Two Interviews with David Holmgren

 

These two interviews with David Holmgren, co originator of the Permaculture concept (along with Bill Mollison), were amongst the first videos I watched on Permaculture, and I still find them inspirational and motivating.

Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

“Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.”

“The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.” 

The Biophilia of E O Wilson

“Each of these [bacterial] species are masterpieces of evolution. Each has persisted for thousands to millions of years. Each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine.”

 “Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms — if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms.”

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

E F Schumacher: Small is Beautiful

“If greed were not the master of modern man--ably assisted by envy--how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher "standards of living" are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies--where organized along private enterprise or collective enterprise lines--to work towards the humanisation of work? It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the "standard of living" and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of of "bread and circuses" can compensate for the damage done--these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence--because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.”

~ E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

 

Wes Jackson: Becoming Native to this Place

“Our task is to build cultural fortresses to protect our emerging nativeness. They must be strong enough to hold at bay the powers of consumerism, the powers of greed and envy and pride. One of the most effective ways for this to come about would be for our universities to assume the awesome responsibility to both validate and educate those who want to be homecomers -- not necessarily to go home but to go someplace and dig in and begin the long search and experiment to become native.”

“We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish "me, me, me" culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground... Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow "family values" arguments.”

Gerrard Winstanley, True Leveller

Gerrard Winstanley (1609 – 1676) was a Quaker reformer and political activist during The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Winstanley was one of the founders of the English group known as the True Levellers or Diggers for their beliefs, and for their actions. The group occupied public lands that had been privatized by enclosures and dug them over, pulling down hedges and filling in ditches, to plant crops. True Levellers was the name they used to describe themselves, whereas the term Diggers was coined by contemporaries.

For libertarian socialist scholar Murray Bookchin there is a coincidence of political projects between German Protestant revolutionary Thomas Müntzer and Winstanley. For Bookchin "In the modern world, anarchism first appeared as a movement of the peasantry and yeomanry against declining feudal institutions. In Germany its foremost spokesman during the Peasant Wars was Thomas Muenzer; in England, Gerrard Winstanley, a leading participant in the Digger movement. The concepts held by Muenzer and Winstanley were superbly attuned to the needs of their time — a historical period when the majority of the population lived in the countryside and when the most militant revolutionary forces came from an agrarian world. It would be painfully academic to argue whether Muenzer and Winstanley could have achieved their ideals. What is of real importance is that they spoke to their time; their anarchist concepts followed naturally from the rural society that furnished the bands of the peasant armies in Germany and the New Model in England."

from "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" Lewis Herber. (Murray Bookchin).

Cover Design from the remastered 1976 film Winstanley

"So long as the earth is intagled and appropriated into particular hands and kept there by the power of the sword......so long the creation lies under bondage."

~ Gerrard Winstanley Fire in the Bush 1650

"England is a Prison; the variety of subtilties in the Laws preserved by the Sword, are bolts, bars, and doors of the prison; the Lawyers are Jaylors, and poor men are the prisoners; for let a man fall into the hands of any from the Bailiffe to the Judge, and he is either undone, or wearie of his life."

"Buying and Selling is an Art, whereby people endeavour to cheat one another of the Land.......and true Religion is, To let every one enjoy it."

~ Gerrard Winstanley A New-years Gift for the Parliament and Armie 1650

Last Child in the Woods

Richard Louv, author of Last Child In The Woods, provides a well researched account of how children and young people are becoming estranged from nature, and how this is affecting their physical, psychological and social health. He coins the term nature deficit disorder to describe the maelstrom of problems we are building up by cooping up children for long hours in the classroom or their bedrooms with computers. In addition to epidemic obesity, immune, sensory and poor musculoskeletal development in the manner of battery hens, Louv shows how giving over green space to corporations for malls and retail parks is causing psychological and social impacts far beyond those anticipated, including alienation, mental illness, crime, drug addiction, and inability to communicate effectively.

The Guggenheim

With the news that teachers are increasingly being surveilled in the classroom, it is worth noting how the structure of many new build academies is based on an eighteenth century prison designer Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham first proposed the idea of the Panopticon in 1791. The concept of the design is to allow a single watchman to observe all the inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether they are being watched or not. The fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched or not means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behaviour constantly. The name is also a reference to Panoptes from Greek mythology; he was a giant with a hundred eyes and thus was known to be a very effective watchman. This is the principle behind CCTV and IT surveillance, sometimes called the Information Panopticon.

Bentham always conceived the Panopticon principle as being beneficial to the design of a variety of institutions where surveillance was important, including hospitals, schools, workhouses, and lunatic asylums, as well as prisons. In particular, he developed it in his ideas for a "chrestomathic" school (one devoted to useful learning), in which teaching was to be undertaken by senior pupils on the monitorial principle, under the overall supervision of the Master and for a pauper “industry-house” (workhouse). Thus the human touch of "teachers" or "prison wardens" becomes a much reduced necessity. The lasting psychological effects on academy children (who incidentally are not even allowed outside to play in one Panopticon school) remains to be seen.

Here is a montage of academy and prison designs all mixed up. At first glance they are indistinguishable. And the last word is left to Foucault.