TreeHugger Interview: David Holmgren, Co-Creator of Permaculture

“Permaculture began as a design question around what would agriculture look like if we designed it using the principles of natural ecosystems. But it was not about just adjusting current agriculture systems, but trying to redesign them from first principles. Embedded within that, was an idea that industrial society as it was designed had no future, that we had to redesign the culture we inherited from the industrial era. So the word permaculture was focused in ‘permanent agriculture’ but also implicit was the idea of permanent culture.” (David Holmgren)

The issue is that we believe that many products that we take as normal permanent needs are very recent in history and will not exist in the future, so they are not worth re-designing.

A lot of the mainstream approaches to how we might make things more energetically efficient and ecologically friendly, although well intentioned, from a permaculture perspective are a waste of time.

So we can see some parallels between permaculture and other ideas that have influenced industrial manufacturing like biomimicry for example, where you use the patterns in nature to design industrial systems of manufacture. But the question is, What are we manufacturing? And, Is this necessary?

For example, nowadays there is much focus on how we can make clothing manufacture more ecologically friendly, but we have enough clothes in the world for the next 20 years, we don’t need more clothes manufacture.

(Read the full interview here)

Related readings:

Permaculture: a Design Philosophy and Practice for a People-Planet-Caring Civilization

“Less, But Better,” Dieter Rams’s Ten Commandments on Good Design and the Design of a Just and Sustainable World

Cradle to Cradle – Remaking the Way We Make Things – a Case for Truly Sustainable Design by William McDonough and Michael Braungart

Design for 10,000 Years by Jeremy Faludi