thing of all wanting the same things and having the same needs that sets us up for being competitive by nature apart from the capitalist economy. So it's like there's a small truth in capitalism and in the permaculture principles framework it's reduced to one principle.
00:31:21
Speaker
Yeah. And you did allude to the illusions that we are living under, and I suppose in terms of our access to a type of fuel that has allowed this kind of unprecedented growth and energy
00:31:38
Speaker
rich lifestyle and habits and choices.
Energy Descent & Societal Change
00:31:42
Speaker
Can you speak a little more to how you see, you know, the current state of human existence and what might be the reality check or the kind of rude shock that is coming when we do not have access in the same way that we have? Oh, well, I suppose that's what my whole, the question my whole life has been concerned with, you know, since
00:32:05
Speaker
really I suppose 1972 and the Club of Loan Limits to Growth report which came out the year I left high school and then travelled around Australia in 1973, became connected to Tasmania in 1974 during the Environmental Design School.
00:32:24
Speaker
And so all of the thinking about environmental limits and enforced change on human systems by larger forces that we could not control through our technological and cultural hubris, and the most obvious of those was the depletion of the king resources that had created the world for us, which was fossil fuel. You know, hundreds of millions of years of stored sunlight.
00:32:55
Speaker
energetic ecological history of the world was a big part of the influences on permaculture and has continued in my later work as a futurist with my future scenarios work. So I just take for granted that this world is not continuing on its trajectory but is moving on to a different trajectory of energy descent and I used
00:33:24
Speaker
that word in Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability published in 2002 as the most honest word I could think of in English that described this reduction, this progressive reduction in power over nature and power to generate more and more complexity and the need to simplify.
00:33:52
Speaker
So that's a different logic in simplification from just the human values argument, which has been there in the modern world for at least a couple of hundred years, reacting to the adverse impacts of modernity and consumerism and affluence, you know, that it's not actually sort of human and that it's not actually that nice and it's got all these downsides.
00:34:20
Speaker
But there's this other aspect of, it doesn't matter whether you like it or not, you know, there's that possibility, probability, certainty, depending on how you view it, of actually a future is composed of less. Not because humans choose that, because it's just, that's what happens when the sugar in the petri dish runs out or
00:34:47
Speaker
you know, when the soil that sustains the civilisation is depleted or the Roman mines, the silver mines that allowed them to pay the legions started being depleted and they had to debase the currency and the legionaries got pissed off and became barbarians.
00:35:08
Speaker
gave up. You know, so all of these different mechanisms by which things reach limits. And I see that as very positive in the sense that it's from a permaculture perspective about how we come back to earth, come back to our home. But there's some deeply unsatisfactory aspects of that return that we have to deal with.
00:35:38
Speaker
So we can think of that as a broad civilizational sense. We can think of it as a nation state and various other collective identities. And we can think of that at the individual scale. But it's obviously true for all of us as we age anyway, because we're all going to die. And that reduction in capacity as we age is a reality that's non-negotiable.
00:36:08
Speaker
So I think the disconnection from those basic personal things and the larger context makes it difficult for people to contemplate that world. But for me it's one that's always involved positive aspects and
00:36:34
Speaker
That's a lot around where that enlightens self-interest. How do you frame what you're passionate about, what your sources of sustenance come from, a world of less, a world connected to nature, a world where you don't have as much control over what happens. So modeling that,
00:37:00
Speaker
without it, without the feedback of it being absolutely essential, has of course been the challenge of the last 30 or 40 years. And that's why a lot of people who've tried that, driven by just maybe fear or urgency, sort of gave up. But for those of us who've managed to find it as a
00:37:27
Speaker
a positive pathway of internal growth rather than material growth, then it's, I suppose, worked for us enough to provide at least inspiration for when it will be essential.
00:37:49
Speaker
I think we're past that point that already for a lot of people working faster on the treadmill of earning more money, consuming more, getting ahead is failing. And so how to work out how to do less.
00:38:07
Speaker
how to simplify, how to downsize, how to work out how not to do things, is becoming more of an adaptive strategy for more and more people. If everyone embraced a degrowth mindset tomorrow, would we be able to change things?
00:38:30
Speaker
Well firstly there would be a complete collapse in the financial system because there's a complete bubble economy that depends on people potentially being on the mouse wheel, at least the 2 billion middle class people. And if substantial numbers of people, I suggested actually in my
00:38:51
Speaker
SA crash on demand that it would only take 10 to 20% of the global middle-class population bailing out of the system to the extent perhaps we have a 50% reduction in consumption, a 50% reduction in work in the conventional system, a 50% reduction in investment
00:39:16
Speaker
in that and a recreation of household and community non-monetary economies that don't feed that system.
Challenges of Land Ownership & Autonomy
00:39:24
Speaker
And that could trigger
00:39:26
Speaker
a global depression because the bubble of inflated, unreal wealth is so fragile and so close to implosion. Now what causes that to burst? They all burst throughout the 5,000 year history of money. And this is the biggest one by far. It's global.
00:39:50
Speaker
bubble of everything. But people like me thought maybe it was going to burst with the 87 stock market crash or certainly the 2008 global financial crisis.
