THE PLOWBOY INTERVIEW BILL MOLLISON

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Obviously, though, we'd just about have to reverse our present mind set to bring about such changes. In fact, I think a revolution in thinking would be the proper word to use . . . in the same sense as Masanobu Fukuoka uses it in his book, The One-Straw Revolution. It's a move toward good stewardship of the earth and toward a sane society. Our present society, you see, is in sane, and the stewardship we practice is horrific . . . in fact, we don't actually care for our earth at all, but exploit our nonrenewable resources and waste our renewable ones!

Permaculture, however, represents an educational process that can lead us away from irresponsible thinking. Anyone who works with a permaculture goes through a learning experience that is complex and interdisciplinary . . . the very things that traditional education is not . In essence, it's an intellectual exercise. Instead of wearing out our bodies in the garden, we use our minds. For that reason, permaculture appeals to people who normally wouldn't be interested in the hard physical labor of gardening — especially double-dig gardening with compost — since the real labor of developing a permaculture is not in doing it, but in thinking about what one is going to do. One's major energy, then, is devoted to the initial designing of the system, not to the maintenance of it.

There are two books that point the way toward this new kind of thinking . . . and they are, in my opinion, the only texts that should be issued to student agricultural designers: Fukuoka's book, which I've already mentioned, and a new volume — just published by Viking Press — called Entropy: A New World View by Jeremy Rifkin. (EDITOR'S NOTE: Turn to page 56 in this issue for a closer look at Rifkin's work.)

PLOWBOY: In your own second book, Permaculture Two, you introduced two ways of looking at the land that were based on Fukuoka's principles of nonviolent cultivation and natural farming. What are those contrasting views, and how do they relate to your work?

MOLLISON: The underlying philosophy of permaculture is the same as Fukuoka's: working with the land, not against it. It's essentially a matter of using the principles of Aikido, the Oriental defense art, on the landscape . . . allowing one to turn adversity into strength and use that energy positively. You're right, there are two very distinct ways of looking at the land. One is to ask, "What can I demand this land to do?" That viewpoint — which is the prevailing philosophy of commercial agriculture — can lead only to the use of force on the fragile soil. A permaculturist asks instead, "What does this land have to give me?" Anyone who asks that question will naturally work in harmony with the earth to produce a sustained ecology. That's what we try to do in permaculture: We adopt a design or strategy that rolls with the strengths and weaknesses of the land, to ultimately make the system stronger. And achieving that goal will naturally strengthen us, too, since our survival depends on the health of the earth.

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