Photos show the currency issued by the combined northern NSW LETSystems in the 1990s.

IN THE LATE 1990s the combined LETS systems of the NSW Northern Rivers region — aka the Rainbow Region — issued a printed local currency, possibly the first issue of such currency in recent times.

The currency was negotiable for LETS transactions — LETS is an acronym for Local Exchange and Trading System — by members of Northern Rivers, Nimbin and Mullum Byron Tweed LETSystems.

The full range of LETS local currency

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LETS is a community-based trading system than operates either cashless or with partial federal currency. This latter was introduced in the 1990s so that people could meet taxation and other obligations only serviceable in federal currency. Usually, LETS transactions are negotiated between supplier and user for an agreed price in LETS credits, the transaction being entered on a database and member accounts adjusted accordingly. This enables trading without direct reciprocal exchange, which diffentiates LETS from barter where the exchange of goods and services is direct between those in the transaction. With LETS, you don’t have to swap something of equal value with the person you trade with.

Once, Blue Mountains LETS, a mere 90 minutes by electric train west from Sydney, was the largest such system in the world. Blue Mountains LETS negotiated with the Department to Social Security to clear up ambiguities around beneficiaries receiving payment in LETS for trading in the community. According to Blue Mountains LETS, trading made it possible for unemployed people to maintain their worklife skills and was, therefore, a socially beneficially thing.

One Australian LETSystem — I don’t recall whether it was Blue Mountains LETS — approached the taxation office about paying tax in local LETS currency. Unfortunately, the department declined.

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Australia a LETS early adopter

As I understand the history, LETS was developed in Canada by Michael Linton. He came out to Australia in the 1990s and spent some time here working on LETSystems, particularly one that never eventuated. That was Sydney LETS and Michael and locals working with him envisioned it as a metropolitan-wide trading system.

I recall Michael and the team working into the night at the Old Randwick Community Centre in Bundock Street, not all that far from the newer centre presently being retrofitted for energy and water efficiency and being fitted with a PIG — a Permaculture Interpretive Garden which will serve as a training garden for Randwick City Council’s Sustainable Gardening course for home and community gardeners, and for school and other visitors to the planned education program.

Somehow, the association of LETS with the Centre is fitting as, just down the hall from the LETS office was the office of another metropolitan group that spawned a number of regional sub-groups, Permaculture Sydney. We offered our 110 hour Permaculture Design Course from the premises and out of that grew the Centre’s own community garden — Randwick Community Organic Garden.

Sydney LETS didn’t get quite as far as issuing its own currency, however.

The local LETS currency is explained on the flip side of each note.

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Why northern NSW?

Why was it that northern NSW proved economically fertile ground for the issuing of a local currency?

I believe the answer is due to demographic reasons. The region, particularly the sector inland from Byran Bay on the coast, through the regional small city of Lismore and further inland to the green fields around Nimbin became Australia’s premier counterculture zone in the early 1970s and attracted a  youthful and mainly innovative group of what was then known as ‘new settlers’ — rural reinhabitants whose previous lives had been spent in the cities. These people, searching for new ways of living, created their own culture over the years and, as it and they matured, the milieu proved intellectually and culturally susceptible to novel ideas like starting your own currency.

Seen in this light, the Northern Rivers LETS currency can be seen as a natural outgrowth, as an emergent property, of the culture that emerged in that region in those not-really-so-distant days.

The notes were similar size to federal dollars, looked like money and had a texture similar to federal currency. This afforded them a certain credibility and made use of what people already knew about money. Nimbin Rocks, a prominent local landmark, is seen in the background with the ranges surrounding the town of Nimbin. The snake suggests the Rainbow Serpent of Aboriginal mythology and is a recognition of the place and role of the local Badndjalung people in the landscape.

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Bloom and decline

It was the permaculture movement of the 1980s that had much to do with the development of LETSystems in Australia. Robert Rosen, an innovator in the permaculture approach to economics and ethical investment has written on this website about the history of permaculture’s involvement in community economics through initiatives such as the Permaculture Earthbank. Also at work at the time was social investment innovator, Damien Lynch, who started with August Investments (still going) and went on to help found Australian Ethical and Ecoforest Pty Ltd.

In many ways, the permaculture of the 1980s was quite different to what it is today. Then, there was, proportionally, a great deal more focus on and involvement in things economic and community development than, perhaps, there is today. For one thing, the ideas of EF Schumacher, the British economist who wrote Small Is Beautiful – Economics as if People Mattered were more in the forefront or permaculture thinking. There was an active interest in technologies such as the intermediate or appropriate technologies championed by Schumacher. There was also influence from an economic-oriented US group, the Schumacher Society.

Some of those early permaculture adopters had a more social focus to their use of the design system, being involved in community work of different sorts. Being both a part of mainstream society and at the cutting edge of a new social movement, it was more or less natural that they would turn their attention to innovations like LETS when it came along.

Soon, regional permaculture associations had adopted LETS trading. Then those in the permaculture of that time let it go where it wanted to go. LETS spread and broadened and the golden age of LETS in Australia dawned like a warm orange sun coming over the horizon.

This was the 1990s. Around the start of the new century however, the number of LETSystems had gone into decline. “What’s happened to LETS?”, was a question that you would be asked. Blue Mountains LETS shrunk as did others. LETS survived, but as a microcosm of its earlier promise.

I don’t know why this happened, why something that caught the public imagination and bloomed went into sudden decline. Was here insufficient popularisation and recruitment into LETSystems? Was it that people became wealthier and found no need for LETS? Did development of the system fall below a critical level? Did permaculture change and take on a new focus?

One explanation I have encountered a number of times is that you couldn’t buy all that much by way of daily living necessities through LETSystems. It was easy to trade for a massage or some similar service, but an incapacity to buy food, construction materials and some skills became LETS’ weak point. This might be something worthy of the emerging community currencies mulling over.

Images of local wildlife lend the LETS notes a bioregional character and suggest coexistence between nature and human culture. The scene depicts the broad expanse of water that is Byron Bay and beaches stretch far to the north. The prominent peak on the horizon is Mt Warning, named by Captain Cook the navigator on his 1770 transit of the Australian East Coast. Mt Warning, the first point of the Australian maintand to be touched by the morning's sunlight, is flanked by the Border Ranges, the political boundary between the states of New South Wales and Queensland.