00:40:06
Speaker
and signs of it in late 2019, just before the pandemic, where it looked like the whole understructure of the global financial system was about to break. And here we still are in some mad form. It's continuing. So people who choose to
00:40:34
Speaker
say, well, that's the boy who cried wolf, isn't it? But of course the point of the fable was that eventually the wolf came and no one took any notice. Is it about our limited time scale? Like we can only inhabit this little parcel of time. And so we think we see a pattern, but really in the bigger, the grander scheme of things, like you're saying, there are always booms and busts.
00:41:03
Speaker
Yeah, well, things that are stable for a long time. I remember the title of a book about one of the periods in Indian history. And the book was called The Golden Calm before this sort of catastrophic collapse and this sense of continuity and the perpetual system. So land prices always go up, don't they?
00:41:28
Speaker
Even something like that, I quite shock people by pointing out that when the Great Depression happened in Australia from 1929, housing and land prices went down all the way to 1948, more or less every year reducing. And then they've been more or less going up since then. But that's now so long ago, that's longer than the life of most people around.
00:41:58
Speaker
But, you know, aren't we illiterate, educated, informed population better than ever? No, it seems history sort of just disappears off the waterfall of people's memory. Well, good. I really want to talk to you about housing.
00:42:17
Speaker
land and security and money and being a young person in this time when I know a lot of people around me get to that point where they say well land prices aren't going down so it's now or never I'm gonna throw everything I have into this basket and just get myself a piece of a piece of land because I
00:42:40
Speaker
Every day that I don't do that, I'm losing, essentially. I'd really love to talk about what are the problems with that thinking around land equalling security.
00:42:52
Speaker
and then also alternatives for people rather than shackle themselves to those kind of, those levels of debt. And just to preface, I'd love to talk about this setup, this exchange arrangement that we have going at Meliodora. So please shatter some of our illusions and then give us a positive, kind of close the loop in a positive way. Well, I suppose,
00:43:19
Speaker
The first thing is like remembering that history shows that things can be different in different times. Land tenure and the ownership structure of freehold land title, most people in countries like Australia think that is like the law of gravity or something.
00:43:36
Speaker
but ownership and control of land can be organised in all different ways and even through the 20th century in some countries changed three or four times, all the land tenure being wiped out. Obviously in communist countries that happened but within those it happened several times you know in
00:43:57
Speaker
East Germany, the land was all distributed to small farmers. They all got 20 hectares each. And then there was this giant collectivisation and these massive industrial farms, you know, and then the Soviet Union collapsed and there was another land tenure, you know, revision. So the idea that a name on a piece of paper called a title document represents some fundamental security
00:44:24
Speaker
is illusory at a lot of levels. I mean the first one is most obvious is that it's actually the bank that owns that because very few people are actually having full control over that.
00:44:40
Speaker
In all sorts of other ways, that is incredibly insecure because it's dependent on these larger pulses in the system, and the most dramatic one is interest rates, because we've been through some of the lowest interest rates in modern history, and of course they are now rising. So when I was saying to people, don't get into debt, and this risk of
00:45:09
Speaker
property bubble collapse and you're having this huge debt and your property being worth less and less. Okay, that hasn't happened so far, but what has happened is this turnaround in interest rates and this gradual squeezing of people and that being on the treadmill of your life for something that you imagine. And I think part of that is
00:45:38
Speaker
reducing one's expectations and people might say, well, comfortable old baby boomer who bought cheap property can say that. But even when Sue and I came here,
00:45:52
Speaker
and the age I was and she was and the skills we had. We actually bought a very modest piece of land whereas I saw lots of people, people in fact who I did consultancy for, buying the largest piece of land that they could get money from the bank to borrow and then being on a treadmill to pay for it and actually doing nothing with the land.
00:46:19
Speaker
So what we chose to do is buy something that relative to the times was a very modest expectation and own that outright and then be able to do a lot to make that into what Meliodora is rather than commuting to work to pay for the land with some illusion that at some stage we will live that life that we were planning.
00:46:49
Speaker
So lowering expectations to fit the circumstances to give you autonomy and control is definitely one strategy. The other thing I can remember when I was in my 20s, sometimes people used to ask me, how did you get all of these skills?
00:47:17
Speaker
I said I used other people's land, other people's tools to do things. And people also used to say to me, why do you do all this work on other people's properties that you don't own, planting trees and whatever? And I'd say, look, what I take away in my head from the experience, no one can take that away from me.
00:47:42
Speaker
What I leave behind might be something of value to others, but I've gained from that learning process. And obviously you have to have something to offer people who are owners to be able to be invited or given the freedom to use their land, their tools, their money to do stuff. And I noticed a lot of people of my generation
00:48:11
Speaker
baby boomers, no, until I own land I can't do anything. So that for me was really important and I think it's more potent now given the insanity price tickets of blood, sweat and tears that are on getting your name on that piece of paper that we call land title.
00:48:40
Speaker
So I think the big challenge is to work out how to share land. And obviously, you could say the main actors in that need to be the people who own the land, who have that notional title. But I think it similarly comes from young people with energy, with wanting to learn, wanting to experiment to
00:49:10
Speaker
except some of that dance of can you work with real people and not have some of your autonomy rather than the fake autonomy you get when there's a globalised corporate institution which is actually telling you what to do every day because of the bank debt.
