THE PLOWBOY INTERVIEW BILL MOLLISON

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Anyway, I think we can reform the cities. I'd like to have a chance to work on great, tall skyscrapers . . . they're nothing more than huge, unused greenhouses that could produce a tremendous amount of energy on their own. It would be possible to grow a lot of useful crops in such buildings . . . and in urban park areas that are now used only for ornamentals. All sorts of cluster-title and land-owning co-op systems could be devised to allow more and more city dwellers to produce their own food.

PLOWBOY: In Permaculture Two you stated that the only sane response to the insanity of our postindustrial age is "to gather together a few friends and commence to build the alternative, on a philosophy of individual responsibility for community survival". Is this the motivation behind the community you've formed in Tasmania?

MOLLISON: Indeed it is. I think that total personal self-sufficiency is an extraordinarily stupid approach to existence. We all need one another — as individuals and as groups — to set up functional interconnections. Human beings, you see, need what a garden needs: a lot of diversity in functional relationships.

What we're working toward at Tagari is a system of regionalism — based on our individual self-reliance — without the defended boundaries so common nowadays. Our group is rather small, but we maintain multilocation activities: We're operating in deserts, in tropical rain forests, in cool temperate areas, in the sea, and in the cities. We believe that all the elements of life on earth are interconnected. Not only is no man an island, you see, but no species is an island.

PLOWBOY: How big is your community?

MOLLISON: At the site where I live with my family and friends, there are only eight of us. But we have alliances with several other similar groups, bringing the total number of Tagari members to about 30. And then we have alliances with many hundreds of other groups in Australia . . . publishing and distribution alliances, training and design alliances, genetic species alliances, and seed collection alliances. Through just this sort of system of linking connections, we foresee the emergence of what might amount to an alternative nation . . . which will be global . But, of course, we can't let any one of the units get too big, or it might become oppressive. If that should happen, we'd have to drop it from the network . . . and it would be unable to survive alone, without those vital interrelationships.

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