Reflections on 50 years of Permaculture with David Holmgren

The Poor Prole’s Almanac

Bleav + The Poor Prole’s Alamanac

Home & Garden, Science, Nature, Leisure, Education, How To

5 • 761 Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2023

⏱️ 106 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode we're joined by David Holmgren to discuss the past 50 years of permaculture and some of his thoughts on its evolution. We dive into some of the uncomfortable subjects of native habitat loss, invasive species, land back, indigenous sovereignty, the PDC structure, permaculture at scale, among other things in what I hope will be an incredibly insightful conversation for listeners curious to dive into these subjects. David Holmgren is an Australian environmental designer, ecological educator and writer. He is best known as one of the co-originators of the permaculture concept with Bill Mollison. He still actively manages Melliodora Farm, a 2.5 acre permaculture homestead, writes extensively, and offers training on his homestead. You can find his work here: https://holmgren.com.au/ To support this podcast, join our patreon for early episode access at https://www.patreon.com/poorprolesalmanac For PPA Writing Content, visit: www.agroecologies.org For PPA Restoration Content, visit: www.restorationagroecology.com For PPA Merch, visit: www.poorproles.com For PPA Native Plants, visit: www.nativenurseries.org To hear Tomorrow, Today, our sister podcast, visit: www.tomorrowtodaypodcast.org/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for tuning into the Port Poyles Almanac.
0:16.8	Once again, this is Andy, and today we have a very special episode, one that I wouldn't have
0:21.3	ever imagined happening, to be honest. We're joined by one of the founders of permaculture,
0:26.0	David Holmgren, to talk about the origins, evolution, and future of permaculture, and dive
0:31.2	into some of the messier topics we've explored on this show, such as invasive species,
0:36.4	poor PDC training, landback, and indigenous
0:38.8	knowledge theft, among others. I'm pretty sure this is our longest episode to date, and for good
0:43.8	reason. We covered a lot of information here, offering different perspectives, and often many
0:48.7	answers were multifaceted, which ultimately meant we couldn't discuss each of these points separately. I wanted to quickly
0:56.0	address them, or at least in some cases, put them into context here. The first is regarding the
1:01.6	concept of ecological fitting, which was first proposed in 1985 by Daniel Jansen. And the second
1:07.8	is the development of agriculture in high fertility soil.
1:11.4	So first off, David brings up this concept of ecological fitting several times in the interview
1:16.1	when discussing the utility of invasive species, which is a thorny issue within and around the
1:21.4	permaculture community. To describe what ecological fitting actually is, we can think of ecosystems
1:27.1	as having these mosaics
1:28.7	of species that interlock, where species are always evolving to fill every gap or niche with life.
1:35.9	Ecological fitting explains that some novel species, meaning invasive species, can fit and connect
1:41.9	into existing ecosystems by filling gaps that aren't currently occupied
1:47.0	or replacing species already present.
1:50.0	This often pushes the existing ecosystem members to begin exploiting new gaps through adaptation
1:55.0	in order to escape the pressure of the novel species.
	...

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