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Transcript of a Permaculture Design Course byB. Mollison (1.0-4)
First Introduction
(Thomas Fischbacher)t.fischbacher@soton.ac.uk
The presumably most fundamental issue underlying the present converging financial, climate, food,energy, and environmental crises is that most of us only have a very dim perception of what it actuallywould mean to "live sustainably" if one were for once to take that notion seriously. Quite a number of people seem to have this vague idea that the destruction of our natural resources is kind of inevitable asthe alternative would invariably involve "going back to the stone age".Related to this problem is a very widespread misconception in our society concerning the notions of "ethics" and "ecology". Almost all people in our society perceive these as what one may call "must-not-do" disciplines: they are widely thought to exclusively deliver prohibitions. Many a book on ecology hasbeen written whose introduction starts out mentioning "The Limits to Growth". Likewise (and somewhatbizarrely) there are ethical banks who seem to think they could make a point towards prospectivecustomers concerning their ethical standards by measuring it in terms of the amount of profits misseddue to adherence to ethical principles.But is this all appropriate? Should there not be another side to both ethics and ecology, one that does notdemand abstaining from certain behaviour, but mandates certain types of action? How does "the activeside" of ecology look like? Simply stated, there only can be one answer: Stabilization and improvementof our natural resources, especially where they were degraded through previous human interference. Inother words:
Gardening
. Is it possible to do this in such a way that at the same time, we can meet all theessential needs of the human population? While this question is most central to the very existence of mankind, and the need for an answer more urgent than ever, man has not yet managed to finally solvethis puzzle. Nevertheless, as Nobel Laureate Dario Fo would say, "Great People are born out of necessity": the problems in particular of the last few decades are of a very special and rather novel kind.Therefore, one should not be overly surprised to see that some people took them as a strong incentive toinvestigate this question much deeper and find ways to do better than we did so far.One should, however, be aware that here, we are not dealing with an issue of the "someone else will findsome solution -- just leave that to the well-paid experts" type. Fundamentally, one idiot can create moredevastation than all professors in the world can repair. That is the tragedy of human existence. So,getting out of the mess we got ourselves into will certainly need our combined effort. And quite heroiceffort indeed. In the end, it will be up to
 you
to get your garden going and up to
me
to get mine going.Bill Mollison, who received the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize")for his "Permaculture" concept in 1981, managed to demonstrate quite dramatically what can beachieved by working with nature rather than trying to impose our will on it by force and gave many
 
courses in which he taught his integrated framework. In these days, there are Permaculture associationsin many countries that offer standardized "Permaculture Design Courses" based on Bill's lectures, and,in particular, the material in the Permaculture Designer's Manual. This set of lectures is atypographically more friendly re-edited variant (extended with many additional comments) of a freelyavailable (in PDF form, athttp://www.bettertimesinfo.org/pdc_all.pdf 
 
