Permaculture-our history, our story…

It’s been 40 years

Forty years and three months to be precise, as of September 2019. Forty years since the second-ever book on the permaculture design system — Permaculture Two: practical design for town and country in permanent agriculture — was published.

Russ Grayson

Published in

PERMACULTURE journal

9 min readSep 7, 2019

“FORTY years. It’s been forty years. Forty years and three months since Permaculture Two was published”, I said.

“Right”, was my partner’s reply as she went back to what she was doing.

A rather perfunctory reply, I thought. Surely an anniversary with a zero on the end is the time for a little reflection?

Reflection. The word triggered memories of how I bought a copy of the new book when it came out. I don’t know how I learned of it. Maybe I saw it in a bookshop. There was no internet then to let you know when a new book was published. A chance find in a bookshop or word of mouth were the way we learned of new publications.

Could it have been through the pages of Earth Garden magazine, the publication that linked and informed people living what we called ‘alternative’ lifestyles in Australia in the same way that the Whole Earth Catalog did in the US? That sounds probable.

I was living in Hobart, close to the birthplace of the permaculture design system on Strickland Avenue in the foothills of Mt Wellington (now Kunanyi-Mt Wellington), and I would have noticed the appearance of Permaculture Two: practical design for town and country because I had a copy of Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements, the first-ever book on permaculture. Both books were an articulation of the permaculture concept as it was then understood by the two who invented it. The books were largely oriented towards rural living. Permaculture One was by someone working at the university called Bill Mollison and a student at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education by the name of David Holmgren. Permaculture Two was credited to Bill alone.

Permaculture One was a somewhat puzzling book. We knew it was full of good ideas but we didn’t have any idea on how to make them real. I recalled my discovery of Permaculture One in a memoir published quite some years ago (currently being rewritten):

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 black text interspersed with line drawings. The authors are clearly trying to explain an idea to people who have never before encountered it. And for the ideas in this book, that is almost everyone.
“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.
The next week I went out and bought my own copy of this perplexing volume. As yet, I wasn’t quite sure what Permaculture One–A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements was all about. I was not alone in this.

Good ideas, but how do you make them real?

At that time there was nowhere to go with permaculture. Until a community started to do something about it on Bill Mollison’s family property in the Tasmanian north-west, near the coastal town of Stanley, that is.

The first book and Permaculture Two which appeared around a year later in June 1979, had immediate appeal to those living what became known as ‘alternative’ lifestyles and the ‘back to the land’ movement. They were a ready readership and from them emerged the first permaculture practitioners, the early adopters who turned Bill and David’s ideas into solid reality on the good earth.

…the two books applied a design logic which contextualised what they were doing…

Many of this coterie were already growing organic food in home gardens, keeping chooks and figuring out how to make their homes energy efficient, the few who had acquired somewhere permanent to live, anyway. To that, the two books applied a design logic which contextualised what they were doing, as did Bill’s comments on the emerging environmental crisis.

I doubt permaculture would have taken off without this alternative subculture to adopt and sustain it. Those were the years of the Great Acceleration born of the repurposing of the industrial capacity developed during World War Two and the consequent decades of economic growth that started in the mid-1950s and brought an acceleration in almost everything: the pace of life, full employment, incomes, opportunity, technology, scientific discovery, medical development, air travel, motor vehicle ownership and numbers, educational opportunity (especially when the Whitlam Labor government made tertiary education free, making it available to tens of thousands just as a changing economy needed skilled workers), new types of work, aerospace technology, automation, computer systems, space travel and science, the Cold War, environmental pollution, land degradation and the social democratic model.

The alternative subculture was an outgrowth of the Great Acceleration as the generation born after World War Two came into their late teens and early adulthood. These were years of economic growth which produced a sense of personal and social security and an optimistic outlook on the future. They were also the time when the Australian environment movement started. It would later developed into an influential social movement and political force. From this acceleration of discovery, economy and life the permaculture design system emerged with the 1978 publication of Permaculture One and, a year later, Permaculture Two.

In David Holmgren’s entry on PermaWiki, the links between alternative culture and Permaculture One is introduced this way:

Permaculture One was far more successful than anticipated, as it seemed to meet a need of the emerging environmentalist counterculture looking for something positive and substantial to align with. It was published in five languages, but is now out of print and of mainly historical value, having been superseded and refined in later works.

