Participants agreed that the aim of the program would be spread the adoption of sustainability behaviour by developing the capacity of communities to engage in sustainability actions. Part of this would be to optimise the use of the energy and water education trails and the Permaculture Interpretive Garden at the Sustainability Hub and to use the Hub as a base. The idea of making the Hub a ‘third place’ where people can come each month and where community organisations can self-organise events was well received (third place is a term used to describe places that are easy of access and cheap to visit and where people can gather to socialise and to hatch good ideas. The concept of third place is based on time spent at a place, with the ‘first place’ being the household and the ‘second place’ the workplace).

Other ideas were to use the Hub as a base for the Living Smarties, the graduates of Randwick Council’s Living Smart course, for training facilitators and for ‘recharge’ activities for both Living Smarties and others working in collaborative change for sustainability in the Eastern Suburbs.

Participants who attended last year’s community leaders’ course at the Sustainability Hub spoke highly of the event and were in favour of a re-run. The course, which Fiona organised, was led by the professional facilitation consultants, Unfolding Futures. It introduced participants to group facilitation and direction-setting techniques and ideas.

Graeme described the outreach program as making use of the pebble-in-water effect, an analogy to the act of throwing a pebble thrown into a pond and watching the ripples expand outward as surges of energy. In the same way, the influence of participants in the outreach program would ripple out into society.

According to Greame, the outreach program would be best implemenrted as two complementary prongs—the delivery of activities such as events, resources, site tours and more—and a capacity building prong that built the knowledge and skills of participants. Peer-to-peer education would make a large part of this, with participants teaching others the skills they possess as part of a ‘sustainability skilling up’ process.

Through a content identification, sorting and calendaring process, a timeline was mapped out. This will form the focus of a meeting in a couple weeks.

What had started as an innovative idea of local people came to an end when, one warm Wednesday afternoon in late March 2011, the City of Sydney removed the community composting installation in Peace Park, Chippendale.

The removal reminded me of something I had learned some time ago at a place not very far away.

Technology transfer a three-legged construction

In those days I worked for an international development NGO operating in the South Pacific and what I learned still makes a lot of sense to me. We worked in village food security and small scale, sustainable farming systems using the LEISA (Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture) approach, however the NGO—then based only hundreds of metres away in the University of Technology, Sydney, though 14 years in the past—also did village micro-hydro electrification.

The row of seven Aerobins - one for each day of the week - at the community composting facility in Chippendale.

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It would have been easy for the NGO to have come in to some Solomon Island village and install a micro-hydro system, turn on the lights and leave. That approach was not unknown when it came to development assistance work by government programs and even by small, community based NGOs. Instead, those in the NGO were savvy enough to know that technology transfer, to be done properly, comes as a three legged structure. That technology transfer structure is this: a new technology or new approach to doing something had a greater chance of long-term success when it comes as a package containing the technology + a clear plan for it’s maintenance + the training of those who will take over and use the it.

It’s a simple enough proposition but it’s all too often ignored. The lesson has stayed with me and it came to mind when I started working with the City of Sydney where I collaborate with the City’s waste projects co-ordinator on community composting trials.

Older origins

I realize as I write that this three-component approach to technology transfer links back to ideas imbibed earlier in my life when the appropriate technology movement was in it’s formative phase. The ideas are those of English economist, Fritz Schumacher, author of the classic book, Small Is Beautiful. Reflecting on technology transfer to developing countries, Schumacher wrote that technologies must be appropriate in scale to the task at hand and appropriate in maintenance costs and skills to what is available in-country.

When technologies were electro-mechanical this made sense. But how many small towns in developing countries have technicians who can repair the computerized systems now extensively used in technologies? We can expect that number to increase, but maybe we need to accept that technical help now comes from further afield. Doing so doesn’t alter Schumacher’s wisdom, just adapts it to the world as it is now.

Local resident, Michael Mobbs, checks out a streetside community compost bin with Fiona Campbell, Randwick City Council Sustainability Education Officer.

