Alan: Let's get back to permaculture. What's your current best definition of it?
Bill: You could say it's a rational man's approach to not shitting in his bed.
But if you're an optimist, you could say it's an attempt to actually create a Garden of Eden. Or, if you're a scientist, you could liken it to a miraculous wardrobe in which you can hang garments of any science or any art and find they're always harmonious with, and in relation to, that which is already hanging there. It's a framework that never ceases to move, but that will accept information from anywhere.
It's hard to get your mind around it - I can't. I guess I would know more about permaculture than most people, and I can't define it. It's multi-dimensional - chaos theory was inevitably involved in it from the beginning.
You see, if you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them. We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible....
..."Then I sort of pulled out for a while in 1972 - I cut a hole in the bush, built a barn and a house and planted a garden - gave up on humanity. I was disgusted with the stupidity of the University, the research institutions, the whole thing.
When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn't write it down fast enough. Once you've said to yourself, "But I'm not using my physics in my house," or "I'm not using my ecology in my garden, I've never applied it to what I do," it's like something physical moves inside your brain. Suddenly you say, "If I did apply what I know to how I live, that would be miraculous!" Then the whole thing unrolls like one great carpet. Undo one knot, and the whole thing just rolls downhill."
Source - Complete Interview : http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC28/Mollison.htm
Additional Links / Research - Building your own Oasis
Permaculture in Austria with Sepp Holzer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHkFG21mtcI
Permaculture: A Quiet Revolution - An Interview with Bill Mollison
http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/mollison.html
2,000 Year Old Food Forest in Morocco with Geoff Lawton
http://tv.naturalnews.com/v.asp?v=E5120F998378156892BA39C1F9AE5F45
7 Food Forests in 7 Minutes with Geoff Lawton
http://tv.naturalnews.com/v.asp?v=33B3A51230BB04745756E3E88DFA81FC
God Bless and Good Growing,
~ antbrother