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A new dawn and rebirth

It was only a couple days ago that someone said this to me: “You know, those things we were ivolved in years ago are only now coming into their own time”.

What he was saying was that we should be cognisant of the ideas innovation curve when we look back on these innovations in social history, such as permaculture and LETS. All new ideas are born of innovators on the creative fringe of society, are taken up by early adopters who tweak the innovators’ ideas and make them workable and then are taken up by early and later mass adopters.

Could it be that this early phase of LETS, whose history I have briefly described, was the innovator and early adopter stage? And that what we are now seeing with what seems to be a creeping popularity of LETS and local currency ideas being the start of a late early adopter phase, a time when the wrinkles of those early attempts will be ironed out of the fabric of community econmics and newer, better systems developed? Could this be where the work of the Transition movement in local currencies fits into the development of the idea?

I hope so. The continuance of LETSystems suggests a level of popularity for an idea that persists. It may be that the permaculture movement and the first phase of community economics focused on LETS in the 1990s has unconsciously handed on the idea to the emerging Transition movement and that it is here that we will see the action. People and ideas, we know, flow from place to place and come together in new milieus that emerge from the turmoil and churn of societies and global trends. This would comply with a trend that has seen ideas popularised in the permaculture movement only to be taken up and developed fully by organisations and movements beyond permaculture.

Whether these are the social dynamics that will recreate those early innovations in LETS and similar schemes as something new and exciting enough to capture the public imagination will be known in time. Let’s watch and, perhaps, help make it happen.

More on LETS in Australia: Find links to LETSystems across the continent — http://www.lets.org.au/

The echidna is found is the forests of northern NSW where it digs for insects with its long snout. It is another of the local wildlife to appear on the notes.

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IN 1986 Simply Living magazine ran an article on ethical investment which elicited more letters from readers than any other article since the magazine had started.

Following the article, the then-editor of Simply Living, Verna Simpson, and Geoff Young (then secretary of the Earthbank Society) appeared on Ray Martin’s Midday Show and talked about ethical investment.

As a result, Simply Living received 500 more letters asking for information about this new form of investment.

The Earthbank Society’s (a brainchild of Bill Mollison from the Permaculture Institute) experience over many years has been similar to that of Simply Living. That is: a lot of people out there want to know more about ethical investment. Recently, market research done by Community Aid Abroad and a major banking organisation has reaffirmed this high level of public interest.

Investment still at low level

The level of ethical investment in Australia is, however, tiny compared with the overall level of investment in Australia, with an estimated $14 million in ethical insurance and superannuation products, $7 million in ethical unit trusts and about $10 million in a range of community based ethical Credit Unions and other localised funds. Church investment funds with often very weak or vague ethical investment criteria applied could be estimated at a further $300 million plus.

One of the main reasons that ethical investment has not been particularly successful in Australia is because the investment industry’s response to ethical investment has been generally somewhere between icy cold and luke warm. Growing environmental concerns has meant an ever-increasing interest in ethical investment but major investment house IPAC continues to claim that they have never had a client even express an interest in ethical investment.

Money Matters is born

Early in 1989 Edwin Macpherson, an experienced investment consultant, contacted Robert Rosen, Secretary of the Earthbank Society, about what could be done to help ethical investment really get off the ground in Australia.

The strategy they decided on was to set up a major Australia wide network of specialist highly competent ethical investment planners, who were personally committed to the ideals of ethical investment and had a good understanding of the important social and environmental issues of our time.

The outcome of their meeting was Money Matters Financial Group Pty Ltd, a licensed security dealer specialising in socially and environmentally responsible investment. Money Matters commenced operations in February 1989.

Edwin and Robert realised that the main weakness in the ethical investment market was a lack of appropriate insurance and superannuation opportunities for most socially responsible investors — early starters in ethical investment life insurance Friends Provident having backed themselves into a corner by alienating almost every ethical investment adviser and commentator in Australia with their policy of investing since 1986 in such companies as BHP, Comalco, Bouganville Copper, Boral, Wespac, ANZ, NAB and Amcor.

MoneyMatters thus turned to another life company, Occidental, and assisted them in setting up the Occidental Environmental Opportunities Fund.  MoneyMatters continues to act as advisers to the Environmental Opportunities Fund assisting in the selection of appropriate investments.

One of the other major impediments to the growth of ethical investment in Australia was seen as a lack of people’s confidence in the security and returns that ethical investments can give as well as a lack of trust in the investment industry generally. MoneyMatters thus consciously put together a formidable team who between them had a solid track record in the investment and finance industry, ethical investment and social and environmental activism.  The team included:

• Edwin Macpherson (Managing Director)
• Robert Rosen (Social/Environmental Research)
• Greg Tarplett (Insurance/Superannuation)
• Martin Myers (Financial Research)
• Mical McCann (ACT )
• Kevin Childs (Northern NSW).

Growing rapidly at a time when most investment advisory firms have been finding the going hard, MoneyMatters now has an office staff of six plus eleven fulltime investment consultants and acts as advisers not only to individuals but also to community and environment groups, banking organisations and fund managers.

The company sees itself over the next few years as becoming more closely involved in the funds management side of the investment industry to help maximise the flow of investment funds into areas which can really make a difference, such as the co-operative sector, low cost housing, decentralised communities and environmentally appropriate technology.

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THE EARTHBANK SOCIETY was an initiative of Bill Mollison, founder of the permaculture movement. In 1982 an Alternate Economic Summit, initiated by Mollison, was held in Tasmania. Although only a dozen or so people attended, two major initiatives emerged out of that conference:

• one was the Maleny Credit Union which Jill Jordan took on the task of helping set up
• the other was the Earthbank Society.

A year earlier after attending a permaculture design conference run by Bill Mollison, Damien Lynch had set August Investment Pty Ltd, Australia’s first ethical investment company. Damien went on to establish August Investment Management Ltd (Now Australian Ethical Investment Management Ltd), the first ethical investment funds manager in Australia.

Robert Rosen

Earthbank was set up by architect and permaculture designer, Geoff Young, and provided the financial and economic philosophy to go hand in hand with permaculture’s permanent agricultural systems. Its original objectives were:

• to increase awareness of the steps required to create a sustainable economic future
• to assist in the economic revitalisation of local communities
• to promote the concepts of social, ethical and community based investment
• to provide assistance and support to financial organizations which adopt social, ethical and environmental investment criteria.