) transcript of one of the originalPermaculture Design Courses given by Bill Mollison back in 1981.This material is interesting for many different reasons. For one, it is a free resource which gives quite adetailed idea what Permaculture is about. Likewise, it should serve to give a good idea of whatPermaculture actually is not about! While Permaculture to a large extent is a clever amalgamation of rather sound simple physical, engineering, and ecological principles, it certainly is not some mysticesoteric occult Hippie New-Age woo woo hanky panky. True, Permaculture is attractive to manydifferent groups of people, which may in particular include Hippies, Pagans and Druids, but just as wellBiologists, Physicists, Hackers, and ordinary people. Furthermore, the main reference text onPermaculture, Bill Mollison's "Permaculture -- A Designer's Manual" unfortunately is a bit cryptic insome places, and these lecture notes frequently provide a different and much more colloquial re-phrasing of some important concepts, which can help a lot to comprehend what some technique issupposed to do and how it works. Still, for a more detailed and more well-structured discussion, one isvery strongly advised to consult the "Permaculture Designer's Manual". Quite a fair bit of the content wefind in this course transcript, and to much lesser degree in the Designer's Manual, is easilymisinterpreted. For example, Bill occasionally says "10" when a physicist would rather say "about anorder of magnitude". (Actually, this holds true for quite many works on resource management, includingas well the Bible, for instance.)As with every involved subject, it usually pays to read through the introductory texts multiple times, asone inevitably will extract more information from it already having a rough map of the subject in mind.Dr. Thomas Fischbacher, who decided to embark on this transcription project, turning the old PDFlecture notes into more useful HTML form, learned a lot over time by linking different texts andsources. As all this background information is not available to the newcomer, he added a number of footnotes and comments to most of these chapters (more to follow) with the intention to build bridgesinto this subject in order to (hopefully) make it more accessible to people who so far never gave issuessuch as food production much thought. Unfortunately, there are a number of points where Bill can berather misleading, especially if taken literally and unquestioned. While there is a lot of sense in muchwhat Bill Mollison has to say, should you find that he just cannot be right in some issue, this presumablyis a matter of missing context. In many situations, it should be pretty evident, however, when he is joking, for example.The first version of these pamphlets was numbered 1.0-1; later modifications which will add furtherfootnotes and explanations will have version numbers 1.0-2, -3, etc. The major version number will onlychange should Bill Mollison himself start to make changes to the content. Later versions with additionalinformation will (might) follow. Thomas Fischbacher would like to personally add that from hisperspective the most important bit that is explained in a far better way in the Permaculture Designer'sManual than in these pamphlets is the bit on the energy flows in natural systems and how to creativelyput a large number of productive uses between source and sink. In his eyes, that issue alone definitely isreason enough to get the Designer's Manual. (Also, one thing that seems to be completely missing in thepublished permaculture literature is the issue of self-organizing criticality in structure formation and anappropriate discussion of natural hierarchies and the extra energy expenses required to impose artificial
 
hierarchies. [Note to self: by now have written up something about that issue, but in German only, and itmakes the point in a way presumably only accessible to theoretical physicists...])Even if only a small part of what Bill Mollison has to teach us were right (T.F. is personally convincedhe presumably is more right on a lot more things than pretty much anyone else) -- these texts at the veryleast should be highly useful to overcome many of the mental blockades our culture is facing at present.Studying historic reports of resource scarceness, these blockades often have been among the mostimportant impediments. For example, there is one report from an obstetrician who worked on the islandof Jersey during the Nazi occupation which includes such bizarre situations as a hospital running out of soap, until he himself eventually started making some -- which actually would not at all have been thatdifficult straightaway!However, as important as it is to make these approaches widely known which presumably are far closerto the right way to do things than anything we developed over the last two centuries, two things shouldbe remembered: the first is that this is not a dogmatic approach. It certainly would be wrong trying tocast the underlying principles in stone, just as much as it would contradict Gandhi's principles to turnthem into a formal catechism-type belief system. In particular, it is well possible that there is a numberof things in here that will not work as expected, and it may often be trickier than first suspected to getthings right (even though it is possible and should be done). Secondly, as the saying goes, "fair wordsplant no cabbages". If we want to go down that route (and it both seems to look rather promising andthere by now is considerable experience with systems that have been set up according to these principlessome decades ago), there is a lot of work that lies ahead of us which will require action where we haveto involve ourselves personally, for example, getting urban garden-scale mini-farming going. After all,problems will not go away by just talking about possible solutions, rather than really tackling the bigchallenge!
Second Introduction
(David Hemenway)
Permaculture started in 1975 or 1976 as a public interest when Bill was talking about it to a friend whohad a friend who was a radio interviewer on the national, government run, radio station in Melbourne.Bill was asked whether he wanted to do a talk-back program at this radio station. So he did. It turned outto be the most interesting talk-back program they had ever had. The board was just lit up for the rest of the day. People were asking what it was about and where could they get more information.Bill, at that time, had a manuscript that he had been working on, just ideas. He thought now was the timeto publish something because there was so much information needed. He had at least three thousandletters coming to him saying, "Where can I get more about this?"At that time, David Holmgren was writing a thesis at the University about permaculture, workingtogether with Bill who was directing his research. So they got the thesis together, Bill added some more,and they rushed together a book which turned into Permaculture One. Twenty-five thousand copies wereprinted. Within three years they were out of print.Out of that came a group of people wanting to get together to talk about permaculture. They decided toset up an association. The Quarterly now has about three thousand direct subscribers. [Now known as
of 00

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