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Wednesday, 19 September 2007

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The permaculture papers

IN THE BEGINNING...

He is silent for a moment as he looks out at the audience as if sizing them up. Then he starts to speak, projecting his gruffy but commanding voice over the tiers of seats in the lecture hall. He launches into an anecdote about the movement he started eighteen years earlier.

The scene was the University of Technology, Sydney. The time, the 1990s. But it could have been anywhere, anytime, for Bill Mollison was in his element, he was in front of an audience. Then in late middle age, he was the storyteller supreme, the man of a thousand tales, the speaker guaranteed to inspire and upset at the same time.

His presentation that evening to the packed lecture theatre was about the design system of which he was one of the instigators. It was an idea then starting to find its place in the world, but its story started some years before in a place far distant…

Discovery

Hobart. It is mid-afternoon on a mild summer’s day in 1978. I am in a friend’s living room in unremarkable Moonah, one of those modest suburbs that make up Hobart’s spread along the western bank of the Derwent River.

"Have you seen this?", Denis asks, reaching out to offer me a large format book.

"It's a new book I picked up in town. Looks interesting”.

"What's it about?", I ask.

I flick through its pages. The cover carries a colourful illustration and inside are blocks of dark text interspersed with line drawings. It is as if the authors are trying to explain an idea to people who have never before encountered it. And for the ideas in this book, that is almost everyone.

The names of the two authors are unknown to us. Yet, curiously, they come from this very same city. Something interesting has been going on around us and we have been oblivious to it. But maybe not quite, for there have been stories about someone doing public talks, someone with rather unusual ideas.

“It’s about something called Permaculture”, says Denis. The name means nothing to me and much the same to Denis. It is simply a word we - and the world - have never encountered before.

A certain affinity

Permaculture One - A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements has been released (1978: Mollison B, Holmgren D; Transworld Publishers). Within its covers are ideas and concepts that, over coming years, will influence many, confuse some, motivate others and launch more than a few onto new and unanticipated trajectories in life.

I was living in Hobart and working in the adventure equipment industry at the time, and associating with a different coterie than that around the ideas in this new book.

Our weekends were spent in the mountainous interior of this rugged little island, scrambling up steep slopes of dark brown dolerite, ski touring its white landscapes, trekking through cool temperate rainforest with its dripping branches and setting up camp beside mountain lakes known to the locals as ‘tarns’. Sometimes, we would be out in those same mountains with the search and rescue unit looking for people overdue. It seemed a such a different life to that hinted at by the authors of that unusual book.

The contents of Permaculture One might have suggested a life quite unlike that which my partner of the time and I were leading, yet it had a lot of appeal in terms of our aspirations. Like others from the mainland we had been attracted to the island state by its cheap rural land.

At the time there was something of a social revolution going on in Australia. The restive, creative edge of the youth demographic was searching for a different way of living that incorporated emerging ideas on the natural environment, technology and lifestyle.

Later, I realised that Bill Mollison, in his role as scientific researcher, must have trodden those same mountains and forests that we travelled through on our weekends off. But the link between us and what he and David Holmgren had written lay less in the mountains than in Denis’ back yard. Like many at the time, Denis had been inspired by the idea of growing food organically and had transformed his Moonah backyard into a large organic vegetable garden long before Permaculture popularised the idea.

Finding an audience

Since the late 1960s, when what became known as ‘alternative lifestyles’ started to develop as a social trend - a movement that would flower to fulness during the coming decade - many had discovered organic gardening, owner-building and recycling, among other things. Now, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren’s book promised to crystalise those practices into a coherent system for living on the land.

Organic growing and the appearance of intentional communities in the US had first come to my attention through the pages of the American magazine, Mother Earth News and through Stewart Brand's compendium of tools and ideas, the Whole Earth Catalog. Mother Earth was available in Australia if you knew where to look and the stories it carried sparked ideas in the imagination of many who read it. It seemed all-so-visionary and promising, like a new world lying in wait if only we could somehow invoke it. For that band of youthful adventurers out there in the backblocks and back here in the cities who wanted to bring this new society into existence, Permaculture One, it seemed, might have a lot of appeal.