More than organic fiood

As David Holmgren and Bill Mollison explained, permaculture gave a sense of direction to an alternative movement or counterculture which had only the vaguest notion of how to get to its goals, poorly articulated that they could be. The books were about far more than the popular practice of growing your own food organically.

Acknowledging the popularity of organic food production in home gardens and on the small rural properties of the time, Bill Mollison placed it in a permaculture context by describing food production in permaculture as “permaculture is organic gardening plus design”.

It was then, and continues to be, a challenge to get across the reality that permaculture is not about gardening alone and that home and community food production is about food security. Instead, permaculture is a design system of which food gardening is a single component. Bill said gardening was a popular expression of permaculture because it was the easiest way to make a start in the design system. It was also subversive in the sense that it was a means of self-provisioning and partial self-reliance (not self-sufficiency) that sidestepped the market, the key structure of the economies of what was then known as the ‘Western world’ (as opposed to the command economies of the so-called communist bloc).

In putting gardening in its proper place in permaculture, Bill put it this way:

I’ve realised… being a good gardener can be like being an ostrich with your head in the sand. You will inevitably die in your own good garden if you don’t pull your head out and see what is happening in the real world.
Therefore, for us to continue to live on the earth, stop for a while from just being gardeners and look at what is happening and try and stop it.
…Interview with Bill Mollison, Permaculture magazine, 1983.

Both Permaculture One and Two were agriculturally-focused. Soon, Bill would enlarge the definition of permaculture from the narrow ‘permanent agriculture’ to the more comprehensive ‘permanent culture’. This recognised the centrality of economic and cultural change in creating a sustainable society based on regenerative agricultural, social and political systems.

The books were revolutionary in both an intellectual and landuse sense because they recognised how agriculture had remade the landscape and in doing so often damaged them. The books proposed how it could be done better in a way that worked with climatic, geographic, geological and ecological structures to provide human needs. This was through the development of what we today call ‘novel ecosystems’.

Novel ecosystems are human-built, modified, or engineered niches of the Anthropocene. They exist in places that have been altered in structure and function by human agency. Novel ecosystems are part of the human environment and niche (including urban, suburban, and rural), they lack natural analogs, and they have extended an influence that has converted more than three-quarters of wild Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel_ecosystem

Unlike the simplified novel ecosystems of conventional agriculture, the permaculture approach described in Permaculture One and Two would build its own novel ecosystems with the complexity, and eventually stability, of natural ecosystems. This was recognised by the title of Permaculture One: Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements. Permaculture would be as anthropocentric as conventional agriculture with the difference that it left plenty of space for both cultivated and wild nature, giving us the notion of permaculture as ‘cultivated ecologies’.

40 years on

Forty years on, Permaculture Two rests on the bookshelves of many a serious permaculture practitioner. I speculate in saying it is seldom read by those coming into the design system.

Is it worth reading? There are plenty of permaculture books of more recent origin with up to date information reflecting how the world had changed substantially from the time of Permaculture One and Two’s publication at the end of the 1970s. Why read a book published before the ideas that make up the permaculture design system were fully fleshed-out?

Why? Because those first permaculture books are foundational texts of what has evolved into a substantial social movement. Reading them introduces us to how permaculture evolved, and in doing that gives us the knowledge that improves our own intervention in the permaculture design system.

The potential impact of threat is defined as intent multiplied by capability. That is also a definition of the potential of constructive systems, like permaculture. Its potential can also be gauged as preparedness + opportunity. It is in reading those early permaculture books that we build our preparedness through understanding, so that we are ready to seize opportunities thrown up by a malfunctioning socioeconomic system.

Current editions of Permaculture One and Permaculture Two are available from Tagari Publishers: https://www.tagari.com/store/books/

Permaculture Two is available from Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2031263.Permaculture_Two

Permaculture One is available from Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3961757-permaculture-one?from_search=true

The first edition of Permaculture One is available from Amazon for US$99.97.
https://www.amazon.com/Permaculture-One-Perennial-Agriculture-Settlements/dp/0938240005?tag=duckduckgo-d-20

Neither book is in digital format.