September-October

New School Permaculture Spring Courses
Permaculture is to live in harmony with nature providing for human needs and the needs of everything around us
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Entrevista sobre Permacultura em Portugal para Atlantico Express dos Acores

Helder Valente em entrevista
 para Atlantico Express dos Acores
sobre o estado da Permacultura em Portugal



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Amazing Bill Mollison quotes.

Here are some of the most amazing quotes by Bill Mollison, if you know some more, please leave them in the comments area so that we can all get inspired ;)


 "Raise potatoes not consciousness"

“I can’t change the world on my own, it’ll take at least 3 of us”

  "Gardeners plant like we will live forever"
Bill Mollison
“Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex,

the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.” 
"There is one, and only one, solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world, and train all our young people to help. They want to; we need to give them this last chance to create forests, soils, clean waters, clean energies, secure communities, stable regions, and to know how to do it from hands-on experience." - Bill Mollison

For the sake of the earth itself, I evolved a 



philosophy close to Taoism from my experiences with 



natural systems. As it was stated in Permaculture Two, it 

is a philosophy of working with rather than against 


rather than protracted and thoughtless action; of 

nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation 


rather than asking only one yield of them; and of 

looking at systems and people in all their functions, 


A basic question that can be asked in two ways is: 

allowing systems to demonstrate their own evolutions. 

"What can I get from this land, or person?" or 



cooperate with them



"What does this person, or land, have to give if I

"To be a complete person we must travel many paths, and to truly own anything we must first all give it away. This is not a riddle. Only those who share their multiple and varied skills, true friendships, and a sense of community and knowledge of the earth know they are safe wherever they go."
- Bill Mollison (Co-Founder of Permaculture)

The past is a useful source of information but never as a substitute for my own fresh thinking. 

I think it's pointless asking questions like "Will humanity survive?" It's purely up to people - if they want to, they can, if they don't want to, they won't.

Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything. But if you lend your skills to other systems that you don't really believe in, then you might as well never have lived. You haven't expressed yourself.

If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don't listen to them that much. And choose your friends from people who you like what they do - even though you mightn't like what they say.

We are sufficient to do everything possible to heal this Earth. We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything. We can do it.

 Pollution is an unused resource.

 Permaculture is a concise design of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have diversity, stability, & resilience of natural ecosystems. -Bill Mollison

Each such cycle is a unique event; diet, choice, selection, season, weather, digestion, decomposition and regeneration differ each time it happens. Thus, it is the number of such cycles, great and small, that decide the potential for diversity. We should feel ourselves privileged to be part of such eternal renewal. Just by living we have achieved immortality – as grass, grasshoppers, gulls, geese and other people. We are of the diversity we experience in every real sense.
If, as physical scientists assure us, we all contain a few molecules of Einstein, and if the atomic particles of our physical body reach to the outermost bounds of the universe, then we are all de facto components of all things. There is nowhere left for us to go if we are already everywhere, and this is, in truth, all we will ever have or need. If we love ourselves at all, we should respect all things equally, and not claim any superiority over what are, in effect, our other parts. Is the hand superior to the eye? The bishop to the goose? The son to the mother?”

“. . . every society that grows extensive lawns could produce all its food on the same area, using the same resources, and . . . world famine could be totally relieved if we devoted the same resources of lawn culture to food culture in poor areas. These facts are before us. Thus, we can look at lawns, like double garages and large guard dogs, [and Humvees and SUVs] as a badge of willful waste, conspicuous consumption, and lack of care for the earth or its people.

Most lawns are purely cosmetic in function. Thus, affluent societies have, all unnoticed, developed an agriculture which produces a polluted waste product, in the presence of famine and erosion elsewhere, and the threat of water shortages at home.

The lawn has become the curse of modern town landscapes as sugar cane is the curse of the lowland coastal tropics, and cattle the curse of the semi-arid and arid rangelands.

It is past time to tax lawns (or any wasteful consumption), and to devote that tax to third world relief. I would suggest a tax of $5 per square metre for both public and private lawns, updated annually, until all but useful lawns are eliminated.” 

