From the outset, our intention was to speak to incredible people across the permaculture community but also beyond it, so that our movement could be informed by the very best ideas, projects and work in the field of regenerative change-making.

Over the years we had the privilege of interviewing, thought leaders, environmental campaigners, land designers, politicians, authors, humanitarians and international NGO leaders. Their take on the world, the intersection of their work with permaculture and the positive impact they bring to the world served as a great inspiration to us as a membership organisation.

Here are extracts from a few of our personal highlights. To read the full interviews follow the links.

Polly Higgins

Polly was an extraordinary woman. She was Earth’s lawyer. And that was not an exaggeration. Her tireless work was to bring about a change in global law to recognise Ecocide as one of the International Crimes Against Peace. At the time of the interview, she was deep in the murky waters of International diplomacy and politics, working with small island nations and the Global South to bring their pleas to the ears of the richer, less affected Global North. Her advocacy and diligence seemed to be paying off but her organisation, Stop Ecocide International, was far from achieving its goals of a UN ratified global law around Ecocide. In 2019 she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and unfortunately did not live to see her work blossom and grow as it now has. But her impact has resonated worldwide with many nations now recognising and actively collaborating on the issue of Ecocide internationally and instigating legislature to recognise the crime within their own parliaments. To find out more about her legacy and work visit Stop Ecocide International.

EXTRACT:

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Polly Higgins found herself staring out of courtroom windows during a high-profile corporate injury trial she was about to win. The view was leafy and picturesque but her thoughts were not. It was the final day of an arduous 3-year case, in the Court of Appeal, in the Royal Courts of Justice in London, awaiting the judges verdict.

Higgins, then a highly paid barrister on the cusp of breaking into the very top echelons of UK advocacy, found herself in the midst of a powerful and disturbing transpersonal experience. The very serious injuries inflicted on her client - the subject of that 3-year high-profile case - provoked a sudden chain reaction of awareness in her and a profound grief for the damages inflicted globally against the earth and all its inhabitants. One individual injustice a grim living metaphor for planetary-scale crimes.

“I found myself looking out of that window and thinking it’s not just my client that is very badly injured, so is the earth. And something needs to be done about that... I looked out beyond my immediate surroundings, I looked out expansively to the earth. 

“I was in a very high courtroom and during the delay my mind’s eye started to soar above the trees and Lincoln’s Inn fields, right above London and ascending up to look right out across the world. In my mind’s eye I could see pictures of destruction and harm. I could see the Athabasca tar sands. I could see the Amazon. I could see indigenous communities being forcibly pressurised off their land. I could see big industrialised agriculture and monocropping. I could see chemical sprays. I could see polluted rivers and birds and bees dying. Everything was coming through very fast. This enormous harm…

There was a sense that everything was discordant. And yet within that, I had a sense of what a world that was harmonious could look like. I had a sense of what that could be and an understanding that law has a very important role to play in all this. How we set the rules of the game of life if you like.”

On returning to her chambers victorious, her colleagues toasted her success and confirmed that she was now well and truly in the ‘major league’, that this was her moment to ‘fly’. What would be her next case they eagerly asked? To expressions of shock and no little dismay, she informed her team and colleagues that she wouldn’t be taking another case, she would instead be taking a 12 month sabbatical to ponder the profound and disturbing experience she had had, answer some of the questions it provoked, and to decide what to do next. They thought she was mad.....

Charles Eisenstein

We interviewed Charles Eisenstein following the publication of his book, Climate: A New Story. Charles is a prolific and influential author and speaker perhaps best known for his seminal book, The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know Is Possible. In this conversation we explored whether a technocratic or a biophilic approach to climate disruption would ultimately be more effective. If climate activists are falling into “matrix speak” when we obsess over parts per billion of Co2 and whether we need to return to a sacred relationship with the living earth based on common ground and relationship if we are to ever bring about the change we would love to see in the world. 

EXTRACT:

The world finally seems to be waking up to the climate crisis facing us and the existential threat such cataclysmic changes could inflict upon all life on Earth. Cities, states and governments have declared climate crises, citizens are taking to the streets in their hundreds of thousands globally, to march against the threat and to demand that we collectively act to rapidly decarbonise our economies and our lifestyles. Yet, simultaneously, world leaders have assumed power on almost polar opposite manifestos. Trump, Bolsonaro, Scott Morrison, to name a few, all came into office promising prosperity and growth based on the ongoing extraction and use of fossil fuels and other extractive industries and they have an undoubtedly popular mandate to do so amongst a broad swathe of their citizens. How do two such seemingly ideologically irreconcilable social movements arise simultaneously and how do we come back into alignment with each other and with the planet as a whole?