Community composting—an appropriate technology

So what has Fritz Schumacher and work in a development assistance NGO got to do with community composting in Sydney? A number of things, it turns out.

Let’s recognise that community composting—and any sort of composting—is the application of an appropriate technology in the spirit of the concept developed by Fritz Schumacher. The devices deployed in community composting—in the example I use here it is the Aerobin—constitute a particular iteration of an appropriate technology designed for resource recovery, for turning green waste into fertiliser for use on the nearby street verge gardens.

That’s the link with the past and it remains valid although it is a link seldom made by sustainability educators. That’s because Schumacher’s ideas are seldom taught in courses and workshops around the technologies of sustainability, a fact I repeatedly discover when I ask those who came of age after that initial surge of interest in appropriate technology in the 1970s.

Gone, but a reboot is coming

Community composting is a new idea both to communities and to local government. Neither have tried it before. Solutions are being developed and trialled as we go. There are no instruction manuals.

The City and local people installed a community composting system consisting of seven Aerobin composters (one for each day of the week) in Peace Park in inner urban Chippendale that is within easy walking distance of Sydney’s busy Railway Square.

That day in late March, the City in agreement with the local people who had been maintaining the system removed the seven Aerobins of the community composting facility.

The reason? Cockroaches. Multitudes of cockroaches. The community compost had gone from a good idea in local resource recovery to a public health issue. There had been the comment from locals about odour and flies, though these may have been not the common house fly but vinegar flies and other flying insects that appear during composting as part of the decomposition process.

Cleanliness and tidiness are important considerations for communities and councils planning to install community composting facilities.

Gone-the Peace Park community composting facility temporarily removed.

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Breeding habitat brings population boost

We traced the cause of this infestation to the creation of breeding habitat in which both warmth and plenty of food (kitchen wastes) were in abundance inside the Aerobins. This came about because of an imbalance of inputs. Trouble-free composting requires a balance of dry, carbon-rich materials such as straw, dried grasses, shredded newspaper or cardboard and garden wastes blended with nitrogen-rich material in the form of moist kitchen wastes.

And that is exactly what was missing in the community compost. Chippendale is a densely packed precinct consisting of Victorian-ear terrace houses and apartment blocks. Garden space is minimal and, where it does exist, consists of small courtyards. There’s not all that much growing space and, consequently, there’s not much waste from gardens, but what there is in plenty are food wastes from the kitchen. Fed by enthusiastic local people with their kitchen wastes and by similar wastes from an adjacent cafe, inputs into the seven Aerobins of the community composting system quickly became unbalanced. All of that kitchen waste created the ideal breeding environment for roaches, whose population rapidly expanded.

That was demonstrated more than adequately during an inspection when we opened the compost bin’s lower access hatch and out flooded a mass of those small, brown, multilegged creatures. It was like watching a horror movie, one of those present said. What it really was, was a good demonstration of the problem affecting the system and a demonstration of the need for a rapid solution.

Solutions were attempted. Eucalyptus oil proved a temporary deterrent. Boric acid powder was suggested but there was not the time to try this before removing the bins.

Massed cockroaches aside, the experience with the community composting trial is what you expect when developing something new. The trial has been a rapid prototyping process, and when you prototype something you expect problems. Developing solutions to those problems is an integral part of the process.

What, then. would be the solution? In a word – reboot. Rather than tweaking the system by trying different roach control additives, the decision was made to do a takedown and restart.

Now, the bins are to be thoroughly cleaned and reinstalled later in the year when there is new staff who will set up the system as a proper trial, complete with project design, monitoring and evaluation. Part of this will be that three corner approach to technology transfer I mentioned earlier—technology + maintenance + education. This latter will take the form of workshops for those who will manage the system.

Organic waste rich in kitchen scraps, including those seen here from an adjacent cafe, led to an input imbalance in the community compost facility in Peace Park, Chippendale.

A little systems thinking

A little systems thinking can never be too much. For the increasing number of local governments and communities contemplating or trying community composting, the Chippendale experience points to the need to take a systems thinking approach that fully considers the type, quantity and quality of inputs into the composting process, the processes of management and maintenance and the qualtity and quantity of outputs.