00:49:35
Speaker
I often think that I can either work in and on the relationships that are providing me security and sustenance, or I could work at a desk to buy a similar thing that might actually be flimsier upon examination. So either way, I'm working and I'm flexing and compromising and being challenged. It's just how do I want to do that?
00:50:03
Speaker
And one involves the stickiness of actual personal relationships and conflicts along with all the joys of that. And the other involves this apparent detachment and independence and anonymous nature as long as you keep doing exactly what the contract says and dance to their rules, then you don't have to really even deal with a human.
00:50:33
Speaker
So when did you start sharing land? Yeah, well I suppose apart from those earlier experiences of sharing land as a non-owner, with Meliodora, the
00:50:51
Speaker
The having volunteers come here for short periods of months sort of began, I suppose, in the early 90s, so a few years after we moved into the house. And there was also that Sue's older son, Kimon, went back to Europe
00:51:19
Speaker
and her older daughter had already gone back. So we were a bit of a smaller household, just me and Sue and young Oliver. And so there was that sense that we could have more space. And there was also Oliver's loss of his older sister and then his older brother who was very attached to
00:51:49
Speaker
And so young people here was like, for him, surrogates for people in their twenties. So that was partly having a more diverse household than just a single parent, a single child situation. And there was also
00:52:15
Speaker
childcare sharing arrangements that we were doing with other parents of just kids all of us age, those little kids coming here. So there was that sort of activity from the beginning. And then we started running permaculture tours of the place.
00:52:38
Speaker
intermittently so that public people accessing the place. So you move away from that, this is my private fortress, sort of where I escape the world and can pick my nose while watching television or do anything that I don't want to be associated with with other people.
00:53:05
Speaker
So we sort of got used to that and combined with home-based livelihood of the house being also my office for consultancy work and then progressively education.
00:53:20
Speaker
And we're also aware that over time what was surrounding us in Hepburn was increasing tourist accommodation and fewer and fewer places for people to live, in fact.
00:53:35
Speaker
the amount of housing stock has doubled in the time we've lived in this side of Hepburn and probably the area under paving and roof has gone up fourfold but the population by the census is about the same as it was in the mid-80s. So there's all this sort of terrible situation that
00:53:57
Speaker
is epitomised by the Airbnb phenomenon and we didn't want to participate in that but we knew we were building more accommodation capacity over time here right from the beginning. I suppose Sue and I felt
00:54:17
Speaker
that it was better to have people on semi-permanent arrangements in these spaces rather than just volunteers coming for short periods. Yeah, and gradually building up that process of, okay, what is that exchange as a non-monetary exchange
00:54:41
Speaker
And I say instead of rent, but how do we navigate as we have with you and other people here that, oh, well, Malia Dora takes a certain amount of work to keep all this going, to provide the abundance of food year round and keep the place fire safe. That's what it takes. We need to share that work and that that's,
00:55:08
Speaker
That's a different sort of relationship to saying, okay, how much labour is that? How much would reasonable rent be? And so pulling those relationships away from money to non-monetary relationships, which is really a part of the economy we have to
00:55:33
Speaker
rebuild that of course all our forebears had and the money economy was just the icing on the cake. Yeah I have a question around this that is relevant for me today because I'm sick and I'm holding in coughs doing my best but it does strike me that that kind of participatory
00:55:57
Speaker
exchange, labour assistance does rely on a level of able-bodiedness and I have wondered what would happen if I got really sick, what in your mind is the contingency if people can't physically contribute? Yeah that's a really good question and that
00:56:25
Speaker
relationship of responsibility and commitment and who can be supported to what degree and that's
00:56:39
Speaker
You know, at a larger philosophical level it's the sort of lifeboat question of how many people come on the lifeboat before it sinks and all of those difficult things without being dramatic to say Meliodor is some sort of survivalist lifeboat that can exist without
00:57:02
Speaker
you know, unaffected by what happens in the rest of the world.
Community Responsibility & Generational Shifts
00:57:09
Speaker
And I suppose those questions in the larger society are existential threats to society, the expanding number of people
00:57:23
Speaker
who need to be cared for, not just because of the ageing of the population, but apparently expanding disabilities everywhere and greater and greater needs and legacies of past harms and damage that seem to be sort of accumulating that are actually threatening to overwhelm the whole society. If the economy doesn't keep going faster and faster,
00:57:52
Speaker
So I think to some extent those issues which are quite challenging are reflective of a larger sort of situation. But I think there's also the issue of credit, reciprocity, understanding of
00:58:21
Speaker
commitment and support that depends on that complexity of relationships that you could say is more fickle than those of blood family relations. So what is the basis or history of those relationships?
00:58:44
Speaker
And I think I can openly say, for myself and Sue, that the people who are living here at Meliodora at the moment, including yourself, we feel this really strong commitment of support.
