Making Permaculture Stronger

Sometimes I find myself inside a dialogue that deeply meets me where I am and lifts me up to a place with more clarity, more vitality, and more possibility. This episode with Pamela Mang was one of these. Pamela is long-term friend and colleague of past guests Carol Sanford, Joel Glanzberg, Ben Haggard, and Bill Reed. She has been working in the space of regenerative design, resourcing and development for many decades. Co-founder of Regenesis Group, she is co-author (with Ben) of the 2016 book Regenerative Design and Development. She is also part of the faculty that runs The Regenerative Practitioner (TRP) programme. In this dialogue Pamela helps me grok the tetrad of regenerative development that Regenesis works from in relation to my own work on Living Design Process. From this paper which in turn sourced it from Regenesis group. https://youtu.be/UJdnMghawTY Upcoming TRPs in NZ and AU Enrolments for the next Australian programme for TRP are open July 15th – August 19, 2022 and the programme commences on September 7th, 2022. Contact me if you’d like to be connected to Drika, Alana or Lara who are the AU co-hosts. Enrolments for the next New Zealand programme are open July 15th – August 13th and the programme commences on September 2nd, 2022. I am considering enrolling myself so I may see you on the course. Contact me if you’d like to be connected to Lucy-Mary who is the NZ liaison. Quotable Quotes Now for a few things Pamela said that I was moved to write down here: Design should be a vitalising process. It creates new vitality, new energies that can source different orders of health, different orders of understanding and so on Pamela Mang Pamela Mang The secret about these frameworks is that they don’t replace intuition. They hone it Pamela Mang Living Design Process Find out more about the Living Design Process Pamela was resourcing me to look at through the tetrad framework here – the next online course of Living Design Process kicks off August 6th 2022 (why not complete before your TRP and make this a year of next-level learning!). Support the Making Permaculture Stronger Book Project This episode also marks the launch of a crowdfunding campaign to fund the creation of the Making Permaculture Stronger book – here’s the video and here’s a link to the campaign page. Support us and feel the good vibes that follow :-). https://youtu.be/1O8KY_Rb-2U

Enjoy part of two of this rich dialogue about bringing Living Design Process to professional permaculture design consultancy. Will make more sense if you listen to Part One first. An aerial photo of the Mayberry project which is mentioned in this episode and is a good example of a design process that uses earthworks and trees to create beautiful organic spaces in between…

Many thanks to Alec Higgins for prompting this exploration. In the first of two instalments, we develop premises for transitioning into professional permaculture design work. Enjoy and to learn more about working with Living Design Process please visit www.LivingDesignProcess.org – the next course starts in August and you can learn more about it here. A photo of the early development of the project I explored with John Caruthers here. From drone footage by Peter Watts

It was an honour to connect in this episode with Daniel Christian Wahl to explore what it means to align with life’s regenerative impulse. Here’s Daniel’s book Designing Regenerative Cultures, his Medium Blog and here’s his wonderful youtube series Voices of the Regeneration. Early on Daniel mentions Christopher Alexander’s Challenge to Permaculture. A few times he mentions Henri Bortoft’s book The Wholeness of Nature. Daniel Christian Wahl Enjoy, thanks to Daniel for visiting Making Permaculture Stronger, and thanks to our mutual friend Clinton Callahan for connecting us.

In this lively second conversation (find the first here) Clinton Callahan and I dive right in to swap notes on the dynamics of living creation processes. We cover creating from fear, chaos, and the groundless void as well as feelings, the unknown, the phoenix process, surfing the wave you are are, and much else. https://youtu.be/qKNGwiqGxTo You can find out more about Clinton at his website here and during our chat he mentioned fearclub.org, rageclub.org and possibilityteam.org

On March 17, 2022, at 85 years of age, Christopher Alexander passed away peacefully in his home in West Sussex, England. This post celebrates his life, and for me, personally, the sheer magnitude his work has had on the course of my life, including Making Permaculture Stronger as a project. If any of you have been touched by this project, then you have been indirectly impacted by Alexander’s life-long quest toward life, beauty and wholeness. Find out about who Alexander was here and here and here and here. Learn about Alexander’s direct influence on my (Dan Palmer’s) work, and on this very project here and here. A Poem Thank you to Ann Medlock, a past client (and hence collaborator) of Alexander’s, for permission to share these photos and this poem here: Alexander sculpts a building out of air and wisdom waving his hands squinting his eyes to see what only he and God can see in this clearing on the bluff. Listening to something we cannot hear, he brings into being a house so solid, silent and calm, so embracing, consoling and inevitable, that it draws in and restores every open soul that finds its way here. And many do. Pilgrims who have heard, who’ve seen a photograph, who sense that here there is something mysterious, rare, perhaps even inspired. On a clear blue afternoon we sit at a long table in the sun, the house embracing this garden and all of us who bask here amid the calendulas and ferns. Feasting on tabouli and cold birds, we talk of poetry and paintings, of terraces in Tuscany and homemade wine, of our work, our passions, our quests. We are friends, gathered here by the grace that emanates from this holy place. At Christmas, the clan assembles. The tree, dressed in familiar ornaments, touches the coffered ceiling and sends the scent of balsam to mingle with fire, roast and cakes. Thick walls hold out the cold, the wind, and every danger of the world we know. Comets cut across the high windows as we are drawn in and held fast, together, blessed by the house that Alexander made, while listening to God. Three Examples of Directly Alexander-Inspired Design Processes https://vimeo.com/456075580/0e4846f331 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2k35m_Q9xg&ab_channel=MakingPermacultureStronger https://youtu.be/l8lffVxj7DI Some Quotes Here I share a selection of some of my favourite quotes from Alexander’s many books. The Timeless Way of Building (1979) You are alive when you are wholehearted, true to yourself, true to your own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations you are in. […] To be happy, and to be alive, in this sense, are almost the same. Of course, if you are alive, you are not always happy in the sense of feeling pleasant; experiences of joy are balanced by experiences of sorrow. But the experiences are all deeply felt; and above all, you are whole; and conscious of being real. To be alive, in this sense, is not a matter of suppressing some forces or tendencies, at the expense of others; it is a state of being in which all forces which arise in you can find expression; you live in balance among the forces which arise in you; you are unique as the pattern of forces which arises is unique; you are at peace, since there are no disturbances created by underground forces which have no outlet, at one with yourself and your surroundings. This state cannot be reached merely by inner work. There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that you need do only inner work, in order to be alive like this; that you are entirely responsible for your problems; and that to cure yourself, you need only change yourself. This teaching has some value, since it is so easy to imagine that your problems are caused by “others.” But it is a one-sided and mistaken view which also maintains the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient, and not dependent in any essential way on their surroundings. The fact is, you are so far formed by your surroundings, that your state of harmony depends entirely on your harmony with your surroundings. Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help you come to life. Others make it very difficult. (pp. 105-106, edited by me from third into second person voice) Building designed by Alexander within Eishen Campus in Japan This next quote changed my whole approach to design: This [approach to design] is a differentiating process. It views design as a sequence of acts of complexification; structure is injected into the whole by operating on the whole and crinkling it, not by adding little parts to one another. In the process of differentiation, the whole gives birth to its parts: the parts appear as folds in a cloth of three dimensional space which is gradually crinkled. The form of the whole, and the parts, come into being simultaneously. The image of the differentiating process is the growth of an embryo. It starts as a single cell. The cell grows into a ball of cells. Then, through a series of differentiations, each building on the last, the structure becomes more and more complex, until a finished human being is formed. The first thing that happens is that this ball gets an inside, a middle layer, and an outside: the endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm, which will later turn into skeleton, flesh, and skin, respectively. Then this ball of cells with three layers gets an axis. The axis is laid down in the endoderm, and will become the spine of the finished person. Then this ball, with an axis, gets a head at one end. Later, the secondary structures, eyes, limbs, develop in relation to the spinal axis and the head. And so on. At every stage of development, new structure is laid down, on the basis of the structure which has been laid down so far. The process of development is, in essence, a sequence of operations, each one of which differentiates the structure which has been laid down by the previous operations. … In nature a thing is always born, and developed, as a whole. A baby starts, from the first day of its conception, as a whole, and is a whole, as an embryo, every day until it is born. It is not a sequence of adding parts together, but a whole, which expands, crinkles, differentiates itself. (pp. 368-383) Get rid of the ideas which come into your mind. Get rid of pictures you have seen in magazines, friends’ houses …. Insist on the pattern, and nothing else. The pattern, and the real situation, together, will create the proper form, within your mind, without your trying to do it, if you will allow it to happen. This is the power of the language, and the reason why the language is creative. Your mind is a medium within which the creative spark that jumps between the pattern and the world can happen. You yourself are only the medium for this creative spark , not its originator.” (p. 397) The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe: Book Two: The Process of Creating Life Our current view of architecture rests on too little awareness of becoming as the most essential feature of the building process. Architects are too little concerned with the design of the world (its static structure), and not yet concerned enough with the design of the generative processes that create the world (its dynamic structure) (p. 4) In our profession of architecture there is no conception, yet, of process itself as a budding, as a flowering, as an unpredictable, unquenchable unfolding through which the future grows from the present in a way that is dominated by the goodness of the moment (p. 12) In a living system what is to be always grows out of what is, supports it, extends its structure smoothly and continuously, elaborates new form — sometimes startlingly new form — but without ever violating the structure which exists. When this rule is violated, as it was, far too often, in 20th-century development, chaos emerges. A kind of cancer occurs. Harm is done. All in modern society succeeded, in the last century, in creating an ethos where where buildings, plans, objects…are judged only by themselves, and not by the extent to which they enhance and support the world. This means that nature has been damaged, because it is ignored and trampled upon. It means that ancient parts of towns and cities have been trampled, because the modernist view saw no need to respect them, to protect them. But even more fundamental, it came about because the idea of creativity which became the norm assumed that it is creative to make things that are unrelated (sometimes disoriented and disconnected just in order to be new), and that this is valuable–where in fact it is merely stupid, and represents a misunderstanding, a deep misapprehension of how things are. Creativity comes about when we discover the new within a structure already latent within the present. It is our respect for what is that leads us to the most beautiful discoveries. In art as well as in architecture, our most wonderful creations come about, when we draw them out as extensions and enhancements of what exists already. The denial of this point of view, is the chief way in which 20th-century development destroyed the surface of the earth (p. 136) At each stage in its evolution the process — when a living one — always starts from the wholeness as it currently exists at that moment. The work is complete in some respects, in some respects incomplete. At the next moment, we take a new step — introducing one new bit of structure… into the whole. The new structure we introduce may be large, medium, or tiny… But the point is that at every stage of every life-creating process, the new bit of structure which is injected to transform and further differentiate the previously existing wholeness, will always extend, enhance, intensify the structure of the previous wholeness… (p. 216) The enigma is that something new, unique, previously unseen — even innovative and astonishing — arises from the extent to which we are able to attend to what is there, and able to derive what is required from what is actually there… and that all this, then, will lead to astonishing surprises (p. 340) In each place, a being slowly emerges from the mist (p. 340) Intellect is too crude a net to catch the whole (p. 388) A shot of Eishen Campus in Japan – Alexander’s largest project The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe: Book Three: A Vision of a Living World Life in nature, and in the humanly constructed world, is generated by a process of unfolding in which living structure grows in stepwise fashion from a current condition (the system of centers which exists) and takes on greater life by a series of structure-preserving transformations, or adaptations (p. 2) I propose then, that the world should be created by adaptive processes which act as nature does, itself. They allow us to create a harmonious whole that embraces nature and creates buildings, streets, and towns, in a fashion which has the same deep structure as nature, and has the same deep effect on us as a result (p. 3) What is the character of the kind of world where we experience emotional possession of the places we are in? It is a world in which the fine adaptation between people and their buildings and gardens and streets is so subtle, goes so deeply to the core of human experience, that the people who then live and work and play in that environment feel as if they belong there, as if it belongs to them, as if they are part of it, as if, like an old shoe, it is completely and utterly theirs (p. 43) My aim for the last few decades has been, through the use of living process, to construct a situation in our world where a deep, profound belonging can exist and does exist. (p. 43) Living process in a garden depends on people following their own hearts, allowing the call of their own hearts, dreams, feeling, to become actual in that place (p. 235) In a section entitled positive space in gardens: Then we build structures in these outdoor areas to differentiate them further, into smaller living centers, animated by the structures – steps, walls, parapets, railings, seats, embankments, bridges, slopes.. that we build in them. And then we allow natural life to rip loose, the plants, the grass, the trees, the bushes — and let these form still further centers, which then animate the positive space even further. That will happen almost of its own accord, if the initial positive space has been correctly made. This is the form the living process takes, in making a garden (p. 243) If a dynamic process is followed, so that each time the next step follows existing things — preserves the structure, and creates and maintains relationships — we get a harmonious living community. If, instead, a static master-plan-based approach is followed, and the 20 or 100 things are built according to the original drawing or plan, then they will exist, for the most part, without real functional relationships: the whole is unrelated in its internal elements; there has been no structure-preserving going on, step after step, and the whole remains dead (p. 336) Here are a few photos from I mention in the episode to accompany a quote from Grabow, Stephen. Christopher Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture. Oriel Press, 1983. I haven’t yet written out here. Some Videos Now for a few youtube videos of Alexander. https://youtu.be/NAjz0INs3Lc Note I particularly love this moment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZHb9-Y9r_E Chris speaks to the birth of the pattern language idea… https://youtu.be/98LdFA-_zfA https://youtu.be/oKO3vYjZbcs “Really one of the very largest problems that is facing the earth just now is rarely mentioned, and that is the spread of ugliness” Some Links PatternLanguage.com – The most developed and resource website I know of that Alexander was directly involved in Christopher Alexander’s Neglected Challenge to Permaculture – the first time I publicly applied Alexander’s ideas to permaculture Living Design Process – The emerging hub for one particular development of Alexander’s living process approach Building Beauty – Alexander-Inspired education run by a bunch of fine folk who knew and worked alongside Alexander Rob Hopkins interview with Alexander – well worth a read. Please submit other relevant links in the comments below. Some Closing Words I wrote these lines maybe five or six years ago. They feel appropriate to share here now. Where did living design process start for me? Well, one image jumps to mind, so I’ll run with that. It is January, 2014. I’m standing next to my mother on lush, green grass. We’re looking across her new vegetable garden. After almost ten years as a professional permaculture design consultant, this job had been different. The writings of Christopher Alexander had been on my radar for some years, with a small but significant influence on my design practice. In particular, in a passage from The Timeless Way of Building, Alexander had helped me move away from seeing sound design as an effectively mechanical process of assembling elements into whole systems. I was now seeing sound design as an organic process of unfolding parts from within the fabric of an already-existing whole system. But on this project, I had somehow completed a multi-year, slow-motion jump from the former to the latter way of viewing and practicing design. Indeed, during the process, I had entered and started applying ideas from Alexander’s later writings. After devouring his 2012 book Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth I dove into his four-volume, 2000-page masterwork The Nature of Order (2002). Back to my mother and I, standing there. Surveying her freshly planted garden beds. She asked what I was up to. For in my hands I held open Book Two of The Nature of Order. I had just a few minutes prior read Alexander making an intriguing claim. He proposed that if one was to design and create using the living process he has been developing throughout his 60-year career, the result will be infused with fifteen specific properties. Fifteen properties Alexander claims are characteristic, definitive even, of what he calls living structure. Living structure is another way of saying stuff that is as fitted to its context as almost anything we consider part of nature (a tree, for instance, or a jellyfish, wave, or rock). The properties have names like strong centers, levels of scale, gradients, alternating repetition, and echoes. It is for another time and place to list or explain them all (go read his books!). The point here is simply that they exist, and that Alexander claims if you go about creating something in the way he advocates, it will have many if not all these properties in it. The moment I read this I walked over to the garden, my mother joining me, curious to see what I up to. “Let’s settle this right now, Christopher!” I was thinking. I hadn’t been aware of the 15 properties during the process of designing and building the garden. As for my co-designers, mum and dad, they had barely even heard of Alexander. And yet as process facilitator I had been keeping us as true as I knew to the living process Alexander says will reliably birth these fifteen properties into the world. Being true to the process means that we had been consciously engaging our whole body-minds in letting the parts of the garden emerge from within the context of the whole space as we laid it out and shaped it up. It was a golden opportunity to empirically test his contention. I remember my spine tingling as I looked from the list of properties on the open page to the garden and back again. Every property was there. I say it again. Every property was there. That moment is as good a moment as any to nominate as the moment that living process, and what we’re now calling living design process, really took root in my soul. I thank you, Christopher Alexander for, in your beautiful writings, helping germinate the seed that lies inside us all. Dan Palmer Endnote: For me, the creation and ongoing development of Living Design Process is the primary way I am keeping Alexander’s extraordinary legacy alive in the world. Learn more about it here and sign up for the first ever online course about it here.

In this episode Brianne Vaillancourt and I explore the the edge between Possibility Management and Permaculture. In particular we explore the potential to harness conscious feelings in our design work. Having started this conversation back in episode fifteen with Clinton Callahan, I feel joy to be going there again. Joy because the clarity of the distinctions I have learned in Possibility Management contexts are contributing so much to my work in design, holding space, and my life generally. Brianne Vaillancourt & Dan Palmer Learn more about Brianne (and sign up to her newsletter!) through her personal website. Learn more about Clinton at his personal website. Learn more about Anne-Chloé Destremau, who Brianne mentions, here. Learn more about Possibility Management, Rage Club, Fear Club and Mage Training which are all mentioned. Something that wasn’t mentioned, but I was thinking of during the episode, is this site using the term Whole Permaculture to explore the Permaculture-Possibility Management bridge. If you are interested in learning more about Possibility Management in an actual training experience, I recommend this online Expand the Box training run by my friend, colleague and guide Vera Franco. Huge thanks to Ellen’ Schwindt for the musical intermission – below is a video of the larger composition I sample. Let me know if these things work for you and I’ll get them in more often! https://player.vimeo.com/video/529143485

In this episode in was my pleasure to get to know permaculture consultant Eliosa Lewis from New Climate Culture. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about Eloisa’s journey and work and look forward to having her back. Here is a link to Kevin Bayuk of Project Drawdown that Eloisa speaks so highly of. Here is the crypto token She talks about: https://icube.finance I look forward to your comments (including questions for future conversations with Eloisa) and at the start I mention online events on Holistic Decision Making and Living Design Process you can find out more about here.

In this episode it is my great pleasure to welcome Carol Sanford back to explore her brand new book Indirect Work. To support and celebrate the book’s launch, Carol has offered a giveaway offer exclusively for listeners of Making Permaculture Stronger. If you listen to and then share this episode on your website or any of your social media channels (such as sharing from the Making Permaculture Stronger facebook page), and then let me know about it, you go into the draw to access: A free copy of Indirect Work posted to your door A free ticket to a 90-minute Q&A on Indirect Work with Carol 10am PT, May 2, 2022 ($200 value) The link to download a pdf Self-Assessment for Regenerative Integrity. $100 value There are also a bunch of different offers for buying different numbers of books here on Carol’s site. Now, a little taste of what this book is all about. Carol explains that: indirect work is building the capacity in people to consistently think at higher levels in order to create innovations for advancing specific contexts and streams of activity. This capacity allows us to become instruments for the regeneration and evolution of the living systems within which we are nested—to become effective change agents. Carol Sanford Here are a few of my favourite passages in the book. For example, every time we try to solve a problem, dividing it into its components to understand it better, seeking to figure out its causes in order to address them, we fall under the spell of classical mechanics. Every time we translate something into a replicable (and therefore scalable) procedure or recipe, we’ve stepped into a machine universe. This is so pervasive in Western and now global culture that it becomes invisible to us. It can be very difficult to get our minds to shake off this continually reinforced pattern in order to question our fundamental shared beliefs about how the universe works. Earlier I said that this book was addressed to well-intentioned people who seek to make the world a better place through the instruments that are available to them, such as business, social activism, or creation of policies and institutions. I also said that most of these efforts are likely to be compromised or fail because they still operate from an old paradigm, within which the world is assembled from discrete pieces, each playing its part in a cosmic machine. Our machine-based metaphors are so pervasive that we hardly notice them: input, output, feedback, leverage, rewiring, reprogramming, metrics, ideal state, and on and on. A living or regenerative paradigm has a very different character and uses correspondingly different metaphors. It starts with an image of the living, dynamic, and unfolding universe, in which each entity is endowed with the spark of life and an innate capacity for growth and evolution with regard to how it expresses itself. Working from this paradigm, one doesn’t attempt to push the world and its inhabitants to an ideal state—that would be coercive and life denying. Rather, one encourages and enables living beings to discover and express their innate potential as contributors to living communities. For those of us who truly want to transform the world, it is the regenerative paradigm that will enable us to do so. This confronts us with an important question. Are the underlying beliefs, assumptions, patterns, and language that characterize my culture derived from a machine or a living systems paradigm? And if I want to cultivate a living systems culture, what must I do I to help with the shift? (note – Carol answers this question in our conversation!) Consciousness is the necessary antidote to our overwhelming tendency to engage in automatic habits of thought and behavior. In its absence, these habits extend to the most general reaches of our collective understanding of the universe, itself, conceived of by Western Europeans in the time of the Renaissance as a giant clockwork. This peculiarity of regional imagination has now become the dominant paradigm of reality worldwide. As such, it has created a self-reinforcing loop in which the mechanistic universe is reflected in the conceptualization of our bodies and minds as biological machines and our institutions as social machines. Thus, we invent mechanistic metaphors and processes for educating and healing ourselves. In other words, we resort to conditioning, a default approach that is precisely the opposite of living free, self-determined human lives. And, in a mechanical feedback process, this conditioning reinforces the already prevalent tendency toward automatism. But the process of accretion of information and action, no matter how comprehensive, will never on its own generate the shift in perspective that allows us to engage with a living whole. If anything, the tendency to aggregate and integrate only serves to reinforce the problems associated with fragmentation. This is because it derives its raw materials from the underlying practice of breaking things down into parts in order to understand them before attempting to reassemble them into something that makes sense. I could see that nearly all of the world’s conflicts grew out of a binary or polarized view of reality: good/evil, right/left, male/female, white/black, profit/loss, owner/worker, wealth/poverty, future/past, energy/matter, ones/zeros. Business, politics, psychology, and even religion were all busy trying to shift things from one column to the other within a zero-sum universe where one person’s gain was inevitably another’s loss. Or, when they weren’t seeking to win the game, they were seeking to maintain its equilibrium through careful compromises and the balancing of powers—complementarity rather than polarity. Faced with the ubiquity of this way of thinking, I realized that the way out of its dead ends had to do with the power of three-ness in a two-force world. In my flash of insight, genuine creativity came from not accepting the rules of win and lose. Rather, one had to see the dynamic tensions between opposing forces as the sources of evolutionary energy. This required stepping outside of the polarity in order to recognize its potential within a larger context. Stepping outside introduced a new, third force, one that was not bound by the terms of the conflict but could embrace both sides (or multiple sides, for that matter) as contributors to a new possibility. Peruse all time-limited bonuses for Pre-Buying InDirect WorkTo be notified of releases of new books, free events and new content and articles, Scroll to bottom of this linked page, to sign up for newsletter.All of Carol’s books and how they fit together

In this episode I re-release an interview Millie Haughey recently did with me for her own podcast which is called Unplugged, Tapped In. We explore the idea that most of us are trapped in the all-pervasive cage of mechanical worldview without even realising it and what becomes possible when the cage is seen and the door out is located. This will be a theme of some upcoming writing and solo episodes also. In the intro I mention Millie’s interview with my dear friend and long-term Making Permaculture Stronger collaborator James Andrews. I also mention this episode in which I interviewed the founder of Possibility Management Clinton Callahan (or see as youtube here). During the chat I mention Carol Sanford a fair bit too.

In this episode I get to inquire into permaculture design process with Penny Livingston-Stark. Penny has been teaching internationally and working professionally in the land management, regenerative design, and permaculture development field for 25 years and has extensive experience in all phases of ecologically sound design and construction as well as the use of natural non-toxic building materials. She specializes in site planning and the design of resource-rich landscapes integrating, rainwater collection, edible and medicinal planting, spring development, pond and water systems, habitat development and watershed restoration for homes, co-housing communities, businesses, and diverse yield perennial farms. She as taught Herbal Medicine Making, Natural Building and Permaculture around the US as well as Bali, Indonesia, Peru, Germany, Mexico, France, Turkey, Portugal, Australia, Belize, Brazil, England and Costa Rica. Check out Penny’s website here and the ecoversity course she mentions here. Check out the offerings I mention on Holistic Decision Making here and Living Design Process here. Oh and please tell me what you think of the new soundtrack too with mega-gratitude to Pip Heath for creating it!

In this episode I share a lovely dialogue with Bill Houghton, a long-term follower and supporter of Making Permaculture Stronger who recently reached out to connect. I love his opener: “I’m just intrigued as hell to know where you’re going man!” Enjoy, and know I am so appreciating the richness of your comments and messages as we navigate this journey together. Bill Houghton

Hey all. I have been so energised from the spirit and content of comments on my last post/episode. Not to mention the private messages coming through. Then Jason reached out and helped me take it up a notch in this delightful dialogue. A dialogue sparked by how the last post/episode fed into some of his latest adventures and insights. Enjoy, do let me know what this stirs up or brings alive inside of you (in the comments or a message through the contact form). Then catch you all in part two of the talking points series – can’t wait! Also, I have a few questions for you to ponder. Deep down, which image best represents the lens you look through and hence the world you see? How sure are you about this? This: or this: ps. One little note of clarity is that I’ve personally been referring to mechanical and living worldviews (of which there are others, I just happen to be focusing on these two right now). Then I have been using the word paradigm to refer to the four levels of paradigm Carol Sanford has previously shared with us. I wanted to acknowledge that in this dialogue we use the words paradigms and worldviews more loosely where when mechanistic paradigm is spoken of this is exactly the same as the mechanistic worldview I’ve been talking about in recent and upcoming posts.