Before setting out in community composting, you need a clear idea of what you will do with the compost produced and where you will do it. Then, as a systems thinker, you design in your feedback loops so that your process and output stages connect via monitoring and evaluation to feed information back into the inputs and process stage so as you can tweak and modify them a you go. It’s the philosophy of continual improvement in action.

One suggestion, and it is a proven one, has been to locate community composting at community gardens. We know from experience that this works, there having been two community gardens in Sydney that have used green wastes from the local community to produce compost for their garden beds. The reality, though, is that not all neighborhoods have a community garden nearby.

For managers of community composting systems, a question arising from the Chippendale experience is about how you obtain a balance of inputs, a balance of carbon and nitrogen-rich materials, such that the composting process fully breaks down the wastes and produces a useful fertilizer.

Debugging is a term that describes the problem solving process that is part of rapid prototyping. Chippendale’s community composting experiment gives the word an entirely new meaning.

Two kerbside community compost bins in Chippendale

Clarification: The Chippendale community composting, street verge gardens and other local initiatives have now been incorporated into the City of Sydney’s Sustainable Streets project which intends to develop the precinct as a demonstration.

More on community composting

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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The road twists as it descends, for these are the convoluted ridges and steep gullies of the mountain’s foothills. Eventually, Strickland Avenue deposits you in the Cascades area of South Hobart.

Why this twining strip of asphalt is significant is because it once housed the dwelling of a remarkable man and because it was here that this man developed an idea with a younger man, and idea that caught the public imagination and that would, in the decades that followed its launch in the late 1970s, blossom into something new in the world.

Strickland Avenue was home to Bill Mollison, co-founder of the permaculture design system, and its twisting route down the foothills , its traverse of ridge and descent into gully, could be taken as symbolic of the unfolding of the design system that came into existence here, amid this steep landscape, on the lower slope  of this magnificent mountain of dolerite and forest.

Descending the Avenue that crisp mid-autumn day was to return to my own past in this southernmost of Australia’s cities as well as an unplanned return to the birthplace of permaculture. It led to a brief discussion with my traveling companion and, later, to thoughts of how permaculture has evolved over the decades.

Our descent of Strickland Avenue that day also triggered another thought. It is not my thought alone but is one that has been raised by others and it is this: why has permaculture not achieved influence among social and political decision makers?

A diffuse entity

Permaculture has evolved as a diffuse entity practiced mainly within the community sector of society. Sure, there are examples of successful small businesses develop from the permaculture concept but they remain few. As permaculture co-founder David Holmgren pointed out in 2007, the design system’s success, its most successful adoption, has been as an approach to sustainable living at the community level.

When it comes with trying to get to grips with the question of the lack of permaculture influence among social and political decision makers I believe we must look to the diffuseness that characterises permaculture. This is both the design systems strength as well as its weakness. The reality is that diffuse and amorphous ideas such as permaculture have many interpretations — they become different things to different people — and so are difficult to clearly define and pin down. Some see permaculture as a type of organic food gardening, others as a whole-of-life philosophy for living sustainably; I see it as an approach to community development.

It has been pointed out that diffuseness around the concept can lead to confusion and to difficulty in getting across just what the design system is. While this diffuseness makes pemaculture easily available to individuals by providing numerous entry points, it makes it difficult to encapsulate for decision makers.

By way of analogy…

One way of exploring why permaculture has not gained greater prominence among institutional and political decision makers is to compare it to something that also had its origins in grassroots community practice but that went on to gain considerable influence. This is the bushland regeneration movement.

We can trace the origin of the movement to the work of the Bradley sisters in the bushland near their home in Sydney’s affluent, middle class Mosman. The practice of de-weeding bushland and restoring it to indigenous, or at least native plant communities has its origins here. It soon caught the public imagination.