00:59:02
Speaker
in that. And we've thought about that a lot in relation to accident and injury because we've never had the full public liability protection for people who come here and we've, you know, taken responsibility and support for people when accidents have happened. But, you know, you think, yeah, what would, how would that work or what would be
00:59:33
Speaker
their vulnerabilities, what would our vulnerabilities be legally, you know, of serious things. And then when you flip that the other way of could we live here, can we live here,
00:59:48
Speaker
as we age with increasing disability. So all those are sort of really big challenging questions, but I think a lot of them relate to
01:00:07
Speaker
the social credit in the social bank of building those. And we see that in the community, don't we, where people get supported in various ways. And sometimes that support relates around the intensity of need. And sometimes it's affected by the level of social credit those people have for whatever they've done or who they are.
01:00:36
Speaker
and what their contribution has been. And I suppose those are the, yeah, those harsh realities. But I think Sue's always had the view, like in relation to children,
01:00:56
Speaker
They're all our children. We're responsible, you know, in talking about little kids, you know, that we need to take responsibility in community. And that is a difficult thing to rebuild because, yeah, what are the capacities? What are the needs? And that sense of shared
01:01:23
Speaker
values or ways of operating to do that, you know, are hard to rebuild. But yeah, they're all processes we've got to experiment and muddle through. Yeah, terrifies me that maybe you and Sue and people of your generation and attitude, are you the last
01:01:48
Speaker
people who retain this sense of community obligation and deep responsibility for the village and what happens when you're not around anymore to hold that because that's quite a radical perspective in my eyes, you know, in compared to how I've been raised and what I've been taught and then my cohort, what I see in us and how we see caring, people care.
01:02:15
Speaker
Like, do you think there's hope that that's already ceded in the generations coming? Or, I don't know, David's like, who thinks like this? Well, I flip a map between this mounting disabilities and burdens down the generations like you're alluding to.
01:02:41
Speaker
the future being harder and harder when for our forebears not very far back the sort of futures we may be facing might have been quite easy for them to navigate so that greater and greater disabilities and dependencies and apparent needs and
01:03:03
Speaker
and inward focus on the self rather than larger purpose. But I also think there's cycles of renewal that come with challenge and the idea that in some ways the baby boom generation was this one of extraordinary privilege and extended adolescence and the first generation of sort of just expanding
01:03:31
Speaker
consumption and our parents' generation that have mostly now died off, the generation that went through the Great Depression and the Second World War in affluent, lucky countries like Australia that still were some sort of
01:03:53
Speaker
downturn that younger generations will actually face challenges as big or probably much bigger than that and that that will create a strength, a sort of a baptism of fire that might be harsh but will renew capabilities that have actually been
01:04:21
Speaker
lost and are not in my generation at all. So the seed needs fire to germinate. Yeah I think there's an element of that and obviously you know we can look at so many positive things in the world that come about through that process. I think of Charles Massey's book Call of the Reed Warbler and all of the pioneering
01:04:51
Speaker
farmers of regenerative agriculture in Australia that he documents in that book. Most of them have been through some sort of crisis, personal or business or environmental that has caused a massive rethink and set their path. And it's interesting that
01:05:19
Speaker
You know, a lot of people would look at maybe what I've done and there's actually a bit about me in Charles Massey's book, but I don't see that I fit that pattern. I feel like I've had this fortunate life of ease. And so I do take on that perception that a lot of younger people have of
01:05:49
Speaker
the baby boomers had it easy. And I referenced that in my essay that I wrote, The Apology, from the baby boomers to the, what do I call them, the disabled generations, you know, for that responsibility for that world that
01:06:16
Speaker
was created over the time that we were adults and had some power. And of course people reacted all sorts of ways to that essay. You don't need to apologise for that. You tried to chart a different path or how dare you claim to stand for our generation or oh it's all right for you. All sorts of
01:06:42
Speaker
But I have that sense of intergenerational angst is mounting. I'm surprised that it hasn't got to the level of lynching yet. You know, that because, I mean, I don't think it's useful in some ways, but it's understandable process that what is this
01:07:05
Speaker
bag of disabilities that are being handed to or problems that are being handed to younger people. And part of that is real and part of it's what's actually in people's heads and the way they can't see the opportunities and
01:07:27
Speaker
the huge abundance that we experience in nature, not just being at Meliodora that we've nurtured and cultivated over these years, but just going down the gully, as we say, and the goats harvesting wild blackberries that everyone else wishes would just go away or harvesting the wild abundance that is around and recognising those
01:07:56
Speaker
huge opportunities that are or seeing those opportunities rather than ignoring them. Yes, I have to put my blinkers on right now and I want to keep asking you about the exchange because I think that's in housing because I think that's really something that people come to me a lot and I see emerging on PDCs and people here
01:08:23
Speaker
But I very much acknowledge that tangent of throwing the baby boomers out with the bathwater and perhaps I'll just link to your essay in the show notes because that's very worthy of digging into as well and hearing from you as part of the maligned privileged old white guy club I think is really fascinating and important because I know a lot of my
01:08:46
Speaker
older male friends are experiencing that sense of being written off and not being able to do any ride and so that pendulum that we've already discussed in this conversation in terms of who you are and what demographic you're part of is swinging so extremely one way and how crushing that must feel as someone who has tried to
01:09:08
Speaker
I suppose do the right thing your entire life but I mean if there is anything more you want to say on that please do.