  • It is my belief that we have two responsibilities to pursue: Primarily, it is to get our house and garden, our place of living, in order, so that it supports us; Secondarily, it is to limit our population on earth, or we ourselves become the final plague. Both these duties are intimately connected, as stable regions create stable populations. If we do not get our cities, homes, and gardens in order, so that they feed and shelter us, we must lay waste to all other natural systems. Thus, truly responsible conservationists have gardens…
    • chapter 1.3
  • …the end result of the adoption of permaculture strategies in any country or region will be to dramatically reduce the area of the agricultural environment needed by the households and the settlements of people, and to release much of the landscape for the sole use of wildlife and for re-occupation by endemic flora.
    • chapter 1.3
  • You can hit a nail on the head, or cause a machine to do so, and get a fairly predictable result. Hit a dog on the head, and it will either dodge, bite back, or die, but it will never again react in the same way. We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable, not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive processes.
    • chapter 2.2
  • I confess to a rare problem—gynekinetophobia, or the fear of women falling on me—but this is a rather mild illness compared with many affluent suburbanites, who have developed an almost total zoophobia, or fear of anything that moves. It is, as any traveller can confirm, a complaint best developed in the affluent North American, and it seems to be part of blue toilet dyes, air fresheners, lots of paper tissues, and two showers a day.
    • chapter 2.5
  • Order is found in things working beneficially together. It is not the forced condition of neatness, tidiness, and straightness all of which are, in design or energy terms, disordered. True order may lie in apparent confusion; it is the acid test of entropic order to test the system for yield. If it consumes energy beyond product, it is in disoder. If it produces energy to or beyond consumption, it is ordered.
    • chapter 2.9
  • What is proposed herein is that we have no right, nor any ethical justification, for clearing land or using wilderness while we tread over lawns, create erosion, and use land inefficiently. Our responsibility is to put our house in order. Should we do so, there will never be any need to destroy wilderness.
    • chapter 3.10
  • Type 1 Error: When we settle into wilderness, we are in conflict with so many life forms that we have to destroy them to exist. Keep out of the bush. It is already in good order.
    • chapter 3.10
  • For priority in location, we need to first attend to Zone 1 and Zone 2; these support the household and save the most expense. What is perhaps of greatest importance, and cannot be too highly stressed, is the need to develop very compact systems. ... We can all make a very good four meters square garden, where we may fail to do so in 40 square meters.
    • chapter 3.15
  • "Most biologists," (says Vogel, 1981) "seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region."
    • chapter 4.4
    • quoting Vogel, Steven, Life in Moving Fluids; the Physical Biology of Flow, Willard Grant Press, Boston, 1981.
  • Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use or value them creatively.
    • chapter 4.7
  • We ourselves are part of a guild of species that lie within and without our bodies. Aboriginal peoples and the Ayurvedic practitioners of ancient India have names for such guilds, or beings made up (as we are) of two or more species forming one organism. Most of nature is composed of groups of species working interdependently …
    • chapter 4.8
  • As we read this, we stand in the plane of the present; we are the sum of all our ancestors, and the origin of all our descendents. In terms of our model, we are at an ever-changing origin, located on the boundary of past and future. As well, we are spinning with the earth, spiralling with the galaxy, and expanding or contracting with the universe. As origins, we are on the move in time and space, and all these movements have a characteristic pulse rate.
    • chapter 4.19
  • A bird's-eye view of centralised and disempowered societies will reveal a strictly rectilinear network of streets, farms, and property boundaries. It is as though we have patterned the earth to suit our survey instruments rather than to serve human or environmental needs. We cannot perhaps blame Euclid for this, but we can blame his followers. The straight-line patterns that result prevent most sensible landscape planning strategies and result in neither an aesthetically nor functionally satisfactory landscape or stretscape. Once established, then entered into a body of law, such inane (or insane) patterning is stubbornly defended. But it is created by, and can be dismantled by, people.
    • chapter 4.21
  • … the value of land must, in the future, be assessed on its yield of potable water. Those property-owners with a constant source of pure water already have an economically-valuable "product" from their land, and need look no further for a source of income.
    • chapter 7.1
  • Of all the elements of critical importance to plants, phosophorus is the least commonly found, and sources are rarely available locally. Of all the phosphatic fertilisers used, Europe and North America consume 75% (and get least return from this input because of overuse, over-irrigation, and poor soil economy). If we really wanted to reduce world famine, the redirection of these surplus phosphates to the poor soils of Africa and India (or any other food-deficient area) would do it. Forget about miracle plants; we need global ethics for all such essential soil resources. As long as we clear-cultivate, most of this essential and rare resource will end up in the sea.
    • table 8.1
  • It seems curious that we know so much about sheep, so little about those animals which outweigh them per hectare by factors of ten or a hundred times, and that we do not investigate these matters far more seriously. Our most sustainable yields may be grubs or caterpillars rather than sheep; we can convert these invertebrates to use by feeding them to poultry or fish. We can't go wrong in encouraging a complex of life in soils, from roots and mycorrhiza to moles and earthworms, and in thinking of ways in which soil life assists us to produce crop, it itself becomes a crop.
    • chapter 8.12
  • As non-scientists, most gardeners deprived of atomic-ray spectrometers, a battery of reagents, and a few million research dollars must look to signs of health such as the birds, reptiles, worms, and plants of their garden-farm. For myself, in a truly natural garden I have come to expect to see, hear, and find evidence of abundant vertebrate life. This, and this alone, assures me that invertebrates still thrive there. I know of many farms where neither birds nor worms exist, and I suspect that their products are dangerous to all life forms.
    • chapter 8.12
  • Too often, the pastoralist blames the weeds and seeks a chemical rather than a management solution; too seldom do we find an approach combining the sensible utilisation of grasshoppers and grubs as a valuable dried-protein supplement for fish or food pellets, and a combination of soil conditioning, slashing, and de-stocking or re-seeding to restore species balance.
    • chapter 8.15
  • Life is also busy transporting and overturning the soils of earth, the stones, and the minerals. The miles-long drifts of sea kelp that float along our coasts may carry hundreds of tons of volcanic boulders held in their roots. I have followed these streams of life over 300 km, and seen them strand on granite beaches, throwing their boulders up on a 9,000 year old pile of basalt, all the hundreds of tons of which were carried there by kelp.
    • chapter 8.20
  • It is possible, in Iran, Greece, North Africa, USA, Mexico, Pakistan, and Australia to see how, in our short history of life destruction, we have brought the hard bones of the earth to the surface by stripping the life skin from it for ephemeral uses. We can, if we persist, create a moon-landscape of the earth. So poor goatherds wander where the lake-forests stood and the forest deities were worshipped. The religions of resignation and fanaticism follow those of the nature gods, and man-built temples replace trees and tree spirits.
    • chapter 8.20
  • Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.
    • chapter 9.1
  • A great many film stars perched on unstable ravine edges in the canyon systems of Los Angeles will, like the cemeteries there, eventually slide down to join their unfortunate fellows in the canyon floors, with mud, cars, and embalmed or living film stars in one glorious muddy mass. We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes...
    • chapter 9.4
  • Peat preserves timber, animals, and such unexpected treasure-troves as hoards of acorns and firkins of beech butter from the forests which preceded the bogs. A whole archaeology may very well lie in peat, and the pollen record may reveal past history. At the base of Irish bogs the Fir Bolg (the little people), their axes, bridges, butter, and forest life are well preserved. They and their forests were banished, as if by magic, by the Tuatha de Danan (the Children of Diana) who now dig the peat. Diana was displaced in turn by Mary, mother of God. But all are mixed in the peat and the tongue of Ireland.
    • chapter 9.9
  • Steps in total planning are roughly in priority:
  1. Assess market; future; prices; potential for processing to higher value; labour; shares, legal systems; social necessities and local self-reliance needs.
  2. Analyse and get advice on soils and necessary nutrients.
  3. Plan ground layout and windbreak, access, and water. Detailing can follow later.
  4. Plan and carry out essential earthworks.
  5. Establish nursery and use selected varietal forms for new or replacement crop.
  6. Commence broadscale placements with or after windbreak and nurse crop.
  7. Continue by constant assessment, consultation, feedback and innovative trials. Fill niches as they evolve.
    • chapter 10.9
  • Brambles, in particular, protect and nourish young fruit trees, and on farms bramble clumps (blackberry or one of its related cultivars) can be used to exclude deer and cattle from newly set trees. As the trees (apple, quince, plum, citrus, fig) age, and the brambles are shaded out, hoofed animals come to eat fallen fruit, and the mature trees (7 plus years old) are sufficiently hardy to withstand browsing. Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.
    • chapter 12.7
  • Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions. Open pans of maple sugar can have the surface ice removed regularly (each day) until a sugar concentrate remains. Salts in water, and alcohol in ferment liquors can be concentrated in the same way.
    • chapter 12.15
  • In the fall, acorns, filberts, and hickory nuts are gathered by wildlife as winter stores. Field and pack rats bring in smaller seed such as wild rice from the marshes. If storages are provided, these foragers will fill hollow pipes or logs, or smaller pipes, old vehicle engine manifolds, and nest boxes or wall cavities. Seed so collected is sound, clean, and neatly stored. Providing some 15% is left, and given over to winter food for these workers, 85% can be collected for human use. A few people regularly collect their hickory nuts or wild rice in this way, by providing dens for squirrels or pack rats. It is a question of cooperation and provision for others, instead of attempting to kill off the experts and do the job yourself.
    • chapter 12.15
  • A people without an agreed-upon common basis to their actions is neither a community nor a nation. A people with a common ethic is a nation wherever they live. Thus, the place of habitation is secondary to a shared belief in the establishment of an harmonious world community. Just as we can select a global range of plants for a garden, we can select from all extant ethics and beliefs those elements that we see to be sustainable, useful, and beneficial to life and to our community.
    • chapter 14.2
  • Security can be found in renunciation of ownership over people, money, and real assets; to gain, keep or protect that which others need for periods of legitimate access. A lending library enables people to help themselves to information; a locked-up book collection is useful only to the person who owns it.
    • chapter 14.2
  • If and when the whole world is secure, we have won a right to explore space, and the oceans. Until we have demonstrated that we can establish a productive and secure earth society, we do not belong anywhere else, nor (I suspect) would we be welcome elsewhere.
    • chapter 14.2
  • In any group endeavour, there are practical and effective, or impractical and ineffective, ways to manage a complex system. Impractical, frustrating, and time-consuming systems are those governed by large boards, assemblies, or groups (seven or more people). These "meetings" have a chairperson, agendas, proposals, votes, or use consensus, and can go on for hours. Consensus, in particular, is an endless and pointless affair, with coercion of the often silent or incoherent abstainer by a vociferous minority. Thus, decisions reached by boards, parliaments, and consensus groups either oppress some individuals (votes) or are vetoed by dissenters. In either case, we have tyranny of a majority or tyranny of a minority, and a great deal of frustration and wasted time. The way to abolish such systems is to have one meeting where the sole agenda is to vote to abolish decision meetings -- this is usually carried unanimously -- and another where a consensus is reached to abolish consensus -- this too shouldn't take long.
    • chapter 14.10
  • There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.
    • chapter 14.10
  • It is no mere coincidence that there is both an historic and a present relationship between community (people assisting each other) and a poverty of power due to financial recession.
    • chapter 14.10

