[Music] [Applause] i'm david holmgren and i'm best known as the co-originator of the permaculture concept in the 1970s with bill mollison [Music] sometimes there's two stories that are told about how the idea of permaculture really came about one story is that mollison was my supervising academic and i was just some technical assistants who worked with him and then there's the opposite of that which is i was the brilliant student and he was the academic who stole my work which neither of those are true i mean for a start he was my mentor while i was
working on that permaculture manuscript but if it had been left to me the permaculture manuscript would have just molded away in a draw it was bill who was like no we're going to take this to the world [Music] the core of the idea of permaculture really came about when i was coming towards the end of my first year in environmental design and my interests were gravitating around ecology agriculture and landscape design and i could see how two of these connected but i couldn't see anywhere where the three crossed over and intersected so i wanted to
look at that at a seminar about how land is owned and controlled there was a bloke there who said some really interesting things he pointed out that the rabbit problem in australia could have been solved by rabbit trappers but they had no incentive to do so because they didn't benefit from the land being in better condition from there being less rabbits so what did they do they farmed the rabbits on the farmers land so he was pointing out that the ownership of the land had this really adverse effect on the sustainability of the land i
thought god this guy thinks just completely different to the academic ecologists i've met and that was bill mollison i got chatting with him afterwards and i said well i'm interested in this intersection between ecology agriculture and landscape design and how natural systems could influence that and he said oh how about this for an idea then if most places on the planet nature creates a forest why doesn't our agriculture if not look like a forest function something like a forest why is our agriculture all composed of only annual plants that grow and die in one year
whereas in nature there's a diversity [Music] and that's exactly in that intersection by understanding how nature designs things we can create permanent agriculture and permanent culture in everything we do [Music] and that became permaculture it comes from two latin roots permanent to persist through time and culture connectivity that supports human existence so put those together it's a persistent system that supports human existence [Music] so bill was my mentor we were developing the first permaculture garden on the fringes of hobart and persuaded me that we should publish it but i didn't have a lot of the
experience in all the different fields that underpin permaculture and so my passion was about doing those things and building meliodora here whereas bill was ready for a larger stage and taking permaculture to the world was his next agenda and developed the beginning of the permaculture design course and that mechanism was really how permaculture spread not just in australia but around the world so although i was the co-originator of the permaculture concept bill was the father of the permaculture movement you