The reasons for this can be found in the confluence of new ideas that emerged during the 1970s and 1980s and to the emergence of the environment movement at the time, with its focus on natural ecosystems. These was also the years when restoration ecology emerged as an academic discipline around the world, with its notion of restoring natural systems and prioritising native plants. The ideas formulated within this discipline went on to infect the new bush regeneration movement. For environmentalists, bush regeneration provided a hands-on means of practicing what they believed in. It was a natural alliance that led to native plants becoming the default setting when it came to landscape design and to their prioritisation by the environment movement.

The groundwork for the bush regeneration movement was laid by organisations like the Society for Growing Australian Plants. Through their publications, the links made with the science of ecology, the threats to native biodiversity popularised through the environment movement and the emergence of specialised native plant nurseries, Australian home gardeners ripped up the lawns in their newly-gentrified suburbs and started to replace them with native vegetation. A new, mainly inner urban landscape started to emerge. At times, the preference for native vegetation took on a tone akin to botanical ethnic cleansing with non-native plants being regarded as second class and their removal and replacement with natives.

This botanical nationalism was not unlike a similar nationalistic surge around the start of the Twentieth Century. Then, it was not gardeners but landscape painters who led the popularisation of the Australian bush in art. Seeking a break with long-established European artistic tradition, the Australian painters, such as those associated with the Heidelberg School, popularised an impressionism that championed the Australian quality of light as well as rural and bushland scenes. Take a look at Arthur Streeton’s The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might and you get a idea of how artists were starting to see the land differently and to celebrate that difference. An analogy  to the surge of popularity in native plants and native ecosystems of the 80s, really, though the artists’ nationalism fed into Australian Federation.

Now catching on as a popular, community-based movement, bush regeneration and its accompanying preference for the native in vegetation moved towards official institutionalisation. By the 1980s, people could be inducted into the practice through TAFE courses and, soon, jobs in bushland regeneration started to appear in local government and in small businesses contracting bushland regeneration services to councils. Jobs, acceptance by local and state government, the availability of TAFE training, native plant nurseries and the emergence of the Landcare movement with its native plant and weed-eradication focus on farms added to community-based gardening practices to establish the dominance of native plants and bush regeneration in the firmament of landscape design in Australia. It was a nexus that was to push bush regeneration into social, institutional and political influence.

Why a lack of permaculture influence?

It was Bill Mollison who drew attention to the reality that the dominant eucalypt-acacia ecosystems were actually human relics rather than the creation of unassisted nature. Bringing an anthropological interpretation to Australia’s landscapes, Bill described eucalypts as “weeds that come up in the presence of frequent, low-intensity burning by Aboriginies over a long period of time”. This was not something that would endear him to the bush regeneration crowd.

The reason why permaculture has not achieved the influence of the bush regeneration lobby is due to its following a quite different trajectory of development and to the decentralised, diffuse structure of the design system.

Like bush regeneration, permaculture has its origins in community action, and like bush regeneration it became a popular movement. It also offered people a means to taking practical action on sustainability. But there the similarity ends. Bush regeneration became institutionalised while permaculture remained in the community sector.

Permaculture has evolved as a decentralised practice based in the work of individuals and community associations. Like bushland regeneration, it developed courses as a means of recruitment. Commonly, these were introduction to permaculture courses and their content has been quite variable with some being little more than gardening courses. The Permaculture Design Course provided a more intensive introduction but this, too, could be variable in focus and content. What the design course was not was an accredited, TAFE-based course. Consequently, and unlike the bush regeneration course of the 1980s and 1990s, it did not achieve the status of ‘official’ recognition. This militated against permaculture’s acceptance as a credible field of study and source of influence by decision makers in local government and elsewhere, though it didn’t work against its acceptance at the community level.

Permaculture’s is a decentralised structure. Power and influence are diffused. The only organisations to attain a quasi-official status are the Permaculture Institute and Permaculture International Ltd, though this remains only a partial status with little influence on the actions of individual permaculturists or their organisations. There are no centralised, representative bodies. This, too, makes gaining influence difficult, for who is to represent permaculture? That’s another of those perennial questions that have surfaced from time to time within the movement.