The book had much to do with food, less about cooking it but more about the bigger picture of how we obtain it. So it was that there developed an early nexus between farming systems, organic gardening and Permaculture.

A book, however, does not make a revolution by itself and for those who bought a copy there seemed nowhere to go with the ideas unless you had land beyond the city fringe.

Like a recipe for a new way of living, That first Permaculture book hinted at a broader philosophy that was not yet in a completely coherent state. That it was more a work in progress became clear with the publication of Permaculture Two - Practical Design for Town and Country in Permanent Agriculture (Tagari Publications, Tasmania), around a year later.

The books took ideas from many areas - farming systems, traditonal agriculture, building design and construction, water supply, ecology and more - and synthesised them into something seemingly complete and achievable. It was an integration, a systematisation of ideas. It was no accident that Bill and David described Permaculture as a synthesis.

Interesting stuff, I thought, as I flicked through the pages of that first of the Permaculture books that warm summer afternoon in Denis’ living room. Come the new week I would go out and buy my own copy. Still, like many others, I was not sure what to make of it.

Sitting, listening

The man sits, listening with increasing excitement. There’s a voice on the radio... a gruffy but commanding voice.

The listener lives in an industrial town in rural Victoria and he's more than a little intrigued. There’s common sense being spoken and there is something compelling about that voice and what it says. He just had to listen because the voice seems to articulate what he feels but can't quite put into words. What that man is saying comes across as both revelation and motivation.

The place: Maryborough, Victoria.

The year: 1978.

The program: Terry Lane on ABC radio.

The interview Terry White listens to that fateful day was with someone he has never heard of, someone that has written a book, a rather extraordinary book, it seems.

His name, Terry discovers, is Bill Mollison. And the book? It will go on to become the foundation of something new, something called the Permaculture design system.

“I found it galvanising,” says Terry. “Bill’s interview kindled my imagination in a profound way”.

The impact of that interview was so profound, Terry says, that he and his associates invited Bill to visit Maryborough for a public meeting.

“We did this in a local context of concern about youth unemployment and land degradation. This provided a responsive setting for the discussion of permanent culture (perma-culture) and an emphasis on positive, practical, whole-system solutions.”

A town ready for new ideas

In an attempt to address these issues, Maryborough had started two employment cooperatives, one making clothing and the other making bicycle trailers. An alternative technology foundation was planning a technology demonstration centre and there was considerable concern over dryland salinity, which was attributed to the removal of trees and the subsequent rise in saline groundwater in the area.

“SALT, which became Project Branchout, received $850,000 of government funding to employ local people to revegetate. They planted 300,000 trees through 33 municipalities,” explains Terry.

“It was the largest project of its type in Australia at the time. It was inspired by Rooseveldt’s Conservation Corps of the ‘thirties, which provided cultural stimulation, collected local histories, local music”.

Like of a burst of innovative thinking

It is uncertain how much the initiatives then underway in Maryborough were the outcome of ideas around local self-reliance and local development current among the innovative fringe in the seventies and early eightees. Those ideas supported notions like local economy, local employment and viable towns and cities. They came as part of a burst of innovative thinking born of the social change of the late 1960s and its maturation over the following decade.

All good ideas give birth to positive spin-offs and those around local self-reliance fed into the notion of LEIs — local employment initiatives. Melbourne man, Geoff Lacey, issued a thin little book on the subject in 1983 (Lacey G; Community Self Reliance; Pax Christs, Carlton, Australia. ISBN 0 9592551 1 7).

Animated conversations prepare the ground for a visit

There was more than a little social ferment in Maryborough at the time, it seems. “There were animated conversations about issues”, Terry says, which produced “good ideas for a local employment column in the local newspaper”.