Making Permaculture Stronger’s core focus is regenerating permaculture design process together. By this, I mean the deep and hard work of a) honing in on permaculture’s essential core, and b) sourcing and developing design process understandings from, and in alignment with, that place. A necessary aspect of this work is developing new material (ideas, metaphors, diagrams, examples, practices etc). An equally necessary aspect is making space for this new material by finding and letting go of material that does not align or belong. I believe this work is like an acupuncture point essential to the development of permaculture’s radical, needed and enormous potential. I also believe that this work, which is ours, as permaculturalists, to do, has barely begun. This series of three blog posts and corresponding podcast episodes is a heart-felt invitation into this kind of work. Where I want to be clear for you, and in within myself, that I am not writing this stuff as any kind of expert or person-with-the-answers. While I have a couple of tentative conclusions and perspectives, I mainly have a wealth of questions and a passionate commitment to create and hold spaces inside of which this kind of work can happen. So, let the experiment begin. This series was prompted by the appearance of an exciting new book into the literature of permaculture design. Its title is Building your Permaculture Property, its authors permaculture teachers and designers Rob Avis, Michelle Avis, and Takota Coen (who is also a commercial farmer). The book lays out a clear and comprehensive approach to permaculture design process. A process the authors have developed over decades of combined practical experience, both personal and professional. I celebrate the existence of this book and all the hard-won learning that has gone into it. Furthermore, I believe this book is a profound contribution to exactly the kind of work I have just been describing.1 It is also true that when I initially flipped through it, I felt some big feelings. Feelings that are informing and energising my effort to write these posts. Feelings that part of my current experiment involves me sharing openly here. I felt JOY in the sheer existence of this heart-felt, earnest attempt to advance the clarity and rigour of permaculture design. This work is so needed and such a gaping hole in permaculture that these three wonderful humans have done their very best to help fill. I am still feeling really happy about this as I am at the obvious extent of collaboration between the authors whose different strengths flow into and make the book so much better than any one of them could have made it. I felt ANGER to note a disconnect between the presentation of design process in the book and the design process developments and dialogues I have been involved in though Making Permaculture Stronger. From my perspective seemingly fertile opportunities for cross-pollination have not happened, where, to come to the point, the book includes much material that I have poured a lot of my life-force into arguing does not belong in, or do justice to, permaculture’s design process potential.2 While this anger has since mostly receded, it is still there also. I felt SAD to reflect on the resulting prognosis for permaculture’s evolution, if there are not established systems for pooling and collaboratively crash-testing and co-developing our mutual advances. If every design process book lays out its own take largely in isolation from a larger field of collaborative development. I felt AFRAID, considering my impression of the disconnect, how I might channel these feelings toward engaging with the authors about their work in a positive, constructive way. Afraid of how gaps I perceive between our perspectives might be bridged without bridges being burned! I feel this fear still. Finally, I felt a different kind of ANGER in seeing what seemed to me to be a profusion of superficial endorsements of the book (including my own!) that did not show any depth of engagement with its ideas. This sort of superficial blanket praise appears to be the norm in permaculture and I’m concerned what that means for permaculture’s capacity to be in the game of evolution. If it is all “your ideas are great and my ideas are great and we’re all on the same page, hoorah for permaculture” when, let’s face it, at least some of our ideas aren’t that great and, if you actually open the book, we are not all on the exact same page!! Well this is a first for Making Permaculture Stronger, publicly sharing my feelings ahead of my thoughts. Indeed, in the last few months I have had to do a lot of work on myself to get to the point where I am capable of bringing the energy I want to bring to this whole engagement. I feel like I am there, and I can now do this, so long as I keep a close eye on myself as I go along. Let us see how we go. Maybe you can keep a close eye on me also and enlighten me when I get off track. To recap something I said above but now in relation to this specific book, I want to stress that: This is nothing to do with who is wrong and who is right This is everything to do with inviting the authors and anyone in the entire permaculture community into a different kind of dialogue where the aim is that all parties grow and develop This dialogue requires that we find civil and constructive ways of not brushing over but diving directly into our differences in design process understandings, in a way that lets us come through these into the realm of fresh insights and discoveries Okay, enough pretext, feelings included. Let us dive into the first of three talking points arising for me as I engage with this wonderful contribution to permaculture’s evolution. Talking Point One – Worldviews and Metaphors While I am no expert in either worldviews or metaphors, together I find them such an interesting and important topic. In particular, I am fascinated by the metaphors3 we use when trying to make permaculture design accessible. Initially to ourselves. Then to others. Aside from the specific idea or process we use a particular metaphor to convey, we can zoom out and pay attention to the kinds or categories of metaphor we use. These kinds or categories I find powerful windows into the worldview we literally view the world from and through. We can then ask whether the worldview we are working from is the best suited to the context of its application. Where, as soon as the worldview changes, the (downstream)4 metaphors all change too. Before coming back to Building your Permaculture Property, I want to share a distinction between two of the various worldviews available to us.5 I will call these a mechanical or mechanistic worldview and a living worldview. Again, I am sharing my limited current understanding here, where I invite crash testing and clarification of everything I say. Mechanistic Worldview In this worldview we view things as if they were mechanisms or machines. As makes sense when working with a clock, computer, or billiard table, this worldview has us break things down into their component parts, examine these parts in isolation, then reassemble them to build up an understanding of the whole.6 Our modern lives are throughly infused with machines that were built by assembling mass produced near-identical components. Most of us interface directly with hundreds (and indirectly with hundreds of thousands) of machines every day. As I understand it, the mechanistic worldview appropriate to understanding and working with these machines has become our default way of seeing almost everything.7 It is fascinating to me how a certain subset of objects (machines) have emerged from within the living processes of Earth (including those subprocesses we call human) and we have then separated out the machines to hold them up as an interpretive lens to understand the life forces that birthed them! Even though I’ve been aware of the mechanistic world view for a while, it is still deeply embedded within me, where I have observed a strong bias toward identifying the relevant parts within any situation and then assembling or reassembling them into more functional configurations. Living Worldview In a living worldview, things are seen as alive and as ebbing and flowing organisms (rather than dead machines). Rather than treating wholes as if they were entities assembled from pre-existing parts, a living worldview sees such ‘parts’ as organs which have unfolded or emerged from pre-existing wholes, as the feet and lungs of a frog have emerged from the growth of the frog as a whole. Here we cannot separate out the different parts, or organs, without killing the frog (or whatever it is). Instead, the approach to understanding is immersing in the living complexity of the whole and gradually developing an affinity or kinship with it. As I see it, such a living worldview has more affinity with any indigenous worldview or way of life than does the mechanistic worldview. Which One is Right? While I’m sure we can agree they are different, neither a mechanistic or living worldview is inherently right or wrong. They both have their place and their value. If we are designing or building or operating or fixing a machine, a mechanistic worldview makes more sense than a living worldview. If, by contrast, we are engaging with a plant, child, or ecology, a living worldview will likely serve us better than a mechanistic one. It is a matter of evolving our capacity to pay attention to and then engage with the worldview most appropriate to the context in which we are working.8 By its nature, permaculture must engage with both worldviews. It deals with both living beings (such as trees) and with machines (such as bulldozers). The question is at what levels and in what situations is each worldview most appropriate? Metaphors I now want to suggest a hypothesis: The worldview we are operating from will unconsciously dictate the metaphors we choose to communicate our ideas. If we are operating from a mechanistic worldview, our metaphors will be sourced from the world of machines. If we are operating from a living worldview, our metaphors will be sourced from the world of life. Again, I welcome any and all perspectives on this hypothesis. The Metaphors in Building your Permaculture Property Let us now consider the choice of metaphors in Building Your Permaculture Property, asking: Are they sourced from the world of machines (and hence, if the hypothesis holds, from a mechanistic worldview) or from the world of life (and hence a living worldview)? To what extent is that worldview the best suited to the context of its application? I’ll mention first that in the book’s treatment of design process, I found a clear example of a metaphor sourced from the living world being used to shed light on the dynamics of healthy design process. In the author’s words: Figure 2.3 shows how a watershed gathers individual drops of water into larger and larger channels starting with raindrops, then sheet flow, before going to rills, runnels, creeks, streams, and then the river, until eventually ending in a delta at the edge of a lake or ocean. The diagnosis and design steps function in the same way. In Step 2: Diagnose, our goal is to create a filestream (pun intended), with the function of converting the torrential downpour of information into appropriately compartmentalized physical or digital file folders. These file folders serve the same function as dams, swales, subsoiling, and gabions to channel and store information into appropriate steam tributaries that correspond to the eleven property resources. image source Once these eleven tributaries begin filling with information, they will inevitably flow downstream and deposit themselves as design ideas that start with broad brushstrokes down to minute details, or what David Holmgren refers to as “design from patterns to details.” The way that I like to think about this analogy is that the river is diagnosis and the delta is design (more on design in the next chapter). As soon as I started to mimic the dendritic branching pattern of a watershed to gather and distribute information, my obsession about learning everything there was to know about permaculture vanished. I stopped bingeing on information memorization. This was because I started to notice that the amount of information falling into the catchment of my mind, just like the amount of precipitation falling in a watershed, can exceed the capacity of the filestream or water channels. And when this happened, it was inevitable that the flow of data or rain would burst its banks and flood onto my physical or digital desktop as unfiled resources. In other words, information, no matter how good the quality, is only as good as your ability to put it to productive use. That being said, you don’t want a drought of information either, because the speed and quality of your design insights are directly proportional to the quantity and quality of your data; poor information yields poor design. You don’t want torrential downpours of data; you want a slow and steady drizzle that keeps pace with the evolution of your filestream. You will also find that just as an older watershed that contains high-carbon soils and deep-rooted vegetation can handle more rain and even the occasional flash flood, a more established filestream can better slow, spread, and sink the occasional higher flows of information. Building Your Permaculture Property, pages 83-84 This is a great example. The authors are using something from the living world (a watershed) to ‘shed’ light on an aspect of permaculture design process. Without getting into any further details,9 according to my earlier logic, this suggests that the authors are, at least in part, oriented toward, and operating from a living world view. I say “at least in part,” given that the majority of additional metaphors illustrated in the book are mechanical in nature. Whether one domino hitting another (p. 3), navigating through a field of landmines (p. 61), disarming bombs (p. 63), directing a small ball through a maze using pullies and dials (p. 88), operating a pinball machine (p. 132), or shooting birdshot, buckshot, or a slug through a shotgun or using a bazooka (p. 142), mechanical/machine metaphors are used repeatedly to explain core ideas and aspects of permaculture design process. The two most central metaphors used to illustrate the dynamics of permaculture design process as understood by the authors are a ball-in-the-maze machine and a pinball machine: Image Source Image source I want to note here that this tendency to pull in machine metaphors when sharing about permaculture design is in no way unique in the permaculture literature.10 I also want to emphasise that in my opinion, all these mechanical metaphors are used brilliantly to make their target points with clarity. Yet, if what I shared above is valid, the predominance of mechanical metaphors indicates that, despite clear indications of a living world view in the living metaphor I shared, the centre of gravity of the book is a mechanistic worldview and its associated mechanical metaphors. As I emphasised earlier, there is nothing wrong with this worldview when used in its relevant context of application – namely the world of machines. However, it is my sense that the relevant context for permaculture design process as a whole is not the world of machines, but is the world of life. Or, at the very least, I feel it would be a worthwhile experiment to try and articulate permaculture design process from within a living worldview, using mostly if not entirely living metaphors. Which brings me to a set of questions around my first talking point: I find it interesting that in permaculture we surprisingly often use machine examples to understand non-machine processes, don’t you? As permaculture designers, teachers and authors, how much attention are we paying to the metaphors (and similes, analogies etc) we use? How much attention ought we be paying to the metaphors we use? Do the metaphors we choose flow from and hence reveal the worldview we default to? What do you think about this? What do you feel about this? Does this stuff even matter? Is it possible to make the points we want to make in a permaculture design context using living metaphors? Is our audience so deeply steeped in the mechanistic worldview (and the techno-sphere it has enabled) that we must prioritise machine metaphors in order to stay accessible? I’d be curious to hear how these questions land for you, and I am grateful to Rob, Takota and Michelle for inadvertently prompting me to ask them. Please talk to me in the comments below or by sending me a message. We’ll look at another core pattern in the book, and raise an associated talking point, in Part Two. Acknowledgements Thanks to Takota Coen for reviewing a draft and making suggestions that helped me more accurately represent the book (which is not to say I’ve succeeded!), Jon Buttery and Beck Rafferty from the Making Permaculture Stronger Developmental Community for their suggestions and James Andrews for helping me clean up the overall energy of this piece. Endnotes

In this episode we explore part of what it means, or might mean, to bring indigenous perspectives to permaculture design with Laura Adams from Seven Winds LLC in Maryland, USA. This episode started with an email from Laura sharing some thoughts on the last episode: Greetings Dan,I have been listening to your podcast with great interest over the last several months whilst taking part in Geoff Lawton’s online PDC.  (Although I have been exploring permaculture for many years) I am also a supporter of and very excited about the Reading Landscape Film, congratulations on making the goal.  I was prompted to send this note when I heard the most recent podcast you released regarding a conversation with your core group about systems thinking and more.  In that podcast you encouraged your listeners to hit pause and answer the question(s) themselves prior to continuing to passively listen which led me to engage with the conversation more actively and I thought there may be a value in sharing a perspective. I agree with you that when you prod systems thinking, it quickly dissolves back to parts, and I believe this is because it evolved from parts thinking (or mechanistic thinking) in the first place. However generative or regenerative thinking is totally different (until the word gets co-opted). I come at permaculture from the perspective of a cultural and spiritual root which is Kongo-Taino out of the Caribbean. When we look at something (be it a person, place, river, mountain, event), the first thing we acknowledge is that it is “Un Misterios” (effectively a spirit) and we know that we cannot possibly understand it fully and if we pull it into its parts, the essence of it (the spirit) will disappear on us. The mode of approach is one of listening and sensing and letting it tell us about itself, knowing that this process could be indefinite. Over time that place (or person, animal, what have you) slowly reveals different aspects or understandings of itself to us, if we continue to pay attention (or “follow the trail”). For sake of illustration, let’s say we are talking about a particular land, it could be a “property” a landowner has purchased. Your typical permaculture designer is going to go in and analyze it for water, access, structures and the various desires the landowner expresses interest in. This is a big improvement on blindly going in a throwing structures and access wherever. However, the land itself has its own spirit, as does everyone who lives on it. I really do not see that permaculture as taught even tries to understand this. The reason is simple, it cannot be measured, easily seen, or “proven”. This is where Indigenous or Re-indigenized culture clashes with Permaculture. I understand that people want to shy away from terms that cannot fully be defined such as “spirit” (or even essence). However geometry is built upon three undefined terms- a point, line and plane.  I do understand why permaculture teachers do not want to get into these waters, (there would be a big backlash and accusations of pseudoscience). Yet, permaculture wants to cosy up with Indigenous cultures (and it should do this to reach its potential). However, if you do want to cosy up with Indigenous cultures, then you have to be ready to see life as infinite worlds within worlds, each one essentially Un Misterios. Keep up the good work! Laura Seven Winds LLC To which I replied: Laura thank you so much for your beautiful email where everything you share resonates with and inspires me deeply. Isn’t it such a muddle how we find ourselves trying to force the deep beautiful mysterious and sacred essence-spirit of a place into our puny little mechanical containers and how in doing so we cut ourselves off from perhaps the most deeply nourishing and soul-warming energies there are to access as a human being (namely relaxing back into the larger pattern of life).Un Misterios. Love it. Two questions. First, would you consider sharing your words as a comment on the shownotes – I want to welcome reflections such as these (which in part help me feel less alone and crazy) on the site, and hope they will in turn prompt related reflections from others. Second, would you be up for getting on a call about this stuff some time that we record toward the possibility of feeding into a future episode? Warmly, to stay in touch, and thank you again for reaching out and for supporting the Reading Landscape film! Dan  Luckily for me Laura agreed to a chat and so we booked in and recorded what became this episode. Afterward Laura then followed up with this comment: Dan, It was lovely chatting with you earlier this week. Our conversation sparked some further pondering on the essence of design not just for utilitarian purposes but as a pathway to deeper connection to the heart of life. I respect that you have the courage to put yourself out there as a professional in this regard, as to an extent it is a lot easier to keep one’s profession and one’s personal design practice separate out of concern that one’s personal design practice will not be accepted professionally. My personal design practice is significantly different from my professional one, as I prefer allowing the design to evolve spontaneously within the natural rhythm of action- contemplation (reflection)-action… rather than plan it out on paper.  Attached you will see two photos. The first is a African American cemetery circa 1850 on our lane. The spiky plant around the grave markers is Yucca filamentosa (Spanish Bayonet). It was planted for protection and connects to Bantu use of Draceana spp -used for the same purposes of protection and marking entrances and boundaries. The cemetery is the boundary between life and death and the Yucca simultaneously marks this important boundary.  The second photo is of my husband’s [Jose Running Water Centeno] burial mound. Its design began on the day he placed a very large boulder to mark a place he called “Mundo sobre Mundo” (World within Worlds). There is now a small hut right in front of that boulder. Once he was buried, I placed other large boulders which were already in proximity to create the mound itself. The design itself is ever evolving, as elements continue to gather to his mound. Four Yucca (these ones are variegated) plants surround the mound, serving the same purpose as in the old cemetery.  I believe you are on a wonderful path by choosing to forgo the idea of a “master plan” and embrace an ongoing relationship with your clients and their land. This approach feels a lot more genuine to what I think people want permaculture to be, a pathway back to connection with land and self. I am also well aware that it takes much more creative effort to have an ongoing relationship with clients than a quick in and out. I wanted to share these visuals, as a small contribution to your process and a thank you. Be well, Laura

In a world first for this project, this episode shares one of last year’s sessions with the Making Permaculture Stronger Developmental Community. Huge thanks to Han Kortekaas, Ronella Gomez, Nicholas Franz, Zola Rose, Barry Gibson, Jon Buttery, Arthur Buitelaar, Dan Milne, Byron Birss & Joel Mortimer for co-creating this with me and for their gracious permission to share here. Here are some of us during a more recent session. Learn more about the Making Permaculture Stronger Developmental Community here. Below is the section on systems thinking in the book Practical Permaculture by Jessi Bloom & Dave Boehnlein (p. 18) that is mentioned during this episode. This section is viewable as a free preview at google books. Similarly, you can also check out page 20 of Toby Hemenway’s The Permaculture City here if you like. From Practical Permaculture by Jessi Bloom & Dave Boehnlein

In this episode my friend John Carruthers shares five insights or principles he’s distilled during five years of developing a 70-acre property in Central Victoria, Australia. It was an honour to act for a part of the journey as what John describes as a ‘robust river guide,’ and I am so thrilled to see John and his partner Rosie in full stewardship of their own process and the beautiful forms that are emerging from it. Here is the video we mention several times in the chat – thanks to John for permission to share it here. https://vimeo.com/576929584/2f23122b41 https://vimeo.com/576929584/2f23122b41 John also sent these further notes: a) the deep ripping across the southern half of the property begun this year is an “option value” decision because it’s an excellent BNS (Best Next Step) for almost any other activity thereafter, be it cover-crop pre-pasture, shelter belt tree planting, or agroforestry or silvopasture. It’s a valuable precursor step. b) The widely-spaced keylined beds in one paddock is where we’ve begun planting oaks, silky oaks, cedar and native pines as a long-term (inter-generational) agroforestry / silvopasture trial. We have planted several hundred this year and forecast planting three times that over a few years. The oaks are being planted from acorns we collected and germinated. This first planting is our BNS before switching focus to the house site early next year. Also the quote I cited “I count him braver who overcomes his desires, than who conquers his enemies – for the hardest victory is over self” is by Aristotle NOT Socrates – as I may have suggested 🙂 If anyone is interested in connecting with John or in the services of drone pilot and film maker Peter Watts send me a message and I can connect you. I also tracked down this video of my first visit to Limestone road, which we talk about in the chat too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESvvzbEOwjk and I found this one also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sprRI18xYw Finally I am excited to announce that today is the first day of our in-house six week crowd funding campaign for the Reading Landscape Documentary Film project. Come get amongst! https://vimeo.com/575191911

It was my pleasure to yarn with Sand Talk author Tyson Yunkaporta on permaculture and much else. Tyson’s perspective complements and contrasts with that of Leah Penniman in the last episode. Please do tell me what you got from the chat in the comments below! Tyson Yunkaporta Permaculture isn’t a form of gardening – it’s a method of inquiry about relationships – that’s all it is. And it’s awesome and in that way it’s similar to traditional ecological knowledge from all over the planet and it’s a constantly shifting evolving body of knowledge too, that’s never the same in the same place twice. Love it! Tyson Yunkaporta The above quote comes from this talk between Tyson and my friends at the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance: https://youtu.be/61XN9_uILpU?t=3543 Also a big shout out to my my three friends Woody, Meg and Patrick who make up Artist as Family who Tyson speaks about in the yarn. Coincidentally Woody is to appear in our upcoming documentary film about reading landscape. To learn more about that project visit the website www.ReadingLandscape.org and either subscribe to the newsletter or donate to get invited to a free project zoom call on July 15, 2021, with David Holmgren, filmmaker Dave Meagher, and myself.

It was a deep honour to have Leah Penniman from Soul Fire Farm join me for this conversation. Along with Leah’s beautiful sharing, I was grateful for the feelings the conversation evoked (many of which only emerged when I listened to our chat again afterwards). I feel like I gained some powerful waypoints in navigating the journey back home. A journey I’m sure I’m not alone in craving. I also appreciated hearing the heartache Leah has around certain patterns she perceives permaculture to be perpetuating. My focus in the conversation was about inviting and engaging with Leah’s perspective. A perspective which comes from her standing outside permaculture and looking in. I would love to hear your perspective in the comments below. What of Leah’s experience of permaculture resonates with your own? What, if anything, doesn’t? What impact, if any, does you listening to this episode have on your journey forward? Learn more about Soul Fire Farm here, and check out a rich trove of Leah sharings on youtube here. This one’s a goodie: https://youtu.be/zvQJP8QP-Ng And here’s one helpful summary vid in which Leah shares the Soul Fire Farm journey: https://youtu.be/LVZq3jITD2g Also here’s a link to the work of Toshi Reagon (see also Toshi’s Opera about Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower Opera) that Leah recommends during our chat. Which, by the way, I must mention happened way back on January 8th, 2021. What did this conversation evoke in you? Would you like to hear more conversations of this nature on the show? Should I share Tyson Yunkaporta’s perspectives on the same matters in the next episode? Please let me know in a comment below!

In this conversation, which follows on from the previous episode, explores Looby Macnamara’s design web. We dive into the topic of emergent design process, and in particular Looby’s design web approach to designing anything. I was pleasantly surprised to discover in my preparations for this chat that Looby is a co-traveller in the realm of design process innovation, earnestly striving via the design web to get free of traps such as: Viewing design process as a linear sequence of steps The logical fallacy of having “design” be one of the steps within the whole “design” process Having observation as a step as if at some point you stop observing Getting too prescriptive about the end state you are heading toward Separating planning from action in ways that cripple the possibility of the best outcomes and discoveries Getting paralysed by complexity Getting stuck in one’s head Mechanical (as opposed to biological and ecological) metaphors Learn more about Looby’s work including books and courses at her Cultural Emergence site here. Also if you’re keen to have Looby support you / us in applying the design web to something in our own lives, make a comment below and if there is enough interest and enthusiasm we’ll make it so! Here is the design web: Looby Macnamara’s Design Web Here is a juicy quote I pulled out from Looby’s latest book Cultural Emergence: The Design Web is a non-linear process with non-linear outcomes and possibilities. Emergent design reflects the flexibility and unexpectedness of Cultural Emergence. It allows for solutions to emerge that take the design in a new direction. It is organic, responsive, adaptive, fluid, flowing and dynamic. As the design emerges we continue to weave our way between the anchor points. An attitude of emergence enables us to flow and move with what is arising. It recognises that things are not always as they seem, there is more to discover and be revealed. The process is alchemical with surprises along the way. Designing regenerative cultures is an ongoing process of emergence, not a permanent destination. We are designing for and with living systems that are organic, dynamic and unpredictable. We are setting direction and intentions. It is an invitation for change, rather than being exact or prescriptive. Looby Macnamara in Cultural Emergence

For some years I’ve been itching to get permaculture designer, teacher and author Looby Macnamara on the show and that dream has finally come true. Not only that, we had such a lovely chat we’ve already booked in a second conversation, where Looby will take us through what she calls her permaculture design web. Find out more about Looby’s books and other work at her personal website here. Looby – image source Find out about Looby’s colleague in cultural emergence, Jon Young, at his website here. And here is an image of Looby’s permaculture design web that I am excited to explore in our next chat. Here’s vid of Looby introducing Cultural Emergence https://youtu.be/bAAFfL4gQaE Enjoy the episode, leave a comment, and catch you in episode 60!

I recently enjoyed the first of what I hope will be many lovely conversations with Takota Coen about permaculture’s potential. Takota is co-author of the new design process book Building Your Permaculture Property. In Takota’s words, we “talk about how a lack of a living, adaptive process is holding permaculture back from reaching its fullest potential, and what we can all do about it.” Here’s the youtube version, here’s Takota’s podcast where this chat was originally shared, and you can learn more about what I’m calling Living Design Process here. Enjoy and please do leave a comment sharing what you make of the stuff we explore! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIJvfkdsxQA Dan and Takota mid-chat

Greetings all. In this episode I get to ask my friend and colleague Michael Wardle from Savour Soil Permaculture all kinds of questions about the history and current state of his work as a professional permaculture designer and educator. Lots of great perspectives and hard-earned learnings in this one – I look forward to seeing what you make of it in the comments! Michael with one of his teachers :-). You can check out Michael’s facebook page here and his website here, including his design consultancy offerings and a section with a bunch of edible gardening tips here. Michael also has a youtube channel with videos such as this one dropping thick and fast: https://youtu.be/gtGLoHXqRwQ

Hey all. So I had the urge to surf along a little in the wake of the last episode, and reflect further on Carol Sanford’s Seven First Principles of Regeneration. Thus, in this episode I reflect on, unpack and further explore what Carol shared about the seven first principles and how they are enriching my own development. My intention for the episode was: I am continuing to explore Carol Sanford’s Seven First Principles of Regeneration… in a way that supports listeners (and myself!) to better grasp and go experiment with them… so that we realising together, any value they can bring to our lives, projects and the Making Permaculture Stronger journey. Hope you enjoy and I look forward to hearing what you make of all this in the comments :-). Further Reading, Watching, and Listening on Carol Sanford’s Seven First Principles of Regeneration If, like me, you’re itching to dive deeper, I found this most helpful series of blog posts (and a separate series of short videos) where Carol clarifies: The history and practice of regeneration (or see this video introducing first principles) Identifying and working with wholes not parts (or see video here) Essence (or singularity) (or see video here) Potential (not problems) (or see video here) Development (video only) Nestedness (or see video here) Nodal intervention (or see video here) Fields (video only) Here’s a quote I really liked from the essence post: Looking to existence, writing down our observations or collecting facts, will not reveal singularity. In order to sniff out essence, we must become trackers and look for it in the same way that native peoples follow the traces of animals who have passed by. Essence becomes apparent in the patterns that are specific to a person, those that reveal how they engage with the world, their purpose in life, the unique value they create as the result of their endeavors. The same is true for the essence of any natural system, community, or organization. Carol Sanford Finally, Here’s a 20m video (with poor quality audio but worth it) of Carol talking about what regeneration is. She gets into the Seven First Principles about 10 minutes in.