In practice, so far much of its work has been devoted to the last two of its objectives. Geoff Young helped bring ethical investment to the attention of the media in Australia with early major stories featuring Earthbank and ethical investment appearing in the financial press,  radio and TV.

He produced the Earthbank Ethical Investment Guide and answered many enquiries about ethical and community investment. Geoff also contributed a regularly to the International Permaculture Quarterly on a wide variety issues associated with community economics and ethical investment.

The idea spreads

Also at Bill Mollison’s initiative, an Earthbank Association was set up on the US West Coast. It took on a high profile and was helped setting up a socially responsible Credit Union in California’s Puget Sound area. It work was highly regarded and produced the widely read Sustainable Economics Guide.

The Association ceased its activities in 1987.

In Australia in 1986, Geoff Young convened the very successful first National Earthbank Conference in Sydney . Later that year, Geoff moved from Sydney to Queensland to help set up Crystal Waters, a rural village development which is based on permaculture principles.

Robert Rosen, working from the North Coast of NSW, took over from Geoff Young as secretary of the Society. In late 1986 the Earthbank Society prepared the feasibility study for the Bellingen District Loan Fund Ltd, a community based socially and environmentally responsible loan fund which was established in the following year.

In 1987 the Earthbank Society started receiving an increasing number of enquiries from prospective ethical investors and was regularly fielding media enquiries and doing radio interviews. This was partly in response to the establishment of the first two ethical managed funds in Australia in 1986-7.

In 1987, a second very successful Earthbank Conference was held in Sydney, with Roger Pritchard from the United States, an authority on community-based economics and investment as its keynote speaker. Also in that year Earthbank Society of WA was formed

Coinciding with growing community awareness in environmental issues, interest in ethical investment increased dramatically in late 1988 and the Earthbank Society began began receiving enquiries not only from the media and interested investors but also from investment advisers, fund managers, banks, insurance companies and stock brokers. After one radio interview on Carolyn Jones’ In Search for Meaning on the ABC, the Society received over 250 letters.

The good thing about the house is its garden. It’s a garden of typically modest Inner West size  – which is another way of saying small — but hosts avocado, various citrus, a longan, clusters of banana and pawpaw, beds of herbs and vegetables and three off-white, very quiet bantams. Even the footpath has been terraformed with a small orange tree and New Zealand spinach.

It was when making my way from kitchen to office — steaming cup of brewed coffee in hand to ward off winter’s chilly air — that I glanced at the titles on the bookshelf and saw a copy of an old book that I am sure I owned down in Hobart towards the end of the 1970s.

The book was the work of that productive publishing duo of the early alternative, rural resettlement movement of the 1970s, Keith and Irene Smith. These were the same people who brought us that long running and still-in-publication magazine (though for many years no longer published by Keith and Irene), Earth Garden.

It is difficult to understate that magazine’s importance to the social movement it emerged from, the movement that it reported to while, at the same time, stimulating it. Earth Garden and a little later, Grass Roots magazine (still in production too) both informed and networked the rural resettlement or back-to-the-land alternative movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, bringing its participants together into a community of readers. That’s no mean accomplishment and the role of those two periodicals in creating a sense of commonality and identity should not be underestimated.

In the days before the Internet, before universal access to email, Earth Garden and Grass Roots created networks of alternatives and new settlers much as the Whole Earth Catalog did in the USA. Out on those early intentional communities, in rural towns, farmhouses, urban share houses and in capital cities, the arrival of those quarterlies was eagerly awaited. They connected people to another reality, one they were attempting to live or one they imagined living as they wistfully flicked through the pages. Over the the dawn of the early alternative/back-to-the-land movement, Earth Garden and Grass Roots shone like an illuminating sun to inform, inspire and connect.

If media is important to starting and sustaining social movements, what was the literary context of those magazines?

Those were the days when the ideas in Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (R. Buckminster Fuller; E.P. Dutton & Co, New York. c1963, 1971) retained a resonance among the creative fringe. So did the writings of British economist, Fritz Schumacher, whose late-1960s book, Small Is Beautiful – economics as if people mattered, was still inspiring an innovative alternative technology movement and was quite influential in the ideologies and technologies of the emerging intentional communities and urban alternative share houses. Late the previous decade, Theodore Roszak had written The Making of a Counter Culture (1968), a book that analysed the social movement of that time. Two years later, Charles Reich’s The Greening of America (1970) attempted to encapsulate what at the time was a somewhat perplexing turbulence of people and ideas.

These books were available in Australia but their influence is undocumented. Certainly, Roszak and Reich’s books were read by those identifying with the New Left as they were available in Sydney at specialist booksellers such as the Third World Bookshop, which opened in 1967 and traded into the start of the following decade before morphing into the bookselling establishments of veteran Sydney leftist politico, Bob Gould.

The first attempt to document the alternative or back-to-the-land movement in this county had to await Peter Cock’s substantial 1979 work, Alternative Australia – communities of the future (Quartet Books, Melbourne). By that time, the movement has gone through its gestatory period and was settling into a set of attitudes, practices and forms applicable to alternative city and country living. The movement’s origin lay back in the latter years of the 1960s when it was an incipient trend among footloose youth unattracted to mainstream society’s offerings. While many of its participants also identified with the New Left, especially in its opposition to Australia’s participation in the war in Vietnam, it was in many ways a parallel strand of the youth movement that saw personal change, rather than political and economic change, as the route to a different future.

Earth Garden and Grass Roots certainly belong in this parallel, non-political strand of the alternative movement. What they reported were personal and small group solutions to new ways of living in city and country. All movements develop their own literature and the Earth Garden and Grass Roots quickly became the titles that would reflect this alternative movement, particularly its back-to-the-land, new ruralists segment of it, back onto itself and which would go on to build up a substantial following in the suburbs of our major centres. That they continue in print today is testament to the staying power of the ideas they wrote about. Unlike the anti-war movement of the New Left which came to an end when its main demand was met — cessation of the war in Vietnam — the social trend represented by the two magazines retained a currency that continues today and that was given impetus first by the organic gardening movement and later, to some extent, by the emerging philosophy of permaculture.