The Maryborough public meeting organised by Terry was well attended and resulted in the formation of one of the first permaculture groups in Australia, the National Permaculture Association.

Not the first appearance

Terry Lane’s interview with Bill Mollison brought the emerging idea of Permaculture before its first mass audience. It was not, however, its first public appearance.

“Permaculture made its first appearance on the world stage in 1976 in an article in Tasmania's Organic Farmer and Gardener magazine which was pubished by the Tasmanian Organic Gardening and Farming Society”, said Steve Payne, now editor of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s magazine, Organic Gardener, and past editor of Permaculture International Journal.

“The article was titled A Permaculture System for Southern Australian Conditions - Part One. It was written by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren”.

The innovators

From the highway it appears as a flat-topped bluff projecting into Bass Strait from pale yellow beaches scalloped by sea and wind.

Take the walking track that climbs The Nut and look back to see the town of Stanley arrayed below. Immediately you notice that this is a small town that clings to a narrow isthmus joining the mainland of north west Tasmania to this imposing block of dolerite.

Look around further and notice that the near-vertical sides of The Nut fall into the often stormy waters of Bass Strait. Look around a little closer as I did one summer day and you might notice the glossy black glint of a deadly Tasmanian tiger snake absorbing the morning’s warmth on a rock.

With its old buildings it is a picturesque town and it is easy to see why Stanley has become a stopover on the tourist trail. Once known for its commercial fishing, it hardly seems the sort of place to give birth to someone notable. But that is just what it did when, in 1928, Bill Mollison was born here.

Mollison left school at 15 to help run his family’s bakery. Among the jobs that followed were mill worker, forester, seaman, animal trapper and shark fisherman.

Describe by Steve Payne as a rough brew for someone who would become an environmentalist, those jobs led him to nine years at the Wildlife Survey Section of the CSIRO (Australia’s leading science research body) and then time with the Inland Fisheries Commission of Tasmania.

“What the two latter jobs provided were long stints in the forests and on the coasts of Tasmania where he closely monitored the life of those ecosystems”, says Steve.

In 1968, Mollison became a tutor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, and, later, senior lecturer in Environmental Psychology. It was in that role that he met a student at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education, David Holmgren, and the seeds of Permaculture were sown.

David Holmgren was born in 1955, growing up on the other side of the Australian continent in Fremantle, Western Australia. His parents were political activists and this may have contributed to his enquiring mindset.

“After matriculating from John Curtin Senior High School in 1972 he spent a year hitchhiking around Australia before moving to Tasmania in 1974 to study environmental design, where he gravitated towards landscape design, ecology and agriculture”, says Steve.

David was attracted to the natural and intellectual environment of Tasmania and was lured by Tasmania’s School of Environmental Design which was led by architect and educator, Barry McNeil. This, Holmgren says, was ‘the most radical experiment in tertiary education in Australia’.

“In this intellectual hothouse I met Bill Mollison, whose life and ideas epitomised a creative bridge between nature and civilisation and between tradition and modernity,” David wrote.

Why Tasmania?

Tasmania is an island isolated physically, not intellectually, and Permaculture is perhaps one of its major intellectual products.

Located in the cool temperate zone around 42 degrees south latitude and separated from the Australian mainland by the 200km width of Bass Strait, the island is a roughly triangular land mass with a mountainous, uplifted core known as the Central Plateau. The physical isolation of Tasmania in these windy and frequently wild, oceanic latitudes has engendered a sense of difference to the mainland best summed up by Tasmanian writer, Christopher Koch:

"Tugging at its moorings under the giant clouds of the Roaring Forties, Tasmania is different: we are no longer in Australia. All the colours have the glassy intensity of a cold climate: the greens greener, the dark blue of the numberless hills and mountains appearing almost black... ". (Return to Hobart Town in Crossing the Gap; 1987; Koch C: Vintage Books, Sydney. Koch wrote the classic political novel, The Year of Living Dangerously [1978] and the fictional Highways To a War [1985]).