In this episode pioneering regenerative thinker Carol Sanford rejoins me to share a living systems framework she calls The Seven First Principles of Regeneration. Sketch by Dan based on Carol’s description Resources to Deepen Learning My first chat with Carol (also see these follow up words from Carol) My second chat with Carol where she shares her four levels of paradigm Carol’s website The Deep Pacific Change Agent Community (That Dan is part of) A series of articles in which Carol applies the Seven First Principles to education Carol going through the principles in a different way on her Business Second Opinion Podcast Carol’s book The Regenerative Life in which she goes through the seven first principles Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm Carol Sanford. A few transcribed lines from the episode Thanks to MPS patron Jon Buttery for pulling some comments that stood out for him from the chat (with approx times): 13:36 – “I don’t want you to be disappointed that after a year you haven’t got them [the seven first principles], that’s a good sign” 18:57 – “You can’t go do – in the sense that you’ll change something – you have to go think a different way and you have to start in a different place” 22:43 – “The word ‘systems thinking’ is thrown around for a lot of things that are machine based”  23:23 – “There are no feedback loops …. we impose those kinds of ideas” 24:05 – “A fragmented view …  we assume … if we get good enough … somehow we’ll see how they all relate”  26:53 – “What is the work this place does in this planet?  … what is its story?” 30:23 – “Watch yourself making lists” 32:26 – “Fragmentation is the basis of every problem on the earth” 38:40 – “It took me literally a couple of decades to learn to see essence. … it’s a different way of seeing the world”

Welcome back to Part Two of a conversation with permaculture co-originator David Holmgren. In which David continues sharing significant milestones from his many decades as a practicing permaculture designer. Thanks to this project’s wonderful patrons, I was once again able to have the audio professionally transcribed. The text below then received significant edits for clarity from patron Jon Buttery (thanks Jon!), myself, and most importantly David. Thanks also to David for kindly sharing relevant photos that help bring the text to life. Don’t miss Part One if you haven’t yet heard/read it, and given the quality of thinking David shares in this continuation, I hope you’ll leave a comment. I anticipate a follow up conversation with David exploring questions and reflections from your comments, so please make the most of the opportunity. Finally, given this conversation again touches on the core skill of reading landscape, please check out and consider supporting the documentary film David, myself, and videographer Dave Meagher are currently endeavouring to bring into the world. Starting Holmgren Design Services Dan Palmer: All right. Well, here I am for the continuation of the discussion we started earlier. After a bit of a break, must have been, I don’t know, six weeks or something.    David Holmgren: Yeah. It’s been a busy time.  Dan Palmer: I’ll say! – a busy and very interesting time. It turned out the first recording was about an hour, and we got to the point where you’d started Holmgren Design Services, so that seems like a great place to start. You’d told us a lot about the project at your mother’s place in New South Wales and the learning you’d been doing from Hakai Tane about strategic planning, and then shrinking that down to apply to a site level. It’d be awesome to hear about the experience of moving into the space of permaculture design consultancy.    David Holmgren:  In 1983 I started a business and registered a business name. There were lot of things that were going on in my life, which I can also correlate with things that were happening in the wider world: that led me to getting serious earning a living, personal relationships, and also living in the city. The consultancy work I did, was primarily advising and designing for people who were moving onto rural properties; what these days people call a ‘tree-change’.   Consulting on a Central Victorian property in 2020 (as part of the Reading Landscape film project) That work fell into sort of two broad types. One-day verbal onsite advisory, walking around the property and suggesting things with clients. Then there was a more limited number of clients where I was providing reports and plans that gave me the opportunity to reflect. There were a lot of constraints on how to make a viable business in that, especially if your work wasn’t focused on affluent people, but instead empowering people who were going to get out and do these things themselves, often starting from scratch, and often making big mistakes. My advice and design drew on a combination of my own experience as well as observing how others had tackled the back to land process over the previous decade. By then I also had a very strong commitment to Victoria and South Eastern Australia of landscapes and ecologies and design issues that I was familiar with in that territory.   Dan Palmer: Was that where all or the majority of your professional work happened?    David Holmgren: Yeah, it was. There was occasional work further-afield – certainly into the dry Mediterranean country in South Australia and into New South Wales, Sydney region, but most of it was in Victoria.  Dan Palmer: Permaculture was a new thing so in a sense you were defining the industry or making it up as you went along.   David Holmgren: Yeah. It was also a time of very strong backlash against alternative ideas. When I set up the business, I had mixed feelings about whether I would describe what I was doing as permaculture both from a strategic “How do I project this as a viable business?” and my own criticisms of what I’d seen in the movement. Some of those criticisms were around design process, some of it around ideology, but I still felt permaculture was the best framework for describing what I was doing.  Beyond people building a house, the most important things that new settlers did in starting on a fresh site were usually earthworks, and in Southern Australia, that almost always involved dams for water storage, issues of bushfire resistant design, where to put orchards, where to put gardens, what to do with larger areas of native bush, what to do about wildlife grazing – so many new issues for people coming from the city, often with some gardening experience but then moving out onto a larger landscape. The work involved an educative coach relationship, but having to do that within, at the time, a budget of a few hundred dollars.    One-Day Consultancies Dan Palmer: So a lot of it was you’d walk in and you’d walk out within a day: can you bring to mind an example just to sort of tell us how you spent that time?    Capturing the process of checking out a contour map before a consultancy for the Reading Landscape documentary film project David Holmgren: Well, as that work consolidated around a Melbourne base and then a few years later moving here to Central Victoria, I firstly had built a really good understanding of the landscapes. So people would ring me up and I’d work out where their property was and I’d get out the 1:25,000 contour map and “oh yeah, it’s there. It’s on the granite country”. So then I knew what the tree species would be. There was a lot I could find out about the land through a combination of prior information and then that rapid site assessment based on the reading landscape skills that I’d focused on for more than a decade previously. In some ways more important question was “who are these people and where they’re at?” and how to get a brief that reflected what the clients were on about and what do they wanted. I used to tell people that they were their land’s greatest asset and its greatest liability to emphasise I needed really to know about them. I didn’t need to be told so much about the land.  Sometimes it would be different, for example when I was working on a farm where people might be multi-generation on the land, because then their knowledge of place was incredibly important. But in most of the work I could quickly see in just a short visit, things that even people who’d owned the land for a year or more didn’t understand about it. So finding out where the clients were coming from, with a couple, always emphasising the importance of both parties being present. Suggesting techniques like people taking notes and recording what’s said and encouraging people to have some sort of rudimentary sketch plan even if they didn’t have a base map of what was there. It was a lot easier working on open grazing land; much more complicated when you’re dealing with an old house with farmyards and bits of paddocks and all of those overlays of past actions: much, much more complex and difficult.    David and landowner Honor exploring an erosion gully in 2020 The ability to save people money, “yeah, this is the house site”, “yes or no to a dam there, road here, or orchard here”. I described it as helping people with the skeleton within which they might develop permaculture, that I wasn’t doing permaculture design in the landscape design sense. The degree to which I got down to specification – it was often with some critical plant infrastructure like shelter-belts and species. Sometimes a site assessment and advice carried over into supervision of earthworks because you could justify the cost when you’re spending maybe thousands of dollars in a few days with heavy machinery and especially if you’re doing house-site, road, dam, soil works like deep ripping for trees. You could justify being onsite, and do a whole lot more ad hoc design work with people as well through that process. If you had other labour onsite with doing handwork finishing up with earthworks then you could provide a lot of value to clients by multitasking. So there was at a lot of serendipitous sort of “oh well, we’ve got rock there or we can use that in this way” those things that you only necessarily discover as you start some process.   Discerning Superficial and Deep Layers of a Site Dan Palmer: Yeah, for sure. You know that whole approach excites me so much: when it actually starts and you’re crafting and making discoveries. Earlier when you were talking about it, it was harder when there was a lot of existing infrastructure; farmyards and old houses and stuff, so that was one of the abilities you were cultivating, the ability to sort of mentally delete superficial or things that could shift?  David Holmgren: Yeah. That balance with what is worth saving, what is needed for frugality in energy and materials conservation, and respect for what exists because anything that exists has some value, and yet not being boxed in where “that’s where the fences are – they’re maybe rooms in the landscape”, but not necessarily. One of the things I used to say to people is that it’s fine to leave a fence in the landscape that’s in the wrong position, if it’s a decent fence for the time being, but to plant rows of trees along it would lock it into the landscape for maybe 100 years. So that dance of how much you work around those things, how much you can see what is underneath, independent of the things that have been overlaid.    So I spent quite a lot of energy, I suppose, ignoring the things that have been put on the landscape. But I remember a particular consultancy on a 10-acre property on the slopes of Mount Buninyong in Ballarat. This was at the time that I was also doing broadacre research that led to Trees on the Treeless Plains in the mid-‘80s, and this property was basically two square paddocks surrounded by stone walls on steep slopes. Being on steep slopes you’re just automatically looking at everything in terms of contours, but there were these stonewalls that were 120 years old or so and the top paddock had been ploughed in the past up and down the slope for potato growing . The soil had moved and filled to the top of the stonewall, so there was a terrace across the land. Then there were Blackwoods growing out of these stone walls that might have been 50 years old. Here I am trying to impose my contour pattern and it was there that I realised “oh no, this like an old English field landscape with square drains”, what people have done on the land in recent times is so changed and embedded in it, that it’s actually…that rectilinear pattern, we should work with in this case”.  Once I did that everything just fell into place.  A lot of the things that we are so committed to , like ‘working with water on the contour,’ didn’t necessarily apply on soils so permeable to water and resistant to erosion. There was nowhere to put dams but the deep free draining soil was perfect for deep rooted unirrigated trees. It was an example of that more unusual sites where what people have done since white settlement has actually not just degraded the land but has added something in the land of enduring value. Of course we can see lots of places where there’s a middle path, where we are saying “no, that’s really, that’s an asset, that’s a beautiful thing that can be incorporated”.  Being dismissive of the past was something I noticed, new owners often do. People often fall in love with a place and then especially if it’s a place with a house and assets, and then they start being really disparaging about what previous owners. “We’ve got to change or…”  Dan Palmer: “We’ve got to put our stamp on this place.”  David Holmgren: Yeah. Using the Land Systems Approach David Holmgren: With those brief onsite advisory visits I developed the ability to at least mentally use the land systems stuff I’d learnt from Hakai Tane. But it was mostly when doing reports for larger farms where that came the fore; actually mapping the land to see how we could work with those patterns in a context of mostly grazing land use and where we are going to be adding trees into that landscape. Dan Palmer: I remember walking – I think it was Yandoit farm – and you were explaining that a little, some of the different factors that you’d used to distinguish different land units.  David Holmgren: Yeah. It’s a subtle thing and in some ways it’s an art. It is sometimes possible to say “okay, this is that land type, that’s recognised in the mapping databases”. It can sometimes be a relatively simple distinction (between say poorly drained and well drained land). But sometimes, yes, like Yandoit farm, the patterns are quite complex and they don’t just reflect contours. It’s the geology and movement of water through the underlying landscape. The hidden things that are shaping it as much as the surface form. Trees on the Treeless Plains David Holmgren: I mentioned the work with Trees on the Treeless Plains which was initially a consultancy for Project BranchOut, an NGO that was the precursor to the Landcare groups in Central Victoria; in fact one of the origin points of the Australian Landcare movement.  I had this consultancy to look at re-vegetation strategies on the volcanic landscapes which are the most intensively farmed, mostly treeless, highest value agricultural land in Central Victoria. In the process of that research I went down every road you could drive down on the volcanic landscapes and went through a whole new phase of reading the landscape and up-skilling in being able to identify over 100 species of planted trees in the landscape.  I used those observations to inform template designs for different landforms and different farm situations that involve tree fodder systems, shelterbelt design, farm forestry. This became the design manual Trees on the Treeless Plains, which was initially 100 copies made as part of the consultancy process for distribution to local landcare groups and then later in ‘90s we published it as a sort of permaculture design manual in disguise.  Shelterbelt planted 1988 by Bruce Valance as part of the Project Branchout Bicentential Revegetation Project in the Captains Ck catchment Blampeid Central Vic Dan Palmer: Yeah, great book. One that, as far as I know, is underappreciated.  David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, of course it was part of what we were doing also with publishing of case studies rather than books about permaculture in general.  Of course there’s a dearth of case study design because, there’s only a limited number of potential buyers who’ll think it’s relevant to them. But TOTP did throw me back into a greater amount of work with conventional farmers and in that context I was the tree guy, designing tree systems rather than it being identified as the co-originator of permaculture. But of course I was always bringing that permaculture design lens to the farm revegetation context.  Maps and Disconnection from Land Dan Palmer: I also remember when you looked at the contour map before walking around Yandoit Farm, just looking at the contour map – it was a simple example of that prior work with reading landscape. You could tell from the contours what the geology was and if it drops off that steeply and that pattern after the flat, it’s basalt and so on. And it seems like a lot of the value you were able to offer in these shorter consults as well as the whole farm stuff, was things you learned because of that past experience were no brainers. You could see instantly and say “well, a dam won’t hold water there, it has to be somewhere over here.” I remember Mollison once talking about how he would drive down someone’s driveway and by the time he arrived at the house he had a whole lot of clarity around suggestions.   David Holmgren: Yeah. A lot of what I could offer was because clients were so disconnected from land. It was different when people had a long familiarity with place and especially if that was multigenerational.  Then different sort of cultural issues that are more to the fore. “Oh yeah, down that paddock, along that fence line, you’re into real wet pug there but up here a tractor would never get bogged in the winter”. So you’ve got knowledge that would take me some time going out and looking at that landscape in detail, walking it. Someone’s got that whole pattern of knowledge deeply embedded. So those are quite sort of different situations and what you can offer in those situations is different.    Specialisation David Holmgren: So there is a degree of specialisation there – my specialisation was really in tree systems and in earthworks design. Whereas on a lot of small rural properties, it was interesting that after building a house, the most complex project people would attempt is setting up an irrigation system and there wasn’t really a trade that did that. You had plumbers at one end of the spectrum and then you had irrigation engineers and there was no one who designed and built small property irrigation systems and they can be quite technically complicated. So that was another area that I moved into because there was no one doing that. In the same way that when I set up Holmgren Design, I decided I wasn’t going to do house design, even though I was as much an ecological builder as an ecological farmer. In fact, I’d already at that stage had worked on building projects and designed and built a passive solar house on the South Coast of New South Wales.    Developing Melliodora David, Oliver and Friend in early days of Melliodora house build Then in those early years, of course we were developing Melliodora after buying the land in ’85. And so it was was really that biggest application of property design and implementation, building on what we’d done with my mother’s rural property – now in a much more compact context on a one-hectare property. Again, earthworks, reuse and movement of soil, house design, irrigation systems, tree systems, all of the interlocked critical paths became the focus of my design process. The greatest amount of design work I did on any project is really Melliodora and I always saw it as being an demonstration of my design work. I didn’t want to be one of those architects who lived in a heritage house rather than a house that they had designed. But I used to say to people “I can help you with the skeleton framework within which you might develop permaculture but I can’t do what we have done here because you could never afford it (the time and the continuous engagement that was possible here)”.   Dan Palmer: I guess not to mention that to take what you’ve done here and give it to someone else is not going to be the greatest fit. All those details really have to come out of individual engagement and reflect the people and the place and all the particular aspects of it.  David Holmgren: But there was in doing things here: a lot at the beginning was actually applying what I was doing professionally and using it. Here we had detailed contour information because the whole town had just been sewered and so there were publicly available mapping systems. And I was able to do a lot of stuff on paper in great detail to the confusion of the local earthmoving contractor who’d never looked at a contour plan. But also having that ability to, and that need to, throw the plan away (not literally) but discovering “ah, there is reef rock” that we assumed a D7 bulldozer can move, “oh no, it can’t”, “oh does that mean a 20-ton excavator with a jackhammer or do we actually change the design?”. And that was a creative sort of response to the situation that I was prepared to do, in spite of having done very, very detailed work in that way. So it was also that further training, like doing small boreholes to see actually what the full profile is before the bulldozer comes and digs the dam. So I was still in that process of learning and gaining that expertise, that I was then applying further afield.  Sharing the Melliodora story on an Advanced Design course Design and Implementation with the Commonground Community Dan Palmer: So you started Holmgren Design Services, you were doing advisory and design work for others and then you started Melliodora and continued to consult as well.  David Holmgren: Yes. And the key project that I did immediately after doing the earthworks in ’86 here at Melliodora was the Commonground community, which was over at Seymour on very fragile erosion-prone landscapes. I can remember, not quite reading them the Riot Act, but explaining that what they were doing, (in building this large community with a lot of people who would come with vehicles and all these buildings), was a massive impact on a landscape that had only ever had a few sheep walk across it. The landscape actually had tunnel erosion on it, just from cycles of overgrazing and rapid populations, and what we were going to do with earthworks and all of the use and intensity was a massively greater impact. Just because they had environmental sensibilities didn’t by itself ameliorate those impacts. Another learning at Commonground was working with many machines simultaneously and having to gain the respect of old-timer rural contractors and “who’s the young upstart from the city who has designed this, he’s not even an engineer”. Commonground dam, gardens and main building (Wedge) 2008 major design project 1985-88 That was a key project, a milestone for me.  It involved working with an architect,  in a sort of a group design process and construction. The project was large enough to allow me to be to be there physically doing soil raking, directing other people, thinking further about the design. Consulting with the machine operators and creatively responding. For example building a major dam spillway and discovering a massive gravel deposit that we then harvested with elevating scrapers to provide the road material for what’s been a major access road in through that property that has had so much traffic over all those years since. So I think that was really a special project too because there were many different people involved in that community over the years who brought different skillsets and experiences, all building on the foundations we laid in those early years. Epiphanies and Surprises Dan Palmer: I’m curious: you’ve explained that for a long time you had already had a distaste of any rigid split between designing and implementing, and you’d learned the strategic planning with Hakai. So from when you started designing professionally, what changed or what did you learn over time? Like, part of what I’m hearing is that you were able to take on more and more complex projects but was there any kind of breakthroughs? I’m not getting that so far, it was more of a gaining more skill and mastery in the same kind of basic process approach or were there chapters or evolutions or epiphanies along the way?  David Holmgren: Well, certainly that property at Mount Buninyong that I’ve described was one of those that “I can accept what’s been done on the land”. There were urban projects as well. But there was, a developing conservatism in what I was prepared to recommend, recognising that there’s a difference between being an innovator-experimenter, especially in fields like tree-crop systems and aquaculture, for which there wasn’t established standard practice. So being more cautious about what one would recommend people do was part of the the learnings.  But there was also being surprised in what some clients managed to achieve.  I had a case here in the local area of doing a one-day advisory and I looked at this property and I said, “There are so many dam sites on this property. It could be this amazing aquaculture system of all these dams down this valley and this could go here”. I thought “oh yeah another couple of people from the city.” That couple actually implemented all of those ideas and beyond, and it became very significant in our local community here, running a permaculture nursery for many years, called Forever Growing. Forever Growing Glenlyon  early years 1997 They became leading figures in spreading permaculture and their place was quite extraordinary. So a case of underestimating what human potential or commitment or interests can do as well, so that there needed to a balance both ways between humility and low expectations on the one hand and an openness to unseen potential.    How Much Design Work? Dan Palmer: So during this period of working in professional design – and I take it that over time your focus has moved slowly more and more to publishing and speaking education, but during that period how much design work were you doing? Was it full-time?   David Holmgren: Yeah. It was only equivalent of a one-third time job. In the early years, there was pretty much a three-way split in what one would consider a working life, between doing things ourselves primarily here at Melliodora, me as gardener, builder (the household economy which involved design constantly, but that wasn’t professional or for money. And that one-third of my time was writing, speaking, teaching, and contributing to the emerging permaculture movement and voluntary work, a lot of which didn’t involve design quite so much. Some of that did, but it was certainly not paid. And yeah, one-third was actually professional work and most of that was design work. So that meant I didn’t do a huge number of consultancies, and especially the ones that involved extensive reports and plans were often just a few a year.    Dan Palmer: So over the time you might have done what? What’s the ballpark? 50, 70, 100?    David Holmgren: Good question, because a lot of those onsite advisory ones, I don’t have documentation – they’re just a sheet in a file and some notes or something. Yeah, I haven’t looked at that but it probably only would’ve been 30 of those a year at the peak. There were larger consultancy projects including at Ceres City Farm in the late ‘80s, a 10-year strategy plan.  And then in the ‘90s, a sort of retrofit of animal systems at the long-established Collingwood Children’s Farm.  There were consultancies for Catchment Authorities and things that mostly built on the Trees on the Treeless Plains work.  Teaching Permaculture Design David Holmgren: Then, in the late ‘80s, I was doing a little bit more teaching about permaculture and of course I was getting understandings of how permaculture design was being taught in permaculture design courses.    My observation of that, was of people drawing from what they’d learnt from Mollison. Remembering that I didn’t think he was so much a designer, more an ecologist, though he articulated, especially in the Designer’s Manual, quite a lot of interesting concepts around design and design process. But there certainly wasn’t a clear design process in permaculture teaching. Many teachers were drawing on landscape design, architecture – to a very limited extent planning, but mostly landscape architecture an gardening design methods together with permaculture ideas. In 1990, I think it was, I agreed to contribute, for the first time, in teaching on a Permaculture Design Course. This was the start of that journey of discovering the lineage of that first decade of design course teaching. I taught with some of the more experienced permaculture teachers and saw how people were teaching permaculture ethics and design principles and process .    Teaching Keyline and Natural Sequence on Food Forest PDC 2006 That work on ethics and design principles work eventually led to the book Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability a decade later, but I knew there was this huge jump between fundamental design principles and design process. I felt I had a stab at trying to teach that on permaculture design courses in the ‘90s, especially ones that we ran. But some people’s reaction to that, was that what I was teaching was advanced permaculture design. The main distinction I was trying to introduce apart from the land system stuff for understand the underlying patterns of the land, was the difference between the methods that are appropriate to large scale Landscape design versus Site design. I was characterising what people were learning as permaculture design as Site Design, in the sense that architects and landscape architects thought about it in some limited context – the place where one is putting a building and the influences that are affecting that spot. Whereas once you looked at broadacre farms or intentional community design, that is across landscape, those Site design methodologies broke down. They had real limitations.    I was trying to introduce landscape design and site design as different design methods.  Of course, a lot of the work I’ve done as a consultant actually informed how to do those site design processes and recognising the process by which, “what comes before what?” and what has to all be done simultaneously and then what can fall out from that process and be left till later. So I was introducing a lot of the learnings I had from the process of doing professional design. But I was also at the same time on permaculture design courses de-emphasising the vaguely ridiculous idea, that these courses were a training for people to be professional designers. Instead I was suggesting that design is a literacy that we use in our lives. So whether that’s designing your own garden or reviewing your living circumstances and working out how maybe things can be rearranged or change direction in some way, and being able to use design thinking in that way. So a lot of that was sort of stepping back and looking at it in more fundamental design principles, rather than “here, we’re going to design landscapes for people”.    Dan Palmer: Did your work impact other teachers? Do you feel that made any kind of difference to what you’d seen previously and some of your concerns with what was being taught as design process on PDCs?    Reading Landscape tour Rockingham 2016 – taken by Oliver Holmgren David Holmgren: Yeah. I think it did with the people I worked with, but again like consultancy I was into fairly “slow and small” solutions. We didn’t do massive numbers of those courses. In the ‘90s we did one a year and we developed a team that we were working with. But I think a lot of that influence really didn’t come about till after publication of Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability and also doing a lot more teaching both around Australia and internationally. So it was really a slow feed-in and small influences.    Dan Palmer: You were saying with the design principles, with which you have had a massive impact on permaculture as a whole around the world, that they were a kind of stepping back from how you might go “what process you might use to design this particular place.” Do you have a perspective on how that gap is being bridged? Are people taking the principles and able to kind of translate those into different contexts from designing your own backyard to designing your life to …?  Fryer’s Forest Ecovillage David Holmgren: Yes, well I think that’s a very important story of how that has emerged more recently and I could talk further about that, but there was, for me, a major step in between. What also was happening in the ‘90s was the development of the Fryers Forest eco-village and that was again design and implementation but in the role of being a developer and project management and bringing together all of those skills that I’d developed, but also working in a team of people. So that really in some ways brought me face to face with all of the regulatory structures in a more detailed way that I’d avoided like the plague through most of my design work, because I really wanted to work in that free creative area of the things that didn’t require regulation. To some extent, it’s one of the reasons I also got out of design work, because a lot of those things like earthworks, dams, and everything have become much more regulated.  I can remember the time when The Day Dam, a one megalitre dam built with a D7 bulldozer and cost $1,000 to build, turned into a $2,000 dam because it now needed an engineer to sign off on a whole lot of very basic paperwork, and that doubled the cost of building those dams. The ways in which regulatory structures work both to keep minimum standards at some sort of reasonable level, but also chop off all of the creativity that can happen in any field, certainly in architecture and landscape design. Farming was one of the areas where there was still until recently an enormous amount of freedom, both for better or worse for farmers to do whatever they want with the land. So that was sort of a creative free space. But in developing an eco-village with planning approval and all of those sorts of things, that became a much bigger part of what I was doing. But it was also the opportunity to see how the passions about sustainable forestry worked, in a design sense and a community engagement sense, and how people would learn and adopt some aspects that might be beyond what they were familiar with.    This issue I spoke of previously, whether you can actually raise some design idea that people might think is a great idea but they actually don’t know anything about it – and the chances of that becoming a reality are often very, very low. In some ways I used to say that as a professional consultant, all you can do for clients is confirm something that they might already half-know themselves. If you’re trying to introduce something that is completely foreign, it’s almost certainly not going to work.  Design Principles and Design Process in a Time of Crisis I suppose in going back to design principles, I was really stepping back from that process of ‘what we’re doing’ to ‘why are we doing it’ and asking the more fundamental questions of why: the issues of diversity, why are small and slow solutions generally better than big and fast ones, and why do we need to be so obsessed with creating storages in the landscapes; storages of water, storages of biomass, rather than things just relying on throughput. Looking at those basic system design principles that we could see in natural systems, and we could see underpinned all traditional cultures of place in the use of land resources, but were contradicted in the modern industrial world. I saw a lot of people going about things quite creatively and exploring all sorts of ideas and even using quite creative design methods, but those deeper questions seemed to me more fundamental building blocks. Of course, the deepest ones of all are the ethical foundations. I really focused on that a lot but was intensely aware that those principles inevitably are abstractions, just generalisations, and they don’t tell you much about how do we get to that holy grail of some desirable outcome. But I certainly saw I couldn’t tackle all those things simultaneously.    Holmgren’s 12 Design Principles Dan Palmer: Yeah. Yeah. And do you see that as a gap that’s yet to be filled or …?    David Holmgren: I think that’s a process that’s still emerging in different ways and I would definitely see your own work with Making Permaculture Stronger as a major contribution in that direction. I think there are many factors that work to drive us in two different directions simultaneously. One is: “why are we here?”, what are the really fundamental questions of going back to the basics and focusing on that. The other, with chaotic rapid unfolding change of circumstances, almost a sense of appearing to abrogate design or planning or any forethought and just responding to what’s coming over the hill at us. So we’re sort of pulled in a sense away from that solid space of some confident thinking ahead, planning ahead, knowing what’s going to happen and that does make it difficult to grasp for a lot of people, how design applies.  Dan Palmer: Such a fundamental issue. It’s something I scratch my head over a lot as things get more uncertain. We’re in a position now with COVID and everything where the buffer we have as a culture is pretty thin right now. So should another shock come down the line… We’re in a position where I don’t know if the ideal is that we’d have a deep enough working literacy of design principles and processes, so that we could ramp it up and default to that when shit gets crazy. As opposed to what probably will happen, or is happening, which is people are just going to reach into the grab bag and “oh, we’ll try this solution, we’ll try this solution, we’ll try this solution”.    Retrosuburbia and Continuous Incremental Design David Holmgren: Yeah. I think that’s exemplified to some extent by the shift after the involvement with Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability and the teaching that came out of that. The lineage of work that lead to RetroSuburbia, recognising that humanity was rolling into multiple civilisational-scale crises. The most notable that people can understand is climate change, but resource depletion and all of the other ones that are linked to all of these issues, including of course pandemics and financial system instabilities and breakdown, and many, many others. As these processes unfold it was really clear to me even in the ‘90s when I was teaching on design courses, that how we retrofit and adapt where people already live is going to be far more important than building new state-of-the-art eco-villages or creating the world anew: whether that’s grand visions of gleaming green cities or the landscape reformed, it’s no longer just pastoral landscapes, it’s all of these amazing permaculture systems.    No, no, that’s not going to happen directly in that way – because those processes to the extent they will happen will be happening in a context of chaotic, if not collapse, breakdown and change of systems that we’ve directly or indirectly relied on. So that adaption in situ and retrofitting what we already have was clearly more important in a strategic sense and also of what is realistic for people to do and what is effective. Because most Australians live in the suburbs, retrofitting those suburbs was a priority. So that notion of moving from clean slate design to every site has a history, every site has something there, and recognising the good and the bad and the complex layers of that – where we are just a participant,  tweaking or adding to what already exists; that shift in thinking was also strategic – in the sense of it bypassed a lot of the regulatory impediments because it’s not big new developments. So sometimes it can be done under the radar and the consequences of mistakes are far less than in grand projects.    The grand projects, yes, they can achieve great things that it’s hard to replicate in other contexts, but they also are where the big mistakes happen. I think that was part of my strategic thinking of how to deal with ongoing design in a context of crisis and chaotic change. Then, the emphasis in RetroSuburbia on three fields of action: the Built, the Biological, and the Behavioural, recognising that there’s limitations to changing biological systems; you can’t fast-track the growing seasons. And the built environment; well, we might not have the wealth or the capacity to knock it down and start again. Those limitations don’t apply to behavioural systems and this contradiction between “is people’s behaviour individually and collectively, the hardest thing to change?” or is it the easiest thing to change? It’s of course, both but increasingly moving to recognition that we can change the world mostly by changing ourselves, because that’s the most flexible system.    It’s wrong to project that sort of view of change, adaptation, and design for, say people living on the Ganges Delta in Bangladesh relying on what they can produce on the farm and remittances from family working in the Middle East, to say “you need to be more creative or change your behaviour”. Whereas in affluent Western countries there’s so much fat in the system, there’s so many opportunities for that creative adaption, that a lot of my focus of design has moved back into the people side of things and how we facilitate that in a context of rapid and unpredictable change.  Dan Palmer: Yeah. Reminds of our mutual colleague Joel Meadows’ refrain about how often we default to a green solution or we design a better house or get more solar panels, when so much of this is around human behaviour and management and the huge scope there to massively reduce consumption and that side of it.  David Holmgren: Yeah. If you can take behaviour out of the good/bad model judgment of right/wrong, and see it as a design problem and be able to stand back and look at one’s situation and treat inappropriate behaviours as a worn-out pair of shoes, or shoes that no longer fit, or were badly designed – that we can get another behaviour that fits the situation. In that sense, I think design thinking can help so much in breaking down a lot of those moral, emotional blocking points that happen when we try and look at behavioural change.  Dan Palmer: I honestly hadn’t appreciated the strategic brilliance of the approach in RetroSuburbia. How it’s landed for me now – it’s supporting people to get things happening in the context where they need to do something, and along the way discerning these different fields of the built, biological & behavioural. Because they are retrofitting what’s already there, like you’re saying, it reduces the scope for huge mistakes. It also forces you to pay attention to what’s already there because it’s there and you’re changing it. It avoids regulatory issues and as you start to move along, you are in a design process. So it’s almost like…    David Holmgren: …continuous design….  Dan Palmer: Yeah. By its very nature, it’s a healthy process that’s not a linear, copied and pasted from landscape architecture approach. It’s like a brilliant doorway into the space of that widespread design literacy as a core capacity that you talk about.  David Holmgren: I think it also helps deal with one of the problems of copying. As we know, every design situation is different and requires a response to that situation. But the template and pattern of suburbia across whole suburbs and landscapes, and especially where there’s similar street layout and houses of similar age, there is that simpler act by which people do things; “oh look, they did that there, we can copy that”. And there’s more chance in those landscapes of that copying actually working whereas in a lot of rural contexts and a lot of more complex organisational contexts, it’s very hard for those copies to work. We recognise that a lot of people do things that way, and we all know as designers, that that’s not necessarily the best, and the idea of how can we uniquely respond to a situation is important, but people are into the baby steps of design. If we recognise design is a human literacy that potentially represents some degree of evolutionary transformation, at least at the scale of literacy and numeracy. Then that original vision I had in Environmental Design school, that our role is, not as expert designers, but people a little bit further down the track, to enable everyone to see themselves as designers and to find that power in the process, which is still I think, a struggle for so many people.    Intuitive Design, Emergent Design, and Working with What’s There Dan Palmer: Yeah. It is exciting. I’ve mentioned to you I’m taking a lot of inspiration from Carol Sanford lately, and I’d already sort of shifted from me being a design expert to me being a design process facilitator. With some of the stuff I’ve been learning from her, I’m moving from facilitation to being an educator and being a resource, like returning people back to their own lives and their own situations as a source of developing design process literacy.    David Holmgren: Yeah. I think there are obviously so many sources that need to be brought in, and recognising the influences of those, to contribute to permaculture design. It’s interesting, with your recognition of the role of Christopher Alexander. For me, RetroSuburbia was written as a pattern language, or a series of stepping stone towards a pattern language, of Retrosuburbia, where we can see those recurring solutions to recurring tensions or dilemmas that are faced. I think many different ideas around the process of design can contribute to the strengths of permaculture. But for myself, in the work on this property at Melliodora, I’m also being drawn back into a direct intuitive process, where I’m wandering in the landscape and inspired to do something. Sometimes, things have actually been effectively emerging for years if not decades, and then suddenly I just act.  I’ve just had that experience in the last two days, working building leaky weirs in our public stream-course with a 60-hectare catchment behind it; a creek that’s had (in 2010 towards 100,000 tons of water come through it in 48 hours). Physically building something with my hands, from what’s in the place, that needs to survive that sort of force and power, and achieve things, in relation to a progressively drying climate, of rehydrating the landscape. So that process for me has involved more and more working with the absolute unique things that are in that place and where things lie and how they might be adjusted. That have also involved the social crossover with neighbours and talking to them about what they’re doing on their land, and literally resources, trees that need to come down for house construction that might become the bridge that they’ll be able to walk over across the creek. This sort of emergent serendipity that doesn’t really look like design at all and I think that is an interesting process. To some degree, it’s the freedom to play rather than work, but the degree to which that is a product of being a constant designer, rather than just running around randomly doing things that have completely unthought-out consequences.  Dan Palmer: Yeah, that’s right. It’s such an interesting one. I’ve made that distinction between a generative process, generatively transforming spaces, vs winging it with random haphazard things. Sometimes people can get a bit fuzzy on the distinction, but it’s amazing to learn of your journey and there were times when the processes, you could describe them as more kind of rational and hard and get the design right first, to something that’s a lot softer and more intuitive and emergent and consultative or integrative in terms of the community. But of course, it’s not like that’s the antithesis of a more structured approach. It benefits from it.    David Holmgren: Yeah. I mean, I do go back to that statement that’s attributed to Eisenhower about planning being essential but plans are useless. And I think that’s nice because it comes from someone who is so hard-nosed – out of the military – and constantly toying with the work to understand and have vision to see what is not, to imagine and the force to be able to project and direct that and at the same time being open and vulnerable and participating as just a participant in a process. Where of course those things appear to be complete contradictions of one another and maybe that’s why the dance of design is so difficult in some ways because it plays with all of those.    Closing Reflections Dan Palmer: Okay, David. Well, this has been an incredible chance to hear about your experience with permaculture design process over the decades. As we bring this to a close, it’d be wonderful to hear any closing thoughts or reflections from you.  David Holmgren: Yeah. Well, I think, not just because we’re in a pandemic at the moment, but because it’s the culmination of expectations from the beginnings of permaculture about a world of unfolding crisis, and that is the context for design now, that the ability to imagine a place, a situation emerging to something different to what we see now, is of course fundamental to design. It’s also the source of hope, not in a naïve sense of fantasy, but without the power of imagination that depends, as Wendell Berry said, of affection for something and imagining it growing or transforming or evolving, then it’s not possible to be effective designers. Designers do require imagination and that that’s one of the greatest resources that design and especially permaculture can contribute in this time of chaotic change. And I think that can be seen in the sort of friendly adaptable achievable changes that we’ve talked about in RetroSuburbia and in my Aussie Street story of showing how this happens in my imaginary street. David presenting Aussie St in Perth WA August 2019 (photographer Stephen Oram) Or more dramatically in the novel that we have just published by Linda Woodrow called 470 which is a ‘cli-fi’ climate change science fiction but has permaculture all threaded through it and showing how people adapt and change what they have, when those crises hit.    In some ways, it brings design as actually central in responding to crises rather than it being a peripheral luxury. It’s actually the great strength that we can bring to situations of unprecedented surprise. I think in small but diverse ways that’s being shown up with the pandemic too, whether that’s household changing what they do and businesses changing what they do, moving from management and focus on just repeating cycles to know “oh, we have to go back to the drawing board, we have to redesign something, we have to retrofit something”, that this is now the continuous action we’ll be engaged with and that it can be incredibly empowering.  Dan Palmer: And you see part of permaculture’s potential as being able to resource others in terms of moving into that.    David Holmgren: Well, I think permaculture is still one of the strongest lineages in doing that from ad hoc unfunded development projects in third world villages, where people are scratching together from what’s around that can be used for some basic function; to creatively thinking ahead thinking about other contexts. Because so much in permaculture, for so many decades, has been ignoring the current signals in the economy of how to do something that’s proper and effective and saying, “Yeah, but how will this work in a world of less? How will this work in a climate-changed world?” Without having those answers, that discipline to be always thinking about the future, always thinking about emergent possibilities both good and bad or however we characterise them. I think permaculture can contribute a great deal to that process.    Dan Palmer: Beautiful. David Holmgren, thank you very much.    David Holmgren: You’re welcome.