Oh, the name of that book I mentioned before – the book I discovered on the shelf  in that house in the Inner West– it was The First Earth Garden Book (ISBN 01 7005 4446)  and it was published in 1975.

Change

History juxtaposes. Social trends overlay political events that overlay technological and economic change.

1975. A year that juxtaposed all of those trends. Only a few years before Australia had pulled out of Vietnam, leaving the gathering quagmire to the Americans. This was a pleasingly chaotic decade, a time of change, and in its own way that book of the Smiths’ was a vector for that change, carrying news of it in the form of a how-to manual of personal experience to a youth hungry for better ways of doing things.

1978. A few years pass and the second edition of the Smith’s book is published. Put yourself in Hobart at that time. A small city of around 200,000 sprawling along the banks of the Derwent estuary, overshadowed by a high, rocky mountain and looking out to Storm Bay and the open seas of the turbulent Southern Ocean, you can see why David Holmgren once described Hobart as sitting on the edge of industrial civilisation.

Back to the present. Only a couple weeks ago I had a conversation with Terry White, one of the permaculture design system’s early adopters. It was an illuminating conversation that cleared some ambiguity about what happened when, back in those closing years of the 1970s. Terry described how, in the year that the second edition of Keith and Irene’s book was published, two minds met in a living room below that mountain that overshadows the city — Mt Wellington.

The outcome of those meetings spilled out of that living room on Wellington’s lower slopes to assume book form. And therein lies the coincidence — a book compiling writings published by the Smiths over previous years meets a book bearing news of a new idea.

They had much in common.

A design context

Today, we know that new idea, that product of those two minds in the living room on the lower slopes of Mt Wellington, as permaculture. What permaculture did was to put those earlier ideas represented by the Smith’s book into the context of a design system. Oh, that book developed from the ideas of those two innovators was called Permaculture One.

Terry White also figures among the coincidences of 1978. I knew it before, but I became truly aware of it while writing for ABC Organic Gardener editor, Steve Payne (one-time editor of Permaculture International Journal). We were working collaboratively on material for an upcoming edition of New Internationalist magazine, a special edition on permaculture. It was while producing this that I spoke with Terry.

Terry is not nationally prominent in the permaculture of today but he was instrumental in getting the design system to its present situation, and how he did this anchors us in 1978. In that year, while living in the rural Victorian city of Maryborough, he heard a radio interview with someone by the name of Bill Mollison. He liked what he heard… there was more than a resonance with his own work… and he invited Bill to come to Maryborough. This Bill did. Out of that meeting and the first permaculture course came another of those publishing coincidences of that year. It was called Permaculture and it was a glossy, authoritative quarterly magazine, and its editor was Terry White. And just as Earth Garden and Grass Roots fed an alternative rural resettlement movement with news and information, creating a sense of participation in a network national in scale, so Permaculture quarterly came to do.

As the cliché goes, the rest is history. Almost ten years after creating a published presence for the permaculture design system Terry handed Permaculture over to Robyn Francis who, in turn and under the name Permaculture International Journal handed it on to Steve Payne.

The reason I write this is because permaculture is a movement approaching its thirtieth birthday — and it may be a social movement losing its memory. Thirty years since 1978 and Permaculture One. Thirty years is time enough for a history of permaculture to be written but that task remains unfulfilled. The need for it is seldom mentioned. All we have is Bill Mollison’s own story as documented in Travels in Dreams and, valuable though that is, it is not the history of the broader movement, the stories of those that were there at its birth. We do have a few brief memoirs of people in permaculture scattered across websites and we will have a proposed book of permaculture biographies in a couple years, but I suspect these together will still not make up a cogent history of the movement.

On reflection, writing the history of a decentralised movement carries with it the danger of omission, the accidental leaving out of people whose stories should properly be included. It also carries the risk of selectivity, as do all media products, because the people who would originate such a project will define its content and direction.

But none of this is a valid argument for not trying. I have this nagging belief that a movement without a history lacks some critical sense of self and is the lesser for it. A documented history brings self-concept, a sense of evolution and some insight into how the movement has accommodated the changes emerging from within itself and those impinging from the wider world. A friend recently asked me, when we were discussing permaculture and the information available about it, whether it was only we journalists – he was referring to the two of us – that have this need to document things. I answered that was probably the case. Somehow, fate has landed us with an interest in stringing words and images together to reflect on things and tell their story.

The road from 1978 to 2008 has been long but, seemingly, has been rapidly travelled. Now, thirty years after that meeting of minds on the lower slopes of Mt Wellington, it really is time to look back as a means to understand the road ahead.

An edited version of their article appeared in the magazine.

This is the article supplied to New Internationalist…

1972-1976 — the formative years

THE STORY OF PERMACULTURE begins in the early 1970s in Tasmania, Australia.

There, it starts with two men – a teacher and student. But let’s go back before they got together, back to their formative years, for it is here that we find the influences that set those two on a course that would intersect… a course that would create something new from the social and political turmoil of that decade.

Origins – Bill Mollison

Bill Mollison was born in 1928 in the small fishing village of Stanley, on the Bass Strait coast of cool-temperate Tasmania.

Bill Mollison in 2008

He left school at 15 to help run his family’s bakery. Among the jobs that followed were mill worker, seaman, animal trapper and shark fisherman. A rough brew for someone who would become an environmentalist, they led him to nine years at the Wildlife Survey Section of the CSIRO (Australia’s government science research organisation) and then time with the Inland Fisheries Commission of Tasmania. What the two latter jobs provided were long stints in the wild forests and coasts of Tasmania, closely monitoring the life of those ecosystems. It was this time in nature that was formative to Mollison’s ideas on ecology and on how the provision of human needs, such as agriculture, could make use of those structures and processes he observed.

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 linked with a student at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education, David Holmgren, and the seeds of Permaculture were sown.

Origins – David Holmgren

David Holmgren was born in 1955, growing up on the other side of the Australian continent in Fremantle, Western Australia, with political activist parents.

David Holmgren makes a point.

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 (but gravitating towards landscape design, ecology and agriculture). It was during the brief but intense association between Mollison and Holmgren, thrashing out ideas in Mollison’s lounge room on the lower slopes of Mt Wellington — what became known as ‘the republic of Strickland Avenue’ —  that the backbone of the permaculture concept was formed.