That might explain the island state’s uniqueness but it does not answer why Tasmania was the location of an innovative idea like Permaculture. David Holmgren puts this way: “It’s a place where modernity and nature collide, both destructively and creatively.”

Perhaps he was referring to the early environmental battles over Lake Pedder and the Franklin River, battles that later gained iconic status in the history of Australian environmentalism and that opened an entirely new arena for community-based political intervention. But, equally, he might have had in mind the state government’s policy of hydro-electrification that attracted energy hungry heavy industry to the state from the 1950s onwards.

State of notables

Why a state, the population of which today barely exceeds 480,000, should throw up so many luminaries remains a bit of a mystery. Well before Mollison and Holmgren, Tasmania gave the world the popular 1930s film actor, Errol Flynn. It was also the birthplace of Australian prime minister, Joseph Lyons.

Tasmania is homeland to a seemingly disporportionate number of war correspondents such as:

• Neil Davis (whose coverage of the Vietnam war was documented in Tim Bowden’s book, One Crowded Hour - Neil Davis, Combat Cameraman (1987; Collins ISBN 0002174960)
• David Brill (whose story is documented in John Little’s 2003 biography, The Man Who saw Too Much (Hodder; ISBN-10: 0733614655)\
• Harry Burton, the Australian television news cameraman killed in Nothern Iraq by Taliban terrorists.

Noted wilderness photographer, Peter Dombrovskis migrated to Tasmania where he was influenced by conservationist and photographer, Olegas Truchanas, an earlier immigrant from Europe. Dombrovskis' images played a significant role in the campaign save the Franklin River and in revealing the rugged beauty of the state’s wilderness areas to the Australian public.

Another immigrant, this time from the NSW town of Oberon, is Dr Bob Brown. He started his political career in the Tasmanian Parliament as a Greens politician before moving to the Senate in Canberra.

With such antecedents, it is perhaps not surpirising that someone as unorthodox as Bill Mollison has his origin in the state.

Significant in other ways

Once described by David Holmgren as being "... on the far edge of the industrial world", Tasmania is significant in other ways.

• The Tasmanian Organic Farming and Gardening Society was already active in the 1970s and was probably the first organic growing society in Australia. It was in the pages of its newsletter that Permaculture was first described.
• Australia's influential wilderness conservation movement originated in the state and conducted the unsuccessful campaign to save Lake Pedder in the South-West wilderness, the successful campaign to save the Franklin River from hydro-electric development and the fight to save the state's old growth forests. From Tasmania the Wilderness Society, a product of those struggles, spread nationally.
• During the early-1970s the small but growing public sentiment of for an alternative politics to that offered by the major parties saw the formation of Australia's first 'green' political party, the United Tasmania Group (UTG).

Formed in 1972, the UTG was inspired by New Zealand's Values Party which had a policy platform that included environmental issues.

Values Party support peaked at six per cent in 1978 [Christine Dann, Green Party of Aetearoa/New Zealand, from her PhD thesis From Earth's Last Islands. The global origins of Green Politics - Lincoln University, NZ, 1999).

The loss of Lake Pedder motivated the UTG to contest the 1972 state election in which it won 3.9 per cent of the overall vote and almost seven per cent of the vote in the Hobart urban electorates of Denison and Franklin. The UTG went on to contest the 1972 federal House of Representatives election, winning four per cent of the vote.

The Values Party and the UTG were the first forays into electoral politics anywhere in the world by the nascent green movement.

The island state might have given birth and been home to a notable bunch of people and might have had a formative role in the organics and green political movements in Australia, but just how much this fed the emerging permaculture concept is uncertain. But in his home on the lower slopes of Hobart’s Mt Wellington, Bill Mollison was surely aware of the environment movement’s gathering strength.

As well as UTG, David acknowledges that the Australian organic agriculture movement sprouted first in Tasmania as part of “an upwelling of intellectual and creative action at the edge of civilisation.”