  • "Hunger is rising, absolute hunger is rising, food’s badly distributed, not distributed at all often. The waste of food, the whole deal of it….it’s eh, a shocking situation, it’s just inhuman. It’s what nobody would intend, and somehow what we’ve arrived at, and we arrived at it by the erection of financial structures, totally divorced from resources. So that the fiscal economy has been a runaway system. We’ve gotta tackle that head on. That is, what I’m trying to tell you, it’s no good any longer just being an organic gardener or farmer, we have to be effective financial and political units. And we’re gonna have to face that. Just as it was very hard for us to learn to garden, then hard for us to learn to collect seeds, once the multinationals took over the open-pollinated seed market; we had to become seed growers. Now it’s very difficult, we have to become bankers. There’s no good trying to pretend we don’t have to. We can run away to the bush, build a mud hut and grow ducks in the garden, it’s not gonna do it. The coals will still be burnt, the land will still be eroded, and the forests will still be cleared for newsprint if we run away to the bush. So, there’s no escape, we’ve just gotta stop running away, stay where we are and start to face up and fight. Good, as long as you’re fully persuaded of that we can get on with the course…." ­ Bill Mollison, 1983 PDC (emphasis added)

"Agriculture is responsible for the loss of 40 per cent of all soils in the last 50 years."

"If I were Emporer I would ban all agricultural colleges and agricultural departments of universities because they haven't ever come up with a sustainable system of food production. All they've ever come up with is another monoculture."