I’m thrilled in this episode to share the first part of a two-part interview in which David Holmgren shares his journey with permaculture design process over the decades. Scroll down to access the full transcript of this conversation, with huge thanks to David for sharing the historical photographs which really bring the story to life. Note that in collaboration with David I had also previously created a downloadable PDF showing the timeline of David’s design process journey that might provide a helpful supporting reference. Finally, be sure to check out the brand new Reading Landscape with David Holmgren documentary project website which is so closely related to this episode. The Full Interview Transcript (Edited for flow and readability) Dan Palmer (DP):Welcome to the next episode of the Making Permaculture Stronger podcast. I’m super excited today. I’ve travelled about half an hour up the road and I’m sitting at a permaculture demonstration property and home called Melliodora. Sitting next to me is David Holmgren. David Holmgren (DH): Good to welcome you here. DP: I’m very excited to be here with this microphone between us and to have this opportunity to have you share the story of your journey with permaculture design process over the decades. David and Dan co-teaching in 2018 DH: Yeah, and that’s something we’ve worked on together in courses: our personal journeys with that. Certainly through those courses, working together has elicited and uncovered different aspects of me understanding my own journey. Childhood DH: Thinking about design process through the lens of childhood experiences, I was always a constructor/builder, making cubbies, constructing things and yet never had any family role models for that. My father wasn’t particularly practical with tools, and yet I was always in whatever workshop there was in our suburban home as a young child. So making things, imagining things which don’t exist, and then bringing them to life was definitely part of my childhood experience. I don’t know, particularly, why in my last years of high school I had some vague notion that I might enrol in West Australian University in architecture. But I left to travel around Australia instead because I was hitchhiking mad in 1973. And in that process, I came across a lot of different ideas to do with the counter culture and alternative ways of living. Studying Environmental Design in Tasmania Most significantly, I came across a course in Tasmania in Hobart called Environmental Design and I met some of the enrolled students. I’d realised by that stage that I was not cut out to do any sort of conventional university course. I was too radical and free in my thinking and wasn’t wanting to be constrained within any discipline or accounting for things through exam processes. DP: What age were you? DH: I was 18 at that time, and this course in Environmental Design really attracted me. Undergraduate students, who were doing the generalist degree in environmental design, were sometimes working on projects with postgraduate students who were specialising in architecture, landscape architecture or urban planning at the post graduate level. Mt Nelson campus where Environmental Design School was part of the Tas College of Advanced Education 1970-80 There was no fixed curriculum. There was no fixed timetable. Half the staff budget was for visiting lecturers and outside professionals. There was a self assessment process at the end of each semester, which then led to a major study at the end of the three year generalist degree. There was the same self assessment process for the postgraduate level. So you got up to the finishing line, and then had to show your results, and that was to a panel that included outside professionals that you had a say in choosing. DP: Suitably radical. DH: I believe it was the most radical experiment in tertiary education in Australia’s history. Set up by visionary Hobart architect, Barry McNeil, who saw that there was no point teaching design professionals a specific set of skills, because the world was changing so fast that by the time they came to practice, those skills could be irrelevant and that you had to teach them more how to problem solve, how to think, and that they would find and develop the skills that were relevant that way. So that’s what led me back to Tasmania the following year to enrol in Environmental Design. As part of that first year, I explored a lot of different subjects. I was actually doing the backyard self sufficiency thing in a rented house and was documenting the organic gardens, the compost making, baking bread at home, all of that self reliance (that I would call retrosuburbia now) in a rented house was actually part of my study project. The book that came out 44 years after David’s early experiments in suburban self-reliance I was also involved in projects with postgraduate Planning students, working with urban conservation activist groups, trying to stop high rise development in the historic Battery Point precinct. Setting up a shop front information for the community to explain planning law and plot ratios of how big you can build a building for how much open space and all of those sorts of things. So I ranged across quite a diverse interest area, and I met a lot of people that came to environmental design, if you like, as refugees from all the design courses around Australia. So it gathered all the radicals at a time when most people went to university in the state where they lived. Whereas more than half of the students in Environmental Design were from outside of Tasmania. And of course, the whole interest in ecology was a huge focus and the crossover between ecology and design. DP: That was a theme of the graduate school? DH: Well, it was something that was identified as a huge area of interest of so many students. And at that time, so much so that they felt they needed to have an ecologist, actually on the staff, because most of the staff were designers (landscape architects, architects, engineers and planners). As an undergraduate student I was on the selection panel for the person who ended up becoming my supervisor in the course. So it was a context where I came across a lot of radical ideas in design. But I still felt quite the outsider. I can remember a particular seminar that was about the design of the Australian backyard. People within the department were basically decrying how terrible backyards and front gardens were designed and how pathetic and hopeless it was people doing it themselves. I can remember being really outraged and getting up and on my soapbox and saying, look, this is one of the last things that Australians still do for themselves – they design and create their own gardens and backyard spaces. Hardly any of them build their houses anymore. Are we a radical design school, intending to extend design literacy and design capability as a universal literacy, or are we about commandeering and colonising another space? Taking something else off people and professionalising it. So I have a strong memory of that, being part of my early thinking about design, that design was sort of a literacy that should be universal. https://youtu.be/Qm-eSXyXCBg David more recently speaking to the reality and potential of the great Australian Backyard DP: It’s exciting for me to hear permaculture bells going off, because there’s already that pre existing overlap between ecology and design. Then when you bring the flavour of being in control of your own design processes and designing your own spaces, you were well on that trajectory already. It doesn’t sound like it was that kind of school where they said “here’s the design process you’re going to use the rest of your careers.” Were you getting a feel for a kind of approach to design or process at that stage or was it still quite open? DH: Yeah, it was very free and open, and I suppose within the design professions, environmental design was either regarded as the best course in Australia because it involved outside professionals. You had to do the postgraduate degree part time and have a job in the field before joining the professional association. So there was a huge amount of practical reality that was encouraging to design professionals. Other design professionals regarded it as the worst course in Australia because people weren’t required to actually sit at a drawing board or learn any particular thing, classic principles of architectural design, or anything. I remember being aware of quite a strong interest in Ian McHarg’s ideas. There were also others that involved designing in perhaps a different way, like George McRobie, colleague of EF Schumacher, famous for of course, writing the book Small is Beautiful, which was published just a year before I started Environmental Design. George was there for six months teaching the whole intermediate technology notion of designing an appropriate technology suitable to scale especially for developing countries rather than just imposing large scale systems that were inappropriate to context. So there was certainly different design contexts and also design processes, but certainly there was no clear didactic direction. The whole thing was a chaotic exploration. DP: You said you were documenting what you were doing in the rental with the compost making and everything. Were you also paying attention at that stage to the process side of things? DH: Not so much, I think I was to some extent quite outcome oriented. But yeah, definitely grappling with that process of how you record and evolve ideas on paper, rather than just literally starting something with your hands, which is how a lot of people do things in the most rudimentary design process. So, definitely that thinking through and documenting ideas and then implementing those, but I suppose with limited awareness of the process. It was in that first year that my interest really gravitated around food production and more broadly, agriculture, as humanity’s prime way for providing for its needs. And looking at that crossover between, if you like, landscape architecture primarily as a profession, and ecology, and how that applied to agriculture. I could see the overlap between two but not between the three. I saw overlap between ecology and agriculture in agro-ecology ideas and organics. Although organic farming began in the 1930s, it was really incorporating early ecological ideas in its reaction against industrial farming. So I could see crossover of any two of them. But I couldn’t see anywhere where all three were brought together. So agro-ecology, for example, didn’t seem to have much of a design focus. Certainly not a physical landscape layout, how the things relate in space. It was mostly concerned with agronomy, husbandry, those processes. There was some crossover between landscape architecture and agriculture but really as cosmetic design overlay in some particular affluent parts. Or the conservation of agriculture in a larger sense, like McCarg’s work to protect agricultural land from inappropriate development and prevent conflicts of different types of land use; the whole zoning idea. But that was treating agriculture as a system with some sort of planning design overlay but design was not actually involved in the essence of agriculture itself. DP: And the overlap between design or landscape architecture and ecology? DH: Yeah, well, for example, one of my teachers in the course who I had a strong connection with was Phil Simons. She was one of the first landscape architects in Australia to use, in quite a few of her designs, local indigenous species. So we had debates and discussions about native versus exotic in those years. She was one of the pioneers of that sort of thinking; how can landscape designer create spaces that can support the diversity of nature and especially indigenous species.  DP: Well, that’s great. I haven’t heard it quite that way before, it’s so clear. And you had yourself a very juicy question. Or a space of how would these things overlap that obviously influenced the course of the rest of your life. Meeting Bill Mollison Bill Mollison during a plant stock collecting trip around Tasmania in 1975. Writes David, “My close and intense working relationship with Bill during 1974-1976 brought together the ideas and the practice which we came to call permaculture” DH: It was at that sort of pivotal time that I met Bill Mollison, and he didn’t strike me as a designer, and I don’t think I was looking for that. I suppose I’d already come to a view that a lot of biological science was highly reductionist and, in fact, even within ecology, there was this tension between reductionist approaches, which would be regarded as mainstream approaches to science, and the more holistic. So I was very much looking for that and then I met Bill Mollison through chance. He was at a seminar in Environmental Design. He wasn’t running it. He was just someone who made some comments that I thought were really interesting. I went to speak to him afterwards and realised oh, this person thinks ecologically. Holistically. Note: see also this short article entitled A Chance Meeting Through chance he invited me to come to his place and I was looking for somewhere to live and I was also a bit disabled because I had a broken collarbone as a result of motorbike accident. So I suppose it was also him taking in a homeless waif. We began a discussion about what I might focus on in second year of Environmental Design. At the time, he was a lecturer in the psychology faculty, a senior tutor actually. The connection with design was really not through him at all. Particularly, as I worked with him, I didn’t see him primarily as a designer. He was an amazing polymath, a genius, and primarily an ecological thinker. DP: And was he lecturing in psychology at the same school? DH: No, at the older tertiary institution, the University of Tasmania. I was at the new College of Advanced Education, as it was then called where the Environmental Design School was. DP: And you were saying you had this hankering for a more holistic approach to ecology and he was an example of that. So were you  learning a lot from him early on, soaking that up? DH: Enormously. Our relationship was very much student and mentor. Co-originating the Permaculture Concept First page of part 5 of the articles by David and Bill published in the Tasmanian Organic Gardener and Farmer in 1976, two years prior to publication of Permaculture One DH: The seed of the permaculture idea came in a discussion towards the end of ’74 in Bill asking me, knowing how free Environmental Design was, “so what are you going to work on next year? What are you going to look at?” I said, “you know that I’m interested in this crossover between these three things that don’t seem to cross over at all.” DH: When I put that to Mollison, that’s what I want to work on, of course, he always had a million ideas and he said, “Okay, well how about this for an idea. If in most places on the planet, nature creates some sort of forest as an optimal ecosystem response to climate and geology and landscape to optimise production and diversity from a sort of an ecological point of view, why does agriculture, if not look like a forest literally, function like a forest? For example why is it not dominated by perennial plants? Why is it dominated by annual plants?” I said, ‘That is perfect, it’s a design question, but it’s fundamentally looking at the design that nature creates, and why don’t we appear to be using that in our prime activity on the planet, agriculture by which we feed ourselves.’ I regard that discussion as the seed of the permaculture concept. https://youtu.be/Syw1yfaWieQ So I started sort of working on the permaculture ideas, when I started the next year in ’75. And it basically consumed all my time, full time. The staff were concerned that I wasn’t doing anything else. But I was free to do that. Mollison and I were developing a permaculture garden at his property on the fringes of Hobart, two and a quarter acre semi rural property about the same size as this place Melliodora. It had forest on it, and he had owned it for some time and he’d defended it and saved it from the great ’67 bushfires not many years before I was there. There were neighbours and other people in that area who were developing self reliance as part of what we were on about at that time. A lot of the interest initially was around what you would call economic botany, the exploration of useful plants, the components from which we might, build a permaculture system. Obviously perennial plants and especially trees. So there were a lot of elements that weren’t primarily design process in that. Even though I was a bit separated from and critical of a lot of what I saw in the design professions and even in environmental design, and I was off on this other tack, with Mollison as my mentor who I did not see really as a designer, so I see the design side of permaculture, in a way came more through me, through the lineage of environmental design and the radical ideas of design that were part of that school. DP: Wow, so 1974 was a hell of a year! DH: Yeah. Two years after the Club of Rome Limits to Growth report, one year after the first oil crisis that precipitated the Western world into the first economic recession since WWII. Of course, 1972 was also the election of the Whitlam government in Australia after 23 years of conservative government, and a whole huge cultural explosion of different ideas and different possibilities, which led to the great constitutional crisis of 1975. And it was the end of the long running war in Vietnam and eventually with the American defeat in Vietnam although Australia pulled our troops out in ’72. So there was a huge social, economic and political turmoil at that time and an openness, certainly in academia, to new radical ideas. Environmental design as that radical school ran from 1970 to 1980. And then it was basically emasculated, turned back into a conventional design course and moved from its Hobart base to Launceston. So it’s very emblematic of the ’70s. DP: You got your timing right! DH: Yeah, the timing for permaculture, generally the huge interest in ecology and related ideas in science. For example, the embodied energy concept; How we use energy as a measure of human systems. In 1979 I went to the ANSAS conference in Hobart and there were five papers on net energy analysis of agricultural systems. Move forward a decade, there would have been none of that. So there was a huge interest in all sorts of things that included design process. I mean, just as an example of that first year I was there, during that project I worked on with the Battery Point urban conservation. There was another project, working as consultants to the State Department of Planning as to how to do, for the first time, a strategic plan for Hobart with community consultation. Because up to that point, planning had just been engineers and staff, deciding where I imagine freeways are going to be built in new urban expansion and whatever. So those ideas of people being involved in design process in things that affect them at that social level was, of course, part of that period. DP: Would you say that period, or that pivotal conversation about what you’re going to do with your project the next year was a kind of a moment? And did that culminate with Permaculture One? DH: Well, I think in a lot of ways for me that did culminate in the publication of Permaculture One in 1978. And the huge interest that there was at the time. For Mollison, that was a stepping stone to moving out of the university, giving up his tenured position, and going to spruik permaculture to the world. Not just through the counter culture and the first areas of interest but more broadly and with huge popularisation. Whereas I felt at that time, not quite a fraud, but I didn’t have the broad base of experience that Mollison had in some areas and also being a generation older than me apart from anything else. So my interest was in building my practical skills. In ’76, I completed the Environmental Design degree and I didn’t go back to do the postgraduate degree because I was actually at that stage, so sick of or beyond wanting to think about things academically and I wanted to do things with my hands. David Holmgren at backyard greenhouse project at Arthur St Hobart 1979 Initially, a lot of that was already happening as gardening, forestry, ecological hunting, but also I had a big role in building and I built a big timber barn on a property that Mollison and I and others had bought to develop as a permaculture place. I worked as an offsider with a friend of mine who was a builder my own age who ran his own building business. We were doing quite complex building projects and learning by doing.  I didn’t like the idea of design, in whatever field, disconnected from the practice of, implementation. That separation wasn’t really viable, and that is apart from it’s class implications that there’s the designers and plodders who implemented. I didn’t respect any of that sort of idea. I was much more interested in doing stuff and building a skill base. But in that process, I suppose beginning about ’76, I was starting to build a skill base for advising other people. I had a self directed apprenticeship really, working on other people’s projects, some paid, some voluntary, doing the odd design consultancy.  David in Jacky’s Marsh 1978. Photo by Bruce Hedge David making pressed mudbricks Tas Down To Earth Festival 1978 Press photo That led to my mother in her middle age, out of the blue, buying a 180 acre rural bush property on the far south coast of New South Wales. And I thought, “I need to go and help her get set up and build a proper passive solar house and get gravity feed water supply systems and appropriate fencing so she can have gardens and be fire safe and implement all those ideas.” Meeting Haikai Tane DH: I’d been working at that stage continuously from when I left Environmental Design and graduated at the end of ’76 to ’79. In those three years, I’d worked in lots of different ways. But I’d also discovered my second mentor in New Zealand, Haikai Tane, who in a way I regard as my second mentor in permaculture. I met Haikai at the Down to Earth festival organised by ex Deputy Prime Minister Jim Cairns, as part of the countercultural movement in Australia, the Down to Earth movement. I’d been there at that festival where there was this huge interest in permaculture. I hadn’t seen Bill for quite a while and we ran up a workshop under a big shady tree with about 150 people. I met Haikai after that workshop and we wandered around this thousand acre grazing property (near Bredbo on the Monaro) exploring things and he made a comment about something that Mollison had said that just made me sit up. He said, “Mollison mentioned that this degraded grazing land needed gorse spread over it,” (which is of coarse a noxious weed), to improve the land damaged by all the sheep overgrazing. Typically confrontational comment, yeah. And Haikai said, “I’m not sure that I agree with Mollison about gorse.” And I thought “this is going to be a conventional argument about invasive exotic species.” He said, “I think Briar Rose is a more appropriate species for this.” Which is of course, another spiny noxious weed. And I thought, who is this guy? What does he know? Reading Landscape with the Land Systems Approach DH: We spent a whole lot of time looking around that landscape and Haikai’s knowledge in reading the landscape just fascinated me and we spent days together. He invited me back to New Zealand to help set up permaculture in New Zealand, the Permaculture Association of New Zealand. note: learn more about David’s approach to reading landscape here He was already a member of the Farm Forestry Association of New Zealand, the Soil Association (the national organic organisation) and the Tree Crops Association. He was actually trained in Law, Planning and Geography, had studied at ANU and knew the Monero country very well, had worked in British Columbia, but had really adopted New Zealand as not just home but spiritual home almost. Then taken a name which was Japanese and Maori, but he was originally Australian. Again, much older than me, but not as many years difference as with Mollison. Haikai Tane, Waitaki Basin South Island N.Z. 1984 Writes David: “I took this picture during my second visit to the N.Z. high country. This barren”naturally treeless ” area has a semi arid climate with very cold winters, but the growth of suitable species of trees on the fresh glacial soils is nothing short of spectacular as illustrated by the 15 year old plantings in the valley. Haikai and his love of the NZ high country was very influential on the development of my ideas.” In working with Haikai in New Zealand in 1979, and then again in 1984, he taught me a lot about the Land Systems approach to understanding land. He’d actually done the Land Systems study of that high dry cold grazing country of the South Island for the New Zealand government Lands Department. Mapping all of the land in a way that integrates the geology, the topography, the climate, and what he called the biophysical resources of soils, plants and animals that express those underlying energetic and geologic forces. And that was the basis of what we would call sustainable land use. You had to have everything mapped on to those patterns, both at a large scale, but also down at a fine scale. DP: I know you learned a lot of holistic ecology with Mollison and I know you moved around the country a lot. So what was the difference in reading landscape? Was it kind of like going deeper or was it in different direction? DH: Look, I was already in that process of reading landscape in the early research for permaculture. Because I would go and visit old forest arboreta and abandoned gardens, places where people have done stuff, and then nature had sort of taken over. I found those much more interesting from a permaculture point of view, to give instruction of the intersection between humans doing stuff and nature doing stuff; than going to some pristine wilderness. So I was already developing those skills and a lot of that was about ID, what is this tree? where is it growing? Why is it there? Those sorts of things. https://vimeo.com/466051707 Hot-off-the-reel teaser for the www.ReadingLandscape.org project So when I met Haikai, his mastery of all that, and especially a deeper understanding of soil, not in the sense of the agronomist’s focus on the condition of the A1 horizon, the topsoil, but understanding the regolith, that deep structure underneath that often determines the moisture availability and possibilities of deep nutrient mining, and different geological strata that would produce quite different ecosystems, and had quite different potential to be developed and quite different vulnerabilities to land degradation processes. DP: Is that an actual word, regolith?  DH: Yeah, that’s describing the material underneath from which soils emerge whether that’s the bedrock or deep deposits of alluvial material. And in New Zealand, the newness of the country compared with Australia made all of those reading landscape skills, so much sharper, so much easier to see. Whereas in Australia a lot of the processes are so subtle, so ancient, it’s harder to see them. Self portrait Mt Cook NZ 1984 The constraints of freehold land tenure for permaculture DH: Haikai also convinced me that the permaculture vision of broad acre integrated land uses of agriculture, horticulture, aquaculture, beekeeping, forestry, all of these things being integrated, couldn’t come about under our freehold land tenure system. So that understanding, from land law and from history of our ancestors before modern land title and the enclosures of the commons and all of those issues I learnt that the way we own and control land is actually a huge factor in how it could be designed. So, it was drawing me into understanding those sort of cultural institutional forces that shape design. Strategic Planning DH: I suppose the most important learning with Haikai was moving away from the master plan idea; design it on paper and then implement it. Which is always a bit problematic when that methodology was taken from designing the built environment and trying to master plan a garden or landscape, because you’re dealing with biological entities that change and complexities of soil you don’t fully understand. In urban planning where cities are so big and complex master plans are similarly problematic. You could say, of course, that Christopher Alexander was very strongly critiquing master planning within architecture too, that it doesn’t really work. I was sort of vaguely aware of that critique, because Alexander was one of the thinkers influencing people in Environmental Design. But because my focus was more biological, I didn’t pick up so much on his work. Haikai really introduced the framework of strategic planning, which had become a tool used by urban planners, but it came out of the military, as he explained it. Military planners had to act with limited knowledge and where they didn’t control all the factors and that idea of having frameworks of action, but you don’t really know how that is going to express itself in final design form. We started applying strategic design process to what we call tree crop agriculture; how do you not just have grazing animals around a landscape or annual crops, but these permanent, long lived structures of tree crop. Like me Haikai was a tree crop nut; he was obsessed with trees. So the application of that sort of design process was very much part of learning from working with him. DP: This is really fascinating and you were saying earlier even before Haikai, you had a sense it wasn’t viable to have a separation between in some cases, white collar design and blue collar implementation. That was already an irk. DH: Very early on. DP: So that was already there and Haikai really helped you go deeper into this? More recent photo of Haikai DH: Yeah, because he was very practical, hands on, as well as working in high level consultancy, to Government and business. He had a consultancy job working for the state government of New South Wales to review the Sydney basin regional plan, the whole of the Sydney metropolitan area. It had become a political hot potato internally, and they decided, unusually in those years, to get an outside consultant, and he somehow got the job. But in the process, he went and lived in five different locations around Sydney, always traveled with taxi drivers and explored the multiple cities and spaces that Sydney really was, rather than the myopic view, as he said, of the planners sitting in the tower overlooking Hyde Park. They had a view of the city and the suburbs, whereas he said Parramatta was already the the largest retailing centre in Australia. He identified as 21 centres in Sydney that had city level function. So he was an iconoclast in many different ways within the planning profession, but he was also a beekeeper and a totally hands on person. You know, so, that practical doing, as well as design and thinking. Yeah, so he was a big influence on my whole design process. In 1979 he encouraged me to get a camera and record what I see in the landscape. So he really put me on that lifelong journey of reading landscape. And that certainly also began how I applied that in my consultancy work. And then, in trying to design in ways that is sensitive to, not just the form of the land, but the actual different types of land – recognising that first. So using that Land Systems approach, which had mainly been used at a macro scale, bringing it down to a much smaller scale of permaculture sites to decide where are the changes in land and understanding those first and mapping those before you start carving up the land into its uses or allocating it to different things. Permaculture in the Bush DP: So you’re well on truly into the domain of design process here, where a key part of it has to be deeply immersing in what’s already there, what’s happening, what are the land units. DH: The first really big project in applying that was my mother’s property on the south coast of New South Wales. Because it was 180 acres of forest. There were 12 different eucalyptus species, three gullies, a boundary to a permanent creek, and two different geologies. As I analysed it, in a case study booklet that we produced on it called Permaculture In The Bush, it had three different Land Systems. Permaculture in the Bush – Wyndham Far South Coast NSW, 1984 I used that macro, stand back, look at the big patterns first, before going down into the details. Looking across the landscape and saying, okay, where are potential house sites identifying five of those and and then checking them against different criteria. So I started using ways of scoring things to come to a complex decision making way, rather than getting locked into single factor design which saw a lot of those sort of processes. It was also interesting as a design process for me, because I had the contour maps, and I had photographs my mother had taken, and I had her to interrogate, but I actually didn’t get to the property for six months into the project. I was in Tasmania and then we were back in Western Australia, selling the family home. When we finally arrived at the land and drove down this bush track, I already knew what was around the corner from just going over contour maps, and trying to get another bit of information. It was squeezing more information out of it. So it was a very weird sort of experience, but a very useful one in terms of design process to explore something that closely through indirect means and then set up camp. That very process of thinking ‘No, don’t make any assumptions. You’ve got a whole lot of stuff in your head. None of it means anything at the moment.’ The primary process of setting up a basic camp. And the first lesson about, ‘don’t set it up on the best spot! Because that could be where you’re actually going to develop.’ David free hand chainsaw ripping blackwood for door and window sills Wyndham 1979 There was also a huge number of practical learnings there in directing earthworks and timber milling, directing other people’s work in building a passive solar house. I had worked a lot in that side and I was actually really passionate about passive solar design. So ironically, that project was also quite a consolidation for me, in practitioner terms, as an ecological builder, more than an ecological farmer. It took me many years to sit and look back and say, ‘Well, actually, I’ve been more of a builder and more of my design work has involved a lot of the nonliving elements, the infrastructure, the earthworks and water supply systems and fencing and all that infrastructure as well as with building. And that knowledge base from the practical arts of woodworking and the processing of timber from tree to saw milling, drying, processing using timber was a greater development of skill in that area than I did with horticulture, let alone animal husbandry. Erecting posts at Venie’s Wyndham 1979 DP: That’s fascinating. You were already very hands on with building and stuff. But to then be working with contractors as well which is another step and working indirectly through them and collaborating. DH: Well, it was mostly friends working at mates rates, jack of all trades. So it was the beginning of that sort of, artisanal building process and definitely doing a lot of thinking things through and planning on paper, and then being prepared to change the design. Of course, when you are actually doing something yourself that you have gone to huge efforts to put on paper, but you see yourself as a learner, and you are at the receiving end, it’s very clear that you will change the design. Whereas when it is separated, and there is someone invested with the authority of being the designer, and this person, the builder or someone further down the chain is experiencing the disconnect between the design and reality, there’s a power relationship, a whole lot of investment that it’s hard to bring that through unless of course those designers very deliberately working in that way. DP: Yeah, it’s almost always like in that model, when there’s a clash between reality and design, the native inclination is to try and make design win. Which of course, it ultimately cannot do.  From Permaculture in the Bush, Wyndham, late eighties Setting up Holmgren Design Services (HDS) DP: I’d be really keen to hear about your transition into professional design consultancy. Is that an appropriate thing to tell us about next? DH: Yeah, because, that project on the south coast in New South Wales was really the final or most important project that really led to me setting up Holmgren Design Services as a registered business in 1983. It was just a couple of years after completing the initial phase of development of the property with my mother. Also the documentation that I took to the first permaculture convergence in 1984, of a case study of that property.  I presented two papers at the convergence. One was on reading landscape, to the young permaculture movement where there had already been four years of people having done a permaculture design course, rushing out enthusiastically trying to design the world, and not necessarily making a very good job of that. I was introducing the idea that skill in reading landscape is one of the core skills for a permaculture design.  As a consultant having to come onto a site where people don’t necessarily have a deep multi-generational historic connection with the land, where there’s not necessarily good mapping of soils or even topography, even decent contour maps and having to advise on key design decisions and needing to be able to read a lot of things very quickly in the landscape. So there was that and there was the case study because I saw that the ‘talk to do ratio’ in the permaculture movement, felt to me quite high. DP: The talk to do ratio? DH: Yeah, that’s what Haikai called it. He talked about how the ‘talk to do ratio’ was higher in Australia than New Zealand. Much higher in America. DH: So the case study documentation of places that had been permaculture designed, and then implemented, rather than just places where people were saying, “oh, here is something that illustrates permaculture ideas. Great. That’s really good.” But was permaculture thinking actually influencing how that came about? Because that’s that next test of the concept, can people use these ideas to actually end up creating more appropriate systems that reflect permaculture ethics and design principles? So then to document that design process and how that was implemented. I saw it as important on an ethical level, of being guinea pigs, of trying out your ideas yourself. And so that was all happening around that same time. And in ’84, I also went back to New Zealand and worked with Haikai again, and through the New Zealand Tree Crops Association working on how did these ideas apply to actually implementing the transformation of pastoral landscapes into multi purpose tree crop dominated landscapes? LSD, Intuition, and “A Case for the Coin” DP: You’ve talked to me in the past about how you grew up in a very free thinking, rational, intellectual household and you’ve told me a few stories over the years about how during your time with Haikai where he’d give you spontaneous lectures about Lao Tzu and bring a sort of Eastern mysticism flavour. Did that have any impact or bearing on or relevance to design process? DH: Yeah, well, actually, that reminds me of a story. I suppose I’d see myself growing up as a super rationalist. Even as a child, I would wake up and not remember any of my dreams, probably because the dream world was, like just too inconsistent with reality. There were a few things that broke down that process. The primary one was the experience of LSD made it clear to me there were more things in the human mind that could possibly be comprehended through simple sort of reductionist methods. Another marker in that was certainly working with Haikai, setting up the site for these workshops over Easter in 1979, on a high country grazing property. We were designing the site “where are people going to park?” “where was the camp kitchen going to be?” “where was the sauna by the stream?”; just designing a small festival space. Both of us as designers were running through all the factors, circulation here or what if its wet weather, etcetera. Anyway, we got to a bit of a stumbling point where there was one option over here and another there. We’d run through a few of the factors and Haikai said, “This is a case for the coin,” and pulls out a coin and he flips it. I was flabbergasted at this idea that you could actually make a decision, a design decision, based on the flip of a coin. And then he gave me this lecture on the I Ching and a whole lot of ideas in Eastern mysticism about firstly connecting to a deeper level of your feelings about what is the right thing to do and part of it is your own reaction to this chance decision. But also that you uncover a different way of accessing part of your understanding. So that was one of the stepping stones in that breakdown of that super rationalist control. Another one was when I was working with my mother, on developing the property, the early stages of the design, and we were refining where the house site was going to be on this 180 acres and looking at gravity feed, water supply, dam site options, all sorts of different factors. The chosen site was fairly thick regrowth logged over bush site. So it involved clearing quite a lot of trees and a lot of thick regrowth. I’ve been working through with my inclinometer looking at tree heights and because you’re talking about forest trees that were 35 meters tall, and how are we going to make the clearing, minimising impact with retention of trees that we wanted to keep and get full sun access into the passive solar building, and full winter sun access to gardens. I was trying to do that through thick young regrowth and big emergent trees. I was using the inclinometer measuring sun angles across tree canopies, working backwards and forwards over a period of more than a week. In the meantime, my mother had wandered in and found an old box that had been left with some rubbish and she stood it up, saying, “I reckon the house should be about here.” And as I worked around, I ended up coming back to where the box was. Now it may have been completely dumb luck, but it was interesting that rational evidence based process somehow connecting with something that came completely intuitively. Stay tuned for Part Two and meantime please a) visit the Reading Landscape with David Holmgren documentary project and b) consider becoming a patron of Making Permaculture Stronger to support the creation of more episodes and articles like this. Also please join the conversation and write a comment below.

