COVER FEATURE CLIMATE CHANGE | Q&A
thing that would tip over ecosystems, agri-
culture, and infrastructure.
We’ve been seeing that, but it’s much
harder to measure those things—great-
er intensity of some storms, greater heat
waves—and, in our part of the world, what
goes with that is increased intensity and
risk of bushfire. Bushfire, being in the most
fire-vulnerable region of the world, has
been the greatest expression of a warming
climate. The general desiccation of the land-
scape has produced another renewed crisis
in our greatest river system, the Murray-
Darling system, with massive fish-kills and
a huge debate that is underlining the failure
of governance, between national and state
governments, and corruption involving the
growing of cotton on the driest continent on
the planet. These things are becoming front-
page news more and more often.
Our experience here in Central Victoria
is that we just went through a January where
not only the maximum temperature but the
overnight minimum temperatures were the
hottest by far we’ve ever experienced. Being
small-scale horticulturalists, the amount of
water we’ve used in that time has been
quite shocking. This has been the shared
experience of all the people in our area. The
rainfall has been low and we’ve had very
high open-pan evaporation figures, which
tells us the water demand. So, it’s a whole
sequence of things. These kind of events
come and go, but there have been records
broken right across Australia this last year,
and that’s been a pattern now; the hottest
years of the century were all clustered in the
past ten years.
Vollmar: I’ve been reading up recently on
the Dust Bowl in the United States. There
is a kind of irony in the contrast between
that ecological crisis and the one we’re
facing now. When you’ve gone out, in liv-
ing memory, and plowed up the prairie
then left it uncovered, and then the winds
come and pull immense amounts of soil
up into the air and buries everybody and
kills people in these dust storms, there’s no
confusion about the causality between those
two events. But with our modern extreme-
weather events, whether it’s a really active
hurricane or tornado season, with each new
precedent that gets set, even people who
agree that climate change is very serious,
we look at each other, asking, “Is this what
climate change looks like?” There’s not that
explicit tie, and, if there were, people who
consider themselves to be climate-change
skeptics or deniers might be more easily
swayed from that position because they live
in places that are being directly affected by
the extreme-weather events. Without that
causal link, it’s easy enough to say, “Yes, the
river is flooding, but that’s got nothing to do
with climate change.”Holmgren: I think there are all sorts of
different coping strategies that people have
with information that is challenging to their
worldview. Certainly, what’s generally called
denial is one of them. This often shows
up in highly intelligent people, who have
some complex rationalization. My work in
permaculture has been focused on the posi-
tive reasons for a change to a better way of
living, which is very difficult to project in
a world where humanity has just chewed
its way through the greatest nonrenewable
resource stocks in a very short time. Con-
templating the idea of mass movements in
history shouting, “Less!”—there’s not much
evidence of those.
My permaculture work, especially as
directed to the billion, perhaps a billion and
a half, middle-class people on the planet, as
opposed to the people at the other end of
the spectrum, has been about constructing
the notion of a world where less materialand energy consumption is not just better
for the future but better for us now. That is a
complex, inwardly focused, and older mes-
sage about voluntary simplicity that comes
to us from many spiritual traditions but is
also tethered to ideas like smart ecologi-
cal design and how to get off the treadmill
of how we provide for our needs at the
moment. Do it in simpler and smarter ways.
Those messages don’t require that you even
need to believe in climate change to be valid.
For all the different groups in society, the
worldview constrains and filters what type
of information people respond to.Vollmar: There is a sense of urgency bind-
ing all the different strains of permaculture
and sustainable-living practices together
that has its roots in Limits to Growth and
the predicted energy-descent future. How
early did that become a central concern of
yours, and how has your conception of an
energy-descent future changed over time?Holmgren: Permaculture, from the begin-
ning and through its teaching, has always
been informed by a dire view of the state
of the world. The Limits to Growth report,
which I believe to be the most important
scientific report in history, was very influ-
ential. I met Bill Mollison two years after its
publication in 1972; our close working rela-
tionship in the mid-1970s led to the publica-
tion of Permaculture One (1978). So, the oil
crises of 1973 and 1979 bracketed the emer-
gence of permaculture, and it was those oil
crises that brought the broader public focus
on the limits to growth. Particularly on the
limits to resources side, though the limits to
growth also have a limits of sinks side—i.e.,
where you send all the pollution. Peak oil,
the constraint of the world’s most important
nonrenewable resource, is emblematic of
the limits of resources, and climate change
is emblematic of the limits of sinks.
Climate change didn’t come to the fore
until the second great wave of modern envi-
ronmental thinking and activism in the late
1980s and early 1990s with the formation
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) in 1988. There was also a
second wave of interest in permaculture atMy permaculture
work has been about
constructing the notion
of a world where less
material and energy
consumption is not just
better for the future but
better for us now.66 W LT SUMMER 2019