Bill was a founding member of the Tasmanian Organic Gardening and Farming Society, the first of its kind in the country. It was the same organisation from which Peter Cundall emerged. Decades later, Cundall would host ABC television’s Gardening Australia, a program that was to give Permaculture a fair share of air time.

While these developments might not have been a direct trigger in the birth of Permaculture, they formed the intellectual, social and political matrix from which it emerged and in which it found its first adherents. In this sense, and like other social movements, Permaculture grew out of the social, economic, social and political context of its time.

A world ready

According to David Holmgren, it wasn’t just Maryborough that was ready for the permaculture message at the end of the seventies.

“At the time there was an upheaval in new, positive environmental solutions as a response to a sense of crisis, especially the energy crisis”, he says.

“Before that”, says permaculture early adopter-now-educator, Robyn Francis, “Bill Mollison spent 1976 and 1977 overseas, collecting ideas that would find a place in the still-developing Permaculture idea”.

While in Maryborough, Bill was invited to visit the sewage settling ponds and the town tip. His suggestions for the productive use of wastes from the two sites were taken seriously by the council and the noted irrigation designer, Ken Yoemans, was brought in to consult on the reuse of treated sewage water.

Bill’s plan for the productive use of sewage waste was published in the first edition of the National Permaculture Association’s quarterly journal, Permaculture, which was produced by Terry White in the summer of 1978.

Although it seldom rates a mention today, the significance of Permaculture to the movement should not be underestimated. The magazine went on to play an important part in spreading knowledge of the Permaculture design system during its formative years and was the direct forerunner of Permaculture International Journal.

Approachability the key to acceptance

Bill’s visit to Maryborough was successful, Terry says, because he could relate to local people.

“He stood for something rather than against things. He created a ‘positive space’ for addressing local issues and their Permaculture solutions. Bill had positive, practical solutions to problems... to real problems.

“He came across as a doer, not a talker. He proposed that instead of waiting for government or for funding, we just go and do whatever it was that was necessary. This approach people found empowering... it released energy. Bill trusted others to carry the Permaculture message.

“Permaculture might have been a bit fringe but it was hands-on. The population of Maryborough at that time was conservative, not hippy or radical. Conservative people can be turned around if the solutions are pragmatic and fit local needs.”

Northwards the message spreads

In both distance and climate, Nambour is far from Maryborough. Yet, here in this minor town in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast hinterland, there was a mind ready for the Permaculture message just as there had been in Maryborough.

The mind was that of a Swiss man, and within it Mollison’s ideas sparked a line of thinking that would culminate in a new type of settlement in the Australian landscape. It would be well over a decade, however, before Max Lindegger set up Australia’s first ecovillage at Crystal Waters.

It was an electrifying time, says Max, even though he lived thousands of kilometres from Tasmania. In a 2007 interview for New Internationalist magazine (written by Steve Payne and the author and published in the July 2007edition), Max told Steve that permaculture “was exactly the way I felt but had been unable to put into words”.

"This was a common sentiment of people then and even now", says Steve. It suggests that social change over the previous decade had prepared people for life-changing new ideas but that, until the publication of Permaculture One, none of sufficient magnitude had come along.

Just as Terry had invited Bill to speak in Maryborough, Max invited him to come north for a speaking tour. In 1979, Max formed what may have been the second permaculture group to come into existence, Permaculture Nambour.

From the publication of Permaculture One and that iconic radio interview with Terry Lane, Permaculture had started to spread. It spread slowly but with a quickening tempo as the years went on. To use the term devised by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, The Tipping Point (2000; Abacus books, UK. ISBN 0 349 11346 7), the idea had ‘stickiness’. That is, it had the property of being the right idea at the right time encountered by the right people and in a form that stimulated their imaginations.

A productive collaboration and an army of field workers

That Tasmania is a place in which nature and modernity collide, as David Holmgren suggests, can be seen where the suburbs of Hobart collides with the tall eucalypt forest that clothes Mt Wellington's lower slopes.