Charles Eisenstein has spent many years writing, speaking and teaching on just such topics, exploring the inner and outer relationships humans have with each other and the rest of Nature. In his latest book, Climate: A New Story, he posits the idea that we are trying to solve the climate crisis in entirely the wrong way. Only through a shift in our consciousness and our understandings of the patterns of destruction occurring globally, can we have any hope of repairing our climate and our societal divides. 

Eisenstein’s foremost suggestion in the book is that we need to stop treating what’s happening as a carbon emissions crisis. His belief is that the mentality that allows ongoing global greenhouse emissions to soar is the same mentality at play clamouring for the drastic reduction of those greenhouse emissions. He believes it stems from our false belief in the geo-mechanical, commodifying, utilitarian view of the planet. In this paradigm of our planet, metrics are of the utmost importance. Whether that be in dollars, atmospheric parts per million, or in gigatonnes of carbon sequestration, our mindset is one of raw data fed into a machine that is our industrial culture. He asks us in Climate: A New Story, to question whether raw metrics are in fact the best way to return health, balance and regeneration to our home planet or if by focusing so heavily on the numbers we will simply continue to follow the route towards planetary existential threat. His quest in this book, as in all his work, is to discover the heart of the matter and to persuade us to put our energies there. And in doing so he knows he is courting controversy......

Bruce Parry

Bruce Parry is strongly motivated to bring the wisdom we have lost in modern culture back from the incredible indigenous peoples he has spent time living amongst. We discussed his years working as a film maker for the BBC, his latest independent film Tawai, and his new life smallholding collaboratively in rural Wales as he grappled with his growing role as a bridge between these very different worlds. 

EXTRACT:

There’s a beguiling optimism blended with a very well travelled weariness to be found in the eyes of Bruce Parry, documentary maker, adventurer, amateur social anthropologist, seeker of wisdom and most of all, gentle human being. 

Made a household name through his global journeying spent with the families and tribes of indigenous peoples across the planet, Bruce’s work for the BBC has done much to highlight the different ways in which human beings inhabit the earth for better and for worse. Spending that precious time in the heart of tribal communities has afforded him the gift of directly experiencing what kind of culture could be possible, and indeed was the basis for hundreds of thousands of years of regenerative ecological culture, before our rapacious industrial growth societies subsumed nearly all that had gone before. 

And in his latest film, his independent directorial debut Tawai - A Voice From The Forest, his ambition was clear. Bruce invited us to look deeply inward, to explore our place in this great web of life so perilously endangered by our folly. To see, if just maybe, we could relearn a way of being that brings forth more life than it depletes, that nurtures all beings equally and brings crumbling down the hierarchical pillars on which we have built this brittle killing-machine we call civilisation.

“Ever since going down the Amazon making a film about globalisation and consumption I realised that our way of life was the problem and that especially our relatively ignorant and thoughtless way of consuming was causing issues around the world, so I wanted that to be part of it.”

Since Tawai came out in 2017 his life has radically altered. He has moved back to the UK from a ten year stint in a rural area of Ibiza, and has bought himself a smallholding in a beautiful rainswept part of Wales which is still tainted by the industrial legacy of lead mining. An area that sums up nicely the dilemma facing all of us in polluted industrial growth societies and to some extent, some of the tribespeople he has lived with as well. How do we move forward to a reimagined, redesigned paradise rather than attempting to retreat impossibly backwards? Bruce takes a deep breath.......

or listen here:

Thought

Thought leadership is at the heart of the Permaculture Association's remit and we published thought pieces from contributors exploring the cutting edge of permaculture and the wider change-making world and the direction we need to travel as a community and as a wider society. Here are just a few of the many thought pieces we published over the last five years.

Permaculture and the Agricultural Revolution

Caroline Aitken asked the question which is often a critique of permaculture at scale. Can permaculture feed the world?

EXTRACT:

Permaculture has long advocated methods for low input, high-yielding production systems. Such as: minimum or zero tillage (no-dig), cover crops (green manures), bi-cropping (growing crops with green manure understorey), polycultures, perennial crops and agroforestry. These methods are rooted in the principles upon which permaculture was founded, the principles of ecology. 