Such a deep honour to have my dear friend and very first ever podcast guest Rosemary (‘Rowe’) Morrow from the Blue Mountains Permaculture Institute back on the show (after being my very first ever guest!) sharing her permaculture journey over four decades this week. Some of the topics you’ll hear in this truly wonderful chat are Rowe’s: new in-progress book thoughts on the adequacies and inadequacies of permaculture issue with most permaculture being taught to middle class westerners work in refugee camps and other largely invisible margins which are rapidly growing thoughts on designing yourself into your place vs designing yourself out of overseas places you work chapter on a permaculture approach to the oceans thoughts on decolonisation and re-indigenising thoughts on the essence of permaculture Please note after our chat Rowe asked if I would please share this link about supporting a permaculture project addressing the Humanitarian Crisis after the burning of the Moria Camp on the island of Lesbos. Image source Rowe also mentioned Milkwood’s Permaculture Living Skills course which you can check out here. Photo from a project in Lesvos Rowe was part of

Continuing our recent focus, this episode shares a lively chat with my friend and fellow decision-making innovator Javan Bernakevitch. For several years we’ve been catching up regularly to talk shop and explore what’s alive for us with respect to our shared interest in values-based or holistic decision making. This time we hit record to explore the difference between procedures with steps and processes with principles. How clear are you on the difference? Take a listen to find out! Find more episodes on Holistic Decision Making here Learn more about Javan’s excellent work here and watch his Facing Fire film here Find out more about my online courses in Holistic Decision Making here Check this link in a week or so to learn more about the David Holmgren Reading Landscape Documentary project Check out the site of April-Sampson Kelly (whose voice makes an all-too-brief appearance) here Become a patron of Making Permaculture Stronger here to access powerful permaculture design resources and enable the creation of more content like this I hope you enjoy our holistic decision making shop talk, bless all you fathers out there (it is father’s day in my part of the world), and catch you in the next episode.

This episode is the continuation and completion of the last episode where I started an interactive rolling review of a holistic context for a permaculture design business. Here we follow through and finish the first pass of Porvenir Design’s Holistic Context with owner-directors Scott Gallant and Sam Kenworthy. To tie in with our current focus, by the way, I have created an online course on Holistic Decision Making starting September 4th, 2020. This course will educate and resource participants to develop their own holistic contexts and start making decisions aligned with that context. There is also the opportunity to attend a PDC with Porvenir Design in either 2020 or 2021. If you are interested in this topic you might also want to listen to my introduction to Holistic Decision Making in episode 40 and my recent interview with Allan Savory. You can also catch up on my prior conversation with Scott on the practical and professional realities of a more living design process in episode 41 and episode 42. Some quotes from this episode Whether you grow the business or shrink the business, that’s a decision, not a quality of life statement. – Dan The entire job (of enabling actions) is to make the quality of life statements true. You know, what do we need to be doing or producing to make them true. One point I’ll make is whenever I do this I’ll make it very clear which enabling actions are attached to which quality of life statements. Even though sometimes one enabling action will serve more than one quality of life statement. I find that really helpful particularly later on when you’re auditing and you’re realising, oh right now this quality of life statement is the least true, so what are we going to do about it? That’s our focus for the next six weeks is to make that more true and then move on to the one that now is least true. Let’s go straight to the enabling actions in service of that and find out what’s wrong there, what’s happening there, what we can change. – Dan When I first got into this I dove really deep into it and really read Savory’s book very closely, workshops and all that. And where I got to with the ‘resource base’ is that he construes it in terms of how things need to be 10, 20, 100, 200 years into the future, socially, on the land. As I tried to work with that, what I found that it directly connected to enabling actions. That’s their job for me. So you’ve got your purpose – where you’re heading, you’ve got the quality of life statements – the core things you need to feel are true along the way if you are getting quality out of being involved and want to stay involved, and then you’ve got the enabling actions – things you need to be doing day by day, week by week, in order to keep those quality of life statements true, which if they’re true, that enables you to actually deliver on your statement of purpose. The future resource base does look into the future, and it’s says, what are the resources that you need to be in place in order to do these enabling actions. What are the enabling actions, what resources are they dependant on, and how do those need to…I think of them as variables. If the key future resource base variable diminishes over time, a classic one in any business is the goodwill of your customers, if that’s going downhill over time at some point you don’t have a business anymore. So it’s one of the core resources you depend on into the future to continue operating. – Dan This is where we put relationships with suppliers. They are in a certain state. And if the quality of our relationship with the people who supply the timber we make our veg beds out of or even the screws and bolts that we bolt them together with or whatever, if those relationships are going down hill, at some point they will say screw you, and give the timber to someone else instead. These are core resources that we depend on to do what we do and we want to bring our conscious attention to them so we can nourish them and keep them strong. And if we have a strong resource base we know that moving forward that we are able to keep doing the things we need to do have the quality of life we want as we pursue our statement of purpose. That’s what gives you resilience and that deep feeling like – we’ve got this, we’ve got a future” – Dan While we were coming up with this, we knew that we were going to bring someone on, we knew we were going to put this out as a blog post, so there was to a certain extent that context that if we create this then others that aren’t me and Scott (because we have so many conversations everyday) could also look at that and go, Oh ok, I see what professionalism means to you. – Sam Porvenir Design’s Holistic Context Thanks to Scott and Sam for letting me reproduce the version of their context they have shared publicly in this blog post. A Holistic Context for an entity (such as a permaculture business) created for a specific reason comprises: a statement of purpose quality of life statements what Allan Savory called forms of production and I call enabling actions a future resource base Porvenir Design’s Statement of Purpose: Why was this entity created? Porvenir Design exists to help clients achieve their goals within the context of tropical land planning and management and to provide meaningful livelihood for its employees. Quality of Life Statements: How do we want out life to BE? Regarding Economic Well Being We are financially secure with a cash flow that is consistent and allows us to prioritize long term planning and quality of life decisions. We have comfortable places to live that allow for gardening and food practice (Note: this is where the current episode starts) Regarding Relationships We have relationships among our Decision Makers and with our Resource Base which are Transparent Mutually beneficial Clear and openly communicated Balanced with regard to power dynamics Empathetic Compassionate Empowering Professional Safe Non-toxic Fun Diverse Regarding Challenge and Growth We continue learning and gain confidence on how to run and grow our business. We grow on a personal level as communicators and facilitators. We accept work which: Encourages us to keep learning. Features diverse projects, ecosystems, and contexts Has clear objectives and outcomes. Brings clear and obvious value to our clients. Align with our values. Regarding Purpose and Contribution What do we want to be? We are effective in helping clients meet their goals. We specialize in tropical agroforestry, permaculture design and education, and project and client facilitation. We are a design firm with an excellent reputation for professionalism. We work within our tropical climatic and culture expertise as a place based organization focused on Costa Rica. What do we ultimately want to accomplish? We create regenerative productive systems that inspire people to spend time in nature every day and actively participate in their landscape. We earn enough money to achieve our individual quality of life goals. We have time for professional development and personal free time. We grow the business in a way that others (community, future teammates, etc) can benefit from the structures we create. We contribute to the efforts of regenerative tropical agriculture and its impacts on social, financial and ecological systems. We are an active and positive presence in the permaculture community in Costa Rica and beyond. Forms of Production: What has to be produced to achieve the quality of life and statement of purpose. We act with integrity, follow our business code of conduct, and foster the quality of relationships described in our quality of life statement. We manage projects that result in productive, beautiful, functional landscapes which are evident in their improved soil/water/microbial/ecosystem health. We manage projects which create safe and reliable livelihoods for workers and meet the financial, environmental, and social goals of the clients.  We have clear expectations and deliverables for clients. We actively engage the Costa Rica permaculture community, visit other projects, network with leaders, and support their work. We work with people whose primary project(s) and focus are in Costa Rica. We monitor our progress through a year end business review, tracking our project outcomes, and ecological surveying. We train teammates to evenly share work responsibilities so that we can all meet our free time goals. We balance our current work capacity, our future financial needs, and our desired time off. We have clear and well documented agreements regarding ownership, finances, decision making, and entry and exit strategies. We have legal working status in Costa Rica. We are legal residents of Costa Rica. We actively seek out workshops, reading material, and mentorship in order to improve our communication and  facilitation skills, and our understanding of power and gender imbalances. We have a network of mentors and advisers. We invest in professional development for ourselves and our team. We work with providers and contractors who are based in Costa Rica in order to foster intimate working relationships We regularly check ourselves against our capacity and skill set when taking on new projects. We have clear and precise language in our public outreach about where we work, what we do, etc We offer employee ownership options to future teammates. We consider all our work and knowledge open source. We document and share our work through blog posts, teaching, open houses, etc. We offer mentorship opportunities to the Costa Rican permaculture community. We actively stay in touch with former, current and prospective clients and students. Future Resource Base: A description of the resource base as it will need to be in order that future generations can live lives described in the Quality of Life statements. People: We have relationships steeped in the values laid out in our quality of life statements. Our clients, students and general network see us as diligent, professional, creative, empathetic, humble and constantly seeking to improve. Land: The lands where we work are abundant in diverse sources of food. The cycles of water, minerals, soil, and microbes are thriving. Wildlife is evident. Succession is moving toward a mature ecosystem. Community: We are surrounded by friends and neighbors who are dedicated to regenerating the planet. Our community is interested and supportive of our work. They supply us with resources, fill niches as they arise, and participate as clients, students, and friends. Was this article useful? Become a Patron to support the creation of more pieces like this and to access support in applying holistic decision making and much else to grow your permaculture design capacities.