A sense of nature is never far away in Tasmania and the mountain, with its precipituous dolerite cliffs known as the Organ Pipes, is frequently snow capped where it catches the moist, cold, south-westerly winds of winter known of the Roaring Forties. It's massive hulk dominates the town, a presence both physical and psychological and it makes this city of 200,000 one of the most physically beautiful urban centres in Australia.

A few kilometres in one direction is the city centre; to the east, beyond the wide brown Derwent, farmland covers undulating country until it reaches the sea; and in the other direction lies the great, cool temperate wilderness of South West Tasmania, a vast area of jagged mountain and button grass plain devoid of permanent inhabitants. Beyond that, in these latitudes, the vastness of the Southern Ocean rings the world. It is these things that give Hobart its invigorating character.

What conversations went on in Bill Mollison's living room, there on the lower slopes of Mt Wellington, below the olive green of the euclaypt forest? Whatever ideas were turned over in that formative dialogue would form the backbone of the Permaculture concept.

Mollison writes of those times: “To many of us who experienced the ferment of the late 1960s, there seemed to be no positive direction forward, although almost everybody could define those aspects of the global society that they rejected...

“From 1972 to 1974 I spent time, latterly with David Holmgren, in developing an interdisciplinary earth science - Permaculture - with a potential for positivistic, integrated and global outreach.”

More recently, Mollison has said that by the late 1970s and following the Club of Rome’s report, Limits of Growth, there was increasing concern about the world running out of resources.

“But no one had any long-term ideas and it was obvious to me what had to be done,” he said. “That was to build an army of permaculture field workers to go out and teach the ideas of sustainable food production.”

Redefing Permaculture

First ideas are often good ideas. They are intuitive but they are rarely ready to roll out. So it was with tthe first expression of the Permaculture design system.

Rather than an approach to 'permanent agriculture' as first envisoned, Bill and David realised that a more comprehensive description was needed. So it was that Permaculture became reinterpreted as 'permanent culture'. This acknowledged the fact that the different elements that make up a culture are linked in an interactive social and economic matrix.

The focus was now on the more comprehensive process of designing human habitation that catered for people and the social infrastructure that supported them, as well as for natural systems.

In 2004, David Holmgren expanded on Permaculture's origins and affiliations: "Permaculture is a design system for sustainable living and landuse. It came out of awareness about the limits of resources, especially the energy crisis of the 1970s.

"The work started between myself and Bill Mollison when I was a student in environmental design in Tasmania. Since then, Permaculture has spread around the world as a grassroots movement of activists and designers, teachers, land managers - both gardeners and farmers.

"It's also connected to a very broad church of alternatives in sustainable building, alternative currency, ideas, ecovillages - many diverse areas" (June 8, 1994: Energy Bulletin, Global Public Media, USA; online interview with Adam Fenderson).

Mollison explained that Permaculture was not new in its elements but was new as a synthesis of those elements - such as farming, building design, community economics and local economies, landuse design and all the rest that make up the design system. It is a way of thinking, he asserted, an approach to design that brings the separate elements into interaction as a cooperative, mutually supportive system.

A way of thinking

This - Permaculture as a way of thinking - is a critical concept and in-part explains why Permaculture has persisted as an individual and organisational practice rather than as a unitary movement.

Rather than propound a theory, a political or other type of programme as would a centralised movement, Permaculture encourages its participants to take the approach of applying its ethics and principles to the diverse range of activities they may be involved in. Permaculture, as a way of thinking, as an approach, sets up the design system for decentralised application where its adherents live and work.

Science fiction author Neal Stephenson could just as well have been discussing Bill Mollison and David Holmgren's idea of Permaculture as synthesis, rather than technology and engineering, when he said " ...it's because he or she put together disperate ideas into a coherent vision that could be used as a road map... " (Neal Stephenson Rewrites History; Wired magazine, September 2003).