Not all that long after devising the original concept of the permaculture design system, David started the work of setting up his rural smallholding – Melliodora — at Hepburn, a small town in Victoria.

No positive direction forward

Mollison wrote 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. These included military adventurism, the [nuclear] bomb, ruthless land exploitation, the arrogance of polluters and a general insensitivity to human needs. An unethical world could waste more on killing people than on earthcare or on helping people.

“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.”

build an army of permaculture field workers to go out and teach the ideas of sustainable food production

Mollison has said more recently that, by the late 1970s and following the Club of Rome’s report Limits of Growth, there was increasing concern from governments and bankers 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.”

Nature and the intellect

For his part, Holmgren was attracted to the natural and intellectual environment of Tasmania. He was also lured by Tasmania’s Environmental Design School that was led by Hobart architect and educator, Barry McNeil. This, Holmgren says, at that time was “the most radical experiment in tertiary education in Australia”, attracting design students from around Australia and the world.

Tasmania… it is a place where modernity and nature collide, both destructively and creatively

“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,” Holmgren wrote.

Holmgren says he is sometimes asked why permaculture emerged from somewhere like Tasmania. His answer: “It is a place where modernity and nature collide, both destructively and creatively.”

That can be seen along the edge, the zone, where the city of Hobart collides with the tall eucalypt forests that clothe the lower slopes of Mt Wellington. The mountain, with its precipituous dolerite cliffs known as the Organ Pipes. is occasionally snow capped in winter where it catches the moist, cold winds known as the Roaring Forties. It dominates the city, a presence both physical and in the minds of locals who intinctively look up to the summit for some indication of the weather or, perhaps, to remind themselves that they inhabit one of the most geographically beautiful cities in Australia. On its lower slopes, below the olive green of those euclaypt forests, is the property where the permaculture concept was born. A few kilometres in one direction is the city centre. In the other, well beyond the horizon, the great cool temperate wilderness of South West Tasmania.

Wilderness the South West might be, it was not inviolable and the politically powerful Hydro-Electric Commission was looking enviously – at the time that permaculture was being hatched – at its wild rivers and thinking about damming them. The Hydro had already inundated Lake Pedder below the grey, wind-whipped surface of a dam’s empoundment, an action that lay almost forgotten behind the emergence of green politics in Australia.

This gave rise to a growing environmental consciousness that developed in Tasmania at that time, but it was a consciousness seemingly unaware of permaculture ideas, being oriented towards wilderness preservation and nature conservation. When that consciousness became self-conscious and formed the early Tasmanian environment movement, it moved into oppositional politics, the threats to the environment perceived to be so great. This was the start of a mass movement that would culminate in the victory on the Franklin River.

Just how much the early environment movement fed the emerging permaculture concept is unknown, but it surely prepared the field for it in a conceptual and ideological way. On the lower slopes of Mt wellington, Bill Mollison was surely aware of that movement’s gathering strength.

Holmgren acknowledges this, saying that “the physical and cultural environment that gave rise to permaculture also produced the world’s first green political party.” In 1972 the United Tasmania Group (UTG), which evolved to become the Tasmanian Greens, was formed.

UTG was the first authentic green party in as much as it had environmental politics at its core. But whether it should be regarded as the first political party with an environmental policy remains open to dispute.

“I was living in Tasmania at the time”, permaculture educator and writer Russ Grayson says, “and figured among my friends and associates some who would later gain prominence in environmental politics in the state.

“I remember conversations with a UTG member, Des Shields, originally a Queenslander, who told me about the earlier work of the New Zealand Values Party which, while not ostensively a green party, had an ecological element to their platform. Des, I think, may have regarded this party as the first green party in history.”

Holmgren says the Australian organic agriculture movement also sprouted in Tasmania, part of, “An upwelling of intellectual and creative action at the edge of civilisation.” In fact Mollison was a founding member of the Tasmanian Organic Gardening and Farming Society, the same organisation from which Peter Cundall, who decades later was to host ABC television’s Gardening Australia emerged.

The island state, it seems, may have been instrumental in giving birth to more than one innovative social movement.

1976 – 1981 – spreading the word

Permaculture made its first appearance on the world stage in 1976 in an article in Tasmania’s Organic Farmer and Gardener newsletter published by the Tasmanian Organic Gardening and Farming Society. It was titled A Permaculture System for Southern Australian Conditions – Part One and was written by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren.

Max Lindegger in 2008. Max was one of the team that established Crystal Waters Permaculture Village in SE Queensland and was instrumental is spreading permaculture in Australia in its early years.

On the mainland, Mollison was interviewed on national radio by Terry Lane. What followed was an avalanche of interest and controversy.

A key permaculture pioneer in Australia, Max Lindegger, who went on to design the world’s first permaculture eco-village, Crystal Waters, said it was an electrifying time. Max, living thousands of kilometres to the north in Queensland, read that first article and realised that ” …it was exactly the way I felt but had been unable to put into words” – a common sentiment of people then and even now. He invited Mollison to come north for a speaking tour.

In 1976 Max formed what may have been the second permaculture group in existence, Permaculture Nambour. Meetings were at his home, and, interestingly, he still gets mail there for the organisation.

The permacultural concept has caught the imagination of hundreds of people in Australia… it may well have a wider impact…

Permaculture was starting to attract attention, but it took another two years for this rich ferment to produce the first book on permaculture – Permaculture One – a Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements. It was published in 1978 by Transworld, with joint authorship to Mollison and Holmgren.

In the book’s introduction the authors comment: “The permacultural concept has caught the imagination of hundreds of people in Australia where we have given verbal descriptions and short resumes of the system. It may well have a wider impact, as the time seems ripe for such a synthesis in a world of famine, poisons, erosion and fast-depleting energy.”

The year 1978 is a significant one for the permaculture design system. As well as Permaculture One, also appearing in that year was the first permaculture magazine – initially called, simply, Permaculture. Its editor was Terry White, a resident of the Victorian town of Maryborough, on Australia’s mainland.

Of the Mollison-Lane radio interview, White says: “I found it galvanising. Bill’s interview kindled my imagination in a profound way.” So much so that White invited Bill to visit Maryborough for a public meeting

“At that time”, says Terry, “there was a lot of concern about youth unemployment. In an attempt to address this, Maryborough had started two employment cooperatives, one making clothing and the other making bicycle trailers. An alternate technology foundation was planning the establishment of 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.