"Architecture and architects are the largest out-of-control experiment ever inflicted on mankind (except for mobile phones)".
- Bill Mollison at 01:47/08:58

It is true that most people I know today have never killed or grown their own food, never cut a mushroom in the field, nor stretched a rabbit’s neck. They have never felled a tree, never seen the red kino (blood sap) flow, nor stuck a pig. Yet they order, and eat, mushrooms and bacon, use wood and planks, paint with bristle brushes and read newspapers. Some, alas, call themselves deep ecologists.
This poses a real dilemma, often deeply felt by young adults; a sense of total powerlessness, or unworthiness. Sometimes, they escape and arrive distraught at farms or teaching centres in rural areas. “Show me how to plant a tree,” they ask, and in a few days are able to plant enough trees to last them for life (if all were to grow). They have often been ‘educated’ until 25-28 years of age, and never once in all that time have they prepared food or gathered the material for a meal, or killed, or planted.
Others, sensitive souls, almost give up eating when they realise that none of their food is familiar to them; they neither grew it, dug for it, transported it nor prepared and cooked it. They feel deeply unworthy of their lives. And in a sense they are; being terribly dependant on unknown hands for all their needs. As mass markets proliferate, and we urbanise more people annually, this sense of being orphaned from the real world increases.
The more privileged our children become, the more free choices they have, the more they anguish about their own fundamental ‘right to life’, let alone their right to reproduce. Can we wonder at the growing numbers of young people in the West, who are truly homeless, truly alienated, truly lost? People without practice in killing, reaping, or sowing feel unsafe indeed.
For a start, we need to teach basic skills, even to take students for that specific purpose. Such humane outlets are opposed by the ‘left’ (unions) and the ‘right’ (exploiters and commercial interests). The very idea of even limited self-reliance is anathema to all extant political parties. They see regional self-reliance as subversive; all governments, since Cambodia (and Kissinger’s ‘Think Tanks’){,} realise that constant de-stabilisation of the person, the family, the village, the region, and the means of production is in the short term profitable (loot being seized cheap or sold), and in the long term provides helpless markets for mass-produced goods, which being produced by robots and very large machines, needs less people every year.
Nations that devote themselves to technological efficiencies (Japan, Western Europe, parts of the USA) cannot exist without destabilised ’regions of influence’. They need to be able to buy cheap and sell dear, and they can only do so if they have subject populations on the grand scale. For even 5% of the world to have choices, 95% of people must be subjected to a lesser quality of life. The panacea is (as in all Indian films) that the hero or heroine might ‘win’, might kiss a frog or meet a Fairy Queen, might (via the great leveller, democracy) become a president, and have their own secret service. Bullshit.
All we get from kissing frogs is cold lips. Democracy is a glamorous illusion, costing the earth to maintain, and carefully preserved for very privileged groups of overused political parties (those who already have lots of money and power). You have to marry into privilege to get it, and if you get it by accident, you must compromise to exist. Less than 10% of us belong to political parties!
The ultimate end to a growth economy (we are all sold on that) is the same as an analogous growth, cancer. But for national economies, the victims are nature, soils, forests, people, water, quality of life. There is one, and only one solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world, and train all our young people to help. They want to; we need to give them this last chance to create forests, soils, clean waters, clean energies, secure communities, stable regions, and to know how to do it from hands-on experience. This is what I am about; what did you do in the war, daddy?

Your intention as a Permaculture Educator, Consultant, Designer is to make yourself redundant. That means Permaculture would be common knowledge and we are no longer needed in that role. Then we can all get on with whatever it is we really enjoy doing in this world. I'd be quite happy to putter around my garden for the rest of my days supplying my needs. We are obviously not there yet and need as many Permaculture Educators, Designers, and Consultants out there doing good work and demonstrating their happy little accidents and sad little failures for all of us to benefit from.
The point is not to make a career out of it, or to lock up some territory or technique for yourself for profit or ego. Thats the same thinking that put us where we are, and is only taking us toward misery and pain. The plant and animal systems are sorted, it's the people systems that continue to muck things up. If only we can get out of our own way long enough to get this planet back into productive function.


Tearing someone down to raise yourself up gets us nowhere, and quite obviously is in opposition to the ethics of permaculture. Thats what makes permaculture special, thats what separates permaculture from most everything else and thats what gives us hope and a chance for a better world.
 A world of CO-OPERATION not COMPETITION.
Bill Mollison, the founder of permaculture, defines the world as such:

"Permaculture ("Perm"anent "agri"culture and "Perma"nent "culture") is a sustainable design system stressing the harmonious interrelationship of humans, plants, animals and the Earth.
Permaculture principles focus on thoughtful designs for small-scale intensive systems which are labor efficient and which use biological resources instead of fossil fuels. Designs stress ecological connections and closed energy and material loops. The core of permaculture is design and the working relationships and connections between all things. Each component in a system performs multiple functions, and each function is supported by many elements. Key to efficient design is observation and replication of natural ecosystems, where designers maximize diversity with polycultures, stress efficient energy planning for houses and settlement, using and accelerating natural plant succession, and increasing the highly productive "edge-zones" within the system.

Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labour; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single-product system."

"I think if we could get Earth in a living and stable state, not a constantly degrading and dying state caused by our actions, then we have won some right to go to the stars. But at present I don't think we'd be welcome anywhere else in the universe. You wouldn't welcome anybody who'd laid waste to their house and wanted to live in yours, I'm sure." .

"Permaculture is a dance with nature - in which nature leads."

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Ecological Farming: A Conversation with Fukuoka, Mollison and Jackson


Mollison and Holmgren began to experiment, to design and to write. With the help of the Japanese-speaking Aussie, Andrew Jeeves they pulled in the ideas of Masanobu Fukuoka (The One-Straw Revolution, 1975), they took over the key line concept from Ken Yeomans (Water for Every Farm, 1954) and F. H. King’s Observations of the highly productive agricultural concepts of Asia (Farmers of Forty Centuries – Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan, 1911). Out of these, they created a design concept for permancy in human activities with landscapes, water-scapes and forestry, which they called "Permaculture".