This interview will show you what working on a holistic context looks like and how you could do this for yourself, your family, or your permaculture project or enterprise. Scott Gallant and Sam Kenworthy from Porvenir Design in Central America have recently created a holistic context for their business. In this episode I review it with them and support them to evolve it further. Here you’ll get a better feel for applying what we learned from Allan Savory in the previous episode on Permaculture and Holistic Management. The whole Holistic Context idea comes from Allan. If you are interested in this topic you might want to listen to my introduction to Holistic Decision Making in episode 40. You can also catch up on my prior conversation with Scott on the practical and professional realities of a more living design process in episode 41 and episode 42. In conjunction with this episode, I have also created an online course on Holistic Decision Making starting September 4th, 2020. This course will educate and resource participants to develop their own holistic contexts and start making decisions aligned with that context. Scott Gallant and Sam Kenworthy Setting a Focus for the conversation: The Task Cycle Framework After hearing a little something of Sam’s backstory, I started by introducing the Task Cycle Framework to clarify our focus for the episode. I learned about this framework from Carol Sanford and the Regenesis folk. Among other things, this framework invites you think through: The task The purpose of the task The products that need to be produced to pursue that purpose The processes that will generate those products In this case, the task was reviewing Porvenir Design’s Holistic Context as a podcast episode. As for the task’s purpose, what came up for me (and resonated for Scott and Sam) was: We are recording this interview to review your holistic context and potentially help you increase its depth, clarity and decision making power… …in a way that supports Porvenir design’s vitality, viability, and capacity to evolve… ..so that you and your business are becoming an increasing potent agent of regeneration in Costa Rica and beyond. The main product was a tight, focused podcast episode that adds value to Porvenir design and to our listeners in terms of resourcing them to do this kind of work for themselves. Then the process we used was, after some scene setting, slowly working our way through the Porvenir context, reflecting on each bit for as long as we need. In addition to going through the task cycle, Dan brought a personal aim to the conversation of evoking reflection and sharing experience more than providing answers. Porvenir Design’s Holistic Context Thanks to Scott and Sam for letting me reproduce the version of their context they have shared publicly in this blog post. A Holistic Context for an entity (such as a business) created for a specific reason comprises: a statement of purpose quality of life statements what Savory calls forms of production and Dan calls enabling actions a future resource base Porvenir Design’s Statement of Purpose: Why was this entity created? Porvenir Design exists to help clients achieve their goals within the context of tropical land planning and management and to provide meaningful livelihood for its employees. Some snippets from our conversation about Porvenir Design’s Statement of Purpose On a meaningful livelihood…”One of the things I sometimes struggle with, with the holistic context, in the (purpose) statement and everything that flows from it, is when are we making decisions to regenerate landscapes and all these things that get us super excited and that we love doing everyday. We also formed it to buy a little piece of land ourselves and have the highest quality of life that we can live, and so I always see those two things and wonder how the rest of our statements flow from there and if there is any tension. I don’t feel like there is any tension within those two statements, those two separate purposes, but they are different purposes.” “…It often feels like an almost irresolvable tension for people. I could do this stuff to make money, and I could do this stuff about the shit I really care about and make a meaningful difference in community and the world, and they seem to be in different directions, and so I will go and earn some money and then come back and do something I care about, and then life becomes this yoyo back and forward. A thing that can literally fragment and tear you apart. And so I think key to an operation like yours and others, and you talked about them being two separate purposes, is reframing to what degree is it possible for them to be fully aligned and in the same direction. And one impulse I had as you were speaking is around nestedness and whether it’s not so much the two things are at the same level and we’re going to try to reconcile or balance them, but maybe one is nested within the other.” – Dan “…oftentimes clients approach us in a way that they want us to be problem solvers for them. And some of the solutions are simple enough for us to come up with, but that’s from our context and what we would do in a given situation. And what we sometimes struggle with is, What do you want? And how can we help define what your context is?…I think that achieving their goals has a lot to do with client willingness to get involved.” “Part of what you exist to do is to help them actually know what their goals are. To articulate and state their goals. So you can’t help them achieve their goals until you’ve got them. And it’s not just helping them articulate goals that they don’t already have, but it’s also helping them become unattached, or to let go of goals they do already have that aren’t a good fit for their context. So a core part of the value you offer is around supporting people to actually arrive at a context appropriate set of goals.” – Dan “The phrase “achieve your goals” reminds me more of running a race and you accomplish the marathon or something. It’s like now it’s this finished thing. But none of landscape management is ever finished. So it’s this ongoing piece and I feel like the idea of “achieve your goal” implies some finite end, but no part of our work is like that and no part of the client’s ongoing management of whether it’s a little kitchen garden or a big agroforestry system, has that end. It’s an ongoing process, and the phrase “achieve your goals” doesn’t capture that process, that ongoing interaction, that ecological literacy training that people have to develop in order to regenerate landscapes.” Quality of Life Statements: How do we want out life to BE? Regarding Economic Well Being We are financially secure with a cash flow that is consistent and allows us to prioritize long term planning and quality of life decisions. We have comfortable places to live that allow for gardening and food practice Regarding Relationships We have relationships among our Decision Makers and with our Resource Base which are Transparent Mutually beneficial Clear and openly communicated Balanced with regard to power dynamics Empathetic Compassionate Empowering Professional Safe Non-toxic Fun Diverse Regarding Challenge and Growth We continue learning and gain confidence on how to run and grow our business. We grow on a personal level as communicators and facilitators. We accept work which: Encourages us to keep learning. Features diverse projects, ecosystems, and contexts Has clear objectives and outcomes. Brings clear and obvious value to our clients. Align with our values. Regarding Purpose and Contribution What do we want to be? We are effective in helping clients meet their goals. We specialize in tropical agroforestry, permaculture design and education, and project and client facilitation. We are a design firm with an excellent reputation for professionalism. We work within our tropical climatic and culture expertise as a place based organization focused on Costa Rica. What do we ultimately want to accomplish? We create regenerative productive systems that inspire people to spend time in nature every day and actively participate in their landscape. We earn enough money to achieve our individual quality of life goals. We have time for professional development and personal free time. We grow the business in a way that others (community, future teammates, etc) can benefit from the structures we create. We contribute to the efforts of regenerative tropical agriculture and its impacts on social, financial and ecological systems. We are an active and positive presence in the permaculture community in Costa Rica and beyond. Forms of Production: What has to be produced to achieve the quality of life and statement of purpose. We act with integrity, follow our business code of conduct, and foster the quality of relationships described in our quality of life statement. We manage projects that result in productive, beautiful, functional landscapes which are evident in their improved soil/water/microbial/ecosystem health. We manage projects which create safe and reliable livelihoods for workers and meet the financial, environmental, and social goals of the clients.  We have clear expectations and deliverables for clients. We actively engage the Costa Rica permaculture community, visit other projects, network with leaders, and support their work. We work with people whose primary project(s) and focus are in Costa Rica. We monitor our progress through a year end business review, tracking our project outcomes, and ecological surveying. We train teammates to evenly share work responsibilities so that we can all meet our free time goals. We balance our current work capacity, our future financial needs, and our desired time off. We have clear and well documented agreements regarding ownership, finances, decision making, and entry and exit strategies. We have legal working status in Costa Rica. We are legal residents of Costa Rica. We actively seek out workshops, reading material, and mentorship in order to improve our communication and  facilitation skills, and our understanding of power and gender imbalances. We have a network of mentors and advisers. We invest in professional development for ourselves and our team. We work with providers and contractors who are based in Costa Rica in order to foster intimate working relationships We regularly check ourselves against our capacity and skill set when taking on new projects. We have clear and precise language in our public outreach about where we work, what we do, etc We offer employee ownership options to future teammates. We consider all our work and knowledge open source. We document and share our work through blog posts, teaching, open houses, etc. We offer mentorship opportunities to the Costa Rican permaculture community. We actively stay in touch with former, current and prospective clients and students. Future Resource Base: A description of the resource base as it will need to be in order that future generations can live lives described in the Quality of Life statements. People: We have relationships steeped in the values laid out in our quality of life statements. Our clients, students and general network see us as diligent, professional, creative, empathetic, humble and constantly seeking to improve. Land: The lands where we work are abundant in diverse sources of food. The cycles of water, minerals, soil, and microbes are thriving. Wildlife is evident. Succession is moving toward a mature ecosystem. Community: We are surrounded by friends and neighbors who are dedicated to regenerating the planet. Our community is interested and supportive of our work. They supply us with resources, fill niches as they arise, and participate as clients, students, and friends. Was this article useful? Become a Patron to support the creation of more pieces like this and to access support in applying holistic management and much else to grow your permaculture design capacities.