Maryborough… a significant hub for the permaculture movement for its first ten years

“It was this context of concern about youth unemployment and land degradation that provided a responsive setting for the discussion of permanent culture – permaculture – and an emphasis on positive, practical whole-system solutions.

“Permaculture One was printed in Maryborough”, said Terry White, “ …and Maryborough remained a significant hub for the permaculture movement for its first ten years. The town hosted two permaculture conferences and two of the first ten day permaculture consultancy courses”. The first permaculture course had been held in Tasmania in 1978.

More than Maryborough

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

“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. Concern over the energy supply was the outgrowth of the OPEC-led reduction in the supply that triggered the oil crisis of 1973, and which led to rationing in some Western countries.

The work of Terry White was critical to permaculture's early development.

White says that people were receptive to Mollison because, ” …he stood for something rather than against things.

“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. People found this approach empowering… it released energy. Permaculture might have been seen as a bit fringe but it was hands-on.

“While in Maryborough, Bill was invited to visit the tip and the sewage settling ponds. His suggestions for the productive use of wastes from these two sites were taken seriously by the council and a plan for the productive use of sewage waste was published in the first edition of the Permaculture quarterly journal of the national permaculture association.

“I was attracted to Bill’s idea of seeing problems as solutions, of reframing questions as positive solutions. There was also permaculture’s systems approach – it’s holistic way of looking at things.

“Permaculture, to me, is a community development model… a grassroots approach”.

Impetus from the Maryborough meeting led to another of the earliest permaculture groups in Australia, and then the National Permaculture Association.

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

Wit, provocation and charisma

Mollison is renowned for his wit, provocative style and charisma, and all were in full force at the time. Lindegger remembers the first permaculture design course, taught by Mollison over three weeks in 1979, with 18 participants ‘invited’ from all parts of the country. The venue was an old hotel in Stanley.

He says the impact on those involved was life-changing and many became a driving force for the movement. Tens of thousands of people have since taken design and introductory courses, going on to work on projects or in their communities around the world.

In 1979, Mollison published Permaculture Two, focussing on design. In 1981, still in the early days of permaculture, he received international recognition with a Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel Prize’. In his acceptance speech, he said: “All my life we’ve been at war with nature. I just pray that we lose that war. There are no winners in that war…”

The 1980s – binding a growing network

The publication of Permaculture magazine was pivotal to the history and spread of the design system. Like its eventual successor, the Permaculture International Journal (PIJ), it bound together a geographically dispersed network of emerging permaculture practitioners. Permaculture was the first publication to highlight the important role of the media in the spread of the design system. That would be more than amply demonstrated over 15 years later with the broadcast of the Global Gardener television series.

When White handed Permaculture over to Robyn Francis in 1987, the magazine moved to Sydney. At the Permaculture Epicentre in inner-urban Enmore (now Alfalfa House Food Coop), in a building shared with a small permaculture shop and Australia’s first ethical investment company, Damien Lynch’s August Investments, a team of media volunteers typed, cut and pasted articles and images into pages of what soon became the International Permaculture Journal.

Robyn Francis, one of the design system's early adopters, has made a career of permaculture education.

Soon, Permaculture Edge appeared, produced by a Permaculture Nambour in south-east Queensland. After a few years of increasingly sporadic publication, Permaculture Edge disappeared after its last edition went on sale at the 1997 International Permaculture Convergence in Western Australia.

The Permaculture International Journal (PIJ), as it became known after Robyn Francis assumed editorship and, later, handed that role to Steve Payne – now editor of ABC Organic Gardener magazine – remained the mouthpiece of the design system although, in the 1990s, Green Connections, which also reported on permaculture, came on the scene. That magazine ceased publication in December 2000, six months after PIJ.

Significantly, PIJ became the first permaculture publication to go mainstream, quite some time before Green Connections. “That was when it became available on the news stands”, says Robyn Francis.

With the turn of the decade, news of the permaculture design system was spreading and, according to White, by the mid-eighties the ten permaculture groups in Australia had grown to around 80 worldwide. In 1987, with key input from Robyn Francis, Permaculture International Ltd was incorporated to expand the distribution of Permaculture International Journal and to support the growing global network.

Permaculture also continued to be advanced through books, in particular, Mollison’s 1988, 576-page cornucopia of ideas, Permaculture – A Designers’ Manual, self-published by his own company, Tagari.

Soon, permaculture’s early adopters were teaching the design system. There was Max Lindegger, and Robin Francis, today based at the Djanbung Gardens training centre in northern NSW, who taught her first Permaculture Design Course in Sydney. She was instrumental in having an elective subject in permaculture accepted in the TAFE horticulture course at Ryde College.

Enter Rosemary

“Janice Haworth said there was going to be a permaculture course with Robyn Frances at Newtown and that I might like it,” she says. “I was suspicious at first but soon realised that it was the approach that enchanted me… it was interactive and overlaid with interconnection of disciplines.”

The different Permaculture Design Courses were often quite erratic.

The Blue Mountains are less that two hours from Sydney by train but they might as well be on the other side of the continent, they are so different. Lifted above the lowlands to their east and west, the mountains are an ancient sandstone plateau dissested by deep river valleys and clad in the olive green of eucalypt forest. Rainforest inhabits the darker, wetter gullies. Rather than the warm temperate climate of the coastal plain, the altitude of the mountains creates a microclimate more akin to the the cool temperate of the southern states.

Rosemary Morrow

The town of Katoomba is the largest of the small towns and villages strung along the Great Western Highway where it crosses the Blue Mountains. And here, in a modest brick veneer house that she is refitting for energy and water efficiency and home food production, lives a woman who has accomplished much permaculturally, Rosemary Morrow.

Rosemary became a Quaker in 1978, she says, the year that Permacultre One was published. She describes her discovery of permaculture.

The different Permaculture Design Courses were often quite erratic

Rosemary recollects the early days of permaculture.

“Well, they were chaotic really. The information was all over the place and some of it was relevent then, but today it’s quite dated. Some of the claims were extravagant and not realistic. It all sounded so simple.

“It took me ages to realise that design was the main subject and that Network Science was the key to it all. My background in agricultural and environmental science and horticulture helped me to make sense of it at a deeper level. It was very attractive because it put all these in the same frame.