Mother Earth News
 March/April 1987
by Larry Korn


Last August, three leaders of the global movement for a natural, permanent agriculture (also called permaculture) gathered at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, for the Second International Permaculture Conference. MOTHER EARTH NEWS was there, too, obtaining the only three-way interview ever with the men our Seasons of the Garden columnists half-playfully labeled "the Holy Trinity" of ecological farming. The following edited discussion is a head-to-head exchange between men who are taking key roles in defining our planet's future. But first let assistant editor Pat Stone, who conducted the interview, fill you in with some background on the three subjects:

Australian Bill Mollison created the concept of permaculture in ecological farming. A gravel-voiced graybeard, Bill has a dry sense of humor, a feisty temperament, and absolute dedication to his cause. Introduced before his keynote conference speech as "a great yarn teller who's motivated thousands of people to action," Mollison has held every job from seaman to Tanzania bush researcher to senior lecturer in environmental psychology. He left that secure university position two years before retirement to blaze the permaculture trail.

To Mollison, permanent agriculture means carefully designed, sustainable systems in which the array, organization, and interactions of plants and animals are the central factors. Perennial plants-especially tree crops-play a large role in his multispecies landscapes. A permaculture system takes much planning, and a good bit of work, to set up, but it should then almost run itself.

Wes Jackson researches perennial crop mixes in Salina, Kansas. A hulking midwesterner with broad hands and a ready smile, Jackson combines a warm nature, down-home humor, and impeccable scientific scholarship (he has a Ph.D. in genetics). For example, his favorite lecture title is "Herbaceous Perennial Seed-Producing Polycultures: Their Contribution to the Solution of All Marital Problems and the End of the Possibility of Nuclear Holocaust."

At his 200-acre Land Institute, Wes and his research staff are working to breed a mixture of perennial sunflower, rye, and other plants that could produce an ongoing yearly seed harvest on the midwestern prairies. This high-yielding system would sponsor its own fertility, have minimal pest and weed problems, and require no erosive annual tillage. The self-maintaining food system would be designed by humans but follow the principles of nature. "It's not that humans don't learn faster than nature," Jackson says. "It's just that nature's been at it a lot longer."

And Masanobu Fukuoka—it would be difficult to fully understand this fascinating man. The short, kimono-clad Oriental is essentially a Buddhist monk who has chosen the path of farming. He speaks no English, but his gentleness communicates itself at a glance. (Those twinkling eyes also reveal that a playful imp shares a place with the humble philosopher.)

Fukuoka was an agricultural scientist who, after a serious illness, had a "flash of insight" that nature was perfect, while human knowledge was meaningless. He set out to prove these ideas through farming and has been raising rice, barley, and citrus on a small commercial farm since World War II. Fukuoka advocates what he calls "do nothing" farming: He has used no tillage, no fertilizer, no weeding, and no pesticides for four decades, and still achieves grain yields as high as conventional Japanese farmers. An example of his techniques: He wraps his barley and clover seeds in clay pellets, and broadcasts them into his maturing rice crop. Later, he scatters rice straw into the sprouting barley. The straw mulch and permanent clover ground cover suppress weeds and promote soil fertility.

Today, Fukuoka-san (san is the traditional Japanese form of respectful address) has distilled his lifestyle as well as his farming methods. Having given most of his possessions to his family, he lives alone in a tiny hut and owns three sets of clothes.

Australian, Kansan, and Japanese—these three present a broad view of the ways a truly natural farming could help save our soil and our planet.

Maybe the best way to start is to simply ask each of you about the purpose of your life's work.  

MOLLISON: I'm a very simple person. All I want to do is regreen the earth. That's what I work on all the time.

JACKSON: For me, the purpose is to save soils, to get off the fossil fuel nipple, to quit introducing those chemicals into the environment that our tissues have not evolved within effect, to run agriculture on sunlight.

FUKUOKA: Part of my purpose is to create a society where no one has to do anything.
I beg your pardon? 

FUKUOKA: [Draws a picture of a man sleeping under a tree]: This is a natural farmer, sleeping in the sunshine. He does no fertilizing, no plowing, no weeding—almost no work. You could say I have been sleeping for 40 years, yet my yields are as high as those of the farmer who works all the time.

Fukuoka-san, could you briefly explain the difference between your natural farming method and conventional farming? 

FUKUOKA: Natural and scientific farming are diametrically opposed. One seeks to approach closer to nature, the other to move farther away. Scientific research discriminates, breaks down, and analyzes, so by definition scientific knowledge is fragmented and incomplete.

But nature is an indivisible whole. There is no starting point or destination, only an endless flux. To learn from nature, you must get rid of your preconceptions, your analyses, your intellectual distinctions. Make the inside of your head empty. Do not think anything. Become a foolish man. Be like the baby who sees everything at once, holistically. Then you can understand nature and instinctively understand what needs to be done—and what must not be done—in order to work in harmony with its processes.

One problem, though: To do natural farming, a person must know what unaltered nature is. People misunderstand nature by looking at the imitation nature people have created. You cannot be a natural farmer by abandoning nature after it has been altered. Instead, you have to carefully select seed and determine when, where, and how to grow it but only after first examining the land and the real nature of an area.

Bill, do you think Fukuoka's type of natural farming is included in permaculture? 

MOLLISON: It's not only included but welcomed. Actually, until Fukuoka wrote The One-Straw Revolution, I had a mind set against all grain farming, so I didn't include any references to it in my first book, Permaculture One. Now I know that the approaches of both these other gentlemen fit naturally into the permaculture framework. Indeed, Fukuoka-san and I are basically the same person.

All three of you believe in an environmentally sound agriculture that uses an integrated mix of plants and no tillage at all. But I sense that there are some real differences among you. 

MOLLISON: I think we're three aspects of a simple endeavor to do one thing. Fukuoka-san works in nontillage grain production. Wes is concerned with prairie revitalization and developing a good-yielding perennial grain. I, and many others who labor with me, work with edible plants and also with health, land, and financial integration to support environmentally sound enterprises.

JACKSON: I would say that Fukuoka-san works a lot with herbaceous annuals. He's trying to take advantage of the natural integrities within current, traditional crops. Mollison emphasizes landscape design, edible landscaping, and so forth. At the Land Institute, we're trying to put together sustainable, herbaceous, perennial ecosystems for farmers.