Elders' Role & Cultural Balance
01:09:16
Speaker
But I will link to that essay. Well I suppose I see a sort of an interesting
01:09:24
Speaker
curious disconnect, dare I say, a hypocrisy where there's this reference to elders past, present and emerging in relation to Indigenous people, which is really important and valuable sentiment, potentially, when it's not just some glib repeated thing.
01:09:52
Speaker
but that that characteristic of not just Aboriginal Indigenous culture, but in fact all traditional cultures of place was this reverence, space given, authority given to elders. And then in the modern world, the culture of youth, which has been building, you know, you could say the baby boomers were responsible for that too.
01:10:21
Speaker
So it's sort of like part of our own medicine being thrown back on us. But that, yeah, disrespect for older white men, well, aren't they sort of the leading candidates
01:10:42
Speaker
along with older white women in the new Europe that Australia is one of, predominantly white people, that they would be candidates for being elders. And I say candidates because, obviously, eldership is not just
01:11:00
Speaker
being senior in years but having some process or what I'd call natural authority at least in some area that someone wants to actually take notice of you. And I've never felt sort of not having that and
01:11:26
Speaker
the curious sort of perception that permaculture was created by two
01:11:34
Speaker
older white males academics so I got classified as an academic because I was a student at an institution for three years. I've never been an academic and my separation from that institutional system culture has been a very strong part of my culture but that people projection
01:12:03
Speaker
And then, yeah, people, clueless, say, about Mollison's deep connection with Indigenous people when I met him. He'd just completed the lineage of the Tasmanian Aborigines, meeting all of the people in Tasmania, in Melbourne, in Kangaroo Island, different places where the descendants live, because the official thing was they all died out with Truganini.
01:12:32
Speaker
And it was actually his study that led to Tasmanian Indigenous people being recognised by the federal government as being Indigenous. So he knew all these people personally, you know. And those... I suppose those stories are, you know...
01:12:57
Speaker
Are people interested to enquire what older people can say also about the past when there was different understanding so that being
01:13:12
Speaker
you like a living fossil of different values and to challenge the progress of a sort of idea that all of that just gets thrown into the rubbish bin of history because that's all old and no longer any good and we move forward on this massive rush into
01:13:34
Speaker
a progressive future. The funny thing is I suppose I've come to feel some sense of responsibility for some of those views in that I think of in my own
01:13:55
Speaker
youth, those views were there, or elements of those that have become more extreme now. And I thought, oh, did I contribute to those becoming these extreme expressions of what, for shorthand, is called woke ideology?
01:14:18
Speaker
You know, and of course many colleagues of my generation and even my mother's generation of radical feminists, and my mother was part of that generation of radical feminists, you know, in her
01:14:36
Speaker
youth in the 1930s and 40s and then right through her adult life of how those understandings have then been seen now as something that can be just sort of cast aside rather than that is something that we stand on the shoulders of people who've come before. But I don't
01:15:04
Speaker
I don't have a sort of a personal problem with those things. I'm more sort of like the curious observer of them rather than being cut by those judgments. I actually quite relish
01:15:23
Speaker
debate and find it a bit difficult how sensitive everyone is to sort of challenging ideas. So I really enjoy that challenge of ideas and obviously that shouldn't be personalised and insulting or putting down
01:15:43
Speaker
people as a person and focus on the issue and the broader subject rather than it being a sort of a personal attack. But people also have that sensitivity that they take
01:16:08
Speaker
all of these things personally. You mentioned natural authority, which is excellent because it brings it home to the question I have around the power dynamics at Meliodora, the hierarchies. And when I was speaking with someone the other day about intentional communities, and I jokingly call this a cult and very tongue in cheek, but we were speaking about what makes
01:16:34
Speaker
an arrangement like this work and why do so many intentional collectives of people kind of crumble and I could distill it down to well we have elders we have this kind of stratigraphy and I feel really safe and nested within that and there is a sense of
01:16:51
Speaker
authority that kind of sits above me and I'm very happy to be guided by I'd love you to elaborate on yours and Sue's authority in this situation and whether you think that is something that can be credited with I feel is a very successful harmonious exchange relationship that is by all in many ways like quiet
01:17:18
Speaker
Unformed and fluid and and messy, you know, like how is that? Yeah facilitated by a degree of power and authority. Hmm. Well, I think that's
01:17:32
Speaker
really special, Katie, you saying that too because I think you're the first younger person here who's articulated that positive aspect of that comfort from an acknowledgement of elder authority that sets a framework because I think
01:18:00
Speaker
younger people can actually be benefiting from that and wanting the benefits of that, but it's difficult to acknowledge it because it also then reminds one of child-parent relationships and that, am I not an autonomous capable adult person in the world?