For those seeking a greater role in society than permaculture has achieved as a popular, community-based activity, the design system has stalled at the level of the home — and recently — the community garden. It has little to zero voice in local government apart from a handful of permaculture trained or influenced people working in local government sustainability education. While this may be no problem to individuals practicing permaculture or to its community associations, it effectively locks the design system out of any deeper, potential influence.

Food advocacy — a marked absence

It is not just political and social decision making that permaculture finds difficulty in directly influencing. It is also advocacy on food at the policy level.

This can be seen as victim to permaculture’s focus on the home garden and on things like energy efficient building design and water efficiency, areas that are now the purview of government and other sustainability-directed organisations. More centrally organised entities like the Australian Conservation Foundation have refocused their efforts over recent years to address issues in urban systems that once would have been the territory of permaculture. It is not that permaculture thinking has influenced these organisations, for the most part the design system in notable for its absence in their thinking. It is that trends in resource use, energy consumption and water management have caught up with and passed what were once permaculture’s cutting edge ideas and permaculture had not moved forward. Thus, the design system finds itself with less influence because its intellectual territory has been partially colonised by other organisations.

Urban food is one of these. Permaculture, through its home garden focus and initiatives such as Permablitz, has excelled at popularising the traditional Australian practice of the home production of food. What it has not done so well is to form partnerships and collaborations with organisations working as alliances to pursue urban food sustainability through influencing policy. Yet, it is through membership of these alliances, and their number is now increasing, that permaculture could truly exert influence. It is true that there may be one or two permaculture people involved with the food alliances, however their number is small.

Set to remain in the community sector?

If David Holmgren is right, then we may be witnessing the confinement of permaculture to the community sector. There it should continue to flourish as it has these past ten years.

This is both opportunity and barrier, especially to taking the design system further into the social decision making process. For that, we will likely have to rely upon the food alliances and other groupings that emerge from time to time to address specific social issues.

Permaculture has come a great distance from its origin there on the winding road that is Strickland Avenue. It retains potential to travel further, however it may require new thinking to achieve that.

Sustainability educator, Fiona Campbell, explains the phases behind a person's readiness for change.

STING is the creation of people associated with TransitionSydney, TransitionMarrickville and Transition Darlinghurst Surry Hills. The aim is to stimulate and cultivate a community of practice among those involved in transition initiatives so as to improve their skills and effectiveness. This would be similar to the community of practice that has developed around the Sydney Facilitators’ Network in which some of those at the STING event participate. The idea is that transition groups become learning organisations, evaluating what they do to derive learnings and adding new ideas and skills.

The STING initiative is coordinated by TransitionSydney within its role as a transition hub offering support and assistance to other transition initiatives.

This first STING event took place on 14 October at the Blues Point Community Centre in North Sydney.

Assessing readiness for change

The event was led by Fiona Campbell, a Sydney sustainability educator working with local government, and was based on the work of US community and business sustainability educator and author, Bob Doppelt.

Doppelt is executive director of Resource Innovations, a sustainability research and technical assistance program, and of the Climate Leadership Initiative of the Institute for a Sustainable Environment at the University of Oregon. His most recent book is The Power of Sustainable Thinking, released by Earthscan publishing in 2008.

Behavioural change now the focus

Encouraging behavioural change among participants in workshops and courses is now the focus for sustainability educators, especially those in local government and others working with the corporate sector. How to do this has, until recently, not been a topic of conversation. Now, however, educators are paying attention to models for  attitudinal, thinking and behavioural change developed in other fields of knowledge in the past, and that are being repurposed for sustainabilty education by leading thinkers. Bob Doppelt is one of these.

Doppelt has taken the behavioural change model developed by health psychology practitioner, James Prochaska, and substantially adapted it for sustainability education.  Prochaska developed the Transtheoretical Model for identifying and targeting people based on their readiness for change.

Prochaska’s model of personal change

Prochaska’s model of how people move through stages in change over time was developed for use in the health field, however sustainability educators have found it applicable to understanding how individuals move through change related to sustainability behaviour.