We're also trying to determine what biological principles may be at work. That's one of the most important contributions of our efforts: discovering the principles of ecosystem agriculture. These principles would be applicable in Chad, the Soviet Union, Japan, or anywhere.

We're trying to become ecosystemologists who use a dialectical whole-system approach, not a Cartesian part-over-whole approach. And let me tell you, that's hard. To help us maintain such an interconnected approach, we're hoping to create a natural, physical connection between our soil scientist, plant breeder, ecologist, entomologist, and plant pathologist. They'll use the same laboratory facilities and all have their names on any papers produced. We hope that shared environment will help dictate a pattern of holistic, ecosystem thought and behavior.

FUKUOKA: No time, no time. If you take such a step-by-step approach, by the time you get your results, it will be too late. Besides, can Mr. Jackson really be on top of this research center? Each department will develop centrifugally; unity will be very difficult to achieve.

There's another way. Don't carry out your research by asking, How about if we tried this? How about if we tried that? Instead, go in the opposite direction and ask, What if we don't do this? What if we don't do that? After 30 years of such efforts, I have managed to reduce my own labor essentially to just sowing seed and spreading straw.

JACKSON: This is a healthy difference of opinion about the role of science. Our current scientific knowledge has come at the expense of forests, soils, and fuel. To regard that knowledge as damnable simply because it was accumulated at a cost of a lot of ecological capital is to treat it the same way we treated those forests and soils. We can't do that now. We need to turn that knowledge to work toward the regeneration of the earth. It has the potential to be regenerated, just like any smaller landscape does.

FUKUOKA: Mr. Jackson, how well do you think humanity knows nature?

JACKSON: Well, of course, we don't know nature very well. But ever since the beginning of agriculture, we've had to figure out how to work with nature as much as possible. To do it well, I think we must ask, Is science an inherently alienating force in society? That question should always be before us, because if we are scientists first and human beings second, we can't afford to ask that question. But if we are human beings first and scientists second, we can't afford not to ask that question.

I think perhaps you are reacting to the current personality of science. I don't believe that science has to alienate us from nature. Let's hope a future science would have high precision along with a higher measure of humility about its own imperfections and the mysteries of nature.

FUKUOKA: The confusion started when humans ate the Fruit of Knowledge. Adam and Eve were thrown away from the Garden of Eden. The only way to get back is to throw away the knowledge! Just become foolish like a bird or baby.

I understand Mr. Jackson's scientific approach. I used to have the same view when I was a scientist. You can just think of us three as being on the horse of Don Quixote. It looks like we are saying different things, but we are really on the same horse. The horse is running toward disaster. Wes Jackson's trying to stop the feet of the horse. Bill Mollison's trying to turn the head of the horse. (Laughs) I'm just hanging onto the horse's tail!

It would be difficult to ignore the hint of doom coloring this conversation. Just how bad do you three feel our current situation is? 

MOLLISON: Modern agriculture is the single most destructive activity on the face of the earth. If we're going to make things better, we have to do it soon or not at all. I'm absolutely convinced of that. I travel a tremendous amount, and I've seen signs of the collapse of large systems everywhere.

JACKSON: Agriculture's high yields create an illusion of success, but they're really just the result of transferring fossil carbon into the carbon of agricultural products. If there were a full accounting, we would have to say that modern industrial agriculture is the least efficient and most devastating form of agriculture to ever be invented-it undercuts the very basis of our existence.

To me, agriculture is the number one environmental problem, aside from the possibility of nuclear holocaust. All in all, we're facing the most dangerous situation that the human race has ever found itself in.

FUKUOKA: The food produced in the U.S. is not produced by soil, but by oil. Herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers-oil, oil, oil. If such chemical agriculture continues, this earth will be destroyed a lot sooner than you expect.

One day the trendy people will say, "Did you notice so-and-so is eating annuals?"  

MOLLISON: I'll concentrate merely on the destructive catalytic reactions we're causing in the atmosphere. Chlorinated chemicals now seem to be destroying the ozone layer over the Antarctic-creating an ultraviolet window larger than America which will sterilize the earth if it widens.

In addition, there's the problem of CO, buildup. Even if we stop now, with the present levels of CO,, science predicts we will at least partially melt down the ice caps. That's already started. Then we'll have to evacuate the coastlines of the world. That's due to the overuse of yesterday's sunlight-fossil fuels -and the destruction of green matter, which absorbs CO2

FUKUOKA: If we lose just 3°7o more of the greenery on the earth, we're just not going to make it. There's going to be a critical oxygen shortage that will affect human beings' feelings and way of thinking.

MOLLISON: Oxygen deficits are really critical now in Greece. You'll see a serious oxygen shortage there soon.

JACKSON: I doubt it. I don't think that oxygen shortage is the issue.

MOLLISON: He thinks it's the carbon surplus.

JACKSON: I think deforestation should stop, but oxygen loss due to deforestation is a minuscule problem compared to the increased burning of fossil fuels and the accelerated loss of soil carbon due to erosion, etc. But we all agree that the place is in trouble. We could sit around here and nitpick on the details and spend most of our time stating our assumptions, but the important thing is that we all agree the positive thing to do is to try to get more vegetation growing and keep as much year-round ground cover as possible.

How are your three efforts at this progressing? 

MOLLISON: I'm working with people who are going the next step beyond property design-into economics. We're using ethical investment and innovative financing to fund a whole raft of businesses in small communities. Our goal is to create people polycultures whose purpose is to create and preserve permacultures, or stable systems. In parts of Australia, we have almost achieved this.
We're also developing more permaculture teachers. And we're trying to preserve those species-rich areas which still exist. For instance, we'll soon purchase a threatened rain forest by setting up a unit trust. You can resell your share; you just can't change the rain forest. Sometimes we buy damaged areas, repair them, and then preserve them.