01:18:23
Speaker
So that whole idea that we're all equal is so strong in our ideology, especially in a country like Australia, that we like to think we're all equal, whereas it's very clear through the whole economic system that we're not and that there is power differences and I think
01:18:44
Speaker
A power difference is not in itself necessarily destructive, obviously when it becomes too great a power difference and that
01:18:56
Speaker
huge numbers of hierarchical levels like in an ecosystem where there's the the plants right through to the top predator. There's only a limited number of hierarchical levels and they're completely different life forms that are with different intelligences that are operating those but in the human economy we've now
01:19:15
Speaker
develop these massive number of hierarchical levels, most of which don't even have formal identification. And yet there's just fallible humans occupying all levels. And so that becomes very, very problematic. But with fewer hierarchical levels, and the connection between
01:19:37
Speaker
that then power difference in itself is not so problematic, especially when it's acknowledged. Where it's denied, that's problematic.
01:19:51
Speaker
So I suppose Meliodora is what Shani Graham at Ecoverbia in Western Australia calls a benevolent dictatorship. But what Dave and Sue say goes in that ultimate sense. And there's obviously a dance there and people here pretty quickly realise
01:20:21
Speaker
what they need to talk to Dave about, but maybe what they need to talk to Sue about. And a lot of people would even say, ah, yes, the real power center. I might be the sort of intellectual big brains, but Sue actually runs Meliodora. So all of those nuances, but also what we would recognise is natural authority in different domains, different subjects.
01:20:51
Speaker
And I think that also then builds that autonomy that
01:21:00
Speaker
that people who are here are gaining natural authority in particular areas. And for me that's been that process of letting go of being the gardener who plans everything with the seasonal garden, you know, and that's been a process with people before you, but you having some agency or decision-making in that and
01:21:27
Speaker
Yeah, that you start, so it becomes more of a dance where, you know, instead of leading in everything, sometimes following. Maybe to use that term that Ivan Illich used in relation to the relationships he identified in traditional societies between men and women, between the genders,
01:21:55
Speaker
as an ambiguous complementarity so it's not a complete synergy there is still some autonomy and that you don't necessarily know or fully understand what the other does or what their world is but it's this dance where there's it's complementary but not
01:22:21
Speaker
a hundred percent integrated or tight. And how do we do that? So we don't become like, as I say, use the example of the beehive. We don't want to be so integrated in any human organisation that we're like bees. But
01:22:39
Speaker
We recognise that it's actually through doing things together that we have all the potential power and joy. I think how does this work?
01:22:56
Speaker
I think the preparedness to deal with conflict and to voice that is something that's true across all forms of collectivity of being able to express difference and deal with conflict and being able to articulate
01:23:23
Speaker
that in a way that doesn't fall back into maybe older patterns. But I think one of the things that's come up from intentional communities and efforts along those lines is that people often started out with the assumption that if
01:23:47
Speaker
people all had similar needs and certainly values that that would naturally produce cooperative synergistic relationships but it actually produces competition whereas difference completely or quite different needs and capabilities actually encourages that complementarity and that means you're actually dealing with differences also that you don't like
01:24:18
Speaker
And I think there's lots of historical cultural examples that can be seen, understood ecologically in that way. One that I like to reference is in India, before petition for centuries, many, many communities had a majority Hindu people and a minority Muslims.
01:24:44
Speaker
and in the ecology of India with a high population density in the tropics it made sense for most people to be vegetarian and the cows were sacred to the Hindus and there's some
01:25:00
Speaker
dairy products but not a lot because they're most eating dry, crappy feed. What happens as the population of cows gradually increases? At some point there needs to be a control on that, so there's not too many cows. Well, the Muslims that eat meat were slowly, in various subtle ways, removing those cows.
01:25:26
Speaker
So there's an example of people with quite different values and ways of living that were actually in ecological harmony with each other. And probably certainly the elders fully understood that.
01:25:46
Speaker
and was harmonious and peaceful for centuries until it was disrupted by bridge colonisation and partition. So we don't have to like or want to be like others that we actually co-depend on.
01:26:06
Speaker
That sounds again like an expectation adjustment and it makes me want to ask you what other skills you think are important as we move into energy descent, move through energy
Resilience Skills for the Future
01:26:21
Speaker
descent.
01:26:21
Speaker
As you know, this podcast is based on a list of hard and soft skills that David, Dave Pollard articulated in an article last year. And I love that list because the soft skills especially give someone like me a soft-ish person quite a lot of hope. So what are your top skills for people to be honing through this time?
01:26:47
Speaker
Yeah, well I'd certainly agree with Dave Pollard about there are a lot of soft skills apart from the concrete ones that I was so fascinated with in my twenties because although I came from a family of political radicals, if something went wrong with the plumbing at our house, you know, my parents rang up a plumber.
01:27:10
Speaker
And then in my travels I became sort of interested in this whole self-reliance world and meeting Bill Mollison and his friends. They seem to do everything.
01:27:26
Speaker
you know, or if they didn't do it themselves, they knew someone who could do things from building an ocean going boat to hunting, you know. So I was like...
01:27:41
Speaker
For me, because I grew up as a kid who was a bit of a tinkerer and dabbler and practical person, even though my parents weren't, I was sort of hungry for all of those skills. And I sort of very strongly focused on building those different skill sets. The way I would see a lot of those skills now is stepping back from particular ones and say,
01:28:12
Speaker
do you have a skill that another person values and needs without the intermediation of a corporation, a government or a large institution? Because most people
01:28:30
Speaker
in our society are skilled, but the skill they have depends on being part of a big organisational structure which will feed that into some economic reward system that theoretically provides needs for people somewhere out the end of that process.