Permaculture became my vocation

Rosemary tried to make order from confusion and explains that permaculture education has changed from its early days.

“The different Permaculture Design Courses were often quite erratic and no one had a sense of the skills and knowledge they wanted participants to have by the end of the course. It was taught by enthusiasts with no teaching skills. Copying Bill Mollison meant a 72 hour talkfest which few could emulate. That’s pretty well changed now.

“I was also intrigued by a course which began with ethics… none of my other studies had ever mentioned the word. There was a correspondence between Quakerism and permaculture. They had in common things like care for people, simplicity, community, ethical use of money and right livelihood. I was at home.

“Permaculture became my vocation and the more I worked with the content, the more interesting and the deeper it went… links started to happen with special nodes around water, plants and soil. I saw design as philosophy and practice and the true subject of the course.

After discovering permaculture, Rosemary went on to take its ideas to Vietnam and Cambodia and to other places. Today, she teaches the design system in the Blue Mountains, where she lives, and promotes the virtues of localism. Rosemary has built a network of local permaculture practitioners.

She has also become an author of permaculture books. First, in the mid-1990s came the Earth Keeepers Guide to Permaculture, then a teacher’s manual based on the content of that book. Later, she wrote a manual on saving seeds for use in developing countries. On a sunny late Autumn day in 2006, a new, updated edition of the Earth Keepers Guide was launched amid the sweet white blossoms of the heritge apple tree collection in the Blue Mountains Community Garden.

Growth continues

“The 1980s were a period of growth for Permaculture”, says Francis.

“The decade started with the Alternative Economic Summit in 1984 – which introduced permaculture to economics – and in 1987 August Investments made a start.

“We had the the Earthbank Conference – that was the outcome of Bill talking with the Schumacher Society. There was the establishment of the Maleny Community Credit Union, the first and second international permaculture convergences, the first permaculture design courses in Nepal, India and Zimbabwe and then the third international conference in New Zealand.

“There was the opening of Crystal Waters Permaculture Village, Australia’s first ecovillage, a project driven by Max Lindegger (now with the Global Ecovillage Network) and his team.

“Declan and Margrit Kennedy, in Germany, taught the first urban permaculture course, for the first time taking permaculture beyond the rural. Canadian, Michael Linton, introduced LETS (Local Exchange and Trading System) to Australia. In 1988, Bill taught the first permaculture course to an Aboriginal community at Alice Springs and the decade culminated with the publication of Bill’s Permaculture – A Designers’ Manual, the most substantial of permaculture texts and one still in print.”

It was late in the decade that the design system appeared on the tube in front of a mass audience, thanks to the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), an event that sparked wider interest in the permaculture agenda. Two early programs featured Bill and permaculture, one entitled In Grave Danger of Falling Food and another, a permaculture garden makeover, shown on the Extra Dimensions program.

The Manual, along with a cut-down version, Introduction to Permaculture (1991), still sells well today. Among Mollison’s other books, which collectively have sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide, are The Permaculture Book of Ferment and Human Nutrition (1993) and his autobiography, Travels in Dreams (1996). Mollison was rumoured to have been working on a number of other publications in recent years but none have yet been published.

1990s – years of consolidation… and expansion

The decade started well for permaculture as it continued to spread its influence. It was growing overseas, too, in both developed and underdeveloped countries. In Australia, the PIJ held the movement together, providing it with the news and information that bound it into a diffused but coherent movement.

Permaculture was still far from mainstream but it was gaining in respectability and credibility. Change, however, was only ten years away.

“The 1990s brought further growth”, Robyn Francis continues. “My own project, Jalanbah Ecovillage, made a start in rural Nimbin, as did my permaculture teaching base and permaculture demonstration centre, Djanbung Gardens”.

The Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network was operating by mid-decade, promoting community-based urban agriculture as a venue for permaculture and associated ideas. Notable also was another television program, the four-part Global Gardener series shown on the ABC, which swelled attendance at permaculture courses.

“In Sydney, the television broadcast of Global Gardener boosted attendance at our permaculture introductory and Permaculture Design Courses, something that other educators reported too,” said Fiona Campbell, who led a Sydney-based permaculture education team that developed a 110-hour, part time urban Permaculture Design Course. “More so that the earlier television programs about permaculture, Global Gardener brought permaculture before a mainstream audience in a powerful way”.

Fiona Campbell led a permaculture teaching team which developed an urban Permaculture Design Course in Sydney in the 1990s and worked with the Permaculture Sydney association.

By this time Mollison had established for himself a reputation as the visionary communicator of permaculture. He stirrer his audiences and was the outspoken public voice of the design system, a reputation he had built over the previous decade. He travelled widely to deliver the permaculture message to audiences both eager and curious.

Holmgren re-emerges

While Mollison was increasing his public presence, Holmgren remained largely out of the public eye, quietly and busily testing permaculture principles on his own property at Hepburn Springs, a couple of hours from Melbourne.

In 1995 Holmgren published a documentation of those years on the land in the form of the large format book, Ten Years of Sustainable Living at Melliodora. This set out in detail the creation of his productive small farm and permaculture demonstration site that included a passive-solar sustainable home, contour planting and tree crops.

Other case studies and writings followed, including case studies of Holmgren’s integrated house and landscape designs in south eastern Australia. Most recently, the landmark 2002 publication, Permaculture – Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability has appeared. Popularised through a speaking tour that promoted the book, it quickly captured the permaculture imagination. The book offered a reinterpretation of the design principles of permaculture and Holmgren’s are now more frequently cited than the earlier set although they in no way disagree with it.

Permaculture – Principles and Pathways and Holmgren’s national tour to promote it did more than remind the permaculture network that David was still there, applying the design system on his own land, overshadowed by Bill’s public presence though he might be. It marked the emergence of Holmgren as the most prominent authority on permaculture in the country, a reputation increased later by his speaking tour with US peak oil writer, Richard Heinberg.

The popularity of Permaculture – Principles and Pathways rests on Holmgren’s reputation as a permaculture pioneer and its serious approach to design concepts. This, despite the appearance of other permaculture books in the period between the publication of Mollison’s Designers Manual and Holmgren’s book. There was West Australian permaculture educator, Ross Mars’ introductory volume and Patrick Whitefield’s books in the UK. Significantly in Australia, Rosemary Morrow’s Earth Users Guide to Permaculture was published in themid-1990s, a book which, thanks to being written in her down-to-earth style, achieved status as a recommended text for a number of Permaculture Design Courses.