The model can be summarised as six stages:

• precontemplative — there is no intention to take action to change attitudes and behaviours in the immediate future
• contemplative — people intend to make changes in the near future
• preparation — there is intention to start making attitudinal and behavioural changes within weeks
• action —change is starting or has recently started and remains at an early stage
• maintenance — change is ongoing and those making the change grapple with the challenge of keeping it going
• termination — changes are now established and built into the individual’s life.

Understanding readiness improves delivery

The purpose of understanding the models of personal change and of learning where people attending a program, workshop or course are on the continuum of change is to tailor messages and programs for specific demographics so as to increase their effectiveness. If transition initiatives are to become effective, a better understanding of the way in which people move into change is needed.

Prochaska’s ideas have some currency among sustainability educators, though it is uncommon to find his or Doppelt’s approach among those active with community organisations. Fiona uses Doppelt’s ideas in her sustainability education work.

An understanding of people’s readiness for change — the phase of change they presently occupy — avoids falling into the trap of making glib and dismissive responses such as ‘preaching to the converted’ and of using tactics such as inducing feelings of personal guilt, as has been favoured by the environment movement. Doppelt offers a more sophisticated understanding and response.

The 5Ds

Based on his work in sustainability education, Doppelt further developed and adapted Prochaska’s ideas and asks what triggers personal behavioural change in regard to sustainability thinking, and what pathways people follow through change of that type. To facilitate comprehension, he has developed the 5D model.

The first D — Disinterest

In this stage, there is no intention to change attitudes or behaviours towards sustainable living and no interest in doing so.

Characteristics of people in the disinterest phase include:

• a personal attitude opposed to change
• little awareness of global and other challenges
• denial that their behaviour contributes to the problem
• the attitude that personal efforts are inconsequential
• a lack of hope in the future
• a lack of belief that they can contribute to change.

The second D — Deliberation

The attitude prevalent here is that people might change.

It is characterised by:

• a start to acknowledging the challenges we face
• a start to seriously considering a change to personal thinking and behaviour
• a start to gathering information that could lead to change
• a personal struggle to understand
• overestimating the disadvantages of change.

The third D — Design

Here, the individual is preparing to make changes.

Characteristics include:

• the benefits of becoming a sustainability thinker are believed to overcome the costs of doing so
• the design of a plan for adopting new thinking and behaviours in the near future
• the making of a few small changes
• incomplete but ongoing resolution of ambivalence towards the effectiveness of and desire to make behavioural and attitudinal changes
• the continuation of an oscillating attitude that is not likely to be resolved until the benefits are seen to more fully outweigh the disadvantages.

The fourth D — Doing

This is the phase in which changes have been made and are continuing:

• action is being takes to modify behaviour
• a great deal of commitment is required to persevere with personal change
• making changes puts the individual under scrutiny
• the benefits of change are seen to be worth the effort.

The fifth D — Defending

Changes have been made, and this phase focuses on maintaining them. It is equivalent to Prochaska’s ‘maintaining’ classification.

Characteristics include:

• making changes and sticking with them over the long term
• the defence of personal behavioural changes in the face of resistance from others
• the need to continually overcome obstacles and recover from setbacks
• repeated attempts to change.

Achieving success

The key to success in working with people is to understand their readiness for change. In a workshop or sustainability course, an understanding of this can be gained by asking strategic questions of individuals or of the group. Education packages can then be adapted according to the phases of change occupied by individuals.

According to Fiona, most of the participants in her Living Smart course are in the ‘deliberation’, ‘design’ and ‘doing’ phases, although she has had some in the ‘defending’ stage.

The presence of people in this phase could be seen as preaching to the converted, however that would be to misinterpret it. Certainly, they are ‘converted’ and practicing sustainability thinking and behaviours. However there presence is, in part, to learn more and to update their knowledge, giving their participation a ‘further education’ function.

Building a tension for behavioural change and emphasising the benefits of change early on, when working with groups and individuals, is done in parallel with dealing with any downside of making changes as they progress.

Occupying multiple stages

A little thought will soon disclose that people can occupy more than one stage of change at the same time.