01:28:51
Speaker
So it's not like everyone needs to be an expert food grower, although food growing in the future way more people are going to be involved directly and indirectly in it. But I often use the example of a bicycle or a car mechanic or someone who actually is really competent in that area.
01:29:11
Speaker
There's a skill that other people will value and whether they pay you for that in money, whether it's in favours or your social credit and status in a community as an important person. Similarly, so many skills in relation to health, basic ones. Can you operate
01:29:35
Speaker
and provide value without some enormous juggernaut of the health system and all of the technology that other people will value.
01:29:47
Speaker
So firstly, those sort of more concrete skills like to sort of try and think for a lot of people how they bring the skills they have back down into that direct connection. And so maybe someone, the example I think I used of one example in retro suburbia was maybe a mechanical engineer who has a hobby which is fixing up old vintage cars.
01:30:14
Speaker
could segue into being a competent backyard mechanic that someone can really appreciate and might even be able to make a part, you know, on his lathe or whatever that's no longer available. So how do people translate those skills rather than necessarily saying, well, I've got these irrelevant things. I need to throw all that away and learn something else.
01:30:44
Speaker
And then I think.
01:30:45
Speaker
Yes, the skills at being able to directly give people joy in direct entertainment. If the internet and all of that is not constantly doing its thing, then even just simple entertainment becomes being able to sing and perform music, for example.
01:31:14
Speaker
and also to navigate problems and solve conflicts between people, both personally, to be able to do that in relation to your own issues, but to be able to do that for other people and develop respect for that is an example of those skills of how do you redevelop
01:31:39
Speaker
the basic elements of community governance and interpersonal conflict. And I think people who are passionate about
01:31:52
Speaker
subject I think especially for young people searching for what is their thing. In permacultures there's often been the idea that you know we're jacks and gills of all trades and there's a lot of that do-it-yourself element and I think that's really important but it was Yashiro from the German permaculture academy when we were
01:32:21
Speaker
there in 2005 on a course I taught where he said, and I thought this was quite cute, especially being second language for him, he said, we need to be jacks and gills of all trades and master of one.
01:32:41
Speaker
instead of master of none. And so that's that skill that we are recognised by our community as we know more about that and that we are valuable and we will be rewarded in some way about that. But we can turn our hands to most things because we will have to do much more for ourselves and we don't have to be the best gun
01:33:11
Speaker
whole organic gardener expert to grow some of our own food. You don't have to be the top expert in something to look after your own machinery so it doesn't break from stupid things. But yeah, there'll be a more limited range of things or one thing that we
01:33:37
Speaker
if we're like professionals at or capable at. I love that idea of translating what people might see as quite abstract skills into the tangible and the practical. I think that's really useful. And I wanted to close out the conversation with something a little bit different than I haven't done before and seeing as
01:34:01
Speaker
I don't know if I'm the only person to have called you an intellectual jukebox, but I'm going to call you that. That's, that's one of your originals. I thought it would be really fun to play word association. So just some little short blirts based on some words that I've written down and you have actually done well in already speaking to some of these things that I had noted down. Um, so I will hit you with these words, Dave, and I'd love to hear what they immediately
01:34:30
Speaker
conjure up for you success success you you've been at the task for a while and there's been all these obstacles all these ups and downs and yet then you get there you know the and whether it's growing something in the garden or fixing something that's broken to me that that's what that word conjures up
01:34:57
Speaker
Filthy rich? Filthy rich. I had wealth written down. I was like, nah, that's not quite, it doesn't have enough foots far. Filthy rich. Well, I suppose the aspect of, for me, it conjures up that wealth, material wealth comes contaminated by filth, by the
01:35:24
Speaker
the collateral damage, the blood at distance that is more than quantity or extreme. But if you'd said wealth, I probably would have said a nice big stack of firewood or something of abundance. But yeah. No, that's really interesting. I didn't expect you to say that. And what I was interested really by was your true definition of wealth.
01:35:54
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's things like that. A nice big stack of stored firewood and the participation in
01:36:12
Speaker
community in nature and the social credit that comes from those things and health and yeah, the simple material expressions like the stack of firewood or the cellar full.
01:36:33
Speaker
of produce. And I remember being in the east of France where there were cows in big barns and there would be a big pile of manure out the front on the village street. And apparently the pile of manure was actually a measure of how many cows you had in the shed, so it was actually a symbol of wealth. A pile of shit. A steaming dung pile. Yeah, yeah. I thought I loved that that had survived into the modern world.
01:37:04
Speaker
Okay, I had apocalypse written down. Apocalypse. Yeah, the funny idea of this sort of end of the world millennialism that I've always been critical of compared with the energy descent idea and that people
01:37:29
Speaker
Focusing through film and media and popular culture in little events of extreme rapid change that don't last very long. Like wars don't last very long. And then out of the end of that comes another world. And everyone's obsessed with the little event. But not what comes next. What does it settle out into?