By comparing natural systems to human systems, co-founders Mollison and Holmgren realised that if we are to survive, we need to start playing by the rules that govern this complex and delicately balanced biosphere. These production methods enable us to provide the food and materials we need without disrupting that balance and from where we now stand, enable us to regenerate degraded natural resources and rebuild biodiversity. 

Key to this approach is the understanding of systems. Systems are more than just the elements they compose of; they are about interactions that create emergent properties, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Just as emergent properties arise from the interactions between species in an ecosystem, so can we gain beneficial outcomes from integrating elements of our farming systems. Mollison and Holmgren’s early books are packed with wonderful diagrams. They show the potential ‘closed loops’ that can be designed into a smallholding or farm, thus reducing external inputs, increasing efficiency and reducing unwanted outputs. Forty years on, it seems the world is starting to get the picture, as agroecology gains important recognition...

If We Care, Let's Organise

Andy Goldring, CEO of the Permaculture Association wrote a clarion call placing community and movement building at the front and centre of our works in permaculture.

EXTRACT:

War and chemicals

As I write, war is raging, the International Panel on Climate Change has announced we have a small and rapidly closing window of opportunity to stop irreversible damage and on a day to day basis, the lives of the poorest members of our society are about to get even harder. Issues like these drive us to form organisations and campaigns, projects and initiatives, fundraisers and events. We care about the world and we want to do something about it.

Permaculture rarely talks about the challenges, or at least gives much more focus to the solutions. This makes sense, because talking about how brilliant natural farming can be is much more engaging and joyful than describing how much damage agricultural chemicals do to soils, wildlife and workers. But they are deeply linked; two sides of the same coin. 

Every farm that converts to organic and agroecological methods is another farm and another habitat that has been protected from the negative effects of chemicals on water and soil; it’s a new space for regeneration and another node in a network for positive change. These changes usually happen due to a great deal of invisible organising behind the scenes.

Inspiring change with a positive vision

Our design approach brings together appropriate techniques and strategies at scales from home to regions:

Delicious food from home gardens

Smallholdings and farms around each town

More self-reliant production of many of our daily needs

Warm, energy efficient buildings

A green curriculum where every child can learn how nature works and how we can be an active part of nature, regenerating and protecting our home together

Frameworks like Doughnut Economics, in part inspired by permaculture, are now being applied in cities like Amsterdam with over a million residents. 

This isn’t the idealism of a niche alternative, these are practical and scalable solutions that show clearly ‘another world is possible’, in fact, it’s here already and you can go and visit examples all over the world. What were ideas and proposals in the 1970s turned into projects and training in the 1980s and 1990s and have become established organisations and networks in the 2000s, with a huge global network of interrelated activity in 150+ countries. We’ve come a long way, with some of our dreams becoming reality.

Accelerating change

We clearly have further to go, and pretty quickly...

Local Futures and the Economics of Happiness

Renowned linguist, economist and activist, Helena Norberg-Hodge shared her incredible experience working with the people of Ladakh and other communities around the world over many decades to rediscover economic and societal models that bring true health, prosperity and happiness.

EXTRACT:

Humans suffer from change blindness. Experiments have proven that a person can look at a scene and often not notice very dramatic or unexpected changes. Someone is being interviewed on a busy street just as workmen walk between interviewer and interviewee holding a big wooden panel obscuring the interviewee’s line of sight. During the confusion, the interviewer - played by an actor - is rapidly switched out for someone with different facial features only for the conversation to continue. The interviewee is completely unaware that they are now talking to a new person. You get the idea. Our minds paper over the cracks of change so that a continuous, logical story can be maintained by the left hemisphere of the brain which likes things to be orderly and to make sense as a narrative. 

If we can be that blind to such obvious change right before our eyes, it’s very easy to see how blinded we are to slow, incremental change over decades. Like failing to notice how many fewer insect splats there are on our car’s windshield compared to our childhood until it is pointed out to us by researchers. Or how culture has been changed by free-market economics or technology. When we really stop to think about it, it seems glaringly obvious, however, so many of us carry on with our lives taking the smartphone for granted when many of us may remember being amazed by the Betamax video cassette player or only a generation or two before to the indoor toilet! Such is the steady unfolding of “progress”.

Mostly structural change is almost invisible. But occasionally change occurs so quickly and people are so primed to notice it that it simply cannot go unnoticed. This is what happened to Swedish author, educator, activist and environmentalist, Helena Norberg-Hodge, in her capacity as a young linguist accompanying an anthropological film team visiting the remote Himalayan region of Ladakh in 1975. And it has shaped the rest of her life and her life’s work...