In recent years Holmgren has ‘come out of his shell’, speaking and lecturing around the world on permaculture and peak oil and sharing the platform with prominent environmental activists such as Richard Heinberg. He continues to live with his family at Melliodora.

Going home

The Tweed Range falls as a rugged, precipituous escarpment clad in subtripical rainforest to the less-precipituous but still steep hills that abutt it. Over the generations farmers have opened the country, clearing those hills to graze their cattle. It was this rolling country that attracted Bill Mollison and led to his establishing the Permaculture Institute on a 2ha block near the end of a narrow, dusty road not all that far from the town of Tyalgum.

Here, Mollison and others living on the site rehabilitated the old farmland with tree and vegetable crops as an example of rural permaculture design. Within a few years the adjining farm went on the market and Mollison bought this, setting up the Permaculture Research Institute.

An experiment with a Permaculture Commonworks was launched, a scheme through which individuals were given access to land, for a fee, on which they would set up income-producing enterprises. A market garden appeared down on the flat land by the creek; a bamboo plantation was started to supply shoots to the food market and to market bamboo stalks; a large, free range chicken system was fenced; a hillside was terraced and tropial fruit trees planted; and a large dam was seeded with edible fish. The scheme seemed to thrive for awhile on the enthusiasm of those setting up the enterprises. Within a few years, however, it had collapsed.

It was now the late-1990s and it was a time of change for Mollison. Having lived for many years on the Institute property in the sub-tropics, he returned home to Tasmania to write and occasionally teach.

The Permaculture Research Institute he handed over to Permaculture designer, Geoff Lawton and his team. When the property was sold, Lawton reestablished the Permaculture Research Institute near The Channon, in northern NSW, not all that far from where Mollison had originally set it up.

Mollison now lives with his wife, Lisa, at sisters Creek near Deloraine in northern Tasmania… his homeland and not all that far from his humble beginnings in Stanley.

Permaculture – established at last

Permaculture is now mainstream in Australia, at least in gardening and environmental circles, with ‘permaculturists’ on national television and writing for major publications.

Key breakaway movements, now also mainstream, were inspired by permaculturists in Australia, from ethical investment to community gardening and the national Seed Savers Network. Some, like community gardening and city farms, were not originally established as permaculture projects, however permaculturists soon found them fertile ground in which to implement their ideas. Northey Street City Farm in Brisbane, set up in 1994, has perhaps taken the link with permaculture the furthest with permaculture educator, Dick Copeman, offering the recently-national accredited certificate courses in permaculture as well as the traditional Permaculture Design Course.

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.

Numerous books have been written here by other permaculture teachers and there has been a coming together of permaculture and organic gardening groups into a strong and vibrant force for the future.

Going international

The road from the coastal plain is long, narrow and dusty. Towards its end it rises through farmland and eucalypt forest and ends abruptly in front of an old, weathered timber building at a place called Pappinbarra. Here, in 1984, at its first international convergence, permaculture was born as an international movement. Present were permaculture’s early adopters, the people who would take the design system to the world.

The international story of permaculture is so diverse and idiosyncratic, it is impossible to throw a net over it. Certainly, an army of field workers has taken the design system far and wide (as Mollison set out to do), even if many no longer wear the public cloak of permaculture, preferring to use its principles within their occupations or community work – whether farmer, architect, planner, simple gardener or community activist.

More recently, permaculture has started to infiltrate the new local government area of sustainabilitty education, although this is taking place only in limited areas such as among some NSW councils. Why the development is significant is because the predecessor approach to local government community education — environmental education (the actual meaning of the terms is somewhat fluid) — has focused mainly on the conservation of the natural environment, water and waste.

Even in the 1980s, without the aid of the internet, word of permaculture spread rapidly.

The first International Permaculture Conference was held in Pappinbarra, Australia in 1984, kick-starting its international outreach.

The second international conference took pace at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington (USA) in 1986 and featured not only Mollison, but famed Japanese natural farming pioneer, Masanobu Fukuoka (author of The One Straw Revolution), and Wes Jackson, founder in 1976 of the Land Institute (researching perennial agriculture in the USA).

Guy Baldwin, founding editor of The Permaculture Activist magazine (launched in 1985 and still going), says the conference was pivotal in bringing permaculture to a mainstream audience in the US although courses and talks had already been held there and a key networking organization, the Permaculture Institute of North America, had been formed.

There is still strong activity in permaculture circles in the US although Baldwin believes that, to some extent, “the momentum started by permaculture in the early 1980s was largely swallowed up by activism in other ‘alternative’ movements such as organic farming, sustainable agriculture and deep-ecology.” Nevertheless, he remembers a great buzz around the international conference which led to many courses and further visits from Mollison.

Outside the US there have been conferences and courses in diverse locations, including New Zealand, Nepal, Zimbabwe and Denmark. The New Zealand conference included cosmologist, Paul Davies, and Ecologist magazine founder, Teddy Goldsmith, as keynote speakers. The latest international gathering was held in São Paulo Brazil in May (2007), featuring alternative and innovative thinkers from around the world.

Many countries now have their own peak permaculture bodies and publications, among them the Permaculture Activist and, in the UK, Permaculture. Although PIJ is no longer published, the Permaculture International organisation remains, maintaining a website and a global directory as networking tools.

Permaculture’s future

Rosemary Morrow describes how she sees the future of the design system in an upcoming book of biographies of people with a history in permaculture.

“I view permaculture today as still a prototype. It is barely thirty years old and continues to grow and stretch out into people’s lives and take forms of its own, especially if we think how David Holmgren has stretched the parameters.

“I remember Mollison saying to me ‘permaculture is about tangibles.’ Today I see the tangibles embedded in intangibles… the conversations, the solitude, the insights, reflections and feedback and new findings in every part of the Permaculture syllabus”.

……Bio notes: Russ Grayson is a journalist who has taught permaculture design, worked on international development projects and is active in food security issues in Australia. Steve Payne is editor of Organic Gardener magazine in Australia and was a former editor of the Permaculture International Journal.