Three examples:

• a woman who occupied the doing and defending stages of sustainable living in most aspects of her life was at the disinterest stage when it came to private car use; this was not based on ignorance of the environmental and carbon emission challenges that private vehicle use entails, but was dictated by the need to travel expediently between home and work and to maintain her schedule around her young child
• another was a climate change skeptic who believed that climate change exists but that there is no human agency in perpetuating or worsening it; yet, she wanted to live sustainably by adopting new personal practices; she simultaneously occupied the disinterest stage in regard to climate change and the design stage in regard to sustainability thinking
• another was an influential person in the environment movement who drove a large, four wheel drive vehicle around the city, suggesting the occupation of the disinterest, doing and defending stages at the same time.

What this discloses is that it is normal for individuals to live with contradiction, that people can hold contradictory attitudes and indulge in contradictory behaviours — towards sustainable living in these cases — at the same time. Sustainability educators would do well to see paradox as normal.

An understanding of value

Understanding how people change is a basic and necessary tool for any social change agent.

Basing approaches to education and influence on the understandings developed by Bob Doppelt is something that separates the informed sustainability educator from those in other social movements that focus on political change alone.

Read more on sustainability education:

• ORID technique
• ideas diffusion.

Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

ACCORDING TO Dr Robert Gillman – a one-time astrophysicist with NASA turned community worker and, later, publisher of In Context magazine – there is a process by which new ideas move from the creative fringe of society into the conservative core.

For those working for social change or to produce a new product, Dr Gillman’s process provides a context and a timeline for their work.

Small groups have influence

Dr Gillman’s message is that successful small groups working to popularise a new idea or innovation can have a long term impact if they understand how ideas move into society and if they strategise to get their ideas to the take-off point.

The process – ideas diffusion – by which this happens was hinted at by well-known anthropologist, Margaret Mead, who is credited with the statement: “Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has”.

The ideas diffusion model

Dr Gillman and others developed what has become known as the Ideas Diffusion model.

Like a leaf caught in a whirlpool, useful innovations are diffused into society by flowing from the edge to the mainstream core.

This process , says Dr Gillman, might take as long as 15 to 20 years, however it may well be shorter. More recently, in the information technology area, we’ve seen a much shorter lead time.

Virtually every major shift in cultural history can trace its origins to the work of a small group, often gathered around an innovative thinker or body of thought

The observation that great ideas start on an innovative fringe has some resonance with an idea postulated by scientists studying in the field of complexity. They allude to life existing in a zone they call ‘the edge of chaos’. Here, the possibilities are greater, the options open. The edge occupies a narrow, dynamic zone between the unorganised chaos beyond and the overorganised, regulated area of limited possibility on its other side. The edge, then, is the creative zone, the place where innovation can occur and change start.

The ideas diffusion model describes the way by which innovative ideas move from the social fringe, where they are created, into the conservative core of society where they are adopted, put into broad use or commercialised.

The model was outlined in Sydney during Dr Gillman’s 1996 visit. It has been developed further in the Context Institute’s book, Making It Happen.

“Virtually every major shift in cultural history can trace its origins to the work of a small group, often gathered around an innovative thinker or body of thought”, write the authors.

If this is true, then the concern, which sometimes borders on anxiety, which so many social change agents have about influencing the mass of people is misplaced.

The road to adoption

The road to adoption of an idea follows a path through society:

1. it starts on the innovative fringe of society with the innovator – an inventor or thinker, a holder of unorthodox ideas who may be sometimes ridiculed or at best disregarded by those inhabiting the conservative core of mainstream society
2. attracted to the ideas of the innovator, perhaps by their book or by media attention, the early adopters take up the innovation; these are solutions oriented people who further develop the innovator’s work, promoting it, perhaps offer courses and workshops in it and set up working examples
3. after a period of development and popularisation by the early adoptors, the new idea is taken up by early mass adopters and by later mass adopters, a larger group likely to be made up of people working within the structures of mainstream society
4. from the later adapters the idea moves further into the social mainstream where it become part of the intellectual or technological toolkit of society; this is the realm of mass adoption
5. mass adoption is not a homogenous state, however, there are those who resist the intrusion of new ideas and new practices; these curmudgeons may feel threatened by the innovation or the new idea; their financial, political or social power may be at stake; alternatively, they may simply be people resistant to new ideas because they have been caught out by them in the past, perhaps having been marginalised by social, technological or economic change.