FUKUOKA: There is no natural farming in Japan. In China, they've started a 1-million-hectare natural farm. There's some natural farming happening in India and the United States. It hasn't started yet in Africa, but I can feel the people's strong interest.

JACKSON: One of the basic problems in our attempts to increase perennial yields is that, in general, a perennial plant's very nature resists such attempts. Whereas an annual puts its energies into seed production to guarantee future generations, a perennial neglects its seeds and puts most of its energies into a surviving root system. So the first basic question we've had to ask is, Can perennialism and high yield go together?

We're getting enough encouraging results that I can now say the answer is yes. I look forward to the day when the trendy people in a natural food restaurant around Berkeley or Cambridge say, "Did you notice that so-and-so is still eating annuals?"  
Seriously, I firmly believe that if we can get high yields from a perennial cross for three years running, perennialism will have a major impact on agriculture. But I figure this will all take 50 to 100 years.

What else needs to be done? 

MOLLISON: To escape disaster, we need to open a broad-scale discussion on defining the future, the way they discuss political issues on TV in Sweden. We had a five-part television series in Australia recently called "Heartlands," which showed examples of positive action individuals are taking-and it had the largest viewing audience in the nation's history.

If we don't get the media into this discussion soon on a global basis, it may be too late. Perhaps we should take charge of local radio and television stations and present case after case for action to the people of the United States and all countries. Get good scientific speakers on it. Get people who have sensible suggestions about reversing things on it. My own passion is to locate enough small examples everywhere to allow us to teach continuously that permaculture works in Fiji, in America, in Sydney because we've got people everywhere making it work.

Let's divert major investment funds toward regreening earth, first of all by telling a lot of people how to do it for themselvesa lot of people. Indeed, gardening self-reliance in your backyard-is the biggest cure for the agriculture problem.

JACKSON: I have a hard time speaking for the rest of the world because I haven't been around. I've never been to Africa or Asia. Why, Bill here may be from the next county for all I know. I haven't been there, either.

What I can speak for is American agriculture, which is probably the major agricultural liability in the world. Unfortunately, it has also become the idealized standard throughout much of the world. The trouble with American agriculture is that it's overcapitalized. Four-wheel-drive tractors cost $120,000; combines run $80,000. Studies now show that if an average farmer has $10,000 to spend, it's more cost effective to hire a person than to buy more equipment.  

This is a good sign. It would not be going backward. What we need for a resilient, biological agriculture is to have lots of people on the land: a high eyes-to-acre ratio.

MOLLISON: Foresters, he's talking about. Foresters tending tree crops.

JACKSON: In the top 20 crops there are only two trees—banana and coconut, numbers 19 and 20. When you're really serious about food, you eat grains and legumes. (Laughs) Considering Bill's strong point of view, I think that statement took bravery on my part!

I'm saying that to make sustainable agriculture work, we need more small farmers. You have to keep your systems small enough that you can keep observing and learning. I think that having landed small farmers what Jefferson had in mind—is not nostalgia but is a practical necessity. Achieving that is the challenge for our time.

I do agree with Bill that the first thing we have to do is find the good examples that already exist around the country and make them highly visible. I don't know if we should spread the word through a journal or word of mouth or what—I'm not as fond of the idea of using television as Bill is. But there are some people who have been doing sustainable agriculture for years, and only God has been watching.

You know, the problem of agriculture isn't insurmountable. It's fundamentally a religious problem. Land is not a gift from God. We don't own it. What we have is the right to use the land. We have no right to damage it. Instead, we have to obey what is effectively a commandment: We are to care for God's garden.

Fukuoka-san? 

FUKUOKA:Even if we practice natural farming—and that's something we have to do—I have a feeling it will still be too late. If we cannot change the way of agriculture now, it will be too late.
Do you three really think that's true? Can we turn things around, or do we have to face an agricultural Armageddon? 

MOLLISON: I agree with Mr. Fukuoka that there is not much time. However, while disaster, if it strikes, will affect agriculture and may well have been caused by agriculture, it won't happen in terms of agriculture.

We won't wash all the soil away before we finally unbalance the atmosphere.

And I don't have any great optimism that we'll survive. Not long ago, we asked something like 900 Australian scientists to help us call on all Australians to get together and discuss ways to change the environmental future. Seven hundred of them wouldn't help. They said it was already too late.

What I do have is the determination to give whatever chance there is a go. But we all have to get to work. The time for gathering evidence is over. There is only time for action. No more spectators. Only players.

JACKSON: Well, I think things will get worse before we begin to make a significant turn. We don't have to wonder about that; things will get worse.

You have to realize that the scale of the problem is much broader than we thought: Agriculture is not a satellite out there in need of fixing. Our whole society will have to move away from vertical energy—that is, fossil fuel energy, the ancient energy—to harvesting horizontal energy, contemporary energy, such as wind power, hydroelectricity, etc.

But we can do better. I'm certainly hopeful.

FUKUOKA: There's one last chance. In sumo wrestling, there's a way to win at the very last moment. When a big wrestler pushes a little wrestler back, back, back, just as the little guy is back at the end of the ring, he uses the weight and power coming at him, and flips the big man over his shoulder. The big wrestler is thrown out of the ring, and the little one wins.

Our world leaders must have a great courage and be this sumo wrestler. They must take the bombers and the missiles that are loaded with implements of war and throw the bombs away. Then pelletize seeds of all different types of vegetables, of fruit trees, of grains. Load the missiles up with the seeds, shoot them up, and spread seeds all over the earth. Scatter them over the deserts. Cover the imitation green pastures and lawns.

In the first year, after rain comes, everything will come up here and there—it may look like a mess. The second year, nature will begin to tell you which plants will grow well where. In the third year, microorganisms, earthworms, and small animals will increase and start making the soil rich.

