Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
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.
RetroSuburbia is an extraordinary and magnificently crafted guide on living abundantly in uncertain times. Part manifesto, part manual, this is the book you and I did not realise we were waiting for!
All these questions are questions of agency: to what extent, if any, can humans be purposeful agents of historical change. This question, I will suggest, has up to now been given something like a free pass in much post-carbon discourse, for reasons that I will explain in depth later.
When I first encountered permaculture, I assumed it had some new principles to suggest, was eager to test them, discard the lemons, and move on. I was wrong.
As I wrote in my post about the Pulse, “Howard Odum was of the opinion that all systems on all scales pulse. Storages gradually accumulate, consumers consume and develop, and eventually decline, and then dispersing materials that will be used in the next pulse.” And if “energy flows, storages, transformations, feedbacks, and sinks” are central to any system, man-made or otherwise, we can see that the peaking of world oil production is going to have a huge effect. So, how does the idea of pulsing change one’s approach to design?
What I am aiming to explore in this post is the pattern of the pulse – a pattern that seems to occur in all natural systems. I want to look at how it has flowed through human history in the form of energy production and consumption, and how it relates to a number of my interests.