Dr Gillman suggests that change agents not waste their energy arguing and confronting opposition because it takes time, energy and resources that could be better used. He suggests bypassing the opposition of curmudgeons in the way water in a goes around a large rock in a stream, wearing it away over time and reducing its influence.

The curve of adoption

Dr Gillman describes a curve of ideas diffusion that tracks the idea from innovation to acceptance. The critical point of the ideas diffusion curve is the take-off point.

The take-off point is the stage at which the idea starts to move into the mainstream. This occurs, says Dr Gillman, when the idea is adopted by between 5 and 15 percent of the population. After that it is probably unstoppable, building up a momentum through word of mouth, media coverage, adoption or commercialisation.

Using the demonstration effect

Dr Gillman says that demonstrating a new idea is crucial to its adoption.

People need to see it in action before they will adopt it. They need to satisfy themselves that the innovation is not threatening or freaky and that it could be integrated into their lives.

This demonstration effect works through the process of learning by seeing and, in some cases, learning by doing.

Educationalists say that learning by doing is more durable than other ways of leaning. That is why practical work, and site visits to a lesser extent, is so important in permaculture and sustainability education. Establishing publicly accessible demonstration sites for permaculture design is one way of demonstrating its effectiveness.

It’s the way people move from being sceptics to becoming early adopters.

The lessons

The lessons stemming from Dr Gillman’s work for sustainability educators, community organisations and social entrepreneurs includes:

• having innovative ideas is not enough by itself; the capacity to implement those ideas is critical to their development and eventual adoption
• the idea has to have some evident social utility to be adopted into the mainstream
• there is a process operating behind the development and introduction of significant new ideas
• it is possible to move in small steps; mass change does not have to come all at once
• the period from innovation to take-off is critical to the new idea, as this pre-take-off time is when the idea needs greatest nourishment and development; it is akin to the proof of technology and prototyping phases of technology development
• to nurture an idea to the take-off point, a reasonable level of organisation, continuity, planning, persistence and capacity is needed
• the influence of the innovator is likely to lessen as the idea enters the early adaptor stage; new voices will emerge from the early adopters and some of the innovator’s ideas may require adaptation.

Making it successful

The Context Institute has identified five characteristics of a successful innovation:

• relative advantage – is the idea better than what exists and will people perceive it as better?
• compatibility – how well the innovation meshes with personal experience and needs
• complexity – the usability of the innovation; how comprehensible it is and how easy it is to use (easier to use = swifter adoption)
• trialability – a trialable innovation allows people to try it out before committing themselves
• observability – are the results of its use easily seen?

For sustainability educators and community organisations:

• the five characteristics provide the foci for educational activity and the further development of the idea; these can be applied to a technology or to an idea
• the possession of communication skills is crucial to the popularisation and adoption of a new idea
• publicly demonstrating the utility and benefits of the innovation should form a major part of the communications process; the demonstration effect works when people witness the idea in operation and realise that it is not threatening and is of benefit to them
• demonstrating the idea should be done so that it is publicly accessible and should be supported by messages and literature explaining the idea and its benefit
• the publishing of information about the innovation and the results of trials provides information of value to early mass adopters.

The process of testing, developing and demonstrating the innovation becomes the key to its adoption.

Development is assisted when accompanied by the production of an educational package around the innovation. This package focuses on the usefulness, relevance and desirability of the innovation rather than on refuting the arguments of those opposed to it.

To popularise an innovation, the Context Institute says that personal adoption, promotion and influence are all necessary. The process can start with any of these:

• personal adoption – the use of the innovation or idea in your life
• promotion – communicating the innovation to others by whatever means are relevant
• influence – putting it into action in areas used by other people and where it is visible; this helps institutionalise the innovation.

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.