Then when there is food for people everywhere, they won't be in such an uneasy, confrontational state of mind. People's attitudes will change. You'll regreen the earth, fix the ecological crisis, fix the economic crisis, and give people the chance to find happiness.
And then there can be peace.

Wes Jackson on Perennial Polycultures

After growing and analyzing some 4,300 accessions from all over the world, we have selected six herbaceous perennials to manipulate genetically and to include in our ecological experiments.

One species is eastern gamma grass, a relative of corn that has three times the protein and 1.8 times the methionine. It also fixes small quantities of nitrogen. It's an "ice cream grass" for cows and is highly nutritious for humans, too. However, it's low-yielding. In the next county north, though, a mutant was picked up that produces two to three times the initial yield. Once developed, this could replace corn, wheat, and soybeans on sloping hillsides in high-erosion country.

Then there's sorghum, a useful perennial that's not winter-hardy. We crossed sorghum with Johnson grass until eventually we got a mix of 1,500 plants. Some 455 of them lived through last winter-making it the first winter-hardy herbaceous perennial to ever be produced by humans on purpose.

Our wild senna plots yielded 830 kilograms per hectare in 1982, and 900 kilograms per hectare in 1985. This is important because it indicates that a perennial crop plant can keep producing a good yield year after year.

We did a biculture experiment of Illinois bundle flower, which fixes nitrogen, and wild senna, which doesn't. In the first year, the two species together yielded the same as they did in monocultures. By the third year, though, the biculture produced almost twice the yield of the monoculture.

We're also encouraged by results from our perennial Maximillian sunflower. It's allelopathicthat is, its roots exude a chemical that acts as an herbicide. There's also giant wild rye, which grows on sandy lakeshores in Siberia. It shows good promise for high yield. It sent up shoots in January, thinking it was spring in Siberia, I guess.

Bill Mollison on Permaculture

Permaculture is designed agriculture, and one of the most important aspects of good design is patterning.

Here (see Figure 1 in the image gallery) is a square lot with a particularly busy road in the back. It has noise from the back, little water, hot summer winds from the southeast, and an occasional cool summer breeze from the southwest. In the winter, cold winds come from the northeast. What can you do to make this an attractive house and garden site?

Construct a curved-earth, plant-covered wall that rises from eight inches at its beginning to 12 feet at its peak around a house and pond (see Figure 2 in the image gallery). The wall provides privacy, blocks out the noise, and protects from both the hot and cold winds, while its opening channels the cool summer breeze toward the house. The pond provides water and reflects warming winter sunlight toward the house. This partial spiral pattern thus solves all the problems.

Suppose, on a different site, you want to build a one-acre trout pond and also grow blueberries. How can you get the most trout and blueberries?

Since trout live and breed along the pond edge and blueberries planted beside the pond will have more water, the more edge you have, the more production you'll have. So maximize edge by extending the pattern in the first example and spiraling your pond (see Figure 3 in the image gallery).

That same pattern is a good template for a small herbary. If you raise it in the center (see Figure 4 in the image gallery), so the whole thing is a climbing terrace, you can have 43 running feet of growing room for herbs in a circular space just six feet across-watered with just one sprinkler set at the top!

Such designs can boost the productivity of a system tremendously. Indeed, the more permacultures I see and work with, the more I've come to believe that there are no biological limits to yield. There are only design limits.

Masanobu Fukuoka on Natural Farming

I broadcast rye and barley seed on separate fields in the fall, while the rice in those areas is still standing. A few weeks after that I harvest the rice, and then spread its straw back over the fields as mulch. The two winter grains are usually cut about May 20. However, two weeks or so before those crops have fully matured, I broadcast rice seed right over them. After the rye and barley have been harvested and threshed, I spread their straw back over the field to protect the rice seedlings, enrich the soil, and hold back weeds. I also grow white clover in these same fields.

As for citrus, I grow several varieties on the hillsides near my home. First, I had to recondition the red clay soil on the hillsides by planting clover as a ground cover and allowing the weeds to return. I also introduced a few hardy vegetables-such as the Japanese daikon radish-and allowed the natural predators to take care of insect pests.
As a result of that thick weed/clover cover, over the past 30 years, the surface layer of the orchard soil has become loose, dark, and rich with earthworms and organic matter. In my orchard there are now pines and cedar trees, a few pear trees, persimmons, loquats, Japanese cherries, nitrogen-fixing acacia, and many other native varieties growing among the citrus trees.

I raise vegetables, in a semi-wild manner, among the weeds all over the mountain. In my orchard alone I grow burdock, cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, mustard, beans, turnips, and many other kinds of herbs and vegetables.

To plant my vegetable crops, I simply cut a swath in the weed cover and put out the seeds. There's no need to top them with soil: I just lay the cut plants back over them as a natural mulch. Usually the resurgent weeds have to be trimmed back two or three times afterward to give the seedlings a head start, but sometimes just once is enough. You can raise produce wherever there's a varied and vigorous growth of weeds, but you have to become familiar with the yearly cycle of the indigenous weeds and grasses and learn what kinds of vegetables will best match them.

Seven Arguments for Natural Farming

1. Since humanity first dabbled with agriculture, we've eliminated almost half of the earth's plant and soil cover.
2. American agriculture causes the erosion of nine tons of soil per acre per year: the equivalent of one inch every 16 years.
3. American agriculture now uses 40 million tons of commercial fertilizers each year, at a cost of over one-fifth of our nation's annual supply of natural gas.
4. Over 80% of our nation's water is consumed on farms and ranches.
5. Agriculture is now our leading polluter of streams .and ground water.
6. Since 1942, crop loss due to insect pests has doubled; insecticide use has increased tenfold.
7. Globally, agriculture has used more oil than industry.

Source: http://www.onestrawrevolution.net/
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Permaculture is to create paradise on earth starting at the kitchen garden