For many, that is what Permaculture became - a road map through the vortices of a confusing world... a way of thinking and a path of action.

In the coming decade, the roadmap would take its early adoptors in new life directions, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. At its destination lay a socially and environmentally sustainable society, and on the highway between destination and starting point lay a sometimes bewildering network of pathways. The important thing was that they all took the traveller in the same direction.

In Australia at that time, the social group which would be attracted to Permaculture occupied the innovative edge of the youth demographic, a cohort of unprecedented numbers swollen by the baby boom that followed the Second World War. It was a generation that had been primed to be receptive to new ideas by a decade of social change.

These factors and others combined to create a society entering a dynamic period in its history and created a heady, optimistic ambience based on a perception of impending change.

The 1970s had seen Permaculture's gestation and birth. Following the publication of Permaculture One and Permaculture Two, the growing group of early adoptors remained small in number but their role would be to put Mollison and Holmgren's ideas into action, to refine them in the light of experience and spread the word through training courses and publications.

Contradictory but inspiring

Whether apocryphal or factual, Bill Mollison would reiterate the story. It was set perhaps in the late-1960s or early the following decade. Just where it sits within his diverse career remains unclear.

It went like this… Bill went into the Tasmanian bush and built a small cabin. That done, he planted a vegetable garden. Then, sitting back one day presumably reflecting on his work, it occurred to Bill that what he had done would do little to make the world a better place. So, as he told it to so many of those eager listeners, he locked the door and walked out, back into society.

The moral of Bill’s story was that you have to live within society to change it. Change is something you cannot do as a recluse. What is needed is action in society and that means living in the world, not in isolation on a backblock retreat in the hills. It means living in a deliberate manner and creating new ways of doing things, ways that will at the same time benefit the environment and provide all that people need to live.

A new decade heralds change

The period from the publication of the first Permaculture book in 1978 until around 1983 can be regarded as the movement's formative years. This was the time when Permaculture was first described, when readers were inspired by Mollison and Holmgren's books and talks to become the first of the early adoptors.

At the time, Mollison sought to differentiate Permaculture from concurrent social movements by portraying it as an applied practice, as a means of taking action. It was more than protest and focusing on what was wrong, he said. Permaculture concentrated on what was right and on how that could be expanded.

This differentiation figured strongly in Permaculture's early period. There seemed to be a need to portray the design system as something different to the social context in which it grew up.

Mollison and Permaculture's early adoptors painted the system as a 'positive' philosophy, as desirably different from the 'negativism' of protest. Permaculture might be this, but their criticism of protest was a little unfair at times because it did not acknowledge the achievements of the campaigning approach or recognise that it arose as a reaction to the initiatives of others. It also led to a noticeable absence of Permaculture from the big environmental issues of the day.

The differentiation has persisted in Permaculture folklore. The design system continues to be promoted as a means of doing things positive rather than as simply trying to stop something happening. At the same time, many Permaculturists recognise the need to confront what they see as wrongdoing and to participate in actions to stop it.

Binding a network

The publication of the first edition of Permaculture magazine was one of the most important events in the history of the design system. Like its eventual successor, the magazine would bind together a geographically dispersed network of emerging permaculture practitioners.

David Holmgren believes permaculture’s popularity to be at least partly due to its comprehensive nature as “ ...a design system for sustainable living and landuse that’s concerned both with the consumption and production side, and that’s based on universal ethics and design principles which can be applied in any context.

“It’s a grassroots, international movement of practitioners, designers and organisations - networks”, he concludes.

With the turn of the decade, news of the Permaculture design system was spreading. According to Terry, the ten permaculture groups in Australia in 1978 had grown to around 80 worldwide, all within seven years. Permaculture, it seemed, was the right idea for the times and news of it was carried in the pages of Permaculture magazine.

As the new decade opened, Permaculture lay quietly below the surface of mainstream society. That was about to change.