01:37:58
Speaker
And yeah, so I think of people obsessed with that rapid change of extreme negative things going on. And yeah, I can remember doing the future scenarios work or the early precursors to that and talking about
01:38:27
Speaker
these futures and people used to say to me things like, are you mean like Mad Max? And I'd never seen this film, even though it was film just not far from here down there, Newstead. And then I saw it and I thought, God, a 1970s sort of road movie as an intellectual reference point for trying to think about futures other than the conventional one. And I thought how
01:38:56
Speaker
sort of primitive the efforts to think about different futures were and you know because I looked at Mad Max and said that doesn't make sense in an energy stressed environment all these V8 cars racing around burning fuel furiously you know like these completely implausible things but that didn't matter because people's apocalyptic sort of
01:39:25
Speaker
Mindset was so, to me, sort of disconnected from any realities, but that's that struggling, I suppose, to find what the hell do things look like when the plans don't work out. Still a good theme for a dress-up party, though. I'll put a few more coins in the jukebox.
Conclusion & Future Episodes
01:39:52
Speaker
Play. Play.
01:39:54
Speaker
I found it took me a while to come to terms with that one. I can remember going and pestering my dad on a Sunday when I was a little kid. Dad, we've got to go up and do all that work because I was sort of really focused on work and modelling that, being productive.
01:40:20
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose it was having a baby and a kid myself that brought me back to that world of play and that I strongly associate it with learning. This is how you learn to do things. You play at them.
01:40:43
Speaker
And in a way that's what we've been doing with permaculture and self-reliance is we're playing while we can and through that is like learning where the consequences are not catastrophic because all of the support systems of society have been there but the period of play is coming to an end and we have to start, you know, we have to start working.
01:41:13
Speaker
It is nice to reframe odious tasks as play, though. I tell myself I'm going to go and play in the compost pile. We can go and play with the fence, play with the blackberries. Yes, and it is part of a
01:41:31
Speaker
mindset and I think also we start in that space as babies and young children and to some extent in dotage we sort of return to that space to some extent of play and fascination with just what exists or that that is a good circle
01:41:59
Speaker
Yeah, we played with that in the retro suburbia framework of the different quadrants of work for the man, permaculture productivity, consumer heaven and voluntary simplicity, which was really that child play space and how much time we spend in each of those in our lives and where do we want to move
01:42:28
Speaker
that activity to one side being mediated by money and the other being mediated by reciprocity.
01:42:43
Speaker
immediately like to think of starting with the self, kin and community. So it actually starts where one has power and responsibility to care for people, which is the self, which is, I like it because it appears a contradiction
01:43:03
Speaker
to the thing of how do we care for seven plus billion people on the planet, which to me seems to easily get lost in, oh, well, I actually don't have any power. It's really complicated. Every effort to do so seems to create worse problems, even when well-intentioned. Start with where we do have power and take responsibility and that to move out.
01:43:32
Speaker
in a sort of ripple of circles. That's how I see people care. And the last one is influence. Oh, I see that in dark and positive ways. And trying to understand what are the influences that are making things happen is a really tricky one. And to sort of... It's a bit like recognising where does power lie.
01:44:02
Speaker
You know, what is, what is making, it's a bit like science generally, what's the cause and effect? What's making something happen? What's moving things? What are the, what are the hidden drivers or the maybe abstract things?
01:44:24
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose I view it as part of a system.
01:44:34
Speaker
held you hostage for quite some time now and I've enjoyed every minute. I'm really, I feel so lucky to have this conversation with you today and thank you so much for being a guest in your own, the home that you built. It's great. I've never had an interview quite like this and it's great to be
01:44:57
Speaker
on your still fairly new podcast and that it's coming from the little tea house at Malia Dora where you live and that we built quite some years ago. Solar passive podcasting.
01:45:17
Speaker
I'll never get tired of hearing Dave's perspectives, and it's a massive honour to be part of his extended household. You probably already know where to access more Holmgren, but if you're looking for leads, jump into the show notes where I've linked as many things as possible that Dave had referenced, as well as upcoming events including tours of Meliodora, permaculture design certificates and retro suburbia talks.
01:45:41
Speaker
One resource that I'm particularly loving and that's relevant for local dendrophiles, which is a tree addict, is his book Trees on the Treeless Plain. It's a revegetation manual specific to central Victoria with lots of lovely nerdy things about our tall woody friends and the soils beneath them. I highly recommend checking that out.
01:46:01
Speaker
if you're interested in the Goldfields region and how to repopulate it sensitively with trees. So in terms of upcoming guests, I have a lot of great guests lined up with about four interviews scheduled over the next fortnight with people I know you know and love. So that's very exciting. I've still got interviews that I've done already that are awaiting release. So I'm just gonna see which conversation asks to be aired next Monday and keep you in suspense till then.
01:46:30
Speaker
Thank you for all your shares, your Spotify stars, iTunes reviews, and emails to me with tales from projects around the world, friends of guests in far-flung places, favorite Sue Dennett quotes, and all kinds of affirming feedback. I really appreciate hearing from you. If there are any questions you want me to ask about illustrious resilience guests, please sing out. And so much gratitude, as always, for listening. See you next week.