In this very special episode, I enjoy an in-depth conversation with Allan Savory, originator of Holistic Management, President of the Savory Institute and Director of the Africa Centre for Holistic Management. While Allan is best known for his work on holistic planned grazing, I was especially excited to dive into the decision making framework at holistic management’s core and its implications for permaculture. This is our conversation at a glance. How we start the process of managing holistically when commencing new projects Moving from reductionist to holistic management is moving from a reactive to a proactive orientation The process of defining what important is The relationship between holistic management and permaculture Addressing complexity with a holistic framework Beyond thinking holistically to managing holistically The challenge with making holistic management stick The paradigm shifts required to manage complexity The individual leadership to inspire and the institutional scale of holistic management we need for meaningful change Holistic management and regenerative agriculture and business Hope for the future Dan Palmer & Allan Savory – with thanks to the Savory Institute for creating this image. Here’s a link to a recent episode on how I’ve been practicing holistic decision making, here’s an article I wrote about it (back in 2014), and below is the full transcript of our conversation (my questions italicised). How we start the process of managing holistically when commencing new projects Allan thanks so much for this conversation. I’d love to start with the deep relevance of managing holistically for permaculture designers, and in particular, how we start the process of managing holistically when commencing new projects. Where us permaculture designers regularly encounter clients who, as soon as we ask them what they’d like our help toward, bombard us with a long list of goals or objectives. “We want a pond and ducks and an orchard and a vegetable garden and a campsite and a meditation platform and and and.” Could you please explain what it means to engage clients on a deeper level than the goals they present us with, how we might go about this in practice, and how important this is if we aspire to be managing holistically?    Sure, let’s see if I can help Dan. You could either start by explaining what the reductionist management of humans is and how essential it is to manage holistically.  That is what is needed if Permaculture (or any agriculture) is to be regenerative. And that is essential if civilization is to survive now facing global desertification and climate change, in which agriculture is playing as large (maybe larger) role than coal and oil.  That gets boring in today’s short attention span and people’s eyes glaze over. So the best way if there has been no training in how to manage holistically is to simply do it. Everyone just wants to be told what to do and how to do it – it is almost impossible I find to stop farmers just wanting to know what to do and to help them decide how to make those decisions, that they don’t want to hear about.  Allan just tell me what to do!  I don’t want to hear about reductionist management and how it is the single cause of almost all that ails us, including desertification and climate change! So the best way if there has been no training in how to manage holistically is to simply do it.  Think trying to explain how to ride a bike vs having a bike and just starting to ride it.  The more you explain how to ride a bike, the more confusing it gets, but a person simply riding a bike gets it in a day.  So, assume I am advising or helping you Dan the farmer.  I would simply say, Dan let’s not talk about your crops, orchard, ducks, cattle or whatever until we can both understand the context in which you are deciding what to do.  What are you managing here? I gather you Dan are making all decisions. Does anyone else make any management decisions?  No, only you OK that is great.  So, Dan what land are you managing? Answer this 500 ha farm. Ok.  What financial resources do you have? Answer –  none but a small salary in a part time job while I farm. OK so all the money needs to be generated from the land.  Now I have an idea  of the whole situation you are managing in this case and we have very little money to work with.    Before you can decide to build that dam, how to graze your animals or anything else, there is more I need to know from you.  Dan, we manage always for one main reason, which is to improve our lives. So let me ask you now, very personally and deeply, how do you want your life to be? Answer – something like, I want to be prosperous, independent, get married, raise a family, be healthy, free to pursue my own beliefs in my culture.   Ok that is great.  Dan, what will your land have to be like 200 years from now if your great great grandchildren want to live a life like you want? If you want to live a life like that, then let me ignore the state of your farm now, which I see doesn’t look very good, and ask you this.  Dan, what will your land have to be like 200 years from now if your great great grandchildren want to live a life like you want?  Don’t talk about species or any of today’s issues, simply describe how this land will have to BE.  So that we get away from obsession with weeds, gullies, or anything else, Dan let’s describe your land using four processes: how water will cycle, how minerals or nutrients will cycle, how the biological community dynamics will function, and how sunlight energy will flow to support your descendants.  Answer – rainfall will need to be fully effective, nutrient cycling rapid and high, biologically very complex diversified communities with solar energy flow very high indeed. Great OK. Now one more question if you are managing to improve your life Dan. You told me you are the only person who makes decisions. However, like all farmers and people, you are totally dependent on other people. So, you have many people in your life who you live with or deal with – friends, clients, suppliers, etc etc.  You are going to need their support.  What can you do to make them support you through thick and thin?  Answer – nothing you cannot change other people. So, what can you Dan do? As Ghandi so wisely said, you can only be the change you expect.   So now please tell me how you yourself are going to have to BE for people who are really a resource base to you to WANT to support you at all times?  I don’t want fancy words, a list of values or any branding, marketing hype – at end of day Dan you are judged by your behaviour not your words. So how must you BE?  And you will describe how you are going to always behave in a few words. All this is very deep and very personal  and is never to be used or bandied about (as I see people doing trying even to use it in marketing!!!) At this point by simply doing it and not explaining you have the nucleus of what is needed – a holistic context to guide all management actions as you go forward.  And this in three parts – A quality of life statement – a description of the land as it will have to be to ensure future generations can live such lives – and how you are going to behave to ensure people want to support you and your family. Now, Dan you might ask me about the dam you want to build for instance, or raising pigs, chickens, growing any crop.  I would say yes, let’s look at that and I would perhaps ask why you want to build it, run pigs or whatever ?  Always, and without exception, because it is how humans all make decisions – you would describe either that you are doing it to meet a need. Or you are doing it to meet a desire. Or you are doing it to address a problem.  That covers countless trillions of decisions humans make daily, and always have done.   I would explain that when we “reduce” the full web of social, cultural, environmental and economic complexity that is inescapable in our lives, to meeting needs, desires or addressing problems THAT IS REDUCTIONIST MANAGEMENT. So now Dan you will still have such needs and desires – there is nothing wrong with them and you will still want such as well as still need to address problems.  BUT and here comes the difference, you will now no longer have those as the sole reason or context for your actions.  You will now have those as needs, desires or problems but in the holistic context of how you want your life to BE. Now, open your mind to all science, all sources of knowledge, and just as before consider any action as you have done in the past through one or more of many factors – past experience, expert advice, friends advice, cost, research results, compromise, expediency, cash flow, profitability, peer-pressures, risk, intuition etc. etc. etc.  And when about to decide simply make sure it is in line not with the need, problem, etc. but with your own very personal holistic context.  Most people do this well and almost intuitively as long as they really want that life more than anything else in life.  If they only pay lip service to it they continue with reductionist management and always unintended consequences due to complexity.  And when there is any doubt at all, we have seven context checking filters or questions.  These you can learn later. Moving from reductionist to holistic management is moving from a reactive to a proactive orientation Thank you so much for clarifying the transition from reductionist to holistic management. Where we move from merely addressing problems, needs or desires to doing so in a way that aligns with a three-part holistic context we have articulated for ourselves. One aspect of how this lands for me is a sense of moving from: more of a reactive orientation to life, where we’re constantly responding to problems and opportunities the world throws our way, to… more a proactive orientation where we are consciously and holistically deciding toward however we deeply want our life to be. Does that sit right for you? That an aspect of moving from reductionist to holistic management is moving from a reactive to a proactive orientation? Dan you have been more astute than most people in that you have realized right away that managing one’s life, farm, or any business holistically becomes proactive.  This began first with the management of the land as the Holistic Management framework was developing.  If you read my textbook you will see in the framework a feedback loop at the bottom.  What I realized long ago was that nature’s complexity (what we are managing) is beyond human comprehension.  What we have been engaged in for thousands of years was reactive, or adaptive management.  We do our best making a decision to meet a need or desire based on research, expert advice, etc. etc. and then almost always we experience unintended consequences (like organic/sustainable agriculture destroying civilizations in every region of the world). So, through millennia we took an action, saw the results and we reacted or adapted.  So, the oldest management in the world is adaptive management.  …when we take any new action affecting the environment then, no matter how well supported it is by research, expert opinion or anything else, we should always assume it is wrong. When I realised this I introduced the idea that when we take any new action affecting the environment then, no matter how well supported it is by research, expert opinion or anything else, we should always assume it is wrong. On that assumption you would now say, OK in this case assuming I am wrong, where will I first detect it?  When you have decided that, you then set up a feeback loop starting with the simplest possible measurement or documentation, so you detect any change as rapidly as possible.  If the change in the ecosystem processes is going the way you intend well and good. If going any other way, you back off immediately and relook at the decision or action.  Proactively managing to bring about the results you intend – not adaptive management reacting to changes. An example so you get the idea. When I first realized that nothing but changed animal behaviour and greatly increased physical animal impact could reverse desertification, that was new.  Never thought of or tried throughout history and totally condemned by all scientists, environmentalists, ranchers, universities, etc.  So, with the very first ranches where we did this I set up a feedback loop based on the assumption I was wrong as everyone predicted. Where I had been taught at university that plant spacing in grasslands was a function of climate, I now believed it was rather a function of animal behaviour overriding climate.  So, I decided that the very earliest indication I was wrong would come from the soil surface and plant spacing. And then looking at the soil surface I asked what I could measure that would indicate almost immediately that I was wrong? That was I decided the nature of the top millimetre of soil – did the capping break or not, and from that did plant spacing start to close up or open out?   On every ranch in five countries I was working in at the time the plant spacing began to decrease, litter and soil cover to increase so we knew we were on the right lines. One way I got early clients to understand this was with brush or wildlife.  A rancher for instance would ask me.  Allan as I start managing holistically like I am doing, what is going to happen to the brush encroachment on my ranch.  Or what is going to happen to the impala or bushbuck?  Those are typical questions associated with what they were accustomed to – reductionist adaptive or reactionary management.  I would simply reply asking them – What do you want to happen to the brush?  Or what do you want to happen to the impala or bushbuck?  Tell me what you want to happen, because that is what your management is going to produce. Almost all government and large environmental organization policies we find lead to unintended consequences. Once we got this concept of proactive management operating as we managed holistically, it became easy to extend it to all aspects – financial, social and land or environment – as is described in the textbook.  And most of all to build in the proactive nature of the framework in policy development.  Almost all government and large environmental organization policies we find lead to unintended consequences.  The policies of all the major environmental organizations and governments, including UN policies here are leading to the worst cases of habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and contribution to desertification and climate change being our 30 odd national parks surrounding my home in Africa. The opposite of what they intend, but their policies remain unchanged year after year.  The US government soil conservation policy actually increased soil erosion. Their policy on noxious plants costs over a Billion dollars a year and has for over forty years – it has not resulted in killing out a single noxious plant in any State but had poisoned the water, caused health problems and done far more damage. But it continues unchanged.  The worst I have come across was a policy in India over 200 years old but followed by their Forest Service still every day, although everyone just laughed because its purpose ended over a century ago. The process of defining what important is Thanks again Allan. I love this idea of making decisions proactively then proactively seeking evidence that the decision might be wrong (or creating an unintended consequence) in order to proactively make the next decision in a process of continuous course-correction. Taking even baby steps in this direction has resulted in a real boost in my own sense of agency and power to contribute toward changes I believe in, while living a meaningful life. One thing I’d love to ask you about here is my sense that managing holistically in your sense sheds much light on the Eisenhower-Covey matrix of urgency and importance. For the process of articulating an holistic context is the process of defining important for the decision makers in question. The importance/urgency matrix (Source) Increasingly we are then able to spend more and more time doing things that are important and not urgent which to me is where most of life’s most quality moments happen. Once this is in hand, we can consciously decide to spend more time on what is important to us, and less time on what isn’t. Which in turn frees up the mental energy to start then noticing the difference between what is urgent and what isn’t. Then, by making time and space for things that are important and not urgent (such as articulating an holistic context!), we can slowly remove the root causes of much of the important and urgent stuff. For example routine dental checkups (important not urgent) reduce the emergency toothaches (important and urgent). Or servicing the water pump (important not urgent) reduces the chance of the cows smashing up the trough and suffering dehydration because the pump broke (important and urgent). Increasingly we are then able to spend more and more time doing things that are important and not urgent which to me is where most of life’s most quality moments happen. After explaining the idea of an holistic context even a little I have had people come up and thank me for having a clear way to define what important is so they could then navigate the importance and urgency matrix much more successfully. Before coming back to the relation of holistic management and permaculture, I’d love to hear how this does or doesn’t resonate with you? You are, I believe, correct but I had never thought of it in the way you are doing. I am very aware of the excellent concept of using that breakdown – urgent and unimportant that occupies us most, versus not urgent but very important, that gets neglected.  I think the very reason we manage at all is with the intent to improve our lives, but few succeed as they hoped.  There are, I believe, two main reasons why most of us are less successful in leading the lives we would like. One is best explained I believe by Robert Fritz in his book “Path of Least Resistance” – explaining so well why people make wonderful resolutions each year about being fit, and there is a multi-billion dollar industry in running shoes and exercise machines, but most don’t follow through and the machines lie gathering dust. This more than anything else I believe explains why thousands of farmers and ranchers have undergone training in how to manage holistically, but then reverted back to reductionist management.  The other reason we don’t achieve what we want for our lives is that all humans unknowingly are managing the complexity of our lives, organizations, businesses, environment and economy in a universally reductionist way. Reducing the web of complexity to the context of meeting needs, desires or addressing problems.   So, yes I think you are right, that once any person or family really think deeply and agree about the lives they desire and they develop the needed holistic context, it has in effect indicated to them what is absolutely vital (more than important).  Clarity on how they want their lives to BE. Clarity on what the state of their life-supporting environment has to BE generations to come. And clarity on how they must BE or behave is they want people important in their lives to be fully supportive through thick and thin.   The relationship between holistic management and permaculture My next question is whether you’d have anything to offer to the question of how we can most usefully think about the relation of holistic management to permaculture for those aspiring to work with both. I have heard people say that holistic management brings decision making and permaculture brings design. I have heard people say that holistic management is a specific decision making and land management approach that can sit within permaculture as a general sort of wardrobe of earth and community healing tools. I have heard people say that holistic management is the broader approach we might at times decide to bring permaculture into (say when we are initially designing our gardens or farms). Can you help clarify what seems to me to be widespread confusion about the relation? Let me try to clarify this important difference.  People are confused because we always seem to learn something new by relating it to what we know.  We even learn new words that way, and we learn to remember things easier by relating them to something we are familiar with.  So, for the moment try to think of PC and managing holistically as entirely different.  Don’t try to relate managing holistically to Permaculture.  You are familiar with permaculture and your whole excellent movement – seeking permanent agriculture through sound principles and design concepts. The different zones as you move out from say the home or centre as Zone 1. That essentially is permaculture as it has been repeatedly explained to me by many people including Bill Mollison. And in the many minds and writings of permaculture practitioners you have a vast body of knowledge that permaculture people keep communicating and helping one another understand and apply.   You will also note that it is difficult to get any of the millions of hectares of vast monoculture cropping areas changed as we have to do through changing agricultural policies, or the immigration, noxious plant, drug or terrorism policies changed with permaculture design and principles. Now as you think of permaculture and observe you will see some really wonderful results with the inner zones, some excellent design principles extending to outer zones, etc.  And we see increasingly more integration of small stock, poultry, rabbits into the polyculture cropping and food production. And this people are achieving by making their decisions to meet their needs, their desires or solve problems.  However, if we think in terms of agriculture being the production of food and fibre from the world’s land and waters as it is, I am sure you will see gaps.  I do not hear of how permaculture principles and design is going to address the major problems with the fisheries or the oceans, or for that matter even the vast teak forests surrounding my home in Africa. These forests are larger than some countries and all these forests are dying gradually because of desertification.  No amount of planting trees, using machines to develop swales or any changed design is going to get the main trees germinating and establishing. Also it is not clear at all how we could use permaculture design and principles to prevent the 30 odd national parks around my home to not be the worst examples we have here of biodiversity loss contributing to climate change.  You will also note that it is difficult to get any of the millions of hectares of vast monoculture cropping areas changed as we have to do through changing agricultural policies, or the immigration, noxious plant, drug or terrorism policies changed with permaculture design and principles. And to tackle global finance driving environmental destruction is I believe beyond permaculture principles or design. Addressing complexity with a holistic framework OK so let’s leave permaculture now.  So what  does it mean to be managing holistically to enable people in any walk of life to address the unavoidable web of social, cultural, economic and environmental complexity?  It means people recognising and clarifying what is being managed – is it a single person in a job in a city? Is it a family who are farming?  Is it a corporation manufacturing widgets?  Is it a nation’s government developing an agricultural policy?  Is it ensuring good governance in a nation? Is it a UN body trying to develop Sustainable Development Goals that will go beyond addressing symptoms of desertification and failing once more?  In every one of these cases we have discovered that we can address the full complexity simultaneously by using the holistic management framework to decide the best actions and to develop policies.  Remember that almost all scientists are now agreed that humans are causing rapid climate change, and we have known for thousands of years that humans were causing global desertification. That means we are doing so in the only way that is possible – through our management of nature and human organizations.  When you think of this whole spectrum of management – remember the things we “manage” are our lives, families, communities, organizations and nature.  Everything else we do is making things using technology.  All that we “manage” is described in Systems Science jargon as “complex soft” and “complex natural” systems. With all that we are managing, clearly holistic management doesn’t have a large body of knowledge (like permaculture does) but using the holistic framework enables people to embrace all known science and other sources of knowledge and begin to manage complexity.  Humanity’s Achilles Heel.   The only areas in the holistic framework where there is some body of knowledge unique to managing holistically is specified in my textbook. That is mostly the key insights that made the development of holistic management possible, and some new knowledge tied to financial planning, planning of livestock infrastructure as well as the holistic planned grazing process to reverse global desertification.   There are two basic ways of managing and that is really what we all need to understand. Reductionist management as is all management and as management has always been – all ages, cultures and humans. And the newly developed holistic way of managing that hopefully will keep being perfected and understood. Right now most permaculture practitioners are engaged in applying permaculture principles and design while engaged in the universal reductionist management. A few, but increasing in numbers, have understood and trained with the Savory Institute or are involved in the many locally led and managed holistic management hubs around the world managing holistically applying permaculture principles and design. I hope this clarifies more than it confuses. Thanks Allan and yes this is all super helpful. I was excited to see you mention Fritz’s The Path of Least Resistance – I have found the ideas in that book powerfully complementary with holistic management. Especially the idea of consciously clarifying then paying attention to the tension between where our lives are and how we want our lives to be. We can then use this tension to create a path of least resistance our actions then naturally flow down. Yes, Fritz I believe captured best why so many people start something with every good intent and determination, only to shortly thereafter drop it and revert to their old ways, or simply pick little bits of the new that don’t disturb their old ways too much.  We have experienced this with thousands of people and managing holistically. While I have you I would love to ask a little more about this topic of managing complexity in a holistic way. I understand from much of what you’ve shared that the key distinction the future of humanity depends on is that between reductionist and holistic management. The greatest danger to humanity is our inability to manage complexity. Yesterday I was corresponding with a deep thinker.  I made the statement that I believe the greatest danger to humanity is not fossil fuels, climate change or desertification and the massive environmental destruction being driven by global finance. The greatest danger to humanity is our inability to manage complexity.  I say that because every one of the “things” we are blaming is a direct result of our policies and management of our resources.  And that management has always been reductionist – hence the failure of many civilisations and now global threat.  Holistic management allows us to manage complexity.  Yes, the holistic management framework enables us in all walks of life to manage complexity.  Like any breakthrough it is in its infancy – 35 years old roughly from when thousands of us working on it got it to the point we could no longer even cause failure in theory.  Beyond thinking holistically to managing holistically Given that before we can manage something, we need to be able to perceive it, I was wondering what guidance you might offer about developing our ability to even see complexity, let alone manage it.  In particular, I am stuck by how we tend to see the world in a mechanistic way, as if it were a giant machine.  Yes, this is what many recognise as our “mechanistic world view” of modern science.  I once listened to a brilliant scientist giving a talk to a major gathering in Texas. He was explaining that science was beginning to see that everything was connected, etc. all the right wording and then to emphasise and make it very clear he used analogy – and he said we are beginning to see it as though it was a giant machine with billions of interconnecting parts! Surely managing holistically requires seeing the world not as a dead assemblage of connected parts but as a living dynamic whole – an organism as it were. Do you have any pointers for how we might shift the lens we look through from a mechanistic, reductionism paradigm to something more in tune with living evolving whole systems? No, I have no magic or way of getting the world to think holistically, but I believe it is coming about and that it is accelerating at present this changing worldview. Right now the covid pandemic is assisting that shift in worldview.  However that is not going to be enough.  Why I say this is because we would be arrogant to think we are the first people in the history of the world to think holistically.  I believe the mechanistic worldview is relatively recent and developed mostly with western science. There is evidence that most past people and cultures viewed their lives as far more closely tied to their environment. I hear that native American tribes saw their connection closely and tried, in view of that, to think seven generations ahead with major environmental decisions.  I believe the San (bushmen) in my part of the world saw themselves and their environment and the animals they fed on as inseparable. So deep is their understanding as hunter gatherers that they, and I believe some nomadic people abandoned their old people to die at some point – that to me indicates a very deep understanding, that past breeding and adulthood contributing fully to the group, every person at that point was a liability to the group because it was totally dependent on its life-supporting environment.   So thinking holistically doesn’t cut it.  Essential as it is to shift society to a holistic worldview, that will not save humanity any more than it saved any past civilization thinking more holistically.  To save civilization and humanity we have actually to change how we make decisions in our day to day management and lives, and particularly where we operate at scale though institutions and policies.  Only by managing holistically and thus managing complexity can we address all that ails us including global desertification and climate change. The challenge with making holistic management stick Thanks again Allan I’m so appreciating your perspective on these matters. One thing I’m wondering regards the thousands of people trained in holistic management who you’ve mentioned soon revert back to reductionistic management. Are you noticing the proportion of folk for whom it sticks and doesn’t shift over the years? Have you been finding better ways of introducing it that increase the stick rate? Or maybe those for whom it sticks arrive at the training with a different attitude or perspective? This is obviously a crucially important matter and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on how we might increase the odds given we are at the eleventh hour. There are many factors playing on what you call the stick rate and I really have no answers, but continue to observe and try to learn.  Earlier it all seemed so simple – as I discovered what we call the new insights that made holistic management possible (all outlined in our textbook) the early ranchers mainly who sought my help were open about it. They came because they were going broke doing all the “right” things advocated by range scientists, researchers and agricultural economists. They had nothing to lose and were desperate.  Then as literally thousands came to me for training the main appeal was that I could, and did, guarantee doubling their stocking rate while improving the land.  However by the time I was operating in North America and not only in Africa and South America, I knew that any focus on just the land or animals led to serious unintended consequences, but ranchers did not want to hear about social and economic considerations.  I then went through a period of refusing to allow anyone to attend one of my grazing management workshops, unless they first attended a holistic financial planning workshop.  That led to increased successes, and to people thanking me for forcing them to get financial and social factors right first before building fences or increasing cattle. However, despite a published independent study showing early adopters averaged far greater profits (300% greater), the stick rate consistently remained low.  A major factor in this I learned from Prof. Everett Rogers, who wrote the book “Diffusion of Innovations” and who served on a thinktank with me. Rogers describes how when people learn something new they generally give it a new name and twist of their own (ego at play). As a result, within a few months of me starting to train thousands of ranchers and academics in the US, there were about 13 new “grazing systems” being promoted.  Tragically these many people dropped the entire punchline and reason for success – All management being in a holistic context and using the Holistic Planned Grazing process.  Even as I write, I am observing exchanges around the world now saying how we have to mimic the natural movement of herds of large animals in the past.  All of this comes from the Holistic Management framework and my TED Talk  – however, such thinking, combined with the reductionist management of those promoting it, will lead to endless unintended consequences because they are making no attempt to manage the complexity or understand the planning process with livestock that enables any practitioner to guarantee good results. So, in summary, after decades I have no idea how to increase the stick rate or to stop distortion causing confusion and delay in healing our environment, economies, communities and more.  Incidentally this problem is not unique to the concept of Holistic Management, it is universal.  Andre Voisin’s work I noted being totally distorted by academics and farmers, so much so in the US that my wife and I had his book reprinted so people could return to the original work. Also with the brilliant writing of Aldo Leopold in his “Game Management” and his focus on the importance of habitat to any species, I see professional academic wildlife managers advising policies of governments and the large environmental organization today such that some 30 National Parks around where I live are our most shocking examples of habitat destruction and biodiversity loss – far more dangerous than the poaching taking place.  The paradigm shifts required to manage complexity Another question I have is whether you are aware of initiatives to make managing holistically more accessible to everybody. I often come across people that hear your name and start sharing their (typically uninformed) opinions about the grazing side of holistic management. I am passionate about communicating to everyone, be they vegans, anti-livestock activists, or whomever, that the underlying decision making framework is powerfully useful in any context whatsoever and is not inherently tied to holistic grazing. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about this. Dan, we know the problem.  Partly this is our fault but was unavoidable.  There are two counter-intuitive and major paradigm shifts for all of humanity involved in learning for the first time in history how we might manage complexity. Not only that, but most scientists and society do not even know that the greatest danger to humanity is not fossil fuels, livestock, global finance driving environmental destruction, etc.  It is our inability to manage the social, cultural, environmental and economic complexity that is the single cause of almost all that ails and threatens us. First, there was our discovery that it is simply not possible to reverse thousands of years of man-made desertification using all the tools known to humankind and scientists advising world leaders. We are a tool-using species and have always really only had two tools with which to manage our environment – technology in all its ramifications, and fire.  As I explained in the now famous TED Talk, we have no option but to do the unthinkable and use livestock properly managed (meaning with the Holistic Planned Grazing process) to reverse global desertification playing a major role in climate change. Secondly, there is the paradigm-shifting insight that from our emergence as humans, managing to improve our lives as we do, has always been reductionist using a genetically embedded simple decision-making framework. This human underlying decision-making framework is recognisable in all tool-using species and in us from earliest cave dwellers to the most sophisticated team of interdisciplinary scientists today.  Increasingly the world is coming to accept that we live in a holistic and not a mechanistic world. And that daily we live in a web of social, cultural, environmental and economic complexity that is beyond human comprehension. Stripped to the core, all humans make decisions to meet our needs, desires or address problems. And to manage our environment at large we have only technology and fire, or the idea of resting our environment to allow recovery.  When, in such complexity, the context or reason for our actions becomes meeting our needs, desires or addressing problems it can only be called reductionist. So, in summary you are correct, it is a pity that because of all the issues involved in society accepting new insights, and the fact that all human endeavours on any scale have to be through organizations/institutions themselves complex soft systems in Systems Science jargon the profound importance of the development of the Holistic Management framework is being clouded and obscured. Some of this I spoke about recently in the U.K. at their Groundswell gathering of farmers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPqhebuf2dM&feature=youtu.be The individual leadership to inspire and the institutional scale of holistic management we need for meaningful change Now I understand that for a long time but especially in recent years you have been looking at institutional stupidity and what it would mean to manage holistically when it comes to policy development and national and international governance. While the youtube presentation you shared above lays out what it would mean for a whole country to have and manage toward a national holistic context, I’d be curious to hear any of your latest insights or reflections on this subject, and whether you are aware of any promising efforts or experiments in managing holistically at this kind of scale? Let’s see how I can respond with least repetition – perhaps if I use a bulleted summary as I strip this down to the simplest logic and common sense, that we know institutions are incapable of:   We have never doubted we are causing global desertification, and now almost all scientists are agreed – we are causing climate change. This can only mean that our management and policies dictating management are the cause of climate change. There can be no other conclusion. We can no more adapt to climate change than the proverbial slowly boiled frog. So policies change or civilization globally fails with all businesses and human endeavour. If we are to address this grave danger remember it cannot be done by us as individuals. We can only act at large scale though organizations – called institutions when formed for religious or professional purposes. Agriculture is not crop production – it is the production of food and fibre from the world’s land and waters – forestry, fisheries, wildlife food, livestock, wild plants and crop production. Almost all of Earth’s land and oceans are now involved in agriculture – with roughly 6% of the surface growing crops. (20% of the land surface growing crops). Thus about 95% of the Earth’s surface is non-cropland agriculture feeding humans mainly from animal life. Agriculture globally is totally dependent on four processes, through which our ecosystem functions – water cycle, mineral/ nutrient cycle, biological dynamics (life with stability and provided by diversity) and solar energy flow to all life through life. Agriculture is destroying soil, soil life, ocean life, rangelands, savannas, tropical forests – biodiversity, without which civilization cannot continue, is decreasing even in national parks, insect populations falling, continental shelves silting, and all while chemical and electro-magnetic pollution increase and reach every part of the world accumulating in biological food chains and humans. While our mismanagement of coal, oil and gas is extremely dangerous it is theoretically possible to replace fossil resources with benign energy sources using technology. Many minds, including institutional minds, are focussing on alternative energy sources because humanity believes in technology providing solutions. Agriculture is doing even more damage to our life-supporting environment than fossil fuels, ensuring continued desertification and climate change even if fossil fuel use stopped entirely tomorrow. Agriculture is humanity’s Achilles Heel being ignored by institutions – universities, environmental organizations, governments and international agencies including COP – climate gatherings of which 25 have resulted in confusion and inaction. Common sense tells any individual (scientist or lay person) that agriculture should be based on the biological sciences, including ecology, but institutional minds are basing mainstream agriculture on marketing of technology and chemistry. We are tool-using animals – and for all of history have only really had two tools – technology in some form or fire – other than those we have the concept of resting the environment to allow recovery of biodiversity. So, understandably institutions only advocate the use of technology in some form, fire or conservation as the environmental solution to  every problem or policy.   Remember in my TED Talk on desertification I explained why it is simply not possible to address desertification, and thus climate change, using only technology, fire or conservation (allowing biodiversity to recover under protection). Not a single scientist in any field or university has shown where that is wrong in over sixty years. Those are some of the key reminders and all I believe are factual. They are points I have made many times in many words over half a century almost. And they have never been refuted to my knowledge, only ridiculed, rejected and opposed by academics and institutional scientists on the basis of “ proof by authority” not on basis of science or logic. Now to your question as to whether there are any examples, or experiments, at managing at scale holistically?  First, you cannot experiment with managing holistically. This is because you are dealing with the unavoidable complexity of human organizations and nature.  Think of it this way:  WWII was won by Allied leaders with clear goals, good decision-making, superb planning and the most up to date science, while directing research to where most needed. Today, global desertification, mega-fires and climate change feeding on one another are a more profound danger than all wars ever fought.  Holistic Management is a way for humans to use the holistic framework to make better decisions using a holistic context to guide actions, a simple planning process using livestock to reverse desertification, the most up to date science, and an ability to direct research to where most urgently required (using the holistic framework in the research orientation mode).   While this, like WWII, can never be subjected to experimental protocols or design it does not make it anecdotal (as academics say managing holistically is) and we can  of course monitor results.  And there is a mass of data steadily increasing where people are monitoring results. No, there is no example of managing at large scale because that is only possible through institutions and no individuals can bring that about. Let me just take your Permaculture concept as an example. You have a great concept based on the biological sciences and you have many well established principles and designs and practices. Why are you not doing this at scale anywhere in the world after so many years?  Because that can never come about until the public (including Permaculturalists) insists that institutions change and begin developing policy holistically.   Regenerative, Organic, Biodynamic, Sustainable agriculture are all in the same boat – they have good biologically-based foundations generally, but none of them are, or can be, practiced at scale until institutions are obliged by public demand to develop policies in national and international holistic contexts. And  as almost everyone, thanks to the Coronavirus pandemic, can now see how even a tiny invisible virus can do more to the global economy in a month than a world war does in years, maybe – just maybe the youth of today will demand policy development become holistic. Six years ago in London I gave the keynote at the Savory Institute gathering and appealed to all groups in agriculture to not go on for another century arguing the merits and validity of “their solution or practice” but to unite and simply insist on policies being developed holistically.  Not a single scientist in the world can argue for policies to be reductionist, nor can anyone in any political party, branch of agriculture, university, environmental organization or even the global drivers of finance destroying our life-supporting environment.  This is one thing the world could unite about – the need for policy to be holistic in a holistic world needing to address future pandemics if nothing else.   Once the first policy changes in one nation watch the dominoes fall!   This is one thing the world could unite about – the need for policy to be holistic in a holistic world needing to address future pandemics if nothing else. You want PC principles at scale – change policy otherwise it will happen a century too late. Want to save elephants or whales in the wild –want to stop mass emigration to Europe – want to stop drug violence in America – want to stop wasting a Billion dollars a year in the US on noxious weed policy – want to minimize future pandemics – want to save civilization by addressing global desertification, mega-fires and climate change at its root cause?  If any of such concerns mean anything to you and if you have any desire for future generations to enjoy a better and more secure future than the increasingly violent and chaotic world we live in today, then address the management that almost all scientists now agree is the cause of climate change. Something I remind you that only institutions can do, but cannot do until the public insists. There has been not a single case in history of any institution leading when paradigm-shifting insights are involved. That only individuals can lead and keep talking about and spreading the word till it happens. Holistic management and regenerative agriculture and business I was also wondering what you make on the rapidly growing currency of the word “regenerative”. Do you see any value in the widespread shift from the language of “sustainable” to the language of “regenerative”? How do you see the relation between the word “regenerative” and the word “holistic”? While I’m sure much of it is about using a different name without necessarily upgrading the underlying thinking, I have been encouraged by the depth of Carol Sanford’s work on what she calls regenerative or living systems thinking. Are you aware of Carol’s work and if so I’d be curious as to what you make of it? While I cannot be sure, I believe the concept of regenerative agriculture arose through discussions that led Bob Rodale to coin the name. About the same time Bill Mollison was developing Permaculture, Wes Jackson was developing perennial grains, Fukuoka was promoting his work, Bob Rodale was focussed on organic crop production and of course we had the great minds whose shoulders we were standing on – Albert Howard amongst them. I was on the outside of this being an ecologist passionate about wildlife and deeply concerned with the military and political consequences of the desertification problem.  Roger Brown produced a documentary film of me on the site of the ruins of the Chacoan civilization talking about sustainable civilization that I saw as the bigger issue – because throughout history we had been able to sustain people with agriculture but had to abandon the cities to much violence to do so. And I had given a keynote talk to a large conventional agriculture group in which I called for an entirely new agriculture – because so many civilizations had failed under organic / grass fed, etc (in fact under everything people were calling sustainable agriculture)– and now we were facing global failure of civilization under mainstream agriculture.  Bob Rodale and I struck a chord and stayed with one another engaging in deep discussion. It was then that I heard the name regenerative from Bob who coined that term. I loved that and have used it since where appropriate.   As Bob so well put it that day, the new agriculture had to be regenerating soils, soil life, families, communities, towns and economies.  It had to go beyond anything we know today if we were to save civilization as we know it. As Bob so well put it that day, the new agriculture had to be regenerating soils, soil life, families, communities, towns and economies. Unfortunately I believe we are seeing people dumbing it down and simply changing names in far too many instances. In a White Paper on Regenerative Agriculture, published by Rodale Institute written some time after Bob’s death I see the holistic nature and intention has gone and it talks more of regenerating soil. Wonderful, and needed, as that is I am afraid that is not going to regenerate the ocean life, the national parks dying around me, nor the vast desertifying teak forests around me. I can only hope as I die shortly, someone will remember that no agriculture can be truly regenerative unless it is an agriculture covering all of our Earth’s surface that is managed holistically – above politics, institutional egos, competing practices so that it is regenerating economies, communities, towns and cities and addressing climate change.  You ask about Carol Sandford’s regenerative business teachings. I am impressed by her work and particularly her 7 principles of a regenerative business.  Clearly anyone following such practices would have an exceptional team of creative, entrepreneurial, people and the business functioning exceptionally well as she has apparently done for major clients like Dupont, Google and others. Now, rather than me tell you, ask yourself what you think?  Could that truly be regenerative? Remember as you answer this, that without agriculture we cannot have a church, university, town, army, politician, government or ANY business. How regenerative is agriculture answers your question about any of the businesses following those exceptionally good seven principles.  I am afraid, no business is on a solid foundation until institutions through which we manage agriculture at scale are developing policies using the holistic framework (or better when developed).  Hope for the future Allan thanks again for the candor and depth of your comments on all these important points – I’m feeling excited to start sharing our interchange with permaculturalists and many others I know will deeply appreciate your insights.  The final question I have for now is about what, in these harrowing times, gives you most hope, or excites you the most. Where do you see the most potential for positive cultural transformation in the coming decade or so? I recently read a survey that stated that a higher percentage of young people of today want to live truly meaningful lives than with previous generations. That gives me hope is something like climate change or the present coronavirus pandemic fires them up to look at concepts such as we are talking of, known, but ridiculed and blocked by institutional paradigm paralysis, for over half a century. This pandemic is yet one more example of reductionist policy development leading to unintended consequences.  Many brilliant medical minds reducing the global cultural, economic and environmental complexity to “how do we control this virus” and developing policy. And the policies doing more economic damage than even major wars.  There are more such pandemics to come, and we are being overwhelmed by desertification and climate change.  In every case policies will be developed by narrowly trained specialists in the context of the problem and as this continues the unintended consequences will be ever escalating desertification, megafires, pandemics, violence and social breakdown. All of this, as we knew forty years ago, so easy to begin addressing sensibly using all available science by simply developing all policies in a holistic context – national in the case of nations, and a global holistic context in other cases. This though cannot happen unless the youth of today insist on institutional change. If you’re interested in learning more about holistic management in a farming context, visit the Savory Institute, Holistic Management International, Inside-Outside Management, and Regrarians. For applications of Holistic Management focused more on decision making in general, visit All Points Design or Dan’s own Holistic Decision Making. Was this article useful? Become a Patron to support the creation of more pieces like this and to access support in applying holistic management and much else to grow your permaculture design capacities.

In this episode I catch up with Simon Marshall after our prior conversation about where he wanted to take his permaculture design practice back in Episodes 37 and 38. It is quite amazing how much of what he was aspiring toward then has manifested itself in the meantime, and along the way we discuss: The complexities of permaculture process and project facilitation when many stakeholders are involved The challenge of breaking the centre of gravity of design projects out of an arrest disorder paradigm towards regenerating life The idea of mental energies at the vital, automatic, sensitive and conscious levels (ah la Carol Sanford) Using inner aims to become conscious and transform process outcomes Much else! I also reflect a little on the wild times we’re in at the start and share a project update at the end. To summarise the update: Allan Savory will be our next guest, followed in the subsequent episode by a review of Scott and Sam from Porvenir design‘s holistic context Several interviews with David Holmgren sharing his permaculture design process journey are the plan after that which will feed right into Phase Two’s conversation about regenerating permaculture by going back to its originating impulse I’m in discussions with David Holmgren about the taking our course on Advanced Permaculture Design Process online The first MPS book creation process is gathering momentum I share some flavours of the recent poll results The regular gathering of project supporters is going strong as we all depend our design process literacy in theory and practice together. Learn more on the project patreon page.

In this episode my good friend Javan Kerby Bernakevitch from All Points Design in Canada interviews me about the various projects I am and have been part of, including permablitz, Very Edible Gardens, Holistic Decision Making, Living Design Process, and of course this one – Making Permaculture Stronger. Initially recorded for Javan’s youtube channel, thanks Javan for permission to share it here too.

This episode is a conversation with Emma Morris from Aotearoa New Zealand who fills us in on the last several chapters of her learning journey around regenerative education practices. It’s a great chat and I can’t wait to hear how the learning centre project Emma is involved in unfolds from here. You can find the project here, and sign up for the project newsletter here. The Learning Framework Emma and colleagues have arrived at. Close-up of the middle section Another awesome project graphic I found – love it!

The idea for this this episode came to me about 20 minutes before I hit record. I share a second pass on a reflection process I’d just finished applying to Making Permaculture Stronger. It is all based on stuff from Carol Sanford’s The Regenerative Life book, a series of free morning meetings she recently ran, and stuff I’ve learned by being part of one of her Seed Communities. I’d be tickled if you’d drop me a line letting me know how this episode landed for you. Oh yes, if you’re curious how I got started with Carol Sanford’s stuff, it all started with this unforgettably disruptive experience right here.

Photo from http://lierlouandthevillage.org/ With thanks to Anna Lenna for a second great chat – check out our first chat here. Here is Anna Lena’s summary of our exchange from here: Dan, founder of Living Design Process from Australia and I are speaking about empty houses in the countryside and how performance art speaks to spontaneous design processes. In our conversation we are strolling through the landscapes of our recent experiences and touch on the conundrum of empty yet unavailable houses in Balaguier and the question how to enliven rural abandoned areas. Could some of these empty places host young people who are drawn to bring life and land-based experiments to the countryside? Especially in times of confinement, many summer house owners cannot come – how to begin a dialogue with house owners that could host other activities in their empty places? Dan shares how many of the people he works with are asking deep fundamental questions as part of the Covid time. Questions rise anew, like: “What am I doing with my life or/and with my land?”. In one of his projects Dan works on this question with two performance artists and found that the spirit of alive improvisation is something that deeply resembles his design processes. In the conversation we explore how the process of creating place and dance are resembling each other in their open-ended, responsive nature. Performance arts as well as living design are practices of “being present and alive and in the moment, listening deeply and letting each next move emerge in real time”, as Dan says. Here’s a link to Lierlou and the Village – the name of the project Anna-Lena is part of. And here’s the actual village: Photo from http://lierlouandthevillage.org/ Finally, here’s is a link to that exchange with Han that Dan mentions regarding the dance and design process connection.

Scott Gallant The second half of my initial conversation with Scott Gallant from Porvenir Design where Scott asks me questions about my facilitatory approach to professional design consultancy work. Enjoy and if you missed episode 41 I’d recommend checking that out first. Also a heads up that in my next chat with Scott we’ll be reviewing Porvenir Design’s Holistic Context you can check out in advance here.

I was delighted when Scott Gallant from Porvenir Design emailed me earlier in the year: Hi Dan, I wanted to reach out and introduce myself after having (finally!) stumbled upon the MPS project. I just wrapped up listening to the Phase 2 podcast and I am all in! A quick jot about myself, my name is Scott Gallant and I am a permaculture designer and educator based in Costa Rica. I’ve been deep in this field for 10 years, 8 of which were spent managing a farm and building out my curriculum at a well regarded site called Rancho Mastatal. In the last few years I’ve been full time in the design/install business here in Latin America with my firm, Porvenir Design. Tropical agroforestry and permaculture education are really my burgeoning areas of expertise. I’ve had the chance to lead or co-teach 14 PDCs and countless short courses, and have been fortunate enough to be interviewed for a number of podcasts over the last few years. I set this scene to let you know that I am all in, although I resonate deeply with your message of approaching permaculture from a skeptics background. For the last few years I’ve been obsessed with the pedagogy of teaching PDCs and the process of design in my client based work. Incrementally, and sometimes abruptly, I tweak these process. I’ve also felt quite surprised by the lack of conversations around these topics and have constantly been pulled toward constructive critiques of permaculture. Clearly, the bubble of permaculture in Central America and perhaps to some degree North America has not been invaded by the MPS project. So, first, thank you for your work. It is essential to, well, making permaculture stronger. Second, I’m interested in getting more involved. I’m slowly making my way through some past posts and will continue to do so over the weeks ahead. If you have any suggestions for involvement they are much appreciated. And third, I am quite interested in mentorship in the field of professional design and education. At the full peak age of 33, I find myself seeking mentorship in order to continue helping students and clients truly dive into the permaculture domain with confidence. In this community that you’ve formed, are there any obvious routes for some form of mentorhsip? Apologies for the long message. Love the work and looking forward to dipping in.Scott Gallant In his second email Scott continued: As I’ve been listening I am really quite curious to learn more about how folks actually implement these ideas with clients, how this changes the teaching within a PDC for inspired instructors, etc. I have a client visit in Puerto Rico soon; outcome will be a concept plan for bringing back to life the family farm and converting an old church on the property into some public facing bar/restaurant/distillery.  The outcome is far from a detailed master plan, but rather will involve a day of visioning/goal setting with stakeholders, two days on the site, and then creating a planning document that provides broad patterns for access, land use suitability, water/soil/plant systems, and recommendations on phasing, species, further resources, etc. I give you this context, because I am most interested in using this project to trial out some of these new ideas from MPS, BUT the actual action of, say, “unfolding the potential of a site’s essence” or “starting from a whole” alludes me a bit. Part of me believe this deeper ability can only be brought forth through years of practice/mentorship and such. Part of me wonders if this is more or less what I already do with clients. I would love to brainstorm how to take what others and myself do now as professional designers/installers and apply these ideas to go from good to great. When I read the comments I don’t see too much where others are saying, “Wow, I’ve been doing this upside down and need to completely change my practice.” It seems like folks are on the same page theoretically, but for professional permaculture designers and educators, how should this exploration of knowledge change our work on the ground, our conversations with clients, our teaching lessons, our contract deliverables, the physical landscapes we manage? Nothing more needed to be said. This is exactly the kind of energy I want to be engaging with so I invited Scott to join me for a recorded conversation, the first instalment of which I share here. Now before our chat, Scott emailed me some of his questions. As well as speaking to those he asked live during our chat, I thought I’d have a go at writing a comment on (if not an answer proper) to some of his emailed ones here too. SG: How do you put the theory of everything your podcast has explored into practice with actual paying clients? What process do you use for “essence reveal,” “story of place”, realizing potential etc. Basically what has it meant to put this theory into practice for you?  DP: That’s a big question! I’m actually writing a book right now attempting to answer it (watch this space!). One comment is that I had found and am continuing to evolve ways of doing this prior to learning about the Living Systems Thinking concepts of revealing essence, story of place (which is one way of going about revealing essence), and developing potential. These newer-for-me concepts are increasingly infusing my work, however, and sort of strengthening, focusing and deepening aspects of what I was already doing. SG: I am very curious about the shift toward “mentorship” style design work with clients. How have clients responded to this versus you directing them what to do? Do you find that this process is more challenging/more expensive/less accessible for clients? How has it changed your deliverables/pricing/types of clients? DP: If this isn’t what a prospective client wants then with very few exceptions I don’t accept the job, meaning that the people I do work with love it in that even if they didn’t know it, and thought they wanted something more conventional, this turns out to be exactly what they really wanted. As in being supported and empowered to be in control of their own design and creation processes, which is one of the most fulfilling things I reckon you can do in life. There are ways my approach is more challenging, given that part of what I’m doing is consciously challenging them to steer their own ship and gently disrupting their habitual patterns toward a more living process. There are ways that in the medium to long term that it is less challenging, given that they are in control and have complete ownership over what is happening, where what is happening is gradually revealing a form to the project that is beautifully adapted to them and their setting, avoiding the common challenges of trying to understand and implement some external expert’s cleverly imposed ideas that even if successfully realised typically turn out a less-than-great fit. As for expense and accessibility, it depends :-). I would say that on average, however, my approach is significantly cheaper and more accessible for clients. Re deliverables I am selling a facilitation service not a design product, re pricing I have moved to an hourly rate rather than a lump sum for a certain class of plan, and re clients they have all changed into the kinds of folk I really want to be working with and they pretty much always end up becoming good friends. SG: Given the last year(s) of learning and insights from the MPS work how has your design work AND PDC teaching changed the most? DP: Far out Scott you are asking great questions that make me stop and think! There are so many changes but what what floats to the top for design work is moving from being an expert consulting designer to resourcing the design and creation processes of others. As for PDC teaching I have only really approached PDC’s in the new (for me) way, though one shift is moving away from having participants present a pretty-looking design to having them present the story of their experience of moving through a sound design process. That’ll do for now – hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did and I am delighted to have Scott as a conversation partner and colleague the work of consciously evolving the ways we practice permaculture design on the ground, which of course is the only place it really matters.

VEG’s context Hey all so today I share a little bit about holistic decision making – the whole-oriented decision making practice I have adapted and evolved from Allan Savory’s Holistic Management decision making framework. I’ve had a bunch of folk requesting more info about this lately and I’m feeling it very relevant to this historical moment when many of us are making big decisions about the shape of our lives and enterprises moving out of the first wave of coronavirus. Hope is helpful – You can listen to my incredible subsequent interview with Allan Savory here, find more info here and there is a series of articles a bunch of people have found helpful here. Here’s our family context which I refer to along with VEG’s context above. Here’s an old vid where Adam and I talk about the impact of this stuff on our business (during a workshop we had Darren Doherty come and run for us): https://vimeo.com/86850657 I mention and thanks Allan Savory during the chat and share how he is currently in crisis (holistic) management mode of the African Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe. Visit the website here to learn more and donate. Here’s what’s up for him from his facebook page: I would like to thank those of you who have donated to support Africa Centre for Holistic Management, which we deeply appreciate. Due to the pandemic crisis Jody and I have had to assume the management role of ACHM. All income has stopped, and Victoria Falls hotels lie empty. We have done the best of holistic financial planning to survive at least 18 months till income might start flowing. Priorities are to save the people managing the land and wildlife and stopping the poaching that is ramping up as hungry people try to feed their families. We are feeding staff and paying monthly what little we can in very tight plan. And as usual things happen! Last night the elephants tore up our water pipes so replan!! Because we operate under a government rated as one of the most corrupt in the world and 600% inflation of the local virtual currency, we have had to install a new donate button to stop government and banks raiding donations. Now 100% donated gets to us to save the people, wildlife and all we hold dear. If you can support please go to front page at https://www.africacentreforholisticmanagement.org and every dollar will I assure you go a long way in this broken failed economy and help a lot of wildlife and poor people. https://youtu.be/kQGy0vxeL_k Allan Savory laying out aspects of the approach

Hey all. I am excited to be here trying out yet anther new experiment in making this project as accessible and practical and interesting as possible. You see I’ve recently started becoming friends with a group of graduates of Schumacher college. Mainly Anna Lena from France and Ahmed from Bahrain. Anna Lena and Ahmed initially reached out, having come across some of my stuff on Living Design Process online. They sensed resonance with their own inquiry into what they are calling dialogue with place. After attending one of their online gatherings, the resonance was confirmed, and we all felt potential in continuing to explore the obvious synergies. So we had this lovely emergent conversation just the other day where the idea emerged of checking in weekly and sharing for ten minutes or so what’s alive in us relating to our our practical projects. Where I realised I could release my bit where I share about my design process adventures here. Potentially as a weekly sort of update. This fits in with the strong will I’ve been feeling toward starting to share more of this Living Design Process approach I’ve alluded to but haven’t yet really dived into directly. https://youtu.be/XrP0i8JF2qA I’m not sure whether to use the audio episode format, the video format, or both, so I’ll share both here and ask some of you what you reckon will work best moving forward. Also here is a that link to Lierlou and the Village – the name of the wonderful project Anna-Lena is part of. Thanks so much to Anna Lena for the chat and to Ahmed also for the way in which this all emerged.

This episode is the second half of the conversation started in Episode 37. In which permaculture designer Simon Marshall and I explore ways he can evolve his practice in desired directions (and I have some useful realisations about how I’ll evolve my approach to this kind of conversation in future).

This episode marks new ground for this podcast. I share the start of what will become a several-episode conversation working with permaculture designer Simon Marshall. Simon reached out and asked if I’d help him explore ways we can evolve his practice in desired directions. In this episode we set the scene and in the next episode we’ll dive right into the business at hand. I hope you enjoy this new direction for the podcast and huge thanks to Simon for being up for giving this a try. In this episode we set the scene and we’ll get down to work proper in the next episode. You can visit Simon’s existing website here and here are some design illustrations he shares in the chat (and that I reference there by image number). Image One Err, let’s call this a continuation of Image One Image Two Image Three

I’m so happy to know Bill Reed (from Regenesis Group) and to have him back on the show for the second time I’ve had someone on for the third time. If you listened to either of the prior chats you already know you’re in for a treat. Thanks again Bill and I’m already looking forward to interview number four.

Jason Gerhardt teaching Such a pleasure to reconnect and get back in resonance with Jason after quite a while in this free-flowing conversation. We talk the current pandemic, ways of responding individually and collectively, and continue our themes around design process and story of people/place. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did and thanks so much for the comment from permaculturalist Wesley Rowe that listening to this is “like peering in on conversations I have with friends” :-).

In this episode I reflect on how the four levels of paradigm Carol Sanford shared in episode 33 apply both to my experience of navigating the coronavirus crisis and to permaculture as a whole. Hope you get something out of this and here’s to our collaborative evolution toward regenerating life together. A few links: Carol Sanford’s site Buy the Regenerative Life The video of Chris Martenson from Peak Prosperity that I refer to in the chat The Making Permaculture Stronger patreon page

Carol Sanford mid-sentence during this episode… Such a deep honour to have Carol Sanford return to the show after the wild ride that was episode nineteen. In this episode Carol takes us deep into one of her living systems frameworks – that of the four paradigms she calls value return, arrest disorder, do good, and regenerate life. This framework has challenging implications for permaculture, and as I explain I am excited with the clarity I believe this framework can bring to our individual and collective efforts to navigate the current global coronavirus pandemic. I will be using the platform of this podcast to look at the current situation through a process lens for the foreseeable future. All other bets are off for now. Check out Carol’s website here, her new book The Regenerative Life here, her seed communities here, and the Deep Pacific Change Agent Community (that I am part of) here. The white paper she mentioned can be read in a series starting here, and she has a Regenerative Paradigm website too. Stay well and until soon. I will endeavour to keep these podcasts coming from my family’s mini permaculture refuge (that has all been created within the last three weeks). I’m also happy to publish the video of this chat with Carol but I’ll let one or two of you say you’d like that before I make the effort :-). What came in the post today – hooray! Snippet from page 162 – hoot hoot!

Here we are. Hovering on the cusp of Phase Two of this project. Toward the end of 2019, we set the scene by way of chopping down a certain tree. We then disappeared for a while.31 We took a breath. We pondered. We came back. It is time to start navigating the path ahead, starting right here, right now. Before we take an actual step, however, let us metamorphose into birds and catch an updraft to consider relevant patterns from up high. In other words, we’ll zoom out to get a sense of some of the things we’d like to make true of our subsequent steps forward. Toward this end, I ask you to bear with me as I explore a fresh framework for thinking about different ways of relating to permaculture as design. This arose after a previous framework led me to the question of “what is a community of practice, anyway?” Looking up that phrase led me first to the distinction between a community of practice and a community of interest and second to the related notion of a community of inquiry. Together, these three then came together in my mind to generate a further framework.32 Communities of Interest, Practice and Inquiry There is a group of folk in the world that are interested in permaculture design. Within this group there are folk who are not only interested in but who practice permaculture design. Within this practicing group there are in turn folk who consciously inquire into permaculture design. Who do research and experiments and make the results available to other inquirers as well as those practicing without inquiring or interested without practicing. I’m not fussed about the exact lines of differentiation between these three nested layers. The lines can remain somewhat fuzzy so long as you agree that it is possible to draw the lines.33 The point is that it is possible to be interested in permaculture design without practicing it, and it is possible to practice permaculture design without (consciously and explicitly) inquiring into the way of designing that you have learned to use and are using. None of these are good or bad, better or worse. They are options. Now. Let us move from the idea of groups or sets to groups that have internal connectivity, whether online, offline, or both. Here, we move from groups to communities. As I’m guessing any permaculturalist knows, communities are where it’s at. From here on as I develop this diagram I am always talking about communities, not just sets of individuals. I personally am part of a large community of folk interested in permaculture design, a smallish community of colleagues who go beyond interest to practice permaculture design, and a tiny community of colleagues who go beyond practice to consciously inquire into permaculture design.34 Overall Ratios, Flows, Blockages and Orbits We can now consider the overall flows, ratios, blockages and orbits between and within the three kinds of communities. Along the way I’ll start laying out what this means for Phase Two of this project. Flows and Ratios The above diagrams are not to scale, and numbers of people within each of these three nested community types obviously fluctuate. As far as flows go, the way folk become permaculture design practitioners is via interest. The way folk become researchers or inquirers, surely, is as a result of questions that arise within their practice. Where, ideally at least, the findings then move back out through the other communities, and in some cases even out into the beyond-permaculture community and culture.35 Indeed permaculture itself was birthed from a two-person community of intense interest then practice and inquiry that lasted a couple of years and catalysed huge waves of interest and in some cases practice in others. The following diagram captures this sense of overall flows in a very simplified, limited way. The black arrows represent people transitioning into communities at each of the three levels, and the grey lines the inquirer’s findings then shared in an outward direction. Presumably more findings are shared with (and are relevant to) practitioners, some subset of these are then shared with those in communities of interest, and some further subset of these may end up being shared with the wider world (indeed some of them may end up catalysing folk to get interested in the first place). In the inward direction, as indicated by the differing arrow sizes, more people get interested than end up practising and a similar reduction occurs as we move from practice to inquiry. Now there are presumably some desirable ratios between the respective numbers of folk in the three levels that when departed from too much reduce the health of permaculture as a whole. Clearly at any moment there are many more people, perhaps two or three orders of magnitude more, interested in permaculture design than practicing it. Something like the same reduction probably occurs in the move from practicing to inquiring (as in inquiring and practising and interested). My sense is that if there is not some certain minimum amount of inquiry happening that is folding back to enrich the communities of practice (and indirectly interest) that those communities are more likely to lose their way.36 And where if the amount of actual practice relative to interest is too low it becomes a situation like a pig-owners club I once read about that quietly disbanded when they discovered that not one member actually owned a pig! Making Permaculture Stronger is not explicitly focused on increasing the numbers of people interested in permaculture design. I am glad that many people and projects are, and indeed the things I do focus on are utterly dependent on their important work. Part of this work is being in position such that when external circumstances (climate shocks, disease shocks, economic shocks, energy shocks, etc) compel more and more members of the general public to look beyond denial, despair, anger and protesting against, escapism, isolationism, survivalism etc. There permaculture awaits, offering a profoundly different way forward. A way focused on designing ourselves back into our local ecosystems and our local ecosystems back into us in a way that boosts community resilience and the health of the whole. Here, it is essential that introductory information, courses and books about permaculture are readily accessible. Indeed, if there were not already many growing communities of interest in permaculture design, this project couldn’t exist. With reference to this new framework, I can now start honing in on what Making Permaculture Stronger is about as it moves forward. Where I’m clear a core focus is participating in and supporting the existence and health of communities of permaculture design practice and inquiry in service of permaculture’s overall health and evolution. Reflecting on this, I am particularly interested in helping to increase the practice side of the interest:practice ratio as high as it wants to go. Once practice is up in a healthy place then the same approach can be taken to upping the number of folk engaged in communities of inquiry. Which brings us directly to certain systemic dynamics that are blocking key flows that I see as highly desirable. Namely what is happening where the question marks are in this diagram: Blockages and Orbits Interest to Practice It is a lot easier to become interested in permaculture design than it is to start practicing it. Let me back that claim up. People regularly tell me they are interested in permaculture design but struggling to find a path from interest into practice. “Tell them to go do a PDC,” you say. Thing is, they all already have at least one PDC, sometimes several. Completing a PDC does not get you across the line. A PDC generally takes you from interested to more interested. The domain of practice still eludes you. As Jason Gerhardt put it, you get shot out of a PDC into a void as large as the whole world. As Ben Haggard put it, you leave this energy-building conversion experience to confront the sheer disjunct between the energy and approach you just experienced and the reality of your everyday life and social circles. I attempt to catch these facts in the framework diagram by making the line between the outside world and communities of interest faint and dashed (i.e., highly permeable) and the line between interest and practice solid. Now I’ll explain the various aspects of the situation that I’ve represented in the diagram. Maybe for fun you can try and decipher yourself first? So the thick black line is folk initially entering communities of interest in permaculture design. After cruising along and perhaps deepening their interest a little, some of them continue being interested, some of them leave to pursue the next thing that has come along (in some cases to later return), some of them do a PDC. The PDC arrow shows a deepening of interest and a bringing up against the cusp of the transition into practice. However as I shared above many people while keen to start practicing get deflected back into the orbit of interest. Some make a second or third attempt by doing a second or third PDC over time. Where of course some get through, as shown. But not that many, as best I can tell. Often those that break through are either already designers of some kind, or are hard-headed and determined enough to just keep charging at the boundary till it yields. Anyways, supporting interested folk to start practicing permaculture design within a community of practice is henceforth a core focus of Making Permaculture Stronger. In the below diagram I show this by helping make at least a section of the boundary between the two more permeable and friendly to navigate. I have no question that this will increase the numbers of folk making it through. I also want to be clear I hold no assumption that everyone will want in. It is totally legitimate to do a PDC then not continue to practice permaculture design. I’m talking about serving the folk that come out of a PDC wanting or called to start practicing, without any expectation of anyone else. I also want to acknowledge the great and many permaculture inquirers out there who are already doing exactly this fine work of helping folk across the line – kudos to you, please reach out and share your learnings with me, and let’s continue to up our game together! My currently active interventions in this space are: hosting a six-weekly gathering of project supporters where we’re developing our permaculture design skills together writing a book sharing the first Phase of this project in an accessible way focused on actual design practice writing another book clearly showing how what I’m calling Living Design Process works on the ground Practice to Inquiry Another category of folk who are semi-regularly in touch have already been practicing permaculture design at a professional level for several or even five or ten years. They have made it through the membrane between interest and practice in their own unique way. However they now find themselves bumping up against certain systemic issues we’ve heard so many of my podcast guests (and myself) mention: Clients not able to receive / understand designs Designs getting second guessed Designs never being implemented Designed systems failing to co-evolve once implemented General sense of disillusionment with the whole design approach they’ve been taught and are trying to make work Sense that a different, better, more inclusive and successful way forward is possible, yet are unsure about how to make some of these new flavours work within their existing business or value-exchange model One way I think about this is that it is all very well and good to make it across the line and to really truly start practising permaculture design. What we generally don’t realise until many years later is that there is this massive rut we almost inevitably fall into. It is a rut that leads to the complaints above. It is the rut of practicing permaculture design using the default design process paradigm of our wider culture. The rut is made from ideas including: design is fundamentally a mechanical process of assembling elements into whole systems permaculture design is a process of inserting objects into empty space design is primary a noun as in a professional-looking picture that is drawn by a qualified expert then handed over to the ‘clients’ the way to create something is first to finish a rationally considered detailed design only then to implement it permaculture design practice is about becoming a designer who does designs for others what ‘clients’ say they want is what they want other have already figured out permaculture design process so we can just run with what they said along with many other ideas we need not crack open right now… Which as I write this gets me reflecting. I feel that some folk have to escape the rut and deepen their practice and make it into a community of inquiry to generate fresh understandings from outside of the rut that then become ladders or frames folk still in the rut can use to get out or clamber clean over it. Where everyone involved supports each-other to stay the heck away from the rut and when they (almost inevitably) start falling back in… Makes me think that part of Making Permaculture Stronger’s interest is calling attention to the rut, growing living bridges right over it, and in the process making the line between communities of practice and inquiry more permeable also: My current experiments in this space of supporting existing designers (including myself) to transform, deepen and grow their practice in community are: Continuing to record interviews with experienced designers and hear about their rut-escaping/hopping adventures Starting a series of podcast episodes where I work one-on-one to support existing designers to transform, deepen and grow their practice. Flick me a message if this sounds like a bit of you and you want to get in line. Part of my emerging intention here is to help create, consolidate and strengthen global and local communities of practicing permaculture designers who are consciously deepening their practice and building unprecedented levels of shared permaculture design process literacy. I mean what the heck – you’re only young once, right? Other Foci Emerging from this Exercise In addition to supporting interested parties to get practicing and practicing parties to deepen their practice, here are two more places I’ll be focusing attention as integral parts of Phase Two: Consciously supporting the development of communities of inquiry My main way of doing this is this blog and podcast and all the conversations happening inside and around them. This feels like it is growing and I’m excited for that. I feel like the main thing is co-creating more spaces and places to support each other’s inquiries and sharings. An annual or bi-annual distributed online gathering? Who knows! One clear inclination I have here is to partner with or at least contribute more to existing forums such as the excellent Permaculture Design Magazine. Within community of inquiry, co-developing process understandings aligned with Permaculture’s originating impulse Now I’ve gone and chopped the tree down, alongside the above things I’ll be focusing on, I want to support myself and others to develop and share process experiments and understandings that grow from and resonate with permaculture’s core. With what Ben Haggard referred to as permaculture’s original creative impulse. Part of this is starting to share more and more about what I’m calling Living Design Process, which is one humble attempt at just that. I am also motivated to continue exploring more of the riches the regenerative living systems thinking approach of Carol Sanford and the Regenesis crew have to offer permaculture. In particular to increasingly use Living Systems Frameworks to non-judgmentally lift our game as permaculture designers. Wrapping Up Okay, that gives you a head up on what is happening from here, toward Making Permaculture Stronger’s current purpose: Making Permaculture Stronger inspires creative exploration and dialogue around permaculture design, in a way that develops our ability to think and act creatively as a community, to enable permaculture practitioners to effect the large scale systemic change we need. Thank you, bless you, and catch you amidst the fun times ahead! Endnotes

That’s right, the February 2020 issue of Permaculture Design Magazine features an article by my good self on the topic of generative transformation (and the below chart). Adapted from a series of past posts here on Making Permaculture Stronger, editor Rhonda Baird invited a contribution and this topic felt like a natural fit with the episode’s focus on emergent design. I can’t wait to get my hands on the whole issue and if you feel the same way go order a copy here or subscribe and support their great service to the permaculture community. As a prelude to this project picking itself back up again after an unexpectedly long summer hibernation (on the surface at least!), I share both a PDF of the article as it appeared in the mag and I’ve recorded a podcast episode where I read the article out for your listening pleasure. I also include Rhonda Baird’s excellent opening comments from the issue’s editorial: Emergent design was one of the leading takeaways for me from our issue exploring Design Process (Permaculture Design #108). Most teachers, according to my understanding, approach the design process as a static, linear one which requires the designer to see and know all things from original principles—implementing them with flawless perfection. The resulting imprint of our imagination onto reality might make Plato proud, but it probably doesn’t happen very often in reality. Recognizing and valuing the fluid, responsive, and messy reality of design and implementation is crucially important. Perhaps it is so important because it requires us to be humble and question our assumptions. But recognizing this messy reality also helps students and clients proceed by accepting there will be valuable mo- ments for feedback and by making adjustments along the way. Adaptability and imaginative response are wonderful foundations for survival and sustainability. More to the point, emergent design allows us to find the growing edge of complex systems and respond ap- propriately. We talk about the concept of “the edge is where the action is.” Permaculturists know the capacity to identify and engage that edge in our rapidly changing world is essential to our success in pushing systems in a positive, life-affirming direction. The more experience we have in design and implementation, the more intuitive our processes become so that design takes less time and realizes more success. How can we work together to ensure others recognize the value of this work? Rhonda Baird – opening words of editorial for issue #115 of the Permaculture Design Magazine Enjoy and catch you very soon with much sharing about the emerging intentions this project will be generatively transforming itself toward in the coming months :-).

In our first ever conversation, Ben Haggard of Regenesis Group shares his history with and perspective on permaculture. This episode catalysed waves of reflection that are blowing my mind. Yes, I was struck with the profound clarity and depth of what Ben shared. Then the sheer resonance of the relevance to exactly where Making Permaculture Stronger is at – well that pretty much knocked me off my seat. You could say I’m still climbing back up off the floor :-). I don’t know about you, dear listener/reader, but I have the real sense that this conversation is itself a nodal intervention in Making Permaculture Stronger’s ongoing evolution. It is like I can feel the energy shifting and growing and generatively transforming throughout my entire being and hence the being of this project. New levels of Will are awakening. I mean I use the terms potential and development (who doesn’t) and before this chat I would have said I had a fairly clear, coherent grasp on what they are. Not any more. I was almost dazzled by the clarity Ben gives these terms in a way that resonates deep in my bones. Then, when he spoke about the idea of permaculture’s originating impulse, well, game over. Let me pen a few reflections on each. Potential After decades of experience and reflection in collaboration with a tight-knit community of practice, Ben has reached a fascinating perspective on what potential is. As I understand him, he sees the potential (or the possible contribution) of something as existing in the tension between that thing’s deep, enduring, inherent character and the ever-changing reality of the context in which it is nested and in particular what this context calls for in this particular “historical and evolutionary moment.” To identify the potential of a farm, a garden, a person, a family, a business, an organisation, a blog project, we need to ask: what is the unique character of this being? then what is currently called for in the immediate, local, and greater wholes it is nested within?, and what could happen here that would harmonise these two things? Which brings us to… Development Clearly, potential often remains latent. For Ben, development is then the practice of actually revealing and manifesting the potential inherent in something, which involves removing anything in the way and becoming more and more relevant and valuable to context. Originating Impulse When Ben first mentioned this phrase late in our chat, I knew immediately it was going to inform my very next steps with Making Permaculture Stronger. So take this as a sneak preview where I’d invite you to start sitting in the space of this all-important question: what was permaculture’s originating impulse? Please don’t rush – take your time with this – there will be space to chime in with what arises for you very soon. One thing here I’d invite if you come across any sound bites or text that speaks of this originating impulse to you, especially if from the early days of permaculture, please send it through to me and I may well include it in the upcoming post. Other Notable Threads what Ben said about permaculture’s usual initiation/conversion experiences and how these can make it very difficult to bring the ideas into one’s existing ways of working I think was well worth further exploration. I mention it here as a reminder to come back to this in future as appropriate. Any thoughts? This idea of the word place as a rare world in English in that it includes people, landscape etc etc… the idea that if you can be with a person or other living entity as it is, you are taking it as whole (as opposed to our default pattern of fragmenting things by paying attention to their various attributes) Links to Stuff Ben is involved in Visit Regenesis Group here. Learn about the Regenerative Practitioner Training here. Learn about the book Ben wrote with Pamela Mang here (Regenerative Development & Design: A Framework for Evolving Sustainability) Here is the chat with Bill Reed where we dive deep into function, being and will Ben on Place https://vimeo.com/202498056